Well, I'm glad that this year's Halloween Bingo ended on a high note for me -- in terms of writing, that is, even if not topically.

She Walks These Hills is one of Sharyn McCrumb's Ballad novels, set in the Roan Mountain / Cherokee National Forest part of the Appalachian Mountains -- I'm guessing that the town of Hamelin, TN, featured in the novel is based on Hampton, TN.  (There actually is a Hamelin, TN, too, but it's in a different part of the state, whereas the location of Hampton fits the book's geographical references perfectly.)  The novel is named for the legend of one Katie Wyler, a pioneer girl who in 1779 was abducted by a group of Shawnee, but managed to flee from her captors and walk all the way back home, covering a distance of several hundred miles; only to be killed once she had reached what she believed to be safety -- and whose spirit is believed to still be haunting the area.  While the novel's Katie Wyler is fictitious, McCrumb based her legend on the story of several actual pioneer women who suffered a similar fate (minus being killed upon their return home); most notably, Mary Drapler Ingles. 

That being said, while Katie's story provides the novel's background, the actual plot weaves together the stories of several contemporary (well, 1990s) protagonists:

* Hiram "Harm" Sorley, a 60+ year old escapee from a Mountain City prison where he'd been serving a de-facto life sentence without the possibility of parole for killing an affluent neighbor some 25 years previously, and who is (rightly) believed to be trying to return to his hometown of Hamelin, TN -- never mind that he's suffering from Korsakoff's Syndrome, i.e., the memory loss condition where, though you do recall events of your remote past, your short term memory is only able to record things for very brief periods (think of the movie Mememto);

* Hamelin Deputy Sheriff Martha Avery, promoted from dispatcher to her current position (on a probationary basis) as a result of a staffing shortage, who, after volunteering for her current job in an attempt to better herself, unexpectedly finds her relationship with the town's other deputy sheriff (Joe LeDonne) on the rocks -- all the while wondering why she seems to be the only person in the office who is taking Harm Sorley's escape seriously and considering him a potential threat;

* History PhD student and teaching assistant Jeremy Cobb, who has made Katie Wyler's story his pet research project and part of his PhD thesis, and who -- though a city kid and a bookworm who hasn't even gone hiking, let alone camped out in the woods a single time in his life before -- decides there is only one way to "get close" to Katie; namely, by hiking part of the rough, lonesome wilderness trail she must have been traveling some 200 years ago (yeah, well, talk about a recipe for disaster right there);

* Henry "Hank the Yank" Kretzer, a local country & folk music DJ (originally from Connecticut, hence his nickname), who covers the Harm Sorley story on the radio and becomes interested enough to try and track down the circumstances that ended up in Harm's life sentence to begin with;

* and Harm's wife and daughter, Rita and Charlotte, who after Harm's conviction went on to live a life very different from the hillbilly / "white trash" life they had been sharing with him, and whom Rita's new middle class husband Euell had shut off from Harm entirely, enjoining them to consider his being locked up in prison forever the same thing as him being dead.

And, in addition to these and other people's stories, which dramatically converge once Harm does actually make it back to the Hamelin area, this is also the story of this particular corner of the Appalachians, whose vast forests, valleys and mountainsides very much make the area's nature and geography a character of its own, and provide for a magnificent backdrop -- and the age-old tale of history repeating itself in that the interests of the defenceless are sacrificed, sometimes very publicly, on the altar of money, power, corruption, and greed: as epitomized by the (real!) story of Mary the elephant, a circus elephant who in 1916 in Erwing, TN, was hanged by a local mob, after she had acted out against and killed a handler who had severely hurt her ... and after the circus owner had realized that as a result she had become a liability instead of the asset she had been so far, and the only way he could generate one last large wad of money out of her was by putting her on display for her public execution.  (Note: You may want to think twice about following the above link or the one in the below first footnote, or researching the story online, if you find it hard to look at images or read descriptions of animals being mistreated.  In fact, I'm going to put the whole passage from the book in which "Hank the Yank" tells the story to his listeners into spoiler tags for the same reason, too:)

"Now the circus was in a pickle. They had to choose between sacrificing an eight-thousand-dollar elephant -- that was Rolls-Royce money in 1916, folks -- or missing play dates in Johnson City and Rogersville.  And the newspaper had fired folks up so that they were screaming for her blood.  It doesn't appear that anybody considered Mary's feelings in the matter.  Ws she a victim of abuse under a  cruel and inexperienced trainer?  Did she consider her actions self-defense? [...]

