The London Seance Society

 The London Seance Society by Sarah Penner 352 pages

When I teach fiction writing, one of my classes is devoted to the first sentence. If the author doesn't grab the reader's attention right away, there is a slim chance the reader will continue.  I love the first sentence in this book: "At an abandoned chateau on the outskirts of Paris, a dark seance is about to take place, led by acclaimed spiritualist Vaudeline D'Allaire."  That a beaut, isn't it? However, that was the best part of the book.

D'Allaire is the toast of Paris and London when spiritualism is at its height. Her specialty is conjuring murder victims to tell her who killed them. 

Lenna Wickes is mourning the death of her younger sister, Evie. She has come to Paris to enlist Vaudeline's aide. Lenna becomes Vaudeline's understudy.

Meanwhile, back in London, a powerful men's organization is also trying to uncover the murder of their president.  Oddly enough, the two murders happened on the same night, October 31.

The novel is interestingly told by two voices, but it's odd.  Lenna's story is told in third person, while their contact at the Society, Mr. Morley, is told in first person. I found it jarring. It takes a while for the reader to figure out exactly what the connection between the two dead people are, but the story does finally come around to a smooth conclusion.

Vaudeline and Lenna go back to London and try to solve the cases. Sometimes the plot was intricate, sometimes simple. There were times the story was a page-turner and times the story plodded along. Many times, I was able to figure out what was going to happen well before t did.

I was disappointed in this second outing by novelist Sarah Penner of The Lost Apothecary. Here's hoping that her third book returns to the skillfulness she displayed in Apothecary.  The London Seance Society receives 3 out of 5 starts in Julie's world.

The Writing Retreat

 

The Writing Retreat by Julia Bartz 320 pages

 

I go on a writing retreat once a year, so when I saw this title in the library, I had to check it out!

 

For the past year, Alex has had writer’s block. She blames it on her breakup with her girlfriend, Wren. The opening chapters set up how destructive Alex’s life is since the two are no longer together.

 

Ursula, a friend, enters one of her old stories into a writing contest. The Grand Prize is a month-long writer’s retreat led by Alex’s all-time favorite, feminist horror writer Roza Vallo. Of course, she gets in, otherwise there would not be a novel. Alex is one of five women invited to the retreat. In addition to working with Roza, the winner will receive a publishing contract and a one-million-dollar reward. There is a lot at stake.

 

The retreat is held at Roza’s upstate New York estate, Blackbriar. Roza is eccentric and the women who care for her and her estate are also eccentric. That leads to a few weird rules and timeframes that seem impossible to meet. Each woman must write 3,000 new words for her novel and submit them to Roza everyday by midnight. If one of the women misses the deadline, she is invited to leave. That is a tough assignment for Alex who has not written a word in over a year.

 

Alex is in a frenzy. Wren is also there, so tensions are high. During the cocktail hour at the beginning of the retreat, Roza tells the group about the people who used to own Blackbriar. This opens a portal to the spirit of Daphne, the house’s former mistress. And that portal provides Alex with her novel.

 

In addition to watching the ladies write, all sorts of weird things begin to happen. The Writing Retreat has all the elements of a great gothic mystery. It also centers on the themes of friendship, creativity, courage and ambition.

 

Th plot is a little over the top for my tastes and too many graphic sex scenes. I’m not a prude, but it got old after a while. I was also disappointed that readers never learn the topics the other women are writing about. I loved the eeriness of Blackbrair and the author’s ability not to foreshadow too many of the happenings.

 

I had to know what happened, but not sure I would recommend this to anyone. Therefore, The Writing Retreat receives 3 out of 5 stars in Julie’s world.

The Last Heir to Blackwood Library

The Last Heir to Blackwood by Hester Fox 336 pages

 

Readers can always count on author Hester Fox for a quietly eerie novel, and her latest doesn’t quite live up to the abilities she has shown in other works.

 

Twenty-three-year-old Ivy Radcliffe is alone in the world. She lost her brother and father in the Great War and her mother succumbed to the Spanish Flu. She is shocked when she is summoned to a solicitor’s office for the reading of the will of the late Lord Hayworth, someone with whom she is unfamiliar. Turns out, he was Ivy’s father’s third cousin, and the last of the Hayworth line.

 

It took the solicitor a while, but they finally connected Ivy to Hayworth, and with that knowledge, she inherited his Lordship’s estate, Blackwood Abbey, located on the Yorkshire moors.

