The Accursed by Joyce Carol Oates

This may be my first truly passionate book crush of the year. There have been other books I’ve liked a lot, granted, but this is as close as I’ve been to swooning this year, and definitely the book so far that has inspired me to start button-holing people and telling them that there’s this book they just have to read.

This is a little baffling, in a way, because there are ways in which I’m not quite sure what to make of the book as a whole. Part of why I want other people to read it is so that we can sit down and discuss and I can hash out all these theories. But I do know that, fully understanding it or not, I love it quite a lot.

I have never read any Joyce Carol Oates before, but this will most definitely not be the last. I was just delighted and intrigued by the whole book. By the end, strangely, it had come to remind me just a little of Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon, only vastly less confusing and much, much more readable. Where they are similar is in their amassing, in a large book, a truly staggering range of Americana of the time period each was discussing, from the very weird to the horrifyingly mundane, to the most out-sized characters of history.

Whereas Pynchon was looking at very early Americana, Oates roots her story in the early 20th century, in 1905 and 1906 in Princeton, New Jersey. Woodrow Wilson is a character, as is Grover Cleveland, Upton Sinclair, Mark Twain, Jack London, and even Sherlock Holmes, as well as a whole raft of wealthy socialites and philanthropists who live in town. (This is why I need to talk about it - it’s not that I don’t get it, it’s that there’s so much that even with what I’ve grasped, I’m very sure there are things I’m missing.)

It’s also a gothic novel, through and through, and the supernatural is strangely mixed into the history. There are suggestions of vampires or demons preying on these wealthy white people, starting with Annabel Slade running away during her wedding ceremony with a mysterious Eastern European man and then disappearing. There are also plagues of snakes, statues of humans, stories of horrible orgies in an underworld, and all of these are laid in so subtly that at times it’s hard to tell if they’re supposed to be real within this fiction, or just the output of unstable minds.

But here is where it is genius. Beside all these manifestations of The Curse, the actual every day curses of early 20th century society exist, and Oates keeps drawing attention to them so deftly that it never feels overdone, but often feels more horrific than the horror. From racism to class warfare to domestic abuse and further, these curses are laid alongside the manifestations that the rich white upper class is willing to define as evil - that is to say, those aspects that affect them in ways they would have scarcely imagined possible.

The book meanders, sometimes, due to the huge scope, but I was pretty much always enthralled, and the final confession that haunts the last pages (the version of the book I have ends on page 667, which feels delightfully cheeky) pulls both types of horrors together, and roots one firmly in the other.

Oates is trying something so audacious here, and she sticks the landing. This is strong candidate for one of my top 10 books of the year.

Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer

One of the big science fiction books of the past year. Winner of the Nebula Award. The first book in a trilogy all of which were released in a single year. It's a slim little book, and I'd certainly heard some of the hype around it, although really nothing about the content. What little I'd heard made me think of The Maze Runner, which is really not the comparison you want running through your head. (God, I hated The Maze Runner.) So I went into this with very few expectations, and was more than pleasantly surprised.

It is obviously the first book of a trilogy, in that by the end of the first book, there are far more mysteries than there are answers. This works for two reasons: 1) I know the other two books are already out, and so it didn't bother me in the way sometimes the first book in a trilogy usually does, but more importantly, 2) the character's story comes to a satisfying conclusion, even if there are still larger questions about the world unanswered. We don't cut off at a random point - her story comes full circle to a deeply unsettling end. It feels like a complete book that is part of a larger work, and I'm sorry to realize how few trilogies accomplish both those things.

What this book accomplished is being damned creepy without pushing so far into horror that I was out. I'm a huge chicken when it comes to scary stuff. This skirted that edge, and yet made me think my horror-loving husband might really appreciate the book. It's on the atmospheric edge of horror, where it's small revelations that are unsettling, not big things lunging at you from the dark.

The main character, who we never know by name, is one of four women who make up the 12th expedition into Area X. What exactly Area X is, how it came to be, and what it is becoming, are never entirely delved into. Partly, it seems that no one knows, but it's not far from a city where life goes on much as we know it. Except there are some unsettling suggestions of difference. She is the biologist, along with the psychologist, the surveyor, and the anthropologist. Other expeditions have been larger, or smaller. Some have disappeared utterly. Some have mysteriously reappeared back in the city, but changed. 

