Storytelling and Supernatural

“There are two types of ghost stories…tales of revenge and tales of love cut short.”

Kill Creek, by Scott Thomas, 2017 Inkshares

A horror novel, in a genre saturated with tricks and treats pushing the limits, does not need to innovate to be a great horror novel. Scott Thomas’s 2017 Kill Creek is testament to this. From venturing onto the following paths cleared by the masterpieces of the genre, Thomas has created a modern horror masterwork.

A Mysterious Invitation – Sam McGarver, an established horror author whose career and personal live is reeling receives an invitation from an eccentric young media producer known for his boundary-pushing content. The push this time is to film and stream live an interview of four prominent horror novelists in an abandoned haunted mansion on Halloween night. If the pitch sounds clichéd, the cash offer of one hundred thousand dollars is not.

A Haunted (?) House with a Dark History – Sam attests to the other writers the house on Kill Creek is “just a campfire story told by teenagers.” But the actual history is pure evil if not haunted. The house was the site of an 1863 double murder of the builder and his wife, a freed slave, by confederate soldiers. The house’s final owners, Rebecca and Rachel Finch, requisitioned a paranormal researcher to write a best-selling nonfiction book in 1980s, with the cliff hanger of never discovering one of the sister’s fate.

Thomas walks the line to instill indecision in his readers as to if the house on Kill Creek is haunted or it is merely suggestion. There is a wind that doesn’t rustle the branches of a tree. The temperature is almost too cool inside the house. There are subtle, indiscernible scents emitting from the sinks. And we are only allowed to process these insinuations through a cast of narrators wavering on their own beliefs, who are suppressive in accepting what is happening to them.

So, we are left alone to decide if we believe or not. But that’s the allure of the supernatural: the agency to truly believe or just suspend it for the sake of enjoying the stories.

A Cast of Characters with Varying Motives – Elevating the novel’s discomfort is a the writers congregating in the house for the night with diverging underlying motives. There is the lure of money, but also the potential for notoriety from the interview for each writer’s own ends. One needs to ensure his work doesn’t fade into obscurity after he is gone. Another needs to ensure that his publisher still considers him worthy. Still another needs to prove that her own brand of feminine darkness has its place of prominence in a genre with a tradition of championing men. Sam’s own motive is opaque even to himself. Yet inside the house, the deep secret he has suppressed his entire life that led him to the dark genre is drawn to the surface of the narrative.

A complimentary disquiet is how much each guest grants credence to Kill Creek’s history and the alleged evil that lives within it. Much of the story is verifiable, and they all owe their livelihoods to the supernatural. Still, distrust forms in each’s hesitancy towards sharing their own beliefs and experiences to the group. Even surrounded by colleagues, each makes an initial choice to face what the house offers alone. 

A Regeneration of a Fading Horror – One of the writers in Thomas’s story walks through the house’s study and reflects on the collection of books and reflects on the need to write our stories. He concludes that we do it “To live on. To exist when we stop existing…To be remembered.”

This novel’s greatest power is the exploration of how storytelling is the lifeforce of the supernatural and evil. And if its power is derived in the telling, does that power die without the telling, or does is lie dormant until word of it is spoken or written again? Can stories create evil where none existed?

The central theme of the first horror novel I read, Stephen King’s It, captivated in me the idea that evil is regenerated across generations. It’s exhilarating to read another novel that decades later regenerates my belief in the symbiotic relationship of evil and story.

The Final Shock – Decades of the “Oh no, the killer’s actually still alive?!” endings to books and films have desensitized the horror audience into rendering the final page/scene shock nearly ineffectual. Nearly, because every now and again a work comes along (like Sleepaway Camp) that genuinely delivers the genuinely unexpected final jolt to the system, reminding us how pleasurable ending this way is. Add Kill Creek to this exclusive list.

An Elegy – Kill Creek is an elegy of a haunted house reminiscent of Richard Matheson’s Hell House, with shades of Stephen King’s It in its regeneration of horror, and an ode (whether intentional or not) to Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado.” It pricks the sensitivities of horror fans and nourishes them with a dark tale that satisfies all the way through to its evil end.

Foremost of My Reading Regrets

On Chesil Beach, by Ian McEwan, 2007 Anchor Books

Among my many reading repentances is to have known certain masterful writers by reputation only. Experiencing Ian McEwan’s prose for just the first time in 2024 is now foremost among them. I purchased his 2004 novel Saturday because I was intrigued by an entire novel dedicated to that day of the week that presents the highest combination of possibilities and variables in our lives but shadowed by the underlying anxieties to not waste it. The Children Act is a study on how the detachment of the Court tries to abate the waves of religious zeal and personal liberty, and if it can ever impart dispassionate judgement for either. As affecting as both these narratives are, On Chesil Beach is his most compelling work I have read so far.

McEwan keeps company with Virginia Woolf and Ernest Hemingway in his ability to distill a cultural and historical zeitgeist into a character or singular plotline. On Chesil Beach’s historical and cultural context is a night in 1962 England, the liminal space between the lingering conservative patriotism of post-WWII and the social liberation of the late 1960s. The present tense of the story is the first night that his protagonists Florence and Edward are spending together as newlyweds.

