Kwaidan: Ghost Stories and Strange Tales of Old Japan, by Lafcadio Hearn

9780486450940
Dover, 2006; originally published 1904
159 pp

paperback

I'm late to the Lafcadio Hearn party, having only read two stories in this collection before picking up this book -- "The Story of Mimi-Nashi-Hoichi" and "Yuki-Onna," which have long been personal favorites. There are seventeen actual "Kwaidan" ( kaidan)  in this book, and then a section by Hearn called "Insect Studies," three compositions that in their own right are definitely worth reading.  From what I've been able to discover, Hearn's wife Setsu related a number of these tales to him, but as Oscar Lewis notes in his introduction, Hearn spent a lot of energy and time trying to

 "unearth some quaint legend or trace down some curious bit of superstition...and he worked with the same slow patience to render his discoveries accurately and without distortion into English."

He was so keen to get it right that

"he made her [Setsu] enact again and again a part of some ancient legend, studying her every gesture, insisting on the exact intonation of every word."

Now, I don't know about anyone else, but to me, that's a prime example of unshakable passion at its peak.  Luckily, his admiration and persistence have paid off in spades -- these are some of the finest weird folk tales, legends, and  ghostly tales to be collected in a single volume. Ranging from out-and-out creepy ghost stories to monks roaming the countryside where various monsters and other creatures seem to abide, there is never a bad note struck throughout the entire collection.

At seventeen stories, I'm not about to go into each one, but I'll highlight my favorites.  As mentioned earlier, I am quite partial to "the Story of Mimi-nashi Hoichi," a tale in which a blind biwa player is summoned to recite the Tale of the Heike (平家物語Heike Monogatari -- another personal favorite) in front of a distinguished audience. He is asked to relate the part about the battle at Dannoura, "for the pity of it is most deep."  Unfortunately for our blind biwa player, his recital is magnificent -- and he is called back for another performance.  Then there's "Yuki-Onna," in which a young woodcutter is about to meet his death, but is miraculously saved by a strange woman he encounters in a cabin in the woods. What happens afterward is just downright freaky creepy.  While all of the tales in this collection are excellent, I also loved "Rukoru-Kubi," the story of a high-ranking samurai turned wandering priest after his master's house was defeated in the ongoing warfare of the time and the house fell. Kwairyō (the priest)  makes a habit of sleeping outdoors, but accepts a humble woodcutter's offer for shelter. Insomnia gets the best of him, and he literally stumbles into a closely-held secret that will literally stick with him for some time. Another fine entry is "The Dream of Akinosuke," in which the dreamer is whisked off to a sort of fairyland in order to marry the king's daughter -- but on waking from the dream, discovers exactly where he's been.  Just super.

Miminashi Hoichi playing his biwa

The stories are short but their length doesn't affect their potency; by virtue of being stories that have been handed down over several centuries, the reader also gets a look at ancient Japan from different angles, from the world of the samurai on down to that of the lowliest peasant. It is a world of constant upheaval in terms of the physical world and also vis a vis the traditional social order.  One major exception is "Hi-Mawari," a story that takes place in Wales, obviously penned by Hearn himself.  After the kaidan section is finished, the reader moves into Hearn's "Insect Studies," where he dwells on butterflies, mosquitoes and ants.  While you might be tempted to skip them, don't. They're absolutely fascinating, drawing on traditional folklore, etc.  from Japan and China.

I realize that not everyone is going to admire these stories like I do, but I love all things Japanese and this collection was simply superb. It might just be a good opening into all sorts of kaidan for a novice reader, and there are several works available in English that would make for great follow-up reading.  Another thing worth noting here is that there is a movie called Kwaidan, based on Hearn's stories, two from this book and two more from other works he compiled.  The two from this collection are "Yuki-Onna" and "The Story of Miminashi Hoichi;" these are joined by dramatizations of "The Reconciliation" (from Shadowings) and "In a Cup of Tea," (which is delightfully creepy) from his Kotto: Being Japanese Curios and Sundry Cobwebs.  [as an FYI, these links go to Amazon, and I get nothing if you click there.]

