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Book Review: Hellbender by Josh Craven

Hellbender by Josh Craven

Raygun Books, 2019

ISBN-13: 9781951494018

Available:  Paperback

It is the summer of 1946. Veterans are returning from the War. Bobby Graywood loves baseball, his job as batboy for the local team the Green Sox, and Addie Vogel, even though she doesn’t know it. He’s an ordinary, awkward teenager, other than his Affliction. Whenever he makes skin-to-skin contact with anyone, he experiences their memories, past or future. As a result, he wears his gloves as often as he can to avoid touching anyone. One fateful day, the new pastor in town, Newton Hellbender, asks that he helps with the laying on of hands, complete with speaking in tongues. He requests that Bobby remove his gloves to better aid in the blessing. He does so reluctantly, and accidentally makes contact with an elderly woman whose memory reveals Hellbender’s true nature. Suffice it to say he is not the Servant of the Lord he purports to be. There is plenty of voodoo, small town politics, intrigue, and baseball games that drive this story to its end.

I do need to make potential readers aware of sensitive topics that require a content warning. This also requires a spoiler warning, as some of this will give key parts of the plot away. Randall Goode, Hellbender’s assistant, is a child molester. We see this through Bobby’s Affliction, which is disturbing on multiple levels. Bobby experiences all of the things in his visions as the person he touches. In one case, he is inside Randall’s mind as he is violating a young boy. I very nearly stopped reading at this point. I had to put it away for a few days before I could pick it up again. Later, Bobby almost falls victim to this abhorrent character. Racism is another sensitive topic regarding Jubal Moss, a Cajun veteran who makes the Green Sox roster. Jubal speaks with a Louisiana Creole dialect, and faces bigots on and off the baseball team. I became frustrated when he, the central Black character, is killed by Hellbender. Another victim of rape in the story is Bobby’s unrequited love, Addie. We do not see her rape occur, but it is implied.

All that being said, it is not a bad story. It is fast-paced, and there is so much going on that keeps the reader interested. However, be warned if you pick this up.

Contains: body horror, child molestation, racial slurs, racism, rape

 

Reviewed by Lizzy Walker

Book Review: Imaginary Friend by Stephen Chbosky

Imaginary Friend by Stephen Chbosky

Grand Central Publishing, 2019

ISBN-13: 978-1538731338

Available: Hardcover, Kindle edition, audiobook

 

Acclaimed author Joe Hill promoted Imaginary Friend by saying the first fifty pages would blow you away, and I 100% agree with that. The first chapter, which takes place fifty years before the rest of the story, is absolutely hallucinatory. Jumping to the present day, the central character is Christopher, a seven-and-a-half year old boy whose mentally ill father committed suicide four years ago, and is now on the road with his mother, Kate, who is fleeing a relationship with an abusive alcoholic. Chbosky does a great job of depicting the loving, if anxious, relationship between Kate and Christopher, and I think he shows a very realistic depiction of the effects grief, and the loss of a father, can have on the dynamic between a mother and son.

Christopher struggles in school. He is mercilessly bullied by the son of the richest family in town, which also owns the retirement home where his mother works, and dyslexia prevents him from succeeding academically. One day, his mother is late picking him up from school, and by the time she arrives he has mysteriously disappeared. When he is found after six days, he can’t remember anything about that time, but everything in their lives starts looking up, from his success on a math test to Kate’s winning the lottery. But Christopher is also starting to get terrible headaches, and he is hearing the voice of someone he calls “the nice man” who wants him to build a treehouse in the woods behind the house his mother bought with her lottery winnings. Is there something supernatural going on, or is Christopher manifesting his father’s mental illness?

The story starts to run off the rails for me here. According to Chbosky, Christopher is a second grader, seven years old. But he and his peers (both friends and bullies) aren’t acting or being treated like second graders. I 100% guarantee that an overprotective single mother is not going to allow her son who was recently missing for six days to go on a sleepover without making sure that the other child’s parents were right there in the house. But that is exactly what happens. Christopher and three of his friends trick their parents into thinking that each of them is going to a sleepover at another friend’s house so they can go camping in the woods in Pennsylvania in November and tirelessly build a treehouse from complicated blueprints, stealing wood from a construction site, with rare breaks for food.

There’s an echo of It or maybe The Body here in the depiction of the four outcast boys on a mission, but the kids in those stories are living through the 1950s, when kids had a lot more freedom to roam, and in both cases, the kids in those stories were older. Some of the actions of the kids in this book would have been more believable had they been older. Chbosky, best known for his YA novel The Perks of Being a Wallflower, might have done better to age his characters up to middle school. I’m  also pretty irritated that Chbosky refers to one of Christopher’s friends, who is in a special education classroom, by the nickname “Special Ed” , given to him by the school bully, throughout the book.