Those are nineties questions, neighbors.  Nobody asked them in 1916.  The circus owner reasoned that he couldn't afford to lose money from missing show dates, and after the notoriety occasioned by Eldridge's [the handler's] death, he didn't think he could get any other show to buy her.  Apparently, he decided that the only way to profit from the experience would be to reap some free publicity by staging a spectacular public execution.

That's where Erwin comes in.  I mean, how are you going to kill an elephant?  Poison?  How many pounds would it take?  Electrocution?  I wouldn't want to be around if you miscalculated the lethal dosage and pissed her off.  But Erwin, population in 1916 two thousand, was the site of the repair shops for the Clinchfield Railroad.  It offered the circus owner a solution.  Why not hang the beast on a one-hundred-ton railroad derrick?  That's the equipment they used to lift railroad cars.  A five-ton animal would pose no problem at all for such a contraption. [...]

The circus people put a chain around her neck and hoisted her right up off the ground.  It took them two tries,* but they finally succeeded in kiling a rare and intelligent creature, that maybe had no business being enslaved in a sideshow anyhow.  Maybe she even preferred a quick death to a life of servitude.  I don't claim to be an expert on the opinions of elephants."

(spoiler show)

Hank concludes the story of Mary the elephant:

"I do know this: sometimes the law seems more concerned with shutting up mobs who are too dumb to be reasoned with than they are with dispensing justice.  Maybe you're wondering what all this has to do with one old man who took an ax to his prosperous neighbor a quarter of a century ago.  It's just a feeling I have, folks.  Something tells me that Harm was just as much a pawn as Mary was.  I think there's another side to both stories, and while we're never going to hear the truth in Mary's case, I'm still hoping that it can be unconvered for Harm Sorley."**

She Walks These Hills was published in 1994, but given recent political events both in Washington, D.C. and, inter alia, in places like the coal mining areas of West Virginia (which aren't actually so terribly far away from the area where this story is set), large parts of it still read shockingly relevant 23 years later -- now more than ever, in fact.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

* Sensitivity warning: The below spoiler adds a detail on the hanging procedure.

**Contents spoiler warning: Don't read the below spoiler if you haven't read the book and don't want to read anything related to its conclusion.

Merken

Bingo No. 3: First column to the right.

Bingo No. 4: Second row.

The "bingo" squares and books read:

Bingo No. 3:

Bingo No. 4:

I'll have a double bingo in the wings once "Amateur Sleuth" is called, and more immediate bingos for "Classic Horror" and "Country House Mystery."  Complete blackout should tumble in within the next 10 days or so, depending just how the remaining bingo calls come up.  So, I'll be taking my time finishing my last bingo book, Sharyn McCrumb's She Walks These Hills -- there hardly seems to be any reason for a particular rush.

My Square Markers and "Virgin" Bingo Card:

"Virgin" card posted for ease of tracking and comparison.

Black Kitty:
Read but not called

Black Vignette:
Called but not read

Black Kitty in Black Vignette:
Read and Called

Black Kitty Center Square:

                  Read = Called

Current Status of Spreadsheet:

(Note: Physical print editions unless stated otherwise)

Books Read / Finished - Update 7:

