Katherine Nabity's Blog, page 160
October 10, 2016
Magic Monday ~ #FrightFall Wrap Up & What I’m Still Reading
I like Mondays. I also like magic. I figured I’d combine the two and make a Monday feature that is truly me: a little bit of magic and a look at the week ahead.
I always thought it would be more interesting if Dr. Strange were a neurosurgeon *and* an amateur stage magician…
#FrightFall Readathon Wrap-up
I finished reading Paul Tremblay’s A Head Full of Ghosts on Tuesday and subsequently suffered from a book hangover exacerbated by reading lots of short stories. Such is life. I did make it halfway through A Vampire Quintet by Eugie Foster (more short stories!) and started Night in the Lonesome October. So, not too readathony for me, but still a fun time. Super kudos to Michelle for hosting!
It’s Monday, What Are You Reading?
This week, I’ll be finishing the two books mentioned above! Next on deck, Holmes on the Range by Steve Hockensmith.
It’s Monday! What Are You Reading, hosted by Book Date!
October 9, 2016
#ROW80 ~ Sunday Update, 10/9
Add 3125 words per week on Wicked Witch, Retired.
Update Round 4, Week 1
I started out the week with about 1300 words that I didn’t like very much and needed to rewrite. I did the majority of that Monday and Tuesday, hence the negative number when I finally deleted what I originally had.
Monday: 774
Tuesday: -84
Wednesday: 756
Thursday: 756
Friday: 585
Saturday: 413
Final total added for the week: 3200 words
This week had my characters travelling. I’m still not entirely happy with how these scenes came out, but it’s time to move on.
Research Link of the Week
The History of Rain Jacket Tech, From Intestines To Gore-Tex
Playlist
(My playlists are whatever I’m listening to or have on in the background while I work.)
Night of the Living Dead (1968)
The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)
The Addams Family (1964-1966) – The Addams Family only lasted two season???
Zodiac (2007)
A Round of Words in 80 Days on Facebook
October 7, 2016
Witchy Peril ~ “Masque” and Other Short Stories
The first read-along for Season of the Witch is my favorite Edgar Allan Poe story: “The Masque of the Red Death.”
I went to a small Lutheran school for grades K-6. It had a library that was about the size of my apartment’s front room and kitchen. In this library’s small collection were illustrated Edgar Allan Poe books published by Troll Communications. I clearly remember “The Masque of the Red Death” and “The Pit and the Pendulum,” but there was apparently a version of “A Cask of Amontillado” too. Sure, they were abridgments, but the color illustrations were glorious. I checked them out often and they cemented my love of Poe at an early age.*
The Red Death, illustrated by John Lawn
I always forget how short “The Masque of the Red Death” is. In less than 2500 words, Poe conjures a world dying a bloody death, a selfish prince, *and* gives us a lot of architectural details. The only place that the illustrated version of “Red Death” falls down is in its depiction of Prince Prospero’s abbey. I was going to call it a hall, and I had thought of it in the past as a series of drawing rooms, but, in the text, it is an abbey. Nothing matches what my mind’s eye has built from Poe’s plans.
A subtlety I noticed this time around, probably because I’ve been thinking about Romanticism since rereading Frankenstein, inside the abbey is a Romantic ideal of beauty. In fact, it’s literally Beauty with a capital B. At the end of the story we’re left with Death and Decay with capital Ds.
* Don’t worry. My mom was the school librarian and most people agree that I turned out alright.
Other Small Perils
I joined the October Reading Club on Facebook. The community features a short story every day throughout October. I haven’t read every story, but I’ve gotten a few in.
“The Red Room” by H.G. Wells (1896) – A fairly standard stay-the-night-in-a-haunted-room tale. That doesn’t mean it lacks tension.
It was after midnight that the candle in the alcove suddenly went out,
and the black shadow sprang back to its place there. I did not see the
candle go out; I simply turned and saw that the darkness was there, as one
might start and see the unexpected presence of a stranger.
“Man of Science” by Jerome K. Jerome (1892) – Men of science and their skeletons, both ones in and out of closets. This is a tale told to other skeptics by a man named Jephson. At the end of the tale:
Brown was the first to break the silence that followed. He asked me if I had any brandy on board. He said he felt he should like just a nip of brandy before going to bed. That is one of the chief charms of Jephson’s stories: they always make you feel you want a little brandy.
“The Terrible Old Man” by H.P. Lovecraft (1920) – One of Lovecraft’s shorter, more straight forward stories. And also a reread for me!
