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Musings: The Cruelty Is The Point: The Burning by Laura Bates

The Burning by Laura Bates

Sourcebooks Fire, 2019

ISBN-13: 978-1728206738

Available: Hardcover, Kindle edition

 

Reading Laura Bates’ The Burning was like a dizzying fall down a rabbit hole to hell.  Anna, the main character, has moved to a new town and a new school to escape a scandal at her old school, only to find that the perpetrator has established social media profiles for her, posting provocative statements and photos that portray her in a very negative light  to classmates who already were incredibly nasty to each other, giving them the excuse they’ve been looking for to bully her (there is a parallel storyline about her visions during a search for information about a woman also unfairly turned on by her community who was burned for witchcraft in the 1650s). After attempts to deal with the cyberbullying on her own,  Anna eventually speaks up and even uses social media to reclaim her image, but  even after the uproar finally dies down, she can’t really escape what’s out there. Once you’re on the Internet, you don’t easily get your privacy back. I don’t know how common it is for cyberbullying to swing that far out of control, but it is terrifying.

Last year’s  The Ghost Hunter’s Daughter  by Caroline Flarity (review here) didn’t go quite as far wirh cyberbullying: the main character (also named Anna) has a reputation for being odd, and she is bullied, but she’s a stronger character and much of  the mockery she faces is due to her reputation as the spooky daughter of an eccentric ghost-hunter (if you have gone to school with the same kids your whole life, you’ll know how hard it is to change the way they look at you). This Anna faces personal and physical threats in a different way (a bully obsessed with her sets her house on fire) as well as ostracism due to social media (a boy she likes tries to convince her to take off her shirt, and later shows video he took to their classmates) but the cyberbullying doesn’t go nearly as far as The Burning in tearing her down. Unlike Anna in The Burning, who is just trying to make it, and reclaim her identity, with her situation central to the story,  Anna in The Ghost Hunter’s Daughter also has to fight a supernatural force and save the day.

Foul is Fair by Hannah Capin (reviewed here), also from last year, is a revenge tale based on Macbeth, where four girls conspire to eliminate the athletes who raped one of them. The girls use the Internet to track down and identify the boys, and erase Elle’s presence in social media (this seems unlikely, but certainly the plot wouldn’t work without this). Changing her name to Jade, and altering her appearance, she transfers to the school the team attends, and manipulates the team members and the girls they’re involved with until one of the boys starts killing off the others. It’s interesting that a lot depends on who has a a cellphone and where it is. Not only is it horrifying to know these boys were either participants or complicit, but the way Elle is able to manipulate them into turning on each other demonstrates vividly the poor judgment, intense emotion, and peer pressure teens experience.

These girls go through some horrific events, and the cruelty and fear of the teens in these stories is what I find really frightening. The Burning caused me to have conversations with both my middle schoolers about their experiences at school. They don’t have much access to social media, so they wouldn’t be exposed to some of the more appalling incidents, but it doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen.  My daughter, who was bullied in elementary school asked what the motivation is for someone to act as maliciously as some of the kids in The Burning. That’s the real horror for me as a parent: for some, there is no reason, or sometimes the cruelty is the point.

 

A final note:  Laura Bates is an English feminist activist and writer who founded the Everyday Sexism Project. At the end of The Burning she offers a list of websites for organizations who offer information and support to girls dealing with issues that appear in the book, and many others,

The Burning contains: cyberbullying, bullying, descriptions of pornographic images, references to abortion, rape, torture, and death.

 

 

 

Posted on April 25, 2020 by , Reply

Book Review: Teeth in the Mist by Dawn Kurtagich

Teeth in the Mist by Dawn Kurtagich

Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, 2019

ISBN-13: 978-0316478472

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

Teeth in the Mist tells the stories of three young women, each from a different time period, navigating the terrors of Mill House, a large house located on Devil’s Peak in an isolated part of Wales. Hermione Smith, writing in 1583, is the young wife of John Smith, the original owner of Mill House, who made a Faustian deal with the Devil.  Roan Eddington, living in 1851, is the recently orphaned ward of Dr. Maudley, the eccentric owner of Mill House at that time. Zoey Root, in the present day, is a runaway who inherited occult powers from her father, who went insane after a visit to Mill House, and has gone there looking for answers.

