I love all things dark in literature. I like scary, and deep, and difficult. I am ok with slow reads. I like thinking, watching and trying to understand. That’s why I was sure I’d have a lasting relationship with the complete collection of works by H. P. Lovecraft (it shows $0.59 for the Kindle edition at the moment, by the way, at least for my region). The lasting relationship never happened, even though “cosmic horror” still sounds very intriguing. Truth be told, I haven’t read much of the collection yet. And that is the problem in its core. I can’t! How do you read this? How do you read this boring, preachy, monotonous and-now-my-dear-reader type of writing?!

I’m sure there are movies (and lots of other art too) based on these stories that are outstanding because the ideas are gripping, unique and haunting. But the stories themselves are unreadable! Whenever I tried to get remotely scared I got bored sooner.

There were legends of hidden lake unglimpsed by mortal sight, in which dwelt a huge, formless white polypous thing with luminous eyes; and squatters whispered that bat-winged devils flew up out of caverns in inner earth to worship it at midnight.

I guess, I was supposed to get scared but I was born a century too late for that.

There was actually one short story that I enjoyed. The Beast in the Cave is written in quite the same style but it’s concise and the topic is thought-provoking.

I failed to like a few other stories that I tried. I thought I was looking at a wrong place so I went for something that I expected to be a major treat, The Call of Cthulhu … and failed to like it either! I couldn’t even finish it! In fact, it was worse than a simple DNF – I dropped the story and read the remains of the plot on Wikipedia! I was too interested in the events but couldn’t last through this tedious enumeration of verbs and nouns.

My post is in no way a review of the works by Lovecraft because I’m obviously doing something wrong. A thing that major and important simply can’t be what I now perceive it to be – a product of breathtaking imagination trapped by pompous and unnecessarily entangled writing. So what am I doing wrong? Shall I read something else by Lovecraft first? What then?

Updated to add: got sent this as a reaction to my post. So far it’s the most entertaining thing I discovered about Lovecraft.

Updated. The awesome comment by sledpress:

“It’s okay, babe. Even those of us who love HPL admit that he is pedantic, needlessly verbose, maudlin and overwritten. I came to Cthulhu and the rest at the age of ten, which made it easier to be scared by the scary parts. But he truly did not find a voice that wasn’t a parody of itself until late in life, and I think “The Shadow Out of Time” is the best thing he ever did stylistically. The early stuff, which is all full of fainting from fright and people going “aaaggh” and contrived Gothic, is just one of those acquired tastes, like really peaty whiskey (which I also love). And those of us who treasure cats can relate to the wonderful cats in “The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath,” who in a subplot reveal an ability to leap to the Moon and back carrying a human with them, in sufficient numbers. (Lovecraft adored cats.)

He was a neurotic man deeply damaged by his mentally ill parents, stilted in relationships (his marriage lasted six months), sickeningly racist and absurdly pretentious about his New England background. But there was always something about him that made me want to throw him over my shoulder and burp him, sort of. There is a biography of him by L. Sprague de Camp which might be on Kindle, not too dense, which makes for entertaining reading.

A group called the HP Lovecraft Historical Society (HPLHS on Facebook) has made several retro-style films of the books, and their “Call of Cthulhu” in silent-film style, with captions, is delicious and catches both the horror and the corniness.

If you can get through “Unknown Kadath,” there is what amounts to a piece of fan fiction called “The Dream Quest of Vellitt Boe” which is a feminist excursion on his dream world. Delicious.”

Of course, I should have never picked up this book. The cover alone should have been enough to let me know that this is not the type of book I would enjoy because I don’t like romantic stories. Surprisingly, I ended up disliking the book for other reasons.

What is the book about?

It’s another teenager tragic love story. I suppose, those have been around even before Shakespeare times.

What’s good about the book?

The writing

The writing is absolutely fine. The style is great and perfectly conveys the voice of a teenager. I could easily imagine this boy.

The setting

North Carolina little town in 1958 sounds like my Montenegro in modern days.

People waved from their cars whenever they saw someone on the street whether they knew him or not…

Yes, this sounds like home.

… and the air smelled of pine, salt, and sea, a scent unique to the Carolinas.

