Small Impressions: 'Every Vow You Break', by Peter Swanson (2021)

 

This was a quick read.  The strong characterisation of the heroine kept it going.  A very satisfying mix of a horror film of a folk horrorish kind (a bit Wicker Man, a bit Ben Wheatley), and a last girl survival slasher.  

SPOILERS

Tiny Summary: A woman is honeypotted on her bachelorette weekend and is later taken to a remote island on her honeymoon, where it becomes clear she's going to be punished, somehow.

Lots of people have mentioned the way the novel 'tries to be feminist but comes off as misogynist', and I totally see how they could think that.  I've been raised on horrors, mostly made by men, glorifying in the beauty, fear of and hatred for women, all mushed up together.  The psychology of all that is scary and fascinating.  This book didn't have 'horror', no gratuitous blood, only clear descriptions of events.  In that sense it wasn't horror, it was a psychological thriller.  I didn't feel it was hostile to women.  I did feel it captured the sort of feelings toward women some men have; at the end it tried to contextualise them a bit (mentioning seminars, mens rights movements etc), but it wasn't forensic, just indicatory.

I give it 5 stars because after a slightly slow beginning, it held me totally and I put off meals, family time and sleep to finish it.  It was very clear and coherent, I didn't lose suspension of disbelief at any time...except right near the end when she escapes and the rich men don't manage to cover her up, buy off ...whoever.  

Maybe it's just the world we are in, or the world the news shows us, but I feel she wouldn't have made it; money would have bought her silence by someone coming for her, her disappearence or her discrediting as a witness.  I don't beleive justice will have occurred, were this a real situation.  But maybe that's simply the triumph of the news...it makes us give up, give in. Not believe anything can change.

Maybe the end is Swanson giving us hope? Maybe it's a false hope, a lulling into a false sense of security...that a lone woman could survive a set up like that?  I don't know.  But it was a good thriller. I liked the last line:

Beasts had come for her.  And she was still alive.

(Smaller version of this, on my GoodReads page.)

Our Wives Under the Sea, by Julia Armfield (2022)

 

This was amazing.  I didn't feel very well (long working summer exhaustion), and started randomly reading this after being taken with the title and off kilter cover art.

I couldn't stop reading and finished a day later.  It's about the deep sea, what might be there.  The love between two people, two women, the little everyday things.  The parents you don't understand and can't get through to but love anyway.  The failure of communication in its many ways.

The haunting of grief.  How people can not be dead, but already gone.  (Like when my now dead ex husband had a stroke and was forever after like a cousin of himself, definitely related but utterly not the same person as before.)  Relearning a new person, and what they might need, against what you need.

I still think that one of the roots of horror as a genre are in the horror of the (relatively) well when faced with regular caring for or being in close proximity to a chronically ill person, a person slowly changing beyond recognition to you or themselves or both. Fear of contagion, mentally and physically. Fear of permeability, of fragmentation, dissolving.

The story and it's characters were lyrical and brisk, clear and straight. The voices of Leah and Miri were so strong, so likeable.  Pieces of a world already gone when the book begins.  Story of a love story over except for one last act.

I felt the echoes of so many films in this, as I'm sure was intended. "It's going to be alright now/it'll be alright now" echoed straight from Paranormal Activity, near the end, when Katie's voice doubles. Many loving references to Jaws. Many others.

I haven't been this engaged with a book in months.  If you like your horror/ghost stories a bit literary, a bit sad, strange, about women loving each other, and incidentally learning a lot more about something you didn't know loads about before (here the sea), you will not be disappointed.  Very much recommended.

 ***

(This review is also up on my Goodreads, but with less words!)

Idol, Burning by Rin Usami (2020 originally) - small and perfect

 

I don't want to say anything about the plot of this book.  It's an amazing character portrait of a lonely girl and what she spends her time and mind doing. One of those books where if you looked at the character from the outside they would seem weird and make little sense.  But inside the character, there's reasons for it all, coping mechanisms. The end was wonderfully ambiguous.

This was so good.  Exploring things that can't be held, or quantified.  The choice of what to try to hold on to and what you never could hold in the first place.  The confusion of everyday life and demands. The mess.  The difference in tone between a life lived and a life blogged - one so alone and not understanding, the other so casual and confident.  The reasons for obsession. Its a tiny little masterpiece.