I loved this book and I can't recommend it highly enough.

creepiest, creepier, creepy: The Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories (ed.) Robert Aickman

0006131247
Fontana/Collins, 1974
(first published 1964)
256 pp

mass market paperback

You just never know what you're going to find when you start cleaning off your horror shelves.  I'd totally forgotten I even owned this book so imagine my great delight when I looked through the table of contents and saw these titles and these authors:

• "The Travelling Grave", by LP Hartley
• "The Ghost Ship",  by Richard Middleton
• "Squire Toby's Will," by J. Sheridan Le Fanu
• "The Voice in the Night," by William Hope Hodgson
• "Three Miles Up," by Elizabeth Jane Howard
• "The Rocking-horse Winner," by D.H. Lawrence
• "The Wendigo," by Algernon Blackwood
• "The Crown Derby Plate," by Marjorie Bowen
• "The Trains," by Robert Aickman
• "The Old Nurse's Story," by Mrs. Gaskell
• "Seaton's Aunt," by Walter de la Mare

Modern readers of horror may find these stories somewhat dated, or perhaps not even scary, but these stories are true classics in every sense of the word. 

 I'm hard pressed to pick a favorite, but Aickman's "The Trains" and "Three Miles Up," by Elizabeth Jane Howard totally rattled me.  I've read "The Trains" a number of times (it's a favorite, and I'm  still scratching my head over that one). Howard's work (new to me) wins my choice for creepiest story in this collection, about some friends who decide to take a boat ride through England's canals.  Crikey -- here's another story where the ending  left some pretty mind-shattering and beyond-disturbing implications in my head.  It was one of the creepiest tales in the entire collection.   Memo to self -- I MUST find more of Howard's ghost stories. 

Also new to me are "The Voice in the Night,"  "The Old Nurse's Story" and "The Crown Derby Plate."  I don't know that I'd classify Hodgson's piece as a ghost story per se, but it's an incredibly disturbing little tale. 

[sidebar: some time back I read a collection of pulp stories written by a relatively unknown author named Philip Fisher, who had one tale called "Fungus Isle" (1923).  While trying to find out more about the author, I came upon a website devoted to Hodgson which noted that "Fungus Isle" was partially (and shamelessly)  lifted from "The Voice in the Night." After having read it,  I can totally see why little factoid might be true.]

"Seaton's Aunt," "The Rocking-horse Winner," "Squire Toby's Will" and "The Wendigo" are old, true-blue  favorites; although they are rereads, they still have an incredible amount of creep factor that produces the familiar and greatly-desired raising o' the hackles and hair on my neck.

 Less personally appealing but still good (although neither totally wowed me)  were "The Travelling Grave" and  "The Ghost Ship."  I have to confess that I'd never heard of Richard Middleton before picking up this book, and even though I wasn't overcome with delight while reading his piece, it did make me want to find out more about him and his other work.  So I bought a copy of his The Ghost Ship and Others; apparently he's also quite well known for a story called "On the Brighton Road," so I'm sure I'll be posting about that collection in the near future.  

Aickman notes in the introduction that "There are only thirty or forty first-class ghost stories in the whole of western literature," without saying which ones, but if the Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories is any judge of what he considers "first-class," I'm eager to move on through all eight of this series of books he edited before Ronald Chetwynd-Hayes took over.  As someone who loves a great ghost story, especially the classics, I'd say that this book is definitely a must-have for anyone who is even remotely interested.  Enjoy the shivers up your spine...

Tales of Moonlight and Rain (雨月物語) -- Ugetsu Monogatari -- by Ueda Akinari

9780231139137
Columbia University Press, 2007
235 pp
paperback

Anthony Chambers, who is a professor of Japanese literature and literary translation at Arizona State, has brought together these little tales of ghosts, spirits and other things in this slim little volume. The title "alludes to the belief that mysterious beings appear on cloudy, rainy nights and in mornings with the lingering moon," and if you look at the kanji characters, they literally read "rain moon tale."  To me, it's a great book to read on a dark night when all is quiet  -- rain is a definite plus -- and it goes well beyond just the stories.

There are a couple of different ways a reader might approach this book.  Chambers offers information about each story just prior to its beginning, offering information and history on Title, Characters, Places, Time, Background and Affinities.  If you're not at all interested in literary, cultural, political or other areas of Japanese/Chinese history (i.e., the scholarly approach)  you might want to skip directly to the story itself. The downside of that approach is that in footnotes, annotations, etc., there are references to other literary works, so just watch out.  If the reverse is true and you're into discovering the history of these works and their forebears, there are several wonderful little gems of information under each of these headings, very much worth the time it takes to read them. I would skip the intro and return to it after you've read the entire book, but of course, that's my own preference (I do that in every book I read) -- but it is also very interesting in terms of historical background so do not miss it.

