The Comfort of Monsters – Willa C. Richards

Posted on by
Reply

Hot on the heels of my last novel about sisters, False Witness, comes another book about sisters: The Comfort of Monsters by Willa C. Richards.

In this story, Peg McBride recalls the summer of 1991 when her younger sister, Dee, disappears. Dee’s disappearance barely causes a ripple in the crime landscape because she goes missing in Milwaukee in 1991, the same time as Jeffrey Dahmer was arrested.

Peg narrates the story of her relationship with her sister as children and young adults up until Dee’s disappearance, and then thirty years in the future when her ailing mother hires an internet-famous psychic in a last-ditch effort to find out what happened to Dee. It’s this development that causes Peg to reminisce about her sister, although I think Dee has informed every single decision Peg has made over the past 30 years.

Peg has always been convinced that Dee’s much older boyfriend, Frank, was responsible for Dee’s disappearance. She hadn’t liked him pretty much on sight.

Frank hugged me when we met. I didn’t like the feeling of his body against mine. I kept my arms awkwardly by my sides. When he pulled away, I felt like he was looking through my clothes. Some men seem to be able to do that–to make you feel totally naked.

After Dee’s disappearance, Frank vanishes into the ether and the case languishes. But despite being billed as a crime novel, the mystery of what happens to Dee isn’t really what this book is about. Sure, it informs Peg’s character (which isn’t particularly likable), but readers looking for a fast-paced mystery are not going to find that in The Comfort of Monsters.

Instead, the novel is a slow-moving, meandering character study of family dynamics, romantic entanglements, our fascination with true crime, race and memory.

Memory, of course, is also a story. It feels like the truth, especially when there is no one to dispute your recollection of events. But it is a story nonetheless–some moments have been elided, and others have been emphasized and made either luminous or horrific or both. […] And because now, more than ever, my sister’s case depends on these memories, I am terrified that crucial pieces of evidence have been lost along the way.

I liked it, but didn’t love it.

False Witness – Karin Slaughter

Posted on by
Reply

I know that American crime writer Karin Slaughter has legions of rabid fans, but I don’t think that I am one of them. I mean, maybe I am throwing in the towel too early because I have only read one other book, Pretty Girls, besides this one. Like that one, this is a propulsive read about estranged sisters, and horrible crimes against women.

Leigh Collier is a lawyer working her way up the food chain. Her younger sister, Callie, is a hard core drug addict living mostly on the streets. Their lives rarely intersect until Leigh is assigned a new case that sends her hurtling back to her teen years.

Andrew Tenant has been accused of brutally raping a woman and leaving her handcuffed to a table in a park. He’s fired his lawyer and hired Leigh. Turns out, he’s not a stranger.

She would never forget him. Trevor Waleski had been a sweet kid. A little awkward. A lot clingy. The last time Leigh had seen him, he was drugged into oblivion. She had watched her sister gently kiss the top of his head.

Trevor aka Andrew hired Leigh because he knows something devastating about Leigh and her sister and he won’t stop until he gets exactly what he wants. The book spends 600+ pages with the sisters as they try to outmaneuver Andrew who, as it turns out, is pretty dang smart. And also a psychopath.

The book has all the requisite twists and turns. Callie was my favourite sister and her relationship with Dr. Jerry, the memory-impaired veterinarian for whom she sometimes works (and steals drugs from) is my favourite relationship in the book. Leigh’s husband, Walter, is also a great guy. He is kind to Callie and supportive of Leigh even though they are currently separated.

The book takes place during the height of Covid – so there’s social distancing and masks. Not sure it adds anything in particular to the story, but Slaughter herself said “Covid has exposed the ever-widening chasm between the haves and have-nots, spotlighted the housing crisis and food insecurity, focused attention on the lack of proper funding for schools, hospitals, and elder care, exposed a bankruptcy of trust in our government institutions, exacerbated the horrendous treatment of inmates in our jails and prisons, exponentially worsened xenophobic, misogynistic, and racist hate speech, heightened racial inequalities, and as usual, has grossly overburdened the lives of women; all topics I have attempted to touch on within the pages of [this] book”.

