Our Share of Night, by Mariana Enriquez

 

"You have something of mine, I passed on something of me to you, and hopefully it isn't cursed. I don't know if I can leave you something that isn't dirty, that isn't dark, our share of night."

9780451495143

Hogarth, 2022

originally published as Nuestra Parte de Noche

translated by Megan McDowell 

588 pp.

hardcover

My introduction to author Mariana Enriquez was her short-story collection Things We Lost in the Fire, which I loved so much that I moved on directly to her The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, also exceptional.  I was super excited for the release of this novel, Our Share of Night and I have to say that I was not at all disappointed.  

It's a hot day in Buenos Aires Argentina as 1981 begins.  Juan has everything ready for the long trip he is about to make with his young son Gaspar to the home of his in-laws.  It's just the two of them, as Gaspar's mother Rosario had died some three months earlier, but Juan has decided that he needs the time with just his son.    Juan knows he must be careful as "the repressive forces were unpredictable," and that he needed to "avoid any incidents" -- after all,  Argentina was in the midst of the dictatorship period (aka the Dirty War) and the police and the army "kept a brutal watch over the highways."   On reaching the hotel where they will spend the first night, Juan, who suffers from a serious heart condition, has also taken precautions so that if he fails to wake up, Gaspar knows what to do and who to call.   It is also there that  Juan comes to realize that Gaspar can plainly see a strange woman in the hallway, not a living one, but an "echo," part of  "the restless dead" (i.e.  "discarnates," ghosts of the disappeared),   "moving quickly," because they wanted to be seen.  Juan sees them all of the time and has learned how to banish these visions;  it's something he'll have to teach Gaspar, but of concern at the moment is that he's realized that his son has inherited his own ability to see into "the floating world."   This is not the best news; Rosario's wealthy and very powerful family is part of  a longstanding "secret society" known as the Order,  and they have their own plans for the boy, beginning with a test to ascertain whether or not he is a medium like his father.   

While I won't give too much away plotwise, members of the Order, as the dustjacket blurb notes, seek "eternal life" or more to the point, the preservation of one's consciousness after death.  Juan's role as medium allows them contact with an entity called the Darkness which Juan refers to as "demented... a savage god, a mad god,"  and there are steep, atrocious and even inhuman costs to be paid in doing so.  It is not a role he relishes -- Juan feels trapped, and even worse,  he knows that he likely won't live long enough to protect Gaspar from the Order as much as he needs to.  He makes plans that he hope will safeguard his son long after he's gone, but the question here, as noted on the dustjacket, is whether or not Gaspar can actually escape what has been foreordained to be his destiny.  

The book moves back and forth through time and events before, during and after the dictatorship, following Juan's efforts to protect Gaspar, while simultaneously examining the horrific violence and human wreckage caused by the Order, a way to reckon with colonialism as well as the corruption and evil bred from wealth and power.  Horror is the perfect vehicle to tell these stories -- as the author states in an interview at Literary Hub (2018), 

"There's something about the scale of the cruelty in political violence from the estate that always seems like the blackest magic to me. Like they have to satisfy some ravenous and ancient god that demands not only bodies but needs to be fed their suffering as well" 

and in a 2018 article for the Freeman's Channel at Literary Hub Enriquez writes that she had asked herself

 "what were the first written texts, the first horror texts that I had ever read? They were the testimonies of the dictatorship.  Bodies disappeared. Common everyday houses which served as concentration camps in neighborhoods. The secrecy of it all, the negation of reality. Children in this time taken from their parents and given another name. It was phantasmagoric."

In Our Share of Night, she brings this "blackest magic" to vivid, horrific life; as with her other books, Things We Lost in the Fire and The Dangers of Smoking in Bed,  this one also reminds readers that the traumatic past has the power to linger and to haunt the present. While the dictatorship may have ended, there are still the scars and shadows to be reckoned with. You need not look any further than the recurring image of the child who disappeared inside of a house and completely vanished, never to be seen again, her disappearance affecting her friends and family for years to come. 

While not everyone seems to share my feeling about it, I loved this book. While I've kept any spoilers out of this post, trust me, there are more than enough horrors filling these 588 pages to satisfy any reader of the genre; there is also more than enough historical base and cultural lore to satisfy someone like me.  I do think perhaps it could have used some editing here and there, but all and all, it's likely going to be a novel I will never forget, one that made such a strong impression that I've had it on my mind since finishing it.  Very, very highly recommended.  