It would spoil the effect to get in to what they find there, but from the beginning, there is something deeply unsettling about the moment where they find a passage leading down into the earth, and the biologist is only able to think of it as a tower. None of the other agrees, but it creates a dissonance every time she thinks of The Tower, and that helped set the unease in my shoulders as I read further. 

This is the biologist's story, as much as it is that of the expedition. Who she is, what drove her to sign up for the expedition in the first place, and how that drives her to interact with the uncanny nature of Area X, form the emotional core, and it is equally unsettling.

As I said, in the end, we don't find out exactly what's going on in Area X, but we are given revelations that were exactly the type to make my spine crawl. Good work, Jeff Vandermeer.  At the end, that character comes to a point in her journey that is a satisfying, if also creepy and ambiguous, ending. It's a good combination of answers and questions, and makes me eager to go on to book two, although I'll probably try to hold out for a while.

I didn't know if I'd like this book, given the hype. Turns out, I liked it quite a lot.

At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft

If you wanted a list of sentences I thought I would never say, "I have just read something by H.P. Lovecraft" would be way up there. Like, way up there. I don't read horror, and I've had bad experiences, not with Lovecraft himself, but with Lovecraft-inspired roleplaying games. I had to swear off playing Call of Cthulhu years ago, to my husband's lasting chagrin, as I found that they were too upsetting and depressing for me to play any longer. Bill and I hashed it out for a long time, trying to isolate what exactly it was that put me so on edge to play Call of Cthulhu, and while I was satisfied with our explanation of the utter lack of agency I feel when I'm playing that game, I'm not sure that gets at all of it.

There are other games where I've played characters out against overwhelming odds, with death on the line, and they haven't made me as upset. I don't know.

So because of that, I've steered far away from Lovecraft. I'm not good at horror at the best of times, and so this seemed safer if it were one of those places where my reading habits and this author never intersected.

Then I ran out of books on a weekend. Blew through all my library books. Had two days of the library being closed before I could get new ones. And my online SF book club on goodreads was reading At the Mountains of Madness. So I asked Bill if he thought I could handle it. He thought I could, and that I probably wouldn't find it scary at all. So I sat down and read this novella.

He was right. Not scary at all. Interesting, but with little sense of dread. I think I know why that is, but we'll get there in a bit.

In this book, explorers go to Antarctica and discover horrors, and the survivors are now trying to warn off another expedition. What they find there are the remnants of a lost civilization, inhuman, with still some monsters lurking in the deeps. And gigantic penguins.

This is most description, page upon page of description, and this is where I start to realize why I think it is that I'm not weirded out by this. Bill and I were talking as I was partway through, and he was saying that for him, the disturbing part is Lovecraft trying to describe the indescribable, and it's that leap where you can almost picture it but not quite that is so very unsettling.

The thing is, I am not a visual thinker. Most paragraphs of description, no matter how lush, result in no more than the shadowy edges of a picture, and more often stay as the pleasure of words. That leap where you can't quite picture it? That's me, pretty much all the time. So reading Lovecraft's descriptions is not that different from reading any author's descriptions. That sense of it remaining just outside your perception is entirely missing. Or far too present, I suppose, but I've made my peace with it.

So there was no sense of unease, just an adventure story with nasty monsters that never leaped to pictures in my brain because that just never happens. As such, I enjoyed it, and it didn't traumatize me, and I'm not feeling quite so wary of Lovecraft. Still, I won't be running out to play Call of Cthulhu again any time soon.

Supernatural Noir edited by Ellen Datlow

There are some very good stories in this anthology, and a number of only so-so ones. I said that to my husband, and he replied, "so, it's an anthology?" Fair enough. More of the problem, if it's a particular problem, is that many of these stories are not very noir. Supernatural, sure. But a few fall down on the noir front. They lack that cynical edge of noir, even a few that manage to include detectives. It's not always a bad thing - one of my favourite stories in the collection isn't in the least a noir story. It's just a really good ghost story.

I read through this collection very slowly, so I'm not sure I remember a ton about a few of the stories. That may say something. But here we go, story by story:

The Dingus by Gregory Frost

This one has the driven detective (in this case, former coach), out to figure out what really killed his former protege and left him in a pile of shapeless ooze on the floor of a whorehouse. It's not bad, but not really striking. Definitely noir.

