bookshelf

NOTES ON JACKSON AND HIS DEAD

Name: NOTES ON JACKSON AND HIS DEAD
Author: Hugh Fulham-McQuillan
ISBN: 978-1-6287-287-0

by Hugh Fulham-McQuillan ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 20, 2019

An intriguing, if uneven, debut.

bookshelf

Eighteen stories that flirt with both psychological horror and philosophical speculation through the unremitting setting of the ordinary life.

Fulham-McQuillan’s debut collection introduces the reader to a cast of hapless characters embroiled in situations that are increasingly difficult to define. In the title story, the speaker is a documentary filmmaker exalting in the singular opportunity to film Jackson, a former conductor beset by a sort of viral existentialism that results in all his past selves manifesting as corpses in the wake of his every movement. In “whiteroom” a man and his late wife have reduced their lives to the eternal simplicity of their pure white room in order to enter into a fraught immortality of the mind. In “A Tourist,” a man attracted by the memory of himself standing in a place before it fell to ruin “[visits] the grief of his past,” setting up camp in a desolate valley where he is haunted by a duo of shadowy others who attempt both communication and violence. To call these stories heady is an understatement of both their intent and form. Deeply influenced by continental philosophy (Kierkegaard is mentioned, Lacan is evoked, Simone Weil is quoted), the book also plays with the formal influence of Poe’s sensual grotesques, Dostoevsky’s tormented psychological realism, Borges' cerebral mythos. The results are ambitious and uneven. In “Winter Guests,” for example, the staff of a resort in the off-season report on the mounting tensions between a single guest and the beautiful female caretaker of a wheelchair-bound and totally bandaged patient. The story is haunting, suspenseful, and intricately detailed. Its philosophy lingers in the realization of its characters; its unanswerable questions rise organically from the setting of the winter seashore and the isolation of the nearly empty hotel. Other stories, however, are less successful and overwhelm the reader with their insistence on mingling Poe’s obsessive stylings with a more contemporary cynicism—or perhaps late-20th-century mass-produced weariness—reminiscent of Beckett or Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud. These influences make for an uneasy pairing, one whose tremendous potential is sometimes buried beneath a miasmic stylistic expression.

An intriguing, if uneven, debut.

Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-6287-287-0

Page Count: 192

Publisher: Dalkey Archive

Review Posted Online: June 30, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION

bookshelf

HOUSE OF LEAVES

by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...

bookshelf

An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.

Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.

Pub Date: March 6, 2000

ISBN: 0-375-70376-4

Page Count: 704

Publisher: Pantheon

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LITTLE BLUE KITE
by Mark Z. Danielewski

- BOOK REVIEW
HADES
by Mark Z. Danielewski

- BOOK REVIEW
HONEYSUCKLE & PAIN
by Mark Z. Danielewski

bookshelf

THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

bookshelf

The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.