Top 5:books to recommend for Halloween

Published on by Margaret3 Comments

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Top 5 Tuesday was created by Shanah at Bionic Book Worm, and it is now being hosted by Meeghan at Meeghan Reads. For details of all of the latest prompts for October to December, see Meeghan’s post here.

It’s time to talk about Top 5 books to recommend for Halloween. It’s trick or treat time — are you going to tell us your best scary books or cutesy Halloween tales?

I’m a reluctant reader of scary stories but these are five I have read and enjoyed:

The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a suspense story of a young woman slowly but surely losing her mind – or is it a case of a woman suffering from post-natal depression most cruelly treated by her doctor husband? The un-named woman has just had a baby, which she is unable to bear to be near her. She spends most of her time in an attic bedroom, with barred windows and a bed fixed to the floor. The walls are covered in a hideous yellow wallpaper which has been torn off in places. It’s not a beautiful yellow like buttercups but it makes her think of old, foul bad yellow things – and it smells.  The pattern is tortuous and she sees a woman trapped behind the wallpaper as though behind bars, crawling and shaking the pattern attempting to escape. Definitely a creepy and disturbing story! By the end I began to question just what was real and what was imagination – it’s psychologically scary!

The Brimstone Wedding by Barbara Vine, a horrifying mystery. I think it is one of the best of Barbara Vine’s books that I’ve read – nearly as good as A Dark-Adapted Eye and writing under her real name, Ruth Rendell, A Judgement in Stone. Jenny Warner is a carer at a retirement home, Middleton Hall where she meets Stella Newland, who is dying of lung cancer. At first Stella never mentions her husband or her past life, but gradually she confides in Jenny, telling her things she has never said to her son and daughter – things about her life she doesn’t want them to know.  The subtle horror of what I was reading gripped me. It is indeed a ‘chilling’ book.

Broken Voices by Andrew Taylor, a ghost story set in an East Anglian cathedral city just before the First World War when two schoolboys are left at the cathedral school during the Christmas holidays. They lodge with Mr Ratcliffe, a semi-retired schoolmaster, a bachelor now in his seventies who lived with Mordred, his malevolent cat, in a grace-and-favour house granted to him by the Dean and chapter of the cathedral. An ancient tragedy is connected with the cathedral and the bell tower – the cathedral is full of shifting shadows, and the bell tower is haunted by fragments of melody, which one of the boys can hear. The story has a creepy atmosphere and a tension as the boys investigate the tower in the dead of night. It’s suitably ambiguous. It’s not spelled out and you can make your own decision – was there a ghost and was there a murder.

Dark Matter by Michelle Paver, a ghost story in the form of a diary – that of Jack Miller who in 1937 was part of an expedition to the High Arctic to study its biology, geology and ice dynamics and to carry out a meteorological survey. As the darkness descends, Jack is left alone at the camp and his nightmare really begins. Jack describes the ‘dark matter‘ of the title, as that part of the universe that cannot be seen or detected, but is there. It’s a chilling book, very chilling, both in the setting in the High Arctic and in atmosphere. And it is very scary! 

Joyland, by Stephen King, a ghost story, a love story, a story of loss and heartbreak, set in a funfair. It’s also a murder mystery and utterly compelling to read. It’s narrated by Devin Jones, looking back forty years to the time he was a student, suffering from a broken heart, as his girlfriend had just rejected him and he spent a summer working at Joyland, in North Carolina, an amusement park with ‘a little of the old-time carny flavor‘. The Horror House, is a ‘spook’ house which is said to be haunted by the ghost of Linda Gray, whose boyfriend cut her throat in the Horror House. The boyfriend had not been found and it appears he may be a serial killer as there had been four other similar murders in Georgia and the Carolinas.

It’s also a story of friendship, of Tom and Erin, of children with the ‘sight’, a young boy in a wheelchair and his mother, and Dev’s search for the killer. I loved it! King tells his tale, with just a touch of horror and the supernatural.

Dead Man’s Time by Peter James: Book Beginnings & The Friday 56

Published on by Margaret2 Comments

Every Friday Book Beginnings on Friday is hosted by Gillion at Rose City Reader where you can share the first sentence (or so) of the book you are reading. You can also share from a book you want to highlight just because it caught your fancy.

I’m featuring Dead Man’s Time by Peter James, his 9th Roy Grace crime fiction thriller. It’s one of my TBRs. I started reading it a few days ago.

Brooklyn, February 1922

The boy’s father kissed him goodnight for the last time – although neither of them knew that.