The Child Cephalina, by Rebecca Lloyd

9781912586202
Tartarus Press, 2019
260 pp

hardcover


"One mistake begats another in those folk who are blinded by their own desires." 

Mid-century Victorian London is the setting for this thoroughly disquieting but captivating novel which will not release you from its grip until you've read the very last word.  Even then it may take some time; it is so cleverly done and so unsettling that in my case, it was impossible to stop thinking about it long after I'd finished.

Narrator Robert Groves is a bachelor living in a house near Russell Square.  With the help of his housekeeper Tetty Brandling and a young boy by the name of Martin Ebast, he's spent the last three years interviewing "children of the streets" as part of his research for his forthcoming book Wretched London, The Story of the City's Invisible Children.   Every Sunday Martin rounds up and brings a small group of these children to Groves' house on Judd Street; it is on one of these days that young Cephalina first appears.  It is apparent to everyone that she isn't a part of that day's group of "nippers;" the first things Tetty and Martin notice are her clean, recently-washed and plaited hair as well as the "slender and white" hands that are "delicately formed" and obviously unused to street dirt or hard work.  Groves is more than fascinated, Tetty is suspicious, and Cephalina offers little information about herself except that she lives in Hackney with her guardians the Clutchers, for whom she does some sort of work and that she has a twin she calls "E." When she returns to Judd Street a second time, she adds a bit more to (and changes part of)  her story; further visits with Robert reveal a bit more about her life with the Clutchers and a strange bond develops between the two.  In the meantime, Tetty has enough on her plate dealing with the stress caused by an embarrassing lack of funds required to run the household, and the tension between Tetty and Robert escalates as Tetty tries to warn Robert about the "sordid child," who has "too much knowing about her" and  he refuses to listen.  He  credits  her fear to her "superstitious nature," failing to notice just how deeply afraid she is of Cephalina.  Ignoring Tetty and her warnings, his obsession with and devotion to the young "waif"  grows ever stronger, as does his desire to help her, which in his own words, leads him to a "sorry mess indeed."   That is seriously all I'm going to say about the plot -- it's better to go into this book knowing as little as possible.

 I normally shy away from modern writers' work set in Victorian England, because I'm a huge reader of Victorian fiction and some of these people just do not get things right.  That is not true in this case --  Rebecca Lloyd has done great things here. Her depiction of Victorian London is striking, not just in her descriptions of the "dirty, grit-filled fog," the "stench of the Thames" or the "incessant din" that could drive a person mad, but she also captures the current mood of the city, for example, in the excitement over the new Crystal Palace, or the "giant wave of spiritualism" which had found its way into London over the past three years, along with its adherents, practitioners and critics.  Her characters are substantial and realistic as individuals, but it's in the various relationships she's created between them where they thrive and give this novel meaning.   But by far the author's greatest achievement is in her ability to keep the reader on edge  as she cleverly puts together a story in which she has interwoven a number of things left unsaid, things kept hidden,  misperceptions,  misjudgments, and above all, the mystery of the enigma that is Cephalina.  From the beginning she leaves the reader with the feeling that there is something a bit off about this strange girl, and continues to heighten our interest in her by revealing her story slowly and only in small bits at a time.  The same is true in the slight scattering of clues that she leaves for the reader to follow to the chilling and shocking end.

I'm just a reader (and a casual one at that),  not a critic, but I know when I've found something of quality  and this is definitely it, a book that tells me that the author is indeed a master of her craft.   The Child Cephalina at times feels like an old serial cliffhanger, and inevitably I read it into the wee hours of the morning, unable to put it down.  It kept me guessing, very much on edge, and when that last page was turned at 4 a.m. I just sat there unable to even think of sleeping.

Very, very highly recommended.  You will want to read this book.  Trust me.  It's unlike anything I've read before.

Lovecraft Country, by Matt Ruff

9780062292063
HarperCollins, 2016
372 pp

hardcover

"... you think you can forgive, forget, the past. You can't. You cannot.  The past is alive, a living, thing. You own, owe it."

