A Short Review on a Slasher Book

Initially, I wasn't going to post anything about this book on my blog, but then I was like, meh. Let's talk about it. As most people know, I'm into horror, but that comes with a caveat: I do not care for gore or torture. To me, that is not scary it's gross. So you won't catch me talking about 'Hostel' or 'Saw' or anything where you're chopping off toes or anything like that. Gross. Of course, there are exceptions to that rule, in that I liked Texas Chainsaw Massacre and there were gratuitous amounts of violence in that, but I digress.

I'm talking about Security by Gina Wohlsdorf. Basically, you have this swank hotel called Manderley with the highest of the high tech security systems and a day before its lavish opening, all of the people working inside are getting systematically and graphically murdered, all the while the person narrating this is some unnamed person. There's a love story thrown in, there's some sex. There's all the makings of a decent B-Horror movie in book form. 

Anyway, I got to thinking about this book and while, overall, I was disappointed in the character development and the sections of rambling introspectiveness by some unidentified narrator, as a slasher book, this was good and inventive. When you get right down to it, you don't really get any concrete answers from the killers as to who they are or why. They just murder. That also made me think, do we ever really know why someone kills? Do we ever really understand a motive? Not really. They just do. Something just snapped and they just decided that killing people was the best way to handle their angst.

So, the underdeveloped characters irritated me because they were whiny. I really wanted to feel for Tessa and Brian, the main characters, I really, really wanted to, but like, shut up. That's all I kept coming back to. Just shut up. I guess part of my feeling is, if you're going to give me a slasher book, don't throw in some love story tripe and hope it pushes the story line. It didn't. They were flat and uninteresting. It was a little like the author tried so hard to push the girl as some strong, independent, workaholic, take no prisoners kind of woman and the guy was some over-emoting, knight in shining armor, desperate, albeit smart, dude. The author kind of tried too hard to reverse your typical horror stereotype of girl needs saving by the smart strapping guy and it felt too forced.

Now, having said that, there were things I really did enjoy. I really like the movies/books where you're seeing the story from the perspective of someone and you don't know who they are or what they role play. Plus, the unnamed narrator was funny. A little comedy in your gross. Win, win. I also liked the juxtaposition of graphic violence and graphic sex, showing how the two can very closely mirror the other. I hear collective giggling, but we're all adults here. It's true. Violence knows no bounds and in some ways, neither does sex. Violence, love, and sex are some of the things in life that transcend all barriers. You can experience them regardless of sexuality, race, social standing, religion, etc.

And in some ways, you can experience them because of those things.

Anyway, I'm rambling. In short, if you're looking for something earth shattering and thoughtful, look elsewhere. If you're looking for a good slasher book, I recommend this for sure, especially with Halloween on the horizon.

Enjoy your stay at Manderley...

If I Had (A Work of Short Fiction)

Maybe if I hadn’t turned my back, things would have come out differently.

If I had just faced the problem, if I had just waited that extra second, I wouldn’t be where I am right now. Maybe if I hadn’t turned away the way I did, or if I stepped a little more to the right, or even the left, I would still be standing.

Maybe if I had waited for one more breath before I spoke the words I did when I turned to walk away, I wouldn't be bleeding to death.

I didn’t feel the bullet at first. For a moment, I thought I had a spasm. I remember thinking, “Was I punched?” Then I fell to my knees, as if my body wasn’t my own anymore. Realization dawned as I hovered, a prisoner to a gravity pulling me forward from my knees, that was no spasm or shove. That was a bullet. Pain began to bloom.

Time slowed down to an agonizing crawl. I had all the time in the world to relive the choices that lead me to this moment, to wonder what would have happened if I had chosen differently. I would hold my daughter one more time. Nuzzle into her blonde ringlets, hear her musical laugh, and tell her I loved her. Call her my lady bug. Remind her that she’s my best girl.

A wild thought ran through my mind the nearer the ground came, a second chance. If only I could get a second chance, I would do this over. I would make this right. I wouldn’t be dying. If I had a second chance, I could fix this. I would change things.