None of the Covid stuff did any of that for me, really, but perhaps other people will find that it added another layer to the story. I don’t know that I would have kept reading except that I wanted to find out how Callie and Leigh were going to get out of the bind they were in. Was the ending satisfying? Believable? Not sure. Lots of people will love this book, but I think my journey with Slaughter ends here.

In Five Years – Rebecca Serle

Posted on by
Reply

I don’t think that I got the book I thought I was going to be getting with Rebecca Serle’s novel In Five Years. That’s not the fault of the book.

Dannie Kohan is living her best life as a lawyer in NYC. She has a fabulous apartment, a fabulous boyfriend and a bestie, Bella, who completes the fabulous circle of her life. One morning, after David proposes, she wakes up in a bed that is not hers with a man who is not David. It would seem five years have passed, but Dannie doesn’t remember any of it. When she wakes up, her world seems to have righted itself again.

Then, Bella introduces Dannie to her boyfriend, and it’s the hunky dude from Dannie’s dream. What does it all mean?

It would be a mistake to think that In Five Years is a romance in the traditional sense, and honestly, that’s what I thought I was going to get. Nevertheless, it is a love story.

Bella and I have been best friends since we were seven years old. Me, Nice Jewish Girl from the Main Line of Philadelphia. Her, French-Italian Princess whose parents threw her a thirteenth party big enough to stop any bat mitzvah in its tracks. Bella is spoiled, mercurial, and more than a little bit magical. It’s not just me. Everywhere she goes people fall at her feet. She is the easiest to love, and gives love freely. But she’s fragile, too. A membrane of skin stretches so thinly over her emotions it’s always threatening to burst.

So, these two women love each other and anyone who has a bestie will certainly relate to their friendship. But like any love story, it’s not all smooth sailing. I wish I could say it was as simple as Dannie’s dream and then meeting her dream guy in the flesh. But Serle goes a different route and your appetite for the story she tells will depend on whether or not you have a tolerance for …well, no spoilers.

I liked One Italian Summer better.

Auto Buy Authors: Lisa Reardon

Posted on by
Reply

In my continuing series on the authors whose books I will always buy, this month’s featured auto buy author is Lisa Reardon. There is very little updated info about Reardon on the internet and that’s because she pretty much dropped off the face of the map in 2010 when she was incarcerated for the assault with the intent to commit murder of her father. Her sentence was four – seventeen years. There is very little information to be had about Reardon, but here is another account of the events surrounding this incident. I believe she only served a couple of years of that time and once she was released she sort of disappeared from the spotlight. As far as I know, she only wrote three novels and I have read all three. If by some miracle she wrote something else, I would hand over my money in a nanosecond.

I read Reardon’s novel Billy Dead at least 20 years ago and it is a book that has lodged itself in my heart for many years. My read of it predates this blog, but I reposted the NY Times review of it here.

“People lose people. I don’t know why we’re all so damned careless. Folks lose their kids, men lose their women, even friends get lost if you don’t keep an eye out.”

No question, Billy Dead is not going to be everyone’s cup of tea, but I am a fan of gritty fiction and in Reardon’s capable hands, the story of siblings Ray, Jean, and Billy is a gut punch of a book. The dysfunction is a deep, dark well in this book and so is the abuse, but then so is the love. I think I really do need to read it again. I definitely became a fan of Reardon.

Next I read The Mercy Killers.

“It’s hard to think how different their lives would have been if it weren’t for the mess they got themselves into, if it weren’t for that war, if they hadn’t all been so young and stupid and scared.”

In my review of this book I said “Lisa Reardon writes about characters who live in a world vastly different from my own. They are broken-down people whose lives are messy – filled with violence and alcohol and drugs and hopelessness.”