Not unique, after all. That’s what Montenegro smells like.

The first two thirds of the story

This part is dynamic and easy to follow. It’s interesting even though it is based on a cliché: a selfish rich kid with father’s issues, minister’s angelic daughter who takes care of orphans. Oh my god they are so different, we will never guess what will happen between them!

What went wrong?

Even though there was the minister’s angelic daughter I was completely unprepared to the Bible becoming a character too.

When “the Lord’s plan” became a centre point of the plot, and the characters started communicating via Bible verses, I felt like an intruder to a party I had never been invited to or planned to visit.

Final thoughts

A Walk to Remember is not a badly written book. It’s easy to read and it’s entertaining. It’s a cute love story that can make you laugh and cry. There’s also lots of Bible in it. This book is definitely not my cup of tea, but maybe it is yours.

General information about The Chalk Man by C. J. Tudor

The Chalk Man is supposed to be a very scary book about children and some games they play. The book is, indeed, gory. If you get squeamish about body parts spectacularly falling out of places they originally belonged to, this book is not a proper reading choice for you. I don’t watch such scenes in movies but looks like I need something more than the scrutinised anatomy of amputated limbs to scare me when it comes to books.The only thing that scared me, actually, was the wish to drop The Chalk Man 50 percents into the story. I had been longing for the book so much! I had been so excited to have my request for it approved! I had thanked the publisher, I had received good wishes from the author and here I was, not being able to last through another page. I summoned my courage and continued. Here is my obviously honest review.

What’s good about The Chalk Man by C. J. Tudor

The story does manage to become slightly more interesting after the middle of the book. You start getting a clearer picture of who the victims are and what actually happened to them. There are also a few unexpected and well-arranged plot twists. The whole plot is knitted from many different threads so it’s also interesting to see how they connect eventually.

What’s bad about The Chalk Man by C. J. Tudor

The dialogues

The dialogues in any book could help reveal a character. It doesn’t mean that a dialogue should be rubbed over a character like a thick layer of warning signs: attention, she’s a bitch! Look out, he’s an idiot! Unfortunately, that’s exactly what happens with the dialogues in The Chalk Man. The lodger of the protagonist, for example, is not able to appear in any scene without producing a bitchy remark. Like a stupid robot, she says something unpleasant whenever she opens her mouth, just for the sake of it. The protagonist himself is not able to mention her without a snappy remark of his own even if it’s about a banal, unrelated to the plot, shopping list. In fact, he always tries to impress you with his misplaced humour but instead he just sounds like a distant relative whose silly jokes you have to acknowledge with a polite smile.

The characters

None of them is developed enough to be multidimensional. They are all just tools to serve the plot. They never grow larger than a function assigned to them.

The clichés

Warning: if you know these clichés they will turn into spoilers for you.

Below are a few clichés from the book. How many of them will you be able to guess? If you do recognise a cliché though, it will be a spoiler for you. Question one: what will happen to a pet in a spooky thriller? Question two: what will happen to a person who announces he knows who the murderer is but will reveal the name later? As for the villain, it’s not a butler (because there’s no butler ) but it gets close to that.

The constant premonitions in The Chalk Man

Suspense is a condiment. You add it to the whole dish to spice it up, to make it more interesting. What will happen to the dish if you unload the whole pack of spices in it? Exactly. Suspense is a must in a thriller but it cannot be the main substance of the plot! You can’t lead a reader through the most of your book just by a mere promise to reveal something spooky later.

Final thoughts on The Chalk Man by C. J. Tudor

I’ve seen people praising the book and saying they left the lights on at night and couldn’t go to sleep while reading the book. My experience wasn’t anything like that. I guess I should be scared by a different type of things and whatever they are, they should be better written.

Thanks a lot to the publishers for a copy in exchange for my honest review.

The Darkness by Ragnar Jónasson enraged me more than I ever expected to be enraged by a book. I had to keep myself away from any social media in order to decompress first and only then to reform my indignation into a more coherent review.

Spoiler free story of The Darkness.

The Darkness is the first book in a series about a detective in Iceland. Her name is Hulda Hermannsdóttir. She’s about to retire but is given an opportunity to investigate one last case of her choice. She picks up an old case about a Russian immigrant found dead in the river.

