Carl’s R.I.P. VI  challenge ended on 31 October and I’m pleased that I completed Peril the First, which was :

Read four books, any length, that you feel fit (my very broad definitions) of R.I.P. literature. It could be Stephen King or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Ian Fleming or Edgar Allan Poe…or anyone in between.

I read the following books (linked to my reviews):

• Naming the Bones by Louise Welsh
• Blood Harvest by S J Bolton
• Portobello by Ruth Rendell
• The Turn of the Screw by Henry James

These are all books that were on my to-be-read list. I think Blood Harvest has to be my favourite of the four and I thoroughly enjoyed it – a dark, scary book, disturbing, and completely gripping.  I was particularly pleased that I finally read The Turn of the Screw as I first started to read it some years ago. It’s an ideal book for the RIP Challenge. Thanks go to Carl for hosting.

I first started to read The Turn of the Screw by Henry James a few years ago soon after I bought it. I stopped reading, mainly, I think, because it seemed so slow to get going with long, convoluted sentences that seem to drag the story down. So, it was with low expectations that I began once more to read it. I was surprised. This time the story didn’t drag, the sentence structure didn’t bother me and I became engrossed in the tale. It’s an ideal book for the RIP Challenge.

But is it a ghost story or a psychological study? Either way there are creepy, disturbing things going on. It’s a story within a story, told as a ghost story to a group of people as they sit gathered round a fire in an old house. It tells of two children and their governess. She has been employed by their uncle who wants nothing to do with them. Their previous governess had died under mysterious circumstances (was it in childbirth?).  The older child, Miles, was away at school and soon after the new governess arrives Miles returns home, expelled from school for some terrible unexplained offence.

The children seem to the governess to be beautiful, little angels, but are they as innocent as they seem? And can they see the ghosts or not? Is the governess imagining them, peering in menacingly through the windows, standing silently and staring from the top of a tower, or gazing intently across a lake. Are they the ghosts of Miss Jessel, the previous governess and Peter Quint, also a previous employer? What relationship did they have with the children? Do they still have a hold over the children? These questions ever never fully answered and the governess, aided (or not?) by the housekeeper, Mrs Grose, becomes increasingly unhinged by all the events. I think it’s all the better for the ambiguity.

The story is dark and melodramatic, about good and evil and with hints of sexual relations, reflecting the Victorian society of the time. The Turn of the Screw is based on a ghost story told to James by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Edward White Benson. It was first published in 12 instalments in Collier’s Weekly, a popular,  illustrated New York magazine in 1898.  By that time his wrist was too painful to actually write the story and he dictated  it to his secretary, William MacAlpine, who typed as James spoke.

My copy of the book  is in the Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism series, edited by Peter G Beidler. It contains not just the text, but critical essays from four contemporary critical perspectives, plus explanations of the biographical, historical and cultural contexts. I haven’t yet read much of the additional material as I wanted to see what I made of it myself. Just scanning the essays I think they show the widely different interpretations and controversies this book has aroused and should prove very interesting reading.

These are my thoughts and reactions on reading Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

I knew the story of Dracula from film and TV versions – with most notably Christopher Lee and later Louis Jourdan as Dracula, but have steered clear of reading Bram Stoker’s book until now. I didn’t really know what to expect from the book but I was interested to know how Stoker described Dracula, was it anything like the film versions? This is what he looked like when Jonathan Harker first entered Castle Dracula:

… a tall old man, clean-shaven save for a long white moustache, and clad in black from head to foot, without a single speck of colour about him anywhere.

… he moved impulsively forward, and holding out his hand grasped mine with a strength that made me wince, an effect which was not lessened by the fact that it seemed as cold as ice – more like the hand of a dead man than a living man.

… His face was a strong – a very strong – aquiline, with high bridge of nose and peculiarly arched nostrils; with lofty domed forehead, and hair growing scantily around the temples, but profusely elsewhere. His eyebrows were very massive, almost meeting over his nose, and with bushy hair that seemed to curl in its own profusion. The mouth, so far as I could see it under the heavy moustache, was fixed and rather cruel-looking, with peculiarly sharp white teeth; these protruded over the lips, whose remarkable ruddiness showed astonishing vitality in a man of his years. For the rest, his ears were pale and at the tops extremely pointed; the chin was broad and strong and the cheeks firm though thin. The general effect was one of extraordinary pallor. (pages 22 – 25)

Not like the film versions I’ve seen.

Dracula is composed of letters, journal entries, newspaper articles and transcripts of phonograph diary entries, from several characters, so the story is told from several different viewpoints. Stoker used a variety of sources in telling his tale – folklore, myths and legends and historical facts, all blended together with his own inventions. It’s a very scenic novel, and I could easily imagine the locations  - most memorable are those describing Jonathan Harker’s journey and first meeting with Dracula. Dracula doesn’t eat and has no reflection in a mirror, can change his shape dramatically and grows younger, but apart from the opening chapters he remains an elusive figure.

