Elric: The Making of a Sorcerer: written by Michael Moorcock; illustrated by Walt Simonson (2004-2006; collected 2007): Elric creator (among many, many, many other things) Michael Moorcock returns to his most famous fantasy creation for an origin story of sorts. Here, we see the sickly heir apparent to the throne of fantasy kingdom Melnibone undergo four trials to determine his worthiness to be king when his father dies.
Walt Simonson's artwork is well-suited to the material -- as with his brilliant 1980's work on Marvel's Thor, this work possesses a real and specific and dynamic view of the fantastic. Moorcock keeps things cracking along in this idiosyncratic tale of trials and tests while keeping things accessible for those who haven't encountered Elric of Melnibone before.
One of the things I noticed in returning to Elric's world after about 30 years away is how much George R.R. Martin's conception of Old Valyria and its dragon-and-dark-magic-based primacy owes to the Moorcock's vision of Melnibone in relation to the Young Kingdoms of humanity, right down to the dragons. Recommended.
Agatha: written by Kathleen Tynan and Arthur Hopcraft; directed by Michael Apted; starring Dustin Hoffman (Wally Stanton), Vanessa Redgrave (Agatha Christie), Timothy Dalton (Colonel Archibald Christie), and Celia Gregory (Nancy Neele) (1979): Slight but enjoyable fictional speculation about what happened during Agatha Christie's famous 11-day disappearance in 1926. I realize that she was actually helping Doctor Who battle giant alien bees, but this is almost as plausible. Redgrave, Hoffman, and Dalton are all excellent, while Michael Apted's direction keeps things mostly tight and Vittorio Storaro's cinematography casts a period glow over everything. Apparently, the Christie estate sued twice to keep the movie from being released, unsuccessfully. But really, it's not all that scandalous. Lightly recommended.
Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief: based on the book by Lawrence Wright; written and directed by Alex Gibney (2015): Excellent, occasionally harrowing documentary about the history and practices of the Church of Scientology from creator L. Ron Hubbard's adventures in writing and sub-chasing in the 1930's and 1940's through its creation in the mid-1950's to its well-financed global position today.
Interviews with former Scientologists and some often astonishing archival material form the bulk of the documentary, along with commentary from Lawrence Wright, who wrote the book it's based on. London, Ontario's Paul Haggis supplies a lot of the ex-Scientologist anecdotes and rueful self-examination, but he's far from the highest ranking member of the Church to testify to the camera about its excesses, leaders, and overall weirdness. Another documentary home run for Alex Gibney, whose best-known previous work is probably The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Enron Story. Highly recommended.
Frankenstorm by Ray Garton, also including the novella "The Guy Down the Street" (2014): Great, fun, pulpy horror-thriller with a terrible title. An unlikely West Coast hurricane and a sinister government bio-weapon project team up to cause major problems for the citizens of Eureka, California, north of San Francisco. Ray Garton handles the multiple viewpoint third-person narration smoothly, cranking up the tension as the disparate plot threads begin to dovetail towards the conclusion.
As pretty much always, Garton manages to work a social consciousness into the horrors and thrills. The bio-weapon team has been abducting homeless people from the Eureka area and experimenting on them in order to develop a viral weapon.
Both the first chapter and various sections throughout generate sympathy for these unwilling test subjects, as well as for a working-class woman who also gets pulled into the terrible events of the novel simply because she needs money for her son's medical care. It's rare that a thriller can end with a solemn contemplation of mortality, but Frankenstorm does, and effectively. This is the sort of thrilling agit-prop we could use more of.
Nonetheless, thrills and surprises are paramount. Frankenstorm stirs a bunch of things that have often served as the plot-engine for a thriller -- a crazy cop, a conspiracy-busting reporter, a well-armed private army, a mad scientist, a hurricane, a child custody battle -- into the same pot. And it's delicious! This paperback edition also includes an X-rated version of the sort of American-suburban contes cruel that Richard Matheson and Charles Beaumont created in the 1950's, "The Guy Down the Street." In all, recommended.