I landed on the ground. Surprisingly, it didn’t hurt. The only I thing I felt was the pain in my back, but even that had begun to fade. The light around the edges of my vision began to dim as the story of my life faded so slowly to black.

Maybe if someone had given them a second chance, they would take it all back. Maybe they wouldn’t have stolen my life. Maybe they would have helped me instead of running away.

Maybe if I hadn’t turned my back, I would still be alive.

HEX and Human Tendency

I keep coming across these books that are accidentally relevant and I hope that never ever changes.

Who says horror can’t be thoughtful?

I discovered Hex by Thomas Olde Heuvelt one day while perusing Amazon for some horror/thriller reads and oh my lord am I glad I did. I’m going to do my best to explore this book without giving the plot away but that’s going to be a challenge.

“Whoever is born here is doomed to stay ‘til death. Whoever settles never leaves.”

The Grant family live in the sleepy town of Black Spring, just on the edge of Hudson Valley in New York. It’s almost Halloween time and the colors of fall take hold and turn the Valley into beautiful autumn fire. The town seems like the kind of place anyone would want to live and raise children except the town lives with a well kept secret. Her name is Katherine and both she and the town are cursed. Katherine is a centuries old witch who haunts the town, showing up at will wherever she feels, from your bedroom, to your grocer’s freezer and may stay there for days on end until she moves on to the next place.

But there’s something else.

Her eyes and mouth are sewn shut. Blind and mute she walks the town, this Black Rock Witch, and the townspeople sort of exist around her. They deal with her like you would a stray cat, ignore it and hope it goes away. In one instance, someone hangs a dishtowel over her face and goes about her business. Simple as that.

A group of teenagers living in the town grow impatient with the regulations set down by the Council about how they must all live and work around the witch. They do what teenagers do and they start messing with her, pushing the boundaries of the council and the witch. But as their antics increase, the habits of the witch start to become erratic. It’s almost as if, instead of wandering blind, she actually has been watching the people.

There’s more to this book than this horrifying idea of a cursed town and a mutilated witch. This book evoked so many emotions in me and I don’t even know where to start. At the crux of this book is one simple idea that has existed as long as humans have and has never failed in proving itself to be true: People never change. Things never change.

It’s more than just frustrated teenagers and complacent adults. Katherine represents a larger aspect of life. She’s the elephant in the room. A problem that exists that we refuse to acknowledge and talk about and change. At the base of who we are is the idea that we never get past our inherent urge to judge and assume and then punish. It isn’t until after we condemn someone that we see whether or not we were right or wrong. That basic human tendency to shoot first and ask questions later.

Once upon a time, Katherine was just a woman. Shitty people made her what she had become. She is existing proof that the sins of the past will always haunt us and that we will always shoot first and take something innocent and destroy it.

There are always exceptions to that characteristic, of course, but mob mentality rules. Where there are those that challenge the status quo, there are those that are punished for it. It’s a never ending cycle we’re caught in.

I cannot recommend Hex enough. It’s gripping and moving to the very last word. It’s creepy and unsettling and it plays on a range of emotions. It sheds light on problems that still exist in the world today.

Let’s acknowledge the faults in our histories and change them moving forward…

...instead of just covering them with dishtowels.

Perspective and The Book of Night Women

There’s a word that I always come back to in my life that I think is invaluable. It’s one of those words that, in my humble opinion, defines life. It defines life, and a life well lived, because it leads to the other words that are crucial to human existence.

Perspective.

Perspective leads to understanding, leads to sympathy, leads to empathy, leads to kindness, leads to caring, leads to education. You can only understand someone else’s perspective if you’ve tried to see the human experience through their eyes. You can only gain sympathy, or empathy, or both, when you’ve understood the human experience. You then become kind and you then seek the education to understand more about that experience.