The first clue that this is not going to be your average Lovecraftian pastiche or rehash is on the cover -- what some people may see as ghosts or white spaces between tentacles actually bears much more resemblance to the white hoods of the KKK.  In fact, if you're thinking this is going to be Lovecraft redux, you seriously have another thing coming.  While his own particular brand of racism was horrific in itself, anything that Lovecraft produced in his fiction is dwarfed here by  the real-life terror that the characters in this book experience in their daily lives in Jim Crow America of the 1950s, and that little yellow, starry-looking thing on the cover that says "America's DEMONS Exposed" certainly isn't just there to add to the cover art.

    The book begins with an army vet, Atticus Turner,   leaving Jacksonville for Chicago,  driving 450 miles the first day nonstop except for getting gas. With his copy of The Safe Negro Travel Guide in hand, Atticus spent that night in Chattanooga, where the Guide showed that there were "four hotels and a motel, all in the same part of the city." The next day, wanting to "put the South behind him," he has the diner next to his motel fill a basket with food and Cokes so that he wouldn't have to stop in Louisville, Kentucky where again according to the guide, there was a "restaurant that would serve him lunch."  An hour after crossing a "bridge named for a dead slave owner" on the Ohio River, he blew a tire, sending him on foot out to find a garage..  Just his luck -- a Confederate flag hangs over the entrance and, of course, that didn't quite work out.  Pulling out his Safe Negro Travel Guide once more, he discovers that the nearest "Negro-owned garage" was fifty miles away; with no other options, he had to wait seven hours for help to arrive. And this is all just the beginning of worse to come.

So at this point (and I'm only on page four), I'm already creeped out about the necessity of something like a  Safe Negro Travel Guide, and after a little digging, came across the story of The Negro Motorist Green Book, and now I'm really interested to see what else Matt Ruff is going to do here.  I just sort of sat flipping pages as the real horrors of the  lives of the characters unfolded in each of the interconnected stories in this book.

The way Ruff sets up this book is clever -- as he notes in an interview at The Seattle Review of Books,  his idea was to start with "classic story" ideas

"... like, somebody buys a haunted house or somebody finds themselves being chased by an animated doll"

and with that, he asks himself the questions of

"how does this happen to my protagonist and how does having a black protagonist change the nature of the story?"

 Without giving away too much of what happens here, Atticus has returned to Chicago after receiving a letter from his dad Montrose in which he reveals to his son that he's discovered "something about your mother's ... forebears," and that there's some sort of "legacy, a birthright" that's been kept from Atticus, something that "has something to do with the place that Mom's people supposedly came from." Now Montrose has gone missing, and Atticus has only the letter he was sent as a clue to finding him.   From that letter, it turns out that "Mom's people" came from Ardham, Massachusetts, in what Atticus calls "Lovecraft Country."  Atticus, his Uncle George and a friend from childhood named Letitia Dandridge set out for Ardham, and encounter the Braithwhites, who have a strange connection with the Turners through "Mom's people."  The Braithwhites are white,  rich,and powerful; they are also key figures in a strange group known as the Order of the Ancient Dawn. (I have to say that my pulp-loving heart went pitterpat here with this name.)  I won't say why, but what happens during their time with the Braithwhites at this meeting sets up all that follows in this book, during which we come to understand the phrase "Lovecraft Country", as one reader puts it, as having

 "more to do with the rampant racism in that part of the US at the time, rather than the Lovecraftian horror subgenre."  

The way that Mr. Ruff has brought out his story here is very nicely done, and the little "mini-adventures" do, as he also notes in the Seattle Review of Books interview linked above, turn out to be each character's "own weird tale." Some of these are much better than others -- I loved "Horace and the Devil Doll," for instance because it's so on point as far as old-fashioned pulpy horror is concerned -- but really,  each story added to a wider picture of  Jim Crow practices of this time, things that, as anyone sane would realize, were just horrific and inhuman.  At the same time, there's a very real sense of empowerment that comes from the characters in each story in some fashion, as they fight back as best they can, each in his or her own way.   Speaking of pulpy/horrorish tropes here,  Ruff obviously went well beyond Lovecraft in framing his tales -- HG Wells, Ray Bradbury, Robert Louis Stevenson and many more authors find their way into this book as well.