As the evening progresses between the two, readers are privy to the reflections of both, interposed with flashbacks from their lives that led them to this moment. From these, we can see how incongruent they really are, in their passions, beliefs, and expectations for the future. Returning to the present, it’s revealed how much they have refused to share with each other, especially expectations on this the most pivotal night in both their lives. Even the two of them are uncertain if the reluctance is to protect their own or the other’s ego.

The flashpoint of the tension revolves around sex, and reading an honest reflection of the topic’s inherent anxieties is therapeutic. Thank you, Mr. McEwan, for sparing us the clichés, euphemisms, and artful suggestions. Even better, there is an absence of mystification and glamorization. Sex means vulnerability and uncertainty, and it’s Florence’s and Edward’s respective responses to it that turn them into each other’s unwitting adversary. Love has little to nothing to do with it; the question becomes if it ever really does.

Sex is also framed as the physical manifestation of ceaseless expectation. At the height of conflict, Florence realizes that “It was the brooding expectation of her giving more, and because she didn’t, she was a disappointment for slowing everything down. Whatever new frontier she crossed, there was always another waiting for her. Every concession she made increased the demand, and then the disappointment.” Even from an expansive view and after sixty years of progress has passed, have we truly been able to liberate ourselves fully from the demands of sex, either culturally or in our own relationships?

McEwan also reminds us that, as unwilling as we may be to accept it, sometimes our most intimate thoughts, desires, and fears are hidden deepest from the ones we hold the closest. How much pain and regret rises with them with they inevitably surface? McEwan’s protagonists/antagonists discover exactly that this night on Chesil Beach.

Regrets. I know my own regret for not reading McEwan until this moment in my reading life will give way to my enthusiasm in knowing there is still so much from him I have yet to read. I have no doubt I will enjoy the experience.

Her Intimate, Deferential Gaze

Death Comes for the Archbishop, by Willa Cather, 1927 Alfred A Knopf, Inc.

Upon reading 1927’s Death Comes for the Archbishop, my third Willa Cather novel, I am convinced of my previous notion that she is one of American literature’s preeminent voices, in company with Hemingway and Wharton. While absent of the brazen metaphor of the former, or the gilded wit of the latter, Cather’s prose has an unadorned, sincere intimacy that allows for a deeper readerly connection than with her contemporaries. 

Cather first creates an affinity between her protagonists and readers. Here we take the road to the mid 1800s American Southwest with her Catholic missionary, Father Jean Marie Latour. Steadfast, conservative, and dignified, Father Latour is a static character. Such a distinction cannot be taken in this case as a discredit. On the contrary, he serves as the constant in the mirage of shifting social, political, and physical landscapes of his time and place. After receiving his papal assignment for the Apostolic Vicar of New Mexico, the French priest devotes his years cultivating relationships with Native Americans, Mexican landholders, fellow priests (both rogue and faithful), and the various frontiersmen pushing the young nation westward. 

Most admirable in this story is the deferential gaze towards all groups of people traveling through the narrative. Cather is not a dispassionate sociologist, nor a patronizing admirer of any of her characters. An elegant example of this balance is the mutual respect between Father Latour and his Native American guide Jacinto. Sitting by the fire after a day of travel, the former reflects that he “seldom questioned Jacinto about his thoughts or beliefs. He didn’t think it polite, and he believed it to be useless. There was no way in which he could transfer his own memories of European civilization into the Indian mind, and he was quite willing to believe that behind Jacinto there was a long tradition, a story of experience, which no language could translate to him.” 

Within the boundary of a paragraph, Cather emanates a wisdom about the acceptance and respect of our differences that the darker parts of our American history reveal too many fail to grasp, much less accept. 

Along with Cather as a respectful observer of diverse human relationships, there is the beautiful conveyance of the physical landscape she is renowned for. In this regard, Death Comes for the Archbishop may be her most triumphant work. The plot itself, with its crisscrossing of wild country, lends itself ideally to the opportunity. In prose rich with symbolism, she writes that “...here there was always activity overhead, clouds forming and moving all day long. Whether they were dark and full of violence, or soft and white with luxurious idleness, they powerfully affected the world beneath them. The desert, the mountains and mesas, were continually reformed and re-coloured by the cloud shadows. The whole country seemed fluid to the eye under this constant change of accent, this ever-varying distribution of light.” 

Cather’s work creates a dichotomy. The saturation of folklore, superstitions, and religious myth border magical realism at times. Even still, the readers are still cast into the grating and callous reality of the era’s American southwest.

Absent however, until the concluding pages of the novel, are the explicit mentions of the social and political issues that plagued the historical era. Therein lies the grace of Willa Cather’s writing; she gives us the story without condemnation of her characters, and the opportunity to go forth with our own conclusions.