The story is also weighed down by a lot of unneccessary repetition. In the first chapter, every time David Olson is mentioned, it’s as “Little David Olson”, even though it’s quickly obvious that David is a young boy. It’s sometimes difficult to tell who is talking, or if they are talking or thinking, because the use of italics, spacing, font size, punctuation, and capitalization is irregular. I’m not sure if that’s intentional,or not, because it definitely adds to the sense of disorientation that Chbosky establishes from the beginning, but it also interrupts the flow of the story. Between the repetition in language and plot and the unusual formatting, the story started to exhaust me. There is also a heavy religious element that begins to take over the story and really dragged it out (there is an unexpected plot twist that jumpstarts things, but this book could still have been 300 pages shorter and been the better for it).

Where Chbosky shines is in character and relationship development, especially between family members. Kate and Christopher are at the center of the book and I am wowed by the way Chbosky portrayed their relationship. We also get a window into the lives of characters in the books who aren’t sympathetic at all, giving us a look at their generational or family trauma. I think Chbosky went a little overboard in getting into the minds of the characters of his very large cast at times. When he’s good, he’s very, very good, but when he goes over the top (and he does sometimes) he really misses the mark.

Chbosky also does an excellent job with creating truly disturbing creatures– I will never feel the same way about deer again– and it is painful, unsettling, grotesque, and terrifying to witness some of what he describes people doing to each other and themselves, over and over. This is a true horror novel that walks the reader through hell.

Imaginary Friend has received accolades from some prestigious review sources. In his acknowledgements, he cites Stephen King as his inspiration, and I can certainly see the influence. Ultimately, though, while there’s some really good stuff here, the book is flawed enough, and long enough, that many readers unfortunately won’t make it through to the end. Recommended for public libraries.

Contains: Violence, gore, body horror, child abuse, sexual situations, domestic violence, suicide, references to child sexual abuse, bullying

 

Book Review: Ghost Stories: Classic Tales of Horror and Suspense edited by Lisa Morton and Leslie S. Klinger

Ghost Stories: Classic Tales of Horror and Suspense edited by Lisa Morton and Leslie S. Klinger

Pegasus Books, 2019

ISBN-13: 978-1643130200

Available: Hardcover, Kindle edition

 

‘Tis the season for ghost stories, and with so many out there, Lisa Morton and Leslie S. Klinger had some difficult choices about what to include in this anthology. They have chosen eighteen tales of the supernatural with varying tone, from comic to terrifying, by authors well-known for their ability with supernatural fiction, authors from both Europe and America, authors well-known for their other works who also wrote supernatural fiction, and some authors barely known to the reading public at all.  There is a brief introduction, and each story is preceded with a short paragraph about the author and his works. When necessary, the editors included annotations, but the annotations do not impede the flow of the story; rather, they enrich it.

The anthology begins with a ballad, “Sweet William’s Ghost”,  which is followed by a gothic tale by Johann August Apel, whose work may have inspired the beginnings of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Sir Walter Scott’s “The Tapestried Chamber”, which Morton and Klinger identify as the first modern ghost story, is next.  They then cross the ocean to America for the next two stories, “The Gray Champion” by Nathaniel Hawthorne and “Ligieia” by Edgar Allan Poe. Certainly no one can argue with either Poe’s brilliance or madness in his writing, and both are depicted in full force here.

Three lesser-known  women writers of supernatural fiction all write powerfully of ghosts driven by their emotions towards the ones they left behind. “Since I Died” by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps is a compelling vision of what follows death, narrated by a just-deceased woman observing her lover’s grief, and is one of the outstanding stories in the book. “The Shell of Sense” by the little-known Olivia Howard Dunbar, details the vengeance, and eventually forgiveness, of a recently-deceased wife on her husband and sister when she discovers they have fallen in love.  In Georgia Wood Pangborn’s “The Substitute”, a lonely woman is visited by a friend who is desperately in need of her help.

Charles Dickens, M.R. James, Edith Wharton, Henry James, and Charlotte  (Mrs. J.H.) Riddell all tell stories of mysterious and terrifying ghosts.  Ambrose Bierce creats a nightmarish, fantastical world in “An Inhabitant of Carcosa”, and Frank Stockton’s “The Philosophy of Relative Existences” is almost science-fictional in nature, a thoughtful puzzle of a story.  Arthur Machen’s “The Bowmen” , based on actual news reports, described a battle during World War I where one of the British servicemen summoned St. George and his bowmen to defeat the Germans. The brief descriptions of the war, and the detail in which Machen is able to vividly portray the men and their despair in very few words, are very powerful. One of my favorites, a surprise to me, was Mark Twain’s “A Ghost Story”, which had me laughing out loud.

The variety in this collection of ghost stories is impressive, and I really appreciated the inclusion of both lesser-known women writers of supernatural fiction, and supernatural stories by writers better known for other work. Over the past several years I have done a lot of reading on my own on early women writers of supernatural fiction and until very recently it’s been difficult to find any work by some of them at all– and for those who are better known for their other writing, their supernatural tales have often been disregarded or kept under wraps. It would be easy to lean back on just a few authors already known for their ghost stories, but the effort that went into making sure this carefully curated anthology was varied in its authors and contents is something I really appreciate. Ghost Stories: Classic Tales of Horror and Suspense is a perfect read for this Halloween season.