Tag: Horror

Posted in Wordpress Prompts

The Most Recent Books That Kept Me Awake

Posted on by thelotusreaders

What’s a book or movie that genuinely scared you?

In the aftermath of Halloween it seems strangely fitting to be thinking about what scares me and I have to admit to having the most vivid imagination and can easily scare myself without much input from books or films. However, I can never really anticipate what’s going to scare me in a book, with the exception of Pennywise the clown of course. He scares everyone right? So aside from It, I read a steady diet of Dean Koontz, Stephen King and James Herbert in my teens but always found myself more spooked by old fashioned ghosts or more realistic fears. So here are the three most recent writers I’ve been kept awake by and the books that creeped me out.

The Watchers and Stay in the Light by A.M.Shine

I chose A.M.Shine’s first novel, The Watchers on Netgalley and was blown away by how creepy it was. A woman is sent on an errand by her antique dealer friend and ends up getting lost in rural Ireland. When her car breaks down she knows she will have to walk to civilisation and the best way seems to be through a forest track. It’s still light and she figures she has enough time to get to the other side before sunset. Once in the forest Mina realises her mistake, it seems bigger than from outside and she’s concerned that the light might start to fade before she can get to the other side. She feels unnerved, although she can’t say why, then she hears a scream that isn’t human, but isn’t like any animal she’s ever heard either. As the shadows gather she is beginning to panic, when suddenly she sees a woman beckoning her and urging her to hurry. She’s standing by a concrete bunker and although that seems odd, Mina decides it’s better than staying out here to be found by whatever made that terrible noise. As they hurry inside and the door slams behind them, the screams grow in intensity and volume, almost as if they were right on her heels. As her eyes adjust to the light she finds herself in a room with a bright overhead light. One wall is made entirely of glass, but Mina can’t see beyond it and into the forest because it is now pitch dark. Yet she has the creeping sensation of being watched through the glass, almost like she is the parrot in a glass cage. A younger man and woman are huddled together in one space, so there are now four people in this room, captive and watched by many eyes. Their keepers are the Watchers, dreadful creatures that live in burrows by day, but come out at night to hunt and to watch these captive humans. If caught out after dark, the door will be locked, and you will be the Watcher’s unlucky prey. Who are these creatures and why do they keep watching? 

I was absolutely entranced by this incredibly disturbing tale and loved the way the author created this unbelievable world inside the everyday. In the opening section Mina’s world is relatively normal, she goes about her day like any one of us. She has an irritatingly perfect sister, she gets lonely, she sometimes drinks too much wine. We can identify with these imperfections and relate to her. So when this ordinary woman, finds herself caught up in the extraordinary, we believe it because we already believe in her. Yet, the author carefully leave tiny details, that instinctively alert us that something is wrong. The remoteness of the place, the way her phone suddenly stops working, the single strange cry she hears – as if something is on lookout, alerting others to her presence. All of these are universal literary signifiers for ‘something’s not quite right here’. The author never describes the Watchers visually, again there are signs they leave behind and other sensory clues: the burrows in the ground, claw marks around the window, the revolting smell, their cries. Just as Mina is standing in the light, unable to see them lurking in the dark, so are we. Even when you think we’re going to ‘see’ them, we never fully do. The clues set our imagination on overdrive, we build the monsters in our heads which makes them so much scarier as they feed into our personal fears and phobias. The dynamics of the characters in this book are unsettling too and it has an incredible ending that blew my mind! I have the sequel Stay in the Light on my bookshelves because I know I want to read it. I just have to be in the right frame of mind.

Nightwatching and Warning Signs by Tracy Sierra

I was sent Tracy Sierra’s first book Night Watching totally out of the blue. I opened the parcel and then the first opportunity I got I flicked to the front page. I didn’t stop reading. I sat down where I was and disappeared into an opening section that is every woman’s worst nightmare; waking up to an intruder in the house. It begins with a nonsense rhyme:

Yesterday upon the stair I met a man who wasn’t there, 

He wasn’t there again today, oh how I wish he’d go away. 

Antagonish by Hugo Mearns

My grandad used to read me this exact rhyme and strange supernatural stories. I used to ask ‘but is he there or not?’ This is the very question this whole book revolves around from the very first line – ‘there is someone in the house’. Our unnamed narrator becomes alert in the night as a strange noise nudges her awake. I was told by a book reviewer who I respect enormously that this was brilliant and she was absolutely right. Although I drove my husband crazy by waking him up to ask if he remembered locking the door. He hadn’t always and I knew I wouldn’t sleep until one of us had crept downstairs and checked. Preferably not me! Our narrator is at her secluded home with her two small children in a blizzard. The sound she hears is a familiar one, a tread on the stairs to her room, but it’s unusually heavy and slow. She has a split second to make the decision – does she hide, try to run or stay and fight. Will all three of them get out alive and if they do will anyone believe her? 

The first thing that hit me about this book was the unique voice this mother has. We see everything through her eyes and experience everything her body goes through – mainly fear. There’s the heart-stopping tension of that first night, the immediate threat rendering everything else unimportant. Yet there are other fears lurking underneath – will the police believe her, will it stir up questions about her husband’s absence, what will her father-in-law make of what has happened? She is waiting for people to doubt her and the reader doubts her too. Always on the lookout for unreliable narrators, I did wonder whether I should trust what she was experiencing. It’s just so incredibly odd. This tall intruder seems to have two voices: a raspy harsh voice when he’s angry then more of a soft, weedling voice. A voice you might use for children as he asks them to ‘come out little pigs, little pigs are more delicious’. As he does this right next door to their hiding place, it’s even more terrifying. Her little girl whispers to her its the ‘Corner Man’ from her nightmares, he sits in the corner of her bedroom at night and whispers to her. My heart was in my throat at this point! Was he real or something supernatural? Could he possibly be real if this is true? My husband was relieved when I finished this one, but the habit of locking the door is ingrained on both of us.

I approached her second novel with trepidation, would it be as good as the first? Well I can set your mind at rest. This novel is incredible and it’s on my end of year favourites list. This is a ‘stayed in bed almost all day to keep reading it’ type of incredible. The plot is simple enough. A young boy named Zach is taken by his father on a ‘boy’s trip’ to the wilderness with people he hopes will invest in his business. As they settle into their cabin and make it ready for guests it’s clear that Zach is an innocent boy, easily ordered around by his dad who’s angry that his secretary Ginny hasn’t been up to prepare the cabin as she promised. As they settle in for their first night, Zach is convinced something is lurking around especially when he has the visit the outside toilet alone and in the dark. The noises and shadows are like nothing he’s heard before. Could a monster be up here with them in the mountains? Possibly. But monsters aren’t always what we expect. 

This author is fast becoming a master of complex and painful family dynamics with an edge of horror. This monster in the snow brought back memories of the first time I read The Shining and there are parallels in the isolated mountain setting, a potential pressure cooker of people forced together and the young, innocent boy at the centre of the tale. Zach knows this place very well, having come up here regularly with his mum and sister and this was one of my first questions. Where are the women in this story? We know Zach came up here with groups of women and their kids, but his mum, sister and even the expected Ginny are nowhere. In a small vignette at the beginning we see a previous trip and Zach’s mum explaining how to check the snow for the likelihood of an avalanche. She impresses upon him the importance of turning back, even if the risk is small it’s not worth taking. It’s clear very early on that Bram, his father, doesn’t have the same attitude to risk. He’s the sort of guy who thinks men take risks and would rather show bravado to his guests than follow the advice of his wife through Zach or the guide that comes with the cabin. 

Zach is such a beautiful narrator and he’s written with such care, everything he thinks or tells us maintains that innocent, slightly anxious voice. I desperately wanted to protect him and get him out of this situation. As adults we wear masks – the one we wear for our job for example or the ‘telephone voice’ many of us use without really intending to. Children don’t and that creates a tension, especially in an environment where the whole purpose is to impress and sell yourself. Bram makes it clear that these men expect a winner and he has to act like one. This idea of wearing different masks is beautifully depicted as Zach takes us back to an evening at home where his mother had returned home late and a little drunk. He listened in silence to their argument and cursed his mother because she knows the rules. Why does she set out to make him angry? Zach describes his father’s other side as his ‘underself.’

“For Christmas two years ago, someone had given his sister a stuffed octopus that could be flicked inside out. Flip one way, pink, fuzzy and smiling. Flip the other way, green, slick and glowering […] switching outerself to underself.”

He has that horrible realisation we all have at some point in our childhood, that other people might dislike your parent or think they’re an idiot. As they set out and he watches his interactions with the other men he realises they can see through Bram. The guide sees he knows nothing and Bram’s need to own the best of everything means his mountain gear is flashy, it looks too new. The only other kid on the trip is Russ and he makes it clear that he knows exactly what type of man Bram is because his dad is exactly the same: 

“My dad, yours? They’re selfish. They nearly got us killed. And for what? Steve said you and me shouldn’t have skied it and they ignored him, because god forbid they don’t get to do exactly what they want.” 

