strange and random happenstance

This one is going to be a hard one to write about. I was a fan of Neil Gaiman. I saw him speak twice and got to meet him at one of those events. He seemed perfectly lovely and dedicated to his fans. As we've since learned by the allegations that first broke on Tortoise Media this was all a front. A way for the spider to lure in the flies. The fallout was deservedly harsh, projects were scrapped left and right. The Sandman was almost completely wrapped when the news about Gaiman broke. Therefore production continued. What was to be done with the show could be decided later. After all Anansi Boys was completely finished when it was permanently shelved. Amazon got a nice tax write-off and got to appear as if they're supporting the victims when it was really all about the bottom line. But the thing is, The Sandman has a life of it's own. The fanbase is all-encompassing. Netflix knew that the clamor Amazon was experiencing over Good Omens was nothing to what they would face if this season never saw the light of day. Plus the team were claiming, whether honestly or to cover their asses, that the series had always been planned as two seasons and Gaiman wasn't really involved. Though I do question that second statement after reading some interviews. So season two of the show dropped in July with no fanfare and minimal press coverage. And I honestly didn't know if I'd be able to watch it. While having previously been a fan of Gaiman I had never been a fan of The Sandman comics. And oh how I tried. But I'd get about six books in, up to Brief Lives, and just throw in the towel. I never got any further and at least now I never have to force myself to finish this series. I am done with it. As for the adaptation, I did feel the need to tune in. The show worked for me where the comics did not. The rough edges and the excessive rapes had been sanded away. And at least we now know why Gaiman included so many rapes. Which actually made parts of this season a painful experience, and not just because of the autotuning of Ruairi O'Connor as Orpheus. When Nada confronts Dream about his treatment of her you are horrified thinking about how the man who wrote this put women in this same situation over and over again. And why bring back the rapist author, Richard Madoc as played by Arthur Darvill? Did they want to hit us over the head with the fact that Gaiman basically wrote his sick fantasies into this series? That Richard Madoc was his avatar in this fictional world. I mean, if Gaiman hadn't been such a good showman we should have seen what was right in front of us all along. Oh, the irony of the second series being about reconciliation and redemption after the first one was about reclamation and revenge. Because he denies it all. There will be no reconciliation for him. No redemption. And there can be no separation of art and the artist, he made sure of that. A part of me even wondered if originally Gaiman was supposed to be there at Dream's funeral next to Madoc. Thankfully that didn't happen. And even if their creator will forever be in torment, at least his creations were given a fresh start. They were released out into the world. They were set free. Hopefully not to ever be caught in their creators net again. Forever connected by somehow liberated.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Amazon, Anansi Boys, And the Emmy Goes To, Arthur Darvill, Avatar, Brief Lives, Comics, Dream, Good Omens, Neil Gaiman, Netflix, Orpheus, Rape, Richard Maddoc, Ruairi O'Connor, Sexual Abuse, Sexual Assault, The Sandman, Tortoise Media

Three Women by Lisa Taddeo
Published by: Avid Reader Press / Simon and Schuster
Publication Date: July 9th, 2019
Format: Hardcover, 304 Pages
Rating: ★
To Buy

Maggie thought she was in love. She thought he loved her too. But it was an unequal relationship. He was her teacher. He slowly worked his way into her life so that he was all she had and then one day she texted him and his wife saw. That ended everything. In fact it felt like her life ended. A few years later she sees his face smiling on the news. He has been named teacher of the year in North Dakota. She realizes it is time to go public, because as her therapist has told her, she couldn't have been the first. Yet Maggie's past calls everything she says into question and the love of her life will get away with the damage he's inflicted. Linna just wants her husband to touch her. A kiss, a caress, anything. She's decided that if this continues for three months she will leave him. Of course he doesn't know that she has a dream, that she will get back together with her high school sweetheart whom she's been having an affair with. Aidan and her broke up in high school because she was raped by three classmates one night and forever branded a whore. Her entire life she has felt the void left by Aidan leaving. And here he is, back in her life, or at least her car, whenever his needs need to be met. She knows it's a one way relationship, but to be touched, to be cared for, even in this small way, was more than she ever got from her husband. Sloane looks to have the perfect life. A husband with whom she runs a successful restaurant, beautiful children, and looks that don't betray her age. She and her husband love each other completely, only he takes sexual satisfaction from watching his wife sleep with other men and women, occasionally participating. All these women would do anything for love. They would degrade themselves, they would hurt themselves, they would even, perhaps, kill themselves.