Antonia Hodgson: The Devil in the Marshalsea

Well, if this doesn't count for "Darkest London," then I don't know what will.  Our narrator is tossed into the Marshalsea prison for being in debt to the tune of several months' salary -- a bit more than £20.00, which would have been a year's salary or more to the poorer classes, but our Tom is an academic (albeit one without a degree, having been thrown out of Oxford for disorderly behaviour), so he'd have reached higher ... instead of which, however, he has managed to drink and gamble it all away and then get himself robbed off the spoils when trying to win it back by turning a lucky card.  Even though Tom, being perceived as a gentleman, is spared the ultimate humiliation of being locked away on the Common Side of the prison (where conditions are sub-human and jail fever or some other form of death would be his certain fate in a matter of days or weeks; months at best), even the so-called "Master's Side" -- where Tom ends up -- is a cut-throat place ruled by the diabolical whims of the prison governor and his brutal turnkeys, where your life and health is only worth as much as you are able to pay for them, and where you'll find yourself deprived of either quicker than you can count to three if you're stupid enough to trust even a single person.

To top it all off, Tom is given a choice of sharing either a putrid cell with a man dying of the pox for a cell-mate or occupying the bed of a recently-murdered man and sharing a cell with the man perceived as the most dangerous of all the inmates on the "Master's Side," nicknamed "the Devil" by the other prisoners ... only to be then clandestinely tasked in short order to investigate the murder of the former occupant of his bed as a price for being released from prison.

Antonia Hodgson certainly has a way with words and with building the atmosphere of a place, and I do believe she has done her research thoroughly.  I nevertheless didn't take to this book wholeheartedly; in no small part because -- aside from Kitty, a kitchen maid whom Tom meets in the Marshalsea -- I didn't find anybody I could truly empathize with; and that most definitely includes Tom himself. 

  I've got the next two books of the series on my TBR and I'm going to leave them there for the time being -- I won't rule out that I am going to return to them at a later point after all.  It likely will not be anytime soon, however.

Gabriel García Márquez: Crónica de una muerte anunciada
(Chronicle of a Death Foretold)

I read this book  in Spanish and I am glad I did -- based on the translation of the title alone, I don't know how many other subletlies I might have missed if I had gone for a translated version.  García Márquez's novella deals with an honor killing, and beyond what is implied in the book's English title, the resulting death is one that is both "foretold" (namely, in a dream) and blatantly announced by the would-be murderers, to all and sundry but to the victim himself. -- At the beginning of the book, the murder has already happened, and the story is told circuitously in reverse, leading up to an almost surreal, slow-motion pacing in the minutes before the actual killing, when fate, circumstances, cowardice, lethargy and ill luck conspire to see opportunity after opportunity to save the intended victim being missed.

In just over 100 pages, García Márquez employs pacing, perspective and contrasts (of perspective, plot elements, personalities, potential and actual murder weapons and much, much more) to deconstruct the society where the murder occurs -- a small coastal town in Columbia -- and its prevailing attitudes that excuse and justify the murder, a justice system unable to adequately deal with the crime, and of course the honor code that causes the murder to be committed in the first place.  It's a gut-punching book as far away from Love in the Time of Cholera as it could possibly be and it's been sitting on my shelves unread for far too long -- I'm glad I finally did something about that.

Peter May: Coffin Road

This book is billed as a stand-alone following May's Lewis Trilogy, but that's not actually quite correct, as the policeman from whose perspective part of the story is told (DS George Gunn) actually features in an important role in the Lewis Trilogy as well, and even the actual protagonist of that trilogy (Fin Macleod) and his girlfriend Marsailie are name-checked here.

That said, the book's primary protagonist is a gentleman who at the beginning of the book finds himself washed up on a beach in the Western part of Harris island (the two major northern Outer Hebrides islands, Harris and Lewis, for geographical and all practical purposes form a unity), wearing a life jacket and with not a clue to his own identity, which to recover henceforth obviously becomes his primary obsession.  In a matter of days, he takes a boat trip to the Flannan Isles, a small group of islands some 30 miles west of Lewis (and double the distance, correspondingly from Harris), on the largest of which -- Eilean Mòr -- he

The book's second protagonist is an Edinburgh teenager at odds with herself and the world ever since her scientist father is believed to have committed suicide two years earlier, and who is trying to find out whether that is actually what happened (and if so, why), or if not, where he is.

