Ms. Hen reviews The Vampire Tapestry

The Vampire Tapestry

Suzy McKee Charnas

Living Batch Press

1980

Ms. Hen decided to read this novel because she did a search online for vampire books, and this appeared. She had never heard of it, so she decided to see is this is something she would like. She is into vampires right now, and if you are a regular reader of Ms. Hen’s blog you would already be aware of this. She is studying the vampire genre because she recently completed a draft of a novel about vampires, since she was in semi-quarantine, and had ample free time. She thought vampires would keep her mind off the troubles of the world.

This is probably Ms. Hen’s favorite novel that she has read about vampires during her quest. It is a novel told in different stories about an anthropology professor, Edward Weyland, who is a vampire. The novel starts at Cayslin College in upstate New York, where he is being pursued by a cleaning lady who figures out that he drinks blood from his research subjects in the sleep lab. His time there ends in drama, but he lands in New York City, where he is held prisoner by some young men, but he escapes and is sent to therapy by the college where he was employed.

After he finishes therapy, he goes to New Mexico where he has a difficult time finding sustenance, since the population is sparse. However, he is resourceful and maneuvers ways to feed on human blood. Dr. Weyland is a hunter and knows how to render a person unconscious so he can feed. He is not like other vampires in the way that he can walk in the sun, and there are none other like him that he knows about. He is solitary, and has lived for a long time, and he sleeps for several years and wakes up, then forgets what happened to him during his former wakings.

Ms. Hen liked this novel because it was well written and engaging. She felt sorry for the vampire; though he kills people, he is compelling. She roots for him in spite of the fact that he is evil. She pictured him as George Hamilton in LOVE AT FIRST BITE, which she saw many years ago, but remembers vividly.

Ms. Hen thinks the different points of view in the chapters work well. It’s difficult to write in varied voices in the same book describing the same thing, but the novel flowed seamlessly through the sections. Weyland is a handsome vampire, ruthless, sexy, appealing, a father figure, and an intellectual.

There is one mention of a chicken in this novel when the opera singer Tremain sits down to eat his dinner, “Nevertheless, he sat down discontentedly to his ritual pre-performance bowl of chicken broth.” Ms. Hen is not sure why Tremain eats chicken broth, but he dies before the end of the night. His broth was his last meal on Earth before he became Weyland’s meal.

Ms. Hen recommends this as the best vampire novel she has read yet. The second best was LET ME IN, and the others were not as illuminating. She thinks that there is a dark underbelly to everyone and she wants to be able to find out what it is. She wants to know about drinking blood, or performing evil deeds, or fighting against the darkness that’s inside us, where the inner vampire dwells, waiting to come out.

Lunch break without Ms. Hen. She doesn't come to work now because of contagions.

Ms. Hen reviews The Complete Stories of Flannery O'Connor

The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor

Flannery O’Connor

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

1971

Ms. Hen has had this book on her Kindle app for a while, and she started to read it some time ago, but never finished. She decided to read it while she was working, since her job is boring these days. She found it difficult to concentrate on it because the people around her talk a lot. But she finished it, and she enjoyed it, though she had some issues with it.

Ms. Hen has always been a fan of Flannery; she first read her because they share a last name, but she started to love her because her stories are grotesque and shocking. When she read her before, she didn’t read the stories with a Catholic lens, and didn’t understand how they could be Catholic, but during this reading, she understands what that means. Flannery was a Catholic that lived in the South, which is a certain kind of Catholic. She and her kind were like salmon swimming upstream.

Ms. Hen reread some of her favorites, “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” and “Good Country People.” These stories are morality tales and try to show right from wrong. Ms. Hen did some research about “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” and she discovered that Flannery meant to show that there are two kinds of bad people, ones who are bad and know they’re bad, and ones that think they’re good, but are actually bad. This story tries to show that there are no good people, only bad people. Ms. Hen doesn’t know if this is true in the world, but it’s the truth that Flannery knew. In “Good Country People,” a young woman gets tricked into thinking a man is interested in her, and he hurts her. Several of these stories show that people are scoundrels no matter what they do, and right and wrong is a black and white area. Ms. Hen does not agree that everything is always black and white; she thinks there are many shades of gray in the world.

