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Book Review: The Residence by Andrew Pyper

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cover art for The Residence by Andrew Pyper

 

The Residence by Andrew Pyper ( Bookshop.org | Amazon.com )

Simon & Schuster, 2020

ISBN-13 : 978-1982147365

Available: Hardcover, paperback, Kindle edition, compact disc, audiobook

Historical horror can be a mixed bag. The immediacy of the terror tends to be removed in a period piece, while dialogue and characterizations, not to mention obsolete settings, can deflate any true scares or dread from the tale at hand, no matter how well it is written.

However, The Residence rises above these obstacles to take up, well, residence, in the reader’s head. It’s in the vein of The Hunger or The Terror, both of which are recent landmarks in the genre.

Andrew Pyper knows how to deliver the horror in a novel. His Demonologist rivaled the best possession stories, and his other titles have been entertaining, chilling books.

This time out, Pyper ventures into terrifying territory– the White House. No, not the current administration. but that of Franklin Pierce, the 14th president of the United States. Pierce stars as a reluctant leader, one not expected to win, but turns out to be a popular man amongst his fellow Americans. A Democrat, he takes on the task of hoping to mend a divided nation.  Pyper transports the reader back to 1853, when Pierce and his family are headed to Washington for the inauguration. Pierce’s wife, Jane, senses that the move might not help them, especially after she and Franklin have already lost two sons.

Eleven-year old Bennie is excited to stand beside his father at the ceremony and live the dream of any young boy, but the train, and possibly external forces, literally derail any hope of happiness for the Pierce family during his presidency. At the bottom of the ravine, only one casualty is found– Bennie.

Grieving the loss of her son, Jane escapes into herself, building herself a “grief room” within the White House, and refuses any duties of a First Lady. Instead, she calls for a pair of psychics, the Fox sisters, to help communicate with Bennie. and salvage any hope she has for remaining in the land of the living.

What they achieve, though, invites something far more sinister: something that becomes a paranormal entity in the capital that threatens to destroy much more than the Pierce family.

Pyper sidesteps any pitfalls that could undermine the horror in this tight, family-centered story that is closely tied to actual history. The White House is reported to be haunted, by several spirits, and much of what is spun here actually occurred. Pyper doesn’t allow himself to become bogged down with an excess of period details or historical overload, rather focusing on the hauntings and how what is unleashed threatens to destroy the Pierces– and much more. Recommended.

 

Reviewed by David Simms

 

Posted on October 23, 2020 by , Reply

Musings: The Cruelty Is The Point: The Burning by Laura Bates

The Burning by Laura Bates

Sourcebooks Fire, 2019

ISBN-13: 978-1728206738

Available: Hardcover, Kindle edition

 

Reading Laura Bates’ The Burning was like a dizzying fall down a rabbit hole to hell.  Anna, the main character, has moved to a new town and a new school to escape a scandal at her old school, only to find that the perpetrator has established social media profiles for her, posting provocative statements and photos that portray her in a very negative light  to classmates who already were incredibly nasty to each other, giving them the excuse they’ve been looking for to bully her (there is a parallel storyline about her visions during a search for information about a woman also unfairly turned on by her community who was burned for witchcraft in the 1650s). After attempts to deal with the cyberbullying on her own,  Anna eventually speaks up and even uses social media to reclaim her image, but  even after the uproar finally dies down, she can’t really escape what’s out there. Once you’re on the Internet, you don’t easily get your privacy back. I don’t know how common it is for cyberbullying to swing that far out of control, but it is terrifying.

Last year’s  The Ghost Hunter’s Daughter  by Caroline Flarity (review here) didn’t go quite as far wirh cyberbullying: the main character (also named Anna) has a reputation for being odd, and she is bullied, but she’s a stronger character and much of  the mockery she faces is due to her reputation as the spooky daughter of an eccentric ghost-hunter (if you have gone to school with the same kids your whole life, you’ll know how hard it is to change the way they look at you). This Anna faces personal and physical threats in a different way (a bully obsessed with her sets her house on fire) as well as ostracism due to social media (a boy she likes tries to convince her to take off her shirt, and later shows video he took to their classmates) but the cyberbullying doesn’t go nearly as far as The Burning in tearing her down. Unlike Anna in The Burning, who is just trying to make it, and reclaim her identity, with her situation central to the story,  Anna in The Ghost Hunter’s Daughter also has to fight a supernatural force and save the day.