It was the design of Angelo Ricci and Joe Czanek and Manuel Silva to call on the Terrible Old Man. This old man dwells all alone in a very ancient house on Water Street near the sea, and is reputed to be both exceedingly rich and exceedingly feeble; which forms a situation very attractive to men of the profession of Messrs. Ricci, Czanek, and Silva, for that profession was nothing less dignified than robbery.
October 6, 2016
Review ~ A Head Full of Ghosts
The lives of the Barretts, a normal suburban New England family, are torn apart when fourteen-year-old Marjorie begins to display signs of acute schizophrenia.
To her parents’ despair, the doctors are unable to stop Marjorie’s descent into madness. As their stable home devolves into a house of horrors, they reluctantly turn to a local Catholic priest for help. Father Wanderly suggests an exorcism; he believes the vulnerable teenager is the victim of demonic possession. He also contacts a production company that is eager to document the Barretts’ plight. With John, Marjorie’s father, out of work for more than a year and the medical bills looming, the family agrees to be filmed, and soon find themselves the unwitting stars of The Possession, a hit reality television show. When events in the Barrett household explode in tragedy, the show and the shocking incidents it captures become the stuff of urban legend.
Fifteen years later, a bestselling writer interviews Marjorie’s younger sister, Merry. As she recalls those long ago events that took place when she was just eight years old, long-buried secrets and painful memories that clash with what was broadcast on television begin to surface–and a mind-bending tale of psychological horror is unleashed, raising vexing questions about memory and reality, science and religion, and the very nature of evil. (via Goodreads)
While I’d been hearing a lot about this book (it won the Stoker Award last year after all), it was the last part of the above summary, the “vexing questions about memory and reality,” that really got me interested in A Head Full of Ghosts. We place a great deal of importance on memory, but our brains are actually really terrible at remembering. And that’s before any questions about the subjective nature of perception. This is a ripe field for horror!
Unfortunately, there was an aspect of this book that was really distracting to me: what year did these events take place in? When I’m given a framing narrative that refers to events 15 years ago, I assume that the framing narrative is taking place in the year that the book was published; in this case, 2015. Which means to me, unless I’m disabused of the notion, that the flashback narrative (and in this case the remembered narrative) happened in 2000-2001. But it obviously does not. There are too many smart phones, thin laptops, and a pope who didn’t become pope until 2013. Which means that the flashback narrative happened in 2015-ish and the framing narrative is set in 2029-2030. But that doesn’t quite make sense either. Considering that blogs are already being considered “retro” in light of platforms like Medium, I don’t think Karen’s blog is really going to be a thing in 2030.
Maybe it’s just me being OCD. For a while I thought that, yes, maybe Merry is simply misremembering things. Someone who grew up in a world where cell phones are common might default to “remembering” someone texting on their phone when (in 2001, in a family that is having money problems) that’s probably unlikely. But when hard facts show up and are included in the TV show recaps, I know it’s not just Merry’s memory.
*** SPOILER ***
Then again we only get recaps of the show from Karen, who is actually Merry. I suppose we could assume that every narrative Merry is involved in is unreliable, but I don’t think that’s Tremblay’s intent. Actually, I am kind of disappointed that the book doesn’t offer a second point of view which is what the blog seems to do until Merry reveals that she’s the blogger.
*** END SPOILER***
A Head Full of Ghosts does nod to a few feminist issues. When fourteen-year-old Marjorie knows fun facts about demons and exorcisms, the adult men around her can’t believe that a girl would know such things. This attitude brought to mind for me both the Fox sisters and the Cottingley fairies. In both cases, young girls were seen as too naive and ignorant to pull off a fraud. Similarly, to me the most chilling moment in the whole book happens during the (rather tame) exorcism. Marjorie begs to be let up and let go, but of course, she isn’t because at this point the men in power believe she doesn’t know her own mind. But there’s a difference between not knowing your own mind and someone else deciding they know it for you.
Publishing info, my copy: ePub, HarperCollins, 2015
Acquired: Tempe Overdrive Digital Collection
Genre: horror
October 3, 2016
#FrightFall Readathon & Season of the Witch
Michelle at Seasons of Reading and Castle Macabre has two events going on that I’m looking forward to participating in!
The first is the Fright Fall Readathon. Running from Oct. 3-9th, the only requirement is to read one scary book. Currently, I’m finishing A Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay. Next up is Eugie Foster’s A Vampire Quintet. If there’s any Fright Fall left after that (I’m a slow reader, y’all), next on the stack Night in the Lonesome October by Richard Laymon.