Although I wouldn’t have thought that I would like The Mercy Killers based on its synopsis, I did like it.

Then I read Blameless.

I said: “Blameless is a quiet novel where nothing much happens. Mary is often her own worst enemy, but as her story is pulled back layer by layer and you come to understand all the ways life has kicked her in the teeth, you just want something, anything, good to happen for her. Reardon has a particular gift when it comes to writing broken characters and I really enjoyed my time with Mary, even though, like her previous novels, the story is pretty grim.”

“Oh my God,” she cried. “Oh my God,” with heaving, gasping, snot-filled sobs.

“It’s all right, Sharon.” I pulled y visor down low over my face. People up and down the beach were looking at us. “It has a happy ending.”

Across the board, Reardon’s novels are compelling, dark, potentially triggering and definitely ‘go there’ in ways that might make many readers uncomfortable. But they are also really well-written, heart-wrenching, and compelling. Therefore, although I suspect I will never have the opportunity to buy another book by her, Lisa Reardon is an auto buy author.

Carmilla – Sheridan Le Fanu

Posted on by
1

According to Encyclopedia Britannica, “Jure Grando Alilović or Giure Grando (1578–1656) was a villager from the region of Istria (in modern-day Croatia) who may have been the first real person described as a vampire in historical records.” John Polidori’s 1918 short story The Vampyre is the first modern literature to feature the bloodsucking creature of the night, Lord Ruthven, who was famously inspired by Polidori’s employer, Lord Byron.

Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1872 novella Carmilla predates Bram Stoker’s far more famous Dracula by 25 years. Le Fanu was a well-known writer of horror and mystery fiction during the Victorian period, and the author of fourteen novels and many short stories. And yet, he’s not nearly so well known as Bram Stoker, who is often credited with creating the archetypical vampiric character. (I don’t mean to say that Le Fanu is not well known, but I read Dracula as a teenager and I only heard of Carmilla a decade or so ago.)

Carmilla is the first person account of Laura who lives with her widowed father in Styria, Austria. The pair and their servants live in an isolated schloss (castle), the nearest village seven miles away. Laura is telling the story of what happened to her when she was nineteen from a point eight years in the future.

I am now going to tell you something so strange that it will require all your faith in my veracity to believe my story. It is not only true, nevertheless, but truth of which I have been an eyewitness.

A chance carriage accident brings a young lady, Carmilla, to the schloss. Her mother must attend to urgent business, but Carmilla must rest after this accident, and Laura’s father graciously agrees to welcome her into his home. After all, Laura could use a companion. Soon, though, Laura begins to feel unwell.

I felt myself a changed girl. A strange melancholy was stealing over me, a melancholy that I would not have interrupted. Dim thoughts of death began to open, and an idea that I was sinking took gentle, and, somehow, not unwelcome possession of me.

Of course, modern readers will know immediately what’s happening. Carmilla is SPOILER ALERT the undead. And, of course, the supernatural shenanigans in Le Fanu’s novel will seem pretty tame by modern standards, but I can only imagine that Victorian audiences would have been shaking in their boots to read of some of the images that plagued poor Laura.

For a vampire literature completist, Carmilla is a must read.

Bunny – Mona Awad

Posted on by
Reply

For a while, Bunny was everywhere and so I bought it and shelved it and, finally, I’ve read it. Canadian writer Mona Awad’s story of academia, writing, and mental health (??) is a masterclass of a fever dream and more than once I was scratching my head and asking myself just what in the heck is going on. When I turned the last page, I still can’t say for sure what I read.

Samantha Mackey is in the graduate writing program at an elite New England college, Warren University. In her writing class of five, she is the outlier; the other four women in the class, The Duchess, Cupcake, Creepy Doll, and Vignette, are an insular group who affectionately call each other Bunny. Their affectation drives Samantha crazy and she and her bestie, Ava, spend most of their time mocking the other women.