Foul is Fair by Hannah Capin (reviewed here), also from last year, is a revenge tale based on Macbeth, where four girls conspire to eliminate the athletes who raped one of them. The girls use the Internet to track down and identify the boys, and erase Elle’s presence in social media (this seems unlikely, but certainly the plot wouldn’t work without this). Changing her name to Jade, and altering her appearance, she transfers to the school the team attends, and manipulates the team members and the girls they’re involved with until one of the boys starts killing off the others. It’s interesting that a lot depends on who has a a cellphone and where it is. Not only is it horrifying to know these boys were either participants or complicit, but the way Elle is able to manipulate them into turning on each other demonstrates vividly the poor judgment, intense emotion, and peer pressure teens experience.

These girls go through some horrific events, and the cruelty and fear of the teens in these stories is what I find really frightening. The Burning caused me to have conversations with both my middle schoolers about their experiences at school. They don’t have much access to social media, so they wouldn’t be exposed to some of the more appalling incidents, but it doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen.  My daughter, who was bullied in elementary school asked what the motivation is for someone to act as maliciously as some of the kids in The Burning. That’s the real horror for me as a parent: for some, there is no reason, or sometimes the cruelty is the point.

 

A final note:  Laura Bates is an English feminist activist and writer who founded the Everyday Sexism Project. At the end of The Burning she offers a list of websites for organizations who offer information and support to girls dealing with issues that appear in the book, and many others,

The Burning contains: cyberbullying, bullying, descriptions of pornographic images, references to abortion, rape, torture, and death.

 

 

 

Posted on April 25, 2020 by , Reply

Graphic Novel Review: Bone Parish, Volume 2 by Cullen Bunn, illustrated by Jonas Scharf

Bone Parish, Volume 2 by Cullen Bunn, illustrated by Jonas Scharf

BOOM! Studios, 2019

ISBN-13: 978-1684154258

Available: Paperback, Kindle, comiXology

 

Bone Parish, Volume 2 follows the Winters family, a New Orleans crime family that created a hallucinogenic drug made from the ashes of the dead. Anyone who takes the drug, called “The Ash”, lives the memories of the deceased. The second volume opens with Grace Winters and the rest of the family attending the funeral of Wade Winters, the youngest sibling, who was killed by a rival cartel. After the funeral, Grace approaches a shadowy figure in attendance who did not approach the other mourners. He is not unfamiliar to her. After all, Andre is her deceased husband. She used the last of her late husband’s ashes for him to be able to attend his son’s funeral.

Throughout the story, Grace starts seeing herself take on Andre’s physical traits, such as seeing his reflection in a mirror where her own should be, and her eyes begin to take on the eerie purple glow that his did when he appeared to her. Her own transformation isn’t the only one occurring with the use of Ash. Other cartels are employing their own people to attempt creating their own strains of the drug, but the results are not the same as the Winters’ product. The “test cases”, typically any drug addict they pick up off the street, are attacked by the memories of the dead who want to go on living. The physical side effects the users experience can only be described as Cronenbergian. While all of this is occurring, Wade’s death has created new rifts. Grace pushes daughter Brigitte to keep creating “The Ash”, especially considering other drug families are trying to create their own strains. Brae constantly berates Grace, Brigitte, and Leon about Wade’s death, the latter of whom he believes is at fault, and about the family business. He is less than prudent and levelheaded when he meets a mysterious woman painted with a Día de Muertos skull, and gets in bed with the enemy, as well as hiring a biker gang for personal protection. Leon, despite his older brother’s tirades and everything else in play that is picking apart already tenuous familial bonds, still believes his late father’s words, that family is the only thing that matters. The question remains, just how much strain can those bonds handle before they are torn apart?

As with the first volume of this series, I am not surprised that Bone Parish, Volume 2 has been nominated for a Stoker Award. Bunn has become one of my favourite writers in the horror genre. He weaves a good yarn, and the artists who are paired with him create fantastic visuals. Scharf’s artwork adds significantly to Bunn’s story. Highly recommended.

Contains: body horror, drug use, gore, murder, sexual content

 

Reviewed by Lizzy Walker

 

Editor’s note: Bone Parish, Volume 2 is a nominee on the final ballot for this year’s Bram Stoker Awards in the category of Superior Achievement in a Graphic Novel.

Posted on April 18, 2020 by , Reply
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