Ghost Story

        

     "What's the worst thing you've ever done?"

"Well, I won't tell you that-- but I will tell you the worst thing that's ever happened to me...The most dreadful thing..."

                      Imagine a glass of water. Now imagine someone comes by every half-minute or so and drops a marble into that glass of water. Now, because we're imagining, imagine the lights in wherever you are are timed to drop lower as the glass fills with marbles, and when it overfills, you have the feeling something very bad is going to happen. Plink. Plink. Plink. Each marble driving you closer to some kind of unnerving, unsettling catharsis.

This is what it's like reading Ghost Story. 

                     I could talk about how it pays homage to the tradition of Gothic novels, how the unsettling nature of sexuality and guilt play a part in the work, but honestly, that's where I want to start. The marbles. The catharsis. Because that's the elegant part. Ghost Story is a brilliant book, a one-of-a-kind book, because it above so many other novels of its type understands subtlety and atmosphere. The book is permeated by it, but offers certain enticing and readable qualities that set it slightly above its drier predecessors. It's not a tight story, but what it lacks in tightness and tension it more than makes up in sheer atmospheric dread and richness of setting. Ghost Story nests its stories, adds stories to the overall framework, and all of it is a brilliant, if unsettling and chilling read. If ever there were a book worth tracking down, worth finding and reading voraciously, this is it

More, as always, below. 

The Fifty Year Sword

           

     The rundown is as follows: While The Fifty Year Sword is a great book and a good example of Mark Z. Danielewski's unique way of telling a story while turning it inside out, the gimmick of five separate narrators overlapping with different-colored quotation marks actually takes away from the story. By cluttering the relatively-short book with an unneeded visual gimmick, Danielewski does himself a disservice and creates a minor turn-off for people who would normally be into this kind of book. In its favor is the fact that it's essentially a children's book for adults, and hiding under the simplistic language is a genuinely creepy story that even when you guess the eventual ending manages to hold its tone and deliver something chilling. Despite the gimmick, the childlike language coupled with the eerie imagery creates a horror story that is at once instantly engaging and easy to understand. 

           The bad bit of course is the gimmick, which obscures a really cool book by having five people talk in nested quotation marks to tell a story. Please, once and future authors who read this blog, don't ever do this. Don't ever have your narrators narrate nested like this. More, as always, below.