Monthly Archives: December 2023

Penpal – Dathan Auerbach

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Dathan Auerbach’s novel Penpal began life as a series of interconnected stories on an online horror forum, which probably accounts for some of the repetitiveness, wonky timeline issues, and disjointedness.

In the novel, a young boy starts to receive a series of blurry polaroid photos in the mail after his kindergarten class participates in a balloon activity. Each student writes a letter, ties it to a balloon and sets them free. The hope is that whoever finds the balloon will write back and include a photo of where they live. These photos will then be pinned to a map.

The unnamed narrator doesn’t think much of the first photo, but over the coming weeks he receives dozens more and upon closer inspection he discovers that he is in every single one of them. Creepy, right? Well, sure…if it had actually led somewhere.

In many ways, Penpal is a coming-of-age story. The narrator and his best friend Josh spend a lot of time in the woods, a place that is both magical and menacing. Once, the boy wakes up and finds him in the middle of the woods, lost. Once, he and Josh go looking for the narrator’s missing cat and that leads to a heart-pounding segment under a house. Then there’s the crazy denouement, which seems to come out of nowhere. And that was one of my issues with this book. It skips around and twists back on itself and although the narrator tells the reader that “the story I am about to tell you is the product of my own mental archaeology [and] like all great digs, how the artifacts fit together in a timeline is about as immediately clear as which things are important and which are not” I kept waiting for some sort of satisfying resolution.

I think Penpal had a lot of potential. There was a lot of hype surrounding this book – perhaps too much for a self-published debut. Lots of people put it in the extreme horror category. Can’t see that, really. Was I wowed by this book? No. Were there some bits that I enjoyed. Yes. Would I read something else by this author? Probably not.

Things You Save in a Fire – Katherine Center

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Cassie Hanwell, the 26-year-old protagonist of Katherine Center’s novel Things You Save in a Fire is the only female firefighter at her Texas firehouse. She’s a fierce and dedicated firefighter, and when the novel opens, she is about to receive the valor award. Her career, it seems, is on an upward trajectory…until the night of the awards ceremony when the person presenting her the award turns out to be Heath Thompson and

…his beefy, self-satisfied face, his pompous grin, his self-serving posture, and then, finally, the recognition in his eyes…Let’s just say it altered my emotional landscape. In a flash, my insides shifted from cold shock to burning rage.

Cassie’s life pivots at that point. Not only is her upward mobility with the department derailed, but around the same time she gets a phone call from her estranged mother asking Cassie if she would be willing to move to Massachusetts to provide some support while she deals with a medical issue. Rock. Meet hard place.

Cassie takes a transfer to a small fire station in Lillian, where the captain thinks that “women in the fire service will be the downfall of human civilization” and where she meets the rookie, another newbie who comes from a long line of firefighters. The rookie poses another threat to Cassie because as soon as she sees him for the first time, Cassie’s first thought is “Oh no.” She has guarded her heart from all potential threats since she was sixteen and then this man lifts his “stunning, heartbreakingly appealing face.”

There’s lots to like about Things You Save in a Fire. Cassie is an appealing character and the rookie (Owen) is, as romantic leads often are, perfect. There’s some other stuff in here, too, about forgiveness and family and opening yourself up to love in all its forms. Not really my cup of tea, overall, but I am sure it would be appealing to lots of readers.

Just Like Mother – Anne Heltzel

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Maeve is a book editor in NYC. She’s got a pretty good life, including a friends with benefits arrangement with Ryan. What Maeve doesn’t have is family. She grew up in a matriarchal cult, Mother Collective, a situation from which she escaped/was rescued when she was just a child. The only thing she really misses from that time in her life is her cousin, Andrea. They lost touch and Maeve hasn’t looked for her in years. Then, on a whim, she takes a DNA test and suddenly Andrea is back in her life…and things get, well, complicated.

This is the premise of Anne Heltzel’s first novel for adults Just Like Mother. And it started out really well. I love cult stories, and although this once doesn’t spend too much time in the cult, there is certainly enough information for readers to know that it’s whackadoodle (although, really, are there any cults out there that aren’t?) This is a cult of women, the one male child mentioned is referred to as ‘Boy’. There’s a locked room and strange sounds come from behind the door, a puppy Maeve thinks.

When Maeve and Andrea are reunited, Maeve is both elated and wary. After all, their shared childhoods weren’t idyllic. Andrea seems to have landed on her feet though. She’s made millions as the “CEO of a start-up that had been making the news for its groundbreaking contributions to the lifestyle market.” But almost as soon as Andrea re-enters her life, Maeve’s life starts to implode. She loses her job and then, a personal tragedy catapults Maeve to upstate New York, where Andrea lives in a fabulous mansion with her husband, Rob.