As for the stories themselves, there are nine.  I have to say that I've recently discovered Hulu's 900+ collection of Criterion films, and watched one called "Ugetsu."  I fell instantly in love with this movie, so I did a bit of research on it.  It turns out that the movie is a combination of two stories in this book -- "The Reed-Choked House" and "A Serpent's Lust", and I was elated to discover that I actually had this collection in my home library.

Machiko Kyō as Lady Wakasa
[These eyebrows for some reason totally creep out my husband; I'm not sure why]

The story list is as follows:

"Shiramine"

"The Chrysanthemum Vow"

"The Reed-Choked House"

"The Carp of My Dreams"

"The Owl of the Three Jewels"

"The Kibitsu Cauldron"

"A Serpent's Lust"

"The Blue Hood"

"On Poverty and Wealth"

The collection itself dates back to the 18th century; it is a classic in the world of Japanese literature.  A number of these tales have been borrowed by Ueda from Chinese literature; he changed them to Japanese settings and adapted them to fit into Japanese culture.  Samurai abound, for example; Buddhism and Shinto also play major roles in these tales.  All of these little stories are quite good (with the exception of "On Poverty and Wealth," which I did not particularly care for),  but my favorites were "The Reed-Choked House" and "A Serpent's Lust," followed by "The Kibitsu Cauldron" (the tale of a very faithful wife), "The Chrysanthemum Vow" (two men whose love conquers death) and "The Carp of My Dreams," the greatness of which is in the author's ability to  blur the line between dreams and reality to an extreme.

While not exactly the mainstream fodder of modern readers of supernatural tales, this collection is beyond outstanding. Anyone who is one-hundred percent serious about literary horror/dark fiction should have this book in his or her library; for me it's a beautiful blending of works from two cultures I love and it perfectly suits my need for reading something different every time I pick up a work of dark fiction.  Just so I feel like I'm being honest here, it is not always an easy read -- you have to read, think, and do both slowly.

It is an absolutely stunning collection I can highly, highly recommend.  Even if you want to bypass the scholarly approach, the stories themselves are amazing.

today's double feature: The Moorstone Sickness, by Bernard Taylor and Day of the Arrow, by Philip Lorraine

I'm so behind in posting in this reading journal that it feels as if I'll never catch up. I'm posting on books I read in May -- that's just how far behind I am. On the other hand, I have to remind myself that there's no one sitting here with a gun to my head making me do this, so I shouldn't complain.

I really ought to buy stock in Valancourt Books because since I've discovered them, they've become a regular staple in my horror shelves. Every time the newsletter comes out with new titles, I'm both ecstatic and freaked at the same time -- ecstatic at the thought of another undiscovered author or title, and freaked because I know I'm going to buy them, adding to my already impossible-to-manage tbr pile. But enough of that.  Time to get down to business.

One very big thing that I came to realize after having finished The Moorstone Sickness is just how very

jaded modern horror readers have become.  When I got to the end of the novel, I realized that here is a case where you really have to consider just what it is that constitutes one's personal idea of horror.  If it's blood, guts and gore splattered everywhere you're after, forget it. Not in this novel. If you need every single detail of what's going on explained to you, you won't find that, either.   But if you stop to consider the implications of this story, then it becomes one of the most horrific stories I've ever read.  But to tell is to ruin, so I can't really give away any details.  I will say, though, that the author of this edition's Introduction, Mark Morris, is spot on when he says that

"To maintain the tension it is important that readers care about the fate of the story's potential victims..."

and this is where Taylor's writing really shines.  This is one of those books where the idea of "sinister" creeps up slowly on the reader, since basically you're reading about two people (Rowan and Hal) who find a great house in a small country village, move there, and discover that everything about the place (Moorstone) is pretty much ideal. That's when, I think, I started worrying about this couple -- I mean, if you've read enough horror fiction, you just know that something is off and that things are just too perfect to be of any good to anyone! As it turns out,  I read this in one sitting because despite the slow pace and the neighborly goodwill of Moorstone's residents, I just knew something awful was going to happen and I was right to be concerned.  The Moorstone Sickness is definitely one worth checking out -- I thought about this one for a long, long while after it was all over.

