Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories
Oscar Wilde
Naxos Audiobook
Fiction, Collection/Humor/Literary Fiction
***+ (Okay/Good)
DESCRIPTION: A grim prognostication leads a young lord to desperate measures... an aged and proper English ghost is driven to his wit's end by the new American tenants of his ancestral home... a man consoles a friend about a mysterious lost love... Six stories by Oscar Wilde are collected here:
Lord Arthur Savile's Crime: A "chiromantist" - reader of hands - at a socialite's party convinces the gullible Lord Savile that he's destined to commit a heinous crime, so he determines to get it over and done with before his impending nuptials... only to find murder is far from easy.
The Canterville Ghost: When an American family purchases an old English estate, they also inherit its irascible ghost, who doesn't know what to do with the unaristocratic and utterly unruly foreigners.
The Portrait of Mr. W. H.: A dinner discussion ignites a passion for an alternative solution to the mysteries of Shakespeare's sonnets.
The Model Millionaire: A young man has a fateful encounter with an artist's model.
The Sphinx Without a Secret - An Etching: One man's dream girl hides a mysterious double life... or does she?
The Birthday of the Infanta: A young Spanish princess's birthday party features musicians, a mock bull fight, a puppet play, and a boy dwarf dancer who tragically misunderstands his circumstances.
REVIEW: Once in a while I take a run at classics, which I find sometimes go down easier in audiobook format. This collection gathers a handful of stories from one of the more famous English writers, and while they can still be entertaining, they also can't help but bear traces of their time (quite notable in certain racial depictions), particularly in their tendency to draw themselves out with verbal meanderings that don't always contribute to the story.
The first story is riddled with social satire and caricatures of 19th century socialites (and others), an amusing and sometimes silly send-up of a self-fulfilling prophecy. When the glorified palmist predicts Lord Savile will murder a distant relative, he starts going through the family Rolodex (or the period equivalent) to find a suitable candidate, as he can't possibly get married with a future felony hanging over his head... but his efforts keep failing him. Along the way, he inadvertently discovers a new perspective on life as he pushes outside his posh comfort zone.
The Canterville Ghost reads like an old Disney family movie from before Disney Studios existed, with very silly overtones and goofy, slapstick antics. The ghost - depicted as essentially an immortal prima donna actor who has never before failed to master an audience - tears his metaphoric hair as the Americans not only refuse to be properly frightened out of their wits, but treat the phantom as a vaguely irritating house guest at best and a laughingstock at worst. The ending veers away from the borderline-cartoony earlier tale into something more sentimental and philosophical, the two parts not quite matching. Some nice imagery and a few chuckles, but overall it was too dippy for my tastes.
The third tale would've been barely more than flash fiction had Wilde not spent so much time rehashing and reprinting and re-analyzing Shakespeare's sonnets (which his target audience was likely more than familiar with) in pursuit of a fictional alternate theory as to whom the legendary bard was addressing in the sometimes-cryptic verses. The theory takes on a life and passion of its own, ending friendships and even a life or two in its fervor before passing on to the next listener. It seems to be more of a study of literary enthusiasts and the dangers of obsession.
The shortest tale in the collection, The Model Millionaire never really develops its story and still takes too many words to reach an obvious ending.
The Sphinx Without a Secret sets itself up as a riff on the old tale of the lover with the secret that must never be pried into (only for the other half of the partnership to be unable to resist the mystery, dooming their future happiness), but never quite feels like it earns the tragic ending it delivers.
The last story is the saddest, though it also feels like one with the most padding, painstakingly establishing the girl princess's father and deceased mother and scheming uncle and more, then plodding through the majority of the party before arriving at the dancing dwarf who - only recently sold into servitude by his charcoal-burner father after a carefree childhood in the forests, entirely innocent in the ways of the "civilized" world or the cruelties of the aristocracy - fails to recognize the dangers in trusting a princess. The final line twists a knife.
