The Collector

"I know what I am to him. A butterfly he has always wanted to catch." 

With the onslaught of formulaic TV crime procedurals these days, I had to read this book with a different frame of mind. I even had to expel a bit of what I remember about the (excellent) 1965 William Wyler-directed film, starring Terence Stamp and Samantha Eggar, because as much as the film is chilling and influenced future twisted thrillers (here's looking at you, Silence of the Lambs and Misery...) it only peeled back just a few of the layers John Fowles' cleverly constructed in the pages of his debut novel. 

The Collector is a psychological suspense thriller, and depending on your opinion, the first of its kind. It involves a butterfly collecting sociopath who after winning the football pools decides to put his winnings into remodeling a countryside manor so he can kidnap and 'collect' a young woman he's been obsessed with. Since such a storyline is blurred between fiction and fact these days, The Collector by summary feels a tad less compelling, but even when I knew every turn I still managed to feel unsettled, engaged, and even conflicted while reading. There was something so stirringly captivating about Fowles pitting these two characters in this disturbing power struggle, becoming audience to how they both perceive their situation, and how complex it all was.

For the first part, you go inside the warped mind of Fredrick Clegg as he stalks and then prepares to kidnap the object of his obsession, a young art student named Miranda Grey. From Fredrick's perspective, you view Miranda as a difficulty, and you oddly start to victim blame, because well, Fredrick comes off being oh so "nice". He's fixing fancy meals, he's bought Miranda everything her heart's desire, and he's made a nice comfortable spot for her in a cellar surrounded by books and painting tools. He even states he only wants her as his "guest". The internal dialogue has you almost sympathizing with Fredrick (yeah, gross I know), as he comes off as this lonely and socially awkward guy who is looking for a friend, and just goes about it in the most ineptest way imaginable.

But the record scratch of reality comes in the middle as the narrative switches gears and we become privy of Miranda's thoughts through a secret diary she keeps between the mattress. At first this transition was jarring, and since she recounts most of everything you have read for the last 100 pages it all seems like a bad literary decision, but it's not, in fact it's a brilliant turn of character building. Miranda is now not bound and gagged by her captor, she is 'free' to speak her mind in her secret diary and we begin to understand the claustrophobic nightmare she is desperately trying to claw out of. From these pages, we learn that Miranda is quite intelligent and resourceful as she tries to figure out ways to best Fredrick, submitting to and resisting him all for the sake of survival. It's devastating to read how she slowly realizes just how insane Fredrick is and how day-by-day she becomes less of a human in his eyes, but more of an inanimate object that is only to be admired, likened to his framed butterflies. 

"I’m meant to be dead, pinned, always the same, always beautiful. He knows that part of my beauty is being alive, but it’s the dead me he wants. He wants me living-but-dead."  

Home Sweet (Sinister) Home: Haunted Quarantines

"A house is a place to go back to, to regroup in. A house is a kind of a special corner of the universe. It's a place where everyone whoever lived in it still does.[...] That's the nature of a house. It absorbs its occupants, kind of keepin' them forever alive." --- 'Maynard's House'

It's fitting during quarantine I'd grab for books about houses. More exact, tales of being confined inside houses where the safety is questionable, and the mental deterioration and claustrophobic terrors reign. In a small way it's taking my mind off of the real time horrors of COVID-19 and the shitshow of a response to it (...and a bunch of other madness --- 2020 is truly on some ain't shit, isn't it?). Still, my imagination runs, and runs into thinking about when a home isn't a safe dwelling, where the walls that shield you from the outside betray (and how it must suck to be quarantined in a haunted house while you've got a damn pandemic going on...). Whether ancient in stance or freshly erected on disturbed ground, where its sinister legacy --- or awakening to --- outweighs its purported domesticity. *cue thunder clap*

I kind of inadvertently kicked off "haunted quarantine reads" with Rosemary's Baby, where a doomed heroine is sequestered in her spacious New York apartment by geriatric devil worshipers and a trash heap husband. While that tale was nestled 'safe' in a city of thousands, two others I read --- The Silent Companions and Maynard's House --- both take a different approach as they focus on the haunted dwellings that reside on the outskirts of civilization, consuming their occupants into a spiral of insanity and terror that falls on deaf ears *cue more thunder claps* Haunted house stories often are cut from the same Gothic cloth, but when they detour from the norm and elevate the "dark and desolate dwelling" motif, I tend to take notice, and these unique tales had my undivided attention whilst sequestered in my own confide space, scaring the wits outta me even more than my daily news feed...*cue thunder clap, evil laughter, howling wolf, and Toupee Fiasco's word vomit tweets* 

////

"Ivy poured out of the eaves and engulfed the turrets at either end of the house. It looked dead. Everything was dead. Parterres lay prostrate beneath the soulless gaze of the windows, the hedges brown and riddled with holes. Vines choked the flowerbeds. Even the lawns were yellow and sparse, as if a contagion spread slowly throughout the grounds."

