Hell

by Kathryn Davis

Part mystery, part domestic meditation and part horror story, Hell is Davis's tour de force." (Joy Press, The Village Voice.) In her brilliantly eerie third novel, three households coexist in a single restless vision.

Genres: Fiction, Horror, Novels, Mystery, 20th Century, Audiobook, American

192 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1998

About the author

Kathryn Davis is an award-winning American novelist.

Davis has taught at Skidmore College, and is now senior fiction writer in the Writing Program in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.

She is a recipient of the Kafka Prize, the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1999, a 2000 Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Lannan Literary Award for Fiction in 2006.

Davis lives in Montpelier, Vermont, with her husband, the novelist and essayist Eric Zencey.

Reviews

[Nate D · Rating 4 out of 5]

Something is wrong in the house.

A set of metonymic images of deteriorating suburban family life: a doll house in which the father has been lost and replaced by a finger, the haunted cottage of a dispenser of 19th century home & cooking lore, the death -- accident or murder? -- of a neighborhood girl during a hurricane, creeping jello, rabid pets, undirected desires. All presided over by the minor household deities of the mouse in doll house, the gin in the grandfather clock, Napoleon's pastry chef. The vague outlines of plot are obvious enough, hinted early and elaborated endlessly, but as in Davis' slightly more cogent later suburban mythology Duplex, story is subordinate to the direct sensory experience that is the warp and weft of every page, as the layers of images bleed together into a total fugue of infernal homemaking. Davis is doing something extremely specific and unusual here, vivisecting classical (i.e. dystopian 50s) American dream(live)s into uncanny chimeras. Reappraising the perfect mid-century home is certainly common material for all counterculture at least since punk, but how Davis works with it is not so simple or obvious. It grates, it perplexes, defies simple absorption. But somewhere in the corner-of-the-eye peripheries flits the sublime.

Sooner or later the house will get the best of you. It will defy your attempts at narrative because it's opposed to content; it only honors form.

[Blair · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hell is a haunted-house story like no other I've ever read. In the town of 'X', histories intersect and overlap as the narrative shifts between a family (the author's own?) in the 1950s; a doll's house belonging to the eldest daughter; Edwina Moss, the 19th-century writer of a book about household management; and her ancestors. Throughout, there are allusions to various other works of fiction as well as real people: 'The Monkey's Paw', Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, the 'first celebrity chef' Antonin Carême. There is the slowly-unfurled mystery of Joy Harbison – the dollhouse-keeping daughter's 'worst friend', seemingly murdered – and the slightly sinister presence of Benny Gold, who draws the neighbourhood children together for storytelling sessions at his home. Memories of some/all of the above haunt Edwin D. decades later as he recovers from a stroke and contemplates his mortality. Pay close attention and people and places will appear to time-travel, intermingle, shift, overlap. The 50s family's housekeeper works for Edwina Moss. Edwina's daughter wakes up in the doll's house. Even a doll with its head missing turns up everywhere, everywhen.

I admit, the distinction blurred.

This slender book is almost impossibly rich. The language is a continual revelation. I read some of this at the same time as I was finishing Matthew McIntosh's theMystery.doc, and it struck me that Davis is doing here – much more concisely and smoothly – many of the things McIntosh attempts in his giant project of a novel, which has almost 10 times the number of pages of this one. Hell demands interaction and engagement from the reader; it mixes fiction with what may, or may not, be memoir; it's labyrinthine, non-linear and capricious; it ends with an 18-page sentence. It's difficult, and won't work for everyone. I thought it was stunning, a wonderful feat of elaborate millefeuille layering, a hallucinatory journey that might reveal an entirely new route with every retread.