The Nature of Balance by Tim Lebbon (2000): An early novel from the prolific Tim Lebbon pits a small group of people against nature gone mad. Or at least intensely angry at human beings.
There are elements of Arthur Machen's work throughout the novel, as one reviewer points out in a blurb on the back cover. Of course, Lebbon has a character talk about an Arthur Machen story early in the text, so there's a signpost here, brightly illuminated. It's Machen's "The Terror," in which animals launch an attack on humanity, that's referenced in the novel.
However, there are other Machanesque touches as well that recall other works, especially a discussion of what true natural evil would look like ("The White People") and Machen's ideas of reality being perhaps too horrible to contemplate without some mediation ("The White People" and "The Great God Pan," among others).
Lebbon doesn't attempt to write like Machen. The Nature of Balance is more like SplatterMachen, with all the explicit blood and guts and gore and sexual ramifications shown where they were only (strongly) implied in Machen's early 20th-century work. It works because of Lebbon's strong hand at characterization more than anything else.
The litany of horrors can get a bit repetitive after awhile (never have so many things smelled so "rich" and "meaty" -- the line between gross-out and dog-food commercial can be a thin one). But Lebbon also exhibits a great deal of creativity in depicting Nature gone mad at warp-speed. There's actually something Miltonic in some of the descriptions of what is, I suppose, a post-post-lapsarian landscape, a world in which once again everything has changed, changed utterly. But there's also hope, and hopeful characters amidst the rubble and the crawling tentacles of malevolent trees. Recommended.
The Superman Chronicles Volume 10, containing Superman stories from Action Comics 53-55, Superman 18-19, and World's Finest 7 (published 1942/collection 2012): written by Jerry Siegel; illustrated by John Sikela, Leo Nowak, Jack Burnley, George Roussos, and Ed Dobrotka.
Minor, unpowered villains that include The Snake, The Night-Owl, and Captain Ironfist appear in this chronological collection of Superman stories, all of them originally published in 1942. You can tell America has entered WWII from the covers alone, which feature Superman vs. the Axis powers in various locales (though none of the stories deal with the war directly).
Lex Luthor makes another of his early appearances in "The Heat Horror," this time threatening humanity from his new headquarters inside an artificial asteroid. Jerry Siegel loved his science fiction. There are a few more mundane tales involving mining and racketeers. The three oddities of the volume are also the stand-outs.
In "The Case of the Funny Paper Crimes," Superman battles gigantic comic-strip characters who've come to life and started committing crimes. All the characters and strips we see in the course of the story are riffs on popular comic strips of the time that include Prince Valiant and Dick Tracy. It's one of the most fun and metafictional of all early Superman stories.
But we're not done with metafiction and the super-roman a clef just yet! In "A Goof Named Tiny Rufe," Superman deals with a very, very thinly disguised parody/homage of popular comic strip Li'l Abner and its creator Al Capp. And there are (unnamed) cameos in this story from various Superman editors and writers. Superman writer/creator Jerry Siegel is certainly having fun, as are his artists on this one, doing awfully good approximations of the style and characters of Li'l Abner.
But wait! There's more metafiction! In "Superman, Matinee Idol!," Clark Kent and Lois Lane visit a movie theatre that's showing a Superman cartoon. Indeed, it's a sequel to the first Fleischer Studios Superman cartoon, "Superman vs. The Mechanical Monsters." The story of this fictional cartoon occupies the bulk of the story. Interpolated throughout are scenes in which Clark prevents Lois from learning his secrets (including his secret identity) from the cartoon itself. This story is all play and all meta, a jolly and fairly sophisticated piece of fantasy writing.
These three fantastical, metafictional Superman stories make me wonder if Jerry Siegel had been reading Captain Marvel comics, which were generally more fantastical than the adventures of Superman, and by 1942 almost as popular if not moreso for a brief time.
