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Tag: creepy

The Seance, John Harwood

I read this book mostly in bed over several nights, while the weather outside was obligingly turning into fall.  Although there are things about the cold weather that are miserable (mainly miserable for my hands and feet, which get very poor circulation as my blood is too busy keeping the rest of me warm like a furnace), they are all outweighed by the snuggly loveliness of cuddling down into your bed when it’s cold outside. (It’s not cold outside yet, by the way – just coolish and lovely – but I am anticipating the necessity of getting out my cache…

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Palimpsest, Catherynne Valente

I love the word "palimpsest".  I like how it sounds and what it means.  When I read Nymeth’s review of this book, and she was all, It reminded me of MirrorMask!, I knew I had to get it.  Catherynne Valente‘s Palimpsest is about a city called Palimpsest, a sexually transmitted city – people have pieces of a map of Palimpsest, like tattoos, somewhere on their bodies, and when two people with the marks on them sleep together, they go to Palimpsest for the night.  Like a dream, except that it isn’t a dream.  The book is about four people who…

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We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Shirley Jackson

Creeeepy.  I read The Haunting of Hill House and liked it a lot, but when I read We Have Always Lived in the Castle, I thought, “Oh, yes, there’s the lady who wrote ‘The Lottery’.”  There are some of the same themes here, particularly towards the end, that mob mentality and the fear of things being different.  My review’s going to contain spoilers, because I don’t know how to talk about the book without any spoilers at all. We Have Always Lived in the Castle is about two sisters, Merricat and Constance, who live with their uncle Julian, the three…

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The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson

At last I have finished a novel by Shirley Jackson!  I liked the short stories I read of hers in eighth grade (“The Lottery”, predictably, and “The Possibility of Evil”), but ignored her novels for years, and then I tried to read We Have Always Lived in the Castle when I got it out of the library at my university in Colchester, and hated it.  I got about ten pages in and couldn’t imagine how it would be possible to go another page. I have to try it again, because I loved The Haunting of Hill House.  I reluctantly bought…

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Baltimore, or, The Steadfast Tin Soldier and the Vampire, Mike Mignola and Christopher Golden

I read about Baltimore on Jenclair’s blog untold ages ago, and I put it on my list, but I didn’t leave myself a little note explaining what it was about.  This is something I do now, but I didn’t always, and so when I would be at the library looking at my list of books, I never checked out Baltimore because I had forgotten anything I ever read about its plot.  Fortunately I was incredibly bored recently and took the time to go back through my book list, look up the reviews, and leave myself teeny little plot synopses. Baltimore…

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I don’t mean to go on and on

But I just read this and threw up in my mouth a little.  I can’t help feeling like this person has to be being sarcastic.  Because nobody could say these things seriously, right?  I mean everyone has noticed that Bella is a cipher, right?  Even if you have overlooked Edward’s tendency to stalk and make decisions for Bella and you think he’s the perfect man, you’ve noticed that Bella has no personality.  I mean, right? Twilight centers on a boy who loves a girl so much that he refuses to defile her, and on a girl who loves him so…

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The Stress of Her Regard, Tim Powers

Sheesh, what is wrong with me?  This is the second book in the past week I haven’t been able to finish.  And honestly, not finishing books is pretty rare with me.  I swear!  If I make it past the first few pages, I tend to plow through to the end, because I want to know what happens, and because I am a completist.  To give you a comparison, I read like four of Anne Rice’s vampire books, which I never liked in the first place, before realizing I’d rather gouge my eyes out than read any more of them.  I…

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What Happened in Hamelin, Gloria Skurzynski

I’ve been such a schizophrenic reader lately.  I’ve not gotten any books out of the library for the past several weeks, because I’ve been reading Harry Potter and Martin Millar, and planning to get started on Shakespeare.  However, the last time I went through reading all the book blogs I read, there were so many books that appealed to me.  And I wrote them all down but I was all on board with finishing up my Harry Potter & Shakespeare reading before carrying on to new things. Ah, and then Obama got elected, and I got an unexpected check from…

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Breaking Dawn, Stephenie Meyer

Spoilers. Many. Nothing but spoilers. Breaking Dawn is an extravagant symphony of screwed-up sexuality and dysfunction. (Enjoyable because of the funny, loathsome because of all the people who think it’s romantic.) I had to stop about every twenty pages and update my sister, who, lucky duck, was the only one home, and we would have a long moan about how insane this book was, and how dismayed we were that people were all, Oo, she’s the next Harry Potter and – still less forgivable – Oo, she’s the next Buffy. Next Buffy. HA. When people are dysfunctional on Buffy, they…

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Waiting for Daisy, Peggy Orenstein

Oh, how distressing I found this book, and oh, how I wished that Peggy Orenstein had kept this whole distressing story to herself. I got annoyed with Ms. Orenstein straight away when she said that in her pre-baby-mania days, she used to say that women who made pre-Betty Friedan choices shouldn’t be surprised when they end up with pre-Betty Friedan results. Which is to say, women shouldn’t choose to be stay-at-home mums, as that is a choice that could never be feminist, and if they do make that atavistic choice, they just deserve all they get. Nasty. I found this…

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