It’s also a very sensual and melodramatic novel, full of religious references. So there is the question of life after death, the existence of the soul, the triumph of good over evil, the nature of sexuality,  fear and superstition. Vampires are at the same time appealing and repulsive. Much use is made of hypnotism and putting people into trances. I was struck by the comparison with Christianity – Dracula drinks the blood of his victims and has everlasting life as one of the Un-Dead and Christ gave his life to redeem the world. It reminded me of the Communion Service – this is my body, this is my blood.

It is too an adventure story with a final chase scene and a love story. It reflects the time in which it was written, with women seen as frail creatures unable to withstand the danger that the men confront. Mina Harker, that most resourceful woman, is left behind whilst the men seek out Dracula and plan to kill him. I was puzzled – why was she left alone with no cross and garlic flowers to protect her when the men were fully armed? The outcome was predictable.

I found the character of Renfield most interesting. He is one of Dr Seward’s most dangerous patients in the lunatic asylum, who wavers between lucid and intelligent episodes and sheer madness. His hobby is catching flies and eating them. He progresses to eating spiders and birds.

I thought it was a fascinating book, found it thought-provoking, both whilst I was reading and after. A book which certainly qualifies for the RIP Challenge.

Life Support by Tess Gerritsen is the fourth book I’ll be reading in the RIP IV Challenge. According to the back cover this is ‘a quick, delightfully scary read‘, which fits in well with the RIP challenge criteria.

It begins:

A scalpel is a beautiful thing.

Dr Stanley Mackie had never noticed this before, but as he stood with head bowed beneath the OR lamps, he suddenly found himself marveling at how the light reflected with diamondlike brilliance off the blade. It was a work of art, that razor sharp lunula of stainless steel. So beautiful in fact, that he scarcely dared to pick it up for fear he would somehow tarnish its magic. In its surface he saw a rainbow of colors, light fractured to its purest elements. (Page 13)

This will be the first book by Tess Gerritsen that I’ve read. It’s been on my bookshelves for quite a while now and I have been wary of reading it in case it’s too gory for me. I didn’t buy it, it was a free book with the magazine Woman and Home, which I buy now and then. When I read the Introduction I was even less sure this book was for me as Tess Gerritsen wrote that she got the idea for the book whilst at medical school (she is a doctor), when she heard the professor say the words ‘human cannibalism’ in his lecture on Creutzfeld-Jakob disease, a viral infection of the brain.

So I put this book way down on my to-be-read books, but since then I’ve read several favourable reviews of other books by Gerritsen so I thought I’d try this one. I like the style of writing in this first paragraph and it does make me want to read on, so when I’ve finished one of my current reads I’m going to start Life Support. Let me know what you think if you’ve read it?

Book Beginnings on Friday is hosted by Katy at A Few More Pages.

It’s set in the fictional town of Heptonclough in Lancashire and there is a very helpful map at the start of the book showing the layout of the town. There are two churches, the ancient ruined Abbey Church and standing next to it the ‘new’ church of St Barnabas. The Fletchers have just moved into a new house built on the land right next to the boundary wall of the churchyard:

The Fletcher family built their big, shiny new house on the crest of the moor, in a town that time seemed to have left to mind it’s own business. They built on a modest-sized plot that the diocese, desperate for cash, needed to get rid of. They built so close to the two churches – one old, the other very old - that they could almost lean out from the bedroom windows and touch the shell of the ancient tower. And on three sides of their garden they had the quietest neighbours they could hope for, which was ten-year-old Tom Fletcher’s favourite joke in those days; because the Fletchers built their new house in the midst of a graveyard. They should have known better, really. (page 17)

Tom has a younger brother, Joe and they’re playing in the graveyard when they catch glimpses of a girl watching them, and hear voices. Their little sister, two-year old Millie sees her too.  Tom is terrified, convinced something terrible will happen and then Millie disappears. Harry is the new vicar, getting to know the locals and their strange rituals and traditions. He too hears voices, in the church but can’t find anyone there. Evi, a psychiatrist has a new patient, Gillian, unemployed, divorced and alcoholic, who can’t accept that her daughter died in the fire that burnt down her home. The Renshaws own most of the land, old Tobias, his son Sinclair and his two daughters, Jenny and Christiana.