Three Women is a puerile and prurient book, like a small child that can not yet form full sentences but randomly yells out "fuck" for the reaction they get from adults. This is not in the least a book about female desire but a book about women molested and controlled by men. One can only assume that all the glorious reviews were written by men who long to dominate women and hope that this debasement is truly the secret desire of all women. I have shocking news for them; it's not. I keep coming back to the fact that Taddeo supposedly worked on this book for eight years and in this time she gained no depth on her subjects. These women could have been handled tactfully, their body image issues and abuse dealt with in a thoughtful manner, instead it's just who they are on the surface, not who they were made to become, and the abuse, while there, also fuels their desire. But why? WHY!?! These women are nothing more than paper dolls. They are one dimensional cliches that I strongly suspect don't even really exist with their love of Twilight and Fifty Shades of Grey. In fact Sloane might very well be nothing more than an amalgam of Serena van der Woodsen and Blair Waldorf from Gossip Girl. And the fact that Gossip Girl handled bulimia better than this book and that even Twilight is better written should give you a hint as to how bad this book is. As you read about Lina massaging the fondant from a Cadbury Creme Egg into Aidan's scrotum you will feel your brain cells dying.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Blair Waldorf, Bulimia, Cadbury Creme Egg, Fifty Shades of Grey, For the Love of Book Clubs, Gossip Girl, Infidelity, Lisa Taddeo, Rape, Serena van der Woodsen, Sexual Abuse, Sexual Assault, Three Women, Twilight

Life in Squares
Starring: Phoebe Fox, Eve Best, Christian Brassington, Eleanor Bron, James Clay, Lydia Leonard, Catherine McCormack, James Norton, Rupert Penry-Jones, Ed Birch, Ben Lloyd-Hughes, Jack Davenport, Sam Hoare, Andrew Havill, Elliot Cowan, Edmund Kingsley, James Northcote, Deborah Findlay, Anton Lesser, Al Weaver, Guy Henry, Jenny Howe, Charlie Appleyard, Maximilian Scull, Finn Jones, Louis Fisher, Edmund Digby-Jones, Rosie Ede, Lucy Boynton, Simon Thomas, and Emily Bruni
Release Date: July 27th, 2015 - August 10th, 2015
Rating: ★★
To Watch

Siblings Vanessa, Virginia, and Adrian Stephen have been liberated from societal, conventional, and parental expectations with the death of their father. Though Virginia's mental health remains delicate a hovering Aunt is no match to their desire to freely express themselves and break free of the assigned rolls expected of them. If they use only one spoon for the entire household, so be it! Dishes take up so much time that could be used productively in the pursuit of art! In an effort to give the girls a glimpse of the greater artistic community Adrian invites over his college friends for salons. At first Vanessa and Virginia feel that they are still constrained, being the hostesses of these evenings, but slowly they become equals to the Cambridge and Oxford educated boys. Thus the Bloomsbury Group came to exist, but their relationships would often be fraught. The love triangles were endless and endlessly discussed. Virginia was forever concerned with losing her sister to marriage, the state to which their hovering Aunt approved above all others! The art critic Clive Bell seemed the most likely candidate to whisk Vanessa away. And after the heartbreaking death of their brother to typhoid Virginia lost her sister to Bell and her sisters newfound love of copulation which soon brought about her first child, Julian. But five years later Virginia would marry Leonard Woolf, though wouldn't take as much joy in copulation as her sister and sadly would have a bad breakdown resulting in a suicide attempt. She was able to come back from this and her first book was published in 1915. With war on the horizon a significant portion of the Bloomsbury Group decamped from Bloomsbury. Vanessa, Duncan Grant, and Duncan's lover David Garnett moved to the Sussex countryside where Vanessa and Duncan could paint while Duncan and David worked the land instead of serving in the army. But this move to the countryside would complicate everything, as Vanessa realized that the homosexual Duncan was the love of her life and she decided that they would have a child together, which they did. Years pass in which no one talks about all their trysts and on the eve of another world war everything starts to break apart. 