How scary must it be as a child to learn that your parent is willing to take huge risks with your life for money? Even worse, Zach finds something that makes him wonder; if his dad has an underself does everyone else? The environment brings its own dangers with further snowfall and too many risks taken. Survival becomes a question between which is safest – taking the chance with the environment or staying indoors which is undoubtedly warmer and locks out whatever it is that Zach saw the night he ventured to the outside toilet. There’s always a tipping point and the pressure the author builds is almost unbearable. My heart was in my throat during those final chapters because I felt so protective of this incredible little boy. Tracy Sierra is able to evoke that heart thumping fear we feel as children, sometimes when we’re doing nothing more dangerous than lying in bed in the dark. With Zach she explores the difference between a manageable fear that’s no more than a calculated risk with the right understanding and techniques, a fear that simply comes from encountering something we’ve never seen before and the fear we can’t face because it’s too terrible. There are far scarier things than the monsters we imagine in the dark.

Changeling by Matt Wesolowski

I read this with no idea of the subject matter, except that it would be framed as a mystery being revisited by a podcast called Six Stories, where Scott King interviews six people connected to a cold case. It’s not that he expects or aims to solve the case, although that’s a possibility, it’s about hearing different voices, perhaps ones that haven’t been heard or have something to add to their original evidence. I had no idea of the geographical location in the book nor could I have predicted reading it when I did. The case begins on Christmas Eve 1988 when Sorrel Marsden is travelling along the Wentshire Forest Pass, a road between Chester and Wrexham in North Wales. He hears a knocking sound in the car and decides to pull over in a lay-by to investigate. As he gets out he glances back to check on his son Alfie who is fast asleep in his booster seat in the back. Sorrel checks under the bonnet of the car, but not seeing anything obvious he decides to continue his journey. However, as he drops the bonnet he notices the rear passenger door is open and Alfie’s booster seat is empty. He looks for his son on the edges of the forest, but with no clue where Alfie has gone he goes to the phone box and calls the police. 

I read this while we holidayed on the welsh borders, with the River Wye running through the garden of the cottage. We were travelling back from Chester Zoo when I started to read The Changeling and I’d passed navigation duties to my stepdaughter so I could put my feet up in the back. So I read Sorrel Marsden’s account of his son’s disappearance just as we drove from Chester into Wales! Wesolowski is skilled at creating a setting that slowly unnerves the reader and I felt this strongly as I read about the history of the forest and the interview King does with a contractor working on the construction of a holiday park. He worked in the forest when Alfie disappeared and tried to help search for the boy. Yet the floodlights and vehicles wouldn’t work – the very embodiment of a ghost in the machine. They were sleeping onsite when the knocking started, insistent and gaining in volume despite having no visible source. What I found most chilling were the voices, whispery and urgent little voices that were indecipherable but angry in tone and with a terrifying intensity. Sorrel Marsden has made a point of walking the pass every year on the anniversary of Alfie’s disappearance. He never claims to hear or see anything on his treks, but they do serve a purpose. They set him up as the victim, the hero of the piece, especially then compared with Alfie’s mother Sonia who has never taken part in the search or been interviewed about her son. Until now.

Sonia does consent to meeting King and talks for the first time about that awful Christmas. She doesn’t deny drinking, but claims that Sorrel is an unusual man, with an ability to draw people to him that goes beyond his looks or personality. She recalls being belittled and controlled. Yes she struggled as a very young and isolated mum, but no help came. Despite claiming she was a bad mother, Sorrel left her alone with Alfie and rarely visited. Other women contacted Scott King to tell their own story of encounters with Sorrel. Like a mini ‘Me Too’ movement these women come together to talk about coercive control, psychological abuse, strange knocking sounds keeping them awake and leaving them unnerved. I had my suspicions about Sorrel Marsden. The women refer to an unusual feeling they’d experienced, as if he had them in an enchantment. It made me think of the word ‘glamour’ in the way it’s applied to witches – folk tales tell of a witch’s ability to ‘glamour’ people, to only show those sides of themselves they wish to be seen. It’s also known as love-bombing. Sorrel is a master manipulator and serial abuser able to charm and convince women to trust him. He then slowly isolates them, breaks down their confidence, gaslights them and convinces them they are worthless.

Sorrel took them camping once in the same forest where Alfie disappeared. From then on Sonia would hear strange voices and knocking when no one was there. However the section that genuinely lifted up the hairs on the back my neck seemed a bit tenuous at first. King interviews a man whose mother has recently died. She was a teacher in the 1980’s, gathering research on pupils who had behavioural issues. Her son found the research in the attic and was intrigued by her notes on Child A, because Child A was Alfie Marsden. She recorded his behaviour on several occasions and the more she saw, the more scared she was. Alfie would turn his back on other pupils and deliberately ignore group activities. Alone with him, she heard muttering and although he wasn’t moving, she could hear a strange knocking. There were times where she was scared to look him in the face, he was unnaturally still as if he was listening somewhere or to something else. Did Alfie just have behavioural issues or was there something more sinister at play? There are a couple of utterly brilliant twists towards the end, neither of which I’d expected and one made me rethink everything I’d read up to that point, in a Sixth Sense way. I wanted to go back and reread with that knowledge, to see how I’d missed it. This was a brilliant and disturbing novel, a clever mix of psychological and supernatural elements that’s very addictive and will stay with you long after the book is finished. I was obsessed with noises in the night at our holiday cottage and felt watched in the open plan glass extension, especially at night. I had to read something fun and light afterwards but it definitely stayed with me.

You can listen to Matt Wesolowski’s real life encounter with the supernatural on this episode of the Uncanny podcast where he talks about a student house and a goth poltergeist.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002mmt2

Posted in Random Things Tours

 The Life and Death of Lucy Westenra by Bee Casey 

Posted on by thelotusreaders

“In this moment, I pray for time to stop. If I could just stay here, listening to her breathing I would never ask for anything else. In her arms, I’d happily spend forever … but she always lets go.” 

When Lucy Westenra met the mysterious vampire, Count Dracula, the world believed she died. But that is the story of men, not the truth. 

Lucy was desperate to escape her life, her betrothal to Lord Holmwood, her forbidden love for Mina and ran away into the night willingly. Her death though, is being threatened by a rogue band of vampire hunters made of Van Helsing, her ex suitors … and her beloved Mina. 

She will have to risk everything to finally rest in peace; including the love of her life. In this sapphic reimagining of a classic gothic tale, Lucy rewrites her own story as a master of her own fate, her own desire and her own death.

I have always had a bee in my bonnet about Lucy Westenra. I didn’t read Dracula until university in my late twenties but prior to that was spellbound by 1990s it girl/actress Sadie Frost and her depiction of this sexy and sassy Victorian woman with three suitors and a thirst for blood. I felt like she got a raw deal. Especially when Jonathon Harker was seduced by three brides of Dracula, but still got the girl, once he’d rescued her from the Count’s clutches of course. When I read the book in both my first and second years of uni I became more aware of the psychosexual elements in the novel and even did a presentation on Sex and Death in Dracula where I talked about the homoerotic elements of Lucy’s suitors, the tainted blood as a metaphor for disease and how Lucy is trapped by her class, her gender and her sexuality. As a mature student it seemed unexpected and I earned the respect of some neo-goths that day. This is the book I’ve been waiting for and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I felt like it righted a wrong and gave life to a character I enjoyed but who had been written as a walking warning, both to her friend Mina and Victorian readers. 

Bee Casey’s Lucy is a delight. She’s beautiful and vivacious, but also intelligent and radical, not afraid of questioning the status quo. Even when it might shock. She mentions that Mina brought her a new piece of clothing called culottes that she felt more free wearing than her usual skirts. She also thinks about the whispering she’s heard of women who seemingly live together, like a married couple. One of them sometimes wears masculine dress like a suit. But these are whispers and she’s never heard of this in Whitby, making the joke that even the Queen can’t imagine such relationships exist. However Lucy knows better and realises people are only viewing sexual pleasure through a male viewpoint and even her own mother has warned her it’s largely disappointing for the woman. She has known the sexual pleasure between two women and she knows she’s in love with her friend Mina. Why can’t they live their lives together, instead of becoming married to the men in their lives? Mina though sees their relationship as girlish experimentation, but something that can’t exist out in the open. When they encounter a strange ship that runs aground in the Whitby harbour, Lucy is mesmerised by it. What follows is like a sickness and those around her are desperately worried for her sanity and her life. 

