Hey, y'all, this is Oculus Reviews.
Have you ever read something so mediocre that words were escaping you to even describe it? Something so dull and tepid and just nothing that it's the literary equivalent of chewing on cotton wool? And when you closed the back cover on it, you lamented the hours of your life you could have spent doing something more useful, like sewing all your shirts' neckholes shut or counting grains of rice? Because I've run into such a book and am now cursing my completionism that made me finish it when I have authors like Lisa Tuttle, Chinghiz Aitmatov and Larry McMurtry waiting for me on my bookshelf.
I suppose I should name the monster, shouldn't I? Let's dive into Marlys Millhiser's 1974 novel, Nella Waits.
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I'm proud to report that even though this book sucked me dry and made me want to break a window several times over, it didn't break me. Finishing it might have been the most pointless enterprise of my life, but I came through, dammit. When I came across it in the local library several years ago, the beautiful cover and the tagline A novel of the supernatural had instantly caught my attention, but I hadn't been quite in the mood to read it at the time. A few days ago, though, I was browsing the library catalog when I came across this book again, and a little Google-fu netted me the surprising results that print copies of it were relatively rare, going for prices like 28 dollars and above on eBay and Thriftbooks. My curiosity was duly piqued. Marlys Millhiser is apparently the author of several Gothic, romantic thrillers and mysteries, and while I'm not big on Gothic literature—I like my spooky fiction leaner and meaner—several of those seemed promising (especially Willing Hostage—what a thrilling title!), and I've preemptively put a few on my TBR list before diving into Nella Waits.
Yeah, that'll teach me.
Twenty-four year-old widowed nobody Lynnette Stewart has to travel back from Colorado to Boringville, Alabama (actually, Roggins, Iowa, but the sentiment is there) for her father's funeral and soon becomes trapped in a suffocating small town she'd been trying hard to escape from. At the same time, Jay Van Fleet, the mysterious bastard heir to the spooky Van Fleet estate is finally tracked down after several years abroad and arrives back to claim his inheritance. The two meet and share some non-flirting charged with non-chemistry, attracted by mutual loneliness and the fact that they both have the personalities of a slice of toast, but the jealous ghost of Jay's mother zzZZzZZzz...
I'm sorry. I'm sorry! I'm genuinely trying to write a review here, but this book is so boring I'm having trouble even remembering what it's about. I tried, folks, I really tried. The first few chapters were actually promising, making me lament what came after: I adore my small town horror fiction, all the closely intertwined lives shaken up by the supernatural (I've grown up in a village myself, and what I wouldn't have given for a ghost or two), and I was sort of intrigued by the subtly chilling prologue of Jay's old uncle finding his death in the Van Fleet house at the hands of his dead sister. Lynn's frustration with her family, who still treat her like a child and expect her to jump at their every whim even though she's twenty-four and has already been a married woman, was believable. But after a while my enthusiasm waned because nothing. Was. Happening. A good 70% of the book is taken up by tepid small-town intrigue between characters who share zero physical or emotional spark, despite the book weakly insisting that they're just so attracted to each other. Ghostly encounters are described in lackluster prose when they actually happen at all, and eventually everything comes together to die a whimpering death in a non-climax so barely-described and nonsensical I'm genuinely not sure what happened, with the obligatory The End... Or Is It?! type epilogue that I love to hate.
Actually, the lackluster prose is mostly what ruined this book for me. Cliche as it is, and even with so little actual plot, this could have been a lurid and perfectly entertaining chiller (there's a SPOILER/trigger warning possible incest plotline that's straight out of some of the more scandalous kind of Gothic fiction), but the beige prose really kills the tension after a while. I'm not a big fan of overdone purple prose either (another reason I rarely read Gothic stuff—lean and mean, like I said), but the "they went there and did this, and then went there and did that" style of writing became so grating after a while. (And it made the obligatory sex scene about as erotic as my electricity bill, in case well-written sex scenes are a draw for some of y'all in a book—the one in Nella Waits is one to avoid, and not even in the Bad Sex In Fiction Award kind of way, alas.)
Not that the characters helped my opinion, once we truly came to know them. Lynnette is a well and truly useless protagonist who has to be rescued over and over and over again, Jay Van Fleet is an unlikeable jerk (and not in the "sexy bad boy you love and hate" way); Hymie, Lynnette's childhood friend is an enigma in that he's repeatedly described with nice and ableist language (I hope y'all can stomach the r-word if you plan on reading this dreck), but he's easily the most perceptive and likeable of the cast; Nella is the most annoying, white-hot hatred-inducing ghost I've ever read about, with the maturity of a twelve year-old even though she's supposed to be a forty year-old mother (there are few words in the English language that make me go HULK SMASH faster than "mischief" or "making mischief"); the rest of the characters are perfectly forgettable, much like the writing itself.
Come to think of it, "Perfectly forgettable" would have been a much better tagline for this book.
Writing: Hemingway this ain't. Or King, or Joe R. Lansdale. You get my point. 1/5
Availability: Only if you have a good 30 bucks or more to throw out the window for a book; but the Kindle edition is there if you don't mind the fact that Amazon is evil. Alas, often it's the only legal source for a book some of us can afford. 3/5
Entertainment value: Rice grains, I'm telling ya. Or I could have repainted the bathroom. 1/5
Do I recommend it?: Well, maybe if you were shipwrecked on a deserted island and this was the only book you could rescue... Otherwise for ghost story fanatics or Marlys Millhiser fans only. I don't think I became one after reading this. 1/5
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