Dorothy Parker famously quipped that the Bloomsbury Group "lived in squares, painted in circles and loved in triangles." The squares and the circles of this adaptation are pitch perfect. The atmosphere, the rooms with every visible surface decorated, the feeling of a lived in artistic space is spot on, so much so that I've started to look at my door jambs and think that they are lacking something in being painted a flat white. I wanted to walk through those rooms and just absorb the creativity. Unfortunately this miniseries is all about the triangles. And I have a feeling that watching the background as I did wasn't the intended purpose in making this promiscuous miniseries. Comprising of three episodes the first two episodes are all about graphic copulation while the third is the Group clumsily dealing with the fallout of said copulation. Now I'm not one to be a prude, I just feel that graphic sex needs to be in aid of something, in particular, the story being told. Here it just seemed to be shorthand for their freedom, both intellectually and sexually. Yet there was a line that struck me as odd, Vanessa receives a letter from Virginia who is on her honeymoon saying she doesn't think sex is all it's cracked up to be and Vanessa blithely replies that the Duckworths messed Virginia up. This sent me down a Wikipedia rabbit hole learning about Virigina's sexual abuse at the hands of her stepbrothers, the Duckworths. I'm sorry, what!?! There's a real issue here that should be dealt with instead it's glossed over or made bawdy, more copulation please! This was the turning point for me. And this doesn't even cover Vanessa's daughter marrying her father's ex-lover! If something so important could be shoved aside as nothing then how could I enjoy anything I was seeing? This disconnect was made "easier" by the switching of the cast between the second and third episodes. In the first two episodes we see glimpses of their future selves played by different actors, and these glimpses were fine and were meant to cushion the blow of switching to the older actors. The problem was I was invested in the younger actors and their relationships, the older actors, once on their own, had no chemistry. None! Nothing at all, it was horrid. And as for Eve Best as the older Vanessa, do they do Razzies for television?

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Bloomsbury Group, Cambridge, Dorothy Parker, Duncan Grant, Leonard Woolf, Life in Squares, Love Triangle, Miniseries, Oxford, Razzie, Roaring Back to Reading, Sex, Sexual Abuse, Vanessa Bell, Virgina Woolf, WWI, WWII

Most people know Virginia Woolf. Of course most people know the bare minimum; she was a feminist writer who killed herself. If you know a little more you know she was a feminist writer who was part of the Bloomsbury Group who killed herself with rocks. This is ingrained by high school curriculum and is a simplification of a life filled with brilliance and madness. Virginia Stephens was born into a blended household, with two boys and a girl from her mother's previous marriage to Herbert Duckworth, and a girl from her father's previous marriage to William Mackepeace Thackeray's youngest daughter, Minny. Her parents went on to have four more children together, including her, despite attempts to curtail their family at five children after the birth of Virginia's older sister Vanessa. Over the years it has become accepted knowledge that Virginia's accusations of sexual abuse at the hands of her half-brothers wasn't a product of her active imagination and probably fed into her mental collapses, the first of which happened when she was thirteen with the death of her mother.

