A deliciously creepy and intense story.
Strong (Burning the Sea, 2002) presents a disturbing and erotic narrative about the lives of an oddly matched married couple who host a teenage girl for the summer.
Ray Shepard is a prominent architect who marries Evelyn, a former circus employee/manicurist with a dark past, after he meets her while both attend a show under the big top. Evelyn’s arms and torso are heavily tattooed, and she keeps her skin hidden from Ray’s colleagues and friends; but Ray is sexually aroused by the images and colors beneath her long sleeves and buttoned-up collars. Evelyn knows she doesn’t fit into Ray’s privileged world and believes that his peers are more judgmental than her naïve husband realizes. Her clumsy attempts to adapt end in failure and resentment on her part, but Ray innocently believes that once his colleagues and friends get to know his wife, they’ll understand exactly why he married her. Enter Ingrid, a rebellious teenager who’s been suspended from a nearby boarding school for the summer after being caught with alcohol. Unconventional and emotionally isolated, she’s drawn to the flawed couple and becomes a pivotal participant in their dysfunctional world. Ingrid and Ray set up office in a room once called the fainting room, and she types for him while he works on a book about architecture. They soon discover common ground—a passion for hard-boiled detective stories—and Ingrid begins to construct her own fictional character, Detective Slade, a tough, observant character who comes to life as she tries to cope with her own uncertainties. Ray is disturbed by his increasing sexual attraction to Ingrid, and Ingrid’s titillated by her feelings for Evelyn. An increasingly murky and uncomfortable tale, Strong’s characters are complex and disturbing. Evelyn’s past attempts to fit in with her circus family are as darkly amusing as her attempts to be the perfect homemaker. Ray’s conventional upbringing, and his one early attempt at outright rebellion, contrasts well with Ingrid’s character, so full of feelings of alienation and anger.
A deliciously creepy and intense story.Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-1935439-76-9
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Ig Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
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
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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