I have to say that on the whole, I liked this book, didn't love it and maybe that's not entirely the author's fault.  Not too far into it, I was reminded in a very big way of what Victor LaValle had done with his excellent  Ballad of Black Tom which uses Lovecraft's own work "The Horror at Red Hook,"  to turn Lovecraft's particularly nasty brand of racism on its own head, so (and I hate that this happens, but I can't help it), there was already a comparison at work in my head. Frankly, when it comes right down to it, LaValle's book, in my opinion, is the better of the two, since  LaValle is hands down, no question,  the better writer.  Having said that though, I don't  mean that readers won't like this one --  there are plenty of reasons to recommend Lovecraft Country to anyone, especially since it seems to be sadly pertinent to our own times.

*****

for more in-depth coverage of this book, I give you

Alex Brown, "Cthulhu Gon' Slay," at tor.com

Requiem at Rogano, by Stephen Knight - in which I had great fun and did a serious double take

9781943910663

Valancourt Books, 2017

originally published 1979

301 pp

Another fine release from Valancourt, Requiem at Rogano is a novel that you may think you've read before as you get further into it, but trust me, that just isn't the case.  While a number of authors in the 1970s produced something similar along these lines (I won't say but you'll know what I mean after reading it), this one stands on its own as something unique. As mentioned on the back-cover blurb, the reviewer from The Financial Times wrote about this novel that he can "recommend this to all who enjoy literate crime fiction," a sentiment I share. I'll also add that not only is it literate, but it is twisty to the point where every time I thought I had it all figured out, something happened that nixed my solution and sent me off in another direction entirely. The light bulb only went on in my head during the final moments of the story, just before the reveal.   Now, I don't know about anyone else, but when a writer comes up with a mystery story that I can't solve, well, to me he or she has done his or her job, and has done it well.  These days it takes a lot to find such a writer of mysteries since I've been reading them since I was just a wee girl -- usually I pick up on what's going on and have to settle for waiting not so patiently while the crimesolver person catches up.  It's frustrating, but happily, that's not an issue here. Thank goodness. 

It's 1902, and we are in London. The newspaper headlines are filled with reports of a strange series of murders done by a figure the police have dubbed "The Deptford Strangler," that are leaving police baffled. In the meantime, because of the police regulations requiring an officer to retire at age sixty, Reginald Arthur Brough has been made to take a retirement he's not quite ready for. He'd "tried to make the best of it," but so far, it's not been a happy time.  Things begin to look up when his nephew, Nicholas Calvin, writes to inquire whether or not he'd like to help him with a History of Murder that he's writing. He also notes that he has "stumbled on one case the like of which you've never seen," one that has brought him to Italy.  Brough doesn't take long deciding yes or no -- it is a way out of the "mental stagnation" of retirement, which he sees as a "slow march to death."  However, when he meets Nicholas later, Brough is disappointed in learning that Nicholas wants to "abandon" the project.  In its place he wants to "write a book on one single crime and its aftermath," and relates to his uncle the bizarre story of a series of murders that took place in the Italian town of Rogano in the fifteenth century, complete with strange figures in black clothing, an abbey built on sheer cliffs of solid granite, and the Inquisition.  So at this point I'm hooked like a fish and it's only page 15. After that, it just gets better, as it slowly dawns on the reader that, à la back-cover blurb, the pattern of the 1454 Rogano murders is "identical" to that of the string of murders happening in the present day.  The question of how this is possible sets Brough and Nicholas on the path of a bizarre journey that only gets stranger as time goes on.

There is a LOT more, which I'm not going to reveal here, because as I said a few days ago when talking about  Uncle Silas, the less prospective readers know about this book going into it the better.  While there are several reviews scattered here and there in the cyberworld, my advice would be to restrain yourselves from reading them until you've turned the last page. It is a mega-twisty book with a number of big surprises on the way to the ending, and trust me -- you don't want to know too much about it beforehand other than what you can glean from the back-cover blurb, which is pretty much all I've said about it here. Read spoilers at your peril -- I didn't and I'm very happy I didn't know anything beforehand to ruin the fun I had with this book. 

What I will say is that when I got to the end, I had to completely re-evaluate all that I'd just read.  The conclusion was a downright shocker and so I went racing back through the novel a second time, at which point I discovered exactly how truly ingenious a book Requiem at Rogano really is and how well the author plied his craft here.  And, just in case anyone's wondering why  I'm posting about this book here and not on the crime page of my reading journal, well, there is a definite reason, but I'm not going to give away anything except to say trust me, it definitely belongs here. Plus, if it's read as just a crime thriller, well, that's just wrong. 