She would suffer mental collapses many more times, the final resulting in her taking her life. Yet despite the fact that the death of her father triggered one of these collapses, it also resulted in her liberation. After his death the family moved to Bloomsbury where they lived as they wished, often holding salons for her brothers' college friends. They became known as the Bloomsbury Group, compromised of writers, philosophers, artists, intellectuals, friends, and lovers who's "prime objects in life were love, the creation and enjoyment of aesthetic experience and the pursuit of knowledge." Her first book, The Voyage Out, was published in 1915 when she was 33, under her half-brother's imprint, Gerald Duckworth and Company. But her second book, Mrs. Dalloway, published in 1925 is easily her most famous. This was printed by Hogarth Press, a publishing house that Virginia established with her husband Leonard in 1917. Though married to Leonard until her death her great love was Vita Sackville-West. Though all the love and family in the world couldn't help her with the depression she felt with the onset of the second world war, and in 1941, at the age of 59, she committed suicide.       

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Bloomsbury, Bloomsbury Group, Duckworth, Feminist, Hogarth Press, Leonard Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, Roaring Back to Reading, Sexual Abuse, Suicide, The Voyage Out, Vanessa Bell, Virgina Woolf, Vita Sackville-West, WWII

Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill
Published by: William Morrow Paperbacks
Publication Date: June 18th, 2013
Format: Paperback, 400 Pages
Rating: ★★★★
To Buy

Judas Coyne acquired quite the reputation as a death-metal rocker. His love of the macabre has resulted in a unique collection of grim occult artifacts. Those from ardent fans and those he has sought out himself. From cooking for cannibals to a used hangman's noose, though perhaps the oddest item in his possession is an honest to goodness snuff film. But he doesn't have a ghost. Jude's assistant Danny discovered the listing on an online auction house. A woman is selling the spirit of her step-father which she is convinced has attached itself to his Sunday suit. This is bona fide proof of the afterlife and Jude wants it, buying it immediately for $1,0000. If only he knew why this suit was for him and what would happen once it arrived at his New York farm in a heart-shaped box. There is no doubt that the suit is haunted and the ghost is a vengeful spirit set on destroying Jude. Because Jude hasn't just spent his life collecting supernatural specimens, he has also collected groupies. Each named after the state they're from he hopes one day to have a complete set. His current squeeze is Georgia. But the ghost? The ghost is there because of Florida. And the ghost won't settle until Jude, Georgia, and anyone close to them is dead. The couple set out on a road trip with Jude's two dogs, Angus and Bon, in tow. They aim to exorcise the poltergeist. But will it kill them first?

Every once in awhile you stumble on a book that you know is flawed, you no it's not perfect, in fact you have many issues with it, but it's still somehow the right book at the right time and you devour it as fast as you can and enjoy the ride. For me that was Heart-Shaped Box. I had just finished reading the abysmal Newt's Emerald and, masochist that I am, had heard that the original e-book version was different than the printed version and as I already had it... I therefore tortured myself by reading the EXACT SAME BOOK. TWICE! Picking up Heart-Shaped Box after this experience was a relief. I should have realized once I started the book that Joe Hill was Stephen King's son, because the book had the same feeling, that quality of fast food, you know you shouldn't, but you crave it and enjoy it the whole time and then wonder at the end if perhaps it was worth it. For me it was. This book tapped into a more modern Gothic sensibility than Shirley Jackson. Shirley Jackson's writing is timeless, whereas this felt more of the moment, of the now. I don't think it will stand up over time but it does capture the time in which it was written, the feel of the American Gothic of that precise moment. Of music and road trips and hauntings from memories and past sins and actual real ghosts. Oh, I was SO ready for this book.

Because while this is a ghost story at the same time it's not really a ghost story. Like his own father, Hill explores the idea of what exactly ghosts truly are. Because while Jude is literally being haunted by the ghost of Craddock he is also haunted by his past, mainly his own father. Yes, Hill went there, much like his father did with Jack Torrance's daddy issues, but with the added irony that King is his own father... oh, can we say meta? Which is why Jude isn't able to defeat the actual ghost without confronting his own ghosts, by going home again. In a messy final act Jude is able to defeat Craddock by confronting the life he ran away from. Because memories, past experiences, emotions, they imprint on us and the world around us, they leave a residue. I always think of the Torchwood episode "Ghost Machine" where the team encounters "ghosts" which turn out to be fragments of emotion and memory imprinted on time. As Captain Jack says: "Human emotion is energy. You can't always see it, or hear it, but you can feel it. Ever had deja vu? Felt someone walk over your grave? Ever felt someone behind you in an empty room? Well, there was. There always is." That episode was able to shift my perception of the paranormal so that I was able to appreciate what Hill himself is doing in his approach to the concept of ghosts.

