Oculus Reviews: Thanks a lot, Horace Walpole

Welcome, folks, to Oculus Reviews.

 

Why, oh why do I keep catching the crap of the crop when it comes to 70's Gothic novels?! I've gotta stop picking up little-known stuff with pretty covers and good taglines, because it turns out that a lot of obscure books are obscure for a reason. I mean, as far as bad books go, the one I'm discussing today wasn't nearly as yeet-your-brain irritating as Nella Waits, but it also didn't have much else going for it, other than some absolutely hilaribad prose every now and then. And that isn't nearly enough to carry a book... even a 192-page one.

Let's dive in, shall we?

In The Terrified Heart, a 1973 novel by Alicia Grace (actually the pseudonym of one Irving Greenfield, as you will soon be painfully aware), Danielle Marsh is a 24 year-old university professor of ancient Greek with a PhD and two years of teaching experience, and okay, I need to call a time-out because what. Either she skipped a grade, or the author skipped a number on the keyboard when he wrote this - and trust me, you're only getting a taste of the level of magnificent realism and thorough editing this book stands at (other gems include Danielle hoping for a "ddcent" relationship, and one character having a master's "certicate" in... sailing, sure). Anyway, she one day respons to a newspaper ad with a job offer by one Keith Wyler, a wealthy, brilliant translator haunted by the murder of his wife that he was accused of. He wants Danielle to work as his assistant at translating an ancient manucript; the catch? She has to go with him to his family mansion, posing as his wife, because insert incredibly flimsy bullshit excuse about family traditions and marriage that even a baby squirrel would see through, but which fools Danielle instantly. The real reason he wants her is to lure out the murderer of his dead wife by turning up with a new one, which is supposed to... Hell if I know. What a chessmaster.

 

So off the zeroes go to Eleusis, the Wyler estate... after several days spent with very essential things like clothes shopping, and awkwardly wrestling with the author insisting they're madly in lust with each other, despite having less spark than a firefighter convention. And they reach the mansion after page... 118. Out of 192. God give me patience.

To tell you folks what happens at Eleusis would be a spoiler (not that anyone would mind, I think, since about two people and a shoelace must be planning to read this), but this book is, holy moly macaroni, where do I even begin. It's not terrible, mind you - but it's so achingly mediocre that spending even the five or so hours reading it are five hours from my life I will never get back. The plot is basically nonexistent until past the middle of the book, after which point plot revelations randomly happen or are just plain told to the characters, to wrap things up in time for a slapped-together finale that made me facepalm. The characters - the ingenue heroine, Diet Mr. Rochester, his evil, unfaithful murdered wife, crazy aunt, hateful disabled brother and sweet old family friend/surrogate father figure - are papier-mache, the descriptions are dry, dull and full of telling, not showing. (And like I said, I was painfully aware that this book was written by a man at each of the gazillion descriptions of the heroine's naked or near-naked body, and especially at the scene where she's taking a bath and takes the time to describe the way her breasts float in the water. Ladies, if your boobs do that, please see a doctor. Or an exorcist.) Also, every now and then the author commits acts of violence against the English language for no reason, like Danielle "obediently" shaking her head to accept a job offer, or Aunt Elizabeth having a "corking-like voice", whatever the hell that means - does she sound like a champagne bottle being popped? But my absolute favorites have to be Danielle comparing unrequited love to a seed planted in shallow soil four pages in (ease up, Emily Brontë, you're in 1973, not 1873), or her landlady expressing her disapproval of Keith's job offer thusly:

"Young people today are not only willing to play in the frying pan, but they must also jump into the fire."

 

What has that poor idiom ever done to you?!

Despite the... everything, I can't say I wasn't the least bit entertained while reading this book. There's a certain dollar-store trashy charm to how ineptly written it is, and since it was so short, it didn't torture me with said ineptitude until I lost my patience, like the other Gothic novel I slam-dunked into the metaphorical trash... I mean, reviewed on this blog. But this is faint praise indeed. I can't in good faith recommend it because there are both much, much better and much more entertainingly bad books for y'all to pass the time with, but... but... at least the cover is pretty?

Yeah, I've got nothin'. Don't read this book.

Writing: Corking-like voice. I rest my case. 1/5

Availability: I have found precisely one copy of it for sale on my usual book sites, although it only goes for a few dollars, plus shipping - make of that what you will. You might luck into another copy in a used bookstore like I did, but don't hold your breath. 2/5

Entertainment value: I'll admit that the hilaribad writing got the occasional chuckle out of me, and I did have a good time riffing the hell out of the plot with my writer friends, but without them it would have been a deadly dull experience. 2/5

Do I recommend it?: Do I look like I recommend it? 1/5

(I know, I know, don't explain the joke, but I've gotta - Horace Walpole was an architect and the author of The Castle of Otranto, usually considered the first work of Gothic fiction in the English literary canon. Thanks a lot for Nella Waits and The Terrified Heart, Horace.)

Oculus Presents: The story of my favorite Hungarian horror cover

Hey, everyone, this is Oculus Reviews. It's uh. Been a while, hasn't it.

IRL stuff has kind of eaten up my time and energies in the past year or so, hence me heinously neglecting this blog, but honestly, the more time goes on, the more I miss being able to talk in-depth about genre fiction that I love. I have found some true underrated gems in the year that has passed since my last post on this blog, as well as some true duds - stuff that has embroidered itself into my brain for whatever reason, but also stuff that relatively few people have heard about in the grand scheme of things. I mean, I probably won't surprise anyone by saying that Frank Herbert's Dune books are masterpieces, but how many of you folks have heard about his novel The Green Brain?

Bottom line: we're back with a vengeance, baby. And to kick off things, let me present my favorite Hungarian edition of the one and only Dracula by Bram Stoker:

I still recall the surprised euphoria I'd felt years and years ago (I don't think I was older than 14) when I found this book in my favorite used bookshop, although back then I was too excited to read it to really stop and savor this fantastic cover art. I really dig the sharp, surprising color scheme as well as the ghastly imagery that evokes old tapestries or perhaps woodcut art; the ship episode is by far my favorite and most remembered of the book, so I'm extra into the fact that the cover artist chose that particular bit to illustrate.

At first glance, the book doesn't name the person who drew this - even with some dedicated Google-fu, all I could dig up is that my copy is a 1989 edition by the publishing house/literary society Jókai Irodalmi Egyesület, and is the reprint of a 1925 Hungarian edition translated by Ferencz Tar. (Amazingly enough, the 1925 one was the fourth Hungarian edition of this book - looks like the readers really ate up this one.) Some more research, however, finally netted me the cover artist's name: this same cover art, only in green instead of red, adorned the cover of the 1925 edition, and was drawn by acclaimed Hungarian artist Tibor Gönczi-Gebhardt. Not sure who in particular is interested in this bit of Hungarian literary history, but I find it really neat to have discovered a bit of lore behind one of my favorite covers ever made for a horror novel. As for whether the contents of the book hold up to my fond memories - only a reread will answer me that question, am I right?

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