While Wilde paints some interesting (if inherently exaggerated) characters and makes many pithy observations and one-liners, the stories do show their age. Additionally, the whole presentation suffered from prolonged musical interludes - not just between stories, but between "chapters" within each of the longer stories. A quick bit to signal a scene change might've worked okay, but these were far too long and grew rather annoying, especially when I could never be sure if they were signalling a switch to a new story or just a very long pause in the same tale. They helped weigh the collection down in the ratings, even though overall I found them more engaging than I'd expected, given my hit-and-miss history with classics.
You Might Also Enjoy:
The Nonexistent Knight (Italo Calvino) - My Review
Fifty-One Tales (Lord Dunsany) - My Review
The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald) - My Review
Thursday, October 17, 2024
Wednesday, October 16, 2024
The Circus of Stolen Dreams (Lorelei Savaryn)
The Circus of Stolen Dreams
Lorelei Savaryn
Viking
Fiction, MG Chiller/Fantasy
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: Three years ago, Andrea's kid brother Francis disappeared in the middle of the night... and it's all her fault. Not a day passes when she doesn't blame herself, though she still hopes against hope that he'll return. One night, at yet another tense family dinner, her divorced parents announce that they're going to finally get rid of Francis's things, insisting it's time to let go... but she can't let go. That's as bad as pretending he never existed at all.
Grieving, angry, she jumps on her bike and pedals off into the moonlit evening to cool down, taking the path through the woods at the park - and finding something very strange. A flyer leads her to the circus Reverie, a place where children from around the world can forget their worries for a single night. The price of entry for one night is a dream or memory - and she knows just the memory she'd love to be rid of, the memory of her last night with Francis and the terrible mistake she made that led to him vanishing.
Once inside the iron gates, Andrea finds herself swept up in a magical world, where she can live countless dreams and memories and nightmares, everything from flying through the clouds to escaping a sea witch sacrifice. But when she finds a nightmare that used to plague her brother, she realizes that he must have come to Reverie after he vanished from their room. Maybe he's still there, one of the countless other children wandering the fairgrounds. With her new friend Penny, she sets out to uncover the truth - and instead discovers a darkness at the heart of the circus, beneath the whimsy and wonder... a darkness that nobody can escape.
REVIEW: Sinister circuses aren't exactly new fictional territory, but The Circus of Stolen Dreams adds a bit of a twist with the dream angle, helped by a main character who genuinely has reasons to want to abandon her pain- and guilt-filled reality to bury herself in another world... and a villain with a vested interest in keeping her there.
From the start, Andrea is a girl whose life has been shattered beyond any hope of repair: she's sitting at a silent dinner table with her divorced parents, staring at the empty seat where her brother Francis should be, crushed by her own guilt (which the reader will understand later on)... only to be told that her mother is about to get rid of the last of her brother's belongings, one more blow she simply cannot take. Her ride in the dark - ostensibly to clear her head, but one wonders whether she intends to really go back home to deal with the thorny emotions lingering there - brings her to the circus Reverie and a strange girl, roughly her own age, who explains the rules and the price of admission. At twelve, Andrea is still young enough to accept magic - especially when facing a circus in the park that could not possibly be where it is - if old enough to hesitate, if slightly. She agrees, of course, at least as much to be rid of the painful memory of her guilt as to gain entrance to a fairground full of literal dreams. Once inside, she encounters Penny, and her first possible hints that something might be amiss; Penny, like everyone else, appears happy, but has the appearance of someone who's been up far past their bedtime. There are also some oddly anachronistic outfits floating among the other guests. But Andrea is too relieved to finally be in a place where she can enjoy herself, where she can set down the burden of her parents' divorce and her estrangement from her own friends and... something else that was bothering her, something she knew must be bad if she agreed to give up its memory to get into Reverie. While the dreams (and even a sampling of nightmares, which provide their own exhilaration in the way a haunted house or wild roller coast does, the adrenaline rush of surviving and escaping) help, Andrea can't shake the nagging sense that she's forgetting something very important... and when she finds Francis's recurring nightmare among the tents, enough comes flooding back to prompt her to ask questions and poke around, even though Penny warns her against it. This brings her into the presence of the Sandman, the creator and operator of Reverie, and the beginning of a high stakes game of sorts between the two, as he tries to coax her back into complacency and forgetfulness and she refuses to give in - with increasingly dire consequences, as it becomes harder and harder to tell just what is dream and what is reality in this place. Even when she finds a little boy who seems to be Francis, he's a child of six, not of nine like the real boy would be - or does time even work the same here in Reverie? As Andrea digs for the truth about the circus and Francis and a means to escape, she finds ways to process the grief that's been strangling her for over three years, an emotional and sometimes heartbreaking journey.