Yet for what the book got right it is flawed. In several regards, but to me and most members of my book club the biggest flaw was in the treatment of animals. If you are at all squeamish about animal abuse... this book has a lot of troubling incidents not for the faint of heart. I mean, yes, you should know what you're getting into, this is Gothic Horror, but still, animal cruelty is a whole separate kettle of fish. I seriously think I could handle the most graphic of depravities humans can inflict on each other but if a puppy or kitty dies, I can't deal. So know this going in, Angus and Bon are going to die. Horribly. Both from gunshot wounds protecting Jude as his familiars. Yet their deaths could have been noble if Jude had deserved their sacrifice. Because throughout the book, even before his trouble with Craddock, he treats these lovely dogs like shit. THAT is unacceptable. These dogs love him blindly and as is obviously apparent, he was unworthy not just of their love but any love. This story, to an extent, has a redemptive side, but I think there is no redemption for someone who mistreats animals. More than that, both dogs didn't have to die. Angus survived the initial fight that killed Bon and IF he had been taken to a vet and not thrown in the back seat of Jude's car, there was a chance. But he's just left there in pain to bleed to death. That's unacceptable.

But then again Jude and Georgia do some of the stupidest things imaginable. They never do what's logical. Then again, does anyone in horror do anything logical? There's a reason the Scream movies, poking fun at the stupidity of the horror genre, were so popular. Why would they take Angus to the vet when they don't even go to the hospital for Georgia's finger. This is perhaps the most vomit inducing aspect of the entire book. Georgia pricks her finger on a pin attached to Craddock's haunted suit. It quickly goes septic. The details are kind of lavished on this disgusting injury. Instead of going to the hospital she spends much time ignoring it or sucking on it like a little child with a wound. I'm not even going to address the issues that insight brings to light, but just harp on about the fact she never went to a hospital. I mean, she was convinced it was supernatural so that obviously it would only get worse until they defeated Craddock. How does she know this? Yes, she's kind of zoning out occasionally and watching snuff films in a trance, but I personally would demand an examination by a medical professional prior to blaming it on spirits. Who knows what could have been put on that pin as a secondary offensive attack? Plus. Just too much eww for me.

The nail in the coffin though, as it were, is that in the end this book is predictable. Because the trope that is the card played too often is sexual abuse, this time used with a side of incest. Obviously Florida had to have had a horrible upbringing to have her kill herself and to have Craddock have a need to exact revenge, but is sexual abuse the only trauma available? It certainly seems that way from all the books and TV shows and movies that go to that explanation. What I wouldn't give for say a serial killer or a cult, anything that doesn't go straight to the creepy sex place. But I think the reason why it always comes back to sexual abuse is because this is the worst it could be. Everyone can imagine the horror. Everyone can imagine the shame however unwarranted. Everyone can imagine it and wish it away. In fact, I wonder, how many people, when asked what their worst nightmare was wouldn't say sexual abuse? Hill though has a need to compound the creep factor by having Florida's sister complicit in the abuse and even offering up her own daughter to Craddock. This takes it to a level of creepy that I just don't want to go to. But more than that, I felt that because of who Jude is, because of the damaged women he drew to himself, it was just too expected. So while this book is a journey I enjoyed, it wasn't one that was always scenic and unexpected. Like a commute, there are some days it feels nice, familiar, but in no way was it unique.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: American Gothic, Animal Cruelty, Captain Jack, Going Gothic, Haunting, Heart-Shaped Box, Incest, Jack Torrence, Joe Hill, Judas Coyne, Newt's Emerald, Sexual Abuse, Shirley Jackson, Torchwood