How fiercely they gripped each other’s pink-and-white bodies. forming a hot little circle of such rib-crushing love and understanding it took my break away.

[…]

I quietly prayed for the hug implosion all last year. That their ardent squeezing might cause the flesh to ooze from the sleeves, neckholes and A-line hems of their cupcake dresses like so much inane frosting.

But then, one day, Samantha gets invited to Smut Salon, a gathering of the bunnies where they share their “Absolute Truth” and drink a “bile-green concoction in which what looks like a small black turd floats.” Suddenly Samantha finds herself one of the members of this strange sisterhood and losing, it seems, her grip on reality.

This is a crazy novel, honestly, but I gobbled it up in a couple sittings without complaint. I think much of what happens is deliberately ambiguous. Is Samantha going crazy? Are the student bunnies really turning actual bunnies into subservient men (although men without penises and who have to wear gloves because their hands are deformed)? Is the whole thing a metaphor for the creative process? Why can’t Samantha write anything? Why does Ava disappear? Who is Max? So many questions and although none of them are answered in a specific way, I think I am satisfied with my own interpretation of the the book. Which I am not going to share here because you’ll want your own.

Definitely worth a read.

Girl, 11 – Amy Suiter Clarke

Posted on by
Reply

The notion of using a podcast transcript as a structural element in a novel has been around for almost a decade. Kathleen Barber’s 2017 novel Are You Sleeping is widely considered the first book to include a podcast and it must have seemed like a cool gimmick at the time. Loads of novels have done it since. Sadie, None of This is True, and Listen for the Lie are a few of the titles I have read that use this formula.

Amy Suiter Clarke’s novel Girl, 11 follows Elle Castillo, whose podcast Justice Delayed tackles unsolved cold cases. Formerly a social worker, Elle brings a strong stomach and a desire to help victims not glorify perpetrators to her work, and she’s had some successes. But now she is trying to solve the case of The Countdown Killer (TCK).

This case has involved several murders with a distinct signature. Girls, in descending order of age, are kidnapped, held for seven days, poisoned, whipped and then deposited someplace where they are easily found. There is definitely a rigid pattern to the crimes.

According to John Douglas, the former FBI special agent who made his name interviewing and analyzing serial killers, there is a difference between the modus operandi–the way a crime is committed–and the signature. The signature is what the killer does to achieve fulfillment. The way they kill might change over time, and it won’t necessarily impact the killer’s satisfaction. But every killer has a signature, something they have to do, or the kill won’t give them the release they’re after. Based on what we know, the numbers are his signature. The three girls, three days apart; the seven days of captivity; the twenty-one lashes.

The numbers mattered more than anything else. And that tells us something.

Elle is like a dog with a bone and she has earned some street cred with the police, so when another girl goes missing after a long period of dormancy, Elle is brought in to consult. The cops don’t think this can possibly be TCK, but when Elle suffers a very personal loss, it begins to look like he’s back.

The New York Times Book Review called Girl, 11 “propulsive” and, I dunno, it wasn’t propulsive for me. It was long and relatively slow and, at times, repetitive. There are multiple perspectives in the novel and some of those perspectives felt like exposition: let me show you why this person behaves this way. Here’s the backstory. I never really love that.

But, overall, this is a well-written novel and if you haven’t had a lot of experience with books like this, you could do a lot worse.

Kin – Tayari Jones

Posted on by
2

Vernice (Niecy) and Annie are childhood best friends, cradle sisters, growing up in Honeysuckle, Louisiana. Neither has a mother: Annie’s ran off when she was just a baby, left to be raised by her grandmother and Niecy’s mother was shot and killed by her father, who then killed himself. She was raised by her mother’s sister, Irene. Tayari Jones’s novel, Kin, traces the fortunes of these girls over many years in alternating voices.

