This story has been told before. Rich man hires people to stay in a haunted house for nefarious reasons. It's a story I enjoy, so was excited to find this on the shelf at my local used book shop.

My excitement didn't last beyond the first couple chapters. 

This story is appallingly bad. Everything happens inexplicably. The rich man only has a vague reason for bringing them to the house; no plan whatsoever. Everyone's attitude is off somehow. It just doesn't make any sense. By the time I finished, I was just happy to be done. Nothing was satisfying; nothing.

Perhaps worst of all is the writing. Occasionally, Williamson goes off on an unexpected diatribe, writing as if the hallucinogenics only just kicked in and he's lost in a slushy, technicolor wilderness that only he can see, describing his visuals to the rest of us who he failed to provide the same substance to. Each time, he returns to narrative at hand as if nothing was amiss while I clear my throat and happily turn the page.

Soulstorm is not a book to pick up on a rainy day. It isn't a book to pick up when you've got nothing better to read. It just isn't a book to pick up at all.

Walter Hubbell, the author of this curiosity, was apparently an actor with a strong interest in the paranormal, like many others in the late 19th century. The transcription I read (on Kindle) is from the "Daily News" Steam Publishing Office, Saint John, N.B., 1879, and since it is about events that took place (or ostensibly took place) in Amherst, N.S. shortly before, it falls into the Canadiana bucket, though written by an American.

How firmly it also falls into the "fiction" column depends largely on how much the reader is disposed to give any credit to Hubbell as a believer in the phenomena he describes, with his rather flat style of reportage. Myself, I find only one thing more incredible than the rolling furniture, flying matches and knives, conversation by mysterious thumps, and spontaneous fires, and that's the report here of other people's reactions to the phenomena, which appears to have been in some cases joking and complete lack of worry about physical harm. There exists a fairly lengthy article in the Proceedings of the American Society for Psychic Research (13: 89-130; 1919, Walter Franklin Pierce) examining the merits of the case from a distance of forty years. One of the its most interesting observations, in my view, is that none of the many witnesses cited by Hubbell are independently verified; even the newspaper accounts of the time appear to have got their citations from Hubbell rather than the friends and neighbours. In other words, it seems entirely likely that Hubbell, if he didn't create the narrative, shaped it to his liking. There was indeed a real Esther Cox in Amherst, and it does appear she had a reputation that was linked with strange happenings and fires (in fact, she ended up in jail for a month or two for arson).

I found it interesting that Esther's various ailments and inflictions in the narrative are directly linked by Hubbell to an incident where she was held at gunpoint in a wooded area, and though Victorian decency obscures the narrative it's pretty clear she was either raped (by a man named Bob) or was just spared that fate because her attacker was spooked by a passer-by. In any case, it's interesting to see her trauma so clearly set out as a precursor - Hubbell does not call it a cause, but he does take some pains to tell the story - to her paranormal afflictions. The principal ghost was even dubbed "Bob" by Esther and her family. It seems likely there were some inexplicable symptoms of poor Esther's trauma, that there was gossip, and that Hubbell, a self-appointed investigator, visited the family for a month as he says he did. After that - well, he sold 55,000 copies of his book to a credulous Canadian and American public (the book also had an American publisher).

I end up placing this work in the same category as "ghost-hunters" TV programs - or indeed, professional wrestling. In other words, believe it (or pretend to) if it amuses you, but there's little to no doubt it's all just so much bunk, and in this case not executed with a great deal of skill. It's fiction, but by no means deserves to be called a novel.

Poor Esther Cox. I hope she did in fact recover in a new environment, as Hubbell claims, after her fifteen minutes of celebrity (including the tour of speaking engagements he dragged her on) were over.

Here, as an appendix to my comments, is Mr. Hubbell's account of what another Esther-observer (and likely a rival, if you believe them both to be in the business of capitalizing on her) had to say about her. It reflects the fascination of the time with the newly-discovered properties of electricity. Hubbell says this about Dr. Edwin Clay, Baptist minister:

He, however, was of the opinion that through the shock her system had received the night she went riding, she had become in some mysterious manner an electric battery. His theory being, that invisible flashes of lightning left her person, and that the knocks which everybody could hear distinctly, were simply minute claps of thunder. He lectured on this theory, and drew large audiences as he always does, no matter what the subject is. Perfectly satisfied that the manifestations are genuine, he has nobly defended Esther Cox from the platform and the pulpit. 