Also every Friday there is The Friday 56, hosted by Freda at Freda’s Voice, but she is taking a break and Anne at My Head is Full of Books has taken on hosting duties in her absence. You grab a book and turn to page 56 (or 56% of an eBook), find one or more interesting sentences (no spoilers), and post them.

‘It’s Nurse Wilson, Mr Daly. Your sister is weakening. I think you should come back quickly.’

Description from Amazon UK

Detective Superintendent Roy Grace is haunted by the past in his latest case, and his private life, in Dead Man’s Time, by award winning crime writer Peter James.

A vicious robbery at a secluded Brighton mansion leaves its elderly occupant fighting for her life. Millions of pounds’ worth of valuables have been stolen.

Within days, Grace is racing against the clock, following a murderous trail that leads him from the shady antiques world of England, across Europe and all the way back to the New York waterfront’s gang struggles of 1922, chasing a killer driven by the force of one man’s greed and another man’s fury.

Although the Roy Grace novels can be read in any order, Dead Man’s Time is the ninth gripping title in the bestselling series. Enjoy more of the Brighton detective’s investigations with Want You Dead and You Are Dead.


The Classics Club Spin Result

Published on by Margaret3 Comments

The spin number in The Classics Club Spin is number …

3

which for me is The Stars Look Down by A J Cronin. The rules of the Spin are that this is the book for me to read by 18th December, 2024. I added The Stars Look Down by A J Cronin because I enjoyed The Citadel many years ago. So, I’m looking forward to reading it but I hadn’t realised that it is 712 pages long!

Synopsis from Amazon

The Stars Look Down was A.J. Cronin’s fourth novel, published in 1935, and this tale of a North country mining family was a great favourite with his readers.

Robert Fenwick is a miner, and so are his three sons. His wife is proud that all her four men go down the mines. But David, the youngest, is determined that somehow he will educate himself and work to ameliorate the lives of his comrades who ruin their health to dig the nation’s coal. It is, perhaps, a typical tale of the era in which it was written – there were many novels about coal mining, but Cronin, a doctor turned author, had a gift for storytelling, and in his time wrote several very popular and successful novels

In the magnificent narrative tradition of The Citadel, Hatter’s Castle and Cronin’s other novels, The Stars Look Down is deservedly remembered as a classic of its age.

Did you take part in the Classics Spin? What will you be reading?

Top Ten Tuesday: Books with Trains, Boats & Planes on the Covers

Published on by Margaret19 Comments

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme created by The Broke and the Bookish and now hosted by Jana at That Artsy Reader Girl. For the rules see her blog.

This week’s topic is How My Reading Habits Have Changed Over Time, but I don’t think they have, I’ve always loved reading and read a wide variety of genres. So, instead I am doing a topic I missed in August when I was on holiday. It’s books Featuring Modes of Transportation on the Cover, Planes, Trains & Automobiles.

The books I’ve chosen show trains, boats and planes on their covers:

Trains

The Christmas Train by David Baldacci – Basically this is a love story. Tom, a world-weary journalist is travelling from Washington DC to spend Christmas with his girlfriend who lives in Los Angeles. It’s also a detective story as there is a thief on the train.

Blood on the Tracks: Railway Mysteries edited by Martin Edwards, fifteen railway themed stories in this collection and an introduction on classic railway mysteries. Train travel provides several scenarios for a mystery – the restriction of space on trains, with or without a corridor, means that there are a limited number of suspects and they can also provide an ideal place for a ‘locked room’ crime or an ‘impossible crime’ story. This collection also includes a couple of crimes with a supernatural element.

The Mystery of the Blue Train by Agatha Christie – Ruth Kettering, the daughter of millionaire Rufus Van Aldin is found strangled in her compartment in the Paris-Nice train, known as the train bleu, on its arrival in Nice and the fabulous ruby, the Heart of Fire that Van Aldin had given her, has been stolen. Fortunately Hercule Poirot is also travelling on the train and he of course unravels the mystery.

4.50 from Paddington by Agatha Christie – this begins when Mrs McGillicuddy was going home from Christmas shopping in London when she saw from the window of her train a murder being committed in a train travelling on a parallel line. But nobody believes her because there is no trace of a body and no one is reported missing. Nobody, that is except for her friend Miss Marple. But she is getting older and more feeble and she hasn’t got the physical strength to get about and do things as she would like. So, she enlists the help of Lucy Eyelesbarrow.

Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie – Poirot is on the Orient Express, on a three-days journey across Europe. But after midnight the train comes to a halt, stuck in a snowdrift. In the morning the millionaire Simon Ratchett is found dead in his compartment his body stabbed a dozen times and his door locked from the inside. It is obvious from the lack of tracks in the snow that no-one has left the train and by a process of elimination Poirot establishes that one of the passengers in the Athens to Paris coach is the murderer.

Boats and Planes

Death on the Nile by Agatha Christie – Poirot is on the river-steamer SS Karnak, cruising on the Nile. Linnet Doyle, a wealthy American heiress is murdered, shot through the head. The motive seems straightforward, looking at who gains from Linnet’s death, but this is a complicated plot (when is one of Christie’s books not complicated?) and following on from Linnet’s murder, her maid is also found dead, Linnet’s pearls are missing, several characters are not what them seem and with the arrival of Colonel Race, a member of the British Secret Service, it seems there is also an international murderer and agitator on board.

Death Under Sail by C P Snow – This is a classic mystery, a type of ‘country house’ mystery, but set on a wherry (a sailing boat) on the Norfolk Broads, where Roger Mills, a Harley Street specialist, is taking a group of six friends on a sailing holiday. When they find him at the tiller with a smile on his face and a gunshot through his heart, all six fall under suspicion. It’s ingenious!

Planes

The 12.30 from Croydon by Freeman Wills Crofts – this begins with a murder but the identity of the murderer is known before he even thought of committing the crime. It’s set in the early 1930s when the country is suffering the effects of the ‘slump’ and Charles Swinburne’s business is on the edge of bankruptcy, and he is unable to raise the money to keep it going. So, he decided to murder his uncle, Andrew Crowther, in order to inherit his fortune. Consequently Andrew died on the 12.30 plane from Croydon. What I found most interesting is the description of the thrill of the early passenger flights. 

Death in the Clouds by Agatha Christie – a kind of locked room mystery, only this time the ‘locked room’ is a plane on a flight from Paris to Croydon, in which Hercule Poirot is one of the passengers. In mid-air, Madame Giselle, is found dead in her seat. It appears at first that she has died as a result of a wasp sting (a wasp was flying around in the cabin) but when Poirot discovers a thorn with a discoloured tip it seems that she was killed by a poisoned dart, aimed by a blowpipe. A most enjoyable book!

Fair Stood the Wind for France by H E Bates – I was totally gripped by the first part of the book describing Franklin’s flight, with his crew of four sergeants, over France then the Alps and on to Italy. On his return flight when they were over France, they began to dive, rapidly losing height and he knew that the port engine had gone. The air screw (that’s a propeller) had broken, meaning they wouldn’t make it back to England and they crash landed somewhere in the countryside. They thought they were about west-north-west of the Vosges. From then onwards the story covers the period when Franklin whose arm had been very badly injured was cared for by Francoise and her family, hidden in their farmhouse. He falls in love with Francoise and she agrees to help him escape and marry him when they reach England.

I’m the King of the Castle by Susan Hill

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I read I’m the King of the Castle by Susan Hill for the 1970 Club hosted by Simon and Karen.

Description from Amazon UK for the Mass Market paperback edition published in 2014:

‘Some people are coming here today, now you will have a companion.’

But young Edmund Hooper doesn’t want anyone else in Warings, the rambling Victorian house he shares with his widowed father. Nevertheless Charles Kingshaw and his mother are soon installed and Edmund sets about persecuting his fearful new playmate.

From the dusty back rooms of Warings through the gloomy labyrinth of Hang Wood to the very top of Leydell Castle, Edmund pursues Charles, the balance of power slipping back and forth between bully and victim. With their parents oblivious, the situation speeds towards a crisis…

Darkly claustrophobic and morally ambiguous, Susan Hill weaves a classic tale of cruelty, power, and the dangerous games we play as children.

It is a depressing, tragic, heart-rending story about 11 year-old Charles Kingshaw’s misery and torture when he and his mother Helena, went to live at Warings, the home of Joseph Hooper and his bully of a son, Edmund, also aged 11. It’s well written, with well defined characters and I could easily visualise the setting, but I can’t say I enjoyed it. There is that awful sense of foreboding all the way through.