The Getaway by Paul G. Tremblay

I'm not really convinced this one was noir, more of a straightforward crime getaway story. But it's a good creepy supernatural story, as the men who planned a simple robbery pile into the car and start...disappearing? 

Mortal Bait by Richard Bowes

Definitely noir. And noir mixed with the fae works rather well - they have that potential cruelty and carelessness with human life that seems to be to be a hallmark of noir. This also has the nice twisty plot, where everyone is turned around and there are at least two more twists waiting.

Little Shit by Melanie Tem

I'm not really sure what I think about this story. The question about entrapping someone you care about is a good one, and the story certainly is disturbing. Noir? Maybe. Maybe not. This is the first time that I realized that a lot of these stories have lesbians as their protagonists, but not a single gay man. Interesting. Not a problem per se, but interesting that this seems to have gotten inclusive in one way but not another.


Ditch Witch by Lucius Shepherd

Oh, wait. The main character in this one, well, he's not gay himself, but might dabble? Okay, I sort of retract. But not really. At any rate, this young grifter picks up another young woman on the sleazy side of the street, and they end up staying at a roadside motel where - hey did that garden gnome just move? It's okay. Nothing stellar.


The Last Triangle by Jeffrey Ford

I really liked this one. I couldn't tell you why. I think it's the combo of the unreliable narrator and the old woman who takes him in that appealed to me. It's got an interesting detective story as she employs him to help her find out who might have been killing people at occult spots around town. And discovers that the culprit might be a figure from her past.

The Carrion Gods in Their Heaven by Laird Barron

Another one that just doesn't feel that noir. Parts of it at times, but it's mostly a story of a woman and her lover shacked up in the woods, where the lover discovers the powers of an old wolf pelt, and seems to be spending more time as a wolf than as a woman. I guess there is a detective. Still, more horror than noir.


The Romance by Elizabeth Bear

This is one of my favourite stories in the collection, and is absolutely in no way noir. I may be biased, as Bear is one of my favourite authors, but it's a really excellent ghost story, set around an old carousel. Just because there's a crime doesn't make it noir, unfortunately - how do we think most ghosts come into being? But still, it's creepy and the protagonist is middle-aged and interesting.


Dead Sister by Joe R. Lansdale

Probably the most noir and most accomplished story of the bunch, but would we expect anything else from Lansdale? Noir needs that neat turn of phrase as well as crime and a detective, and this has the trifecta, with a dame and everything. A woman shows up at a detective's door, with a story about her sister's grave being disturbed every night, and the answer is creepy as hell.

Comfortable in Her Skin by Lee Thomas

Frankly, I don't remember this one very clearly. It's something to do with a wizard and the ability to wear someone's else's skin, and while I think it was fine, the fact that I've forgotten most of the things about it is not a good sign.

But For Scars by Tom Piccirrilli

This is a haunting little tale about love and loss and how fucked up that can make someone. Set right in the middle of a biker gang, one man must try to figure out who killed the former leader years ago, if only to pay a debt to the daughter of that leader that he has failed. It's got a light touch with the supernatural, which seems just exactly right.

Blisters on My Heart by Nate Southard

I really liked this one, told by a dying man possibly facing the end of the world, telling the story of the woman he loved and may have doomed the world for. It's an intriguing voice, and truly unsettling in implications. 

The Absent Eye by Brian Evenson

This was more a meditation than a story. There's no real narrative to the story, most just the backstory for something else. It's interesting as a meditation, the idea of creatures that live with us until our deaths, but don't know what happens to themselves when they die. They find a human who can see them and he becomes a detective on the trail. Interesting, but still not really a story.

The Maltese Unicorn by Caitlin R. Kiernan

The most obviously noir in terms of the title, and makes good use of the conventions of noir. The twist here is not only the supernatural, but that the "detective" swept up in this who must figure out what's happened to her, is female. And a dame walks into her shop, telling her to pick up an object for a demon madam she does odd jobs for. This one is rife with more explicit sex than you would find in old noir, while still retaining the flavour, and the twistiness of alliances.