A Serbian Film (2010) - a review of extreme horror for Halloween 2022

MANY SPOILERS, BEWARE.

I decided to do a review of extreme horror for Halloween for my blog.  Just randomly, out of nowhere. This is the one I chose - and knew nothing at all about it before watching, except that people always mention it when they talk about films that have gone too far. It was apparently banned in 46 countries at one point.  And its not for the gore, though there is some.  It's for extended scenes of extreme sexual violence.  And …I saw the edited version with 4 and a bit minutes cut out, and I can see exactly where they went from.  

    This has to be the most thoughtful film I’ve ever seen about porn, porn stars and what people pay money to see. Power, who has it, with what lies and evasions and greasy money are they keeping it. Its very easy to see this extreme film as politics of the region at a time of great violence, in microcosm. Propoganda, its construction.

Tiny plot bit: Milos was the hero, a retired porn star, one last job.  It’s a live action torture porn snuff film, which he didn’t realise.  Then he is drugged with a sort of Viagra that kicks out your memory too, and spends the rest of the film finding out what he did in the missing time.   

    It gets worse and worse, of course.  But other reviews I read had most people feeling he had become a monster.  He didn’t.  He was drugged into being a machine; he was already a bit of a performance machine.  It wasn’t his fault, he never would have been so violent if he wasn’t insanely drugged. The minute he realised, and saw he couldn’t fix the [IMO] justified multiple murders he did to the film makers, and the heartbreaking rape of his own wife and small son, he kills himself and them. His brother was the real monster; he didn’t do it for money. He was jealous and wanted what wasn’t his. And Vukmir, the filmmaker, a child psychologist. He was properly mad or evil or sociopathic or all of those. And the security guards too. They all knew what was going on and sometimes participated.  Lives were very cheap in this film, and women were beautiful holes. Especially when their teeth are all pulled out.

It’s subtle and interesting that I felt such sympathy for a porn star  - an antihero to some of society? - who did that horrible angry man porn face during the clips of his early films, and yet was actually peaceful and trying his best to live a good life, with his family in the present.  The need for the money suckered him in.  Money – what it makes us do?  Fevered drugs or emotions, what they make of us.  What people do when they have no choice, or are fooled or high; the people who seem to be at the edges of our world to pull you under and make you swim with their bloody minds, till yours is drowned.

This was hugely well made, shot and acted.  It  - due to the censor edits – didn’t drive me away, and I really can see where those 4 minutes went, and it makes the film more watchable, those scenes being gone; what remains has some very very effective small sound effects: you don’t need to see. I can think more clearly about it not having seen the missing bits. The film said a lot about what beauty is and isn’t; what’s real and fake; why a person can’t be an object to another; what’s valuable and what isn’t. About transactional interactions with people – they have to be clear for both sides, and agreed on, to work.  Politics and life rarely work that way. And you can’t help thinking of war crimes when you watch this. And Yugoslavia and all that went on there during its disintegration.

This film is a velvet shot sledgehammer, a bit like arguing in a pub with someone very clever but drunk enough to get very shouty and determined to win the argument by taking everything to its logical conclusion.  Or, like Harry Enfield says: “is that what you want? Cos that’s what’ll happen!”

I wouldn’t watch the uncut version, so there’s my recommend: if you want to clearly think about this, watch the edit. And it’s not just shocking, it’s too well acted for that.  It’s thought provoking.  

     Update: And the next day, here I am thinking its similar to Clockwork Orange, just more overtly violent and less stylised. Also I think my brain is going to take a while to wash this one through. 

    And another update: it's January 2023, and this film won't leave me.  I'm still worrying at it.  When people do bad things while drunk or otherwise high and say they can't remember, I'll always think twice now, maybe they really can't? I always thought that was a huge copout and way of taking no responsibility for what you'd done by pretending you don't remember; but maybe some things are too horrible to sit with.  They aren't you, yet you did them. I feel there is some overarching truth here, that I've not seen in any other horror film, despite my years of watching them.