What’s good about The Darkness by Ragnar Jónasson.

The protagonist is well crafted. Hulda Hermannsdóttir is quite a likeable character. It’s easy to root for her and to sympathise with what she’s going through.

The writing (and I guess the translation) is decent. Nothing is too simplistic yet the story is easy to read.

All the elements of a good detective story are there. There are no holes in the plot, all dots connect in the end.  The plot did sometimes depend on the stupidity of some characters but this stupidity looks quite plausible.

There are two dramatic background stories, one of which had a very unexpected twist, that’s when I thought I might like the book eventually.

What’s really bad about The Darkness by Ragnar Jónasson.

The ending of the story is a disaster! How could one tell a story like this?! Why?! Books are supposed to bring some level of satisfaction. Sure, not all books do. But this is the first book I’ve ever met that intentionally betrays the reader. Is it done for the novelty or the shock effect? It’s not only that your expectations are not met, it’s also the way the details of the betrayal are savoured. You are shown more than you need to see just to disgust you even more.

I’m seriously suspecting The Darkness started a phobia in me. How many books are out there that will use me this way?  How can I choose the right book if good writing, well-developed characters and a well-knitted plot are no longer indicators of a good book?

Final thoughts on The Darkness.

Obviously I cannot recommend the book as I wouldn’t want to put anybody through a similar experience. That being said, there are tons of positive reviews of The Darkness. I even saw readers being happy about being shocked this way. Thus, even though I will never pick up the second book in the series you might still like it. Consider yourself warned and choose for yourself .

Big thanks to the publishers for the copy in exchange for my obviously honest review!

Sold on a Monday by Kristina McMorris is about a group of cliched characters dancing around a well-knit plot. The characters are a damsel in distress, two knights in shining armour; one is a loser with a good heart, another one is a winner with a hard one. Her choice is very original [Sarcasm].

There are menacing parents who “love in their own way”, strict bosses with the same tough love, and kids with shallow kid-talks.

The storylines are strikingly predictable but there are no loose ends. Most characters have a dramatic past up their sleeve to talk about while violins are playing on the background. All obstacles comfortably turn out to be from the dark side so they are subject to rightful demolition. All little Chekhov’s guns that are spread along the novel shoot at some point. It’s still awkward that the plot exists just because the main character screwed up. Initially I thought the story could make a good movie even when failing as a good book. By the end of the book, though, the characters were so cemented in cliches they looked like cardboard figures that even a movie wouldn’t revive.

As for the writing, I believe if I ever see one more “torso” with “muscles of his arms defined by shadows” my book will fly out of the window even if it’s a Kindle. Some authors seem to think the readers should be lured to the book in the same manner soap advertisers tried to lure customers in the 90s.

Also, dear Sir/Madam who teaches authors how to create realistic characters, can you please stop telling them that characters should restate their beliefs in follow-up phrases?! Phrases like “He was happy, he truly was” and “They will be all right, they both will” belong to cardboard characters. They truly do.

I’m not sure if I’m giving the book 2.5 stars because it really deserves that many or because I’m experiencing a version of Stockholm syndrome. The book is new. It was published just two days ago. I couldn’t preview the book before it appeared in my Kindle. I had preordered it and so I was stuck with it. Thus, I might have had no other option but to like it at least for 2.5 stars.

I would not suggest this book to anybody. And maybe preordering a book is also a bad idea .

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Genre: thriller. Stars from Goodreads: 3.89. Stars from me: 1

Do you know what the worst thing about a bad book is? It poisons your own language. The disfigured style plays in your head even after the book has finished. Just like the characters in the book you are no longer able to express your thoughts coherently. You suddenly find yourself squeezing in words you don’t need, making unnecessary sentences. As if you were now also cursed with having one wish only, and that is to hear the sound of your own voice.

The symptoms of the curse are phrases like these. (They are actual quotes!)

• “It doesn’t make any sense, but somehow it does.” It doesn’t sound like bullshit, but somehow it is.
• “Sometimes saying nothing says too much but somehow the words won’t come.” Sometimes writing nothing is better than writing something but somehow the nonsense still comes.
• “We all die in the end, I suppose”. We are all born in the beginning, I guess. Although some seem to have been dropped by storks.
• “We couldn’t get kids. We didn’t know why. The docs said it might be genetic.” Definitely dropped by storks!
• And the one coming from a comatose paralysed patient, “I mustn’t move. I mustn’t make a sound.”

