Mrs God by Peter Straub
My rating: 2/5 cats
ugh—i don’t know what this book is thinking.
it isn’t so bad as to be unendurable, but it definitely is the kind of thing where you can see elements of it that make sense, but the overall effect is just not working.
i mean, i guess so. it is better than what i could make.
but when you are going up against:
you’re pretty much screwed. and i don’t know yet what the horror novel equivalent is to my little fashion gargoyle mondo, but someday my horror prince will come.
i read this one because it promised to be a literary-themed horror novel, about a haunted yaddo type of place where famous people like eliot and henry james and virginia woolf etc once did some work, contributing to some secret archive of unknown glory blah blah blah.
if you are reading this for the inclusion of literary greats, go find another book. the only place these people show up are in photographs. there is no attempt to write about them as characters or to discuss their “secret” work. there is a brief and completely unsatisfying laundry list of work that “may have been inspired by” their time here, but then it becomes a list of, “oh, here are some moderately creepy works by authors people know—i will pretend they once worked at this house for dramatic purposes! bang!! whimper!!”
so but this book is about someone who is chosen to come to this house to study the archives of his aunt; a poet who was either way ahead of her time or batshit crazy, and while he is there he discovers seeeecrets and horrrorrr…
only it’s not, really. again, like poor mila’s outfit—there are all these parts but nothing really comes together in a harmonious whole. things are not as they seem, and the man himself has a creepy backstory and is this drunkenness or madness and what is the deal with these tiny houses and this room full of newspapers and this stairway that goes on and on and on…why is this man yelling at me in a graveyard and who are these people i see thru the windows and what do my dreams mean?
it gets messy.
i was talking to someone about this at work, and he suggested that it was because straub is old and can’t cut it. which, maybe, but after i used the internet—he is only 69!! leonard cohen is about ten years older and just released his best album in 20 years.
ageists…
i was hoping for a short horror novel about literary personalities.
instead i got kind of a mess.
it might just be that my own expectations were not met except for the “short” part, and i am just being cranky, but i really think this is an unsuccessful exercise. there are too many placeholders for things that should be scary and interesting, and not enough actual cohesive story.
straub—you can leave the runway. and please clean up your workspace
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