That’s when things get weird. Just Like Mother is one of those books that you keep reading because it is so ridiculous that you can’t stop. Some readers called it “terrifying” and “deeply disturbing” but it was neither of those things for me.

Paperbacks from Hell – Grady Hendrix

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Grady Hendrix (The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires, My Best Friend’s Exorcism) digs through the horror vault in Paperbacks from Hell. Subtitled The Twisted History of ’70s and ’80s Horror Fiction, Hendrix, no slouch himself when it comes to things that go bump in the night, traces the history of mainstream horror fiction and his observations are both astute and often comical.

For anyone who grew up in the 1970s, lots of these authors will be familiar. Personally I was reading a lot of Stephen King back then, and there’s not really a lot about him in this book. Instead, Paperbacks from Hell (mostly) looks at the seedier side of horror, tracing the resurrection of the genre to Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby, Thomas Tyron’s The Other and William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist.

As Hendrix explains “All three spawned movies and, most importantly, set the tone for the next two decades of horror publishing.

Hendrix catalogues the specific sub-genres of horror, everything from satanic cults, haunted houses, explicit sex, creepy kids, possessed animals, zombies and vampires. The book is filled with lots of amusing turns of phrase and enough specifics to make a horror aficionado happy.

Then there’s the cover art. If you have any interest in pulp horror from this period – you should just go right ahead and order the book. It’s a whole lot of creepy fun.

This would make a great gift for any horror reader on your list. And while you’re at it – pick up one of Hendrix’s novels, too. He clearly loves the genre and he’s a great writer.

Tom Lake – Ann Patchett

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It’s 2020, the scary beginning of Covid, when Ann Patchett’s latest novel Tom Lake opens. Lara and her husband, Joe, and their three adult daughters Emily, Maisie, and Nell are hunkered down on the family’s Michigan cherry farm. The girls have asked Lara to tell them the story of how she came to date Peter Duke, a famous actor. Emily, the eldest and the child who intends to stay on the farm, has long believed that Peter Duke is her father and it has caused quite a bit of friction between her and her mother over the years.

Lara’s story really begins when, in high school, she and her best friend, Veronica, are roped into helping at a community theatre casting call for a production of Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize winning play Our Town. Although she was really only there to take the names of those who’d come to audition, Lara ends up auditioning herself and lands the part of Emily, a role which is to change her life. Later, at college, she plays the part again and as she remarks “Luck was everything.” A Hollywood producer, there to see his niece in the role of Mrs. Gibbs, is enamoured with Lara’s portrayal of Emily and thinks she’d be perfect for a movie he’s casting. That opportunity leads her to Tom Lake, a summer stock theatre in Michigan where she will reprise the role of Emily for a third time. This is also where she meets Peter Duke, or, as everyone calls him: Duke. He’s playing Mr. Webb, Emily’s father, even though he is only four years older. Everyone could see that he was destined for greater things, though.

This is a story about falling in love with Peter Duke who wasn’t famous at all. It’s about falling so wildly in love with him – the way one will at twenty-four – that it felt like jumping off a roof at midnight. There was no way to foresee the mess it would become in the end, nor did it occur to me to care.

Almost from the moment that they meet, Lara and Duke are a couple and their summer together is one that changes the course of Lara’s life. Lara’s daughters think they know (most of) the story, but she parcels out the narrative, editing and obfuscating because “There was always going to be a part of the story that [she] didn’t tell Joe or the girls.”

Honestly, I will read anything Patchett writes. Even if I didn’t know anything about Our Town, I would have loved this story of a mother and her daughters, of first love and the devastation it can leave in its wake, of friendships and marriage, of family. But because I am very familiar with Wilder’s play, which is really about some of the very same things Patchett writes about, I found this book extra meaningful. Wilder once said that his play was about finding “a value above all price for the smallest events in our daily life.” Much of the action of Patchett’s novel takes place on the family cherry farm where mother and daughters spend their days picking fruit. In the evenings, they share dinner, conversation, and movies. Covid made the circumstances perfect for this sort of thing because where were you going to go and what else were you going to do?

Tom Lake is a quiet novel but that is not to say that you won’t be swept along by these characters and their story. Like Lara’s daughters, I wanted to know what became of Peter Duke and there were some other surprises in this novel, too.

Outstanding.