If Stephen King suddenly got very much into drama, but lost all his talent for building characters and dialogues he could write this book. The plot, though, is also not of Stephen King quality. There are lots of loose ends sticking out from it like threads from an old tablecloth.

The author spins a few implausible characters in front of you, hoping to make you dizzy enough so that you wouldn’t figure out who the villains and the victims are. If you use the trick of ballerinas and focus on one point only, you’ll see through these juggles very quickly.

The plot itself got infected with the worst disease possible. The disease is called stupidity dependence. When this disease occurs the plot can develop only through the stupidity of characters and by the means of implausible facts. The intrigue at work progresses only because one character is an idiot who doesn’t notice things under her nose. A dangerous situation happens because a character is dumb and does not warn another one. A complicated scheme works out because apparently you can post two cat photos to a new Twitter account and get viral overnight for a gossip. Stealing drugs from a hospital and poisoning anybody with them, including hospital patients, is easy. Nobody notices because the plot is sick with stupidity dependence.

I had an audiobook version. Do you know the difference between an actor and a narrator? The narrator of this audiobook doesn’t. She dramatically breathes into the microphone through most of the lines, but if there are modal verbs she has to cry them. Like “I have to open the door but I CAN’T”. Whenever there’s a dramatic situation (and there are lots of them) she gets super intense. She literally sobs through some of the lines which made me want to calm her down rather than continue with the book. There are also lots of kid rhymes at supposedly scary moments and she makes it sound even more cliche because she sings them like in an outdated horror movie.

The only thing I’m thankful for is that there was no quasi-suspense like in Something in the Water. No actions were cut midway by a boring Wikipedia article. Instead, every time an action was interrupted a previously interrupted one was resumed. That’s the only thing that helped me move through the book. This, and a colony of ants I had to battle with on my balcony unable to press a stop button without contaminating my headphones.

I didn’t expect to have a one-star book so soon on my blog. I choose books carefully but I was tricked by an almost 4-star Goodreads rating and an interesting description. Sometimes I Lie is indeed not boring, but is still not worth your time.

Genre: horror
Stars from Goodreads: 4.2
Stars from me: 3

Dear Mr.King,

Who can I suggest your book to? Shall I say it’s for those who love detective stories and for those who love horrors, but these two groups should read different parts of the book, then meet in the middle, hug each other and have dinner?

I understand it is my fault that I expected Miss Marple from a book that said “Stephen King” on its cover. Only, the book danced along the classic lines of a nicely knit detective story, for the most part of it. Like a naive idiot I was piling up evidence, reading between lines and suspecting all characters at once. Then, suddenly, Miss Marple started growing horns, a scaly tail and whatever other attributes that are usually ascribed to creatures from the netherworld. Just for the record, it’s a metaphor.

For the remaining part of the book I was sent on the unbelievable trip of star watching. That is, I was watching stars falling from the rating I was initially ready to give to The Outsider. There were originally four solid stars, then three and a half, then I had to battle with myself to keep at least three. I have no problems with horrors, but I object to being ambushed by a scaly Miss Marple while I was unsuspectingly picking up clues to solve a crime with her. Do you see what I mean? It would be the same if I gave you a bowl of ice-cream scoops with a spoonful of aspic hidden beneath. Why would I do such a thing? I would have to be either a prankster, or a sadist or a chef with two unmatchable dishes and with an urgent need to get rid of them. Is that what happened to your book?

What I enjoyed was the swarm of characters interacting. They just can’t shut up, can they? I don’t know what black magic you use to keep the creatures locked within the pages, but on those pages they definitely acquire minds of their own. I’m sure those are living beings, I cannot imagine a person being able to create such intricate dialogues, even if the person is Stephen King. There was absolutely no use in those characters explaining the story lines to each other, but I couldn’t stop watching them do this. They gave zero interest to the fact that I just learned what had happened, they needed to recite the story to each other again! Completely unnecessary for the plot line, but what an art of a dialogue!