The tale came close to earning an extra half-star for delving surprisingly deep into the pain of a broken child and family and how attempts to ignore reality and the truth inevitably produce backlash that causes at least as much pain as the thing one was trying to ignore in the first place - not just for oneself, but for those around you, even total strangers caught in the maelstrom of consequences - and setting up parallels between Andrea and the Sandman that make it plausibly difficult for the girl to outwit and outmaneuver him. I kept thinking the tale had reached its peak, and it just kept going higher and hitting harder. After the emotional climax, the final parts feel just a little too stretched, though, with a couple things that, though tangential, stretched the premise a little far (even given the presence of magic)... things that almost make me wonder if Savaryn was intending a sequel or series involving Andrea and/or Reverie. It was a very, very near miss, though. I wasn't anticipating a tale as emotionally charged as this one, as willing to confront head-on concepts of grief and loss and guilt and the yearning to escape it all, capturing along the way the immersive, strange wonders of dreams.
(As a closing nitpicky note, I call foul on the concept of not feeling pain in dreams. Personal experience suggests otherwise.)
You Might Also Enjoy:
Small Spaces (Katherine Arden) - My Review
Haunter of Dreams (Claudya Schmidt) - My Review
Full Tilt (Neal Shusterman) - My Review
Lorelei Savaryn
Viking
Fiction, MG Chiller/Fantasy
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: Three years ago, Andrea's kid brother Francis disappeared in the middle of the night... and it's all her fault. Not a day passes when she doesn't blame herself, though she still hopes against hope that he'll return. One night, at yet another tense family dinner, her divorced parents announce that they're going to finally get rid of Francis's things, insisting it's time to let go... but she can't let go. That's as bad as pretending he never existed at all.
Grieving, angry, she jumps on her bike and pedals off into the moonlit evening to cool down, taking the path through the woods at the park - and finding something very strange. A flyer leads her to the circus Reverie, a place where children from around the world can forget their worries for a single night. The price of entry for one night is a dream or memory - and she knows just the memory she'd love to be rid of, the memory of her last night with Francis and the terrible mistake she made that led to him vanishing.
Once inside the iron gates, Andrea finds herself swept up in a magical world, where she can live countless dreams and memories and nightmares, everything from flying through the clouds to escaping a sea witch sacrifice. But when she finds a nightmare that used to plague her brother, she realizes that he must have come to Reverie after he vanished from their room. Maybe he's still there, one of the countless other children wandering the fairgrounds. With her new friend Penny, she sets out to uncover the truth - and instead discovers a darkness at the heart of the circus, beneath the whimsy and wonder... a darkness that nobody can escape.
REVIEW: Sinister circuses aren't exactly new fictional territory, but The Circus of Stolen Dreams adds a bit of a twist with the dream angle, helped by a main character who genuinely has reasons to want to abandon her pain- and guilt-filled reality to bury herself in another world... and a villain with a vested interest in keeping her there.