The author has followed the story of Dracula, but writes from Lucy’s perspective with letters bringing other events into the story, such as Jonathon Harker’s visit to the Carpathian Mountains. This keeps everything focused on our heroine. Her nocturnal wanderings and nightmares are viewed as possible hysteria because rest is advised to start with. What they don’t know is that Lucy encountered an unusual woman called Mercy near the abbey and is seduced. Mercy relates the life of a vampire and describes her two ‘sisters’ and the Count as a family. She describes the eternal life of the undead, the freedoms and pleasures of living outside society and it’s easy to see why this would be attractive to Lucy who often bemoans having to choose one person to spend her life with and the expectation that it will be a man and marriage. 

“Why I cannot just keep them all. Why do we have to deal with the trappings and expectations of modern marriage. Why must I choose one partner when the world is so large, when people are so complex […] Why must possibility be sacrificed in the name of propriety”. 

She likens herself to the mythical examples of Penelope and Persephone. Penelope weaving and waiting for Odysseus to return, keeps delaying suitors in a strategy they don’t even recognise, something Lucy calls a ‘quiet rebellion’. When considering a life and death like Mercy’s she thinks of Persephone living half her life in society and half in Hades. Can there be such a compromise for her? It’s telling to me that Quincey is the only one of her suitors who reads the female authors she suggests and he’s also the first to offer up his blood when Van Helsing insists on a transfusion. He was also the first to propose. He seemed like the better choice to me but as she points out she has a choice but no freedom – “an illusion of free will”. She’s also intelligent enough to realise that the others proposed because Quincey did, more enthralled in the competition with each other than marriage to the real her. She considers whether she’s scared of dying to become undead and ponders that even her name would be erased if she married her choice – Holmwood. Even her gravestone would have his name and she would only be remembered as the wife of Holmwood and not her own self. Of course at first she has no idea what Van Helsing has in store for her interred body. This is a brutal scene in Dracula as all three of her suitors drive a stake through her heart and cut off her head. It feels like a punishment for resisting them and with the phallic stake it also has a corrective element too, driving home that this is what men do to women. But as the men talk, thinking her unconscious, she overhears. This would be a second death. How can she avoid such a brutal fate? 

This novel is filled with a tension that comes from us knowing the source material and Lucy’s fate, where as readers we should be glad she has been restored to eternal life by her suitors desecrating her body. I was desperate for there to be a different ending here. The joyous moments happen when she and Mina are together and Lucy truly does light up when she’s around. I was absolutely desperate for a happy ending! This book clearly comes from a love of the Gothic classic, but a frustration with Lucy’s lack of agency and voice throughout. This novel elevates her character beyond the moral warning she becomes in Bram Stoker’s hands. It repositions her as a radical thinker, passionate lover and a critic of the male dominated society she’s brought up in. Exactly where Lucy should be. I’ll leave the final words on men to her. 

They ‘have always revealed themselves to be a disappointment, to have some ulterior motive, to enjoy the chase of me, then upon realising my excitement and whimsy is not just an act of seduction attempt to put out the fires of my passion and sedate me to becoming an acceptable bride”. 

Out now on Kindle and paperback

Meet the Author

Bee Casey is a writer, book reviewer, copy editor but above all – a book lover. They describe themselves as genre-fluid, because they write whatever inspires them; whether it’s horror, poetry, fantasy or romance. They wrote their first ‘novel’ when they were eight years old, the exciting tales of Desmond the Bear (written in beautiful purple crayon and unfortunately lost to time). They have released two novellas, What If and Constellations, and a poetry collection, Healing in Reverse, available now from most online retailers and select indie stores. Their next release is set for early 2027. When not writing, they are also a Random Things Tours reviewer too!

Posted in Publisher Proof

Warning Signs by Tracy Sierra

Posted on by thelotusreaders

I couldn’t stop talking about Tracy Sierra’s debut novel Night Watching. I inhaled it and I have been lending and buying it for everyone around me since. So I approached her second novel with trepidation, would it be as good as the first? Well I can set your mind at rest. This novel is incredible. The ‘stayed in bed almost all day to keep reading it’ type of incredible. The plot is simple enough. A young boy named Zach is taken by his father on a ‘boy’s trip’ to the wilderness with people he hopes will invest in his business. This is a part of the country he visited often with his mother who taught him everything he knows about skiing these mountains and survival. As they settle into their cabin and make it ready for guests it’s clear that Zach is an innocent boy, easily ordered around by his dad who’s angry that his secretary Ginny hasn’t been up to prepare the cabin as she promised. As they settle in for their first night, Zach is convinced something is lurking around especially when he has the visit the outside toilet alone and in the dark. The noises and shadows are like nothing he’s heard before. Could a monster be up here with them in the mountains? Possibly. But sometimes, monsters aren’t always what we expect. 

This author is fast becoming a master of complex and painful family dynamics with an edge of horror. This monster in the snow brought back memories of the first time I read The Shining and there are parallels in the isolated mountain setting, the pressure cooker of people forced together and the young, innocent boy at the centre of the tale. This wilderness is somewhere Zach knows very well, having come up here regularly with his mum and sister and this was one of my first questions. Where are the women in this story? We know Zach came up here with groups of women and their kids, but his mum, sister and even the expected Ginny are nowhere. In a small vignette at the beginning we see a previous trip and Zach’s mum explaining how to check the snow for the likelihood of an avalanche. She impresses upon him the importance of turning back, even if the risk is small it’s not worth taking. It’s clear very early on that Bram, his father, doesn’t have the same attitude to risk. He’s the sort of guy who thinks men take risks and would rather show bravado to his guests than follow the advice of his wife through Zach or the guide that comes with the cabin. 

Zach is a beautiful narrator and he’s written with such care, everything he thinks or tells us maintains that innocent, slightly anxious voice. I desperately wanted to protect him and get him out of this situation. As adults we wear masks – the one we wear for our job for example or the ‘telephone voice’ many of us use without really intending to. Children don’t and that creates a tension, especially in an environment where the whole purpose is to impress and sell yourself. Bram makes it clear that these men expect a winner and he has to act like one. Heartbreakingly, Zach has a soft toy he’s smuggled up there but knows it must remain hidden or risk it disappearing. Bram can’t have a weak son. This idea of wearing different masks is beautifully depicted as Zach takes us back to an evening at home where his mother has returned home late and a little drunk. He listens in silence to their argument and curses his mother because she knows the rules. Why does she set out to make him angry? Zach describes his father’s other side as his ‘underself.’

“For Christmas two years ago, someone had given his sister a stuffed octopus that could be flicked inside out. Flip one way, pink, fuzzy and smiling. Flip the other way, green, slick and glowering […] switching outerself to underself.”

He also has this horrible realisation, that we all have at some point in our childhood, that other people might dislike your parent or think they’re an idiot. As they set out and he watches his interactions with the other men he notes that they can see through Bram. The guide sees he knows nothing and Bram’s need to own the best of everything means his mountain gear is flashy, it looks too new. The only other kid on the trip is Russ and he makes it clear that he knows exactly what type of Bram is because his dad is exactly the same: 

“My dad, yours? They’re selfish. They nearly got us killed. And for what? Steve said you and me shouldn’t have skied it and they ignored him, because god forbid they don’t get to do exactly what they want.” 

How scary must it be as a child to learn that your parent is willing to take huge risks with your life for money? Even worse, Zach finds something that makes him wonder; if his dad has an underself, does everyone else? Coming at this from a psychological viewpoint I loved the way Zach describes his concerns about the men he’s with and his father in particular. The environment brings its own dangers with further snowfall and too many risks taken. Survival becomes a question between which is safest – taking the chance with the environment or staying indoors which is undoubtedly warmer and locks out whatever it is that Zach saw the night he ventured to the outside toilet. There’s always a tipping point and the pressure the author builds is almost unbearable. My heart was in my throat during those final chapters because I felt so protective of this incredible little boy. Tracy Sierra is able to evoke that heart thumping fear we feel as children, sometimes when we’re doing nothing more dangerous than lying in bed in the dark. With Zach she explores the difference between a manageable fear that’s no more than a calculated risk with the right understanding and techniques, the fear that simply comes from encountering something we’ve never seen before and the fear we don’t want to acknowledge because it makes us face a terrible truth. 

Out Now From Viking Books

Meet the Author


Tracy Sierra was born and raised in the Colorado mountains. She currently lives in New England in an antique colonial-era home complete with its own secret room. When not writing, she works as an attorney and spends time with her husband, two children, and flock of chickens

Posted in Random Things Tours

Scars of Silence by Johanna Gustawsson 

Posted on by thelotusreaders

As autumn deepens into darkness in Lidingö, on the Stockholm archipelago, the island is plunged into chaos: in the space of a week, two teenagers, the son of the island’s mayor and that of a powerful businessman, are brutally murdered. Their bodies are left deep in the forest, dressed in white tunics with crowns of candles atop their heads, like offerings to Saint Lucia. Maïa Rehn has fled Paris for Lidingö, where her husband grew up, trying to come to terms with the death of their only child in a car accident. But when the murders shake the island community, the former police commissioner is drawn into the heart of the investigation, joining Commissioner Aleksander Storm to unravel a mystery as chilling as the Nordic winter. As they dig deeper, it becomes clear that a wind of vengeance is blowing through the archipelago, unearthing secrets that are as scandalous as they are inhuman. But what if the victims weren’t who they seemed? What if those long silenced had finally found a way to strike back? How far would they go to make their tormentors pay? And you – how far would you go?