James - you picked a good one. Thanks!!!! 

campfire reading, part one of two: Muladona, by Eric Stener Carlson

9781905784844
Tartarus, 2016
290 pp

hardcover

Trying to get myself mentally put back together after a few upsets over the last week or two, Larry and I just spent three days far  from the madding crowd in a cabin in the woods. No television, no people, nothing but silence and the smell of oak trees -- an environment beyond conducive to mental health repair and reading, so read I did, perfectly relaxed while laying out by a roaring campfire.   First book, this one, by Eric Stener Carlson, who is the author of one of my all-time favorite novels, The Saint Perpetuus Club of Buenos Aires (2009).  This time he's given his readers the tale of Muladona, "a doomed soul transformed into the devil's mule," based in part on an old Catalan legend.

This story belongs to Vergil Erasmus Strömberg (Verge),  who tells us at the beginning that years ago he'd promised never to reveal the story of what happened in 1918, but it seems that "recent events" have made it necessary to go back on his word.  His tale takes place in Texas, 1918, as the influenza epidemic rages through the small town of Incarnation.  He's a "sickly boy" whose world is pretty much confined to his house and his books, and those have to be smuggled in by a friend since Verge's father, a coldhearted and narrow-minded Scandinavian Protestant pastor, believes that "anything written after Dante's Inferno" is "pure debauchery."  Verge's brother Sebastian also has an interest of which his father wouldn't approve -- he is fascinated with mythology, anthropology, and mysticism; he also has a keen interest in "magical transformations into animals," and keeps his forbidden collection of books under the floorboards of his room.  When they were younger, they were also transfixed by others who would feed them creepy tales, and one of these centered on the legend of the muladona: 

"...when a woman commits an impure act, she becomes the devil-mule at night. She chooses her victims just like the first one ... the liars, the gossipers, the bad, li'l kids. And you'll hear her comin' for ya at night, by the way she clanks the chains of hell." 

As the flu wreaks death and devastation throughout Incarnation, Verge, now 13, finds himself alone in the family home.  His mother has been gone since he was seven, his father receives a telegram that takes him away from Incarnation to tend another pastor's flock, and Sebastian has run away from home with the idea of traveling "from reservation to reservation" across Texas to "record the stories of the elders before they disappear," as a volunteer doing ethnological surveys for the Bureau of Indian Affairs.  The woman looking after him also has to leave to take care of her sister, so Verge is left on his own.  It isn't too long before he receives a strange telegram from his brother that at first Verge thinks is a joke, but in reality it is a warning that muladona is coming for him at midnight and an admonition to be prepared.  And when the visit takes place, this strange creature from hell tells Verge  that over the next seven nights,

"I will vi-isit you. Each night, I'll tell you a be-ed time story. Wrapped within the sto-ories are clues to the identity of the person who takes the form of this mi-ighty creature you see before you. A-any time you like, you can throw back the sheets and tell me who you think I am. If you're sma-art enough, Poof! I disappear, and you never have to see me again."

If he fails to guess the creature's name correctly, the muladona promises, Verge will be dragged down to hell. And so the stories begin, as does Verge's torment while he tries to make sense of what he's hearing.

If I try to explain further, I'll wreck things for potential readers, but there is a LOT going on in this book, starting with the intolerance of the good Christian folk who stopped in Incarnation and made it theirs, relegating the "descendents of the natives" who formerly lived in the town's "grand old mansions" to the status of menial servants. As the dustjacket blurb notes, the story takes the reader "through the dark history of Incarnation, from the murder of the Indians by the Spanish settlers..." so beware -- it is not at all pretty.   It's not too difficult to understand the subtext here, but the most interesting parts for me were the stories told by the muladona each night.  Oh my god -- I already knew that this author is one hell of a writer, but I was completely sucked into each story, each one pointing to some horrific realities not just for Verge but also in their repeating themes that I'll leave for others to discover.

I will say that I am not a big fan of monster stories, but sheesh -- this one had me tied up in knots as I waited for young Verge to figure things out.  And what's more, when I got to a part toward the end where Verge warns someone  of the muladona's  impending visit, it dawned on me that Mr. Carlson had set up a world here in which no one thinks our young lad is crazy, but one in which the existence of such a creature is just another part of the landscape.