From the start, Andrea is a girl whose life has been shattered beyond any hope of repair: she's sitting at a silent dinner table with her divorced parents, staring at the empty seat where her brother Francis should be, crushed by her own guilt (which the reader will understand later on)... only to be told that her mother is about to get rid of the last of her brother's belongings, one more blow she simply cannot take. Her ride in the dark - ostensibly to clear her head, but one wonders whether she intends to really go back home to deal with the thorny emotions lingering there - brings her to the circus Reverie and a strange girl, roughly her own age, who explains the rules and the price of admission. At twelve, Andrea is still young enough to accept magic - especially when facing a circus in the park that could not possibly be where it is - if old enough to hesitate, if slightly. She agrees, of course, at least as much to be rid of the painful memory of her guilt as to gain entrance to a fairground full of literal dreams. Once inside, she encounters Penny, and her first possible hints that something might be amiss; Penny, like everyone else, appears happy, but has the appearance of someone who's been up far past their bedtime. There are also some oddly anachronistic outfits floating among the other guests. But Andrea is too relieved to finally be in a place where she can enjoy herself, where she can set down the burden of her parents' divorce and her estrangement from her own friends and... something else that was bothering her, something she knew must be bad if she agreed to give up its memory to get into Reverie. While the dreams (and even a sampling of nightmares, which provide their own exhilaration in the way a haunted house or wild roller coast does, the adrenaline rush of surviving and escaping) help, Andrea can't shake the nagging sense that she's forgetting something very important... and when she finds Francis's recurring nightmare among the tents, enough comes flooding back to prompt her to ask questions and poke around, even though Penny warns her against it. This brings her into the presence of the Sandman, the creator and operator of Reverie, and the beginning of a high stakes game of sorts between the two, as he tries to coax her back into complacency and forgetfulness and she refuses to give in - with increasingly dire consequences, as it becomes harder and harder to tell just what is dream and what is reality in this place. Even when she finds a little boy who seems to be Francis, he's a child of six, not of nine like the real boy would be - or does time even work the same here in Reverie? As Andrea digs for the truth about the circus and Francis and a means to escape, she finds ways to process the grief that's been strangling her for over three years, an emotional and sometimes heartbreaking journey.
The tale came close to earning an extra half-star for delving surprisingly deep into the pain of a broken child and family and how attempts to ignore reality and the truth inevitably produce backlash that causes at least as much pain as the thing one was trying to ignore in the first place - not just for oneself, but for those around you, even total strangers caught in the maelstrom of consequences - and setting up parallels between Andrea and the Sandman that make it plausibly difficult for the girl to outwit and outmaneuver him. I kept thinking the tale had reached its peak, and it just kept going higher and hitting harder. After the emotional climax, the final parts feel just a little too stretched, though, with a couple things that, though tangential, stretched the premise a little far (even given the presence of magic)... things that almost make me wonder if Savaryn was intending a sequel or series involving Andrea and/or Reverie. It was a very, very near miss, though. I wasn't anticipating a tale as emotionally charged as this one, as willing to confront head-on concepts of grief and loss and guilt and the yearning to escape it all, capturing along the way the immersive, strange wonders of dreams.
(As a closing nitpicky note, I call foul on the concept of not feeling pain in dreams. Personal experience suggests otherwise.)
You Might Also Enjoy:
Small Spaces (Katherine Arden) - My Review
Haunter of Dreams (Claudya Schmidt) - My Review
Full Tilt (Neal Shusterman) - My Review
Friday, October 11, 2024
How to Survive History (Cody Cassidy)
How to Survive History: How to Outrun a Tyrannosaurus, Escape Pompeii, Get Off the Titanic, and Survive the Rest of History's Deadliest Catastrophes
Cody Cassidy
Penguin Books
Nonfiction, History/Humor/Science
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: History is a dangerous place, but it also has some excellent sight-seeing. After all, where else are you going to witness herds of woolly mammoths or the splendor of 1400's Constantinople? If you managed to obtain a time machine, and avoided the pesky causality paradoxes that might erase your own existence, you could experience the vacation of a lifetime... but it's not much of a vacation if you don't make it home safely to share your photos on social media. If a Tyrannosaurus Rex crashes your Cretaceous-era picnic, could you get away? If your working vacation takes you to the construction of the Egyptian pyramids, how would you blend in? What if your trip to long-ago London coincides with the arrival of the Black Plague, or your around-the-world cruise drops you into Magellan's ships, or your Old West adventure lands you in the notorious Donner Party? Find out in this handy guide to some of the world's greatest disasters, and learn from those who survived.