Death Comes for the Archbishop is a story of intimacy, an intimacy with her characters that radiates outward toward one with the landscape. Her characters are bonded through life and death to that landscape. In the end, the readers are bonded with both.

The Gothic Genre's Heir Apparent

Sarah Perry’s third novel Melmoth conjures the same feelings as peering into an abandoned well. There is something just beyond your perception. But and the longer you look into its depth, the darkness deepens indefinitely into that contained space. 

Melmoth, by Sarah Perry, Custom House 2018

Likewise, Perry’s work is a contained space of under 300 pages. Within these, she follows the footsteps of Melmoth, the woman who witnesses, then subsequently denies, the resurrection of Jesus Christ, and who is cursed to traverse the Earth until His second coming. Since then, Melmoth manifests as a dark-cloaked apparition forced to bear witness to our history’s most tragic religious and political condemnations. She attends Mary I’s persecution of protestants, Nazi Germany’s condemnation of Jews, and the Armenian genocide in the first World War. Through each tragedy, a flawed and conflicted character is surrendered to be Melmoth’s guide to each tragedy.

Finally, we arrive with Melmoth in present-day Prague, where Essex native Helen is serving her self-exile for the sins of her own past. After Helen unwittingly finds herself in possession of first-hand accounts of Melmoth the Witness, she finds out that knowing of Melmoth is inviting the Witness to harvest her own guilty conscience. The difference with Helen’s sins is they are wholly personal, and she has her companions to pull her away from Melmoth’s possession and her own penitence. 

Through centuries, Perry’s Melmoth thrives on guilt. This emotion, and its consequences, becomes the novel’s underlying layer. It is the occupant in the blackness. Perceiving it, the reader is left with more questions than answers. How guilty are the agents of society’s collective crimes? Does guilt recede over time, or does it lay in wait? Does confession and forgiveness wholly absolve us of our transgressions? And how do we reconcile with the ones we cannot bring ourselves to confess? The novel asks us what we have all asked ourselves. “What might they say, if they knew?”

I scarcely sense darkness rising from pages, and it’s been many reading years since I have. Stephen King’s It, Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, and Peter Straub’s Ghost Story all possess that power. Perry’s novel joins these contemporaries transcending the “show, don’t tell” writing dogma. This novel makes us feel the fear, uncertainty, and shock every time the apparition of Melmoth surfaces. 

Still, even weighed down with dread,  the novel is clothed in elegant prose. In fact, Perry’s sentences shine all the more for this backdrop. Lines such as “Let them be the song, and I the dying echo,” and “Everything before it was prologue: everything after, a footnote,” are there for the reader to hold onto.

Melmoth is an heir apparent to the enchantment of the Gothic novel. Against the classics of the genre, it is more affecting than most of them. The rich historical accounts, the use of the epistolary form, and the fall into madness paint a dark masterpiece.

Thank you Sarah Perry for reminding us of reading’s magic, that hypnotizes and suspends us in the written word’s realms. I turn the last page, switch my lamp off, but still Melmoth lingers, as I peer out into the darkness.

A Terrifying but Transcendent Novel

Origingally published Ensaio sobre a cegueira, Editorial Caminho 1995 published in English as Blindness, Harvill Press 1997, by José Saramago

I sometimes acquire a propensity to read the right books at the most histrionic moments. Often, I dismiss it as happenstance; read enough novels and Kairos will unwittingly intervene on some of their behalves. Pennywise and I met on a rainy Saturday when I was a teenager. I spent the first night in The Shining’s Overlook Hotel as snow piled up outside my bedroom window.

As thick as the air has become in 2020, the risk will possibly, or hopefully, never be higher for a written work to send tremors through our already-frayed sensibilities. From the first pages of José Saramago’s 1995 novel Blindness, I felt that tremor being carried on by the furor of this present year. As such, this is not the novel to read in 2020, but one to be read for its invaluable benefit to our cultural and personal posterity.

Saramago is a discerning purveyor of a hypothetical sociology, as he infects the novel’s city with a contagious but physiologically and psychologically inexplicable blindness. The terror of the pandemic (that inherently loathsome word now the most despised in 2020 vernacular) is eclipsed by the terror of witnessing what depths humanity will descend if stripped of eyesight. Far from straying into just the metaphorical, Saramago surveys the functional and operational elements of a physically blind society. His meticulous rendering is often a disagreeable one, as it is cringingly explicit and unfiltered. How do the blind find food? Where do they go to use the bathroom once utilities shut down? And how much blood will flow from the instinct to survive? The answers to all those inquiries are found in this novel.

Revolving primarily around the handful of initial characters to be struck blind, Saramago’s plot follows them into a government-issued quarantine. The most manifest theme from their collective experience is how brittle and superficial society’s social structure is, and how one variable can demolish it. Designations and titles have lost all validity. Through a shared incapacity, a doctor, prostitute, pharmacist, hotel worker, an elderly veteran, and an orphaned child are bonded together. All are anchored by the doctor’s wife, the only person known to have not lost her sight. A telling liberty taken by Saramago is the absence of their names. Not even the setting, city or country, is graced with a name. In a world gone blind, the answer to “What’s in a name?” could only be frivolous.