 

When Ivy arrived, the sprawling mansion was in disrepair, yet the servants who took care of her ancestor were still there. I don’t recall in how long the period was between the Lord’s death and Ivy’s arrival, but it cannot have been overlong since they were still there. The mansion is dark and depressing, attributed to its gothic vibes.

 

Almost immediately, Ivy is bored. She knows no one and there is little for her to do. On an afternoon outing to the local bookstore, she meets Sir Arthur Mabry. He discloses the existence of a magnificent library housed in the crumbling abode, and that he would love to get a chance to see it.

 

The conversation leads Ivy to wonder what she isn’t being told, especially if there are parts of the   house where she is told she cannot investigate. But a library! Ivy loves to read and makes it a priority to discover its contents.

 

The library is magnificent, but strange things happen there…footprints in the dust that lead to a solid wall without another living creature present is only one example. Still, Ivy isn’t scared away. Until the night of the storm.

 

I had a tough time piecing this novel together. I didn’t understand what the Prologue has to do with the rest of the story. Even after I finished the book and re-read it, it did not seem to tie in. I am afraid this is one of those stories that the author knew and understood but was unable to draw the picture for the reader.

 

 The Last Heir to Blackwood receives 3 out of 5 stars in Julie’s world.

 

The Cloisters

The Cloisters by Katy Hays 320 pages

I don’t need tarot cards to let me know that Katy Hays has a big future in writing, even if it goes off the rails a bit.

When Ann arrives in New York City, ready for her summer internship at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, she is dismayed that the job no longer exists. Instead she is sent to The Cloisters, a museum that is part of the Met to work there. I had never heard of The Cloisters and spent an entire afternoon online, learning about this medieval museum and garden. I hope to visit there someday.

But back to Hays’s debut novel. The story start rather slowly, not much happening before page 183. It does pick up as the curator, Patrick, and his assistant, Rachel, are obsessed with locating a missing tarot card from a 15-century deck that will seal their careers. They believe that finding that lost card, that is undeniably located somewhere in the museum, will set history on its ear. 

Readers who don’t much about academia and its dark side, I think, will find that aspect of the novel compelling. There are a lot of secrets that haunt the museum, but nothing earth-shattering.

Undoubtedly, this book is well written, but it lacks depth. The setting, the museum and its gardens, provide a creepy aesthetic, but the characters are shallow. “The Cloisters” receives 3 out of 5 stars in Julie’s world.

 

Cathedrals of France

Cathedrals of France by Auguste Rodin, translated by Elisabeth Chase Geissbuhler, 275 pages

The only book by the famed sculptor Auguste Rodin is this celebration of the great Gothic and Romanesque cathedrals of his native land.  This last is not incidental - Rodin continually emphasizes the connection between the Gothic and France, viewing Gothic architecture as the natural outgrowth of the French landscape.  As this should make clear, the book is neither a travel guide nor a history, but a work of aesthetic and spiritual contemplation, for "Art and religion give humanity all the certainties it needs to live by and which are unknown to epochs dimmed by indifference."

Rodin is not, however, a mere antiquarian.  To the contrary, he asserts strongly the continuity between medieval and Renaissance art, and rejects entirely the slavish imitation he detects in the neo-Gothic.  His goal is instead to encourage - indeed, evangelize for - the ever deeper study of nature and the great art of the past to inspire and direct the art of the present.  "To bind the present with the past is the necessary action.  In so doing one will restore wisdom and happiness to the living.  Those who possess happiness because they have bowed down to truth do not wish to reserve that treasure for themselves alone."

The Dollmaker

 The Dollmaker by Nina Allan    416 pages

 Now that it is full-on fall in Missouri, it’s the perfect time to luxuriate in a gothic novel. Nothing said creepy to me like the cover of Nina Allan’s “The Dollmaker.” It’s a story of a dwarf and a woman in a mental institution, both you are avid doll enthusiasts.

I noticed that Allan didn’t use the politically correct term “little person” for Andrew Garvie, which seemed to add to its creepy-factor. Since he was a child, Andrew has been fascinated by dolls. He collects them, he creates them, and he gives them life. He seems to be alone in the world, which adds a deeper element to his connection with the dolls.

One of the things Andrew looks forward to is the monthly arrival of a collector’s magazine. He pours over its pages the moment it arrives. He even reads the personal ads. They are mostly from other collectors wanting to buy or sell a certain type of doll. That is until he comes across the ad from Bramber Winters.

