Rose Cottage by Mary Stewart, a Classic, Reviewed

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Reviewed by D. L. Keur

AVAILABLE FROM AMAZON.COM

cover, Rose Cottage by Mary StewartFor anyone who wants a lazy Sunday afternoon read, one where you don’t need to worry about sex, religion, politics, getting indigestion, or sore stomach muscles from EXTEME tension, this is a book for you. Originally published in 1997, the current novel is available in paperback, republished in 2011 by Chicago Review Press.

Always a fan of Mary Stewart since I was a child, I’d never read Rose Cottage until my mother recently bought the book from Bas Bleu and passed it on to me after she’d read it. A wonderful story about a girl stigmatized by her mother’s past indescretions, Rose Cottage is a gentle sweep back in time, living through the mind and eyes of a girl whose gotten on with her life, despite a painful childhood wrought by jealousy and revenge.

The novel takes us to, first, Scotland, then England back right after the conclusion of WWII.  With berns and brooks, thrushes, blue bells, and old fashioned roses, this book is actually a gentle mystery that proves at once satisfying, yet discerning.

This isn’t a book for folks looking for excitement. Nor is it a book for those who prefer shallowly written and tersely delivered plot.  This is an old-fashioned, and, therefore, pleasant experience for true readers who enjoy the more in-depth pacing and subtleties of purely excellent writing.

Needless to say, I highly recommend this novel, a book which strays from author Mary Stewart’s more well-known genre of “classic romance”, now known as historical fantasy, bringing you a more mainstream modern historical. In my opinion, it’s well worth your time and money if you want a solidly, well-written novel that is written in that most wonderful Mary Stewart style.

4 gold stars.  It loses one because this isn’t “great” literature, just a very good novel for a lazy Sunday afternoon.

  • Paperback: 240 pages
  • Publisher: Chicago Review Press; Rep Una edition (September 1, 2011)
  • Language: English

–D. L. Keur, The Deepening World of Books

Book Review: CEMETERY CLUB by J.G. Faherty

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Cemetery Club

J.G. Faherty

JournalStone

March 2012

ISBN 978-1-936564-23-1

254 pages

Horror

http://www.jgfaherty.com/

When Cemetery Club starts, it has all the makings of a great horror novel. Right from the beginning, J.G. Faherty expertly draws in the reader with a number of brief vignettes from the history of Rocky Point, the setting of the plot. You meet a crazed preacher, who is not above murder to exact God’s vengeance. You briefly join a mob of worried townspeople intending to burn a leper colony within city limits. Then there is the sanitarium physician, whose human experiments have led to countless deaths and clandestinely discarded corpses. After you leave him behind, you finally meet the heroes of the story: the four members of the Cemetery Club on a mission to curb evil.

After setting the stage, Cemetery Club continues on masterfully and whisks the reader to present-day Rocky Point. It is there that the great ride begins to slow. As evil rears its ugly head in the plot, a more and more difficult demand to suspend disbelief is issued to the reader. Picture, if you will: zombified creatures are gnawing a path of destruction through a small town. People disappear. Even so, a subsequent fictional town hall meeting shows less upset and hot tempers than a real-life parcel tax proposal discussion elicited just recently in Los Angeles County.

Indeed, it almost seems that Faherty turned over the keyboard to a different author. The meticulously crafted character development that is evident in the first portion of Cemetery Club seems to take a higgledy-piggledy joyride, just as the action takes off.

By the way, this is when the reader hits the next set of speed bumps. Zombies slash, gnaw and do worse; repeat. The next day, guess what the zombies do again? The day after that, would you believe that the zombies are at it again? In short, there is copious action, splattering blood and flying body parts, but there is also quite a bit of repetition.

The grand finale is indeed grand. Good and evil clash. Once again I cheered for Faherty who seems to have left behind the valley of repetition and absurd depiction of the town’s population at large, when I turned the final page. Was the ending really necessary? Really?

Truth be told, Cemetery Club is masterful story-telling with a few hiccups along the way. Faherty has a command for description thus far only associated with Stephen King and those like him. Nevertheless, I cannot wholeheartedly recommend this book to the average horror fan, unless you are a diehard zombie fiction aficionado who enjoys a blood-soaked story with plenty of teeth.

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For the sake of full disclosure, let the kind reader please take notice that I received a copy of Cemetery Club, free of charge, from the author.
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Sylvia Cochran is a voracious reader and long-time book reviewer. She sinks her teeth into anything having to do with vampires, horror, steam- and cyber-punk. Of course, she never turns down a good post-apocalyptic read, either.

 

Book Review: A LITTLE HELP FROM MY FIENDS by Michael McCarty

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A Little Help from My Fiends

Michael McCarty

Sam’s Dot Publishing

October 2009

ISBN 978-0-9821068-9-1

172 pages

Horror/Short Stories

A Little Help from My Fiends is a fresh approach to the horror genre’s short story collection. Who is not familiar with the grizzly tales that offer a number of vignettes delving into vampire lore, zombie horror, futuristic fears or real-life terror? Some of the most famous horror authors (think Edgar Allen Poe) are more famous for their short stories than their long tomes of doom, gloom and terror. This presents the horror author with a unique quandary: horror short stories have been done. In fact, they have been done to death. I must confess that I have picked up plenty of short story collections that were well-written in their own rights, but lacked any type of connective tissues.

It is here that Michael McCarty’s A Little Help from My Fiends truly shines. His collection of short stories is a lovingly created, watered with blood and harvested at the peak of ripeness kind of work. The approach to the collection is so fresh that–were it a steak–you would note still a bit of warmth and even a faint pulse. You see, each story in this collection is co-authored with another excellent storyteller. Mark McLaughlin, Terrie Leigh Relf and Dave Miller, to name a few, make appearances. Each short story is prefaced with a few words that identify the co-author, point to an interesting tidbit of the tale’s creation, and never fail to show McCarty lauding the co-author while remaining modestly in the background. (You cannot help but love this guy.)

The other thing that the seasoned horror reader will note is the amazing variety. A Little Help from My Fiends takes a quirky look at the recently zombified; it looks to the future but does not fail to also look at the present. The vampires do not sparkle; loyal readers know that this is a pet peeve of mine. In fact, some of these vampires are not at all the mainstream bloodsucking fare. Some horror short stories will leave you chuckling while others stick with you for unknown reasons. They touched chords that you, the reader, did not even know where there to be struck in the first place.

I highly recommend A Little Help from My Fiends. It is an excellent read for the teenaged horror fan or the adult in search of something fresh. Meet Michael McCarty who has somehow perfected the art of writing funny, tragic and haunting horror stories. Who knows, he might just be the long-awaited polymath of the genre?

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For the sake of full disclosure, let the kind reader please take notice that I received a copy of A Little Help from My Fiends, free of charge, from the author.
***

Sylvia Cochran is a voracious reader and long-time book reviewer. She sinks her teeth into anything having to do with vampires, horror, steam- and cyber-punk. Of course, she never turns down a good post-apocalyptic read, either.