Each girl has a complicated relationship with their absent mother. Niecy says

While I was tended to, I was never mothered. Many people suffered far more, even people raised at the knees of their actual mothers. Still, the hole in my spirit made me into the girls I was and then the woman that I am.

Annie’s grandmother tells her “”I can’t say what’s a harder cross to bear. Me having Hattie Lee for a daughter or you trying to be her daughter. She was my youngest. Number six. And how she did me when she was being born, she made sure no other baby could come behind her. She’s been like that all her life, salting the fields on her way out.”

The novel follows the girls as they grow up. Then, one day, Annie runs off with Clyde, Bobo and Babydoll. She heads to Memphis where, last she heard, her mother resided. Niecy is heartsick when she loses her best friend, but she is headed for college in Atlanta. Life has different things planned for the girls. Despite the road each girl travels, they are each other’s chosen family, their ‘person’. But the book gives them very separate stories and for much of the novel, those lives are lived apart. I found each girl interesting and their journeys were also interesting, but I wasn’t as invested in either of them as I thought I might be. I couldn’t tell you why.

On the plus side – I enjoyed the writing a lot. The book gave me lots to think about. As a middle aged white woman (it’s probably a stretch to characterize myself as ‘middle aged’, I know!) who grew up in Canada, I know next to nothing about the experiences of Black women in the south in the 1950s. There were some funny moments and some tender moments, too.

The story moves along, but in some cases I think I felt a little short changed. For example, Niecy’s relationship with Joette felt superficial because we didn’t really see how it developed. The ending, purported to be devastating, left me feeling …well, not very much, really. Did I enjoy my read? Sure. It was an easy book to sink into. Would I recommend it? Sure – lots of people would love it. Did I love it? Not really.

Yesteryear – Caro Claire Burke

Posted on by
Reply

It’s been a couple of weeks since I finished Caro Claire Burke’s debut novel, Yesteryear, but life has been very busy as it always is at the end of the school year. Exams are over now, though, and all the marking is done so once prom and grad are over and done with, it’s just a coast to the end of the year and a whole summer of reading on my deck.

I probably needed some time to sit with Yesteryear anyway. A couple of the young teachers that I work with were both raving about it, couldn’t put it down, and so I moved it up the tbr pile. My feelings are more ambivalent than theirs.

Natalie Heller Mills lives in a beautiful restored farmhouse “nestled in the rolling divots between two mountain ranges in Idaho.”

She and her husband, Caleb, are parents to five children and Natalie is pregnant with baby number six. They are living the American Dream. But it’s a curated dream because Natalie is a social media influencer. Her stock and trade is selling her lifestyle to over a million followers. That’s a lifestyle that takes a lot of work.

Through the camera’s discerning eye, the cooking space was perfectly cluttered: a half-filled mason jar of water here, a flour spill there, a few forgotten flower stems strewn across a worn-looking cutting board. It looked like a space where a mother worked; like a kitchen in the real world, only obviously better than anything the real world had to offer.

It takes a lot of effort to sell the dream Natalie is selling. She needs help to do, but she never shows the help because Natalie “wouldn’t be able to forgive [herself] if [her] social media account ended up compromising them in any way.”

Yesteryear is very timely in that it captures the current juggernaut that is tradwives. Natalie is a devout Christian (but is she?) who bakes sourdough bread, homeschools her children and eschews the modern world in favour of the world she has created. She is definitely the brains behind the operation – as readers will come to understand when they read about her upbringing, her time away at college and her decision to marry Caleb, “the youngest of five boys, the runt of the litter in an American dynasty.”

But then one morning Natalie wakes up in an unfamiliar room under an unfamiliar blanket. When she makes her way to the kitchen she discovers her family, her children but not her children “all wearing raggedy-looking clothes that remind [her] of a pioneer reenactment.” Her husband’s “eyes are not [her] husband’s eyes. This man’s eyes are black and cold and dead.” What in the actual heck is going on? Is she on some weird reality television show?Is she actually expected to live the life she sells online?