REVIEW: As the description implies, this is a nice, light "popcorn history" book. Using records, archaeology, speculation, and some science, as well as numerous interviews with experts (not all of whom agree on the best courses of action to, say, survive the Titanic or escape Pompeii), Cassidy brings big ideas and moments down to a human scale. From facing off against giants of Earth's prehistory to surviving the darkest years of the Dark Ages to escaping the ravages of the worst tornado ever recorded in America and more, he whisks the reader/time traveler through highlights (or lowlights) of the past and offers survival tips for the savvy time tourist. Each entry is fairly short and contains interesting details, though a few gloss over what felt like important points and end a little abruptly. Overall, though, it's an intriguing little book of historical facts and factoids and speculations.
You Might Also Enjoy:
A SURVIVAL GUIDE: Living with Dinosaurs in the Jurassic Period (Dougal Dixon) - My Review
Terry Jones' Barbarians (Terry Jones and Alan Ereira) - My Review
Where's My Jetpack? (Daniel H. Wilson) - My Review
Cody Cassidy
Penguin Books
Nonfiction, History/Humor/Science
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: History is a dangerous place, but it also has some excellent sight-seeing. After all, where else are you going to witness herds of woolly mammoths or the splendor of 1400's Constantinople? If you managed to obtain a time machine, and avoided the pesky causality paradoxes that might erase your own existence, you could experience the vacation of a lifetime... but it's not much of a vacation if you don't make it home safely to share your photos on social media. If a Tyrannosaurus Rex crashes your Cretaceous-era picnic, could you get away? If your working vacation takes you to the construction of the Egyptian pyramids, how would you blend in? What if your trip to long-ago London coincides with the arrival of the Black Plague, or your around-the-world cruise drops you into Magellan's ships, or your Old West adventure lands you in the notorious Donner Party? Find out in this handy guide to some of the world's greatest disasters, and learn from those who survived.
REVIEW: As the description implies, this is a nice, light "popcorn history" book. Using records, archaeology, speculation, and some science, as well as numerous interviews with experts (not all of whom agree on the best courses of action to, say, survive the Titanic or escape Pompeii), Cassidy brings big ideas and moments down to a human scale. From facing off against giants of Earth's prehistory to surviving the darkest years of the Dark Ages to escaping the ravages of the worst tornado ever recorded in America and more, he whisks the reader/time traveler through highlights (or lowlights) of the past and offers survival tips for the savvy time tourist. Each entry is fairly short and contains interesting details, though a few gloss over what felt like important points and end a little abruptly. Overall, though, it's an intriguing little book of historical facts and factoids and speculations.
You Might Also Enjoy:
A SURVIVAL GUIDE: Living with Dinosaurs in the Jurassic Period (Dougal Dixon) - My Review
Terry Jones' Barbarians (Terry Jones and Alan Ereira) - My Review
Where's My Jetpack? (Daniel H. Wilson) - My Review
The Brides of High Hill (Nghi Vo)
The Brides of High Hill
The Singing Hills Cycle, Book 5
Nghi Vo
Tordotcom
Fiction, Fantasy
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: Cleric Chih continues their travels about the land in search of stories to record for the archives of Singing Hills. After a chance meeting on the road, they are asked to accompany young Pham Nhung and her parents on the way to an arranged marriage with the wealthy lord of Doi Cau. The man is much older than her, but such arranged marriages are not uncommon, and her family needs the wealth the union will bring. But something is not right in the home of Nhung's intended. The servants are sullen. The lord's son is acting very strange. And nobody seems willing to answer Chih's questions, especially about what happened to the lord of Doi Cau's previous brides...