TinyLetter | Twitter | Instagram | Tumblr

[Szplug · Rating 3 out of 5]

Time flows like a river—but are there eddies, pools, sinkholes, where time can circle back on itself, ripples collide and embrace, then and now jostle with what will be?. Where does imagination break from dream, abrade reality, override causality? Davis' beautifully written, enigmatic and somewhat cavernous short novel takes us into such exploration, into the tense, caviling fragments that provide the routine whole of a mid-fifties family in the United States, with the added peculiarity that this story is intermeshed—in time, memory, space—with that of a similarly dysfunctional, miniaturized family inhabiting the eldest daughter's dollhouse (who suffer the frustration of making decisions while lacking the mobility or means to enact the desires of their will) and a nineteenth-century author of domestic ceremony named Edwina Moss; and all are thematically and spiritually linked with the culinary ghost of one Antonin Carême, chef to the stars of the Directorate and the Napoleonic Empire, an alimentary artist whose creations appease both physical and metaphysical hungers. Within these confused, occasionally terrified cross-ruminations runs the trail of a coterminous mystery about that beloved unknowable, Death, culminating in the apparent murder of the dollhouse-owning daughter's best friend (and enemy) Joy Harbison—a murder whose perpetrator eventually appears to be the character in this infernal lamentation with simultaneously the most to hide and the most eventually laid bare for the reader's discernment.

There are clever allusions to The Monkey's Paw and what I gather are various novels from Victorian authors such as Jane Austen, of which I am sadly unfamiliar and thus unable to incorporate into my understanding of what Davis has attempted here as a whole—this last a particularly unfortunate state, as I sense that my Austen-less status denied me the full appreciation of Davis' kaleidoscopic triptych. Although the splintered and puzzling tale is intriguing and written in a lovely, hallucinatory manner, about half-way through I found myself starting to become restless, thinking who really cares about all of this hard-to-follow, breathless streaming, anyways? Since finishing it, I have discovered online that readers are urged to have a second go at Hell, whereupon its secrets and its structure will become more apparent, more revealed, more appreciated; unfortunately, the story is just not compelling enough to invite that second read from me. Nevertheless, I would still recommend it for Davis' ability to conjure and invent such elegant convolution. Her idea of hell as a self-created miasma of haunting memories, burning hungers, and ghostly evocations, where we act both as God and as one under the fateful thumb of a Demiurge, is alluring. As the tale progresses towards its frantic, scree-filled, purgatoric purge, one ponders the execration wherein you look at your undeniable complexity and you think there's no reason I shouldn't live forever, all the while aware—if only subconciously—that all creation, all being inherently admits decay, dissipation, the endless digestive process of the (super)natural in which what came before will give birth to what is, and what is to come is comprised of all that already arrived; the universe an infinite meal set before the ravenous, insatiable appetite of the Gods.

[Emily · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is what I think it would feel like to go insane.

[Ben · Rating 5 out of 5]

Here is a gilded puzzle box of a novel, intricate, ornate, meticulously crafted and mysterious.

This is a work of virtuosic abstraction, a novelistic fugue that eschews linear plotting and instead braids various motifs around interwoven narrative threads, the most prominent of which include: (1) an unhappy 20th-century family; (2) the inner-workings of a child’s dollhouse; (3) the life of a (fictitious) 19th-century author; and (4) the writings of Napoleon’s chef Marie Antoine Careme, an actual historical figure. (The exact details and connections between these threads I will leave for the reader to discover.)

As this description suggests, this is a dense, heady novel despite its brevity. Davis writes with gleaming intensity, suffusing the pages with dread, her prose a mixture of crystalline descriptions and off-kilter asides, digressions, and literary references.

In the end what does it all add up to? A maze without an exit, a riddle without an answer, a clockwork insect that refuses to sit still. An enigma in ink and paper. There are no easy meanings here; the gilded box opens only to reveal yet more puzzles in infinite succession.

[Maria Headley · Rating 5 out of 5]

I discovered Kathryn Davis via her fantastic story in My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me and now I'm wondering how I missed her all these years. Her work will appeal to fans of Angela Carter (Saints and Strangers)and Kelly Link (Magic for Beginners), and this book in particular reminds me of a more mysterious, more complicated version of The Lovely Bones crossed with, say, David Lynch's Blue Velvet, and Angela Carter's terrific story about Lizzie Borden, The Fall River Axe Murders.

In short, it's totally brilliant, and it deserves your attention.

