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Book Review: The Residence by Andrew Pyper

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We are more than midway through October and Monster Librarian still needs to raise the funds to pay for our hosting fees and postage in 2021. If you like what we’re doing, please take a moment to click on that red “Contribute” button in the sidebar to the right, to help us keep going!  Even five dollars will get us closer to the $195 we need to keep going at the most basic level. We have never accepted paid advertising so you can be guaranteed that our reviews are objective. We’ve been reviewing and supporting the horror community for 15 years now, help us make it another year! Thank you! And now, David Simms reviews The Residence by Andrew Pyper.

 

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

Book Review: The Tenth Girl by Sara Faring

The Tenth Girl by Sara Faring

Imprint, 2019

ISBN-13: 978-1250304506

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

 

Teenage Mavi, living in Argentina under the military dictatiorship of Jorge Videla in 1978, is barely scraping by in the streets of Buenos Aires after her parents have “disappeared”.  Desperate to evade the police herself, Mavi uses forged credentials to get a job as an English teacher at the Vaccaro School, an exclusive boarding school in a huge Gothic mansion located in isolated Patagonia. Angel is a disembodied visitant from 2020 to Mavi’s time and place.

The Vaccaro School was built by the wealthy De Vaccaro family in the nineteenth century on land seized by the fictional indigenous Zapuche tribe. Mavi’s uncle explains that the Zapuche enacted bloody rituals when their land was seized. Sixty years ago, a mysterious illness reputed to have sprung from a Zapuche curse killed nearly all the residents of the Vaccaro School, and a girl had to be sacrificed to stop it. It is just now reopening. I think the author was trying to make a commentary on the damage colonialism has done to Argentina and its indigenous people, but the “Indian curse” and “savage bloody sacrifice” tropes really need to be set aside. The Zapuche being a fictional tribe means that the author lost an opportunity to bring attention to the existing problems of Argentina’s indigenous peoples.

The Tenth Girl was promoted as a Gothic psychological thriller with a twist, and for about 350 pages it hits pretty much every trope in the toolbox for a Gothic thriller, without actually having a story that goes much of anywhere. One thing that I did find interesting was the way the house seemed impossibly larger and space more disorganized on the inside than on the outside,  reminding me of the Winchester Mansion or Hill House. Sara Faring is an Argentine-American, so maybe that’s why she set the book in a remote part of Argentina, but the majority of this could have taken place in any isolated location. Faring’s descriptions of Patagonia are lovingly written, but there are too few of them, as for the majority of the book, the school’s inhabitants are trapped inside by the terrible weather. The sudden twist turned the events and characters in a completely different direction, leading to the raising of some interesting philosophical questions. However, I also felt that it cheapened the historical events chronicled in the book. I felt that the twist ending undercut the harsh realities of  Argentina’s “desaparecidos”. The twist also explained in part why the depiction of indigenous people is so problematic, but I think it was just unneccessary in the first place.  I’d love to say more about why, but that would spoil the book for potential readers.

I picked this up because it made the preliminary ballot for the 2020 Stokers in the YA category. It was a real struggle for me to stick with the book for the first 350 pages, but I’m glad I persisted. Faring’s twist ending really changed my perspective on the events and characters. I have trouble imagining many teens picking up this doorstopper and working their way through the whole thing, though.

Contains: pedophilia, self-harm, mentions of suicide, violence, gore.

Posted on February 11, 2020 by , 2 comments

Book Review: The Poe Estate (The Grimm Legacy, Book 3) by Polly Shulman

The Poe Estate (The Grimm Legacy, Book 3) by Polly Shulman

Nancy Paulsen Books, 2015

ISBN-13: 978-0399166143

Available: Hardcover, Kindle edition, audiobook, audio CD

 

This, sadly, is the last book in a trilogy where the real star is not any particular character, but the New-York Circulating Material Repository, a combination library/museum/pocket dimension of fictional objects. The first book, The Grimm Legacy, introduced high school students Elizabeth Rew and Andre Merritt, who were hired to work as pages in the Repository, as they discovered magical objects from fairytales and fantasy. The second book, The Wells Bequest, introduces science geek Leo Novikov and explores fictional objects found in science fiction tales. This third book, The Poe Estate, ventures into the world of Gothic and early horror fiction. It takes place years later, after Elizabeth has become a librarian. She and Andre travel New England looking for haunted objects and houses to store in the repository’s Poe Annex (a detail I loved was that in order to reach the Poe Annex, visitors must first travel through the Lovecraft Corpus, which is just as creepy and atmospherically terrifying as you would expect). However, unlike the first two books, we get a first-person narrator, sixth grader Sukie, whose protective older sister Kitty died from an inherited blood disease from her mother’s side of the family, the Thornes.  Kitty haunts Sukie, still compelled to protect her even after death. Sukie and her parents, suffering financially, move into Thorne Mansion, which is in a sad state of disrepair, with their mother’s very elderly cousin, Hepzibah Thorne, and Sukie soon discovers another ghost haunting the house.  After meeting Elizabeth and Andre at a flea market, Sukie discovers that the house, and members of her family from generations past, appeared in an unfinished Gothic novel. Sukie, Andre, and Elizabeth go on a treasure hunt, passing through the Lovecraft Corpus, visiting the Spectral Library (a fictional library with a ghostly librarian, containing fictional books that exists inside a story: examples of fictional books include the Necronomicon and The King in Yellow, both of which are better handled by a ghost than a human being), and traveling through the Poe Annex, which contains not just haunted houses, but haunted ships, haunted trains, and haunted islands. There are enough Easter eggs in this book to give any fan of Gothic and early horror fiction plenty to delight in, and the metanarrative is kind of fascinating, although it’s also somewhat confusing.

I personally am absolutely delighted to see the names of some of these lesser-known stories (such as “Afterward” by Edith Wharton and “The Wind in the Rose-Bush” by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman) and authors appear in a middle grade novel, and I love the Repository and its collections. However, Sukie’s story as a girl dealing with grief over the death of her sister, financial difficulties at home, and bullying at school, whose elderly cousin is being pursued by unscrupulous developers, gets shafted by the author’s need to incorporate the Repository into the narrative. Jonathan Rigby, the villain from previous books, doesn’t get much space in the story, and the conflicts and relationships don’t get the attention they deserve. Sukie’s story is definitely a middle-grade story, but its intersection with the Repository storyline mostly derails it in favor of dropping names that might not be familiar even to many adults. Shulman could get away with this in The Grimm Legacy, because most kids have a basic familiarity with fairytales, but I don’t think it works here.

If you are an adult who loves the idea of  fantastic libraries or getting to step into favorite stories (visiting the House of Usher, flying on a broom from Young Goodman Brown, tracking down Captain Kidd’s treasure) then this is a really fun book.  Unfortunately, I think a lot of it will go over the target audience’s head. Polly Shulman does provide a list of authors and titles mentioned in the text, and she got me interested enough in Hawthorne to look some of his stories up (The Scarlet Letter successfully turned me off to Hawthorne in high school), but I have trouble seeing kids in elementary or early middle school  actively seeking these stories out on their own. This isn’t great writing, but it’s a lovely tribute with an enjoyable concept,  one of those books that is best shared between an adult who loves the genre and the kids in their lives.

 

Posted on January 14, 2020 by , Reply
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