    

 

The Other Black Girl, by Zakiya Dalila Harris - I'm one of the people that loved this book

 

Fascinating that almost the first thing I’d note about this book I really enjoyed is that it’s written by a Black woman and yet though it was all about being Black in the workplace – and everywhere – that I never felt thrown out by the language used or the descriptions: as a white woman, I didn't feel my total lack of this other life experience was stopping me from understanding someone else's.  It was written perfectly for your average white bookworm stealing time in Waterstones to enjoy.  I straightaway talk about white and Black 'cos that's what the book is about.  Black female experience in a mostly white workplace.  Racism, micro aggressions, code-switching, self sabotage, frenemies, paranoia, science fiction, horror and comedy. I'm not going to summarise the plot, I'd just say read it. Then I'd be confused by the responses.

When I gave it 5 stars on Goodreads, I was shocked to see how many Black people hated it.  REALLY hated it – the writing, the plot, the characters: everything.  So by thoroughly engaging white readers (the star rating was much better here) and painting a portrait of contemporary Blackness of one woman…she lost a lot of the Black reading – the Goodreads section at least -  demographic.  I can’t see how, cos I thought it was brilliant, but something was hugely off for the Black readers, and really right for most of the white ones.  Maybe it’s a huge experiment, a big joke, related to the actual plot of the book, on the part of the author?? Obviously I’ve no experience as a Black woman, I’m a middle aged white one.  So I’m sure all those people who hate it have a point and there must be inaccuracies of speech or reported experience that really grate.  I can’t see them, as me. 

Big memories of the books of The Stepford Wives [quietly rage enducing and savage social commentary] and Invasion of the Body Snatchers [paranoid and claustrophobic, mistrust of everyone] for most of the read.  It’s not just one genre falsely marketed as a thriller, it’s several.  

 I Loved it.

Small review of Her Dark Wings by Melinda Salisbury (2022)

Modern retelling of the story of Persephone (Kore), and how she came to be in the Underworld. I won't set it up more than that.  That's the bones you need.

This has one of the best, quietest and clear last paragraphs of a book I've read in ages.  Simple and calm but powerful.

It's often hard to read characters that change a lot over the course of a book and them to not feel too fatally different, to the point you can no longer feel with them or identify with them; it's a common fault in books I read: a protagonist will become so much better/stronger/more powerful that whilst I am happy at her growth and wherever the end leaves her, I can no longer travel with her, she's like a friend grown well apart from me.  You can say you knew her well, once.  This book doesn't do that.  Over the course of it, Corey changes a lot, but I was with her every step, and by the end, I still knew her.  That's so important in a book, that it not leave you lonely.

Also, the blurb on the back makes it seem like a romance.  It has a love interest in it, but it's mostly about friendship and manipulation.  Perceptions, how we don't know people as we thought we did, either from afar or in life. It's also about generosity.  

So read on for Hades, Hermes, The Furies (who play a large role and are wonderfully painted), The Boatman Charon, The Fates, and Eris the Lady of Discord and Strife (ever not what's expected). More, but they are the main mythic characters.

Ate this, lush like the pomegranates it talks of, in a very short time between hellish busy work days in a very hot kitchen in a heatwave.  Lovely rest it was. 

Recommended. 

(a much shorter version of this review on my Goodreads feed.)

Review of Tell Me Your Lies (2022) by Kate Ruby

 

Some SPOILERS!!!

I really enjoyed this - it has lots of elements I enjoy, packed together in one book: therapy and its jargon; how New Ageiness can cross into sounding like therapy but not being therapy; relationships between characters that are layered with broken dynamics, resentments real or imagined, and expectations galore; possible unreliable narrators; lots of immersion in the characters mindsets...and more!

One of the reviewers on the back cover said the protagonist was 'flawed' but we 'can't help rooting for' her.  The oddest thing about the protagonist Rachel, is that she's so normal!  Not book middle class normal - but real life 'don't know who the hell I am and lie quite a bit as a result' normal.  The sort of casual lying we all do here and there for self protection, or to grease the wheels of conversation, or to bond with a stranger: faces we wear.  Rachel is a more extreme example but I can see where it all comes from; and as a narrator, she's very honest about her lying, you know when she's doing it - it makes her a reliable witness.  In many ways she's so wonderfully open and almost desperate for connection and a sense of worth that she lies to herself, knowingly, to keep connections even when she knows they are all wrong for her, hurting her. I sympathised with and understood her, so many elements of me in there (hence I think she's 'normal'; I think we all lie about how much or often we lie in social situations (see my review of Fake Accounts here too), so Rachel was refreshing and true.