Dreamer of the Day by Nick Mamatas

Also one of the very noir stories in the bunch, this one has a dame trying to get a guy to off her husband. Her present lover takes her to an old man who might be able to help. But he might be sick of his position, and things may not work out the way she thought. Nicely twisty, tightly focused. Fun.

In Paris, in the Mouth of Kronos by John Langan

Unwieldy title, but a very good story. It taps into real-life horrors like those that happened at Abu Ghraib, and puts a supernatural twist on them. Another one I'm not sure was really all that noir, but a very creepy story, and the melding of the real-world with the supernatural was excellently done. 

I Am Legend by Richard Matheson

Warning: Major Plot Spoilers Near The End

Yet again, I've been breaking the rules. This time, it wasn't on purpose! But I went into reading I Am Legend knowing the ending, knowing the twist. Years ago, you see, my husband had wanted to talk about the book, probably when the most recent adaptation to movie form had come out, and I am well known for not reading horror, so it wasn't an unreasonable assumption that I would never read this.

So, wrong, in the long run, but it made reading this for the first time a very different experience than it would be for someone who was going into it cold.

And I think it made the book more horrifying, not less. Knowing what I knew, many actions suddenly appeared in a new light. I would recognize how someone would interpret it the first time, but then have the chill down my spine that knowing the narrative twist created.

In this book, Robert Neville is possibly the last human left alive. Well, that's not quite true. The last uninfected human left alive, anyway. At what point do you cease to be human? What are the defining characteristics? The rest of the human race, as far as he knows, has contracted an illness that closely mimics vampirism. (I'm not marking that with a spoiler, that comes out in the first five to ten pages, and I'm of the firm opinion that stuff that happens that early needs no spoiler tag.) Some have died, and are reanimated, walking at night. Many others are infected humans.

Neville at first works only on the simple mechanics of staying alive - it takes all of his time and mental energy, not that he has much mental energy, having lost a wife and daughter to the plague. Eventually, he turns his attention to science, and discovers certain things about the plague and why it works the way it does, although his efforts on some fronts fail to explain certain aspects - there seems to be a potential mingling of the viral and the supernatural.

I Am Legend is the story of a harried, traumatized man, trying to survive, and lashing out at those who nightly try to kill him, while he hunkers down in his barricaded house. That story, in and of itself, is interesting. It is the narrative twist that Matheson puts on it at the end that elevates it into something more.

I want to discuss some things about the ending, so let's get into spoiler territory.

At the end of the book, Neville is captured by the newly forming society of those who are infected but alive, and is sentenced to death. He realizes that he has, in fact, become the Boogeyman of this new society. If they are all that is left, he is the monster, preying on them while they sleep, particularly killing women (the book makes a point of this), dragging people from their beds and murdering them, so that when others wake up, all they find are the dead bodies of those they knew and perhaps loved.

Not only is there no place for him, but there is the recognition that he had decided they were not human and deserving of summary execution, but they saw themselves as still people, bloodsucking tendencies notwithstanding.

But this brings me to the most horrifying part of the book, one that is only vaguely hinted at, but I'm pretty sure I'm reading this right. Neville's wife died. He couldn't bear to take her to the firepits where, at that point, the authorities were mandating all bodies be taken. He buried her. She came back, and tried to kill him.

That's all pretty clear. What's less overt is that, as far as I can tell, when he was able to disable her again, he took her to a mausoleum, nailed her into a coffin, and CONTINUES TO NAIL HER INTO THAT COFFIN every time she makes progress on breaking out. He visits, and checks on the nails. There is an earlier scene where he wonders if he'll have enough coffin nails, and this is the only use for which they are mentioned.

So you have a man who, from the perspective of the vampires, preys on them while they sleep, steals family members out of their beds and leaves their dead and decaying bodies behind, keeps a woman trapped in a coffin eternally...yeah, he makes a pretty good boogeyman.

Because we've taken the ride with him, that's an unsettling realization.

It's also why the people have to remain vampires, not get turned into zombies, or mutants, or whatever. Nothing else gives you that time period where they are quiescent, sleeping during the day, unable to wake up, while he stalks among them. But I'm not sure Hollywood's ever going to be up for that ending anyway.

I found I Am Legend unsettling to read, in a good way, and the rest of the stories in the version I had to be entertaining. And that twist is one of the all-time greats. I have a hard time thinking of a better.