I tremendously enjoyed the book; May is a phantastic writer who manages to make the Hebrides come alive in all their magic austerity time and again.  Yet, this book has certain undeniable similarities to the first book of the Lewis Trilogy (The Blackhouse), which I read for last year's Halloween Bingo -- most notably, in that each book features a tiny, ocean-, wind- and rainswept island off the Outer Hebrides where the actual solution to the mystery haunting the hero is to be found, as well as contrasting narrative perspectives (first person present for the main protagonist, third person past tense for all other characters) -- and I also have to admit that loss-of-memory stories aren't my favorite type of mystery; chiefly because I never know with absolute certainty to what extent the described effects of the memory loss are in keeping with what is neurologically and psychologically / psychiatrically realistic.  (Which isn't to say that I distrust Peter May's level of research into the issue; still, there's always the odd little detail that has me thinking, "wow, for purposes of storytelling it's certainly convenient that he should [not] be able to remember this.") 

This all notwithstanding, however, I'm glad I've taken another, albeit "only" literary trip to the Hebrides -- and not just Harris and Lewis, either; some small parts of the book are also set on the Western Scottish mainland, just south of an area I particularly love, as well as on the Isle of Skye ... from where a couple of the story's characters take the early morning ferry to Harris, which is exactly what I did a few years ago, so this part of the book evoked a whole lot of memories as well.

Eilean Mòr, Flannan Isles: The lighthouse, chapel of St. Flannan and erstwhile rail tracks leading up to the lighthouse from the mooring place -- the novel's key Flannan Isles locations (photos from Wikipedia).

Leaving Uig (Isle of Skye) on the early morning ferry to Harris.

Harris Island: approach at dawn

The bridge connecting Harris and Lewis, from the sea.

On Harris Island

Tabert, Harris -- the ferry back to Uig, Isle of Skye.
(Even the bright yellow railing is mentioned in May's novel ...)

Isle of Skye: Kyle of Lochalsh and Skye Bridge

Isle of Skye: Sligachan Old Bridge

Western Scotland, near Achnasheen:
View towards the Torridon Mountains and Loch Maree

Western Scotland: in the Torridon Mountains, near Kinlochewe

Western Scotland, Applecross Peninsula: view of the Isle of Skye

Western Scotland: Sunset on Loch Torridon
(all photos of Harris, Skye and the Western Scottish mainland mine)

 
Joseph Sheridan Le  Fanu: Carmilla

I'd never read anything by Sheridan Le Fanu, even though In a Glass Darkly -- the short story collection which includes Carmilla -- has been sitting on my TBR for a minor eternity ... no pun intended.  So when Carmilla was picked as the "Classic Horror" group read, I made a snap decision to jump in and join, though I'm using this read for my card's "Vampire" square.

Carmilla predates Bram Stoker's Dracula by 25 years, and either both authors were equally inspired by the Romanian "Count Drácul" myth and its mountain setting or Stoker took a page and a half out of Sheridan Le Fanu's book.  Certainly, both vampires have similar attributes; not least their ability to shape-shift into a large mammal (a cat in Carmilla's case, a dog in Dracula's), which makes me wonder to what extent vampire and werewolf lore have common roots as well; and in both stories, ultimately a "vampire expert" is consulted and helps bring about the destruction of the vampire, strictly according to the rule book ... a stake through the heart coupled with a beheading.

Yet, Sheridan Le Fanu's story doesn't begin to come close to Stoker's in terms of atmosphere, and while Stoker's Jonathan Harker does acctually seek (and barely manage) to flee once he's clued into who his host is, Carmilla's hosts -- father and daughter alike -- keep wandering about with their eyes wide shut until it's almost too late, and have to be made wise by a friend who made the same mistake at the cost of his young ward's life.  Sheridan Le Fanu may have intended this approach as a concession to his readers' expected attitude ("well, really, there is no such thing as vampires"), but Stoker convincingly shows that if you're writing a book about supernatural monsters, there just comes a point where you have to kiss that attitude goodbye, and the more brutally and straightforward you do it, the more convincing it will ultimately come across.  (Heck, even Anne Rice managed that one better in Interview With the Vampire.)