The story is one of barely-repressed horror, taking place amongst 1)the residents of a dollhouse, trapped inside the house of 2)the 1950's family of Edwin and Dorothy Moss, which is haunted (if not literally, metaphorically) by 3) Edwina Moss, a 19th century expert on household management whose "sensible advice" seems to have shifted into a fervor of obsessive-compulsive madness. There's also the occasional glimpse from the point of view of Antonin Careme, chef to Napoleon, in particular a chilling/beautiful banquet of turtles and spun sugar he creates for the Emperor and his bride-to-be, Josephine. In each grouping of characters, there are feasters and fasters, as it were. The 19th century homemaking expert tangles with a daughter who wants to live on air, and in the 1950's narrative, something similar happens. In the dollhouse, everyone is hungry, and all there is to eat is plaster dollhouse food, and a dish of moldering barley provided by the dollhouse's owner. In the 1950's section, a young girl is killed, and throughout the novel, details come together seemingly casually to clarify what happened to her, and why.

The novel is interested in the notion of one person's perfection being another's hell, as well as in the notion of one person's perfection being THEIR OWN hell. The TV series Mad Men deals with this, of course, as do books like Richard Yates' Revolutionary Road. The idea of the glory/horror of 1950's suburbia is something that we've read and seen for a long time, but HELL goes far beyond those works. (However, if you like them, you may well enjoy this!)

The three parallel narratives slide and shuffle around each other, and it takes careful reading to remember which of them is going on at any given moment - there is no indication in chapter headings - but in truth, it doesn't matter. All the narratives inform each other, and the events in each time period/place slip into the next. I suspect a lot of initial reviewers/readers were paralyzed by the book's seeming "difficulty" - it's not remotely straightforward. This is a book that one must give oneself up to. It doesn't work if you try to reformat it into a traditional narrative structure. (Hence, I really can't even try to summarize it. There are endless bits that I can't explain, but which are constructed according to their own magic. There's an amazing sequence from the point of view of a mouse trying to reorganize a dollhouse, for example.)

As Nancy Willard, reviewing for the New York Times, said in 1998 when HELL was first published: "Davis's writing shines brightest when, with sinuous sentences and catalogues of objects, she describes interiors so complex that you feel as if you'd stepped into a box assembled by Joseph Cornell. A list of the contents of a kitchen drawer evokes the 1950's, and, considering his penchant for dolls behaving like humans, it's no surprise that E. T. A. Hoffmann shows up on the house's bookshelves. Lest we miss the point, one short section of the novel is devoted to a discussion of dolls, Freud and Hoffmann's tale ''The Sandman.'' "

That leads me to a final example of Kathryn Davis's ingenious craft: Back to that dollhouse-arranging mouse and E.T.A Hoffmann. The German writer and pioneer of fantasy, Hoffmann (1776-1822), is best known for his story "The Nutcracker and The Mouse King," which is the basis for the wildly-popular holiday ballet, The Nutcracker. (The ballet Coppelia is loosely based on The Sandman. Very loosely.)

Hoffmann's work is profoundly dark and strange (the aforementioned Sandman contains walking-talking dolls, as well as the Sandman himself, a character who steals children's eyes. Neil Gaiman uses the notion in his own Sandman series (Preludes and Nocturnes) with a memorably terrifying character named The Corinthian), but has often been transformed into glittering entertainment. In The Nutcracker, there is, of course, a sequence involving a mouse ballet, as the Mouse King and his cohorts take over the house, endangering Clara, the heroine. She throws her slipper, enabling The Nutcracker Prince to kill the Mouse King and save her, taking her to the Land of Sweets.

In this book, nobody gets saved. The mouse takes all the furniture out of the dollhouse and piles it on a "dropping-spattered" dresser scarf, all the while looking for food and talking with the ghost of a dead girl. It takes over the house. The dolls lose their grasp on perfection, and the mouse puts all the rubble of their civilization into a pile. The Mouse King (or Queen) wins.

