Beguiling Haunted Houses

From My Shelf: Happy Halloween!

A house is normally considered a safe place. In fiction, however, when a house has creaky stairs, rattling shutters, dark attics and basements and trapped secrets that embody the shadowy essence of unnerving spirits, scary becomes even scarier--especially on Halloween.

Shirley Jackson paved the way with her terrifying 1959 novel, The Haunting of Hill House, where four people investigate an 80-year-old house filled with spirits and other unexplained events. Richard Matheson expanded that premise in Hell House (1971), where a physicist and two mediums examine a spooky shuttered house in Maine presumably haunted after serving as a domicile for decadence, drugs and alcohol.

The unifying elements of haunted house novels--past and present--seem to be long-buried secrets, demons from the past that need to be confronted and escalating suspense.

This House Is Haunted by John Boyne is set in a country estate in 1860s Norfolk. This Dickens-inspired story centers on a governess who cares for two seemingly parentless children and a malign, supernatural presence that taunts them.

An old carriage house on a sprawling estate invigorates Rebecca Makkai's The Hundred-Year House, where a young couple faces unexpected rumors of buried bodies, family mysteries and the presence of a ghost immortalized in a prominently displayed portrait.

Long-dead, lingering spirits--former residents of an old country house--jostle with an estranged, contemporary family, heirs who have come to sort through the detritus of their departed patriarch in Rooms, an imaginative, explosive story by Lauren Oliver.

In A Sudden Light, Garth Stein has crafted an atmospheric ghost story set in a rambling Pacific Northwest ancestral estate. This epic tale is part family saga and part mystery, infused with secrets, curses, dark familial legacies and a tragic love affair.

While jack-o'-lanterns, bats and witches are all symbols of Halloween, it's the haunted house, where ghosts and a fear of the unknown collide, that keeps readers bound captive to the page! 

Note: This article is a reprint and is being posted (in a slightly different form) with the permission of Shelf Awareness. To read this piece as published on Shelf Awareness for Readers (10/31/14), link HERE

Furry, Four-Legged Narrators in Fiction

In multiple genres, dogs and cats have emerged as credible, likable narrators:

In Love Saves the Day, a novel by Gwen Cooper, a smart, tabby named Prudence tells the story of her owner, Sarah, who has gone missing. Prudence is forced to relocate to the home of Sarah's lawyer daughter and her unemployed husband. Will the feline-averse couple in marital crisis ever accept the love of this abandoned kitty?

Two cats living in modern-day Beijing narrate Pallavi Aiyar's imaginative novel Chinese Whiskers. Soyabean is a male kitten living in a multi-generational middle-class household, while Tofu, a female kitten, roams the streets, roughing it. How the two cats come to live together is only part of the story, a suspenseful morality tale about the values of "Old China" versus "New China."

Chet, a dog who flunked out of K-9 School, offers a clever point of view as the sidekick to down-on-his-luck private investigator Bernie Little. The two "babysit" a Hollywood heartthrob, a bad boy with secrets, who is filming a blockbuster movie in a sleepy little town in A Fistful of Collars, the fifth installment in Spencer Quinn's humorous Chet and Bernie mystery series.

Children and young adults can experience the perspective of Enzo, a lovable, observant lab-terrier mix in Racing in the Rain: My Life as a Dog, the adaptation of Garth Stein's adult novel The Art of Racing in the Rain. This tender-

hearted story teaches valuable lessons about friendship and the choices we make for our lives. Its message speaks to readers of any age.

So whether you're a cat or dog person, enjoy reading general fiction, mysteries or YA/crossover lit, take your pick. Animals, in the hands of the right authors, have become great storytellers. 

Note: This article is a reprint and is being posted with the permission of Shelf Awareness. To read this piece as published on Shelf Awareness for Readers (3/15/13), link HERE

Hotel Angeline

What happens when 36 writers, of various genres, come together and work on the same novel at 2-hour live intervals for a period of one week? The Hotel Angeline is what happens...a wonderful new book by an imaginative collective of authors who all reside in and around the Pacific Northwest. The novel, written in chapters penned by each of the 36 participants, tells the story of Alexis, a precocious 14 year-old girl whose life is far from ordinary. She and her gravely ill mother live in (and serve as the landlords for) the Hotel Angeline in Seattle, what was once a mortuary, but has since been converted into apartments - dilapidated, run-down apartments that serve as "home" for a group of eccentric, misfit aging artsy types who smoke pot, detest Fox News and the conventionality of the ordinary. Beyond the liberal leanings of those who populate this insightful, well-rendered novel is a wonderful coming of age tale for fatherless, identity-challenged Alexis. She is faced with extraordinary choices and goes to great, often unexpected, lengths to do right by a mother whom she loves and wishes to honor. The unexpected arc of the plot keeps the reader turning pages as Alexis strives to save the Angeline and the residents therein. There is something for every fan of literature here - adolescent lit, thrillers, mysteries, fans of comic, fantasy, domestic fiction and even graphic novels. Over the course of the story, I marveled at how the voice of Alexis carried through the novel so distinctly and seamlessly, despite the influence of multiple authors who lent their time and talent to this project to benefit Seattle7Writers, a literary nonprofit organization. It was also great fun to read the novel with an eye toward authors whose work I already admire-- Elizabeth George, Garth Stein, Mary Guterson--to read their individual chapter contributions and the way in which their literary choices propelled the story forward with great insight, wit and sensitivity (fascinating!)...and also to discover the work of other voices and talents of which I was not familiar. 

Link HERE for a video about the project and the book.

Hotel Angeline (A Novel in 36 Voices)
Open Road Integrated Media LLC, 978-1453218785, 260 pp.
Publication Date: April 18, 2011
To order this book via Amazon.com link HERE

In order to write this review, a copy of the novel was provided to me via Open Road Integrated Media in conjuction with NetGalley