My Mum is a Legend!

What a bizarre yet enthralling story The Trial turned out to be.  The bizarreness of the situation and the strange characters ie  K.’s defence lawyer who is gravely ill in bed, but he is still working on the legal documents for submission.  Lawyers are not even officially recognised within the system; they are merely tolerated but are actually necessary.  The one person who can really advise K. on the legal system itself and his chances of acquittal is a painter by the name of Titorelli.  He is told that he is guilty (but of what he, or we, never know), and that there is very rarely an actual acquittal.  However, by manipulating the system he may get an ‘apparent acquittal’ but then he would be open to arrest again, or he could get a delay.  Delays can go on for years, and in the meantime he would be free to go about his business, albeit being shadowed by the men from the faceless and nameless legal institution. Apparently Kafka was involved in a legal case, and it must have been frustrating for him as it inspired The Trial.

I loved the parable about the entrance to the law and the door keeper.  I thought it would make a good stand alone short story only to find on Wikipedia that was it was in fact published separately under the name of Before the Law.

I was listening to it driving to work this morning, and it was rather funny as the narrator stated “Chapter 10”, then a bit of silence… then “The End”, then more silence and I thought it actually was the end which really threw me, then it started up again with it being the final chapter.  But, even funnier, at the end K. is abducted by two men and taken to a quarry.  They have a large knife and he feels that he is expected to take his own life, but he is unable to.  One of the men then plunges the knife into K’s heart and as K's sight begins to fade he says…..”Thank you Jeeves by P G Wodehouse”: one book had run right into the other – and at such a strange moment in the story! I had to listen to the end of it properly on my computer when I got home.  It’s such a sad end for K. but The Trial was an unfinished piece of work, and it would be so interesting to know how it was meant to end…  but we’ll never know.

I have been looking forward to listening to Thank You Jeeves, and after listening to a couple of chapters I realised that the storyline is that of one of my favourite episodes with Hugh Laurie & Stephen Fry.  It will be a light change after The Trial.

The Mint Julep was Yum!

Yesterday (Sunday) was spent eating and drinking coffee (as usual) and perusing the book shops in a vain attempt to find some horror or ghost anthologies that may possibly contain Ringing the Changes.  I couldn’t find one, because I couldn’t find any anthologies.  There were shelves and shelves of vampire novels instead…. how disappointing.  Stephenie Meyer has created a monster, but it’s a dreary bland monster and I can’t understand why it has spawned so many novels and why they are being purchased!!  What a hypocrite I am, when I was 15 I probably would have gravitated to these too.  There’s just so much of it out there now, the publishers have saturated the market and even worse is that we are subjected to it on TV too, all the programming these days is aimed at this particular age group with this particular theme. It’s mindless depressing rubbish which this age group could really do without (says I who read nothing but horror and ghost stories as a child, and was told by my English teacher when I wrote one of my own that I needed to see a psychiatrist!!). I think we live in depressing times as it is, so let’s lift it up a bit you authors and TV programmers out there.

On the upside (er maybe…. I haven’t read it yet!) I picked up a copy of A Stir of Echoes by Richard Matheson for $4.00.  I’m still interested in his work despite the two rather bland reads lately, especially as I have been reading Nightmare at 20, 000 Feet.  The title story made my heart go a few times (I was reading it in bed) and last night I needed to keep my light on for a bit before feeling comfortable that I was soon to fall asleep and could switch it off!  Mad House, another of the stories is so well written it’s hard to believe that’s it’s the same person who wrote Somewhere in Time!

Right, time to listen to some more Jeeves and Wooster I think...........they’re a joy to behold.

PS my mother is a legend and found the ISBN number I have been looking for and I now have a copy of Mary Danby’s 65 Great Tales of the Supernatural containing Ringing the Changes wending it’s way from Amazon as we speak. Woo Hoo! I should be reading it by mid November.

I Won't Be Defeated!

What a frustrating time I’m having.  After reading The Festival by Lovecraft and reminding myself of Robert Aickman’s Ringing The Changes I really want to read it again.  Convinced that I must have it in my book collection I’ve torn apart my bookshelves and dug out all my anthologies.  There’s plenty of his stories is those that I have found but not the one I’m looking for.  I googled it and found a few anthology names, but the library does not have any of them... grrrrr.  I found one on Fishpond but it is currently unavailable!!  Now I want to read it more than ever.  I won’t be defeated, I may have to scour some second hand book stores over the next couple of weeks.