REVIEW: Once again, the traveling cleric of Singing Hills finds themself pulled into another story brought to life around them, this time compelled by their heart as much as their calling: their feelings toward the young bride-to-be are more than friendly, and Nhung does not actively discourage the attention. This makes Chih a little more protective than they would be of most traveling companions, and a little more prone to sticking their nose into the matter of the arranged marriage, which was already far from a love match but starts to take on very sinister tones from the moment they pass through the lord's gates. There is a story here indeed, but not the one the cleric expects - one that may well be the last story they ever witness. Their talking hoopoe companion Almost Brilliant would be an asset in figuring things out, but the bird has not traveled to the compound with Chih, an absence they feel keenly, even as they pine for the woman they know they can never really be with. Something about this entry in the series felt a little bit thin or stretched compared to previous tales, in a way I can't quite identify but with left me a little less satisfied than I should have been by the end. It's still a decent, if dark, tale, and I still enjoy the characters and the world.
You Might Also Enjoy:
Nettle and Bone (T. Kingfisher) - My Review
The Tiger's Daughter (K. Arsenault Rivera) - My Review
The Empress of Salt and Fortune (Nghi Vo) - My Review
The Singing Hills Cycle, Book 5
Nghi Vo
Tordotcom
Fiction, Fantasy
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: Cleric Chih continues their travels about the land in search of stories to record for the archives of Singing Hills. After a chance meeting on the road, they are asked to accompany young Pham Nhung and her parents on the way to an arranged marriage with the wealthy lord of Doi Cau. The man is much older than her, but such arranged marriages are not uncommon, and her family needs the wealth the union will bring. But something is not right in the home of Nhung's intended. The servants are sullen. The lord's son is acting very strange. And nobody seems willing to answer Chih's questions, especially about what happened to the lord of Doi Cau's previous brides...
REVIEW: Once again, the traveling cleric of Singing Hills finds themself pulled into another story brought to life around them, this time compelled by their heart as much as their calling: their feelings toward the young bride-to-be are more than friendly, and Nhung does not actively discourage the attention. This makes Chih a little more protective than they would be of most traveling companions, and a little more prone to sticking their nose into the matter of the arranged marriage, which was already far from a love match but starts to take on very sinister tones from the moment they pass through the lord's gates. There is a story here indeed, but not the one the cleric expects - one that may well be the last story they ever witness. Their talking hoopoe companion Almost Brilliant would be an asset in figuring things out, but the bird has not traveled to the compound with Chih, an absence they feel keenly, even as they pine for the woman they know they can never really be with. Something about this entry in the series felt a little bit thin or stretched compared to previous tales, in a way I can't quite identify but with left me a little less satisfied than I should have been by the end. It's still a decent, if dark, tale, and I still enjoy the characters and the world.
You Might Also Enjoy:
Nettle and Bone (T. Kingfisher) - My Review
The Tiger's Daughter (K. Arsenault Rivera) - My Review
The Empress of Salt and Fortune (Nghi Vo) - My Review
Thursday, October 10, 2024
Hemlock Island (Kelly Armstrong)
Hemlock Island
Kelly Armstrong
St. Martin's Press
Fiction, Thriller
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: After her whirlwind marriage to a tech mogul ended during the pandemic, Laney Kilpatrick managed to remain friends with her ex, Kip. He even gave her the little private island in Lake Superior where they'd built their dream vacation home... an island inauspiciously named after a stand of poisonous hemlock. Unfortunately, Laney's modest salary as a teacher and the minimal income from her debut novel aren't nearly enough to afford the place, especially after her sister passed away and left her the guardian of teenager Madison, so she's been forced to offer Hemlock Island as a summer rental. Lately, though, strange goings-on have been spooking the clients: strange occult symbols, wind chimes of bones and feathers, escalating now to bloodstains and claw marks in a closet, as though something - or someone - had been trying to scratch their way out. After the latest renters abandon the place, Laney decides she needs to investigate things herself... and Madison isn't about to be left behind, not even for a night. Her ex-husband has also been alerted, as well as their mutual high school friends Jayla and Sadie - the latter of whom brings along her police detective brother Garrett. These are not the people she'd choose to bring with her, for various reasons, but there's no turning them away.