Muladona is original, fresh, and above all, it is a thinking person's horror novel, which I genuinely appreciate.  It's not some slapdash book that's been thrown together -- au contraire -- it is very nicely constructed, well thought out and intelligently written.  I would expect no less from the author, whose The Saint Perpetuus Club of Buenos Aires is truly a work of genius. He continues that genius here.  Don't miss this one -- mine is the hardcover copy, but there is an e-book available as well. Highly, highly recommended for readers who enjoy the work of excellent writers and for people who like their horror novels more on the cerebral side.  This is a good one, folks.

The Port-Wine Stain, by Norman Lock

9781942658061
Bellevue Literary Press, 2016
224 pp

paperback

(read in May)

"To see oneself mirrored by another can be unnerving." 

This novel is really getting the short end of the stick from early reviewers over at LibraryThing, and I think that's just plain sad.   What I've noticed is that some of these people picked up this book expecting a Poe clone and didn't get it, thereby allowing their expectations to guide their reading experience.  I learned a long time ago that if you assume one thing and get another, well, newsflash , you're going to be disappointed -- so the trick for me has been to sit back and let the book take me where it's going to go. Someone once told me that "assume" makes an ass out of you and me, so I just let my books speak to me on their own. And this one spoke to me about just how easy it is for someone already quite impressionable to be pushed from sanity to madness.  That transition lands this book squarely into my reading wheelhouse.

The quotation from chapter one is from Poe's "William Wilson," an apt start to this novel since somewhere down the line the main character/narrator (a physician)  is going to encounter what he feels is his own doppelganger.  The story is told from his perspective to a friend, looking back from present (1876)  to thirty years in the past. He captures the attention of his friend by promising to reveal how he "came to know" Edgar Allan Poe and how Poe "initiated" him into the occult, ushering him "to the iron door of the tomb" where "he bid me knock;" the story of "the winter months I spent with him." He also reveals that for a short time, he was a "principal character in one of his horrors."

 However, there's a catch: as the narrator states right up front,

"I'm a careful observer of the body's minutest motions, its fevers, crises, maladies, disturbances, but however clearly I seem to see my past, I can't be certain that what I remember of it is the truth. Memory is as liable to blight as the soul ..." 

giving us our first clue that perhaps this narrator is going to be less than reliable.

Very, very briefly, young Edward Fenzil is an assistant to the renowned Dr. Mütter, who in 1844 Philadelphia is already famous for his successes in reconstructive surgery. One day Mütter receives a visitor who, as he reveals to Fenzil, is none other than Edgar Allan Poe. Fenzil has never heard of Poe, nor has he ever read any of his work. A week later, Poe returns, "fascinated" by Mütter's collection -- his specimens -- and Mütter gives Edward the task of showing Poe around and giving him "every assistance." The relationship between Fenzil and Poe intensifies as time goes on, as they spend long nights together and as Poe begins to bring young Fenzil into his rather bizarre world. But things take a very weird turn when Poe and his friends from the Thanatopsis Club decide to "initiate" Edward into the group, starting a sequence of events that lead to a most horrific tragedy and an unexpected ending that blew me away.

Here's the thing:  as I said, if you're expecting a Poe-centric story or Poe clone here, you're going to be disappointed. Yes, he's in the book, and yes, the author does take you into his sad, dark world, where he finds a "strange beauty in suffering."  But here the narrative firmly belongs to Fenzil, not Poe, so Edward is most definitely the one to watch.   Another thing: many readers have complained about the style and the prose of this novel, but anyone who reads widely in 19th-century literature will have no problems with it. I suppose that many of the negatives may come from people who do the so-called "fifty-page rule," and who didn't find it punchy or exciting enough within that space to continue reading or at least to give the book more of a chance.  It's not that I think the book is great, because I don't (like a 3.5 on a 5-star scale)  but it is very dark and examines how the sanity of a seemingly-normal yet impressionable person can be so easily tipped over the edge, making it a book that is right up my alley.

