TITLE: In a Glass Darkly

AUTHOR: J. Sheridan Le Fanu

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DESCRIPTION:

This remarkable collection of stories, first published in 1872, includes Green Tea, The Familiar, Mr. Justice Harbottle, The Room in le Dragon Volant, and Carmilla. The five stories are purported to be cases by Dr. Hesselius, a 'metaphysical' doctor, who is willing to consider the ghosts both as real and as hallucinatory obsessions. The reader's doubtful anxiety mimics that of the protagonist, and each story thus creates that atmosphere of mystery which is the supernatural experience. This new annotated edition includes an introduction, notes on the text, and explanatory notes.

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REVIEW:

Rating: 3.5

In a Glass Darkly is a collection of 5 possibly "paranormal" or mystery stories, first published in 1872, includes Green Tea, The Familiar, Mr. Justice Harbottle, The Room in le Dragon Volant, and Carmilla. The five stories are purported to be cases by Dr. Hesselius, a 'metaphysical' doctor, who is willing to consider the ghosts both as real and as hallucinatory obsessions.

Green Tea, The Familiar and Mr. Justice Harbottle all involve hauntings of some kind - demonic monkey or otherwise. These three short stories weren't particularly memorable. The Room in le Dragon Volant is not so much a ghost story as a gothic historical mystery novella with a mysterious lady in distress, a mysterious and jealous count, conspiracies and just plain weirdness. This was the best story in the collection. Carmilla is the story of the famous lesbian vampire written 25 years before Bram Stoker's Dracula.

This was a delightful read!
How I love Cody. He is so sweet and just wants to be helpful.
Brenda knows this and lets him help, not realizing she needs more help than she even knows. Her marriage is rocky, she's an empty nester and life is not where she thought it would be. 
Steve, her hubby, is a good guy. He has no idea what the issues are. But that's totally a guy thing.
These characters feel so real. Like my neighbors, whom I have known my whole life and can see the stress in their lives. I feel it.
Definitely love the ending! I love when things come together just as you would expect them too. 
Yup, people are gonna love this one!!

A moment of silence please, as I mourn the passing of one of my favourite series. I’ve enjoyed every one of these books & feel like I’m saying good-bye to old friends….friends with lives waaay more exciting than mine.

In the final instalment, we find Kingston police officer Kala Stonechild at loose ends. She has a good life in the city but can’t deny a growing urge to chuck it all & hit the road. She has some big decisions to make & in an effort to clear her head, she & niece Dawn head off to a cabin in the wilds of northern Ontario. The little resort promises spotty cell service & no wifi but plenty of rivers to explore by canoe followed by quiet starlit nights. Perfect. Or it should have been.

People staying in the cabins only see each other when they gather for meals at the main lodge. Among the staff & guests is Rachel, a pretty 16 year old working as a waitress for the summer. Unfortunately, Kala will only get to know her after her broken body is found on the side of the road. She’s been brutally murdered & the small, close knit community promptly goes into shock.

Enter OPP Officer Clark Morrison, a former colleague of Kala’s when she worked in a northern detachment. And due to staff shortages, he could really use a hand. Would she be interested in a temporary reassignment? This was supposed to be a break from bodies & paperwork but Kala can’t shake the feeling the killer is hiding in plain sight. And they might not be done.

Back in Kingston, boss Jacques Rouleau ok’s her request to join the investigation. But he’s worried. He & her partner Paul Gundersund have sensed Kala’s restlessness for a while & wonder if this is her first step toward saying good-bye.

Readers expect a lot from a final book. You want a great story but usually there are some long running plot lines to tie up as well. This strikes a good balance. The investigative aspect is detailed & loaded with red herrings that keep your brain veering in every direction. When the killer was revealed, I had to do the forehead smack….how could I forget the most basic tenant: cui bono? But in my own defence, my God, some of these people are a hot mess. When Morrison compared their shenanigans to Peyton Place, he wasn’t wrong (something for all you youngsters to google).

But it’s also a very personal read. If you’ve been following along, you know Kala had a rough start in life. It’s affected her ability to form relationships & recognize a home when she finds it. Her friendship with Jacques is the heart of the series & he’s become the father figure she never had. And after some bumps in the road, she & Paul built something solid. Or so I thought. As Kala pondered her future I found myself dreading the final pages as I had very firm opinions about where these characters should end up (one didn’t quite pan out so in my head I added a chapter. Go for it, Vera!).

This aspect of the story is about change, those life altering decisions that are scary. Where you call home, what you hang on to & what you let go. Several of the characters are at a crossroad & the choices they make are reflected in the book’s title. I’m sure the publishers would have loved the series to continue but hats off to the author for going out on a high. Hopefully she has a new gang of great characters lined up & I look forward to whatever comes next.

'The Remaking' is a self-aware horror novel about an urban legend with supernatural inertia. The story of how Ella Louise and her daughter Jessica were labeled witches and burned in a small southern town in the 1920s is told again and again, a cult movie, a 90s remake, eventually a podcast comes knocking....

The story is inviting enough, but the air went out of the novel when I realized a hundred pages in that the back-cover copy was the entire novel. The novel isn't about the vindication of Amber and/or a quest to get to the heart of the curse of Jessica, the little witch girl. You follow each stage and it doesn't matter, because you know what's going to happen. I know old 40s movie trailers used to show the whole film in 30 seconds, and audiences were fine with that, but I thought we were past all that. This isn't like 'Moby-Dick' or something, where we all know the ending but the brick of a novel is still worth reading. I feel like in the last five years or so there is no effort made in making trailers that invite you in. They just say it all. Which is disappointing, because this isn't Moby-Dick, or even a decent horror film.

This knowing exactly where the story was going as I plodded through it was a little frustrating and took a lot of the appreciation out of the occasionally well-crafted atmosphere generated by the book. Even if I didn't know where the story was going, I don't know if the novel would have held up, as each section had trouble standing on its own. We didn't spend enough time with anybody but the understandably anxious and, later, damaged Amber for any real horror to creep in.

I read it through to the end to see if the author would pull a last-minute victory of an ending, but it was some vague, pseudo-feminist babble. I don't think an author can have characters rattling around and doing nothing for hundreds of pages and then pretend at the end it was all part of some sort of grand scheme. It's too bad, I loved the horror film references and would have liked some contemporary commentary on the genre.

Chapman's book is part history of Tussaud's Chamber of Horror, part brief histories of the various criminals who are model in wax.

Strangely, while I brought this for the crime history, the parts about Tussaud and the museum itself were for more interesting than the bits about the various killers. Enough to make want to read her books about Tussaud herself.

You can learn about the killers, but you can also learn about how the wax figures survived fire and the Blitz.