******

"...it's our belief in a thing, mine or yours, which makes that thing -- forever, or for a moment -- divine." 

Moving right along, we come to Philip Loraine's Day of the Arrow, which although written in 1964, still packs a hell of a gut punch that I won't soon forget.  Do yourself a HUGE favor though and read the novel before you watch the 1966 movie that was based on it, "Eye of the Devil." While the movie is very good (especially the creep factor of Sharon Tate's indescribable stare), and would be just super for a Deborah Kerr Halloween night creepfest along with "The Innocents",  it leaves out so much of what makes this book an incredible read.

Very much Gothic in tone with atmosphere that doesn't quit, Day of the Arrow begins when James Lindsay spies his former lover coming out of a Paris where she'd evidently been for a tryst.  That makes him wonder ... after all, he knew she was married to Philipe de Montfaucon for six years.   They eventually meet, and Françoise reveals that for the last three years, something's been a bit off with Philipe. It's not another woman -- it's that Philipe is certain that he is going to die.  Lindsay agrees to come to the Montfaucon country estate, Bellac, to see what he can make of things, and while he's there he uncovers a secret in some old tomes of family history that is rooted in traditions going back before the Christians ever set foot in the place.  Something is very much amiss at Bellac, as James discovers, and to his horror, he also comes to understand that whatever is going to happen cannot and absolutely will not be stopped, no matter how hard he tries.

Day of the Arrow is one of those novels that just gets under your skin from the beginning.  Once the scene moves to Bellac, there is no shaking off the atmosphere that Loraine has so expertly crafted. It is  a horror novel with an intense mystery at its center, it goes deeply back into time, and it's a very hard book to put down once it's opened. And while it may not appeal to gore/splatter/swimming in guts sorts of readers, I'd put this old book up against anything coming out today.  It is, in two words, beyond excellent.  It's another one worthy of absolute shrieks of delight once I turned that final page.

playing catch up here: Benighted, by J.B. Priestley

Benighted: 
 9781939140234
 Valancourt Books, 2015
originally published 1927

 152 pp -- paperback

"I've taken this old bag into some damned odd places, but I have a feeling this is going to be about the oddest." 

When I picked up Benighted, by J.B. Priestley, I had absolutely no idea what I was about to read. As it turns out, it is one of the most claustrophobic novels I've ever read.  In a good way, of course.

The back cover blurb says it's a "classic 'old dark house' novel of psychological terror." And indeed, director James Whale in 1932 would adapt Priestley's story and create a movie called "The Old Dark House," which I watched directly after reading this novel. Whale is good at  creepiness and atmosphere, but he also plays parts of his adaptation for laughs, so the movie becomes a very mixed bag, sadly without the whole existential feel created by Priestley. Truth be told, the book is SO much better than the film.

  Indeed, the first several pages into the book,  I was ecstatic to find all of the trappings of the 'old dark house' story: a horrific storm complete with blinding, torrential rain, flooded roads, mudslides and a completely impassable road that brings three people to the literal old dark house. This one happens to be in the Welsh countryside, a perfect setting, a house with some rather strange inhabitants. This wave of ahhhh just settled right over me.

The Wavertons, Margaret and Philip,  along with their friend Penderel, find themselves stuck in their car during this storm on their way to Shrewsbury, and conditions are so bad that they are forced to seek shelter. As Penderel says, they're

"Benighted! -- that's the word..."

When the door is answered in response to his knock, "A huge lump of a man stood there...a shapeless man with a full black beard and matted over a low forehead,"  the travelers' introduction to Morgan, the manservant. On entering the house the three are met by Horace Femm and his sister Rebecca; their elder brother, Sir Roderick Femm, is "confined to his bed,...very old, very weak..."  They are welcome to stay, according to Horace, but Rebecca literally screeches at them that "They can't have beds."  They're not at chez Femm very long before another set of stranded travelers is "benighted;" enter Sir William Porterhouse and his companion, Miss Gladys Du Cane.

The story then changes from what I was expecting and takes much more of an existential turn once all of the travelers are in the house.  Since they're all there for the night at least, they start a game of Truth, which turns their time together into some deep philosophizing as they reveal secrets and stories about their pasts and what they hope for their futures.  There's only one rule to the game, and as Philip notes,

"the very existence of this pastime, with its one rule about answering truthfully, is an awful comment on society."