Just as I have Christmas books that I break out and read every year in November and December, I have this one book that I read every year as part of my All Hallow's Read/Halloween Bingo/spoopy-months celebration (spooky-adjacent sorts of things that aren't scary but are amusing).

This is something I picked up lo! these many years ago, because of course part of the Halloween observance is giving seasonally-appropriate books. They lost interest in it ages ago, but the mix of expected (skeleton in the closet) and unexpected (octopus washing dishes) still it delights me every year. And amazingly, hardly any of the moving bits came off or tore. Some of my September and October reads are re-reads, but the only other piece I return to very often is Click-Clack the Rattlebag, the audio version read by Neil Himself.

Personal copy

Content warning for the book: suicidal ideation, gory descriptions of severed body parts, on-page bullying.

Shun, Hiroshi, Takuro, Mika, Anna, and Takeshi are all students at the same middle school. Takuro is one of the most popular kids at school. He's also a bully who may have been involved in a past student death and who is currently tormenting Shun. The few bright spots in Shun's life are the computer game he's creating in his spare time, his friend Hiroshi, who's smart and doesn't seem to care what anyone thinks of him, and Anna, the class president and one of the few people who's friendly towards him and encourages him. Mika and Takeshi are Takuro's friends (or, more accurately, his lackeys), although they're not usually involved in the worst of the bullying. Takeshi is a coward, and Mika secretly wishes her emotionally distant parents would spend more time with her.

One evening, Takuro, Takeshi, and Mika cart some boxes over to an old mansion that Takuro's father supposedly bought. The mansion, now nicknamed the Jailhouse, was supposedly last inhabited 20 years ago by a young couple and their daughter, who used a wheelchair. Shun, Hiroshi, and Anna all end up going inside with Takuro, Takeshi, and Mika, and the six kids suddenly find themselves trapped in what appears to be a haunted house. If they can't figure out how to escape, they may all end up as food for the giant blue monster that roams the halls.

I haven't played any of the Ao Oni game versions, although I did watch parts of a few "let's play" videos. I didn't really expect all that much from this, but it actually wasn't bad. I'm curious as to the intended audience, though - it read like a Middle Grade book, and yet included gory scenes that would have been a better fit for older readers.

As seems to be the case with pretty much every J-Novel Club title I've tried so far, the writing was occasionally awkward and clunky. One example:

"Shun noticed that the bags under her eyes - something he ordinarily found charming about her - were darker than normal." (34)

This sentence is structured in a way that makes it seem like Shun found the bags under Anna's eyes to be charming, when in fact it was probably her eyes that he found charming.

The overall story might have been scarier had the writing been better, but there were still parts that I thought worked extremely well and were genuinely creepy. My top two favorite moments were the "this is why you can't hide in a closet forever" scene, which featured a really effective use of illustrations, and one of the last deaths, when the few survivors tried to figure out whether the person was still alive (even though they almost certainly were not, and it was foolish to check).

Takuro was 100% horrible - of all the characters, he was the one I was most hoping would end up dying. Takeshi didn't really make much of an impression on me, Hiroshi struck me as being fairly creepy (although it turned out that there was more going on than I realized), and Anna was annoyingly underutilized. I cared most about Shun, who'd been ground down by Takuro to a depressing degree, and Mika. Yes, Mika had opted to side with a sadistic bully, but she'd done so because she'd convinced herself that he could provide her with the love her family didn't give her. I felt bad for her, even though her willingness to forgive Takuro just about anything made me grit my teeth a few times.

The ending was...weird. Most of the book was slight creepiness, gore, and occasional appearances from a ridiculous "blueberry-colored" monster. Then it all took a sudden "very special message" turn at the end, morphing into a suicide prevention story. This would have been fine, although heavy-handed, but the steps the story took to get there felt like a cop-out. I had been wondering how the series was going to continue, despite everything that had happened, and I wasn't pleased with the answer.

Still, I liked this well enough to want to continue on. I also tried to hunt down some "let's play" videos of Ao Oni version 3.0, the one this book was based on. Unfortunately, I have yet to find one done by someone whose voice/sense of humor I'm able to stand.

Extras:

• Prior to the start of the book, there are a few manga pages depicting a later scene.
• Several black-and-white illustrations.
• An afterword written by the author.
• A brief note written by the illustrator.
• Two pages of the illustrator's initial character designs.
• A couple color illustrations.

(Original review posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.)