Reading The Book of Night Women was a departure for me, a step outside of my comfort zone, if you will, but not entirely. Most of my life I have been fascinated by the Civil Right’s movements, the concept of slavery, and the struggles of people different than myself. I’m a white woman. I have absolutely no idea what it is like to look at the color of my skin and wonder if I’ll be judged on sight for that. The only discrimination I have faced is that I’m a woman and therefore seen as the weaker sex. But that’s a topic for another time.

‘Every negro walk in a circle. Take that and make of it what you will.’

The Book of Night Women follows a girl named Lilith who was born into slavery on a Jamaican sugar cane plantation in the late 1700s. Lilith learns early that she’s different, chiefly because she has green eyes. That trait in a slave girl means that  her father was likely a white man. Lilith also learns that she’s different because she feels in her soul a sort of darkness that she can’t quite explain. She just knows she feels it. The other black women on the plantation feel it in her, too. Through a series of experiences, some horrifying, some not, Lilith and the other women on the plantation come to understand how real and deep that darkness goes and how much of Lilith’s own strength it takes to combat that.

A girl becomes a woman, a forbidden love blossoms, a war is waged, and through it all, a perspective is gained.

This book was published in 2009 so I’m a little behind the curve in picking this up, but I am glad I did. Marlon James is a brilliant writer. He’s Jamaican which I think makes him a natural storyteller in its own, but he tells such a beautiful story. You feel for her. You ache for her. You get mad at her, and mad for her, and at other times, you feel just as confused as she is. But you understand her. That’s the most important part. And James doesn’t mince words either. He presents this human experience with all the language and imagery necessary to drive home to points of the time. This is the way it was. Period. It’s brutal, it’s upsetting, it’s compelling.

I think what I feel is what anyone feels, you don’t want to believe these kinds of things happened to people. You don’t ever want to believe that people are responsible for these kinds of hellish acts against other humans. I also think that we’re so removed from the time of slavery that it’s easy to fool ourselves into thinking that issues like this no longer exist. The problem, is they do. When you read this book, it gives you some perspective on what it took to break down the spirit of a human and drive them to believe that they are lesser. Lilith comments to herself that she finds herself thinking so many thoughts and having so many feelings, but how can she have them when she’s as dumb as they say she is? That kind of feeling still exists today. So much time was spent breaking down the human spirit and drilling home feelings of superiority and inferiority that the ghosts of the past still haunt us. The easiest way to eradicate those ghosts is to admit they existed, learn from them, and do what we can to protect the people most affected by it going forward.

This story is a fantastic retelling of history from a different part of the world at that time and it is worth every minute you spend on it.

Let’s not walk in circles any longer.

This Procrastinator's Journey

So this is, I guess, my first official post on this blog since ‘Flash. Wait. Fail.’, and I think I have yet to decide what my intended purpose for this blog is. I think my initial thought was that I was going use it as an avenue to post short works of fiction, but knowing myself, I won’t really only do that. I imagine I’ll use this as a way to post short fiction, of course, but perhaps write book reviews, too. Perhaps just to write about anything. I'm currently kicking around a few things I would like to write about over the next couple months, one of them being a review of the book I'm reading right now. It's changed my life in a very meaningful way. I guess, really, I'm just using this platform as an excuse to write in some capacity every once in awhile. Kind of like a Live Journal when that was a thing.

Is that still a thing?

Am I dating myself?

Anyway, I start this journey without a plan, but I’ve lived my whole life up to this point pretty much flying by the seat of my pants and it’s worked out ok for the most part. That’s also not a lie. I’m a procrastinator and I’m lazy and I decide things spur of the moment. Kind of like deciding to start this blog. I have done it my entire life. Once as a child, I just randomly decided to make a TV out of a cardboard box. It had changeable channels and a remote and everything.

So welcome to my blog and my Procrastinator’s Journey into actually doing something. Here’s hoping I can bring you some kind of fantastic musings or madness at bare minimum at least once a week. That is the name of the blog, after all. Here’s hoping you decide to read it and you get something out of it. I would like to give you all the feels.

I think at the base of our human existence is a vain hope that we can leave someone just a little better than we found them, even if it’s just by writing a few words.

Thanks for stopping in.