The genius of his work is that at no times does the reader find the depravity of his characters, or of the society as a whole, as unbelievable outcomes. The criminality that ensues, the sordidness of living conditions, the evaporation of formal authority and order, none are interpreted as hyperbole. What makes this work outright terrifying is that a reader has no other choice but to subscribe to even its darkest elements as inevitabilities.

Thankfully, through both the physical and metaphorical darkness of his novel, Saramago does not forsake his reader of all hope for the goodness of the human heart. Instead, he acts more as a comforting companion helping us to absorb this distressing hypothetical, rather than being the objective mind creating it. If he had opted for the latter entirely, the terror of it would have been overwhelming. Instead intuitions such as “…we say Fine, even though we may be dying, and this is commonly known as taking one’s courage in both hands, a phenomenon that has only been observed in the human species,” guides us through the hard pages. 

As if this companionable narrator wasn’t enough comfort, the English major and book fanatic in me was flattered that Saramago was accommodating enough to include an ode to the written word, and its transcendence even as civilization buckles. After over 300 dispiriting pages, I needed that scene of the doctor’s wife reading to her companions by the soft light of an oil lamp.

Finally, I acknowledge the tacky irony of reading a novel titled Blindness in the year 2020, and the perversion of coming across in 2020 a 1995 novel about a pandemic. But isn’t it true that the most transcendent works gain potency by being prophetic as years pass? Brave New World and 1984 resonate more today than when they were published. Blindness does the same.  

The Purest Literary Metaphor

The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway, 1926 Charles Scribner’s Sons

My dog Scooby, born 2006

For readers being introduced to Hemingway the first time, his writing style will be initially perceived as stark, and lacking the luster of his contemporaries. What I learned in reading The Sun Also Rises, in a series of epiphanies occurring about once every ten pages, is that this is the purest form of literary metaphor I’ve ever read. It’s a purity that can only be filtered through Hemingway’s unadorned writing style. Any decoration of prose would only have weakened his voice. As such, a century later his voice retains all its power.  

On the surface, The Sun Also Rises is about a group of expatriates scattered and drifting from their native countries after World War I, the war that was to end the rest of them. Their drifting empties them into Pamplona, Spain, in time to bear witness to the yearly fiesta’s fireworks, running of the bulls, and bull fights, while saturating their experience with drink. Through the unaffected voice of American war veteran Jake Barnes, Hemingway’s characters accept and suppress their feelings of artificiality, hopelessness, and restlessness. Hemingway’s command is that those feelings partake of a gradual transference as the pages are turned. By the end, the invested reader, as I was, is left internalizing the remnants of those feelings left in the novel’s wake. Enhancing the story’s effects is the taut line of unrequited love braided into the narrative. All the other feelings the characters ache from are bound by this.  

With all the bravado and masculinity surrounding the Hemingway ethos, The Sun Also Rises proffers Hemingway’s heightened understanding of vulnerability, and that the craft of writing is the most pertinent way for expressing it. Throughout the narrative, Jake fortifies a wall built with impassivity and a front of control. Hemingway allows the reader to peer over it. In a revelation of what lies on the other side, Jake reflects that “It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing.”

My naivety was in believing that this novel was truly going to be about bullfighting; the actual bullfighting scenes span only a few pages. Hemingway, in the greatest display of his mastery, renders this ferocious sport with a simple elegance that only he could do. From his hand, both the sport and the writing perform a graceful choreography. A moment it which the reader anticipates being appalled transforms into a moment of admiration.

That transformation of what is expected into an understanding of truth is Hemingway’s power. We expect to read of the characters’ drunken, distant excursion to a celebratory week of festivities. In truth, the emptiness of life clings to them. As gripping as Hemingway’s transcriptions of the drunken turmoil, or the velocity of the celebration are, still more affecting are the quiet moments after these scenes where Jake’s anxieties and confusion drift back in. Being a perceptive narrator, he sees those same anxieties reflecting back at him from his companions. And yet, as much camaraderie is involved, the coping process remains a singular endeavor.

Finally, to return to the metaphor, Hemingway is deft enough for it to escape an immersed reader’s notice. Jake Barnes’s physical and psychological pain from the war manifests itself acutely. There is a scene, near the end of this novel that encapsulates how this novel is metaphorical of that conflict. Jake muses that “In the morning it was all over. The fiesta was finished…The square was empty and there were no people on the streets. A few children were picking up rocket-sticks in the square.” In this novel, a group of loosely bound acquaintances from various nations and motives converge on a European town for a time of incessant clamor, chaos, and danger. As Jake knows, the ensuing quiet is just as unsettling.  

Reading The Sun Also Rises in 2020 is a reminder that the human reactions to transformative events remain the same. Nearly a century after its publication, feelings of restlessness and uncertainty are as prevailing today as they were when Hemingway so powerfully rendered them.