Ms. Hen was shocked by some of the language in this collection, and her profuse use of the “n” word, but she knew that it was written a long time ago, and people spoke differently then, especially in the South. She wanted to find out if Flannery was a racist, because several of her stories are about racism. She found a great article, which you can read here:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/06/22/how-racist-was-flannery-oconnor

She found out that Flannery wanted people think she was socially conscious, but in her letters she wrote the truth, that she didn’t think much of African Americans. She didn’t like integration, and she didn’t want anything to do with people not like herself.

When Ms. Hen was in writing school, all the teachers loved Flannery O’Connor. She is a darling of MFA programs because she wrote perfect short stories, and it doesn’t matter to them that she saw the world from a different point of view than educated liberals have now. She has become more famous posthumously than during her life, and Ms. Hen doesn’t know how people should feel about her now. She was a racist, but that isn’t surprising given when and where she lived. Should we vilify her now because we don’t like her politics from today’s standards? It’s an ethical question, and there are several shades of gray, not right or wrong. She was a great writer, but we can’t judge the artist for the art.

Ms. Hen reviews Year of Wonders

Year of Wonders

Geraldine Brooks

Penguin Books           

2001

Ms. Hen read this because it was recommended to her online. She had read one other novel by Ms. Brooks, MARCH, which won the Pulitzer Prize that year, and she loved it. Many years ago, she interviewed Geraldine Brooks for her college newspaper, and met her at a reading. Ms. Hen thinks that YEAR OF WONDERS is a book everyone should read right now because it is important to the way we are living our lives in this moment.

YEAR OF WONDERS is a novel about a village in England that is struck by the plague and almost everyone who lives there dies. A man comes to the village who works as a tailor, and he stays with Anna Frith, a young window with two children who works as a servant for the rector and his wife. He spends time in the village, but is suddenly struck dead with the plague. The villagers start to die, first they get a fever, then they get a boil on some part of their body, and right before they die, they get a rash. Anna helps the rector’s wife take care of the ailing villagers by learning about the herbs that the midwives used to heal people.

The rector implores everyone to stay in the village so the plague will not spread. The large landowning family decides to leave because they do not want to get sick, and the rector doesn’t like that they leave, but he can’t stop them. In some families, almost everyone dies. Anna’s father becomes a gravedigger and takes people’s precious belongings to make profit from the dead. The rector decides to have their Sunday services outside so they will not be so close to each other in the church.

This novel spoke to Ms. Hen about what is happening right now. This is not the first time there has been a pandemic, but the difference between 1660 and now is enormous. The people in this time had very little communication with the outside, and barely knew what was happening in other parts of England, let alone the world. Also, there was no medicine or science. The rector had told them before the Plague came around that if a person was sick, it was because God was testing them, and they should not try to get better. The rector gives a sermon and tells the villagers that they should be grateful that God is giving them a gift because He loves them so much. There is no school in the area and almost nobody can read, so they do not have the education and capacity to question what the rector says.

Though they have little science, and don’t know how to stop the Plague, what Ms. Hen noticed, is that they have a sense of community. The people help each other for the most part, though their loved ones die, and they are destitute. Ms. Hen doesn’t see people helping others that much when it isn’t necessary in these times. We have science, but the expression, “You do you,” has become popular during this pandemic. Ms. Hen believes in this, because she knows she can’t get angry at the world, but at the same time, she thinks it’s selfish.

Another aspect of this novel that Ms. Hen admires is the writing style. The book is well researched and the expressions and the dialogue seem authentic. Ms. Hen didn’t know what every word meant, but she could figure them out by context. This is like reading a book that was actually written during that time. Except in that time, a novel would not have such strong women characters.

Ms. Hen liked the ending; it is not mushy and romantic, because that’s not the way life is. Ms. Hen thinks that everyone should read this novel to learn the way people used to be compared to the way we are now, and how much the world has changed, and how much it hasn’t. How far have we come in almost four hundred years? We’re being struck again, and history repeats itself if we don’t study the past. Even if we do, it still comes back.

Ms. Hen reviews Fledgling

Fledgling

Octavia E. Butler

Grand Central Publishing

2005

Ms. Hen decided to read this novel because right now she is studying vampires, and she is a big fan of Octavia Butler. She never knew that Ms. Butler wrote a vampire novel, but it came up when Ms. Hen did a search for vampires online. Ms. Hen was excited, because she knows there is a lot of bad vampire fiction out there, and she does not want to make the mistake of falling down that ramp again.