I loved the timing of this novel from Johanna Gustawsson, her second set on the island of Lidingö in the cold, dark run up to Christmas. Here she bases her murder mystery around the feast of St Lucia and it begins when a body is found in the traditional dress of the festival. The victim is wearing a white tunic that’s been slit up the back, with a red sash and a crown of candles representing the festival of light. It reminded me of the locally held Christingle services, where small children in white hold a symbolic orange with a lighted candle in it and a red ribbon meant to symbolise Christ’s blood and his role as the Light of the World. It was something I’d never encountered before, being Catholic it wasn’t part of our tradition, but it fits into the many festivals that bring light to the winter months such as Hanukkah and Diwali. The festival and the victim’s clothing make the scene of the crime even more dramatic and hard to forget. It also throws up immediate questions about whether the date or the costume is a message from the killer. Visiting French detective Maia Rehn offers her help to local commissioner Aleksander Storm and they begin to investigate together. It soon becomes clear that the killer isn’t finished with the island community and the pair must work very fast, prizing secrets from people who are reluctant to talk and digging up long buried events that will devastate and destroy lives. 

One of the things I love most about this series is the atmosphere that the author builds. This is not the average crime novel, it definitely has a more Gothic feel that I would normally associate with folk horror. 

“It was hardly an ocean this mere strip of sea. A moat more like – cutting Lidingo off from the life of the Stockholm mainland. A ghost infested moat, surrounding a poisoned island”. 

This killing takes the community back several years to the murder and rape of a young woman dressed in her St Lucia costume. The victim is Jennifer, a well known and liked teenager in the community whose white dress and crown gives the impression of a angel in the snow. Jennifer was the daughter of Sophie Ackerman who bonds with Maia at a party, when they realise that both of them have lost a child. The pain and confusion of these unexpected and sudden losses have no descriptive word in the Swedish language, only the Sanskrit word ‘vilomah’ comes close, meaning ‘against the natural order.’ Motherhood and who we become when we lose a child is a theme of the novel and drives home that violent deaths affect a whole community. In fact, following the death of Jennifer Ackerman suspicions fell on her friend Gustav who found her body. The way the community treated Gustav, as well as the grief, caused him to commit suicide. It’s such an important theme that the novel’s opening takes us to a classroom on the island where Gustav’s mother holds everyone at gunpoint, blaming them for the death of her grief stricken son. These events and the darkening winter days hang heavy over the tiny island. Maia describes the loss of her son with such beautiful and haunting words that let us know he is still so present in her thoughts she almost expects him to materialise: 

‘He’s everywhere around me, so I’m always waiting for […] a word, a sound, the slightest caress from him. I find myself sniffing the air for the scent of him’.   

Sophie talks about her daughter Jennifer in the words of Cyrano de Bergerac, showing that she is still ever present for her too. It’s such a beautiful way of describing grief that comes in waves, some days it seems far away and other days it feels as if the loss was yesterday. I identified with this so much, knowing that even ten or twenty years on there are days when the grief feels painfully fresh. How much worse it must be with violent deaths where there are feelings of anger, guilt, resentment and so many questions left unanswered. 

‘Her name is in my heart like a bell. Every time I think of her it’s like I can hear that bell ringing and ringing and the memories and feelings resurface every time’. 

As the investigation unfolds it is clear that Maĩan and Aleks work quite differently, but complement each other. He is more of a facts person, whereas she picks up on emotion and her own feelings, heightened by tragedy, seem to have honed this skill. As an outsider she also seems more effective at getting people to talk, something that can be a struggle when a detective lives in the community they’re investigating. Their discoveries are both haunting and horrifying – especially a ‘trophy’ find that absolutely turned my stomach. Some of the themes were very timely, aside from the normal teenage themes of peer pressure, relationship angst and experimentation, there are also more up to date themes of incels, grooming and consent. I found it fascinating that Swedish law reform in 2018 placed the emphasis on positive consent so that rape was no longer defined by saying no, but the absence of actively saying yes. It recognises that when backed into a corner, freezing and becoming unresponsive are normal survival instincts and not consent, so threat and physical force don’t have to be present for an incident to be defined as rape. When we are finally taken to the night Jennifer Ackerman died it is hard to read, but that’s how it should be. This first incident is like a veil of darkness triumphing over light. It’s as if the island loses its innocence. I loved that the answers don’t come easily and the tendrils of the aftermath are everywhere. This is a vivid, symbolic and haunting crime story and the truth is devastating – a gradually revealed horror that has echoed down the generations of this isolated community. 

Out now from Orenda Books

Meet the Author

Born in Marseille, France, and with a degree in Political Science, Johana Gustawssonhas worked as a journalist for the French and Spanish press and Her critically acclaimed Roy & Castells series, including Block 46, Keeper and Blood Song, has won the Plume d’Argent, Balai de la découverte, Balai d’Or and Prix Marseillais du Polar awards, and is now published in nineteen countries. A TV adaptation is currently under way in a French, Swedish and UK co-production. The Bleeding was a number-one bestseller in France and is the first in a new series. Johana lives in Sweden with her Swedish husband and their three sons.

Posted in Netgalley

Victorian Psycho by Virginia Fenton

Posted on by thelotusreaders

Winifred Notty arrives at Ensor House prepared to play the perfect Victorian governess. She’ll dutifully tutor her charges, Drusilla and Andrew, tell them bedtime stories, and only joke about eating children. But the longer Winifred spends within the estate’s dreary confines and the more she learns of the perversions and pathetic preoccupations of the Pounds family, the more trouble she has sticking to her plan.

Whether creeping across the moonlit lawns in her undergarments or gently tormenting the house staff, Winifred struggles at every turn to stifle the horrid compulsions of her past until her chillingly dark imagination breaches the feeble boundary of reality on Christmas morning.

Having seen this billed as a Victorian horror comedy and having a taste for the macabre I thought this would be my perfect read and it definitely was. If you ever wondered whether the governess was the psychopath in The Turn of the Screw, then this is the book for you. Here our young governess Winifred arrives at Ensor House to take charge of Drusilla and Andrew Pound, however she isn’t just teaching them French, instilling a Christian faith and charitable nature, along with their etiquette. Winifred has instead set herself a very different and unexpected agenda. 

“It is early fall, the cold is beginning to descend, and in three months everyone in this house will be dead.”

So, alongside her everyday duties to the children she slinks around the house unnoticed by the rest of the family – cutting the eyes out of the ancestral portraits, stealing the children and bloodthirstily stalking the servants. Miss Natty is the perfect killer because of her position. I love reading about governesses in fiction because of their liminal position in a household, not as elevated as the family of the house and certainly not in the ranks of the servants. Too educated to fit in downstairs but as someone who earns a living, she’s definitely below the family. In one sense this could make her lonely at Ensor, but it also gives her an incredible amount of freedom. Governesses have bedrooms near the children, but the nanny will be on night duty. She’s free to roam with impunity, carrying out her horrible deeds. By day she’s teaching good manners and Christian values but by night she’s free to follow her darkest obsessions. 

“It fascinates me, the fact that humans have the capacity to mortally wound one another at will, but for the most part, choose not to.”

Disturbingly I found this character rather amusing, there’s a certain quirkiness about her that’s appealing and in places I found myself laughing. She is our narrator so we have her inner monologue as well as the havoc she creates. Miss Natty notices everything in the house with the skill of a psychotherapist: observing the servants, the family and their visitors closely to decide who will be murdered next. She’s weighing up their behaviour and those who are unkind and treat others badly will be in the firing line first. As she becomes increasingly murderous, with plenty of gore flying around, she is most definitely enjoying herself and so are we. What has turned this young woman into a potential psychopath? The author has written this book with the staid politeness of a Victorian novel, contrasting sharply with the mayhem being described. It added to the humour and my enjoyment. Of course there’s a feminist slant to this, the men in the house know it all, explaining away any anger and displeasure from their wives as hysteria. Meanwhile their particular shortcomings go unacknowledged. I think we’re still told a lot about how to behave as women and books like these with a female protagonist who commits terrible acts with total abandon and enjoyment is like a release valve. Her tongue can be as sharp as her scalpel, bringing them rapidly down to size. She is breaking every convention, particularly that of the Victorian ‘angel in the house.’ I felt like the author had taken the two Mrs Rochesters from Thornfield Hall and put them in one woman; the quiet and unassuming governess and the murderous madwoman in the attic. She is so incredibly clever and likes her revenge to come, not cold, but sharply, precisely and decorated with liberal amounts of blood. 