The two begin to correspond and grow closer and closer. It doesn’t even phase Andrew that Bramber has lived most of her life in an institution.

After much correspondence, Andrew decides that the they should meet.  He makes plans, without telling Bramber, to visit her.Andrew goes by train and makes many stops along the way at various musuems in small towns. He also carries with him a book of fairy tales by Ewa Chaplin, also a dollmaker.

Andrew’s travels and letters to Bramber are interspersed with Ewa’s stories. Turns out, Ewa is a real-life figure, but I couldn’t find much about her on the internet. A blurb about Ewa as an Author’s Note could have put it in perspective for me. I don’t understand why the author placed those stories within the novel. It seemed, to me, like a way to ease the eeriness that I felt reading Andrew and Bramber’s letters, but I felt they had no revelance on the story.

Andrew and Bramber’s meeting was not at all what I expected, which is a good thing. I won’t give my impression of the ending as I don’t want to cloud others’ opinions.   “The Dollmaker”  receives 4 out of 5 stars in Julie’s world.

The Witch of Pale Harbor

 

The Widow of Pale Harbor by Hester Fox     291 pages

Author Hester Fox had gained a new fan. Granted this is the only book of hers that I have read, but I loved it.  Part romance, part literary, part gothic, part ghost story and part thriller, “The Widow of pale Harbor” has a light creepy factor that makes it a perfect fall read.

Both of the main characters, Sophronia Crarver and Gabriel Stone, are haunted by the deaths of their spouses. Not literally, but the ghosts of their lives travel with Sophronia and Gabriel. Gabriel has left Concord, Massachuestts, for Pale Harbor, Maine, to become a transcendentalist minister. His late wife, Anna, has aspired to that for him, although he knows little about the movement. Sophronia is the widow of one of the town’s wealthiest and most influential residents. When he died, the town was sure he was murdered and convicted Sophronia without the benefit of a trial. Since then, she has not left the grounds of her large home, Castle Carver, that she shares with Helen, a woman she plucked out of the poorhouse. Helen has that creepy factor that reminded me of Mrs. Danvers from “Rebecca.”

I was hooked from the first sentence of the twisty novel: “This was the fourth dead raven to appear of Sophronia Carver’s front path in as many weeks, and there was no explaining it away as coincidence this time.” Isn’t that wonderful? Whenever I head about a raven, my thoughts immediately fly (no pun intended), to Edgar Allen Poe. His works play an important part of this novel.

Gabriel tries to settle into Pale Harbor, but it’s not as easy as he’d hoped. The people want to welcome him into their hamlet, but when he loses their trust when he befriends Sophronia. 

There are so many twists in the novel that I could barely put it down; It’s one of those that will keep y’all up all night. I loved it! “The Widow of Pale Harbor” receives 6 out of 5 stars in Julie’s world.

AWN Pugin

AWN Pugin: Master of Gothic Revival, edited by Paul Atterbury, 392 pages

This catalogue was produced for an exhibition at the Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts.  As such, it focuses on Pugin as designer rather than architect, and thus reveals the power of Pugin's unity of design, the fittingness of architecture, decoration, and furniture.  An unusually lengthy and substantive collection of essays, in turn, place Pugin himself into his proper context, establishing him as a visionary rather than a mere antiquarian, and tracing his influence on the Continent and across the Atlantic.

Encyclopedia Gothica

Encyclopedia Gothica by Liisa Ladouceur    313 pages

"A guidebook to the language of the most shadowy of subcultures, this work collects and defines more than 550 Gothic words and phrases. Compiled by an acclaimed Goth journalist and poet, this compendium provides insight into the unique vernacular of this fascinating community, describing in detail and with black humor the fashion, music, and lifestyle as well as sharing insider slang such as Baby Bat, Corp Goth, and the Gothic Two-Step. A Goth Band Family Tree and essential Goth listening, reading, and viewing recommendations are also included in this phantasmagorical work."

