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Book Review: Songs of Dreaming Gods by William Meikle


Songs of Dreaming Gods by William Meikle

Macabre Ink, 2017

ISBN-13: 978-1946025951

Available: Paperback, Kindle edition, audiobook

 

Haunted house stories have been overtaken by tropes and lazy writing, and in most cases, should be boarded up. In recent years, however, a few have managed to introduce something new. Books such as House of Leaves, The Unseen, and The Haunted have introduced new wrinkles to the sub-genre. Songs of Dreaming Gods is one of these: it’s far more than a haunted house story. It is a solid read that stretches the imagination: readers may have to flip back a few pages occasionally to be certain they’ve caught all the nuances and plot twists. Is it horror? Definitely. But it’s not contained by the genre.

Those familiar with the works of William Meikle know that the author conjures up some pretty freaky designs for plot and setting (The Hole and Fungoid quickly come to mind).  In Songs of Dreaming Gods, we see that Meikle has once again done an extraordinary job in the telling of the story and in the layering of both the house and characters. Reading the book is like peeling an onion, or opening Russian nesting dolls.

A trio of local cops are called to the house where a bloodbath has occurred. Several bodies, or what’s left of them, are discovered in an old house. What’s been done to them is unlike anything one would expect from any human being, or animal. The trio realize that this is unlike any crime they have yet encountered. Doors that led to the stained floors where the forensic team should be now open up to another room not in their reality. Each of the investigators come to the house with their own wounds, mentally or physically, and face different doors, each which lead to scenes and realities that break down what each has known in his or her life. Once the characters go deeper into the house, and themselves, the reality they knew cannot be retrieved. All they can hope for is to escape with whatever the house allows them.

Songs of Dreaming Gods is decidedly different from most recent haunted house reads. With its fast-paced plot and complex structure, Meikle’s latest is a welcome addition to the sub-genre. Recommended.

Reviewed by Dave Simms

Posted on April 11, 2018 by , Reply

Musings: Drawing on the Walls: The Boy Who Drew Cats

The Boy Who Drew Cats adapted by Lafcadio Hearn and Margaret Hodges, and illustrated by Aki Sogabe

Holiday House, 2002

ISBN-13: 978-0823415946

Available:  Used hardcover and paperback, Audible audiobook

 

I had a reader request the name of a book about a little boy drawing all over the walls. The classic story about a boy drawing himself into a story is Harold and the Purple Crayon by Crockett Johnson, but that didn’t seem quite right. I finally remembered a Japanese folktale about a boy who drew all over the walls of a temple and drove a demon away, and was able to find what I think is really the answer to this question; it’s a story called “The Boy Who Drew Cats”, and it has been adapted and illustrated many times. The copy pictured above was adapted by Lafcadio Hearn and Margaret Hodges, and illustrated by Aki Sogabe, but there are MANY other versions.

The story follows a young man who is obsessed with drawing cats; he draws only cats, but he draws them amazingly well. Forced to leave home to find a trade, he spends the night in an abandoned temple, with empty screens all around, just begging to be painted with cats. After painting the walls, the boy falls asleep, waking in the night to hear a tremendous fight. In the morning, he discovers a terrible rat demon, dead, and notices the cats on the screens are not in the same positions he had painted them in. His cats have defeated the monster and saved his life, revealing his artistic ability and enabling him to become a professional artist.

Walls can be the source of creativity, as they are in the nonfiction picture book Painting for Peace in Ferguson, a story about the creative approach the community of Ferguson took to beautify  and inspire neighborhoods where the buildings had been boarded up or defaced following demonstrations against police brutality that turned violent. They can become a personification of insanity or paranoia, as they are in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”, in which the protagonist has delusions of a trapped woman creeping behind the room’s wallpaper, or the whispers from her dead mother that one character hears in Amy Lukavics’ The Women in the Walls.

Walls can be an “in-between” place, as they are in Neil Gaiman’s The Wolves in the Walls and Coraline,  in which the main characters have to make choices about whether they will be passive or active participants in their own lives. If you are on the outside, walls can be a barrier you look to cross that conceal a treasure inside, as in The Secret Garden, and if you are on the inside they can be a trap– a haunted house that won’t let go, a locked-room mystery you can’t escape, like the inhabitants of the island in Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None. If you are the builder, like Hugh Crain in The Haunting of Hill House, you can make the walls be disorienting and disturbing to inhabitants to influence their minds, and if you want to keep people away, like Baba Yaga, you can decorate with human skulls.

Or you can follow your passion where it goes, and both protect and beautify the world by transforming walls into something new, like the boy who drew cats.

Posted on December 13, 2017 by , Reply

Book Review: The Grownup by Gillian Flynn

The Grownup by Gillian Flynn

Crown, 2015

ISBN-13: 978-0804188975

Available: Hardcover, paperback, Kindle edition, and audio.

 

If anyone can write an unlikable woman character and make her seem sympathetic for even a moment, that person is Gillian Flynn. The Grownup is narrated by a con artist who gives hand jobs for a living, and is retiring due to carpal tunnel syndrome.  As a sex worker, she has a client who loves to read and, in a little metafictional foreshadowing to the events that follow, lends her Gothic supernatural tales to discuss during their time together. In her new career as a psychic, she hopes to expand her business into the homes of upper-class women who want their homes “cleansed”.

Enter Susan Burke. While at first Susan is skeptical, she is soon convinced that there is something wrong with her house, and, possibly, with her stepson. Susan is convinced that she has found blood on the walls, that her stepson is disturbed, and that it all comes down to bad vibrations in the house, a former Victorian manor that has been gutted, renovated, and modernized.  The narrator convinces Susan that she can get rid of those bad vibrations… for a price.

Soon, it appears that the narrator may have conned herself into believing the house is haunted. Or has she? Research turns up a gore-filled history on the house, and the stepson, an angry fifteen-year-old, is saying and doing bizarre and threatening things. For the first time concerned for someone else, she goes to Susan and urges her to leave the house immediately. When Susan runs from the room, and her stepson enters, reality really starts bending. The ending of this story is surprising and disturbing, both in what it says about the Burke family and the narrator. Even the last sentence doesn’t seem like an ending as much as the beginning of another twisted tale.

Fast-paced and compelling, The Grownup is a trainwreck from which the reader can’t turn away.  Those looking for a sharp, fast (it’s just 69 pages), unsettling, Gothic tale will find that Gillian Flynn has hit the mark. Recommended.

Note: The Grownup originally appeared as “What Do You Do?” in the anthology Rogues, edited by George R. R. Martin.

 

Reviewed by Kirsten Kowalewski


Posted on September 30, 2016 by , Reply
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