Out now from Fourth Estate Books

Meet the Author

A native of Spain, Virginia Feito was raised in Madrid and Paris, and studied English and drama at Queen Mary University of London. She lives in Madrid, where she writes her fiction in English. Victorian Psycho is being adapted for a feature film.

Posted in Random Things Tours

The Howling by Michael Malone 

Posted on by thelotusreaders

There was such an atmospheric opening to this last novel in the Annie Jackson series, setting up the link between the incredible scenery and Scottish folklore. Then we see Annie in her safe place, the little cottage she calls home nestled in the middle of nowhere. The only place where she gets some respite from the ‘murmurs’, the terrible portents of death she suffers when she meets someone who is going to die. They are a curse, not just because of the painfully loud noise in her head but because if she tells someone they rarely listen and if she doesn’t she’s left racked with guilt. She is taking in some fresh air outside, when she falls into the stream that runs at the front of the cottage. It’s freezing cold and reminds us that whenever Annie starts to feel safe, something comes along to challenge that sense of peace. This time it’s her brother Lewis and his girlfriend Clare with some brilliant news, they’re having a baby. Annie is so excited for them, but there is a downside. Even though it’s very early days, Annie is worried that this child will inherit the family curse of the murmurs. Maybe there’s a chance she can put the curse to bed? The woman who tried to kill her wants Annie to visit her in prison. Sylvia Lowry-Law was pulled into the dark arts by a professor at her university and believed that sacrificing Annie would raise an ancient demon to do her bidding. Now she needs Annie’s help in tracing the son she had adopted 17 years ago. Could this boy be the key to a future where she’s not waiting for the next murmurs to hit? That would be life-changing for Annie, not to mention Claire and Lewis’s baby. 

This is a complicated story that Michael Malone tells with multiple narrators and different time frames, slowly bringing them all together to solve the mystery. Linking with the opening section, there’s a boy called Drew who feels bonded with a wolf cub more than the family around him. 

“I was a wolf. And I was a boy. It was a long time ago. They wore funny clothes […] I would run away from my mother and be a wolf. And we were killed. They said we were witches”. 

It’s been quite a year for witches and books that hark back to King James VI of Scotland and all of them have been incredible reads. Here Malone alludes to the dangerous atmosphere in that time, where even the remotest villages were aware the King had given licence for witchfinders to root out anyone seen as different or troublesome. They would be tested against the king’s book Daemonologie then strangled and burned at the stake. Drew clearly has a similar ancestry to Annie and perhaps a long line of ancestors fighting against lycanthropy. His family are emigrating and as usual the author takes us deep inside the character. Drew’s childhood narrative is so emotive because I understood his feeling overwhelmed in an airport full of people and having to feel all the layers of their anxiety. All he wants to do is curl up quietly with his fellow wolf cubs and when he’s pushed, his shout sounds more like a wolf howl – a definite cold feeling down the spine moment. Then there’s Annie and Lewis who are a great investigative pairing, Annie has bags of empathy and insight even without the murmurs and Lewis is well versed in the technology side of investigation, but one thing they both have is a stubbornness that means once they’ve started looking they can’t stop until it’s done, even when the costs for Lewis become very high. They both go to Ashmoor Hospital, the psychological facility where Sylvia is being treated, but she wants to see Annie alone. What she asks for is help finding her son and puts them on to her lawyer Bernard Peters, a timid soul who has worked for her several years as his grandfather did before him. They were helping trace her family and a rather familiar and colourful tale emerges: 

“Witches and curses and twin sisters who fought over a man, leading to one of them being burned at the stake”. 

There is a sense here of history repeating itself through generations. It blends with Scottish folklore and it being a ‘thin place’, the term for places where the veil between this and the spirit world is almost transparent – those that believe and can tune into it of course. Bernard is astounded by the prominent people who are caught up in this strange ancient order that Sylvia belongs to. She tells him she owned his grandfather and that there are secret records that must be protected. Bernard’s grandfather dying suddenly, leaves some of this dark and dangerous business undone. Even as they try to help him they can’t wait to get into the secret room he’s been searching in. There are secrets in here that could bring down very powerful people, but why would the order keep them? Again it brings to mind current news, the Epstein Files and the buzz around having them released, bringing into the spotlight people we could never have imagined to be involved. I felt for Bernard because everyone else has some understanding of the background to this, but he’s blindsided. Also everyone else is here by choice, whereas he is thrust into the middle of it by birth and the death of someone he loved and looked up to. Now he’s implicated in a widespread network of influence and blackmail. The author balances all these narrative viewpoints so well and each section brings a little more information, with sudden little discoveries that fill in gaps and definitely drip feed tension to the story. 

This series has always been an unusual mix of thriller, family saga, horror, magic, folklore and crime. It defies being placed in a genre and I often find that’s where the best and most surprising reads are. It was lovely to have Sister Theresa make a cameo, with her sketchy grasp of data protection she’s a real asset in finding out about the past and nuns are often very quirky and unusual individuals I’ve always found. I left this novel less worried about Annie, I had always wondered if the isolation and loneliness of life with her gift would overwhelm her. Here I felt like Annie’s murmurs took a bit of a back seat, but she gets stronger with each book; a more resilient heroine who still has an otherworldly and mysterious air about her. I always imagine her rather like Kate Bush, which is always a compliment. The more she finds out about her family, the more settled she seems to be and is still working in the local café despite previous incidents with customers whose deaths she could see. However, as we raced towards the ending with tension in bucketloads I couldn’t be sure she’d be safe. The order is a many tentacled monster and I wondered if they would really be able to sever and destroy all its parts. As Sylvia says, they have ‘fingers in a lot of very interesting pies’. There is no depth they won’t stoop to and they operate very quickly indeed as Lewis finds out. I can’t ever imagine that Lewis and Annie will give up investigating and trying to help others, it doesn’t seem in their nature to kick back and enjoy the quiet life. Not for long anyway. 

Meet the Author

Michael Malone is a prize-winning poet and author who was born and brought up in the heart of Burns’ country. He has published over 200 poems in literary magazines throughout the UK, including New Writing Scotland, Poetry Scotland and Markings. Blood Tears, his bestselling debut novel won the Pitlochry Prize from the Scottish Association of Writers. His dark psychological thriller, A Suitable Lie, was a number-one bestseller, and is currently in production for the screen, and five powerful standalone thrillers followed suit. The Murmurs and The Torments, first in the Annie Jackson Mysteries series, were published to critical acclaim in 2023. A former Regional Sales Manager (Faber) he has also worked as an IFA and a bookseller. Michael lives in Ayr, where he also works as a hypnotherapist.

Posted in Netgalley

Love, Sex and Frankenstein by Caroline Lea

Posted on by thelotusreaders

Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein, was born in 1797 to politician and writer William Godwin and his wife and fellow writer, Mary Wollstonecraft who wrote The Vindication of the Rights of Women. In her book she made, possibly the first, claim that women were not naturally inferior to men. It was a feminist manifesto centuries ahead of it’s time. Sadly Mary’s mother died only eleven days after she was born from puerperal fever, leaving Godwin to raise Mary as a single father. However, he remarried in 1801 to a widow with two children of her own, Clare being very near in age to her stepsister Mary. In 1841 Mary became connected to the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, a well-known writer who was already married with three children. Shelley was 22 and Mary was 16. Facing nothing but criticism and social sanctions in London, the couple decided to escape to the continent along with Mary’s step-sister Clare. They then settled for a time on Lake Geneva, sharing a house with Lord Byron and his doctor Polidori. As the weather changed they become snowed in for a period of time and one of the diversions thought up by Byron was that each of them write a ghost story. Up until this point, Mary has only written in her journal but she can feel something stirring within her and in this strange place, Frankenstein’s monster is born. 

Probably every English Graduate who specialised in Gothic Fiction has fantasised about a stormy night, in a house on the edge of a lake near Geneva. That night was supposedly the genesis of the first vampire story – Polidori’s The Vampyre – and Mary Shelley’s classic horror, Frankenstein. It always seemed strange to me, how two iconic horror legends were conjured up in the same place on the same night. Of course it was a longer period of time and everything these writers experienced in their young lives so far was fuel for their creativity. The setting is definitely strange and unsettling. Caroline Lea paints a picture of the lake becoming monstrous, magical but evil too and no longer a place where children paddle and dive underwater. The sky is dark, trees look like ‘funeral lace’ and ash rains down from above. Local people have noticed that at times the lake throws up strange shadows and clouds, some that look like sky cities floating in the air. When they find a man called Karl Vogel drowned in the lake with his eyes turned from brown to blue – they are shocked, but this is a place of transformation. It’s as if nature is creating the perfect circumstances for monsters to be born. 