This novel is about Shori, a fifty-three year old vampire who appears to be in an eleven year old girl’s body. She wakes up with amnesia after her entire family was killed in a fire. She is rescued by Wright, a young man who becomes her first symbiont, which is the person she drinks blood from, though she does not know that word at first. She and Wright become lovers and she eventually finds out the truth of her story.

At first Ms. Hen was creeped out by Shori and Wright sleeping together because she appears to be a child, even though she is old. But she gets used to the idea, and the novel is about power struggle, and Shori is the one with the power. Wright is a gentle character, and Ms. Hen almost pities him for getting involved with this situation.

Shori and Wright try to discover what happened to her family, and that brings her to her father’s family, but they also get burned out of their houses and murdered. Shori doesn’t know why people are trying to kill her families, but she learns from two symbionts that survive her father’s family’s fire that people are upset that Shori had been genetically modified with black skin so she could walk in the sun, and some Ina, which is what the vampires call themselves, think she is dangerous. The four of them, Shori, Wright, Celia and Brook, try to find a safe place.

Ms. Hen thinks this novel is about love, and trying to find family, and making family from the people who are near, and the struggle between the old and the new, and also prejudice of new ideas. The old family, the Silks, do not like that Shori can be in the sun are offended because she is something new, and they do not want change.

This novel turned into a courtroom drama at the end, which Ms. Hen did not expect or particularly enjoy. Ms. Hen doesn’t think that this is a typical vampire novel; it’s a little too nice, and somewhat slow at times. Ms. Hen had high hopes for a vampire novel by Ms. Butler, and though she didn’t love this, it wasn’t the worst book she has read recently.

Ms. Hen reviews The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires

The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires

Grady Hendrix

Quirk Books

2020

Ms. Hen decided to read this novel because someone she follows on Twitter read it, and she is into vampires right now. She read about the book, and thought she would give it a chance, though she does not usually buy hardcover books, times are different now.

This novel is about a group of women in a book club who decide to read crime books, fiction and nonfiction. A strange man moves to their neighborhood, and Patricia, the protagonist, befriends him. She eventually finds out that he is a vampire. This novel is steeped in the South; it takes place in South Carolina in a small town. People who live there write down license plate numbers of cars seen in the area that they don’t know, and the women are housewives, none of them work, and they are serious about taking care of their families.

Ms. Hen thinks this novel might have supposed to be funny, but she doesn’t think it is. She thinks it’s sad that people live this way, suburban housewives who have nothing to do except fret over making lunch for their children and who is driving the carpool. She thinks the characters might have been intended to be satirical, but she’s not sure. She doesn’t know how anyone could live like this, and if they do, Ms. Hen feels sorry for them. Maybe Ms. Hen doesn’t understand Southern culture enough, but she doesn’t get it.

As for the horror elements, they were scary, but not scary enough. Ms. Hen didn’t take the book seriously enough to be scared by it. If she gets scared, she’s genuinely scared, and not half-scared, or scared in-between the silliness. She doesn’t think anyone would take this novel seriously, because the characters are so shallow and lifeless, she doesn’t know what to think of them.

The characters all blend into each other. The members of the book club who aren’t Patricia seem the same to Ms. Hen. She knows they’re different in some way, but trying to tell them apart was too difficult for Ms. Hen. She really doesn’t like any of them. And the novel seems racist to Ms. Hen. The African American characters are stereotypical and one-dimensional. Ms. Hen thinks that some people would get offended by this, the way she is.

This book is not the type that Ms. Hen would stop reading because she can't stomach it, however. The writing is acceptable, and though it is ridiculous at times, it is well-paced, and readable. She doesn’t know why people would love to read a pointless book like this, and Ms. Hen will be more careful deciding which vampire novels to read because she knows there are a lot of truly bad ones out there.