A Love Affair

The most vital advice I ever received about writing wasn’t directly about writing. It wasn’t about how to develop characters, prewrite, or structure a plot. Instead, it was advice about reading from my charismatic communications professor. One afternoon, with the signature flourish of his voice and sweeping hand gestures, he asked my class of 70 undergrads “Who here considers themselves readers? I mean, you read everything you can get your hands on. Reading to you is just as important as eating every day. It’s part of who you are.”

Only two students were bold enough to raise their hands. My 21-year-old self wasn’t one of them. “That’s what I figured,” he remarked. “There’s usually about two or three in any class. For rest of you, I tell you that readers have such an advantage over nonreaders, so I challenge you all to become readers. Read everything you can!”

Accepting his challenge on that day was the most valuable decision of my writing life. Stephen King says in On Writing that “Being swept away by a combination of great story and great writing – of being flattened, in fact – is part of every writer’s necessary formation. You cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you.” Over the past decade, so many writers have swept me away and illuminated how great writing works, and what makes it impactful and magical. 

I began by rereading J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, my childhood favorite. Aside from the captivating adventure, I recognized how this fantasy masterwork uses a reluctant protagonist to traverse the geographically and historically complex Middle Earth. As intricate as Tolkien’s world is, Bilbo’s tale makes it accessible to young readers. He introduces us to an alluring world without detracting from the mystery of it. So, we keep discovering with The Lord of the Rings.  

Great writers create beautiful narratives out of the darkest of times. Reading All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr immersed me in a narrative from World War II. He contrasts that backdrop with a beautiful and heartbreaking story of love and hope that proves all the more enchanting from the darkness that surrounds it.

Reading Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse was when the term metaphor transcended from a literary device into the way a writer infuses magic and power into her settings and characters. The Ramsey property becomes a metaphor for a war that shook the foundations of an entire generation. I read, spellbound, as “The nights now are full of wind and destruction; the trees plunge and bend and their leaves fly helter skelter…”

Then there is opportunity to preserve, for posterity’s sake, the idiosyncrasies of a particular era. The best writers capture the mindset, language, and attitude of an era. That’s why if an English professor asks on the first day of class what everyone’s favorite book is, there are always students that say The Great Gatsby or The Catcher in the Rye. For me, I fell in love with Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere because she captures what it meant to live, as I did, as a child in pre-9/11 America. 

And while my first love is fiction, reading nonfiction has bestowed invaluable lessons in form and craft. My professor’s words were to read everything you can get your hands on. I’ll refine that to say read every subject that is meaningful and fascinating; what can be learned about the craft from nonfiction writers is boundless.

Each essay or story I read by David Sedaris is a reminder that writing’s most important function is a search for a deeper understanding of one’s self, relationships, and environment. And if that search can bring you or others a smile or a laugh, the process will be all the more rewarding.

Nonfiction also reinforces that the most powerful writing takes the intimacy of personal narratives and threads them into a larger cultural tapestry. Just as Hemingway’s characters personalize the first World War, or Harper Lee’s Jim and Scout grow up in the South, the best nonfiction stories help paint a cultural and historical mural. Sam Quinones 2015 exposé Dreamland is a masterful work that gives readers a dynamic understanding of American’s opioid epidemic by fully developing snapshots of all the personal stories that shape it. On that same subject, J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy follows the author’s own personal narrative of his family and rural community as it struggles with this crisis in its own unique ways. Both works are emblematic in how, regardless of how grand the subject matter, the best writing is intimate and personal.

Finally, I remember the winter afternoon, sitting in a corner of the Yorktown, Virginia library when I read that “Words were more real to me than real life, and certainly more interesting,” from Robert Gottlieb’s Avid Reader. I set the book down, realizing that at last someone had purified into one sentence what I had been feeling my entire life. My hope is that all writers approach their craft with the same sentiment because for writers, words are reality.

While these weeks are difficult, they grant us the opportunity to deepen our most intimate and important relationships. I’m indulging in my love affair with the written word, discovering how much more it has to teach me.

Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro

Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro, Vintage Books 2005

Rarely has a writer unthreaded the woven intricacies of an intrapersonal conflict with as much deftness as Kazuo Ishiguro did with the protagonist of his 1989 novel The Remains of the Day. With the same dexterity, he sews together a beautiful patchwork of relationships, however strained at the seams by the incessant tug of an appalling inevitability.

Angled from the hesitant perspective of his adult narrator Kathy, she begins by recounting her time at Hailsham, her idyllic preparatory school/home at an undisclosed location in the English countryside. Yet it’s only a collective, sheltered ignorance that permitted her and best friends Ruth and Tommy to believe in the idealism of their childhoods. Ishiguro methodically wipes away the halcyon glow of Hailsham. Revealed underneath are the dark layers of truth and reality undermining their relationships.

As their years together conclude in their late teens, they concede (each by different means and to varying degrees of success) to the most fatalistic of these truths: what they were created (yes, created) to be. The latter portion of the narrative traces their attempts at reconciliation to that acceptance, and how they can salvage love under the threat of fate.