Indeed, this entire book could be looked at as a comment on society, especially during the postwar period where things are changing very quickly,  and it examines in part, as noted in the introduction, the people who "are clinging to their manners against an uncaring and chaotic universe."

There are some moments of mild terror and creepiness that come into this novel, but if you're expecting Whale's  "The Old Dark House," forget about it.  Much of Benighted had a sort of semi-Gothic, rather than horror-ish feel to it, and it seems to me that if you take the story as a whole, it works very nicely on an allegorical level.  The house, with its locked doors, its secrets,  its creepiness and its strange inhabitants provides a great setting for understanding how some people work up the resolve to confront their fears, while others choose to stay locked away from the rest of the world.

As the introduction to this novel notes, there is a sense of "existential dread" that permeates this entire story. I'll leave it to the reader to discover exactly what this means, but it's not a book that allows you to rest easy while you're reading it. I got so caught up in these lives that I could not put the book down until I saw how everything turned out.  Let me just say that this book has a shocker of an ending, one I never saw coming and one that hit me like a sledgehammer. It's also so dark that when day finally dawned, like the 'benighted' travelers,  I was so very happy to get out of that house and back into the sunlight again.

Awesome job once again, Valancourt!

The Uninhabited House, by Mrs. J.H. Riddell

1406839043
Echo Library, 2007
105 pp
(originally published 1875)

paperback

My many go thanks to Michael Flowers, who maintains a website dedicated to Charlotte Riddell (1832 - 1906) where I was fortunate enough to find some valuable information about this relatively unknown author -- well, at least I'd not heard of her prior to discovering this book.  An incredibly prolific writer, Riddell's vast bibliography includes over fifty novels and short stories, several of them classified as "supernatural."  The Uninhabited House is a novella-sized haunted house story, set just outside of London along the banks of the Thames.

The "uninhabited house" of the title is River Hall, the property of Miss Helena Elmsdale who inherited the property after the death of her father. Miss Elmsdale has not yet reached her majority, however, so the business of keeping the house rented falls to her aunt Miss Susannah Blake who  puts it in the hands of her attorneys, Messrs. Craven and Son.  She is not the easiest of clients, but the lawyers do their very best to keep it rented for her.   Unfortunately for everyone concerned, the house has a history of tenants who are only too eager to leave shortly after taking the place.  After one tenant decides he's had enough, Mr. Craven realizes that the house that is doomed by reputation to never again see a tenant grace its threshold. With Miss Blake demanding that something be done, one man takes it upon himself to stay in the house so he can discover the secrets that plague River Hall.

Charlotte Riddell, 1875

Without giving anything away, the circumstances in which Miss Blake and her niece find themselves in this book are loosely based on events in the author's own life. After her father died and left the family in financial straits, Charlotte and her mother relocated to London where Charlotte took up writing as a way to help support herself.  Her skills came in handy after her marriage when her husband also suffered some financial setbacks.   In this story, the Blake sisters (the other being Kathleen, now deceased) discover one day that "their trustee had robbed them," and that they were penniless.  Although they tried to earn a living, they found themselves "on the edge of beggary." In The Uninhabited House, the sisters are saved when Kathleen marries a businessman, Mr. Elmsdale, but with Kathleen and Elmsdale dead, Miss Susannah Blake and Helena find themselves in a bad financial predicament once again.   The story's focus on money and the lack of it is quite interesting, not just because of art reflecting life, but because all of their problems could have actually been solved if only Susannah Blake had not set her social and class standards so high throughout her life.  It seems to me that in many ways, one of the points of this story is that it isn't money that brings happiness -- in fact, it is just the opposite in some situations.  Combined with the supernatural elements of this story, it definitely should have made for interesting reading at the time.

I will say that for a while I wasn't quite sure how this tale was going to play out, since it reads like a mystery novel in some parts.  Actually, for me as a crime reader that's not a bad thing, but I really wanted to know exactly what was happening at River Hall. As it turns out, it becomes sort of a hybrid mystery/ghost story when all is said and done; the downside is that it also has a wee bit of sentimental sappiness there at the end, which frankly, given the time it was published doesn't really surprise me.  This is also a story you don't read in hopes of being scared out of your wits ... it's more something you read in appreciation of the author's craft and as a representation of Victorian ghost-story writing, especially the work of a woman writer.