I really disliked Edmund who took great delight in terrorising Charles. As for the parents I was shocked at their behaviour and attitudes. Mrs Kingshaw is oblivious to what is going on between the boys and how much Charles fears Edmund. Charles is a sensitive boy, but smart and resourceful. He decides to run away, but Edmund follows him into Hang Wood and they lose their way. Charles can cope, but Edmund falls to pieces, cries like a baby, and injures himself falling into a stream. However, after the adults rescue them and they return to Warings Charles succumbs again to Edmund’s bullying, dominated by his cruelty. Things come to a climax when they all visit a ruined castle, where Charles is really the ‘King of the Castle’ and Edmund falls off a high wall. There is no way that all will end well. It reminded me of that sense of impending tragedy in The Lord of the Flies. It’s disturbing, dark and violent. The ending was inevitable and totally tragic.

I’ve had this book for a long time and can’t remember when or where I bought it, nor why I haven’t read it before now. My copy is a secondhand hardback published by Longman in 1970. The Introduction clarifies that Susan Hill wrote the book for adults. It’s a chilling novel that explores the extremes of childhood cruelty.

The Girl Next Door by Ruth Rendell

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Rating: 5 out of 5.

Ruth Rendell, Lady Rendell of Babergh, also known as Barbara Vine, who died aged 85 in 2015, was a literary phenomenon. From 1964, when Inspector Reginald Wexford first appeared in From Doon With Death, she wrote more than sixty novels, including police procedurals, standalone and psychological mysteries plus numerous books of short stories. Many of them were adapted for television or made into feature films.

The Girl Next Door by Ruth Rendell, is one of my TBRs, a book that’s been sitting on my bookshelves since 2016. It’s one of her later novels, a stand-alone book, first published in 2014, a year before her death.

Description from Amazon UK

Beneath the green meadows of Loughton, Essex, a dark network of tunnels has been dug. A group of children discover them. They play there. It becomes their place.

Seventy years on, the world has changed. Developers have altered the rural landscape. Friends from a half-remembered world have married, died, grown sick, moved – or disappeared.

Work on a new house called Warlock uncovers a long buried grisly secret: the bones of two severed hands are discovered in a box, and an investigation into a long-buried crime of passion begins.

The friends, who played together as children, begin to question their past. And a weary detective, more concerned with current crimes, must investigate a case of murder.

The book begins just before the second world war when Woody killed his wife and her lover when he discovered they were having an affair. He then cut off their hands, a right hand and a left that they had held together, and put them in a biscuit tin, which he buried in a tunnel, where the local children played.

Time moves on to 1944. Ruth Rendell describes a garden where the neighbourhood children play:

The garden was not beautiful. It had no flowering trees, no roses, no perfumed herbs. Tunnels they called it at first. The word ‘qanat’, an impossible word, was found by Daphne Jones and adopted by the rest of them. It meant, apparently, a subterranean passage for carrying water, in some oriental language. They liked it because it started with a q without a u. Their schoolteachers had taught them that no word could ever start with q unless followed by u, so Daphne’s idea appealed to them and the tunnels became qanats. (pages 13 – 14)

Time moves on again and we meet up with the children as adults in their seventies, when the skeletal hands have been discovered. The qanats were actually the foundations of a house called Warlock in Loughton, twelve miles north of London and most of the children, are now still living in the area. When they read the newspaper report about the discovery of the hands they get together and reminisce about their childhood and playing in the tunnels, wondering whose hands had been buried.

This is when the book expands into a study of ageing as well as murder mystery:

As you get older, you forget names: those you studied with, lived next door to, the people who came to your wedding, your doctor, your accountant and those who cleaned your house. Of these people’s names you forget perhaps half, perhaps three quarters. Then whose names do you never forget, because they are incised on the rock of your memory? Your lovers (unless you have been promiscuous and there are too many) and the children you went to your first school with. You remember their names unless senility steps in to scrape them off the rock face. (page 17)

It’s quite a long book, nearly 350 pages in a small font in my copy and Ruth Rendell takes time to describe these old friends’ lives and reveals their relationships, their loves and losses and those of their own children and grandchildren as well as their regrets, and bereavements. I felt I really got to know them as real people. Long buried secrets rise to the surface, and old passions are reignited.

From the beginning we know the identity of the murderer, Woody and that of his wife Anita, but not that of the man, whose hand had held Anita’s. At times I thought I’d worked out who it was but when his identity was revealed it wasn’t who I thought it was – it was more complicated than I’d realised. And who is ‘the girl next door‘? I did work that out correctly. It is in some places a bleak novel, and all the characters’ lives have changed by the end of the book. It’s a book that really gripped me and drew me on to find out more. And I really enjoyed how it shows the changes that have taken place in society from the 1930s onward.

I’ve read several of Ruth Rendell’s standalone books and I think this is one of her best. I’ve also read some of her Inspector Wexford books and those she wrote under the name of Barbara Vine.