Ms. Hen reviews The Almost Moon

The Almost Moon

Alice Sebold

Little, Brown and Company

2007

Ms. Hen decided to read this novel because she picked it up at a Little Free Library near where she lives before the time when she wouldn’t touch anything for fear of illness. She had read THE LOVELY BONES by this author years ago, and when she found this book, she read the first line and it intrigued her. It is, “When all is said and done, killing my mother came easily.” Who could not be fascinated by a line like this? Ms. Hen was hooked.

This novel is about a woman, Helen, who kills her mother in a heat of passion, and spends the next twenty-four hours thinking about her life and what is has come to. She is divorced and has two grown daughters who live far away, and she kept living near her mother in order to take care of her. Her mother was mentally ill, and was agoraphobic, and never left the house for years. He father committed suicide. Her ex-husband is an artist, and she was his model, and afterwards, she became a model at the college near where she lived.

One of Ms. Hen’s problems with this novel is that all the characters seem like they’re not very nice people. They have a way of talking to each other that sounds like they should be living in a sitcom like ROSEANNE or THE MIDDLE, a chirpy, screaming way of conversation that Ms. Hen found she couldn’t stand. It’s not that Ms. Hen thought that Helen was wrong to kill her mother; in fact, she thought she had good reason to do so, but she thinks that Helen didn’t go about it the right way, that she could have gotten away with it if she wasn’t so stupid. All the characters in this novel don’t seem very intelligent to Ms. Hen.

Another aspect of this novel that Ms. Hen didn’t like is the ending. The reader never learns what happens to Helen. Ms. Hen can appreciate an ambiguous ending in a short story, because that’s a place where it’s okay for an ending like that, but after we spend almost three hundred pages following Helen around trying to find out what will happen to her, we never find out! There is no ending! Ms. Hen hated this. She wanted to know. She understands this could be a literary technique, but she thinks it’s cheap, and it’s cheating the reader.

Ms. Hen read this novel fast, not because she thought it was good, but because she wanted to find out what happened to Helen, and then she never found out! Ms. Hen does not recommend this novel. You should read something else.

Ms. Hen reviews Dubliners

Dubliners

James Joyce

Penguin

1914

Ms. Hen had read DUBLINERS many years ago, but she decided to read it again, because she wanted to read a book on her phone while she was working, and she thought short stories would work well for this scheme, that way, she would not forget what happened in the book since she only works one day a week. She does not think it’s right to read a book while she is at work, because it would appear as if she is not working. But everyone always looks at their phones, so she has no problem reading on her Kindle App. She prefers hardcopy books, but we can’t always have what we want, as this new era has taught us.

Ms. Hen was reminded of how charming and realistic all of these stories are. A lot of them seem to Ms. Hen as if they are about characters who are looking at another life different from their own life, and wondering what it would be like to be somewhere or someone else. In the story “An Encounter,” two schoolboys skip school and try to cause trouble, but a man disturbs them by speaking of beautiful young girls, and they run off. In “A Painful Case,” an older man who lives alone befriends a woman who is married, but then breaks off with her, and it shocked was she dies suddenly. He had a brief time of happiness when he knew the woman, but feels worse when he learns of how she died. “A Mother” is about a young girl who has an overbearing mother who demands that her daughter be paid for her accompaniment on the piano at a concert. Her mother thinks that it’s important that her daughter be paid because it is in a contract. All these stories are about people looking at other’s lives and yearning for change, but it most likely will never come.

These stories have a comfortable air to Ms. Hen; she has read them before, but when she read it this time, it was almost like she had lived them before, and they are about a world in which the characters believe will always be the same, and cannot change because if it did, it would be as if everything turned upside down.

When Ms. Hen read “The Dead," she had the odd feeling of familiarity, like she had been in the room where the Christmas party took place before. She thinks that this is an excellent example of how to write a party scene, and Ms. Hen can learn a lot from it. (She has written some party scenes recently, and they’re difficult to pull off.) Every character is accounted for and the scene moves from one end to the other and we can see what’s happening with everyone piece by piece. “The Dead” is a sad story, and one that can touch a lot of people, because there are ghosts who haunt them, who they carry around and never tell anyone until it comes out if a burst like Greta when she tells her husband the story of her youthful love and his tragic death.

Ms. Hen thinks everyone should read DUBLINERS, not just because it is a classic, but because it’s about people who lived in a era that is like a time capsule that will never exist again. They think things won’t change, but they have no idea what’s around the corner. Neither do we.