That all being said, I'll likely go on to read the rest of In a Glass Darkly, too, even though probably in bits and pieces and not all in a single go.

Currently Reading:

First Bingo (Update 3 -- Sept. 23, 2017): Squares and Books Read:

Second Bingo (Update 5 -- Oct. 7, 2017): Squares and Books Read:

Books Read / Listened to - Update 1:

Terry Pratchett: Equal Rites

Wilkie Collins: Mrs. Zant and the Ghost
(Gillian Anderson audio)

 

Martin Edwards / British Library:
Miraculous Mysteries - Locked-Room Murders and Impossible Crimes

Agatha Christie: Mrs. McGinty's Dead
(Hugh Fraser audio)

Books Read / Listened to - Update 2:

 Donna Andrews: Lord of the Wings

Ruth Rendell:

The Babes in the Wood

& Not in the Flesh

Robert Louis Stevenson: Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde

Cornell Woolrich: The Bride Wore Black

 Raymond Chandler:

Farewell, My Lovely

  The Long Goodbye

The High Window

Books Read / Listened to - Update 3:

 
Martin Edwards: The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books

 
Emily Brontë: Wuthering Heights
(Prunella Scales & Samuel West audio)

 
Simon Brett: An Amateur Corpse

The Medieval Murderers: House of Shadows

Shirley Jackson: We Have Always Lived in the Castle

(Bernadette Dunne audio)

Murder Most Foul (Anthology)

Edgar Allan Poe: The Dupin Stories -- The Murders in the Rue Morgue / The Mystery of Marie Rogêt / The Purloined Letter

(Kerry Shale audio)

 Agatha Christie: Endless Night
(BBC full cast dramatization)

 Dick Francis: Knockdown (Tim Pigott-Smith audio)

 Ngaio Marsh:

Artists in Crime (Benedict Cumberbatch audio)

Overture to Death (Anton Lesser audio)

Death and the Dancing Footman (Anton Lesser audio)

Surfet of Lampreys (Anton Lesser audio)

Opening Night (aka Night at the Vulcan) (Anton Lesser audio)

Books Read / Listened to - Update 4:

 
James D. Doss: Grandmother Spider

Terry Pratchett: Men at Arms

Ovid: Metamorphoses
(German / Latin parallel print edition and David Horovitch audio)

Apollodorus: Library of Greek Mythology

Plutarch: Life of Theseus

Books Read / Listened to - Updates 5 & 6:

 
C.S. Forester: The African Queen

 
Margery Allingham: The Crime at Black Dudley
(David Thorpe audio)

Jo Nesbø: The Snowman

The Book Pool:

Most likely: Donna Andrews: Lord of the Wings

Alternatively:

* Diane Mott Davidson: Catering to Nobody
* One or more stories from Martin Greenberg's and Ed Gorman's (eds.) Cat Crimes
* ... or something by Lilian Jackson Braun

Most likely: Emily Brontë: Wuthering Heights
(audio return visit courtesy of either Michael Kitchen or Prunella Scales and Samuel West)

Alternatively:

* Wilkie Collins: The Woman In White
(audio version read by Nigel Anthony and Susan Jameson)

* Jane Austen: Northanger Abbey
(audio return visit courtesy of Anna Massey)
* Isak Dinesen: Seven Gothic Tales
* Carol Goodman: The Lake of Dead Languages
* ... or something by Daphne du Maurier

Candace Robb: The Apothecary Rose

Change of plan:

C.S. Forester: The African Queen

Most likely: Simon Brett: A book from a four-novel omibus edition including An Amateur Corpse, Star Trap, So Much Blood, and Cast, in Order of Disappearance

Alternatively:

* Georgette Heyer: Why Shoot a Butler?
* Margery Allingham: The Crime at Black Dudley
(audio version read by David Thorpe)
* Carol Goodman: The Lake of Dead Languages
* Minette Walters: The Shape of Snakes