This incredible book. is a brilliant combination of historical and horror fiction, with a large side order of feminism – all of my favourite things. Every time I put the book down I would look at my husband and say ‘wow’ then try to write down everything that struck me. I ended up with ten pages of notes that I now need to build into coherent sentences and do this novel justice! Firstly the historical settings were incredible. When we first meet Mary and Clare, they are living in lowly lodgings in London. Mary’s baby is born and they are desperately trying to avoid the bailiffs that seem to follow Shelley wherever he goes. The author really captures 18th Century London with the girl’s filthy lodgings a bleak place to look after a baby. They’re also struggling to sleep, worried that any moment their flimsy door will be kicked down. This is the reality of being the mistress and illegitimate child of a well-known poet who does not pay his debts and has retreated back to his family home. I never imagined that Shelley left her in this position. I’d imagined them living on Lake Geneva complete with servants and all the excesses that Byron was famous for, then travelling around Europe, leaving their troubles behind them. Their relationship would probably be considered abusive now, not just because of their age difference but because of the way Shelley manipulates her. Something that only worsens when Byron and his peculiar brand of chaos are on the scene. When Mary tries to stick up for herself, all the qualities he supposedly loved about her – her independence, her spirit, her intelligence – are thrown back at her, in order to control, manipulate and punish her. He calls her a good mother, but also accuses her of fretting and becoming boring. It is her independent spirit that landed her in Shelley’s arms but he’d rather she didn’t have the independence to question him, refuse him or leave him. His threat is very clear:

‘Women who leave their children, will never see them again’. 

Of course Shelley wouldn’t give up his carefree life to look after his child. He would probably hire a string of nursemaids to seduce then discard, until his only option is to dump his son on his long suffering wife who is pregnant again. Mary starts to realise that although he professes to love her, once she has become a mother she is always expendable. My urge to slap Mary’s step-sister Clare started early in the book and flared up very frequently. She has absolutely no girl code. She had left with Mary in the hope of rekindling a brief liason with Byron. However, it’s clear she’s happy to switch affections if he isn’t there, even onto Shelley. She flirts and simpers, touching his arm and holding his hand to guide her outside. Byron’s treatment of Clare is utterly cruel, he manages to ghost her even when they’re finally face to face. He refuses to acknowledge she exists and then only picks her up again when the weather descends and there are no other prospects. Despite this it is hard to like her, especially when she gains snippets of information from Shelley only to drop them on Mary when they’ll hurt the most. The arrogance of both poets is endless! Byron isn’t just a seducer of women, he drinks and takes laudanum at every opportunity too. He abuses his supposed friend and doctor Polidori, considering him dull and mimicking his stutter in front of the women. His own disability is never mentioned by anyone – the limping stride he’s had since childhood is overlooked or even compensated for as Mary notices some people unconsciously falling into step next to him, slowing their stride to match his. His impulsivity is like that of a toddler, moving mid-week from a hotel to the house on the lake, determined not to pay for the weeklong stay he originally booked. It will cost more for the hotelier to clean up after his bizarre animals, including two eagles, a huge dog and a monkey. He sets his sights on Mary and despite his magnetism she can see what he truly is – a boy throwing mud at windows to detract from his own badness and shortcomings. 

The setting is glorious and it’s clear why frozen mountains, cavernous lakes and the arctic weather feature heavily in Frankenstein. It’s where Mary goes to have time to think, away from the chaos and hedonism indoors. The seemingly magical weather conditions are explicable, even though they feel supernatural. Lake Geneva is known for throwing up mirages called ‘Fata Morgana’. They take the form of distorted boats just above the horizon or even ‘castles in the air’, where a whole city seems projected into the clouds. Named after Morgan Le Fay the mirages are created by rays of light pass through air layers of different temperatures. The sheets of ice on a lake keep the surface air cooler than in the layers above. It’s easy to see why people might by unnerved by something that appears so otherworldly. A more psychological phenomenon that’s clearly takes hold within the house is cognitive dissonance, felt strongly by Mary in particular. The villa is starting to feel like a place she doesn’t belong because her emotions and reactions don’t seem to match anyone else’s in the group. 

‘She feels like a stranger in the foreign land of this room, unable to understand their bright chatter and loud laughter […] every moment takes her further away from these awful people who carry on as if she isn’t there at all’. 

Motherhood and the reality of being Shelley’s mistress has changed Mary and it’s so relatable. She wonders whether all women feel pulled in so many different directions at once. She also wonders if she ever had a true understanding with Shelley. A fire that lit up her heart and her mind is now glimpsed very rarely and she wonders if it ever truly existed. Has she fallen in love with her idea of Shelley – the one who creates the grand illusion of romance in his poems. He doesn’t love her, merely the idea of love itself. In disappointment with all men she turns to the wisdom of women, particularly her mother’s work. Mary Wollstonecraft was the first woman to write a feminist manifesto and she truly understood what needed to change for women – the problem of having to depend on a man. She realised that nurturing women’s learning was the first step: 

‘Strengthen then the female mind by enlarging it and there will be an end to blind obedience’. 

Women could only overcome their dependence on men if they were educated and could earn their own living. In Mary’s dark night of the soul she hears her mother’s voice encouraging and coaching her and the minute she does Mary’s able to breathe again and see a clear way to support herself – by selling her writing. Once she can do that, it no longer matters whether Shelley is inconstant or distant – she does not depend upon him for security and stability. She is ashamed that despite her intellect she has allowed this man to reduce her. Yet she has to tread a fine balance and think these things rather than say them outright. She fears that Polidori’s friendship with the two men, means they have convenient access to a doctor. If she fully expresses what she feels might Shelley think her mad and seek to have her committed? However, she is furious that she might be asked, yet again, to grant forgiveness to a man who is not sorry. She feels that both poets have taken and ruined promising young women, not caring that the consequences of their actions will rest solely on the girl’s shoulders. She wonders what it must be like to take up space in the world, to believe it is your birthright to dictate the temperature of every room they’re in. It is Byron’s arrogance that becomes her blueprint for a future self, allowing herself to be angry and consequences to be damned. She wants to be more like him, true to her emotions and principles and saying exactly what she thinks without worrying about the outcome. In fact it’s a dalliance with Byron where Mary seems to find more strength. It’s an uncomplicated exchange of desire, full of passion, but at no paint does he take anything from her. It gives her the strength to confront Shelley about returning to his wife and leaving both women at the mercy of debt collectors, out of sight and out of mind. She finds her voice and addresses Shelley as a man, rather than the great poet, making her feelings about his infidelity very clear, but also pointing out his cowardice and the times he hasn’t been there for her. 

I loved how the story of Frankenstein’s monster is psychological fragments stitched together, just like the monster himself. Through writing Mary processes her own emotions and thoughts which then feed into the emotions of the abandoned monster. She remembers stories of medical students digging up bodies and stealing them for dissection. Then she gives the creature an internal monologue, ripe with the emotions she has felt, but never expressed. Frankenstein leaves his monster just as Shelley left Mary and their baby in squalor. She’s writing a criticism of men who create with no thought for the thing they’ve created. Victor Frankenstein goes to sleep expecting his creature to die and feels nothing. The creature meanwhile feels a combination of Mary’s grief and abandonment, first losing her mother and then the loss of her father, a man who brought her up to have a rebellious spirit and think for herself, but rejected her when she lives by these principles. Mary is this bewildered and angry creature and that’s perhaps why she gives her monster the equivalent of philosopher John Locke’s tabula rasa – the blank slate of a small child ready to experience nature, love and all that is beautiful. Frankenstein’s monster embodies the nature/nurture debate in that the creature isn’t born evil, it’s other people’s cruel treatment of him that makes him monstrous. Her writing has processed all these feelings and working through them makes her feel hopeful for the first time. She might return to London with her son and instead of being beholden to Shelley or her father, she could keep them both with her own writing. 

Typically, blinded by his own arrogance Shelley doesn’t see himself in Victor Frankenstein at all. At first Mary thinks he’s feigning ignorance, but he genuinely can’t see his own reflection. He sees too much ambiguity in the story, thinking either the creature should make Victor look at his own shortcomings or she should make it so monstrous that no reasonable person would expect Victor to care for it. I loved the way she takes his criticism, because it shows us how much Mary has grown up. She realises that at every stage on the way to publication there will be a man who wants to shout his opinion. It doesn’t matter, because she knows they will all be mistaken. The book, like the creature at it’s centre, will be sent out into the wilderness looking for a creator. She’s fairly sure it will find one, because she knows her book is special. As for Caroline’s book, this is an absolute masterpiece and made me think about Frankenstein from so many different angles. Caroline Lea’s Mary take us through the psychological trauma and brings to life her relationship with Shelley, often told in a rather salacious or romantic way without any thought to the inequality between them. Through this experience she guides the reader through the genesis of this incredible novel. It is stitched together from so many different parts, but here we can see them all and understand the circumstances they come from. What Caroline has written is a Bildungsroman, a novel of Mary’s rebirth from girlhood to womanhood. Frankenstein is the chronicle of that birth, as messy, terrifying, horrific and momentous as it is. This birth being the genesis of Mary Shelley as a woman but also as a writer of one of the most important novels in literature.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    

Meet the Author

Caroline Lea grew up in Jersey and gained a First in English Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Warwick, where she has also taught on the Creative Writing degree. Her fiction and poetry have been longlisted for the BBC Short Story Prize and Sunday Times Short Story Award, and shortlisted for the Bridport Prize, the Fish Short Story Competition and various flash fiction prizes. Her novel, THE GLASS WOMAN, was published to critical acclaim and shortlisted for the HWA Debut Crown. Her next novel, THE METAL HEART, was Scottish Waterstones Book of the Month. Her most recent novel, PRIZE WOMEN was featured and acclaimed on BBC Women’s Hour. Caroline is passionate about helping other writers to grow and succeed: she teaches creative writing both privately and, currently, for Writing West Midlands and is often recruited to give talks at literary festivals and events. She currently lives in Warwick with her partner and children and is working on her next novel about Mary Shelley writing Frankenstein. Her books often feature ordinary women in extraordinary circumstances.