This novel is dichotomous in its success. Here Ishiguro shows again he is a virtuoso in fashioning characters worthy of our full affections. Yet within the context of this intimacy, he uncloaks a society that dehumanizes them in the most mortifying way. Readers’ hearts will break and hands tremble in the reading of it. 

The Nightingale, by Kristin Hannah

The Nightingale, by Kristin Hannah, St. Martin’s Press 2015

As one of Kristin Hannah’s supporting characters confesses to her novel’s heroine that “Some stories don’t have happy endings. Even love stories. Maybe especially love stories,” this one is heartbreakingly, albeit beautifully, so.

The heroine we fall in love with is Hannah’s young Frenchwoman Isabelle Rossignol, who proves so audacious and cunning with beauty to match, that she could be an heir apparent to Rebecca Sharp herself. While both leading ladies carry an indomitable will, the former illuminates the page with the purity of her convictions.

When Nazi Germany steamrolls into France to impose its will during the second World War, Isabelle’s iron defiance will endure anything to resist and undermine. This anything involves the looming threat of imprisonment and death, as she cloaks her identity under the pseudonym “The Nightingale.” With this guise, she generates shock and awe through the Nazi ranks as the elusive French resistor establishing an intricate network of safe houses and escape routes to aid downed Allied airmen escape Nazi-occupied France. Thus, she’s transfigured from an inconsiderable daughter of a Paris bookseller, to an epitome for French opposition.

Apposed to Isabelle’s narrative is that of her elder sister Vianne and her daughter Sophie, left behind when the men of France answered the summons of war. From an initial failure to accept the full ramifications of the war, a series of harrowing atrocities against Vianne and those she loves induces her to become a reluctant heroine herself. The two sisters’ stories eclipse each other as the war continues, as they traverse the perils of a country desolated by the ensuing pain. Each page leads them into darker actualities of that pain.

This story gains power like a wave racing towards the shore through a storm. We can foresee the resolution drawing near, but still shudder when it arrives and overwhelms. While the historical fiction genre may be saturated in the World War II era, a heartbreaking tale delivered by superior writing will stand luminous. The Nightingale deserves a place on the shelf next to Anthony Doerr’s 2015 Pulitzer Prize-winning All the Light we Cannot See. Hannah grants a depth to emotions and a richness to the language seldom found in a novel.

In Sunlight or in Shadow: Stories Inspired by the Paintings of Edward Hopper, edited by Lawrence Block

In Sunlight or in Shadow: Stories Inspired by the Paintings of Edward Hopper, edited by Lawrence Block, Pegasus Books 2016

If there’s one American artist worthy of being honored by writers from virtually the entire literary panorama, Edward Hopper is deserving of the distinction.

Each writer blends his or her own color into a chosen Hopper piece, to the effect of an enriched narrative for both. The mercurial and rapid plot line of every story elevates the intrigue. And while a collective urgency unites this collection, the array of themes inspired by his art is equally compelling. Including murder mysteries, historical intrigue, domestic dramas, and even horror, the fiction genres manifest inherently from the works.

As a testament to Edward Hopper’s (born 1882) timelessness, these stories are set throughout the twentieth century and into our present day without a compromise to his cultural ethos. Some writers incorporate the scene depicted into their stories, while some cast the painting itself into a supporting role influencing the resolution. Still others utilize his paintings as mood-evoking backdrops. All three approaches prove successful.

Despite your druthers for a genre, this collection is so absorbing that your favorite story is always the one you’re with. Each one alternates between moments of captivating light, pursued by moments of foreboding darkness. They echo the dynamic range of musings and emotions Hopper’s work evokes, from anticipation to nostalgia, from anxiety to serenity. It’s a resplendent literary tribute to America’s preeminent artistic voice.

The Man in the High Castle, by Philip K. Dick

The Man in the High Castle, by Philip K. Dick, G.P. Putnam’s Sons 1962

A friend more fluent in science fiction recommended years ago Philip K. Dick’s popular novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Actually coming to read one of his novels was much more serendipitous than a suggestion. A vacation to Asheville, North Carolina meant a customary visit to a local bookshop. Malaprops Bookstore/Café was a charming gem, and its “Blind Date with a Bookseller” was too inviting to say no to. Each book on this shelf is wrapped and detailed to entice.

Among others, “resonant” and “haunting” are pitch-perfect descriptors for this 1962 novel. It’s an intersection of narratives traversing across the nonpareil what-if scenario of the twentieth century, wherein the Axis powers defeat the Allies in the second World War. Japan and Germany’s Third Reich supplant the United States and Soviet Union as the global superpowers. Both nations’ dominance has burgeoned into holding split control of the United States.