In any case, they're a delight. Siegel's artists do fine work, especially John Sikela, who approximates both Joe Shuster's style and Al Capp's style in the course of a volume. And I haven't even mentioned one of the greatest scenes in Superman history. See, The Night-Owl has a trained owl with claws dipped in deadly poison. He sends it after Lois Lane. But Superman arrives just in the nick of time... and punches the owl so hard it explodes in a flurry of feathers and claws. That is awesome. Highly recommended.
The Naked Sun by Isaac Asimov (1956): Isaac Asimov all but invented the science-fiction mystery with his first novel about human police detective Lije Baley and robot partner Daneel Olivaw in 1950's The Caves of Steel. Six years later (well, a year later in book time), the two pair up again, this time to solve a murder on the most sparsely populated of the worlds colonized hundreds of years earlier by Earth and its colony worlds. Solaria has a population of 10,000, along with millions upon millions of robots.
The Spacers, as the inhabitants of Earth's long-emancipated colony worlds are known collectively, are far ahead of Earth both technologically and biologically. However, they no longer have anything resembling a police force on any of their worlds: the elimination of want and need caused by their use of robots has made them a virtually crimeless society. Thankfully, run-down, over-populated Earth has lots of crime and thus lots of experience solving crime. As Lije Baley acquitted himself well in the first novel solving the murder of a Spacer on Earth, he's now called upon to run the investigation on Solaria.
Asimov continues to develop the peculiar psychology of Earth residents here -- Baley, like most citizens of Earth, is intensely agoraphobic because Earth's entire civilization exists inside vast, enclosed cities. Earth's surface has been devoted to providing food for the planet's teeming billions. But Baley must work to overcome at least part of this agoraphobia during his investigation. Solaria is so intentionally under-populated that its citizens have developed crippling social phobias when forced to be in the physical presence of other human beings.
Daneel Olivaw, human-form robot from the pre-eminent Spacer world of Aurora, both aids the investigation and acts as a bodyguard against repeated attempts on Baley's life. Olivaw chips in with his emotionless logic and understanding of Spacer psychology, though even he is an outsider on Solaria.
The murder itself has ramifications for Earth and the Spacer worlds on a number of levels. The most wide-reaching consequence attaches to Earth's ability to begin colonizing worlds again with the aid of the Spacers. Baley's own son wants to be one of these new colonists, but the program may also keep both Earth and the Spacer worlds from falling into a social decline. If Baley can solve the case without embarrassing the Spacer powers that be, at least some of Earth's billions may find new homes elsewhere. And a necessary cross-pollination between Spacer and Earther cultures may benefit everyone.
Baley and Olivaw's investigation flows much more smoothly here than in The Caves of Steel, in which the plot required Baley to deduce a killer incorrectly several times before finally getting it right. Here, on an unfamiliar planet, he devotes himself to social fact-finding as well as the murder investigation. The former is necessary for the latter to succeed. This reduces the always entertaining Olivaw's role in the investigation, really the novel's only narrative flaw.
Otherwise, The Naked Sun succeeds as both science fiction and whodunnit. Olivaw functions as the source text for a legion of logical sidekicks that would follow, most prominently Star Trek's Spock and Data, and more precisely in such 'future cop' shows as Almost Human, Future Cop, and even Holmes and Yoyo (!). Recommended.
Annie: based on the characters created by Harold Gray; adapted from the Thomas Meehan/Charles Strouse/Martin Charnin musical by Carol Sobieski; directed by John Huston; starring Albert Finney (Daddy Warbucks), Aileen Quinn (Annie), Carol Burnett (Miss Hannigan), Ann Reinking (Grace), Tim Curry (Rooster Hannigan), Bernadette Peters (Lily St. Regis), Geoffrey Holder (Punjab), Roger Minami (Asp), Edward Herrmann (FDR), and Lois De Banzie (Eleanor Roosevelt) (1982): There's something bizarre about John Huston directing this musical. I assume the paycheck was good and that it allowed Huston to check 'Direct Musical' off his Career 'To-Do' List. But he does a solid job. We can actually see people's feet during the dance sequences. He gets solid performances out of both children and adults. Even the dog does solid work.