My thanks to LibraryThing and to Bellevue Literary Press for my copy.

book #2: The Witch and the Priest, by Hilda Lewis

9781939140289

Valancourt Books, 2013

(originally published 1956)

276 pp

paperback

The "witchcraft" entry for this year's Halloween reading lineup, The Witch and the Priest by Hilda Lewis,  just may be one of the most intelligent witchcraft novels I've read on the topic. Based on the very real case of the Witches of Belvoir of the 17th century, Lewis has fashioned a very well-crafted story about what really lies beneath the persecution of these women.  It is also a story about justice, compassion and mercy and the often dual-sided nature of both good and evil. 

from bewitchment-at-belvoir-flowers-revenge.html

The foreword to this book offers readers a starting point in terms of just who these witches were.  In a 1619 pamphlet that details the trial of these women (illustrated above), Margaret and Philip (Philippa) Flower, were executed after being "specially arraigned and condemned" by the assize judges after confessing not only to the "destruction of Henry lord Rosse"  by means of their "damnable practices against others." Their mother Joan was also arrested for witchcraft, but died along the way to Lincoln, missing the hangman's noose altogether.  It is Joan whose story drives the narrative in this novel; the entire book is an ongoing conversation between Joan and the Reverend Samuel Fleming, one of the examining judges in the original case. Fleming, it seems, has been carrying a heavy burden for a "twelvemonth," wondering if these three women were really witches or whether the

"poor hanged creatures were nothing but desperately unhappy; a little crazy, maybe with their miseries? Or -- how if they were poor, merely; and ugly and ignorant and uncouth? That -- and nothing more?" 

He also wonders whether or not he was a "righteous judge or a credulous old man," and though his sister feels that he shouldn't worry so much since he didn't actually sentence them to be hanged,  his "own heart" would never "acquit" him.  Indeed, he worries so much that in a moment of agony he calls out to the now-dead Joan Flower, asking the question that had been tormenting him for over a year:

"Did we wrong you bitterly, you and your two daughters? Or were you rightly judged?" 

bringing Joan to him, "as he had seen her last..."

 As she notes,

"Since I died denying my Master, the gates of Hell are shut against me; since I died unshriven, the gates of Heaven are shut against me also. I come because you will not let me rest. While I was yet alive you did not with a full heart wrestle for my soul. But because you grieve for my sake, one more chance is given you to win my soul for your god. If you fail, your soul in is peril also, because you failed to do that which your god set you to do."

Once Fleming agrees to listen, she begins her long story, explaining how and why she became a witch and how she got her daughters involved with her Master.   In fact, the entire novel is a long conversation between Fleming and Joan Flower that not only focuses on the Flower family and their deeds, but on Fleming himself, justice, the nature of good and evil, and above all, compassion.

I think I'll leave it there, but I will say that this novel has it all. You have your Sabbats, esbats and frenzied orgies; there are drugs that offer the feeling of flying, witches' familiars, curses, etc. At the same time Lewis patiently applies astute reasoning to why women (in this case anyway) were often branded as witches. She gets into the socioeconomic reasons, the class/caste differences between the regular folk and the nobility -- the mutual mistrust between the two groups,  the double standard benefiting the latter among other things --  and even more relevant in today's world, the failure to take into consideration that some people are just not as mentally acute as others, calling for a justice tempered with mercy and compassion in their cases.

The Witch and the Priest is definitely what I'd call a page turner, but it is also well written and intelligent, making this a novel very much worth reading.  No "Charmed" BS here -- just a great book.  

The Ghost Hunters, by Neil Spring

9781780879578
Quercus, 2013
522 p

paperback

"Do you suppose that those who hunt ghosts are haunted, in turn, by them? 

Normally a 500+ page book will take a few days to read; once I seriously got into this one,  I had it done in two.  I gave up a lot of sleep to read this novel, and it was totally worth it, in fact, the constant wind I could hear blowing outside provided the perfect ambience. The Ghost Hunters is really several stories meshed into one -- first, there is the story of Sarah Grey, a young woman living with her mother who in this book became confidential secretary to Harry Price, the subject of the second story, a "psychical researcher" and  debunker of fake mediums during a time when spiritualism was at its heyday. The third story focuses on the "most haunted house in England," Borley Rectory.  When I first bought this book I thought I was getting a horror story, and even though it didn't completely turn out that way, I was totally amazed at just how good this book is. Aside from a few parts that verge on melodrama, the novel is highly atmospheric and will definitely send shivers up your spine here and there.