Philip K. Dick orchestrates his plot from multiple vantage points, including a German double agent, American shop owner, and a Japanese government official. Their lives illuminate the fears, discontents and volatility of an imagined world, both routine and grandiose in scale. In 1962, his characters reflect the Cold War mentality of the latter half of the 1900s. While the players in his fictionalization are different, the harrowing potentials oscillate toward the actual. Most unsettling is how suggestive they are of our past and present. Like Philip K. Dick’s cast, we harbor today, as we have for over seventy years, an acute fear of dubious regimes and nuclear proliferation.

The singular grace against such portentous times is the characters’ inclinations to retract faith in the State, and bestow it onto the personal liberations of relationships, literature, and religion. Still, the same characters succumb to, and are victimized by, the same prejudices that arise from generations of unrest and war. Regardless of the variant of government or political party holding power at any given present, such prejudices have waned little, if at all.

The Man in the High Castle is a tautly-written account where after our sigh of relief of what did not come to pass, we hold our breath, imagining what still may. 

The Last Hurrah, by Edwin O'Connor

The Last Hurrah, by Edwin O’Connor, Atlantic, Little, Brown Books 1956

Foremost, O’Connor’s political masterpiece is a 400+ page eulogy to the singular power of charisma. Frank Skeffington, as mayor of an unnamed (though thinly guised) Northeast city is, dependent on whose opinion is sought, a loathsome or lovable, extortionate or benevolent rascal of a politician. With a proud Irish heritage as the bedrock of his convictions, he’s held a bedazzling sway over the populace of his constituents for the first half of the twentieth century.

O’Connor’s novel, published in 1956, opens in the twilight of Skeffington’s political reign, having announced at age 70 that he will again defend his title. This public declaration is coupled with a personal invitation extended to his nephew Adam Caulfield to join his campaign in an observer role. A newspaper cartoonist disinterested in politics, Adam’s is a reluctant acceptance. His initial hesitation however, is converted to transfixed admiration in the heat and madness of the campaign, and as he bears witness to the ingenuity of its master.

Explicitly and entirely the irrepressible head of the city’s political machine, Skeffington’s façade as such dissolves against his nephew’s shrewdness as the race culminates towards election day. The mayor, in unconscious response, softens his guard, behind which lies a quiet humanity. O’Connor invites us to see the desperation and loneliness concealed behind the dual veils of power and action. When such veils become backdrops, the emotions become exponentially more affecting.

The Last Hurrah is a venerable peer to Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men. The astute introspection of the latter on Southern politics is matched by its Northern contemporary. As long as politics paint the American aesthetic, such novels and the lessons contained therein, will illuminate the canvas.

Zero K, by Don DeLillo

Zero K, by Don DeLillo, Scribner 2016

Having never read DeLillo’s pasts works, this reading was a tabula rasa endeavor, and the refreshing clarity of his linguistic style compliments perfectly the audacity of his vision.

DeLillo’s imagining follows a restrained, if not completely objective, narrator Jeffrey Lockhart as he answers the summons of his billionaire financier father Ross to a clandestine desert facility. Here, in no-man’s land, Ross reveals to his son how he is a principle benefactor of a scientific research group there perfecting the freezing and preservation of live human beings. From there, virtually limitless time can be had to reverse-engineer the cellular process of aging. Thus, death becomes anachronistic.

Jeffrey’s natural uncertainty is compounded by the revelation that his own stepmother has volunteered to take this pilgrimage of transcendence. In the wake of her decision, Ross and Jeffrey are left to balance the worthiness of her natural life against the assumed perfect being she will be reimaged as in an undetermined future. Darker still is contemplating the invitation to join her.

The minimalistic approach to the prose, nearly void of emotion, elicits his readers to explore their own feelings and beliefs on such weighted topics. And in these pages are true heavyweights: death, immortality and the inevitability of mankind towards destruction. “Zero K” is a harrowing premonition that, regardless of its validity, is unsettling in its delivery.

Place this novel on the shelf next to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and H.G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau, works simultaneously breathtaking in vision and horrifying in implication.

THE LAST PAINTING OF SARA DE VOS, by Dominic Smith

THE LAST PAINTING OF SARA DE VOS, by Dominic Smith, Picador 2016

THE LAST PAINTING OF SARA DE VOS is a beautiful play between light and shadow, past and present, mystery and discovery, and, most salient, authenticity and imitation. Dominic Smith crosses centuries and societies to artfully blend three narratives into the mystifying history of a Dutch masterpiece and its esoteric creator.

Inspiring is how Smith, through prose, infuses life into a visual medium. His readers envision the color saturations, smell the oils in the pigments, and trace the textures of the brushstrokes. This engenders an intimacy traditionally reserved for the characters, of which Smith does so with his cast just as beautifully.

Sarah de Vos is an enchanting female protagonist, graced with humility and artistic passion. When her sole known masterwork in transposed with a forgery in 1950s New York City, Manhattan lawyer Martin de Groot’s pursuit to reclaim this family heirloom induces him to chase his own artistic enchantress. The consequences of this diversion bind them both to the present and future fates of the masterwork.

Smith’s own artistic mastery is his meticulous, color-rich brushwork that fashions a beautiful story, in both the details and as an alluring composition.