The Silent Companions occupies a bunch of cliches and worn-out tropes of the neo-Victorian novel. Crumbling mansion. A disturbing familial legacy. Locked up spider-webbed  "west wings" with ~secrets~ and yellow-paged diaries. Fidgety oddball servants. Paranoia around every corner. Our main character waking up in an insane asylum, committing some crime she swore she didn't commit ...yup, the Gothic motif gang is all here. Yet, to carry these tropes out in a fresh, intelligent and creepy way is where I commend author Laura Purcell. 

Purcell even forgoes an enigmatic brooding love interest a la Edward Rochester so we're left with focusing on the house of horrors our main heroine has stepped in. Oh, and our heroine isn't plain, or a Jane, but she's rather grouchy and bossy, and I guess you'd be too if you were widowed, pregnant, and had to live in a centuries-old clammy castle that carries the weight of a horrific legacy that keeps the surrounding townspeople on edge and its livestock on high alert. To see this constant complainer get taken for a ride was fun...until it wasn't, this when the house begins to show its true nature and intent, and our heroine begins slipping into serious darkness.

This isn't a perfect book, and can come off not as unique for its trove of tropes, but I appreciated being drawn in and feeling dread burn slow and steady, in a pacing that doesn't wander or waver on emitting a sense of mental dislodging throughout. I had to read this book in the daylight due to its utter creepiness --- and that's not usual for someone who relishes in horror reads.

As much as I tend to spoil things here and there for (over) analyzing sake, but I feel going into this book blind is the best bet. Not even knowing what a "silent companion" was when I dove in kept the the creep factor afloat and I dared not hop on Google for the answer. Still, once you do find out these companions were real deals (they're a type of wood-carved painting/sculpture that was popular in the Netherlands during the 17th Century) and realize Purcell turned some carved wood into a malicious antagonist, the fright is never diminished and takes on a sinister presence that becomes unimaginable. 

Devil's In The Details

This is no dream, she thought, this is really happening...

Ira Levin isn't concerned about taking things at face value, about what's on the outside, on the surface. His forte is what's skittering, squirming underneath the mask of human nature. Rosemary's Baby is notorious for its Satanism motifs, it being the definitive tale of woman becoming impregnated by Satan himself, but between the lines the real horror isn't the devil --- no, that's to stir the curiosity --- the real horror is the shattering of seemingly docile domesticity. Where the quiet muffles screams. Where the ordinary reveals its odious odor. 

Levin is so good at this, masterful even. After reading The Stepford Wives and The Boys From Brazil, I became enamored over his knack for shattering the sense of so-called "normalcy". Nothing is "normal", there isn't such a word, a feeling, and I like that Levin is blunt about that as he wriggles a little subtext into the mix. Little warnings to not trust that a neat suburban neighborhood is tranquil, or that just because Hitler is dead that right-wing Nazism can't be resurrected in his Führer's image. "Horror" as genre isn't associated with Levin, and even the man himself didn't ascribe to being a practitioner of the genre, but I do think he taps into a realistic, naked horror that explores the enduring nature of evil within ordinary settings, the type that can't be considered terrifying at first glance --- well, that is depending on what one considers terrifying. 

I'm late to the devil baby party of Rosemary's Baby. A paperback has lounged about my house for years (and wouldn't you know it goes MIA when I want to read it most...), and the book isn't out of print, or difficult to find, just that I admit after partaking in super famous film adaptions first and hearing things such as "this movie is EXACTLY like the book" (see The Shawshank Redemption), that I tend to ignore the source material. I know. I suck. It pains me to even type that I have such a reflex, but Roman Polanski's 1968 film adaptation made such a deep impression on me over the years, to where reading the text felt...redundant.

For me, Rosemary's Baby as a film is ingenious and intriguing for its details. Those tiny, blink-and-you-might-miss-them details that are sprinkled throughout retain a delicious sense of unsettling ambiguity. Polanski is a terrible person (and the gross irony of him directing a film about a woman's rape isn't lost on me...), but he crafted a classic blueprint for domestic horror with this film (...and we will dare not speak of the dismal 1976 TV sequel, Look What Happened To Rosemary's Baby or the even more ill-advised 're-imagined' 2014 miniseries). It raised the bar on taking horror films from the b-movie mire into the mainstream and approaching them from a more psychological perspective where the details mattered. Details that would take on larger, more unnerving forms and meanings of uncertainty to where, by film's end, everything is not what it appears to be --- while being exactly what it appears to be.

I never watch this movie the same way as I did before. I'm always finding something new that I missed, some little quote spoken that takes on new meaning or those fine-tuned little visual details that spring up to change my perspective or question others motives. I know every twist and turn, and of course, the doomed outcome, but it still feels fresh with each viewing, and never am I not trying to warn Rosemary to get away from those meddling neighbors and that shifty-eyed husband of hers. I'm also never not chilled over the fact that a woman's pregnancy --- something that is supposed to be intimate and innocent --- is turned into something so perverse and terrorizing. 