As soon as they set foot on Hemlock Island, it's clear that this is not just the work of some pranksters or yet more unruly renters. Something far more sinister is afoot, every discovery more chilling than the last. When the boat is destroyed, Laney and the rest find themselves stranded - and they are not alone. The very isolation that once drew Laney to Hemlock Island, too far from the mainland for telephones or cell signals, now turns it into the perfect trap, made all the worse as long-buried feelings and secrets between the friends are unearthed. Will any of them survive long enough to escape?
REVIEW: A group of fractured friends and lovers, an isolated location, a deadly threat, and no way out... Hemlock Island has all the standard thriller ingredients and uses them competently, delivering a serviceable, if not especially standout, tale.
Starting with a phone call from upset renters about the latest unusual incident on the island, the story kicks off with minimal dithering, assembling its cast and suggesting a storied history binding them as they head to Hemlock Island. They all have their reasons for joining Laney, some a little flimsier than others, that come out as they find themselves in over their heads on what seemed at first to be simple acts of vandalism. It goes without saying that, no, this isn't just some bored teens playing pranks or spoiled renters finding yet another way to wreck the property, but something much more dangerous... something that soon racks up a body count. Laney wavers between being an independent, proactive woman and a hesitant, even overcautious person too prone to giving others the benefit of the doubt even in exceptionally dire and dangerous situations. Much of her life has been bent to accommodate the wills and apparent wishes of those around her. Hemlock Island was a dream come true for her when she and Kip first went there, and it's the one thing that she's clung to just for her own sake; it and her niece Madison are the two things she will fight for with every fiber of her being, even against the evils she finds waiting for her. The other characters generally slot into familiar roles: the sassy, brassy best friend Jayla who believes in Laney more than Laney believes in herself, the "friend" Sadie who is more of a manipulator than an actual confidant (and who may or may not have her own agenda for including herself in the trip), the brash and hopelessly biased (not to mention poor at his apparent job) "detective" Garrett whose history is all too predictable within five minutes of meeting him, the supportive ex Kip who still will do anything for Laney, and the teen girl Madison who refuses to be coddled or protected by grown-ups who still see her as a child. The external tension of being stalked by a sadistic killer - human or supernatural - leads to old wounds being reopened, driving wedges between them when their only hope of survival is banding together.
Even with the familiar parts, Armstrong creates a solid sense of isolation and eeriness on Hemlock Island, each revelation and discovery upping the creepiness (and the gore; this is not a bloodless jump-scare story). There are times when Laney's tendency to lock up under stress gets a bit frustrating, and other times where she skirts the border of being another woman whose sole strength and motivation boils down to mothering. The nature of the threat occasionally feels a bit more nebulous than threatening, and the gore could be over the top and even numbing, losing some effectiveness after the umpteenth graphic description of a mutilated corpse. It came very close to losing a half-star, but managed to hang on by delivering pretty much exactly what it promised.