Some bed-time reading

I have almost finished The Trial, by Kaftka.  It’s a nightmarish/David Lynch sort of situation, very bizarre and absurd.  I notice that he has written a few stories in the collections I have.  I also had to laugh at myself too after going through all of these books.  A couple of years ago I really wanted to read The Great God Pan by Arthur Machen, and couldn’t get it from the local library.  I asked one of my bookclubbers to get it from their Brisbane library system and in that I was successful.  I then had the task of getting it back to them so they could return it when I had finished it……. last night I found not only The Great God Pan but a whole collection of his short stories on my bookshelves!

Last night I finished Somewhere in Time by Matheson, and it did redeem itself with quite a satisfactory ending.  Now I am going to start on his short stories as I’m just sitting here waiting for the rest of my shopping to be delivered as half of it was missing yesterday.  How they could have got it so wrong totally defeats me?  

Golden Lane, No 22

Golden Lane, No 22

I have started listening to The Trial by Franz Kafka which is a book on the 1001 book list.  I read Metamorphosis a couple of years ago and thought it very clever and rather disturbing!  

I don’t know much about The Trial except that it is about a man who is arrested by people who won’t state who they represent, for a crime which he knows nothing about and the men won’t tell him what it is.

He is given the date and address of his hearing  by phone, but when he puts the phone down he realises he wasn’t told what time.  As most proceedings commence at 9am, he make his way to a strange block of flats in a run down area of town.  On arrival he is advised that he is 1 hour and 5 minutes late.

We know this man as K. (Josef K.) and being frustrated at this ridiculous situation he lets rip in the ‘court room’ demanding to know what exactly is going on.  That is as far as I have got.  I know that Kafka died before completing the novel, and as such it is apparently flawed with inconsistencies within the narration, but so far so good.

The picture above is of Kafka’s house.  It is actually a postcard that was sent to me by one of my original book clubbers who visited it on one of his European jaunts.  He told me that he was very surprised at how small it is. Amazing to think that these classics were written there.

As for my other reading, I've almost finished The Order of the Phoenix, and hopefully I can get through Somewhere in Time so I can start the Matheson short stories.

Had a busy night tonight, so going to have a cup of tea and watch the crazy team on Top Gear for half an hour.

The Blackest Gulfs of Immemorial Ocean.....

Nightmare at 20, 000 Feet

I plodded on with Somewhere in Time last night in bed and Hell House this morning (I believe I’m close to the end of it now).  I’m plodding even slower with The Time Traveller’s Wife!!  It’s not that I don’t like it, I can’t even put my finger on it, but I have read about 150 pages now. This will be the book that breaks the record of taking me the longest time to read.  The current record is held by Moby Dick - it was a drudge and a half getting through that one.

During lunch I had a nice surprise and read a rather creepy story that I wish I had read tonight instead so that I could savour the creepiness before going to sleep.  It was only a short story called The Festival by H P Lovecraft.  It tells the story of (we presume) a young man who goes back to a town that he has been called to by his ‘fathers’ – meaning his ancestors – to attend an ancient Yuletide Festival.  The houses within the town are very old fashioned, there is no cable car although he had thought that it did run into the town, and all doors are closed and curtains are drawn.  He knocks on the door of ‘the house of his people’ and the door is answered by a man who is dumb but who writes a friendly welcome on his slate.  The room he is ushered into is cold and damp, there is an enormous fireplace but it is not lit, and there is a woman spinning furiously on a spinning wheel with her back turned towards him.  The old man’s face shows no emotion or expression and the younger man feels a certain unease that it is a mask. He is told that they are waiting, and so takes a seat and of the terrible books sitting on a table close by he picks up the unmentionable Necromonicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred to read.

The tale then goes on to tell how he and the rest of the town make their way to an old church and then descend into the bowls of the earth to ride off on demon like creatures.  Our narrator is meant to ride a creature too but he throws himself into the putrid river than runs underground to get away……  he awakes in hospital, the town is as it should be (modern and with the cable car).  The only way he can prove to himself that he did experience those horrors is to obtain a copy of the Necromonicon and see if he recognises the passages that he had read the night before.

This passage I thought was wonderful; the narrator had just descended under the church:

“….. and suddenly there spread out before me the boundless vista of an inner world – a vast fungous shore litten by a belching column of sick greenish flame and washed by a wide oily river that flowed from abysses frightfully and unsuspected to join the blackest gulfs of immemorial ocean”.

Lovely!!