Also for October is Season of the Witch! Check the link for all the details, but here’s the quick read-along schedule.
Week One – The Mask of the Red Death, Poe – Discussion on October 7/8
Week Two – The Dunwich Horror, Lovecraft – Discussion on October 14/15
Week Three – The Pit and the Pendulum, Poe – Discussion on October 21/22
Week Four – The Dreams in the Witch-House, Lovecraft – Discussion on October 28/29
October 2, 2016
#ROW80, Round 4 2016 ~ Goals (or rather Goal)
A Round of Words in 80 Days is the writing challenge that knows you have a life.
Round 4 begins on Monday, October 3rd. Starting this round, the community is changing from a linky-style blog-hop to a Facebook group.
Goals
Back in 2004, I wrote the majority of a novel in about four months. I felt pretty good about that. Since then, my love of and engagement in writing has waned and waxed. It’s been a bumpy road. Heck, I didn’t even make it through round four last year because I decided to go on hiatus as a writer.
For some reason, I think that I should be doing so much better* now, writing so much more word-count-wise than I was then. But maybe my pace is my pace, and maybe I’ve been making myself crazy trying to stretch.
So, I’m going retro and I’m going to keep it simple this round:
Add 3125 words per week on Wicked Witch, Retired.
That ends up being 12,500 words a month, 75K in six months.
This goal also allows for a lot of writing/rewriting room. I’m still feeling my way through the world of Wicked Witch, Retired. While I’m not really a pants-er, filling in background for the characters and for the world is something I prefer to do within the narrative rather than on worksheets or the like.
The manuscript is currently at 15K after five weeks, with about 1300 words that I don’t like very much. I’ll be starting the round rewriting those.
*Looking back on that novel I wrote in 2004, I do think that I’m a better writer. I guess there should be some progress in a decade.
October 1, 2016
Deal Me In, Week 39 ~ “Prey”
Hosted by Jay @ Bibliophilopolis
What is Deal Me In?
“Prey” by Richard Matheson
Card picked: Six of Diamonds
From: I Am Legend, and other stories
Thoughts:
The wooden box resembled a casket. Amelia raised its lid and smiled. It was the ugliest doll she’d ever seen.
The doll is actually a Zuni fetish in the likeness of a fierce warrior named “He Who Kills.” It is a birthday present from Amelia to Arthur, a very nice high school teacher and amateur anthropologist that she’s been dating. The fetish is wrapped in a gold chain which, it’s said, keeps the spirit of He Who Kills inside the doll…or something like that. After Amelia argues on the phone with her over-bearing mother mother and then Arthur, the doll is upended and the chain falls off.
Eighty percent of this story is Amelia battling the fierce seven inch warrior. She spends a good deal of time paralyzed in fear. To be fair, Matheson does a great job of writing action. The story moves at a great pace, never lagging. Amelia does manage to destroy the doll, but the spirit of He Who Kills continues on.
September 29, 2016
Review ~ Summerlong
This book was provided to me by Tachyon Publications via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
Summerlong by Peter S. Beagle
Retired history professor Abe Aronson is a cranky, solitary man living out his autumn years on Gardner Island, a ferry ride away from the hustle and bustle of nearby Seattle. One rainy February night, while dining at a favorite local haunt, Abe and his girlfriend Joanna meet an engaging enigmatic waitress, new in town and without a place of her own. Fascinated and moved by the girl’s plight, Joanna invites her to stay in Abe’s garage. It seems everyone falls for the charming and invigorating the waitress, but she is much more than she appears, and an ancient covenant made a millennium ago threatens to disrupt the spring and alter the lives of Abe, Joanna, and all those around them forever… (via Goodreads)
I.
The Last Unicorn is one of my favorite books. I reread it every two or three years. Like many of my generation, my familiarity with the story began as a kid with The Last Unicorn movie. I saw it in the theater in 1982 with my grandpa. It wasn’t until college (and bookstores more impressive than Walden Books at the mall) that I finally read the book and began collecting Peter S. Beagle’s back list. In the 2000s, with a new business manager, Beagle started publishing again. Since 2006, there have been three collections of short works, some other miscellanea, and the award-winning novette, “Two Hearts,” a sequel to The Last Unicorn. But it’s been 17 years since Beagle’s last full-length novel.
II.