You Might Also Enjoy:
Those Across the River (Christopher Buehlman) - My Review
The Shining (Stephen King) - My Review
The Hollow Places (T. Kingfisher) - My Review
Kelly Armstrong
St. Martin's Press
Fiction, Thriller
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: After her whirlwind marriage to a tech mogul ended during the pandemic, Laney Kilpatrick managed to remain friends with her ex, Kip. He even gave her the little private island in Lake Superior where they'd built their dream vacation home... an island inauspiciously named after a stand of poisonous hemlock. Unfortunately, Laney's modest salary as a teacher and the minimal income from her debut novel aren't nearly enough to afford the place, especially after her sister passed away and left her the guardian of teenager Madison, so she's been forced to offer Hemlock Island as a summer rental. Lately, though, strange goings-on have been spooking the clients: strange occult symbols, wind chimes of bones and feathers, escalating now to bloodstains and claw marks in a closet, as though something - or someone - had been trying to scratch their way out. After the latest renters abandon the place, Laney decides she needs to investigate things herself... and Madison isn't about to be left behind, not even for a night. Her ex-husband has also been alerted, as well as their mutual high school friends Jayla and Sadie - the latter of whom brings along her police detective brother Garrett. These are not the people she'd choose to bring with her, for various reasons, but there's no turning them away.
As soon as they set foot on Hemlock Island, it's clear that this is not just the work of some pranksters or yet more unruly renters. Something far more sinister is afoot, every discovery more chilling than the last. When the boat is destroyed, Laney and the rest find themselves stranded - and they are not alone. The very isolation that once drew Laney to Hemlock Island, too far from the mainland for telephones or cell signals, now turns it into the perfect trap, made all the worse as long-buried feelings and secrets between the friends are unearthed. Will any of them survive long enough to escape?
REVIEW: A group of fractured friends and lovers, an isolated location, a deadly threat, and no way out... Hemlock Island has all the standard thriller ingredients and uses them competently, delivering a serviceable, if not especially standout, tale.
Starting with a phone call from upset renters about the latest unusual incident on the island, the story kicks off with minimal dithering, assembling its cast and suggesting a storied history binding them as they head to Hemlock Island. They all have their reasons for joining Laney, some a little flimsier than others, that come out as they find themselves in over their heads on what seemed at first to be simple acts of vandalism. It goes without saying that, no, this isn't just some bored teens playing pranks or spoiled renters finding yet another way to wreck the property, but something much more dangerous... something that soon racks up a body count. Laney wavers between being an independent, proactive woman and a hesitant, even overcautious person too prone to giving others the benefit of the doubt even in exceptionally dire and dangerous situations. Much of her life has been bent to accommodate the wills and apparent wishes of those around her. Hemlock Island was a dream come true for her when she and Kip first went there, and it's the one thing that she's clung to just for her own sake; it and her niece Madison are the two things she will fight for with every fiber of her being, even against the evils she finds waiting for her. The other characters generally slot into familiar roles: the sassy, brassy best friend Jayla who believes in Laney more than Laney believes in herself, the "friend" Sadie who is more of a manipulator than an actual confidant (and who may or may not have her own agenda for including herself in the trip), the brash and hopelessly biased (not to mention poor at his apparent job) "detective" Garrett whose history is all too predictable within five minutes of meeting him, the supportive ex Kip who still will do anything for Laney, and the teen girl Madison who refuses to be coddled or protected by grown-ups who still see her as a child. The external tension of being stalked by a sadistic killer - human or supernatural - leads to old wounds being reopened, driving wedges between them when their only hope of survival is banding together.
Even with the familiar parts, Armstrong creates a solid sense of isolation and eeriness on Hemlock Island, each revelation and discovery upping the creepiness (and the gore; this is not a bloodless jump-scare story). There are times when Laney's tendency to lock up under stress gets a bit frustrating, and other times where she skirts the border of being another woman whose sole strength and motivation boils down to mothering. The nature of the threat occasionally feels a bit more nebulous than threatening, and the gore could be over the top and even numbing, losing some effectiveness after the umpteenth graphic description of a mutilated corpse. It came very close to losing a half-star, but managed to hang on by delivering pretty much exactly what it promised.
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