Book 30 of 2018

What a great little novel! It's a classic haunted house tale with a multi-dimensional twist. Once you figure out what's happening to the victims you wish, as many do at horror films, that you could intervene somehow and stop them from doing what they are about to do. That's what makes dramatic irony so cool, right?

Of course a few of the victims are really distasteful people, so it's fun to see them get their occult comeuppance. But even they don't deserve this fate. Well, maybe the cop does.

As in Cloud Atlas, Mitchell keeps track of multiple narrative lines and characters and they are all fully fleshed out with profound and individual and entertaining back stories. Of course these lines and characters all end in a similar manner because their fate is pulling them gravitationally toward the singularity of Slade House. We get to experience this same fate from different points of view, and that's a fun exercise for a writer, to imagine how different people would experience and describe the same sorrowful fate. And Mitchell shows off by keeping them in character as they are snuffed--the things they notice and how they notice them are well done.

The little alley where Slade House hides itself is carefully and quaintly wrought. All of the settings are classic ghost story with 21st century updates. The House itself is truly entertaining, and its means of haunting is unique.

And the book, though creepy and harrowing, is also funny as hell. All good haunted house novels blend humor and despair. Mitchell does so quite well.

A great Halloween read. You can finish it between handing out candies Wednesday.

Book #1 of 2015

I must admit I almost bailed on Wilton Barnhardt in the middle of chapter one. I found the central consciousness so annoying, so cloying, and so close in maturity and temperament to the middle school students who assail me daily in class that I nearly shelved the book in my "donations" pile. But I persevered, and gladly...because this novel progresses through the points of view of several characters associated with a grand old Southern family not only in decline, but in precipitous free-fall. Many chapters are dark and sardonic in the tradition of Southern Lit, but there is always a lively and wry sense of the humor of things, and some outrageous laugh-out-loud moments. Barndhardt captures the South, and its damnably intractable problems with race, poverty, and historical accuracy. But this South is not your grandparents' Dixie, and it is doomed to fall a second time to the combined civilizing pressures external to it and to those continuing to rise within its boundries.