I picked this up because it was on a cart of books to evaluate and randomly turned to a page . .. which led me to another entry . . . and then on Pandora, a Sisters of Mercy song came on and I felt it was a sign I should check out this book. I found this book to be a lot of fun, informative and with just a touch of snark. While I never went full Goth, I definitely enjoyed a lot of the music and some of the fashion. I still enjoy a fair amount of Goth music and had feelings of nostalgia when reading entries for Scary Lady Sarah, Wax Trax, Sisters of Mercy (yes, I own all of their CDs), and more.  I have seen Cruxshadows in person (at DragonCon, hawking their CDs) and thought Ladouceur's entry on them was pretty funny: "But despite appearances, there's something not quite Goth about them. The fact that they eagerly identify themselves as Goth might be the first clue."   Um,  yes.

I also liked the entry for Industrial music, which reads "Goth's meaner sibling, a style of dark, heavy music with some similar themes that's just as slippery to define . . . "

I'll be grabbing the Black Box from Wax Trax! to listen to in the car soon and also pulling out some Sisters of Mercy to listen to at my desk.

God's Architect

God's Architect: Pugin and the Building of Romantic Britain by Rosemary Hill, 498 pages

Augustus Pugin died in 1852 at the age of forty.  His brief career as an architect, which did not begin in earnest until the publication of his manifesto Contrasts in 1836, defined British architecture - and much else besides - in the Victorian era.  Indeed, as Rosemary Hill documents in her exhaustive - but at times exhilarating - biography, a direct line line runs from Pugin through Ruskin and the Rossettis to Morris and beyond.  In his quest to recreate the Gothic, Pugin founded workshops to meet the demand for fabric, woodwork, tile, and stained glass.  In her telling, Pugin was not merely an antiquarian or even an influential ecclesiastical architect, but a daring theorist with definite ideas of how the modern city could be tamed and made more humane.

God's Architect manages to interweave the public and private lives of Pugin, covering his professional projects - most famously his work on the Houses of Parliament, including the clock tower popularly (but erroneously) called "Big Ben" - and his often tragic personal life, complicated by his own uncompromising nature.  Hill compellingly follows the often troubled relationships between Pugin and his circle of "Romantic Catholics" with the Tractarians on the one hand and ultramontane Catholics on the other.  These connections are often neglected in histories of the Oxford Movement and its personalities, and while her account, viewed as it is through the prism of Pugin's career, is not entirely fair to some of the other individuals involved, it does make God's Architect a critical addition to our understanding of nineteenth century art and religion.

Chartres and the Birth of the Cathedral

Chartres and the Birth of the Cathedral by Titus Burckhardt, translated by William Stoddart, 144 pages

The magnificent cathedral of Our Lady of Chartres has proven magnetic to a diverse collection of men and women, including Henry Adams, JK Huysmans, Eric Gill, Joseph Campbell, and Orson Welles, all of whom have found in the mysteries of its beauty a key to some of the mysteries of the universe.  In Chartres and the Birth of the Cathedral Titus Burckhardt attempts to explicate some of those mysteries.

That explanation is rooted in sympathetic appreciation of medieval thought and culture - Burckhardt understands that medievals were more literary and less literal than moderns.  Indeed, Burckhardt's goal is to enable moderns to contemplate the cathedral as the work of art it is, one intended to convey meaning on a number of levels.  Not only does he largely succeed in this goal, due to the author's focus on the intentions of the builders the book is blessedly free from the kind of absurd claims about esoteric meanings and occultism that so often populate its genre.

Bardwell's Folly

Bardwell’s Folly by Sandra Hutchison   342 pages

I’ve read Sandra Hutchison’s first two novels (The Ribs and Thigh Bones of Desire and The Awful Mess) and loved them both. Now there is a third novel for me to love and tell all my reader friends to grab a copy.

In this story, Eudora “Dori” Bardwell and her stoner brother, Salinger, are living in a small town in upper Massachusetts. The house is a replica of a southern plantation home her father, Bedford Bardwell, built as a living legacy to himself and his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Tea and Slavery, which was considered the most important work of fiction about slavery since Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

The house, known as Bardwell House, is a historical landmark in town, and the townspeople are very, very fond of it. A board of trustees runs the house, but thanks to her father’s will, Dori and Salinger are allowed to live there. Unfortunately they aren’t allowed to make any changes, so the summer heat is stifling. In other words, no air conditioning.

The air conditioning is only one symbol of how out-of-touch Dori is with the modern world. She doesn’t have an answering machine, a computer, or a mobile phone. Now 26, Dori had to leave college when her father flew his plane with her mother and four other siblings into the ocean (aka John Kennedy, Jr.) years earlier. She barely makes ends meet working at as a nursing home aide and a part-time grocery clerk. She may live in what seems like a mansion, but the cupboards are bare. Many nights she goes to bed hungry.