I mean, come on. You don't have to think about all of that while you're reading. I just thought about it as I was writing this, but the truth of this book is that it is ALL like that. It goes deep. If you want to go deep with it (it'll lend itself to multiple readings) you can, and that would be fun. Davis uses references throughout the book which each extend backward into something like the Hoffmann/mouse/dollhouse reference I detail above, but even a reading that doesn't take any of this into account will be a pleasurable one. This book is magical and haunting, scary and wondrous, just like those original Hoffman stories were before we covered them all up with tutus and feathers and Mother Ginger's bonbons.

Do yourself a major favor and read it.

And PS: Since we're talking about E.T.A. Hoffmann, and about Angela Carter, it'd be criminal not to also recommend Carter's novel The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman which is inspired by Hoffmann's stories and narrative arcs.

PPS: Another book this reminded me of, however sideways, is Betty Ren Wright's YA chiller The Dollhouse Murders. Even if you're an adult, you might dig it as a purchase along with this.

[Peter Landau · Rating 4 out of 5]

One thing is certain, Kathryn Davis is smarter than me. I read her novel, HELL, as I often find myself reading poetry, as if a foreigner. I let the words build up as sounds, sometimes even with meaning, but mostly with a sense of awe and wonder. There were strains of narrative that I picked up (summaries on back covers are helpful), but the pieces never made a whole for me because I was too busy trying to keep up. At points I was there, and then at points I was not, because, as I stated, Kathryn Davis is smarter than me. That is, of course, a compliment. It is also an endorsement. I want to be uncomfortable. I want to lose my way. I want to have a smarter guide who takes me only so far and trusts me to make up the slack, even if I can't. I want the mystery and the inspiration of those not beholden to convention. There's nothing wrong with pleasurable reading, a page-turning propulsion of plot, likeable characters and easily unraveled theme, but there's more than one kind of pleasure. I guess what I'm saying is I like a challenge, sometimes, and will return to Kathryn Davis when I get too comfortable with myself.

[Rachel Swearingen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow! Perhaps because I had been prepared for a very difficult book, I found this to be much more enjoyable and fascinating than expected. Kathryn Davis's prose is just fantastic. I liked this so much better then The Thin Place. It is challenging in some ways, but if you just go with what you're reading and not try too hard to piece the various narratives and characters together, it all falls into place. I love how she plays with scale. There's an Alice-in-Wonderland quality to this novel, constant turnings and reversals of scale, and somehow Davis manages not to join narratives, but to mix and meld them. Cooveresque? Some have accused Davis of overwriting, but I find her prose to be pitch-perfect for this particular book. This is rich language, but authentic. I envy the sheer beauty of this story, reminds me of a masterful musical piece with its seamless, strange transitions and riffs. Deserves a second reading.

[Kim Lockhart · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed reading the first half of this highly experimental novel more than the second half. The whole story is fairly elusive, even intimidating, but I was in constant awe of the level of the writing. Just look at the distribution of the rankings to see how everyone experiences the novel differently.

This is one of the few books that I actually recommend reading the professional reviews first, and even those might not be nearly enough help or preparation. I often had no idea what was going on, in any of the time periods, and quite literally "lost the plot," but even so, I remained mesmerized by the way the author created parallels for the characters in different time periods rooted to the same place. All of the characters were defined via their emotional states and reckless actions. The author laid out all the ways those characters imprinted themselves upon places, objects, other people, even on time and history itself.

Kathryn Davis has explained her own work saying: “I’m interested in the plight of a character embarked on a journey through an utterly unfamiliar (and frequently fantastic) landscape. The quest itself has never interested me as much as the chance to describe that other world.” 

I would go one step further and say that description is in itself really her main goal. Davis has a singular way of describing the familiar, and a knack for presenting and/or interpreting that which we have never even thought to define. What is the sound you hear just before you faint? Is all memory anachronistic? What does it mean if everything in a house talks to themselves, including inanimate things? Is fear really the companion of hope? I had to stop and reflect quite often.

Davis, as always, aims to take us somewhere surreal, bizarre, disturbing, and disorienting. This is not the kind of novel for readers who prefer straightforward stories. Kathryn Davis novels are purposefully confusing and slippery. I would characterize the genre of this novel as slipstream mixed with the lavishishness of literary fiction. It's ambitious.