Posted in Throwback Thursday

The Thin Place by C.D.Major 

Posted on by thelotusreaders

I have a fascination for the idea of ‘thin places’ – where there’s only a thin veil between our world and the spirit world, or possibly passages to another time or dimension. I am swayed towards the idea that it’s where something traumatic happened and left an imprint on a place, so that however much time passes, the events of that day can break through and be replayed almost like an echo of the original event through time. Ava Brent is a journalist who is investigating one such place. The Overtoun Estate is a strange and looming presence over town and no one seems to know it’s specific history, but it’s rumoured to be a thin place, steeped in myth. The legend is about a bridge where it’s claimed many dogs have thrown themselves to their deaths. The locals steer clear and when Ava begins to ask questions the warm welcome she received at first becomes a cold shoulder. When she discovers that a sick young girl lived there, the sadness that surrounds the building starts to make sense. Ava is expecting her first child so is maybe susceptible to this tale, but a message scratched into a windowsill  fills her with horror. What happened here and is she really prepared for what she may discover? What might her fascination with this place cost? As her life begins to unravel, she knows she should cut her losses and walk away. Then threats start to arise, but Ava can’t deny that despite the fear she is compelled to return. 

This was an excellent slow burn gothic novel from an author that was completely new to me. I am interested in tales of motherhood and the paranormal, brought to my attention at university where I was influenced by Frankenstein and Rosemary’s Baby on my Gothic, Grotesque and Monstrous course. There’s something about the extraordinary changes in the body and the idea of another person growing inside you that’s open to the world of monsters; rather like a human set of Russian nesting dolls. I think it’s also horrifying when a horror exploits that moment when both mother and baby are at their most vulnerable. Ava is drawn to the specific bridge on the property, despite the strange and eerie feelings that congregate there. Ava is taken in by it’s ’otherworldliness’ and slowly it takes over her life. The author lets us into Ava’s inner world by devoting some of the narrative to her journal entries where page after page is devoted to her ramblings about the place. Her home life starts to become disrupted, self-care goes out of the window and even her pregnancy can’t compete with her drive to discover the truth. 

In between Ava’s story we’re taken back to the historic occupants of the house. In the 1920s it’s Marion who lives there, a newly wed who feels lonely as her husband is away a lot for work. Then twenty years later it’s Constance, the sick little girl who is almost a prisoner, kept inside by her over anxious mother. Is she really the sick one in her family? Or is there some other motivation keeping her life so limited? We never know during these narratives whether what we’re being told is the truth. Are the women seeing events truthfully or skewed through the filter of their own experience? We all the view the world through our own learning, experience and emotional state so we have to question whether Ava’s state of mind is colouring her judgement? Is Marion’s loneliness affecting how she views the house? Could Constance’s illness and solitary existence have left her vulnerable to suggestion? All three could be unreliable narrators and the atmosphere can’t help, a sense of unease that settles over them and us. The darkness and mood seem to follow Ava like a miasma, created by every bad thing that’s happened there. It’s this that envelops her and draws her back again. Some historic events are appalling and I was affected by the scenes of animal abuse, as well as pregnancy trauma that’s also depicted. The scenes detailing pregnancy complications left me needing a few deep breaths and a cup of tea. That just underlines how well written the book is. I swear that as the book went on my blood pressure was climbing along with Ava’s. I was also left with a disoriented feeling sometimes and I think it’s a clever writer who can echo the character’s experiences with the feelings she evokes in the reader. 

The supernatural elements were very subtly and gently done, with the mere suggestion of the paranormal being enough. The way I felt while reading proved that this was the type of gothic horror I really enjoy. It felt like a classic horror that creeps up on you woven in with the sort of historical background that really grounds the characters in their time. The author uses the supernatural elements and the terrible story of the dogs, to tell us something about mothers and daughters – daughters being an echo of every woman who has come before them in the family line. It’s also about how the women fit into their world and I loved how the author explored the expectations on women and pressure placed on them by others and society in general. The author’s notes at the end are so interesting too, especially the elements of the book based on a true story. Overall this was a great combination of gothic storytelling and a compelling historical thriller. 

Out Now from Thomas and Mercer

Meet the Author

C. D. Major writes suspenseful books inspired by strange true stories. Alongside her thrillers she writes big love stories as Cesca Major, rom coms under the pseudonym Rosie Blake and emotional women’s fiction as Ruby Hummingbird. All information about her books, Book Club Questions and more are over on her website http://www.cescamajor.com. Cesca lives in Berkshire with her husband, son and twin daughters. She can be found on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram and enjoys connecting with readers.

Posted in Random Things Tours

The Torments by Michael J. Malone

Posted on by thelotusreaders

I was bowled over by the first novel in the Annie Jackson series – The Murmurs. I already knew that Michael was an incredible writer, able to bring great compassion and intelligence to his characters while delivering a page turning thriller. The added elements of the paranormal and Scottish folklore really grabbed my attention and fulfilled my craving for all things weird and gothic. Here we find Annie living in her little cottage with a view of the loch, the only place that gives her peace from ‘the murmurs’ that can strike at any time beyond the walls of her home. The murmurs are sibilant whispers letting her know that someone close by is near to death. A vision of a skull appears over the person’s face, followed by a horrible premonition of how they meet their fate. One day, while working a shift in the local coffee shop, Annie can hear the whispers and feel the rising nausea. This vision is for a young local man called Lachlan. Annie sees a terrible car accident and Lachlan’s vehicle wrapped around a tree. Torn between warning him and drawing attention to herself, or walking out and ignoring the vision, Annie chooses a middle ground. She tells him his tyres are bald and he really should change them. Even this course of action backfires as only hours later she is berated by a man who comes to tell her Lachlan is dead and she could have prevented it, but didn’t. The rumours about her powers go into overdrive as people realise Annie is the woman who found the bodies of several murdered women. 

Annie can’t win. She’s either dismissed as sinister or even mad or she stays quiet and is blamed for whatever ensues. Desperately wanting to hide from the world, she hopes her little cottage will continue to protect her from the murmurs, but hadn’t banked on how angry locals would be. They break her windows and target her house with red paint. Thankfully, her twin brother Lewis arrives to stay and help just as their adoptive aunt visits, hoping that Annie’s gift might help someone in need. She wants them to look into a missing person case; a young man called Damian has disappeared and she suspects something sinister has happened to him. Damian has had a very complicated past, including ending up in prison on one occasion, but in recent months he had calmed down due to the birth of his son Bodhi. While Annie is keen to explain that she isn’t a medium and can’t find people on command, Lewis thinks they might be able to help. Why not research and interview people like a private investigator? Then during their investigation if anything comes up for Annie they can act on her ideas. What awaits them is a surprising and complex puzzle, that seems to include the dark arts and a woman with the ability to ‘glamour’ others. This time Annie could be in serious danger. 

Michael moves us through different timelines and perspectives, from Annie and Lewis’s investigations to new characters called Ben and Sylvia who are pupils at a private school several years earlier. I found their tutor very disturbing, almost grooming both of them into his fascination with the occult. He’s chosen exactly the right students to draw into his web, students who are distanced or estranged from family and potentially vulnerable. His name is Phineas Dance – an awesome name for the villain of the piece! He gives them a reading list including Alastair Crowley and other proponents of the dark arts and they take to his teaching very well, particularly Sylvia who we watch become more obsessive as she matures. Their training involves ritualistic sacrifice, as well as the attainment of wealth and success – using their new powers to ensnare other followers of celebrity and influence. This leaves them both free rein to operate where they live, having local dignitaries in their pocket. Every few years they have a chance of ensnaring the Baobhan Sith, a mythical female deity who can unleash havoc. All they need is a sacrifice and who better than Annie? The author excels at creating a nail-biting game between Sylvia and Annie’s powers, with Sylvia drawing Annie towards her beautiful home and Annie’s murmurs being suppressed then surging again. Annie is confused by this strange sensation, that feels as if her brain is dialling in and out of a radio station! I was mentally begging her to resist Sylvia’s strange abilities and stay with her brother who is in a battle of his own. He’s using detective work to find out about their missing man Damien and unearthing a possible link to a terrible fatal accident that happened when he was only a teenager. Could this incident be behind Damien’s reckless and addictive behaviours? I loved his interactions with the detective working the missing person’s case, Clare is deeply suspicious of the brother and sister team at first. However, when she has an inkling that corruption might be at play she works in tandem with Lewis and they make a formidable team. I even detected a a bit of chemistry between them. This is a fast moving case, especially when Annie is targeted, meaning you won’t be able to put the book down until you know if she can be found before the ritual sacrifice begins. 

