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Book Review: A Love Not Deceased by Eric Kapitan

A Love Not Deceased by Eric Kapitan

Self published, expected February 2020

ISBN: 978-1-082219-35-1

Available: paperback

 

Eric Kapitan’s A Love Not Deceased is an eclectic mix of romance, sex, murder, and overall weirdness.  The story has a bit of everything, done to the right amount.  The sex isn’t too graphic, the gore isn’t over the top, every part fits together.  It’s a strange romance that will appeal to a non-romantic horror fan.  The only real drawback is the ending: it came too soon.  This story had more room to run: it’s a shame it didn’t.

Maggie, the story’s protagonist, is a wonderful study in contrast.  She’s 31, looking for True Romance, and saving herself for Mr. Right.  Casual sex and one night flings are NOT her thing.  Her current means of supporting herself, oddly enough, consists of customer service over the phone for a national sex toys company, and self-publishing erotica novels for “lonely and horny soccer moms”.  She has a deep-seated fear of losing those she loves, since she lost both her parents at an early age.  She finally meets her Mr. Right: Mike, a nice, stable, self-supporting fellow, who introduces Maggie to the world of sub/dom relationships… and she finds herself loving it.  Minor spoiler ahead: tragedy strikes when Mike unexpectedly is murdered, and Maggie begins her descent into madness,  with her actions getting  increasingly crazy and bloody.

The writing is a nice balance of exposition and dialogue, with a slightly dark overall tone.  The author shows he can write all situations equally well: the part describing Maggie losing her dad is genuinely touching, and will yank on your heartstrings.  There’s also some unexpected humor to lighten the mood.   The dialogue of some of Maggie’s conversations with her sex toy customers was hilarious, and the parts where Maggie and Mike act like excited kids over tattoos and rock concert tickets help to make them genuinely likable characters.  The first 50 pages of the story are strictly the background scenery for setting up the characters for the actual plot. However, it’s written well, and will hold your interest.  The last 40 pages are where the story cuts loose, with Maggie losing Mike, then going nuts.  Kapitan adds in a nice touch here, since a couple of the chapters are still written from Mike’s point of view, even though he’s dead… or is he?

It’s a quick story, and at 91 pages double-spaced, it’s a breeze to get through.  This brings up the only negative: the story ends just when it kicks into high gear.  Most of it is a slow buildup to  Maggie’s spiral into insanity.  Just when it hits the overload point, and it feels like the story is about take off at a breakneck pace for the finish line, it ends.  It would have been nice to see it keep going– there was a lot of potential left on the table.

 

Contains: violence, profanity, sex

 

Reviewed by Murray Samuelson

Posted on September 16, 2019 by , Reply

Book Review: Curse of the Boggin (The Library, Book 1) by D.J. MacHale


Curse of the Boggin (The Library, Book 1) by D.J. MacHale

Random House Books for Young Readers, 2016

ISBN-13: 978-1101932537

Available: Hardcover, audiobook, audio CD

 

Marcus O’Mara was an ordinary troublemaking kid headed to detention until a ghost in pajamas started haunting him, and the words “surrender the key” appeared in shattered glass in the school hallway. Suspended from school for accidentally blowing out all the computers in the computer lab while in unsupervised detention, he researches the term on the Internet and finds the obituary of the man who has been haunting him, and decides to sneak out of the house to find the man’s family. When Marcus arrives at the man’s household,  his wife recognizes Marcus, and tells him that both her husband and his birth parents were paranormal investigators who died under mysterious circumstances. Her husband had been holding onto something left for Marcus by his parents: a key that can open any door into a library of unfinished stories. The librarian tells Marcus it is up to him to finish the chain of events that will lead to the end of the ghost’s story, which means capturing the spirit who led to his death: the boggin. The boggin is a spirit with the power of illusion whose chief purpose is to cause fear and dread, and it is the one demanding that Marcus “surrender the key”. With the help of his friends Lu and Theo, Marcus must find a way to defeat and imprison the boggin and prevent it from getting the key to the library.

This is the first book in a series, and provides the setup for further volumes that the author says can be read in any order as stand-alone adventures. And they are adventures: from the prologue on, the action rarely stops. MacHale’s economy of words means the story moves along, but there’s enough description to create appropriately frightening atmosphere (much of which is related to weather, such as lightning strikes and thick fog). A spirit who can create completely effective illusions gives the author a lot of latitude to work with in terms of creating some pretty nasty experiences for Marcus and his friends.  As in many suspense and mystery novels for middle-graders, there are a lot of unlikely coincidences and character tropes (MacHale plays with these, but the physically adventurous risk-taker and the cautious, nerdy skeptic are pretty standard) and the ending is predictable, but I love the concept of the Library! Kids looking for a mildly scary, suspenseful ride, with plenty of ghosts and spirits (and spiders), will enjoy this.

 

Editor’s note:  Curse of the Boggin is a nominee for the 2019-2020 Young Hoosier Book Award in the grades 4-6 category.

Posted on September 13, 2019 by , Reply

Book Review: Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado

Her Body and Other Parties: Stories by Carmen Maria Machado

Graywolf Press, 2017

ISBN-13: 978-1555977887

Available: Hardcover, paperback, Kindle edition, audiobook, audio CD

 

Carmen Maria Machado centers women, and especially their bodies, in this genre-bending collection of stories. Her story “The Husband Stitch”, which appears in this book, has been generating buzz (and admiration) for years. Now that I’ve read it, I can say that it deserves the attention. Framed around the urban legend “The Green Velvet Ribbon”, anyone who knows that story will predict the ending, but, narrated by the woman in the story, there is so much more inside. “Inventory” starts out as a list of one woman’s sexual experiences, but against a background story of a spreading pandemic, it starts to take on a feeling of dread and inevitability.  “Mothers” is a hallucinatory story with an unreliable narrator that involves a fragmented relationship between two women that may also involve a baby. “Especially Heinous” recounts surreal, fictional summaries of episodes from 12 seasons of Law and Order: SVU. This particular story, even with supernatural elements, doppelgangers, and interpersonal drama, was far too long. I feel like in “Mothers” and “Especially Heinous”, Machado was experimenting with style, and maybe this worked for some readers, but not for me. “Difficult at Parties”  about the effects of trauma and rape on the body, mind and intimate relationships, is very different from the other stories, which have a slightly surreal or fantastic feel to them. Other stories include “The Resident”, “Eight Bites”(this gets into eating disorders), and “Real Women Have Bodies”.

One thing I really loved about this book was the way Machado writes about sex. Her characters aren’t passive. They enjoy sex, sometimes paired with love and sometimes casual, both with men and women. It’s so refreshing to find this! She does a skillful and fluid job of describing sex and passion. Her writing is unapologetically feminist and queer, but her way with words is lyrical and it all flows into the story. I kind of want her to write about the early days of Mary Shelley’s love affair with Percy Shelley after reading this!

Her Body and Other Stories is an uneven collection: it has a few outstanding stories, a couple of reasonably good ones, and some I don’t feel the need to revisit. Machado does a good job at creating a sense of the uneasiness and dread that come from, and are felt by, women’s bodies, and it’s a collection well worth visiting. I’m adding “The Husband Stitch” to my list of “favorite short stories”, and this is the perfect time of year to read it. Recommended.

 

Contains: sex, violence, descriptions of pornography, references to rape, domestic violence, eating disorders

Posted on September 6, 2019 by , Reply
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