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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

Musings: The Disconnect Between What Kids Want and What Teachers Recommend

Table with sign that says "Need a Book? Check out thes authors and titles that Mr. ____ recommends" with a number of books face up on the table.

The reason I went back to school after working as a children’s librarian in a public library was that I noticed that sometime around grade four kids stopped coming to the library, They were too busy, they had too much homework, they had stuff going on. Even programs carefully designed around their interests weren’t attracting those kids.

 

I wanted to reach those kids. And I was willing to quit my job and go back to school to reach them where they were– school– a captive audience I could finally reach. And I did. But even in 2005, the librarians were the first ones to go when the budget got sliced.

 

In grad school and through 2005 I was part of a children’s choice committee for grades 4-6. We had a list of books proposed that we had to read, evaluate, discuss, and eventually choose 20 books for our nomination list. Kids who read at least 5 could vote for their choice for  best book. And the book with the most votes won the award.

Where am I going with this?

I currently volunteer in my kids’ former middle school library.

In early February I was asked to pull teacher favorites for a display. These included many of what would be considered classics- To Kill a Mockingbord, Night, The Call of the Wild, 1984, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Only two of them had been written since 2005.

 

In mid-February, a teacher put a table of best books out on a table These were great choices I would have no problem recommending.  But I recognized almost all of them as books I had read while on the children’s choice committee. Only a few had been written in the last five years. One (Scythe) is taught as required reading at the high school.

 

We are not reaching teachers. They may be tolerating or even accepting horror in their classrooms but many aren’t promoting or providing horror genre titles to their students. And teachers have a huge influence on what gets checked out. It has to be a cooperative effort. The media specialist had a virtual visit with students with Lorien Lawrence in February, but on the day I came in, his books were still on the shelf.

 

I have helped the media specialist pull and promote scary and horror-themed books in the past. At the elementary, there’s time for storytelling to shape readers. But that isn’t enough at the secondary level. How do we reach teachers, especially at a time when giving kids books is so dangerous?  It’s time to think outside the box.

 

Editor’s note: I have had this characterized as a “diatribe against teachers”. It’s not. Teachers have a difficult job that is being made harder by conservative school boards and state legislatures. There is currently an effort to pass a law that would criminalize teachers and librarians for giving students “inappropriate” books in my state. Many school and classroom libraries have been cleared away elsewhere. 

Teachers face the difficulty of finding reading material their students will find relevant and engaging within challenging restraints. 20 years ago I was working to convince other school librarians horror was relevant and had the potential to be engaging to their students. Today there’s a Librarian’s Day at StokerCon: librarians are engaged in collection development  and promoting the horror genre. I am asking, where do we, as members of the horror community, go from here? What can we do to help? 

Posted on March 3, 2023 by , Reply

Book Review: And Then I Woke Up by Malcolm Devlin

 

 

And Then I Woke Up by Malcolm Devlin. (Bookshop.org  | Amazon.com)

Tor.com. 2022

ISBN: ‎978-1250798077

Available: Paperbsck, Kindle edition.

 

 

This was an PDF ARC provided to me by Ellen Datlow so changes may have been made prior to publication.

 

And Then I Woke Up has an unreliable narrator, a middle-aged man named Spence, who (we are told) is at a mental facility for people who have been “infected” by a virus that caused a mass delusion that made them believe people around them were flesh-eating zombies, reinforced by a media narrative, and by infected charismatic leaders who emerged from the chaos to take control of small groups of “survivors”.

 

Spence notices Leila, a new patient, is not fitting in. After accidentally seeing a snippet of a news report she decides to break out and Spence goes with her. We learn Spence’s story– or do we? The story he remembers is not the one other infected people remember, or the one the Army reported, or the account in the news, or the one the families of people he attacked remember. And only one of those stories is the one the therapist wants to hear him repeat.

 

Leila wants to return to join her group because it was easier to understand the world in black and white, but needs a different narrative to justify her survival so Spence comes up with one, or maybe a second, or maybe a third– he’s not sure what actually happens, although he hopes her story will be enough to influence the narrative positively so infected, cured, and uninfected can coexist peacefully.

 

But Spence’s imagination will no longer allow him to believe in a single narrative and as he dreams of both past events and possible futures he loses his grip on reality.

 

What’s interesting about Spence is his lack of interest in the media or politics. His reaction to the infection establishes him as a “believer” fully enough that it completely alters his perceptions despite that. Rather than simply a story about a zombie invasion or pandemic, Devlin has written a critique of how narrative can be shaped to influence even people who don’t start out with an interest in it.

 

And Then I Woke Up is a short piece that will appeal to readers who appreciate unreliable narrators, but those looking for a straightforward narrative will want to look elsewhere.

 

There’s a lot about storytelling, narrative, othering, grief, guilt, and what makes a believer. This felt political, but makes its mark on a very personal, heartbreaking, and terrifying level.

 

Reviewed by Kirsten Kowalewski

Posted on September 8, 2022 by , Reply
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