There are a TON of literary references, and the ones mentioned most often are the most important. For instance, the short story "The Monkey's Paw" by W.W. Jacobs is referenced in some detail. If ever there were a warning sign saying "Be careful what you wish for," this would be it. There is enough symbolism in the story for an advanced placement English class, complete with references to all the classical elements: air, water, earth, and fire.

I have never seen a more deft utilization of first, second, and third person all in the same narrative. Some sentences were pure art. I could not pass them by quickly, because that would be like rushing through a museum.

And just like in a museum, we don't always understand all the art, but we still recognize it as art.

[Kristi Kienast Hernandez · Rating 1 out of 5]

Don't read this one! Don't waste your time. Like others have said, there are three intertwined narratives, but they don't really have any connection, are not clear, and clearly ramble on for about 178 pages. Thankfully this book wasn't that long or I would have put it down without finishing it. I did skim the end because nothing made any sense at all and it was just plain boring. I kept looking back at the title and wondering why this book was called "Hell"? What was so hellish about it? It was a poor attempt at experimental literature. Skip it! Seriously.

[Craig · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Something is wrong in the house."

And not just any house. Every house. From historical mansions like Monticello to your neighbor's split level, all houses -- including the doll houses within those houses -- have something wrong in them. And those wrongs remain, well after their initial impact. This is the origin of "horror," of fear. Fascinatingly, Davis links this to food, and given my own, "dear" issues with food, I'm simultaneously jealous and flummoxed by the connection.

Providing three "scenes" of food "crime," the "narrative" takes shape. Even still, these memories fade, then jump back into focus at the strangest of moments. Davis navigates these mental and temporal leaps with narrative aplomb. Her skill manifests as though the reader has developed telepathy, picking up the transient mental effluvia of lived moments, historical moments, weak moments. With that in mind, "History" becomes a subjective subject, where an interaction with Napolean's chef is just as significant as a husband making an overheard, untoward joke with the maid. This coupling is the thing I love about Davis: the mundane and the miraculous exist in such close proximity to one another, and she sells me completely on it.

Davis is not selling to everyone, however, so bear in mind the challenge you undertake with meandering through her work. The ending is also a bit weak, with very little resolved. By comparison, the other novels have had a more definitive ending whereas this peters out.

[Tracy · Rating 1 out of 5]

I bought this novel some time ago but hadn't read it. I remember picking it up once and reading a little and then putting it down. I tried to read a month or so ago but found it nearly unreadable. At first I considered I just needed to get used to the writer's style, image heavy stream of consciousness prose, but the more I read the less used to it all I got. The plot(s) was(were) so confusing, in spite of being broken into three different "sections" where "something is always wrong in the house".

I really wanted to like this. I was fascinated by the concept of telling the story of the dollhouse people, as well as of the two "real" families, but I had to read sentences (and paragraphs, since several paragraphs took up pages and pages) before I had any comprehension of what may have been going on. Not what was actually going on, but what may have been. I'm so disappointed that I couldn't get more immersed in this. I stopped reading after a few chapters and donated my copy to the library.

[Sylvie · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book attempts the novelty of three story lines that are meant to come together, but the execution is miserable.

Reading this felt like a chore, especially when it came to the few chapters that are just massive run on sentences, such as: pages 42-43 at 47 lines, pages 71-72 at 37 lines, pages 91-92 at 35 lines, and the last chapter from page 162-179 [the last chapter has some places where a question mark or exclamation mark looks like it marks the end of a sentence, but the following word is not capitalized, so I marked the number of lines up to those points in this chapter, but continued to count the lines until the next questionable end of a sentence. I also quickly gave up when I figured I would get to finish this book sooner if I stopped counting] at 53, 60, 61,114, 115, 179 etc. lines. My point is, this book is exhausting to try to read and I quickly gave up trying to make sense out of these massive walls of text.

Overall, this book feels pretentious and condescending, especially when it makes references to Pandora's box, Sisyphus and Descartes even though these references don't have anything to do with the plot.

If you want a book with the novelty of multiple, seemingly unrelated plot-lines that come together beautifully by the end, and you want it written well, read either Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell or Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, not this.