Summerlong is, of course, a much different novel than The Last Unicorn. It is very much a middle-aged story. Abe and Joanna are set in their lives. Abe, the older of the two, is entering the winter of his life. Joanne, eleven years younger, seems content to continue on as things are. The third character in this novel’s starting situation is Lily, Joanna’s gay daughter. Lily is struggling in her life. Joanna doesn’t seem to know how to help her and is maybe disinclined to engage in Lily’s drama.
Into this trio comes Lioness Lazos. The crux of this story should be the mystery behind Lioness Lazo. She is a young woman of classical beauty who seems to maybe hold some supernatural sway over nature. She is undoubtedly on the run from someone. But the resolution of the mystery takes a backseat to how our trio of characters react to her. Both Abe and Lily are infatuated by her. Joanna feels some level of maternal protectiveness toward Lioness, but it’s her life that is upended the most by the young woman. Many of the summaries for Summerlong emphasize Abe as the main character, but I think this is much more Joanna’s story. When I reread this novel, and I undoubtedly will, it will be with Joanna in mind.
This is a slowly told story and, sometimes, it feels like it lacks focus. The turning of the seasons is an important part of this novel, but I felt like there needed a stronger chronological basis. The dates at the beginnings of the chapters didn’t seem to reflect the passing of time in the story. (I wonder if this was a problem with the ARC.)
III.
Is Summerlong a novel for fans of The Last Unicorn? Maybe, maybe not. It is definitely for fans of Peter S. Beagle. Fortunately for both types of fans, September brings a feast. The September/October issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction magazine includes “The Green-Eyed Boy,” one of the long-rumored Schmenrick stories. It’s good, but of course it is.
At this point, I feel I should include some mention of the controversy between Beagle and his former business manager Connor Cochran. Peter S. Beagle filed suit against Cochran last year. There are also ongoing complaints from fans who have purchased items from Conlan Press, but never received products. I would advise that if you’re going to buy any of Peter S. Beagle’s books, do not do so from Conlan Press and avoid ebooks edited by Connor Cochran.
Publishing info, my copy: ePub format, Tachyon Publications, September 2016
Acquired: ARC from NetGalley
Genre: fantasy, magical realism
September 28, 2016
September Reading Wrap-Up
Well, September happened. I had good intentions to read more of my own books, but I got wrapped up in a couple of library books. R.I.P. is going well. I’m only through one novel (of hopefully four), but I’ve been reading quite a few “seasonal” short stories.
Finished in September
Long works:
Descent into the Depth of the Earth by Paul Kidd – #readMyOwnDamnBooks reread
The Séance by Iain Lawrence – library book
(I’ll probably finish From the Dust Returned by Ray Bradbury by Saturday.)
I didn’t finish my other library book, American Ghost, although I read about two-thirds of it.
Shorter works:
“Keeping His Promise” by Algernon Blackwwod
“The Invisible Assistant” by John Gaspard
“Smee” by A. M. Burrage
“The Daemon Lover” by Shirley Jackson
“Flop Sweat” by Harlan Ellison
“The Green-Eyed Boy” by Peter S. Beagle
“Two Hearts” by Peter S. Beagle
Additions to my Library
The Faerie Key by Denise D. Young, 9/8/2016, Amazon
The Invisible Assistant by John Gaspard, 9/8/2016, Amazon
The Whole Art of Detection by Lyndsay Faye, 9/8/2016, ARC
Heaven’s Ditch: God, Gold, and Murder on the Erie Canal by Jack Kelly, 9/8/2016, I won it from Doing Dewey!
A subscription to Fantasy & Science Fiction magazine, 9/26/16, Amazon
Notes
My plan for October is to read R.I.P. books that I already own. But, you know how plans are.
September 26, 2016
Magic Monday ~ Hoping for a Dazzling Week
I like Mondays. I also like magic. I figured I’d combine the two and make a Monday feature that is truly me: a little bit of magic and a look at the week ahead.
Some quick card magic and quicker patter from Alex Elmsley:
It’s Monday, What Are You Reading?
I’ve been behind the ball for the last two weeks. After a semi-restful weekend, I’m ready to begin the week with a clean(er) slate.
American Ghost was feeling like an anchor around my neck so I decided it was time to mark it DNF and move on. This week I will be finishing up From the Dust Returned by Ray Bradbury and moving on to The Accidental Alchemist by Gigi Pandian. My Deal Me In story for this week is “Prey” by Richard Matheson.
Next week is the #FrightFall Readathon; most of my current TBR is mystery, so I’ll have to find something more appropriate for that.
It’s Monday! What Are You Reading, hosted by Book Date!