Most likely: Something from James D. Doss's Charlie Moon series (one of my great discoveries from last year's bingo)

Or one of Walter Mosley's Easy Rawlins mysteries

Alternatively:

Sherman Alexie: Indian Killer

Terry Pratchett: Carpe Jugulum

Change of Plan:

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu: Carmilla

One or more stories from Martin Edwards's (ed.) and the British Library's Miraculous Mysteries: Locked-Room Murders and Impossible Crimes

Most likely: Agatha Christie: Mrs. McGinty's Dead
(audio return visit courtesy of Hugh Fraser)
Or one or more stories from Martin Edwards's (ed.) and the British Library's Serpents in Eden: Countryside Crimes

Alternatively:

* Carol Goodman: The Lake of Dead Languages
* Josephine Tey: Brat Farrar, To Love and Be Wise, or The Singing Sands
* Georgette Heyer: Why Shoot a Butler?
* Peter May: The Lewis Man
* S.D. Sykes: Plague Land
* Arthur Conan Doyle: The Mystery of Cloomber
* Michael Jecks: The Devil's Acolyte
* Stephen Booth: Dancing with the Virgins
* Karen Maitland: The Owl Killers
* Martha Grimes: The End of the Pier
* Minette Walters: The Breaker

One of two "Joker" Squares:

To be filled in as my whimsy takes me (with apologies to Dorothy L. Sayers), either with one of the other mystery squares' alternate books, or with a murder mystery that doesn't meet any of the more specific squares' requirements.  In going through my shelves, I found to my shame that I own several bingo cards' worth of books that would fill this square alone, some of them bought years ago ... clearly something needs to be done about that, even if it's one book at a time!

Isabel Allende: Cuentos de Eva Luna (The Stories of Eva Luna) or
Gabriel García Márquez: Crónica de una muerte anunciada (Chronicle of a Death Foretold)

Most likely: One or more stories from Charles Dickens: Complete Ghost Stories or
Sharyn McCrumb: She Walks These Hills

Alternatively:

* Wilkie Collins: Mrs. Zant and the Ghost
(Gillian Anderson audio)

* Stephen King: Bag of Bones

Terry Pratchett: Men at Arms

Obviously and as per definition in the rules, the second "Joker" Square.

Equally as per definition, the possibles for this square also include my alternate reads for the non-mystery squares.

Most likely: Cornell Woolrich: The Bride Wore Black

Alternatively:

* Raymond Chandler: Farewell My Lovely or The Long Goodbye / The High Window

* James M. Cain: Mildred Pierce
* Horace McCoy: They Shoot Horses, Don't They?
* David Goodis: Shoot the Piano Player or Dark Passage
* ... or something else by Cornell Woolrich, e.g., Phantom Lady or I Married a Dead Man

Most likely: Ruth Rendell: Not in the Flesh or The Babes in the Wood (audio versions read by Christopher Ravenscroft, aka Inspector Burden in the TV series)

Alternatively:

* Carol Goodman: The Lake of Dead Languages
* Sharyn McCrumb: She Walks These Hills

Most likely: Peter May: Coffin Road

Alternatively:

* Stephen King: Bag of Bones or Hearts in Atlantis
* Denise Mina: Field of Blood
* Carol Goodman: The Lake of Dead Languages
* Minette Walters: The Breaker
* Jonathan Kellerman: When The Bough Breaks, Time Bomb, Blood Test, or Billy Straight

* Greg Iles: 24 Hours

Most likely: Sharyn McCrumb: She Walks These Hills

Alternatively:

* Karen Maitland: The Owl Killers
* Greg Iles: Sleep No More

Most likely: Margery Allingham: The Crime at Black Dudley
(audio version read by David Thorpe)

Alternatively:

* One or more stories from Martin Edwards's (ed.) and the British Library's Murder at the Manor: Country House Mysteries
* Georgette Heyer: They Found Him Dead
* Ellis Peters: Black is the Colour of My True-Love's Heart