It's all both better and grittier than the 2014 remake/rewrite. It could also use about 15 minutes of cuts. The budget for this thing approached that for the first three Star Wars films combined, so it's no surprise that it looks good. The singing is also good throughout, as are the songs. Aileen Quinn performs Annie about as well as a child actor performs anything. Hey, Punjab and the Asp are here too! And Albert Finney, while solid as Daddy Warbucks, is a little short for the role -- 5'9". So it goes. Recommended.
JFK: adapted from Jim Garrison's On the Trail of the Assassins and Jim Marrs' Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy by Oliver Stone and Zachary Sklar; directed by Oliver Stone; starring Kevin Costner (DA Jim Garrison), Gary Oldman (Lee Harvey Oswald), Brian Doyle-Murray (Jack Ruby), Sissy Spacek (Liz Garrison), Joe Pesci (David Ferrie), Tommy Lee Jones (Clay Shaw), and Donald Sutherland (X) (1991): Oliver Stone's epic conspiracy film still plays out as his most interesting and ambitious film. Visually, it's a stunner, with both scope and rapid-fire editing, often among different film stocks and aspect ratios, making it one of the most visually complex American films ever made. Stone's use of audio follows suit, acting as commentary and counterpoint to the score and to the strictly diegetic sounds of the movie. Indeed, the blur of sound between diegetic and non-diegetic coupled with the blur between film stocks and, sometimes, between recreations and the real photographs and filmed sequences from the assassination of JFK... well, style makes the point of content.
The truth in this case is a very wide quantum smear of possibilities. The narrative makes the case for a singular true story, but that's endlessly hedged by the difficulties the film shows in discovering anything concrete and unassailable other than the simple fact of the President's death. Lee Harvey Oswald remains the virtual particle at the heart of the narrative, his locations and trajectories throughout the investigation's focus seemingly multitudinous, unfixed by an actual observer.
The actors are a Who's Who of American film, from Kevin Costner doing his best Jimmy Stewart as the real-life Louisiana District Attorney who tried a New Orleans resident for being a secret CIA operative involved in a conspiracy to kill JFK to Donald Sutherland delivering a dead-pan 18-minute soliloquy linking together a vast array of disparate elements. Only the relationship troubles between Costner and Sissy Spacek as Jim Garrison's wife seem rote and stereotypical. As fact, JFK may be laughable. As film, it's terrific -- and its central point about a secret U.S. ruling elite that wants the U.S. population to live in a state of endless fear and endless war seems even more plausible now than it did when JFK came out in 1991. Highly recommended.
I Am Chris Farley: written by Steve Burgess; directed by Brent Hodge and Derik Murray; featuring interviews with Adam Sandler, Christina Applegate, Mike Myers, Dan Aykroyd, Bob Odenkirk, Bo Derek, David Spade, Bob Saget, and many others (2015): Somewhat hagiographic biography of Chris Farley nonetheless supplies both insights and context for the deceased comic actor's life and work. There's some fascinating footage of Farley from his days at Chicago's Second City and from his even-earlier stage work. The interviews throughout from family members and colleagues that include Mike Myers, Bob Odenkirk, Dan Aykroyd, and David Spade illuminate the fascination Farley held for those closest to him. Apparently, like John Belushi before him, Farley was actually funnier live than on camera. Recommended.
Batman: The Dark Knight Archives Volume 4 (Collecting Batman Issues 13-16, 1942-43/Collected 2003): written by Bill Finger, Don Cameron, Jack Schiff, and Ruth Lyons Kaufman; illustrated by Bob Kane, Jerry Robinson, Jack Burnley, Ray Burnley, and George Roussos:
Batman's co-creator Bob Kane leaves most of the art chores to other people in this volume of Batman stories from 1942-1943. And the prolific Don Cameron writes the majority of the stories, with an assist from Batman co-creator Bill Finger, who was otherwise writing most of the Batman stories in Detective Comics while Cameron handled Batman in Batman.