When I think about trad wives, I think about Nara Smith.

Back when I used to have Instagram I would sometimes watch her videos and laugh – her voice, the ridiculous outfits, making Froot Loops and Fruit Rollups from scratch because her kids wanted to eat them. But, she’s coining it and is clearly not a dumb woman. She has at least four kids and is 25, so she definitely fits the mold. She and her husband, Lucky Blue, are both models and Mormon. I suspect Natalie isn’t quite as glamorous as Nara, but you get the idea.

I find trad wives fascinating and terrifying, but they aren’t a new phenomenon. Remember The Stepford Wives?

Yesteryear has a great premise and it’s a timely novel and it’s well written. Natalie is a character you will love to hate because she is self-involved and fake. But I also felt some sympathy for her, although maybe I wasn’t supposed to. But I didn’t love the book. I found it too long and the reveal was sort of unbelievable for a variety of reasons that would be spoilery to talk about. I think the book does offer some pointed commentary about motherhood, fame, the patriarchy, misogyny, influencer culture and so there’s certainly lots to talk about. It was just okay for me.

Auto Buy Authors: Carolyn Slaughter

Posted on by
1

My love affair with Carolyn Slaughter began in the 80s when I happened upon her novel The Banquet in a second-hand bookstore in Hamilton, Ontario. That book, which opens with the lines “I am waiting for them to come. I am not frightened at all”, was a sucker punch of a read and sent me on a treasure hunt for more of Ms. Slaughter’s books.

Slaughter was born in India in 1946, but the family moved soon after to the Kalahari Desert in what is now Botswana. She lived there until her family moved to London in 1961.

Every single book of Slaughter’s I have managed to find has felt like a stroke of luck because like Thomas H. Cook, you’re not picking up one of her books at the local big box book store. Sadly, everything I have read by Slaughter predates this blog with the exception of her memoir Before the Knife, which was published in 2002 and chronicles her childhood in Africa. It is the book she says she wrote to make sense of why she’d been driven to write about violence and murder up until that point. There’s a 12-year gap between The Widow and this memoir. Slaughter hasn’t published anything since 2007’s Dresden, Tennessee which, sadly I DNF. Although I suspect she may be retired, Slaughter became a psychotherapist in lives in (according to Wiki) New Jersey.

I have read and enjoyed several of her novels.

The Story of the Weasel (in North America it was called Relations), 1976

”This my third attempt to put my thoughts down on paper; in my mind they chafe mercilessly.”

This is the story of Christopher and Cathy, siblings in the late 1800s, whose relationship is, let’s just say, complicated. If you recall another set of siblings named Christopher and Cathy, you’ll have a clue as to why. This book floored me when I read it.

This was Slaughter’s debut and the second book I read. This is also the book that prompted me to write my first and only fan letter to an author and, miraculously, she responded!

Magdalene, 1978

”Today is my birthday, today I am thirty-seven. And look, here is my face floating in the polished silver mirror.”

This is the story of Mary Magdalene and her relationship with Christ. I remember this book as being as angsty as heck.

Dreams of the Kalahari, 1981

“The small girl sat on the sand under the thorn tree.”

An autobiographical novel of a young girl’s coming of age in the Kalahari.

The Banquet, 1983

This is the story of an architect called Harold who meets a young shopgirl called Blossom at a Marks & Spencer. She is the most beautiful woman Harold has ever seen and the two eventually fall in love. One of the most beautiful and horrifying books I have ever read.

A Perfect Woman, 1984

“A woman stood by her window looking out at the garden with the gaze of someone surveying the sea or a long sweep of hills and fields.”

The story of a love triangle.

The Innocents, 1986

“I’m being buried alive.”

A tale of South Africa during the Apartheid

My collection will be complete when I get my hands on Columba, 1977; Heart of the River, 1982; The Widow, 1989. I own, but have not yet read, A Black Englishman, 2004.