Kurtagich can really write. The gloomy atmosphere and the evil of Mill House and the mountain are described so effectively that the book is an immersive, visual experience. It has a clever design as well: at times, words are placed deliberately on the page in specific locations with different type and sizes to make a particular impact; there are pages that appear to be pieces of old documents and letters; the story is told not just through traditional narrative, but through diary entries, Facebook posts, transcribed recordings and camera footage, flashbacks, and multiple points of view. It’s a lot to balance. While Hermione’s story is not as strong (she’s just not that dynamic a character), Roan’s is dramatic, suspenseful, and terrifying, and Zoey’s has slowly building suspense that ratchets up as it progresses until an abrupt ending. Unfortunately, the ending is abrupt enough that I was left wondering how and why things wrapped up (or were left loose) the way they were. In sum, Teeth in the Mist is a gripping, compelling, violent, creatively designed, and atmospheric Gothic novel, but with a disappointing ending. I picked up this book with only the knowledge that it was on the preliminary ballot for this year’s Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a Young Adult Novel. Although it didn’t make the final ballot, it definitely deserved the additional recognition. It won’t be to everyone’s taste, but for the right kids, it will be a guilty pleasure. Recommended.

Contains: Witchcraft, the occult, body horror, violence, gore, incest, cannibalism, murder, torture, sexual situations

 

Posted on February 27, 2020 by , Reply

Book Review: The Remaking by Clay McLeod Chapman

The Remaking by Clay McLeod Chapman

Quirk Books, 2019

ISBN-13: 978-1683691532

Available: Hardcover, Kindle

 

The Remaking is a meta-supernatural thriller that follows a true crime paranormal case revived by various means every twenty years. The book starts in 1951, with the telling of a campfire tale, “Witch Girl of Pilot’s Creek”, that occurred in the 1930s. For ten years, Jessica and her mother, Ella Louise, lived in the woods surrounding Pilot’s Creek, Virginia. They did not live within the town itself, since they were ostracized by the citizens of the town, as well as by their own family: Ella had no use for the societal game, and Jessica was born out of wedlock. Ella ran an apothecary from her cabin, and while the townspeople avoided the family in public, they were not above patronizing Ella when in need of a cure. But when a well-known customer died, Ella was immediately accused of witchcraft and both mother and daughter were burned at the stake. Because of the superstitions and paranoia of the townspeople, Jessica, thought to have magical abilities, was entombed in a steel-reinforced coffin surrounded by a fence of white crosses.  Ella was buried in an unknown location.

In 1971, someone who was present at the telling of the campfire story has grown up to become a film director. He casts Amber Pendleton as Jessica in his horror movie. Amber’s overbearing mother thinks this will be a great opportunity for her, and make her a star. The tensions and stress on set drive Amber to run into the woods, where she comes face to face with something nobody believes happened. Fast forward to 1995, and Amber is trying to make ends meet by doing the horror convention circuit. A young, up-and-coming director with money approaches Amber to play the part of Ella in his remake of the film that cost her an early career. She reluctantly agrees. She becomes the star of her own witch hunt after something happens to the new Jessica actress on this set.

The book then switches to 2016, with a popular form of media, the true crime podcast. An enthusiastic, greedy, journalist hunts down Amber (who has, strangely enough, moved to Pilot’s Creek), to get her side of the story. Amber thinks telling her story might just be her best bet to redeem herself. Of course, there’s also a chance that it will just add to the neverending cycle of the nightmare of Jessica and Ella.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. An interesting aspect of the book for me was that it was always ambitious, heartless men at the core of each of the retellings of Jessica and Ella’s story. There was no heart in the development of the original film, nor the remake, only prestige and greed. Both directors were convinced that Jessica was demanding that her story be told, only to become so firm in their own vision that they missed the point. Amber immersed herself in both roles, and was chastised and abused for her intuitive reactions to her characters, first as the young Jessica, and in the remake as Ella Louise. She is blamed for creating her own drama and trauma, and ultimately put on actual trial for an incident that occurred during the filming of the remake. Then the podcaster aims to debunk the sightings of Jessica and Ella, as well as dig as much information out of Amber as he can to debunk that, too. Chapman’s characters and layout of the story are great. The Remaking is a fast and engaging read. I would recommend this for those who like true crime (it was based on the true story of a mother and daughter who were burned for being witches) and unique storytelling experiences. Highly recommended.

 

Reviewed by Lizzy Walker

Posted on October 5, 2019 by , Reply
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