One of the pleasant surprises here, other than Cameron, is the art of Jack Burnley. He's not as good at the comic grotesques of those stories with artist Jerry Robinson on them, but he supplies a very straightforward, cleanly rendered adventure version of Batman.
The Batman Mythos was rapidly coming together by this point, barely three years after the Caped Crusader's first appearance. Robin is fully entrenched as Batman's sidekick, and villains such as Catwoman, the Joker, and the Penguin are already making repeat appearances.
Standouts in this volume include the following stories:
"Here Comes Alfred" by Don Cameron, Bob Kane, and Jerry Robinson introduces the (initially fat) butler to the Batman saga.
"The Grade 'A' Crimes by Ruth Lyons Kaufman and Jack Burnley features a rare Golden Age story written by a woman.
"The Boy Who Wanted To Be Robin" by Cameron and Burnley introduces the idea of a criminal training himself to be a sort of 'anti-Batman.'
"The Two Futures" by Finger and Burnley offers a grim vision of an Axis victory in WWII.
"Swastika Over the White House" by Cameron and Burnley is a rare WWII story in which Batman actually battles Nazi saboteurs.
"The Adventure of the Branded Tree" by Cameron and Burnley may be the first example of a strange sub-genre of DC superhero stories, those that are narrated by an inanimate object, in this case a roll of paper. It's also part of a fairly widespread tradition of showing superheroes reading about their own exploits in the comic book that they're appearing in. You'd be amazed how often this sort of meta-fiction shows up in comics of the 1940's.
In all, an enjoyable and surprisingly dense read. The comics of the 1940's often had crude art, but they generally offered a surprisingly generous amount of prose along with that art. They certainly weren't for the illiterate as they were so often accused of being. Recommended.
The Superman Chronicles Volume 9: (Collecting Action Comics 47-52, World's Finest 6-7, and Superman 16-17, 1942/Collected 2011): written by Jerry Siegel; illustrated by Joe Shuster, John Sikela, Fred Ray, Leo Nowak, and Ed Dobrotka:
The chronological reprinting of Superman stories from the beginning, regardless of what title the stories appeared in, continues here with an offering from several months of 1942. America has just gone to war, and while the covers reflect this -- Superman doles out punishment to Hitler on one cover, for instance -- the stories have not yet caught up to reality.
We do get some great battles with super-villains, however, and a not-yet-omnipotent Superman. The Man of Steel's powers are still developing four years after his first appearance. He still seems to be vulnerable to poison gas, for instance, and he still needs to push off from something to fly.
The gems of the volume are two linked stories pitting Superman against Lex Luthor, previously a red-headed evil scientist who has now mysteriously gone bald like another early Superman foe, the Ultra-Humanite. "Powerstone" and "When Titans Clash" see Luthor gain powers greater than Superman's from the mysterious, titular Powerstone. For once, Superman's wits and knowledge of Luthor's psychology must save the world, not his strength.
One bizarre story all but recreates the story of The Natural, as Lois Lane and Clark Kent discover a baseball prodigy while on a train ride to MLB spring training. Did Bernard Malamud read Superman comics? Annoying unpowered foes The Prankster and The Puzzler also make their first appearances. They really seem like rejects from Batman's Rogues' Gallery.
The volume also offers a battle against a mind-controlling tyrant self-dubbed The Emperor of America and a battle against the first iteration of long-time Superman foe Metal[l]o, here a guy who's taken "super-serum" and dressed in a suit of impregnable metal, but later to become the Man with the Kryptonite Heart.
Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel keeps the ideas cracking. This Superman is a bit more Establishment than Siegel's original version, though still much less authoritative and pompous than he would become in the 1950's. And he still seems to operate in a world where he's at least partially an Urban Legend -- many criminals don't know who he is, thus leading to much fruitless gun-play and fisticuffs.
Superman's artistic father Joe Shuster only illustrates one story here, "Man or Superman?," and parts of it seem to be traced from his previous work. Even this early in the game, Shuster was being undone by his declining eyesight. John Sikela and Leo Nowak do solid work as Shuster's ghosts. Sikela is perhaps the closest to Shuster's style of all the ghosts, though he's more polished and less pleasingly raw than Shuster. Nowak gets more of Shuster's cartooniness in his art, but even less of that raw power and dynamism. In all, recommended.
The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters (2009): The Little Stranger begins with a brief incident involving our narrator Faraday's visit as a boy to the English estate dubbed The Hundreds, just after the conclusion of World War One. The main part of the narrative takes place a couple of years after the conclusion of World War Two, still narrated by that boy who's now a country doctor in his childhood village in Warwickshire, an area in Central England half-way between London and Liverpool and just west of Birmingham, containing Stratford-Upon-Avon and Coventry.
Dr. Faraday's mother worked at The Hundreds as a nursery attendant; his father was also a working man. They managed to put together enough money to put Faraday through good enough schools to get through to his M.D.. He has a lingering guilt over the idea that his parents' efforts on his behalf led to their early deaths. He also pointedly feels class snobbery throughout the novel, both generally and in his practice: he feels that he's at a disadvantage against his 'higher-born' colleagues when it comes to getting well-off clients.
As the main narrative begins, Faraday answers a call at The Hundreds. His colleague who normally handles medical problems at the estate is on another call. And so for the first time in 30 years, Faraday steps into what seems to have been a shining moment in his youth. However, what he finds is becoming more and more the normative in 20th-century England -- an estate and a family fallen on hard times and in the process of falling further as Clement Atlee's new Labour government sets higher taxes on the wealthy and the landed.
Both the house and the grounds are falling into chaos and ruin. The Ayres family, longtime owners of The Hundreds, simply don't have the money to keep things running the way they ran during Faraday's boyhood visit. Faraday is appalled but charmed by the still-impressive mansion. He's been called to find out what's wrong with the Ayres' last full-time servant, a 14-year-old maid who's only been with them for a month or so.
Faraday quickly realizes that the maid is feigning illness. She's anxious over her feelings of isolation and loneliness, especially at night in the nearly deserted mansion as she sleeps a substantial distance away from anyone else. And she believes there's a malevolent ghost loose in The Hundreds. So it begins.
The novel takes cues from a number of the greatest hits of the horror genre. It's easy to see The Turn of the Screw in the setting of an underpopulated country house as seen and described with at least some unreliability by someone who isn't from England's upper class. The Hundreds is inhabited by a mother and her two grown children. The daughter is named Caroline, the son Roderick. So the novel nods to another waning family and decaying mansion in Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher." You know, with a major character named RODERICK Usher. Nudge, nudge.
Mainstream critics certainly seemed to twig to these well-known, canonical works in relation to Waters' novel. The novel's style certainly suggests neither Poe nor James. It's solid and workmanlike, and the accumulation of telling detail works throughout with the slowly turning screw of the plot so as to make The Little Stranger a terrific page-turner. That the novel crashes into the mountain and explodes over the last 20 pages is a shame, but what comes before is mostly excellent.
How does a ghost story get shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, as this novel was? Well, Waters was a well-regarded, mainstream novelist. The Little Stranger deals with Great Britain's still overwhelmingly class-oriented social system to the extent that the novel's ghostly, ghastly happenings all constellate around class consciousness, class resentment, and social change. People love class-related stuff, especially when it's set in the past and especially when there's decaying gentry and giant houses involved. It's Downton Nightmare Abbey.