When the trustees decide to hire a service to keep up the lawn, to keep up appearances, Dori comes face-to-face with her high school sweetheart, a man whose marriage proposal she refused in front of the whole high school. Sparks fly.

Thanks to an insensitive racial joke, which blew up on social media, Dori’s family in once again in the spotlight. For years, there had been rumors of an unfinished manuscript that her father left behind. When a reporter comes snooping around, interest in finding the manuscript becomes important to the board and leads Dori’s to uncover deep family secrets.

A mixture of romance, intrigue, family secrets, past lives, and a house that is as much a character as Tara was in Gone With the Wind, create a spell-binding read that you won’t want to put down. I give Bardwell’s Folly 6 out of 5 stars.

On the Abbey Church of St Denis

On the Abbey Church of St Denis and Its Art Treasures by Abbot Suger, translated by Erwin Panofsky, 87 pages

The renovation of the Abbey of St Denis in the Ile de France, undertaken in the 12th century by Suger, the powerful and influential abbot, friend and advisor to kings and popes, is widely considered to mark the birth of Gothic architecture.  Aside from the considerable expense of the work, Suger faced two major obstacles - the antiquity of the original building and the corresponding reverence in which it was held, and the contemporary Cistercian reform movement with its uncompromising spokesman St Bernard of Clairvaux, implacably hostile towards displays of wealth and opulence.  These two sources of opposition inspired Suger to write multiple explanations of his work, which simultaneously serve as celebrations and defenses.

Panofsky cannily notes that there is no difference for Suger between his own glory and his glorification of the abbey, the two are indissolubly wedded together in his mind.  This marriage, in turn, has as its purpose the greater glory of God.  Suger utilizes the mystical hierarchies of Pseudo-Dionysius, then believed to be identical with the St Denis buried at the abbey, to justify the aesthetic splendor of his renovations, but he is just as proud of his improvements to the abbey's landholdings and finances as its architecture and decoration.

Bliss House

Bliss House by Laura Benedict, 446 pages

Ed reviewed this a year ago so I’m not going to discuss the plot.  I will say that I liked this much better than Ed did.  I mostly liked the characters and the story and didn’t really see the plot holes he complained about.  I was really creeped out by the book (which was the point!) and didn’t want to put it down.  I felt like everything was pretty well summed up in the end and that we were still left with an uneasy feeling that maybe it wasn’t all completely over, which I feel like is a good thing for this type of book.  I would definitely recommend this to people that like ghost stories and horror. Especially gothic horror.

The Quick

The Quick by Lauren Owen
523 Pages

James and Charlotte Norbury are brother and sister from a previously well off family that finds themselves financially strapped with the death of their father.  Forced to shut up the house, the two go to live with their aunt and eventually James continues his education while Charlotte stays at home.  After graduation James moves to London where he finds himself overwhelmed by the enormity of the city.  When the aunt dies, Charlotte sends a telegram and gets no reply.  Worried about what happened to James, Charlotte goes to London and uncovers a horrendous secret.

The novel starts out strongly but devolves about a third of the way into a mishmash of genres.  The biggest failing is that none of the characters become fully developed and the reader has little sympathy for the fates of any of them.  The novel touts itself as a natural choice for readers of Anne Rice, the Night Circus, etc.  It isn't and if you directed a patron to this book as a choice, you would probably lose their faith.

The Gothic World

The Gothic World 1100-1600: A Survey of Architecture and Art by John Harvey, 132 pages

 

This is a general survey of architecture produced in the Gothic style (including the Curvilinear, Perpendicular, and Flamboyant sub-styles) during the half-millennium from 1100-1600, the craftsmen who produced it and the techniques they employed.  Despite the subtitle, Harvey does not deal with other forms of art, with the exception of a few descriptions of ornamental sculpture.

 

Overall, this serves as a useful corrective to certain romantic nineteenth century notions about Gothic, but it is itself now somewhat out of date (the pointed arch, for example, is no longer regarded as an importation from the East).  The discussion of artistic styles and techniques of craftsmanship occasionally gets drowned in details of names, places, and dates.  Likewise, the author shows a certain amount of patriotic prejudice towards the English contribution to Gothic culture.  These minor problems are more than compensated for, however, by nearly 300 photographs of buildings and artwork from the period.