Most likely: Something from Terry Pratchett's Discworld / Witches subseries -- either Equal Rites or Maskerade

Alternatively:

* Karen Maitland: The Owl Killers

* Shirley Jackson: The Witchcraft of Salem Village

Most likely: Antonia Hodgson: The Devil in the Marshalsea

Alternatively:

* Rory Clements: Martyr
* Philip Gooden: Sleep of Death 
* Minette Walters: The Shape of Snakes
* Ngaio Marsh: Death in Ecstasy

* One or more stories from Martin Edwards's (ed.) and the British Library's Capital Crimes: London Mysteries

Most likely: Robert Louis Stevenson: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
(audio return visit courtesy of Sir Christopher Lee)

Alternatively:

* H.G. Wells: The Island of Dr. Moreau 

* ... or something by Edgar Allan Poe

Most likely: Something from Ovid's Metamorphoses

Alternatively:

* Robert Louis Stevenson: The Bottle Imp
* Christina Rossetti: Goblin Market
* H.G. Wells: The Island of Dr. Moreau

Most likely: Jo Nesbø: The Snowman

Alternatively:

* Val McDermid: The Retribution
* Denise Mina: Sanctum 
* Mo Hayder: Birdman
* Caleb Carr: The Alienist
* Jonathan Kellerman: The Butcher's Theater
* Greg Iles: Mortal Fear

Most likely: The Medieval Murderers: House of Shadows
or Hill of Bones

Alternatively:

* Sharyn McCrumb: She Walks These Hills
* Shirley Jackson: The Haunting of Hill House
* Stephen King: Bag of Bones
* Carol Goodman: The Lake of Dead Languages
* Michael Jecks: The Devil's Acolyte

Ooohhh, you know -- something by Shirley Jackson ... if I don't wimp out in the end; otherwise something by Daphne du Maurier.

Merken

bookshelves: summer-2014, tbr-busting-2014, published-1994, newtome-author, historical-fiction, lifestyles-deathstyles, mystery-thriller, north-americas

Narrated by Sally Darling.

Description: Historian Jeremy Cobb is backpacking on the Appalachian Trail, attempting to retrace the tragic journey of eighteen-year-old Katie Wyler, who was captured by the Shawnee after the massacre of her pioneer family in Mitchell County, North Carolina. In late summer, Katie escaped from a Shawnee village on the banks of the Ohio, and followed the rivers through the wilderness to find her way home - a brave journey that ended in sorrow. Jeremy, a city-bred graduate student with no trail experience, is determined to complete his scholarly quest, unaware that his journey will be both a trial of hardships and a mystical experience. He does not know that the spirit of Katie Wyler is still seen wandering the hills, trying to get home. Mountain wise woman Nora Bonesteel sees her every autumn "when the air is crisp and the light is slanted and the birds are still." Hiram Sorley, known as Harm, is also at large in the Appalachian wilderness. Sorely, who has escaped from the Northeast Correctional Center in Mountain City, Tennessee, is the focus of a wide-spread manhunt involving most of the area's law enforcement officers. There's just one problem: nobody wants him caught. Harm has become a folk hero. Sheriff Spencer Arrowood feels sorry for Harm, imprisoned for life for killing a hated local bureaucrat. There is even some doubt about Harm's guilt. Besides, the elderly convict has Korsakoff's syndrome, a disease that robs its sufferers of their recent memories. To Harm, it is always 1967. Harm doesn't even remember the crime. For Martha Ayers, who wants the job of deputy, catching Harm Sorely would be the best way to prove her fitness for the position. Harm, an Appalachian Don Quixote on the edge ofreality, meets both Jeremy and the still-wandering Katie Wyler on his journey back to a home that isn't there anymore. He is the "last moonshiner, " holding the dream of an unspoiled wilderness in the fragile web of his delusions. When he goes, it will be lost forever.

In true Bettie style, I dive straight into a one off from the middle of a series. Interesting premise, nicely read, stunning scenery and an enigmatic running woman on the deer track.

Best line: 'People who have been shot at don't take desk jobs seriously.'