Still, without Levin's wonderful text, his attention to every detail from the start, there wouldn't have been this brilliant film affair. Polanski studied Levin's text to the letter to where character ticks, whole dialogues, and even the food that is consumed is replicated on film. It's about as faithful as an adaptation as you'll get, a film that complements the book, extending the terror it has laid bare. The genius Levin flexes in text, (and I repeat) shows that that everything is not what it appears to be, but then sentence by sentence, detail by detail, everything is exactly what it appears to be --- and then the rug is yanked beneath our once stable conscious.

Novella November: Seasons Change

"Things come in three major degrees in the human experience, I think. There's good, bad, and terrible. And as you go down into progressive darkness toward terrible, it gets harder and harder to make subdivisions."

"An ill-defined and disreputable literary banana republic" is how Stephen King described the novella in the afterword of this collection, and of course he of all authors would say that.

King laughs in the face of the 'slim novel' as even his leaner efforts seem to feel wide, and wander around in their labyrinths longer than the norm. It's why I wondered if placing this book among the miscellany of novellas I read and revisited for this monthly series was a bit fair. Different Seasons is a whopper at 600+ pages, as it contains not one little novel, but four B-I-G novels. The stories pack a punch, and have in a way, outgrown the spines they've been sewn in as three of the four novels have all gone on to become feature films, two of them  (Rita Hayworth & The Shawshank Redemption and The Body) now considered to be classics and some of King's best adaptations set to celluloid.

Different Seasons itself is also considered to be his best collected work of shorts and novellas for this reason, and I concur. For a time I thought Night Shift had that title on lock, but nah, Different Seasons yanks that crown off of its head, as he doles out some of his finest writing and introduces us to some of his most enduring characters in this collection.

Released in 1982, Different Seasons was considered "un-publishable" at the time due the four tales detouring away from the horror genre that made King serious coin, and it's true, this collection is devoid of supernatural elements, but there are things present that are tangible to terrify and evoke shivers. King excels at putting a lens on humanity (and inhumanity), making humans being as monstrous as we are capable to be, and this collection knows no different. The "monsters" in Different Seasons, whether it be the occupants in a looming maximum penitentiary, a former Nazi war criminal and his psychopathic adolescent tormentor, or four young boys who come face to face with death, do roam, and roam a range that only King himself could concoct.

Let The Long Walk Begin...

"They're animals, all right. But why are you so goddam sure that makes us human beings?"

Humans presented as the true monsters is what all the best horror stories entail. Stephen King, no doubt raised on a diet of Rod Serling, Shirley Jackson, and Ray Bradbury, learned such a notion from the best, and he too has explored with wit and depth how malevolent and miserable human beings can be, and are to each other.

King might not be as verbose or fragrant in his prose as his predecessors, but he knows how to push you, headfirst, into the pool of facing reality through a warped lens. So realistic are the worlds and the people he creates that deja vu sets in --- you have encountered such a surreal moment, you're acquainted with that abusive asshole, you've passed through that weird town or even lived in it for a time --- and that dahhling, is the horror in itself, how fiction begets truth.

This aspect is what I've always liked about King's works ever since my Mom (a King fangirl before it was in vogue to be so) allowed me to read and watch the film adaptations of 'Salem's Lot, Carrie, and The Shining as a kid. I was drawn to how a vampire could just move into a small community and separate the strong from the weak, how a meek high school girl's menstrual cycle emboldens her and sparks cataclysmic horror, how a family would just willingly stay at this strange isolated resort, and cave into their own mental madness. For all it's fictitious elements, it all still felt real. What King laid out had definitions, but various shadings, and you can bet even my precious R.L. Stine and Christopher Pike paperbacks began to lose their luster due the types of complexities King coaxed out of his works.

I'll be honest: I haven’t read a lot of King's works, post-1990s that is. I got turned off after Dreamcatcher (farting aliens? Go home Uncle Stevie you are drunk...), and have been content with sticking with the classics. I know. I know. I might be missing out on some gems he wrote (11/22/63 has me intrigued), but I prefer my King old school, so I went old school with The Long Walk, one that he wrote under the Richard Bachman moniker, and was treated to one of his best nightmares set to paper.

The Bachman years dealt with King trying to distance himself from Stephen King: The Brand, and where he could rework and release unpublished material so it wouldn't rot in the depths of his desk. The Long Walk is said to be the first book King wrote, this back in the 1960s when he was in college, and such a fact lends to why this book doesn't feel quite as fleshed-out or rich in character and dialogue as his future works would, but some of the bare nakedness of this heightens the ominous intensity of the plot, as well as provide the reader to put themselves into the literal worn shoes of our doomed travelers, and oh boy, it's brutal.