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Book Review: Midnight Reynolds and the Spectral Transformer (Book 1) by Catherine Holt.

Midnight Reynolds and the Spectral Transformer: Book One by Catherine Holt
Albert Whitman & Company, 2017
ISBN-13: 978-0807551257
Available: Hardcover, paperback, Kindle edition

 

Midnight Reynolds was born at the stroke of midnight on Halloween. Her name and birthday have always made her stand out, when all she wants is to fit in. When her slightly wacky family– vegetarian recipe blogger mom, her fiance Phil (a mechanic who enjoys dressing like a Viking) and older sister Taylor– move to a new town, two popular girls, Sav and Lucy, immediately draw her in, and Midnight finds herself “fitting in” for the first time. The only problem is that Sav and Lucy both come from well-to-do backgrounds, while Midnight’s family is a little more financially stretched. So when Sav invites her to a week at a ski chalet over their winter vacation, Midnight has to find a job to earn the $200 she’ll need to buy things for the trip.  She takes a job with Miss Appleby, a neighbor with a broken leg. Miss Appleby was also born at the stroke of midnight on Halloween, and she tells Midnight that their birthday uniquely qualifies them to see ghosts, or “spectral energy”, and capture it. Miss Appleby has been doing this on her own, but now that she’s broken her leg, until she heals, she needs Midnight to do the ghost hunting. She explains to Midnight that spectral energyis dangerous. It possesses objects, and in order to remove it, Midnight will have to use a camera-like item called a spectral transformer to capture it. Once the spectral energy has been trapped on a glass plate, it can be separated later and held in a lead-lined tank in Miss Appleby’s yard.

While she’s working hard at fitting in and earning money (tw0 things that don’t necessarily match up) Midnight has additionally been partnered with the school goth, Tabitha, for a local history project. Midnight’s incredible organizational and spreadsheet skills (a weirdness she doesn’t share with her friends) and Tabitha’s interest in cemeteries and dead people are both valuable for the project, and it turns out that the two girls actually get along pretty well. Midnight can’t understand why Tabitha prefers her all-black look over friendship with Sav and Lucy, but most readers will pick that up right away, because you can’t not like Tabitha, and Sav and Lucy are pretty self-absorbed. Tabitha is into research and libraries (according to Tabitha, the librarian “may be a hacker, or a ninja”) and is also adventurous, so she turns out to be a perfect accomplice for Midnight as it turns out that Miss Appleby may not be telling the truth.

Midnight is an exasperating character, but we do get to see character growth.  I enjoyed seeing her change as she encountered unlikely aspects of characters who could have been left undeveloped.  Tabitha could have been a stereotypical goth girl, but Holt gives her context and a unique personality. Midnight’s soon-to-be-stepfather, who she is impatient with through the whole book, turns out to have hidden depths. Even cute boy Logan has more substance than I typically expect in a book this short. There are plenty of characters who still need fleshing out, but since this is the first book in a series, I expect we’ll see more of that in later volumes.

This isn’t a terribly scary book, but it does have its moments. Miss Appleby is responsible for some deeply disturbing actions, and Holt has strong descriptive powers. Midnight Reynolds and the Spectral Transformer  is an entertaining read for a tween looking for ghostbusting adventure and mild scares, and now that she’s come into her own, I’ll be interested to see what happens in book two. Recommended.

Posted on August 18, 2019 by , Reply

It’s Elementary: Sherlock Holmes in the Horror Genre

Sherlock Holmes is one of the most beloved characters in fiction. He’s not particularly lovable, or even likable; in fact, he’s a depressed, drug-addicted, arrogant, misogynistic, obnoxious know-it-all. Even his  creator tried to kill him off. There’s just something about him that draws people to read about Holmes and his faithful chronicler, Watson, and to visit and revisit the characters. Holmes can’t be contained to just the stories Arthur Conan Doyle wrote anymore, most of which are now in the public domain. He belongs to his readers, the visitors to Baker Street.

 

Or does he?

 

The estate of Arthur Conan Doyle approached the publisher of the soon-to-be-released anthology In The Company of Sherlock Holmes, co-edited by Leslie Klinger and Laurie R. King, and attempted to extract a license fee, threatening to discourage distributors from carrying the book unless the fee was paid. Klinger sued the Conan Doyle estate in federal court, asking for a judgement that Sherlock Holmes and a variety of characters and elements from the Holmesian universe were in the public domain and that reference to them does not require that a license fee be paid to the Conan Doyle estate. The judge mostly agreed with Klinger. You can read that story here.

 

What’s important about this is that people don’t just want to read the original stories. They want new takes. There’s a tradition of Sherlock Holmes pastiches– homages to the Master Detective. Some are very good, and some are a lot of fun to read. And many of these fall into the horror genre. Did Arthur Conan Doyle deserve to profit from his creation? Absolutely. But should his estate be bullying writers and publishers a hundred years later, even after the majority of the stories have entered the public domain? It doesn’t make sense to me. It’s past time to explore characters that just can’t stay in the pages of their original stories, and see what new writers can do. Want to check out some of the horror genre’s takes on the Great Detective?  Here are some possibilities.