Mr. King, it’s a bit awkward that one of your characters is trying to remember if John Lennon was already dead when she was younger. It’s not even important how many years younger. She’s somewhat my age, and I saw John Lennon only in black-and-white as he was long dead before I was born.

The desynchronization between what the main character Ralph does and what you say about him is quite uncomfortable. He behaves like a narrow-minded bully, who doesn’t let in any other version of events but his, no matter the amount of evidence that he might be wrong, and yet you call him “a person of two minds” who at one moment even “wants to believe, but can’t”. Nothing in Ralph’s behavior or words suggests he wants to believe any other opinion but his own! On the contrary, whenever Ralph gets the microphone back he restates that to him there’s still no other truth but his. This kind of literary gaslighting is disturbing.

I found another moment quite unexpected. It’s a very old trick to use a clichéd scene and then to refer to it as clichéd in the attempt to rinse the cliché off the scene. When people hold hands and run from bullets “like a group of friends in some romantic movie”, when a person helps his abuser back to his feet, “like in a Bible story”, those are clichés and the attempts to cover them up. When cliché is played around as a conscious move, it can sound forgivable to many. It is still a cliché, though, and the move is a cosmetic repair to the scene.

I also have a question to Will Patton, the narrator of the audiobook. That’s the question I started googling even before I finished the book. What the HECK is wrong with Holly? I now discovered that she’s a character from other series, so is there something that happened to her that made her sound like that? Honestly, part of the time I was sure the plot twist would be that she’s a robot. Why does she speak with a voice of an old Apple computer? “I…might! have? sooome neeeeew information? for! you…” I got so exhausted hearing these schizophrenic jumps in timbre, I nearly dropped the book. Holly’s deformity is even more surprising taking into account that other voices are made so perfectly, the performance felt like a radio play! I loved knowing who the following action would be about because the voice would already change into the character’s accent and mannerisms even before the character himself went on stage. I wasn’t surprised to find out that Will Patton was once called a Narrator of the Year.

Overall, after finishing the book, I felt like those fans of Lost TV show who patiently waited for the finale to get all answers only to find out that nobody cared enough to give them any, and the main purpose of the series, all along, was just to keep the audience glued to the story while it lasted. The Outsider is not that dissatisfying, but it came close.

Genre: thriller
Stars from Goodreads: 3.76
Stars from me: 2
Available on Amazon

Every now and then I get sad for the trees that were cut to print one bad book or another. What a waste. Thankfully, no trees suffered for my copy, as it was an audio version. When I finished this book I was so frustrated, I felt a need to constantly rant about it, and even more frustrated because I had nowhere to rant about it, my blog didn’t exist then.

That’s why I was so relieved when I found these two reviews on the Internet, first and second. Finally somebody was saying the words that had been clogging up my throat. There are spoilers in those reviews, but some books are better spoiled than read.

Something in the Water is about a couple who don’t know how to behave in the most obvious situations, but probably they were made idiots because the author needed a reason to move ahead with a catchy but highly unbelievable plot about mafia, money, death and Bora Bora holidays.

The audiobook took me through hours of tedious housework, so the book gets two stars from me, not one. You have to be thankful for company when cleaning cat toilets. I was able to zone out and focus on garbage while missing chunks of irrelevant internal monologues. By the end of the book there was a blister in the part of my brain that processes tag questions: ‘He won’t do this, will he?’, ‘They would already be here, wouldn’t they?’, ‘He can’t do this, can he?’ Marvellous grammatical exercise. Shitty internal monologue…isn’t it?

Perhaps, one of the biggest sins of this book is not even the fact that Catherine Steadman doesn’t distinguish Turkish from Arabic, or calls a city with two million people a village. The worst sin is that she doesn’t care if her readers are enjoying her book. There’s a difference between good, well-timed suspense that makes a book even better, and random, unrelated pieces of text jammed into the middle of an action with the sole purpose of moving the finale further away. The second one seems to be exactly what Catherine Steadman was doing.

Reese Witherspoon chose Something in the Water for her book club. I don’t know what kind of housework Reese Witherspoon had to do to come up with this decision. One thing is certain, Reese Witherspoon and I have very different chores and very different tastes in literature.