The other two main characters are Lily and Amber.  Lily is Rachel's mother and the focus of her anger and desperately thwarted love (and vice versa).  All she wants is a normal relationship, yet she has to choreograph each and every meeting and moment, to try and keep things even with Lily.  Lily is a powerfully scary creation: someone who is so certain of herself and her right to control her children's (whole family's really) lives, she just goes right ahead and does so, with a mixture of passive aggressive "weaponised" conversations, twisting words and feelings to suit what she wants to happen and for them to feel; and outright hostility, toward the end. It's her undoing.

Amber is the therapist Lily finds for Rachel to help with her drink and drugs problems (is there an echo of Marian Keyes' Rachel of Rachel's Holiday here? The way Rachel in that book thought she was living one life and its not till later we see she's living quite another more tawdry drink and drug filled one). Amber is very expensive, very exclusive, and is a wonderful mixture of confidante, best friend, Catholic confessor (- the sort we all might of wished we had while reading the Susan Howatch Glittering Images series long ago, a Father Darrow figure), New Age guru and cult leader.  She's hypnotic, you feel yourself falling for the intensity even as we see her leading the questions and turning the conversations with Rachel exactly where she wants them to go while bolstering Rachel with all the things she wished had been said to her, all the boundaries broken she wished she could have had with 'normal' family relationships, deep and satisfying.  

(Moment while I ehem, as I haven't experienced anything like that in real life, but people write it so often, you assume either we are daydreaming our way to the better family lives we all crave, or someone out there has them and we are ever increasingly whispering these tales of betterness to each other and living vicariously through them...I don't know.)

Of course, Amber is more than she seems.  The other main characters in the book are mostly female (nice, I like that) - Esther, a once upon a time teenage nanny to Rachel's sister Sophie, who is also not what she seems; and Sophie herself who who is adoreable and honest and ordinary in a way that Rachel is both frustrated by and protective of.  The remaining male characters of the main ensemble are Nick, Rachel and Sophie's father - a bull and a bully with swagger and money, who is nevertheless protected by his wife from life (whether he asked for that to be the case or not); and Rachel's brother Josh, in many ways a MiniMe of the father and also a bully.

It's a wonderful exploring of the roles we get assigned in families - you are the black sheep, you are the dutiful daughter, you are the long suffering mother, you are the provider father etc - and there's a scene about halfway through the book at a retreat where Amber plays with these sorts of names for her clients during a very hippyish and almost Laing-like rebirthing scene, where the clients see 'past lives'.  What the past lives appear to be is metaphoric realignings with how they see the relationships with the most problematic family member in their lives: Marco (another client at the retreat) sees his inappropriate and over fun-loving father as a soldier with him in a previous life, where they were best friends, and that the soldier-friend then died, causing Marco a terrible feeling of not having looked after him, that covers his feelings toward his father in this life: a man who behaves like a naughty uncle or friend instead of a father, causing Marco to beleive he must always look after him instead of the other way around - leading Marco to a sort of permanent adolescence, stuck needing a father but being a caretaker. When Rachel has her experience, its anything but ecstatic and illuminating; instead it's terrifying, but tells a truth about how she perceives her mother.  Note: I'm definately a hippywitchy type and I do regard past lives (it's one of my notions) as possible; and yet I loved the reason for these probably very false ones.  It made perfect sense, with Amber's need to control her clients and their emotion flow toward others and especially toward her; and therapeutically, it seemed to help the others (a convoluted placebo; a reframing of a narrative).

I won't spoiler where the story goes - just to say that I very much enjoyed the interplay of these characters and I could not put the book down - this was a read till 3 a.m. and sod the consequences book for me.

Lastly, it's a book about addictions and how we swap drugs and substances for behaviours (self destructive usually) and sometimes people.  Sometimes an unholy mix of all of those.  It all rang true - expressed psychologically and pop psychologically; I even bought in to the hippiest of New Agey talk from Amber, because I could really see how it applied to Rachel; sometimes vague and lacking meaning when you examined the sentences spoken, sometimes simple and profound, like finding something you'd lost a while ago and being happy and surpised to see it again.  

I don't know if Kate Ruby's subsequent books can be as absorbing and true to its characters as this one, but I really really hope so!  Do I need to say this is recommended?? :-)