Dr. Faraday will become increasingly entangled in the affairs of the Ayres family. He'll reveal through his narration his growing devotion to both them and their magnificently decaying estate. Bad things will happen with decreasingly believable rational explanations. Is there a ghost? Is Faraday becoming obsessed with The Hundreds over and above his concern for the people there? Will anyone call in a vicar or read a book about supernatural occurrences published in the 20th century? Is 'spinster' Caroline, perhaps 30, really a repressed lesbian? Will Basil Exposition show up?
Well, 'sort of' to that last question. Waters generally has a light hand with explanation and exposition. But the novel's favoured explanation of what's going on at The Hundreds is so odd that the two bouts of exposition that explain the concept aren't enough to suspend my disbelief. And I'm willing to believe an awful lot in the context of a ghost story.
But what's required here isn't simply belief in a fairly dodgy concept that shows up in some explanations of poltergeist activity. It's belief in something that can reach across miles of distance, read minds, imitate a wide variety of sounds and voices, spontaneously start fires, write in some indelible way on walls, lift and throw heavy objects, control animals, and possibly apport objects from one location to another. It's not a poltergeist or a ghost -- it's the Swiss Army Knife of the spiritual world, with powers that would make for a pretty dangerous member of the X-Men.
Some of the problem springs from the fact that the supernatural explanation has to be fitted to the novel's exploration of class resentment. And ghosts and other supernatural forces have indeed often functioned as metaphorical explorations of real-world social and personal problems. But Waters' concept has so many moving parts! And it's so programmatic in relation to the sub-text it's illustrating! It's not too far removed from the Hyper-allegorical monsters of Edmund Spenser's The Fairie Queene. Especially Errour, who vomits evil books because dammit, I you will understand this point I'm making about erroneous interpretations of the Bible as set forth during the Great Pamphlet Wars.
And so The Little Stranger ends up stranded in a sort of metaphorical borderland between the two greatest English-language haunted-house novels of the 20th century, Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House and Richard Matheson's Hell House. Jackson's novel leaves the reader in as much mystery at the end as it does at the beginning -- supernatural events have occurred, but it's difficult to see any meaning in them beyond the basic malign, and their mechanisms are never revealed. Hell House offers a pseudo-scientific explanation for its horrors, fully explained and reasoned through, and satisfying in a literary sense without destroying any of the horror that has preceded the final solution.
The Little Stranger stands between these two. There's still mystery at the end, but the novel has advanced a preferred or privileged explanation of the reasons and mechanisms of the haunting. But that explanation is too brief and patched together to seem convincing.
The novel also falls away from the peaks of the haunted-house novel as a sub-genre because of an attribute it shares with many of Stephen King's novels: the dominance of the sub-text. The Shining is a haunted-house novel that has a very clear and intentional sub-text; it's the haunting as an elaborate metaphor for domestic abuse as perpetrated by an addictive personality under pressure. Obviously there are other things in there too, but the sub-text looms over the events in the Overlook Hotel. Similarly, The Little Stranger uses the supernatural to discuss issues of class and gender in England after World War Two (and, really, to the present day -- it's not like the gentry have gone away).
But the aforementioned novels by Jackson and Matheson aren't about something other than the supernatural, at least not in the programmatic way that the Waters and King texts are. They're ultimately about the hauntings themselves, and how small groups of people deal with them. The Haunting of Hill House and Hell House engage fully with the Sublime and the mysterious. The Little Stranger does not -- nor does it seem to want to except in a couple of brief passages. As such, it's a finer novel involving class conflicts and social change than it is a ghost story. And there's certainly nothing wrong with that.
The Little Stranger is a heck of a ride, dense with period detail and blessed with a narrator who may be too sympathetic for the novel's own good. That he's unreliable and obsessive may or may not matter -- the novel certainly privileges one reading of the events over all others by the conclusion, but it doesn't seal off one's ability to read things in other ways. The major characters are all skillfully drawn, a period skillfully evoked, a disintegrating house skillfully drawn so as to almost become a character itself. Highly recommended.