Actually, whilst I was reading it, it brought to mind a short story called Ringing the Changes by Robert Aickman.  I haven’t read it for a long time but it has always stayed with me.  It was set in a seaside town but all was not what it appeared to be.  I must find a collection that has it so I can read it again……

Anyway, I picked up Nightmare at 20, 000 Feet by Matheson from the library; it is dedicated to, and has a forward by, Stephen King.  I also picked up Walter Scott's Ivanhoe.  I've never read any Scott but he's mentioned in many novels and after reading Whales for the Wizard by Malcolm Archibald I had to put him on the list. Whales for the Wizard pays homage to all of Scott’s novels.

Off to watch a bit of Jeeves and Wooster now.

Scare Me, Please!!

Hmmmm, it’s so hard to review a horror book.  They are not meant to be great literature, but sometimes it is hard to find where the merits lie.

I’m halfway through two Richard Matheson novels.  Somewhere in Time is a left of centre romance, though I have seen it listed as Sci Fi and Hell House is most definitely horror.  I’m not really enjoying either, which is a great disappointment as I have read I Am Legend, Duel and 7 Steps to Midnight and thoroughly enjoyed them.  The fact that I’m reading these directly after North and South is maybe not doing them justice as there is no comparison.

What I have had to do is to put myself in the frame of mind of the era when they were written ie 1975 and 1971 respectively.  What was horror back then…. most of it was pretty tame, so some of the scenes and the sexuality of Hell House may have given it a certain amount of notoriety when it was first published.  I’m listening to it during my drive to and from work, and maybe if I listened to it at night I may find it creepier than I do.  I think I did see the movie years ago and enjoyed it, but these days we’re a bit more sophisticated in what we need to frighten us.  I’m a tough old bird and not much scares me (except cockroaches) so I demand a lot.  The Exorcist scared me, and anything involving unnatural movement really frightens me ie the fiddler in movie The Gift, the girl from The Ring 1 and The Ring 2.

Jagged Teeth

Jagged teeth I really don’t like either – such as Pennywise’s (The clown from It), and the doppleganger from The Hammer House of Horror’s The Two Faces of Evil.  Really unexpected ugly things like the dwarf at the end of my all time favourite movie Don’t Look Now.  Horror is individual thing and I take a lot to be scared.  Although some of my waking dreams scare the hell out of me.  I’m still getting over waking up and looking over to my bedside table a little while ago and my beautiful grey tabby Jasmin was sitting there all bright eyed, with a lovely glossy coat, looking at me.  I was surprised to see her (she’s been dead for over two years) and I called out her name and went to stroke her (I was obviously not quite awake).  She leaned her head forwards and as she did so it started to change.  I knew it would not look good and I cried out and switched on my bedside light…… my heart pounding.  I had to sleep with the light on for a while after that!

So, although I haven’t yet finished it I’m finding Hell House very tame (nay even lame), however I do prefer it over Somewhere in Time.

Somewhere in Time is just plain bland.  The descriptions, the dialogue……I’m so disappointed.  I feel that maybe Matheson is better at the short story and with this in mind I have booked Nightmare at 20, 000 Feet from the library to help raise him in my estimation!! Basically the ideas are there, but the delivery isn’t (sorry Bradley) and it appears to me that in this instance the movies are better than the  novels.  I won’t give up though, there must be a horror out there that will scare me or at least unnerve me (like Pet Cemetary…. now that really was creepy).

Just an aside, my de facto mother in law died yesterday.  She lived in New Zealand so the last time I actually spoke to her was when we spent Christmas Day at the old folks home with her a couple of years ago whilst we were touring the South Island on holiday.  But even though we weren’t close I still feel sadness at her passing, and just wish to say "Rest in Peace Phyliss".

All's Well That End's Well

I finished North and South this morning whilst cleaning the house.  It had a very acceptable ending, which pleased me.  So many times you read a good book and the ending ruins it all.  I won't spoil it by writing about it as it really is worth the read.  It's a nice feeling to have enjoyed a book so much.

I have started listening to Hell House by Richard Matheson, but I haven't got very far because I missed a bit whilst day dreaming and had to go back, but it's not book marked very well and it went right back to the beginning.  I couldn't be bothered trying to find where I was so listened to it all again!  The upshot so far is that a dying millionaire has hired four experienced people to study the disturbances at a well known haunted house known as the Belasco House to determine whether there is life after death.  There have been two studies in the past all resulting in death or madness of all but one of those involved. Fischer, the survivor, is a physical medium and is one of the group to be hired.