 While it has its issues,  I enjoyed The Uninhabited House very much, and when I finished it, I bought two more books of her work for my home library, Volumes I and II of The Collected Supernatural and Weird Fiction of Mrs. J.H. Riddell,  published by Leonaur.  (By the way, I don't reap any benefit if you click on this link that goes to Amazon).  I foresee many hours spent reading Riddell's work in my future -- and would recommend this book to readers who are interested in Victorian-era women writers, to readers of old ghost stories/haunted house tales, and to anyone like myself who is trying to discover previously-unknown authors and bring their obscurity into the light.

The Golem, by Gustav Meyrink

9781873982914
Dedalus, 2000
originally published as Der Golem, 1915
translated by Mike Mitchell
262 pp

paperback

"The soul is not a single unity; that is what it is destined to become, and that is what we call 'immortality.' Your soul is composed of many 'selves,' just as a colony of ants is composed of many single ants."

I read The Golem with a group, which in my opinion, is a very good way to read this novel.  I spent a full two weeks with this book, dragging in other books to use as a reference when I got stuck, in particular my old, raggy copy of  Gershom Scholem's wonderful and classic Kabbalah which came in very handy.  Kabbalah is only one element of the mystical in The Golem, though; as you start this novel you're already into Buddhism, then you get into theosophy, Hindu mysticism and whatever else Meyrink was into -- it's all here.  But the mystical has a purpose -- it is all about spiritual reintegration and self awareness,  and that is most definitely the subject of this novel. Then again, it's a novel of many possible interpretations, so mine may not match anyone else's.

I'm not going to go too much into plot here, but the story focuses on an unnamed narrator who is dreaming/hallucinating  and whose mind makes his way into the body of a gem-cutter named Athanasius Pernath. The truth is that our narrator has lost his memory and he finds himself as Pernath after putting on a hat he had found earlier at church. Pernath's name is written on the headband in gold letters -- and the careful reader will see that this is the first instance of the power of the written word in this novel,  an important theme that follows the story here.  Pernath is in his apartment when he is approached by a strange man who hands him a book that needs repairing -- as it is happens, it is called the "Book of Ibbur," and it is the "I" on the front which needs to be fixed.  Issuing forth from this book in a metaphorical way are all of the important components of Pernath's life that he must discover before the "I" can be repaired, but as things progress, he comes to understand that this is not something he can really do alone. The ghetto's archivist, Hillel, takes Pernath under his wing, and initiates him into the mysticism of Kabbalah (mixed with the other practices I've already mentioned).

   The action in this book takes place in the Prague ghetto, where it is also rumored that the Golem lives in an inaccessible room with no doors; it also known that the Golem returns every thirty-three years in times of spiritual crisis. It seems that this is one of those times;  Pernath will cross paths with the Golem more than once as he attempts his spiritual journey, and along the way he will fall in love, will be tempted by forces he doesn't quite understand, and act as a friend to many in need, all the while trying to remember his past. It is also a book about memory and forgetting, and where better played out than in the streets of the Jewish Quarter of the Prague Ghetto? 

I could go on and on and on about this novel, because frankly, I absolutely loved it.  After I read the book and let things gel in my own head, I looked at several reviews of this novel where the reader had his or her own take on things; rarely did any two agree.  But I do think that it's interesting that Meyrink wrote a book about a man who, because of the influence of outside forces beyond his control, was separated from parts of his memory -- which seems to reflect the story of the upheavals in the Jewish quarter of the Prague Ghetto, and indeed reflects some of the  modernist concerns of the time.  Another thing -- Meyrink may come across as a bit of a woo-woo writer to some people with his intense focus on mysticism here, but considering the fact that psychoanalysis was just barely getting started at this time, it's interesting that Meyrink's focus here is on the importance of connecting with one's self/soul/identity to achieve one's own "salvation" so to speak. There's so much more I could say but well, time and all that.

The Golem is a lovely book, and I'm so very happy to have read it.  I can't think of enough superlatives to describe this book, but  Meyrink's writing here is absolutely beautiful, and this book has led me to others he's written that I plan to read in the very near future.  One thing, though...if you're getting into this novel thinking it's going to be about a monster, or that it's a horror novel, forget it. That's just not the case here.  It's a story about identity in crisis, much more than anything else.