People who think they don’t like horror stories are going to be very surprised.
Three novellas by a little-known master of horror visit luxurious locations in the twilight zone.
In his introduction to this collection, Daniel Handler finds himself at a loss for words to describe the work of Ingalls (Times Like These, 2005, etc.)—the best he can come up with is “psychological.” So he writes to the author, an American in her late 70s who has lived in the U.K. for more than 50 years. She suggests “a combination of fable, fairytale, and Romance….Maybe that is Gothic.” Whatever their genre, the stories are wry, elegant, and terrifying. The first, I See a Long Journey—also the longest and the best—is Edith Wharton meets Shirley Jackson. It begins in a leisurely fashion, describing how Flora happened to marry James, the scion of “one of the richest families on the Eastern seaboard,” detailing the marriages of the other siblings and getting into a bit of family politics. When Flora and James decide to take a vacation, with their bodyguard, even that unfurls slowly, with the couple dawdling in the airport gift shop buying gifts for their children before they have even left. When they get to their destination and begin to while away the days shopping, eating, and visiting a local oracle, what we have suspected is confirmed—Flora has a raging secret crush on the bodyguard. You will have absolutely no idea where this story is going until it gets there, though when you read it again, as you well might, you see the author almost came out and told you several times. The second is almost a Rocky Horror Picture Show setup—a couple gets lost on their way to visit the eponymous Friends in the Country and winds up fogged in at a mansion with bizarre company and very, very bad food. On Ice sends a nice American girl on a ski vacation with her German boyfriend—but it is certainly not about skiing.
People who think they don’t like horror stories are going to be very surprised.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-94043-644-9
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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