Hell House got it's name from the acts of peversion that took place within it's walls and with the basic introductions to the characters I think I can see where it will lead.  Florence Tanner is a mental medium, and by all accounts attractive.  Barrett, the leader of the group is married to the clingy Edith who  has a masculinity to her looks...... I just hope that this will read better than a Richard Laymon.  But so far so good.

'Che'

I'm half way through Somewhere in Time, also by Richard Matheson (it will be interesting comparing his style between the two novels and genres).  Our protagonist has wished himself back to the nineteenth century to go in search of Elise the stage actress whose photo he fell in love with.  It's a nice romantic notion but so far I feel that the writing style is quite basic and it isn't really 'giving' me anything to go on with regards to imagery.  Still it's an easy read for a bed-time book.  If I could go back in time, I'd go looking for Ernesto Guevara before he met Castro in Mexico.  How different his life could have been........

Other reads ~ I've just about finished Flatland and Harry Potter and I've uploaded Thank You, Jeeves (thanks Tanya!!) and Franz Kaftka's The Trial for next week.  Both are on the 1001 list.

Right, cup of tea time and a few episodes of the X-files before bed!  

A Hussy and a Liar!

Birley Cotton Mill

Honestly, things are going from bad to worse in North & South, and I can’t put the damn thing down, I’m loving it.  Even worse is the Milton accent that the wonderful reader is using….. it’s infiltrating my thoughts.  I sound like Higgins (the union man) when I’m thinking about something!  I even sound like Higgins whilst working on this.  I need help……!

Well, anyway, to sum up so far – Mrs Hale died not long after Bessy died.  But worse than that, her long lost son Frederick came to say his goodbyes.  Well, he wasn’t lost (he lives in Spain) but he was involved in a mutiny and is a wanted man.  Margaret wrote him a hurried letter about their mother and he came at once.  But Dixon (she’s the haughty servant) was out shopping in Milton and recognised a sailor who had been on the same ship as Fred.  Knowing that he might be recognised, court martialled and hung he must make his escape.  Mr Hale suggests he use the quieter railroad station to depart from and Margaret accompanies him but is unfortunately seen by Mr Thornton who mistakes her brother for her lover. 

Waiting at the station, bad luck has it that the sailor now works as a porter there, and makes a scene when he sees Fred.  There is a scuffle and Fred knocks the porter from the platform, but the train arrives at that instant and he is able to make his escape to London.  Margaret goes to look for the porter but he’s no-where to be found.  Later, Margaret is visited by a policeman who is investigating the death of the porter who, although was seen after the scuffle, died a short time later.  Margaret had been identified as being at the scene but she flatly denies it.  When Mr Thornton, who is also a Magistrate, finds out that Margaret may be somehow involved, he directs that there is not enough evidence for an inquest as the porter was a known drinker and was in the advanced stage of disease.  When Margaret realises what Thornton has done she is relieved but also mortified as in his eyes she is now a hussy and a liar!!  Four more discs to go…….

Creepy............

Shadows of Death ~ this is my lunchtime book as it’s short stories but I really haven’t had a lot of time to read it – there's always interruptions and the phone  (I’m chained to my desk at work!)  I have however almost finished the first of the stories The Shadow out of Time.  Lovecraft really does create this creepy, dark feel to his stories. The protagonist has had a three year episode where he was not himself.  He knows, but others would not believe, that his body had been taken over by one of the Great Race and during that time his mind was transported to that body.  Once he had recovered from the horror of being in an alien body he studied for a while in their libraries.  When his mind was returned to his body, all that he learned was to be wiped from his memory, however he did remember still in his dreams and fragments of thought.  He wrote some papers about it and it was mostly ignored.  One day he receives a letter from an archaeologist who is digging in the desert in WA and has come across strange blocks with hieroglyphs that our narrator has written about so he goes to see for himself…….. It’s full of typical Lovecraftian words to try to impress the horror of what is about to unfold.  It’s great!

Harry Potter ~ I managed to listen to a bit more today.  The plot is a little bit slow so hoping it picks up a bit, but still enjoying the characters.

Flatland ~ almost finished, it’s been a bit of chore really!

I’ve just found out too that our library system’s eAudio Books can now be uploaded to your iPod.  It used to be that I could only listen on my laptop which was really inconvenient.  I’m not sure if the MP3s expire like the WMAs do, but my first download is going to be Hell House by Richard Matheson, which was recommended to me by ‘BradleyonFilm’.  So here's to another night of reading.........

and dreaming............