The last lesson of Sarah de Vos is of authenticity, of art but more so of passion. The light of Dominic Smith’s passion for his art radiates from every page.

Avid Reader: A Life, by Robert Gottlieb

Avid Reader: A Life, by Robert Gottlieb, Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2016

In Gottlieb’s aptly titled autobiography, the New York publishing mogul gives readers a candid, chronological account of his rise to eminence in the industry. Every era of his career was driven by a near-maddening love affair with books, permeating every dimension of his personal and professional lives. And like most passionate love affairs, this one is a pleasure to read.

Fellow readers will envy his ascension through the ranks of Simon & Schuster to his taking the helm at the venerable Random House imprint Knopf. And though his position granted him the opportunity to work with the most prestigious authors (Joseph Heller, Toni Morrison, and Ray Bradbury among others), he doesn’t filter his praise or criticisms on their behalf. When Michael Crichton presented him the draft of his future bestseller “The Andromeda Strain” for instance, the editor admits the authors work was initially “sloppily plotted, underwritten, and worst of all, with no characterization whatsoever.

It’s important to note however, that Gottlieb’s sincere criticisms were never condemnations, and his nonchalant frankness is one of the characteristics the great writers, however inflated their self-images, gravitated to him. Such gravitation was virtually always mutual. Readers will be enamored by the hundreds of personal and professional relationships he expounds on in these pages. Only an appreciable editor would write of Bob Dylan that “This genius rebel and tremendous star was almost childlike – you felt like he barely knew how to tie his shoes, let alone write a check.” The results of such observations serve to humanize iconic writers in the most charming way.

As a reader, what’s striking about Gottlieb’s career is that he remains true to his early adage that “words were more important to me than real life, and certainly more interesting.” Plot, structure and characterization always take precedence over the demands of his writers. Even in the ensuing success of his collaboration with President Bill Clinton on “My Life,” he regrets that Clinton’s deadline didn’t allow him more time to polish the manuscript of the bestseller.

Equally inspiring is his absolute immersion in his craft and passion. He spends sleepless nights reading manuscripts, abhors long weekends that pull him away from the office, and considered his time as editor of The New Yorker as “a rest cure.” For the latter alone, I’ll go further than “avid” and say his is a consummate career. Robert Gottlieb’s life is an alluring and enduring ovation to an impassioned life.

Little Fires Everywhere, by Celese Ng

Little Fires Everywhere, by Celeste Ng, Penguin Press 2017

The power of Celeste Ng’s novel is the friction caused by repression: of secrets, unfulfilled desires and unrealized dreams, and the fires, both literally and metaphorically, that ignite when the pressure to repress overwhelms. The story Ng has created from the flames is both tragic and beautiful.

She captures the essence of the late 90s pre-9/11 American culture in pitch-perfect form. The novel will resonate deeply with readers who came of age in the decade. The mindset, both culturally and personally, is hauntingly retrospective of a long-gone era, made to seem much further away by the turbulent decades that followed.

From a more intimate perspective, Ng is a master of animating dynamic characters who despite (sometimes egregious) flaws, compel the reader to at the least empathize, but with the full potential to fall in love with. The core catalyst, the Richardson family, is at the surface the Good Housekeeping version of the American Dream, with the exception of the eccentric youngest daughter Izzy. Only with the enigmatic artist Mia and sweet-natured but naïve daughter Pearl move into the Richardson’s rental home is the collective vale dropped. The ensuing immersion of the two families dissolves the opaque charades both have been hiding behind for years. With each page the heartbreak and fear that lies beneath gains clarity; the reader shares in the communion of prevailing emotions.

In the end, Little Fires Everywhere is an unsettling novel. Fire is, regardless of size and duration, an unsettling force. But that isn’t to say the glow can’t be illuminating, if not beautiful.

Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002, by David Sedaris

Ardent readers of David Sedaris know his allusions to the massive volume of diaries the humor essayist has logged every day since the late seventies. And now fans finally have a (albeit a cursory) glimpse of the daily musings, the source material for his essays.

While each entry is a standalone anecdote, together they string several candid narratives from his wayward progression out of North Carolina through Chicago, New York and Paris. The most vibrant entries are centered around his family. While he’s declarative of their eccentricities, it’s endearing to read about the bond they share.

Equally admirable is Sedaris’s sincerity about his own struggles. Here is a writer with enough humility to admit to watching a Twilight Zone marathon while drunk and stoned (later confessing to being drunk every night for eighteen straight years), and who once referred to his shoddy appearance as that of “a tired, fur-bearing whale.” Lovable too is his refusal to become a braggart in his later sobriety and improved health.

Finally, he shares with us his reluctance to accept his new-found life as an established author, with prolonged stays on the bestseller lists and first-class accommodations on extensive book tours. He himself seems most perplexed. But with as much talent as he possesses, he really shouldn’t be.

Concerning his humility, the only qualm to be had is his bashful insistence that one wouldn’t want to read his diaries from start to finish. With his observational wit this entertaining however, that’s exactly what you’ll do.