Heptonclough is not a good place for little girls, three have died over the past ten years and Christiana asks Harry to tell the Fletchers to leave:

‘So many little girls’, she said. ‘Tell them to go, Vicar. It’s not safe here. Not for little girls.’ (page 353)

It’s not safe at all for the Fletcher family. I was completely convinced not only by the setting but also by the characterisation that this place and these people were real. It’s full of tension, terror and suspense and I was in several minds before the end as to what it was all about. I had an inkling but I hadn’t realised the full and shocking truth.

An excellent book to read for Carl’s RIP IV Challenge.

The street is very long, like a centipede snaking up from Pembridge Road in the south to Kensal Town in the north, its legs splaying out all the way and almost reaching the Great Western Street main line and the Grand Union Canal.

… The Portobello has a rich personality, vibrant, brilliant in colour, noisy with graffiti that approach art, bizarre and splendid. an indefinable edge to it adds a spice of danger. There is nothing safe about the Portobello, nothing suburban. It is as far from an average shopping street as can be imagined. those who love and those who barely know it have called it the world’s finest street. (page 2)

The plot promised to be good, with Eugene Wren finding an envelope filled with money and sets in motion a chain of disastrous events. But it failed to live up to that promise. The money belonged to Joel, a very strange young man who after being attacked in the Portobello Road and losing the envelope, suffered a heart attack and a near-death experience in which he went through a tunnel and was then brought back.  Joel is accompanied by Mithras who came back with him through the tunnel. He descends rapidly into an unreal world shunning the light and doing nothing at all.

Eugene is a secretive man who owns a Fine Art Gallery and is engaged to Ella Cotswold, a doctor. Ella takes on Joel as a private patient even though it’s clear his problems are psychological rather than physical and even when she refers him to a psychotherapist he continues to consult her.

Eugene in an attempt to lose weight and give up smoking tries eating low-calorie sweets and becomes addicted to Chocorange, a sugar-free pastille containing just 4 calories. This is one of the parts of the book that irritated me – it is repeated ad nauseam  how he wants to give up, tries to and fails, how he hides packets everywhere.

A third set of characters are Lance Platt, a petty burglar (who told Eugene the money belonged to him) and his Uncle Gib. Lance Uncle Gib is a reformed burglar, now an Elder in the Church of the Children of Zebulon, who only puts up with Lance living in his house for the rent money. Uncle Gib is another unpleasant character:

… a tall, emaciated old man with his Voltairean face and his fluffy white hair singing hymns as he bounded along. Eccentricity is the norm in the Portobello Road. (page 134)

It’s descriptions like that, that kept me reading this book, for Rendell is expert in depicting sad and seedy individuals, the mentally ill, and obsessed and strangely addicted characters. I wasn’t impressed with the way she tied up all the loose ends; it seemed too sentimental and not in keeping with the rest of the book. Overall and having thought about since finishing it I think that the prose drags the book up beyond the two stars (meaning it was ok) I gave it on Goodreads, so if I could I’d upgrade that to two and half  - I nearly liked it!

I’d identified this as a book to read for Carl’s RIP IV Challenge but I’m not sure it fits, although there is some suspense in it and a touch of dark fantasy.

Paperback: 384 pages
Publisher: Arrow (13 Aug 2009)
Language English
ISBN-10: 0099538636
ISBN-13: 978-0099538639
Source: I bought it (in a 3 for 2 in Waterstones)

I found it a slow start as Dr. Murry Watson, an English literature professor from Glasgow University researches the life of a largely unknown poet Archie Lunan. Lunan had died thirty years earlier, presumed drowned off the island of Lismore, although his body had never been discovered. As Murray investigates Lunan’s life, talking to people who had known him, he begins to suspect that Archie’s death may not have been the suicide it seemed and as more deaths come to his attention the mystery grows and becomes more sinister.

Murray’s personal life is in a mess; his relationship with his brother has broken down following their father’s death and his work life is complicated by his affair with his boss’s wife. This is a detailed book, the characters are vivid and memorable and  each location is beautifully described, not only the sights and sounds but smells too:

Murray pulled back his hood. The scent of wood smoke mingled with the falling rain and the damp rising from the sodden earth. It was an ancient smell, the same one the earliest islanders who could be resting, preserved beneath the peat, had known a millennia or so ago. (pages 327-8)

It is when Murray arrives on the island of Lismore in Loch Linnhe on the west coast of Scotland that the pace picks up, and the tension builds. Here Murray finally meets Archie’s girlfriend, Christie and begins to piece together what had happened thirty years ago. The book ends with some ambiguities still to be explained, an ending which I found perfectly in keeping with the story.

I was taken with Welsh’s handling of biography, describing it as

… a paper facsimile of life hurtling towards death. (page 128)

Murray is hoping to discover how much Archie’s life had influenced his art, whereas his former tutor, Professor James, had insisted on the importance of divorcing writers’ lives from their work, thinking it to be reductive and simplistic. It is the work itself that is important and Murray wonders whether this is right and whether he should limit himself to a discussion of the poetry, rather than the man. Again Welsh leaves this open to the reader to decide.