[Melanie Page · Rating 2 out of 5]

I knew this book was difficult because I gave it several starts and re-starts. The flap of the book tells the reader that there are three things going on at once: a family in the 1950s, a family in a doll house, and a woman named Edwina who writes about domesticity. Had this dust jacket flap not existed, I might not have caught any of this until half way through. There are clues about what's going on: mentions of plastic milk jugs, Edwina's name pops up, and Noodle the dog who belongs to the 1950s family are three references that let you know what's going on. There are separate "chapters"; however, this doesn't mean you'll stick with one of the three families/time periods. They mix together! I had to utilize the 2 steps forward, one step back method with this book. I would read about 40 pages and then go back a re-read chapters that were REALLY confusing or read the first sentence of each paragraph of those chapters that were less confusing. So, you really have to want to read this book, in my opinion. The last 15 pages or so seem to ramble, so I ended up skimming. The content is so buried in the style that the book seemed more like an exercise in hope of a reward than it did a meaningful reading experience. What if Davis had separated out the three narratives into separate chapters? I could possibly make connections on my own, rather than having her blend them all together.

[Andrew Horton · Rating 2 out of 5]

Kathryn Davis' The Thin Place is easily the best book I've read in about the past 10 years or so, but Hell quite simply didn't hold up as well. The early-nineties copyright date should have clued me in to this being a piece of writing workshop juvenilia, but the premise - three intertwined narratives existing in (sort of) the same spacetime - that of a real house and family, a doll house existing in the real house, and then a real person existing in a book in the doll house 100 years in the past ("or something") - sounded promising, reminiscent of John Crowley's work and the classic surrealist film Celine and Julie Go Boating, a personal favorite. The inside is bigger than the out, thing thing is its own reflection, the beginning is the end of the beginning is the end of the...and so on. But none of that promise can save Hell, which balks on the premise and is instead a lazy, jumbled mess. I'm currently digging Davis' The Walking Tour and simply cannot endorse The Thin Place enough, but Hell is for children and/or other people. Ho-ho!

[Janet · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a short book but in no way is it a quick read. The story consists of 4 separate worlds; (I am excerpting this from an old Washington Post review) : " 1) the home of an unsurnamed nuclear family in 1955 Philadelphia; 2) a dollhouse feverishly manipulated by the unnamed older sister in that family; 3) the domestic environs of Edwina Moss, fictional 19th-century expert on "household management"; and 4) the genuine, historical world of Antonin Careme, personal chef of Napoleon." I rather enjoyed the 1955 Philadelphia world. Much of Davis' 'writing' consists of adjective-laden lists of life in her four worlds and she has captured life in the 1950s to perfection. Reading this book felt more like flipping through old copies of "Good Housekeeping" magazine -- the images are familiar but the people are just models with no emotion and no history. This book is a lot of work and in the end I don't think it was worth the effort. I wanted to like it but I grew tired of reading sentences that never end and thoughts that never ....

[Amanda May · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is probably one of the most challenging books I've ever read, and for the simple reason that there are so many parallels between plot lines. The transitions between narratives are practically seamless; stylistics is probably one of the best tools of evaluating who is telling the story, but even then, the possibility remains that the unnamed eldest daughter is narrating the entire novel. This book truly is a conflagration of uncertainty whose sixteen page sentence of a final chapter leaves the reader feeling confused about his/her own life. I admit that when I started reading this book, I absolutely hated it because I felt so lost, but if you are the kind of person who can wade through 180 pages of incomprehensible writing and come to terms with the fact that the novel is simply beyond understanding, then I encourage you to try reading it.

[Nelson Maddaloni · Rating 4 out of 5]

Honestly this book is between a 3-4 but here's why I'm giving it a 4. It's a very interestingly structured story, very intricate, very complex, and sometimes pretty confusing. The prose can be a bit flowery but for a domestic novel it's certainly fascinating. What really marks it for me is that while it wasn't the greatest thing I've ever read, it's still stuck in my mind since I've read it about a year ago. Whether it works or not, I'm not sure, but if it is a failure it's a fascinating failure and I'd honestly like to see more like it. It tries new things without getting mired in it's own conventions and tries presenting a story in a new and interesting ways and for that I'm grateful.