The narrative is related mainly by Sarah Grey, looking back over her life and career from 1955.  Her story begins in 1926, two weeks before she turned 22.  Her widowed mother, having lost her husband during the war, is very much into spiritualism, and on this particular day in January, Sarah is reluctantly accompanying her to the gala opening of Harry Price's new laboratory.   Sarah disapproves of her mother's interest in mediums and seances, thinking spiritualism to be in "poor taste," and also believing that instead of focusing on the dead, people should be thinking about moving on.  The laboratory is paid for by funds from the Society for Psychical Research,  "equipped with the necessary scientific equipment," and is a place where "men and women with open minds can test the mediums unhindered by preconceived prejudices."  On this night, the two women witness the testing of a medium whose powers seem so real, only to be followed by Price's denunciation of her work as a trick.  Price also announces that he does not believe in ghosts, and notes that his "science, psychical research," will leave behind the "cheap mummery of the seance rooms."  His comments are objected to by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, a member of the Society for Psychical Research, famous  for his belief in spiritualism, making for an exciting evening.  Harry himself is rather at odds with the Society, and makes no bones about his stance on their methods.

Eventually, this gala opening turns into a position for Sarah as Price's confidential secretary, as well as his eventual assistant in his debunking activities.  It isn't long until Sarah comes across a letter from a Dr. David Chipp, who also attended Harry's lab opening, and who finds that his own experiences are "at odds" with what Harry had to say. The letter goes on to tell about several eerie things that happened to him during a visit at the family home of a colleague and friend, Borley Rectory.  After the visit was over, he heard many more stories about Borley Rectory and the things that his friend had witnessed, and while Dr. Chipp was himself looking for a "satisfactory explanation" on the rational side, he could never come up with an explanation.  Chipp tells Harry that perhaps he should investigate the place for himself. Sarah alerts Price, who is not at all interested, and the matter drops until sometime later when a story is written in the newspaper about Borley Rectory and the experiences of the new tenants of the place.  As it turns out, the reporter who wrote the piece, Vernon Wall, is eager for Harry to visit, because he himself had  traveled there and witnessed some things that "confounded all reason."  As Wall states to Sarah,

"In my occupation one is accustomed to discovering facts and reporting them -- accepting them. But when I remember what happened at that house I am unable to explain it to my satisfaction. Either what I saw wasn't real, or the bedrock of modern science is entirely inaccurate...I can't see how it can be otherwise."

Wall invites Harry to go to Borley Rectory to experience the place for himself, but it is only when Harry's  obvious reluctance moves Wall to say that perhaps the Society for Psychical Research might wish to go there that Harry decides he'll take the case.  With Sarah in tow, Harry meets Wall at the rectory, and what happens during this investigation will have an impact on the remainder of Sarah's life.

Borley Rectory, from occultopedia.com

 While, as I noted earlier, this isn't a horror story per se, there are some spine-tingling moments in this book that ghost-story aficionados would love.  Mr. Spring details each and every event so well that I got totally immersed in the Borley scenes and didn't want them to end.  The author incorporates actual sources into Sarah's account; in fact, to be really honest, since this was the first time I'd ever heard of Borley Rectory, I thought they were all fake until my post-read curiosity got the better of me and I discovered that there really is a place called Borley Rectory, and that there really was a person named Harry Price; one of the footnotes even directed the reader to a book called Poltergeists Over England that I'd forgotten I actually own.  There is such a fine blending of reality and fiction in this book that it's hard to determine at times where one stops and the other starts.  The book also provides an atmospheric quality that gets under your skin as you read; whether or not you are in the Rectory, you can't help but wait for that next little jolt of fear to hit. But beyond all that, I really liked how the author set up the theme dealing with the costs of deception throughout the story.

When all is said and done, Harry Price turns out to be a character loaded with irony, and the author sets things up so that it isn't up to the last that we discover exactly what that irony entails. The "secret" Sarah carries around with her isn't so earth shattering when revealed (and I figured it out early on), but even with this little bit of drama (a tad bit overdone, imho), she is also an interesting person both with and without Harry Price.  There are many side characters who also come to life here -- most notably, the tenants of Borley Rectory, past and present.

Overall, considering I went into this book with the wrong expectations, I really enjoyed it ... just the perfect thing for a windy/stormy night's read.