 

Victorian Undead  by Ian Edginton, illustrated by Davide Fabbri . Victorian Undead is a graphic novel that collects the comic books for this limited series of  six issues, which pit Sherlock Holmes and Watson against zombies, led by Professor Moriarty. It is followed by Victorian Undead II, in which the duo go up against Dracula. The Monster Librarian, a zombie fan, really enjoyed this series. Be warned, there is a fair amount of gore, which is not exactly a signature of the Holmes oeuvre, so this is probably a better way to introduce a zombie-loving reader to Sherlock than a Sherlock lover to the horror genre.

 

   Gaslight Arcanum: Uncanny Tales of Sherlock Holmes  edited by J.R. Campbell and Charles Prepolec.  This is the third volume in a series of anthologies that introduce the supremely rational Holmes to the supernatural and horrific. You can read our review here. Gaslight Grimoire: Fantastic Tales of Sherlock Holmes and Gaslight Grotesque: Nightmare Tales of Sherlock Holmes precede this volume in the series. While these books have both excellent and not-so-excellent stories, there are definitely more winners than losers, and there are some fantastic authors included. Gaslight Arcanum includes a fantastic story by Kim Newman. This is a good volume to offer to both Holmes lovers and horror lovers, so if your library doesn’t have it already, you might consider it for its appeal to both mystery and horror readers.

 

   Sherlock Holmes: Revenant by William Meikle. William Meikle grew up in Scotland reading Sherlock Holmes, and you can really tell. Read our review here. It’s not long, but it gets the point across. Again, keeping in mind that you can’t please everyone all of the time, this is a great story appreciated by lovers of both Holmes and the supernatural.

 

  Shadows Over Baker Street (Sherlock Holmes) edited by Michael Reaves and John Pelan. Here you’ve got a collection of stories in which Sherlock Holmes and company encounter the gods and creatures of the Cthulu mythos. I am admittedly not a fan of Lovecraft, so I haven’t picked this up, but it’s an intriguing concept and when the two come together in the right way, could make for some really effective storytelling. This might be a way to introduce Lovecraft and Lovecraftian fiction to a new audience– like Sherlock Holmes, the Cthulu mythos has moved beyond the original stories to reach its tentacles out in many directions.

 

The Canary Trainer: From the Memoirs of John H. Watson by Nicholas Meyer. Nicholas Meyer’s pastiches are considered to be some of the best. Preceded by The Seven-Per-Cent Solution and The West End Horror, The Canary Trainer pits Holmes against The Phantom of the Opera.

 

Dust and Shadow: An Account of the Ripper Killings by Dr. John H. Watson by Lynsay Faye. Naturally, as a horror review site, we couldn’t leave out Jack the Ripper.  The combination of Sherlock Holmes and Jack the Ripper is a tempting one for many authors, so there are quite a few pastiches that take on this theme. Faye’s 2009 debut novel received great reviews, so if you’re looking for a pastiche that pits Holmes against the Ripper, this one is a good choice.

 

  Sherlock Holmes and the Horror of Frankenstein by Luke Kuhns, illustrated by Marcie Klinger. Now, frankly, I don’t know anything about this book, but it appears to be a graphic novel, and just the cover makes me want to open it up. Frankenstein and Sherlock Holmes– what a perfect combination! It’s just out, so if you decide to try it out I would love to find out what you think of it.

 

This is not anywhere near the number of pastiches of varying quality out there that you can check out, and I’ve shared just a few of them here (so please don’t feel indignant if I left one of your favorites out). There are many short stories as well, including Neil Gaiman’s excellent “A Study in Emerald”. For more suggestions, you can visit this blog post at Tor.com, which did a project a while back titled “Holmes for the Holidays”.  Enjoy!

 

Posted on January 6, 2014 by , Reply

Shoot the stereotypes!

Genre fiction is full of stock characters. They’re so common that it’s actually an event to encounter a character who doesn’t fall into some kind of recognizable category. It can be comfortable to slide into a world of familiar tropes and character types, and genre readers often have expectations about what they’ll find in their particular brand of fiction.

But it is a pleasure when I meet someone in a book that is more than their stereotype. And today I met Clare Fergusson. Clare is an Episcopal priest who used to be a helicopter pilot in the Army.  Not too many of those around, at least to my knowledge! She’s a Southerner whose parish is in a small town in upstate New York- an obvious outsider. There’s a lot going on under the surface in her community, and I saw many stereotypes get turned on their heads, or at least shaken sideways.

Clare is  one of the two main characters in a mystery/suspense series by Julia Spencer-Fleming, and the book I met her in is the first in the series, In the Bleak Midwinter(her newest book, One Was A Soldier, has just been released). Spencer-Fleming could have played it safe and written a “cozy”, with a sleuthing priest- there are lots of mystery-solving nuns, rabbis, and priests. Instead she created a complicated person, and because of that I was kept guessing about how she, and other characters, would act, until the very end. And I loved it.

It’s so rare to find characters who are so filled with contradictory parts, characters who can drive the story without slowing it down, and it’s such a pleasure. I sat in a waiting room for five hours this afternoon, and I am glad to have had the company.

So, how about you? Have you met any good characters lately?

Posted on April 6, 2011 by , Reply