Oculus Reviews: The past is in your blood

"Have you the blood, John?"

Welcome to the first Oculus Reviews in a year, folks.

If you're like me, you know that hunting down underrated and lesser-known genre books is the literary equivalent of going out into the Wild West - you never know what you'll find along the way. Sometimes you unearth a lost classic like the Terminator novelization; sometimes you find a book that makes you long for the excitement of unloading the washing machine. And sometimes it's Nazi Leprechauns.

Today isn't one of the "lost classic" days, because the book I'm about to review is still in print and relatively easy to find; but it's definitely a quieter gem of the horror paperback boom, one that is little talked about by non-fans of niche horror literature and very much appreciated by fans of it. Which includes me now, because this book bewitched me the way maybe not a single non-King horror read has managed to do.

"Have you the blood, John?" begins Alan Ryan's 1984 novel Cast a Cold Eye, setting the mood with a single sentence for a beautifully written, evocative ghost story, set in the wildest parts of Ireland where the past still rules the present. Jack Quinlan, an American writer of Irish descent, decides to travel to the country to do research for his latest historical novel, which takes place during the Great Famine. At first everything goes well: he meets friendly Irish beauty Grainne, with whom he shares a real spark, and finds himself a nice place for research in the isolated village of Doolin. But Doolin has a few secrets hanging heavy over it, secrets Jack senses immediately: ghostly figures in the road at night, old folk doing something inexplicable in the cemetery, a strange distance in the behavior of the friendly old priest, Father Henning (easily my favorite character in this, besides Grainne). And naturally, the more time Jack spends reaching for the ghosts of the past, the more they reach back for him.

Where do I even begin with this book? Let me say first that the William Peter Blatty quote on the front, unlike a lot of these paperback praise quotes, is entirely accurate: the late Alan Ryan's prose is something to behold. Literate, moody, atmospheric - these are just a few words to describe it. He had a real skill with painting a scene with his words; his descriptions of the gloomy Irish countryside, the lashing cold rain, the muddy sheep grazing on the hillsides were vivid and almost poetic, without ever going into purple prose, the bane of my existence. Listen to these descriptions:

In the village of Doolin, where the breezes carried the salt and scent of the ocean onto the stone-strewn hills, a man named Padraic Mullen was nearing death.

The circle of people stood silent among the graves. Near Jack's feet, a stone, its inscription long ago blurred away by wind and rain, leaned over as if weary of its own weight.

It's books like this that make me want to become a writer myself. The atmosphere, that sense of foreboding and dark secrets, is done perfectly in every single sentence. Even before Jack witnesses the four village elders pouring a vial of blood into an open grave, we already know that Doolin is a haunted place, and I don't mean it in the ghostly sense (oh, that comes later): a place haunted by history and old customs, and by the very real horrors of the Great Famine. Ryan sketches the picture rather subtly, and rarely ratchets up the quiet chill into real terror... but when he does, oh man. The scene where Jack hears a baby crying outside his house on a foggy day and goes to investigate ended with some of the most shocking imagery I have seen in a horror novel; not grotesque like a Barker or in-your-face like a splatterpunk, but something that honestly chilled me to the bone. Too many horror writers never learned how to write a scene like this.

The character portraits, too, are wonderful. Jack, I'll admit, won't be my favorite protagonist ever (if I never see another straight white male writer in a horror story it'll still be too soon), but he does feel like a real person, rather than a blank slate or a thinly veiled self-insert. He's a bit of a tool sometimes: his approach to historical accuracy is basically "if I research too much it'll bog down the book, so I'll just make up a few things" - I can almost feel my writing circle cringe collectively as I write this - and he's not above spying on a funeral if it means inspiration for a new scene. But I'd rather have a flawed protagonist than a bland one, so that's more than fine with me. Jack's chemistry with Grainne is open, easy and sincere, an affectionate but down-to-earth romance that brings a little warmth into the cold seaside air of Doolin. Father Henning, the old men and women and the quiet, hard-faced sons of the village all felt like people I could have met and walked among, the sense of community - one of the central themes of this book - subtly woven into everything they said and did.

The plot of this book is, I think, what will make it or break it for horror fans. Relatively little actually happens: a lot of the story concerns Jack's comings-and-goings, his relationship with Grainne, and his slow discovery that something past his understanding is happening in Doolin. Which, again, is fine with me: the sense of something big slowly approaching, the ghostly secrets teased and hinted at, and the simple, believable character dynamics carried this book forward and absorbed me a lot more than a 100-page trashy romp would have. (Nothing wrong with trashy romps, of course, but they don't attract me nearly as much as thoughtful chillers like this one.) And the finale... "Beautiful" is the only word that comes to mind. But if you like your monsters, entrails and adrenaline, you won't get it in Cast a Cold Eye. What you will get is a haunting, at places almost lyrical slow-burn story of relationships, community, kinship and the power of old traditions. Whether that is your kind of book, I can't tell - but I know it will stay with me for a while.

Writing: Some of the best I've read outside of straight-up literary fiction. 5/5

Availability: While this probably isn't a book you'll find on every bookstore shelf like a King or a Koontz, it never quite fell out of print either, and used copies of it - even the first edition I own with this gorgeous Gothic cover - go for relatively cheap as far as I could tell. And if that's not for you, there's always the ebook. 4/5

Entertainment value: This is one of the most absorbing horror books I've ever read, but I know the slow pace and ominous atmosphere aren't for everyone. 4/5

Do I recommend it?: I'm biased because I love this book, but yes - very much. As a matter of fact, this is a new favorite for me, not just from this year, but from the genre in general. 5/5

Oculus Reviews: Cornfields, angst and watching paint dry

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.

goodreads.com

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