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Book Review: Fourteen Days edited by Margaret Atwood and Douglas Preston

Fourteen Days edited by Margaret Atwood and Douglas Preston

HarperCollins, 2024

ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0358616382

Available: Hardcover, paperback, audiobook, Kindle edition

Buy:   Bookshop.org  |  Amazon.com 

 

Fourteen Days is a collaborative novel written by thirty-six American and Canadian authors, benefiting the Authors Guild Foundation. It takes place during the Covid-19 pandemic in a dilapidated apartment building during fourteen days under a shelter-in-place edict in New York City. Yessenia, the new super, is stuck in the building without the resources to do her job and unable to get through to the nursing home where her father is a resident. The previous super left his things behind, including a journal with notes about and a nickname for each tenant.

 

Unable to stand staying isolated inside, the residents start gathering on the rooftop each evening to tell stories, each night over the course of fourteen days. Yessenia never refers to them by name, only their nickname, and she secretly starts to record the stories on her phone and transcribe them into the super’s journal.

 

The structure of people isolating themselves to tell stories during a plague reminded me of  The Decameron but the editors specifically say it is not… and one of the stories, told by a professor who attended a book group that read from it, acts as a critique that suggests that this is actually a counter narrative, including people from different ages, belief systems, backgrounds, and races: the people who, unlike the characters of The Decameron, don’t have the wealth to escape the city as the plague rages.

 

At first the book seems grounded in realism: maybe it’s not something likely to occur, but it seems possible, with events that did occur, like the inability to get through to nursing homes, and unlike many stories set during the pandemic, here it is integral to the story. But unexplained events start to occur. Is the building haunted? Did a spider girl really interrupt their gathering? What’s the noise in the apartment above the super’s?

 

The stories also get weirder, more confessional, and gruesome, such as the story of Elijah Vick, who lost his arm to an alligator gar, and a story of retribution against a rapist. Other readers may guess the ending sooner than I did, but it managed to surprise me.

 

Fourteen Days does not have many contributions from horror writers, but it does have many “literary” authors contribute strange, unsettling, and disturbing tales, including Dave Eggers, Tommy Orange, and Margaret Atwood. It is a haunted novel, and worth the time to untangle.

 

Reviewed by Kirsten Kowalewski

 

Posted on May 28, 2024 by , Reply

Graphic Novel Review: Lot 13 by Steve Niles, art by Glenn Fabry

Lot 13 - Niles, Steve

Lot 13 by Steve Niles, art by Glenn Fabry

Dark Horse, 2023

ISBN: 9781506734484

Available: Paperback, Kindle edition

Buy: Bookshop.org | Amazon.com

 

 

The story opens in 1670, in Fairfax, Virginia. The bodies of the Wyatt family are on trial. The father, Robert, stands accused of murdering his family before committing suicide. The court ultimately finds him guilty of mortal sin and cast their bodies into unhallowed ground for eternity.

 

Time switches abruptly to the modern day. A married couple are finally ready to move into their dream home. Their three children aren’t as ready as their parents to leave their friends and apartment, but they will get used to the idea in time. The family load up into the moving van, and head to their new home in Fairfax. Unfortunately, when they arrive, the house isn’t ready to be occupied, and the cozy family has to find other accommodations. After an accident on the road, they come across an apartment building, where they are welcomed by an elderly man. When they start seeing things, the secrets of the mysterious building emerge, and they find themselves fighting for their lives.

 

The story is okay, but not great. It is good if you just need some gore. Some things don’t line up or even get addressed. For instance, when the family hits what appears to be a child in the middle of the road with the moving van, gore is all over the front of it and the road in one panel, and in the next it is gone. There is no viscera on the hood, no body parts littering the road. There is also no discussion over what just happened, just the son pointing at a random building nearby advertising apartments to rent for a night to a year. The family just appears to forget what they just saw. The incident is never spoken of afterward. Weird things happen in the building, and some of it is treated in a similar manner. It makes me wonder if the family often has mass hallucinations to make them just gloss over such things.

 

It took me a minute to remember the name Glenn Fabry. I admit I am really bad with names. As soon as it hit me, I knew the art was going to be intense. His covers for Preacher are incredible, and his art in general is fantastic. Fabry goes above and beyond with the amount of gore in this one. Highly recommended, more for the art that the story

 

Reviewed by Lizzy Walker

 

Posted on March 15, 2024 by , Reply

Book Review: Shockadelica by Jon O’ Bergh

cover art for Shockadelica by Jon O'Bergh

Shockadelica by Jon O’Bergh

Bookbaby, 2021

ISBN: 9781098372415

Available: Paperback, Kindle edition ( Bookshop.org | Amazon.com )

 

Shockadelica is a suspense/horror ghost story that uses the tried and true tools of an old apartment building with mysterious noises in the night.  The premise has worked for many authors over the years, but Shockadelica never quite gets the story off the ground floor.  It’s an extremely dialogue-heavy story, and it’s difficult to keep the reader’s interest through the entire 252 pages.

 

Drag queen Kendall and his buddy Jenna start hearing unexplainable noises in their apartment building, and they soon learn that their neighbors do as well.  Feeling that an actual haunting would be great material for their “all things horror” weekly podcast, Kendall and Jenna investigate, and learn that the building has a sinister history.  The rest is a mystery as they try to find the source of the noises in the building, and whether it is a true haunt, or human nature with an evil purpose.

 

It’s a decent premise, just very slow moving.  The first 130 pages consist almost entirely of Kendall and Jenna interviewing the building’s other inhabitants to learn what they may have seen or heard.  The dialogue is  straightforward, without much injection of the characters’ personalities.  Hearing about the “hauntings” secondhand through dialogue with the other residents hurts the story’s excitement level. Describing the incidents as they actually happen from a narrative point of view would have helped; the few times the hauntings are narrated by the author are pretty good, and doing it more would have helped a great deal.   The story doesn’t start building real interest until around page 186.  The payoff at the end of the book is decent and there is a nice touch of Irish folk legend involved, it’s just questionable if readers will make it that far.

 

As for the characters, the secondary ones help the story more than the primary ones.  Kendall and Jenna are uninspiring characters; outside of talking about dresses, they don’t do much and generate minimal interest or sympathy.  Fleshing them out more would have helped.  The secondary characters are eclectic and have a little more life.  Vince, the goth/metal musician, is fun, and Rooney is probably the best.  She makes her living doing bogus written and video reviews for products she’s never used, and her adventures between the building walls trying to scare her annoying neighbor add some much-needed flair.  It’s too bad the main characters weren’t as entertaining.

 

Shockadelica may appeal to some readers who like stories with a lot of exposition, but most readers will probably want to skip this one.

 

 

Reviewed by Murray Samuelson

Posted on September 6, 2021 by , Reply