[Shanna · Rating 2 out of 5]

I never would have read past the first twenty pages of Hell if it hadn't been assigned for one of my graduate classes. I found the writing condescending, and I quickly tired of Davis burying her motives for writing the book into the story. It left me feeling insulted.

I will say that after spending three days of class dissecting the book and discussing particular passages, I developed more respect for the demand that a book of this sort makes on the writer. Nonetheless, the book did not engage me, and I would not recommend it to others.

[Jenne · Rating 1 out of 5]

Wow, I don't remember this at all, but it's on my reading list so I must have tried it.
From the description, it sounds kind of tedious:
"This demanding and rewarding third novel by the author of Labrador and The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf will delight all serious readers. Its sensuous prose and vivid rendering of the minutiae of everyday life propel the reader through three haunting tales woven together."

[Diane Bluegreen · Rating 4 out of 5]

a truly bizarre book,and i loved it. i can't even really describe it. it's rather dark,but i found the the book enjoyable. part of it takes place inside a dollhouse,so that might be partly why i have a fondness for this book. i read it without trying to understand it. i know when i'm out of my league,or there isn't a league at all.

[Kate · Rating 1 out of 5]

Um... I'm about 12 pages in and I'm confused. This might be more slipstream than even I can follow. The writing is too lush for my taste. I will hold out for a few more chapters and see if it begins to gel.

[Darrin Doyle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Difficult and dark and bizarre and gorgeously written. Demands a second read (at least). Well worth it.

[Kelcey · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love it more with every read, and I think at least one student agrees. :)

[Anna · Rating 1 out of 5]

I wish I could give it no stars. Horrible, terrible. I'm not smart enough, I guess.

[Ryan · Rating 1 out of 5]

The last chapter of this book is an 18 page sentence. An 18 page long sentence... Reading this book was like trying to make sense of a nightmare for 179 miserable pages.

[Megan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Absolutely delirious.

[Jenny · Rating 5 out of 5]

Weird. So weird. But I expect nothing less of Kathryn Davis.

[Joe Bruno · Rating 5 out of 5]

So, I am not going to pretend I completely understand everything that is going on here, or even the most part of it. But Kathryn Davis is a force, and the only thing I can think of to describe her writing is how I felt recently after cataract surgery. They gave me a drug called versed, (pronounced ver-SED) that interferes with the brain's ability to store memory. There are gaps in the storage, and the brain compensates by weaving everything together into a somewhat cohesive whole. So you have what you think is a memory of the event but it turns out to be chunks of memory lumped together that don't always line up correctly. This is sort of like that.

But not at all either. The story sort of lurks in the amazing description, references pulled from here and there and piled together that I would bet 5 readings would not illuminate all of them. The intellect of the woman, astounding? Amazing? Humbling?

This is not for everyone. I met her several times here in St Louis. I was a complete fan-boy from "Labrador" and "The Silk Road." This slight older woman less than half my size reducing me to a gee whizz, aw shucks - stammering. She was actually quite gracious.

I just checked the St Louis Public Library and they have several of her books in their collection. I actually found this at the Feed My People thrift store in Lemay.

[Matthew Peck · Rating 3 out of 5]

Difficult to grasp and/or review, "Hell" does something inspired by tossing in at least four different narratives into one slim novel, dizzily switching between them or layering them atop another like translucent slides: pioneering French chef Antonin Careme, a mid-19th century domestic guru named Edwina Moss, a 1950s family in the wake of a hurricane, and a ragtag "family" of dolls. Like Davis's "Duplex", "Hell" left me wowed but utterly nonplussed. Both books are bizarre, but "Duplex" describes outlandish scenarios matter-of-factly, while the earlier book describes covers more ordinary goings-on through challenging, ever-shifting, disorienting prose. It's also packed with allusions and quotes, making me feel that an annotated edition would have increased my appreciation. Still, every page is intriguing, and the writing is beautiful – above all, the final chapter comprised of one long, spellbinding sentence. Recommended for readers without distractions and extra time to think and research.