Naming the Bones isn’t the book I thought it was going to be – it isn’t really ‘gothic’, or dark, or about the occult. It isn’t really crime fiction, either. Nor is it anything like the only other book by Louise Welsh that I’ve read – The Cutting Room, which is really gothic and dark. Once I’d got over my expectations I enjoyed the book for what it is – a mystery and a good one too.

• Paperback: 389 pages
• Publisher: Canongate Books Ltd (3 Feb 2011)
• Language English
• ISBN-10: 1847672566
• ISBN-13: 978-1847672568
• Souce: I bought it

The purpose of the R.I.P. Challenge, which runs from 1 September to 31 October, is to enjoy books that could be classified as:

Mystery.
Suspense.
Thriller.
Dark Fantasy.
Gothic.
Horror.
Supernatural.

There are two simple goals for the R.eaders I.mbibing P.eril VI Challenge:

1. Have fun reading.
2. Share that fun with others.

As always Carl is hosting and this is the site to visit if you’re interested in joining in. There are several levels and I’m aiming to do Level One:

Peril the First:

‘Read four books, any length, that you feel fit (my very broad definitions) of R.I.P. literature. It could be Stephen King or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Ian Fleming or Edgar Allan Poe…or anyone in between.’

I’ll be choosing from these books (in no particular order), all from my to-be-read books:

• Naming the Bones by Louise Welsh
• Blood Harvest by S J Bolton
• Shadows in the Street by Susan Hill
• Life Support by Tessa Gerritsen
• Diamonds are Forever by Ian Fleming
• The Distant Hours by Kate Morton
• Blood Hunt by Jack Harvey (Ian Rankin)
• Portobello by Ruth Rendell
• Great Ghost Stories by Aldous Huxley & others
• The Turn of the Screw by Henry James – I started this ages ago and never finished it!

This has come at an appropriate time for me as, for once and amazingly, I have no books on the go!

Now I just need to decide which one to read first – I’m torn between Naming the Bones and Blood Harvest!

Sally and Gillian were orphaned when they were very young and went to live with their eccentric, elderly aunts in New England. Generations of the Owens women have lived in the house for more than two hundred years and have a reputation as witches. Everything that goes wrong in the town is put down to them. Yet women come to their door at night looking for remedies, particularly for love potions. Sally and Gillian grow up and both move away from their aunts to make their own way. Gillian, the younger wayward sister, has lots of love affairs ending up with Jimmy. Sally, the sensible one, meanwhile has two daughters and is a widow. When Gillian lands up on her doorstep with a dead Jimmy in the car, Sally’s life is turned upside down as she tries to cope with the situation. In the end it is the aunts who are called upon for help.

This is the first book by Alice Hoffman that I’ve read and whilst I thought it was OK I shan’t be rushing out to find more of her books. It has the feel of a fairy tale, mixed up with reality which I liked. There was enough suspense to keep me wondering how it would end and I liked how the characters interacted – Sally and Gillian were both well-drawn. I wasn’t that keen on the love stories, which seemed to be of the type of instant attraction with disastrous consequences. Interestingly, for me at any rate, I didn’t mind that it’s written in the present tense, most of the time I didn’t even notice it.

I didn’t identify this as a book for the RIP Challenge, but it fits in well, I think.

It’s time for Carl’s R.I.P. (Readers Imbibing Peril) Challenge. This challenge runs from 1 September to 31 October. As he describes it, it’s that time of the year

where two short months are dedicated to reveling in all things creepy, eerie, mysterious, gothic, horrifying, suspenseful and strange.

It is time to celebrate things that go bump in the night; that favorite detective that always gets his man, or woman, in the end; that delicious chill of a creak on the stairs, of the rogue waiting in the dark, of the full moon and the flit of bats wings.

The categories of books to choose from are:

Mystery.
Suspense.
Thriller.
Dark Fantasy.
Gothic.
Horror.
Supernatural.

There are a number of Perils, but I’m going for the easy one – Peril the Third, which involves reading one book that fits within the R.I.P. definition.

I have a few books to choose from as I don’t like to commit myself too soon. These are from my TBR list. If I read more than one that it is all the better:

• Sepulchre by Kate Mosse
• The Turn of the Screw by Henry James
• Dracula by Bram Stoker
• The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson (and the other books in the series!)
• Cause of Death by Patricia Cornwell
• The Collector by John Fowles
• The Meaning of Night by Michael Cox
• The Ghost by Robert Harris
• The Wrong Mother by Sophie Hannah
• The Last Enchantment by Mary Stewart

(The links go to Amazon.co.uk)