When you finish this book you’ll feel like you’ve been on a fairground ride! The author has a brilliant way of engaging the reader’s emotions, drawing us into the character’s inner lives in a depth that can be rare in thrillers. It’s his ability to make us root for this brother and sister pairing that drives this novel. I feel so much for Annie, who hasn’t asked for this strange ability she has but has to live with the consequences and it’s a lonely life. She’s misunderstood and shunned by people who really don’t understand how powerless and frightened she feels. It was great to see her with the back up of her brother, who accepts her abilities without question and doesn’t judge. Their bond felt very real and setting aside the paranormal elements of their quest, they did remind of the close bond I have with my own brother. When you add these characters to a great case, full of drama and danger, it makes for a very satisfying reading experience. I absolutely raced to the conclusion, never expecting the outcome and enjoying the twists along the way. It left me hoping for more from Annie and Lewis, with a hope that Annie gets a little bit of respite from the murmurs first.  

Published by Orenda Books 12th September 2024

For more reviews check out these bloggers on Septembers blog tour.

Meet the Author

Michael Malone is a prize-winning poet and author who was born and brought up in the heart of Burns’ country. He has published over 200 poems in literary magazines throughout the UK, including New Writing Scotland, Poetry Scotland and Markings. Blood Tears, his bestselling debut novel won the Pitlochry Prize from the Scottish Association of Writers. His psychological thriller, A Suitable Lie, was a number-one bestseller, and the critically acclaimed House of Spines, After He Died, In the Absence of Miracles and A Song of Isolation soon followed suit. A former Regional Sales Manager at Faber & Faber, he has also worked as an IFA and a bookseller. Michael lives in Ayr.

Posted in Squad Pod

Monstrum by Lottie Mills

Posted on by thelotusreaders

This is a very personal review, because when you have a disability it’s impossible to read a collection of stories about bodily difference and it not feel personal. I was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis in 1995, but originally broke my back at 11 years old and after years of pain developed Myofascial Pain Syndrome and disc degeneration. Disability and difference have been part of my life for so long but yet I never feel fully part of that world. That’s because my disabilities are usually invisible and I don’t really belong in either world. I even read this while struggling with my health and finally catching COVID. I’m typing up my review while in bed after a radio frequency denervation, where a heated needle is guided towards the compressed nerves and burns them to disrupt the pain messages that refer nerve pain to my legs and lower abdomen. All this goes on behind closed doors because I’m simply unable to get up and out. Then when I can go out, I appear to have very little wrong with me unless I’m using my stick or a crutch. I’m doing what’s called ‘passing’ – able to look like everyone else while having disabilities. So it’s hard to put across how moved I was by this collection portraying ‘otherness’ and how able-bodied people respond to it. Using mythology, fairy tales and a touch of Shakespeare, Lottie Mills has managed to put across so much about life with a disability and what happens when it brushes up against an able-bodied society that’s considered the norm. However, in her world these disabilities become abilities, sometimes magical ones.

The first story in the collection introduces us to a magical island where Cal and his daughter have a beautiful life of warm sand, sea and a night sky glittering with stars. He tells her stories about bear people and she asks him if they are bear people? Yes they are he says, although her mother wasn’t. She was from a human world that’s about to clash disastrously with theirs. In the human world, there’s so much that Cal can’t do because it isn’t set up like their island. In the human world Cal becomes disabled. We then see what happens when human agencies come up against their little family with disastrous consequences. Instead of concentrating on what he can do, they look at him through the prism of their own abilities and only the things he can’t do. How can he possibly look after his daughter properly when he’s so disadvantaged? Mills takes disability theory here and applied it to her character’s lives, which judging by the name Cal (Caliban) come from the type of magical island Shakespeare describes in The Tempest. Caliban has been more recently portrayed in productions of the play as a black man, a slave, or an asylum seeker rather than a monster. Mills makes the point that Caliban is only a monster when we make him one. The original model of disability is a medical one that assumes there is one ideal healthy body and anything that differs from that is wrong and needs to be fixed. When used in a social context it tells you that the things you can’t do in the world are down to your difference from the norm. However, the social model tells us that it is the way the world is set up that creates the disability. For example if all buildings eradicated stairs, creating ramps and lifts within the normal building model, the environment becomes accessible to all. If Cal is viewed in his own environment, he is capable of looking after his daughter. I was desperate for them to be reunited and I also felt a personal yearning to be part of Cal’s world. This fairy tale explains that while agencies like social services and the NHS might think they are doing the right thing for someone, there is often a better solution. That solution champions individuality and concentrates on what the person can do, rather than what they can’t.

In another story we meet a young disabled woman who craves the perfect pain- free body, something I could definitely identify with right now. However, when her wish is granted she finds it difficult to let go of her disabled identity. This was a fascinating exploration of how disability affects the person psychologically. If a disability is innate then it’s the only body that person has ever known. They know the world’s expectations of that body, their own perception of what they might achieve within that body and how able-bodied people perceive them. If the disability is acquired it can be a long and painful process to come to an acceptance of your new body. You must grieve the body you have lost, as well as all the things you expected to do with that body. I have heard many friends tell me that while they’d happily give up chronic pain or a particular aspect of their disability, they wouldn’t want to go through a reverse change and be able-bodied again. There is even a fear of becoming able-bodied again, with all the expectations that places on a person. This story perfectly encapsulates that fight within the self and how far our disabilities are assimilated into our idea of who we are. I loved Lottie’s use of horror and settings where disability has often found a home such as the circus or fairground. Freak shows were popular in the 19th Century, in both the UK and USA, with different bodies placed on show for entertainment and wonder. In fact Coney Island in New York was a hugely successful venue for such shows, where businessmen and entertainers like Barnum were making money from the display of people with differences and disabilities. It certainly wasn’t the wonderful musical extravaganza portrayed in The Greatest Showman. However, it was a place where someone with a disability could make their own money, live in a community where difference was appreciated and accommodated and achieve a level of fame. She lets us know that these issues are complex and look very different from person to person.

There is a beauty in this world of ‘otherness’ and it’s a world made up of an incredible mix of ingredients. Every person with a disability is different so the variety of experience is endless and hybrid bodies, unusual pairings/families and queer love thrives here. Lottie has found a way of balancing how the world sees us and how we see ourselves. She has used magic realism and alternative communities to show the strength there is in accepting disability and making a life with it, rather than constantly fighting to change yourself and remain in the able-bodied world. What was the most interesting thing to me was her understanding of how these issues affect the world of writing and how there are accepted narrative tropes around disability. I studied for a PhD, sadly never completed, where I was looking at how disability is portrayed in autobiography and memoir and whether this was driven by an author’s internalisation of society’s expectations or whether the publishing industry is biased towards narratives that are acceptable to able-bodied readers and they know will sell widely. The public like people who battle against their disability and illness, preferring words like ‘fight’, ‘overcome’ and ‘survive’. The accepted narrative trope is that of a journey from the dark days of diagnosis towards the rehabilitation and a triumphant ending of cure or a successful life, despite the disability. Often people with disabilities read these narratives and feel inadequate for struggling, for not achieving a similar level of ability and success. Mainly they don’t feel represented. Here Lottie shows us these stereotypes and gives us something different – individuality, community and love. Her narratives don’t follow the accepted tropes, instead focusing on acceptance, owning a disability and living with it in a way that works for the character rather than an able-bodied reader. Lottie’s writing manages to latch onto the reader and not let go, but for me it was her refusal to conform and instead confront people’s perceptions of disability. I’m hopeful for much more from this talented writer and that publishers are starting to see the value of individual and adventurous disability narratives that truly represent such a vibrant and varied community.

Published by Oneworld Publications May 2024.

Meet the Author

Lottie Mills was born in Hampshire and grew up in West Sussex, Hertfordshire, and Essex. She studied English at Newnham College, Cambridge, and contributed to Varsity and The Mays during her time there. In 2020, she won the BBC Young Writers’ Award for her short story ‘The Changeling’, having been previously shortlisted in 2018. Her work has been broadcast on BBC Radio 1 and BBC Radio 4, and she has appeared on programmes including Look East, Life Hacks, and Woman’s Hour to discuss her writing. Monstrum is her debut book.