Review of CURSE at Tangent Online!

Wow, this has been a week of unexpected treats. First the Daily Deal from Audible.com (which put Curse at their #1 bestseller slot, temporarily displacing the Game of Thrones and Outlander series), and then the review from Down Under at SQMag, and today Dave Truesdale emailed me with the news that his review at Tangent was going live today:

"What a great stage-setting, atmospheric opening paragraph to The Curse of Jacob Tracy, the debut novel by Holly Messinger. The plush, masculine, Victorian-era appointments describing the library hint at the exotic, of perhaps a once aristocratic European opulence reserved only for the fabulously wealthy. With a sense of foreboding, our interest is piqued. Why does Trace not look into any dark corners, why do big old houses hold nasty surprises for him, who is this enigmatic Miss Fairweather, and why is he in her house in the first place? We're hooked. 

... If you are a connoisseur of supernatural horror, I have a feeling you're going to love this one. I look forward to the further adventures of Jacob Tracy; he's an everyman hero for whom we are happy to cheer."

My author ranking at Amazon had been looking a little depressing lately, so all of this was a great boost get six months after the publication date.

Carry on!

Jacob Tracy review in SQMag

This review of THE CURSE OF JACOB TRACY in the latest SQ Mag is maybe the most lucid and insightful I've seen. 

I was especially intrigued by this bit: 

"The first half or so of the book, it felt as though she had yet to fully engage with Jacob’s voice, but heading toward the climax to the end, the author’s presence totally fades into the characters and setting, letting them tell the story."

That's pretty perceptive, because I was aware myself of the stiltedness of the first 3-4 stories, being strung together as they were from the old short-story format, which has different pacing and demands of character development. The last third of the book, Horseflesh, was the hardest to rewrite and took the most revision, but once I quit fighting it, it settled into itself and flowed. Trace changed a lot between those first 5 stories and the end novel, because my understanding of him and the kind of story I was telling changed a lot.

This bit also made me perk up my ears, so to speak: 

"it felt as though the author started, then shied away from, any romantic elements whatsoever. I realize romance is something some authors don’t want to be associated with, but this girl enjoys a great love story in any genre and at the very least a natural progression of romantic elements, even if it’s not the focus of the plot."

All reader responses to a work of fiction are to some extent a Rorschach test, but none more so than the romantic bits. All you folks who've read CURSE, I'd be curious to know what you thought of the romance in the book, or lack thereof. Did you want more? Less? Do you think Boz was right about Miss Fairweather having the hots for Trace? Comment below.

Moreau's Daughter reviewed in Tangent Online

Neat! And they used the word "intelligent."

“Moreau's Daughter” by Holly Messinger tells the story of Lily's vigilante hunt of a serial killer. Her meeting with the killer and her recent reunion with a female lover are told in conjunction, with alternating scenes, so that we learn of Lily's past at the same time as we are assured of the main action's forward progression. Although Lily's character is interesting, the story focuses more on a coming together of events set in motion by Lily's past actions and resolutions, rather than any internal conflict or decision. Messinger intelligently lays out Lily's narrative in such a way that references to The Island of Dr. Moreau by H. G. Wells are clearly understood without necessitating an intimate familiarity with the 1896 classic.

rum drinks and snark: a book review

I am not a big drinker. My recent infatuation with gin and tonics is an anomaly. Nevertheless I am interested in cooking, and history, and through one quirk and another I found myself wondering what people--specifically poor people in 1880's New Orleans--would drink to unwind. Rum, I figured. But rum isn't such a popular drink these days, aside from rum-and-cokes, and though I, my husband, and the bartender at Blanc on the Plaza racked our brains, we couldn't think of any commonplace, traditional drinks that featured rum.

(Yes, yes--that's why we have the iPhones and the Internet. Don't jump ahead of me.)

Then I remembered I had acquired a copy of "Steamdrunks: 101 Steampunk Cocktails and Mixed Drinks" a couple of months ago on a whim. And sure enough, when I opened my Kindle I saw there were plenty of historically-accurate and shudder-inducing mixological concoctions featuring rum.

And I should mention, the book itself is a hoot:

"Rum is the saucy drink of choice for your Steampunk sky pirate. Those of you seeking an authentic Victorian flavor need to search the cheapest, bottom rotgut shelves of your local liquor store. The $6 gallon bottle will still be too refined and palatable, so try adding a nice mix of rat droppings, sweat scraped from a homeless man's armpit, and the bitter white citrus interior you've thrown away from all the other recipes in this book. It'll still be too pure for the sake of authenticity, but you'll start to get a feeling for why every rum cocktail of the 19th century was blended with citrus, sugar, and crushing regret."

After reading that, I also understand why not so many rum cocktails have remained popular into the current day.

I recommend this book if you're into booze, or hosting, or history, or any combination thereof.

movies of the week

You know how sometimes you know a movie is going to be bad but you have to watch it anyway just to get it out of your system? I downed three of those in the last 24 hours.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (Gary Oldman, John Hurt, Colin Firth)--Benedict Cummerbranch and Firth were the only two who didn't seem to be sleepwalking in this somnambulant spy thriller. Ultra-stylish, limping along on flashbacks, mistakes obfuscation for suspense.

Anonymous--Vanessa Redgrave and Jolie Richardson play Queen Elizabeth I as a childish, neurotic cougar. Bunch of other men conspire around her to no effect. And there's some slop about the power of words and the glory of artistic expression.

A Dangerous Method--less melodramatic than the trailer would have you believe, which is all to the good, but the restraint of the writing, acting, and directing leaves me with a tepid feeling of frustration--not exactly the afterglow you want from a movie in which at least three main characters advocate freedom of thought and sexuality as vehicles to mental health.

I feel so repressed right now I may have to flush my brain with some Michael Bay to recover balance.

saith the gourd unto Herod

Aren't spam subject lines fun?

Anyway, here's some mental housecleaning for the week, mostly about words and writing. Hey, did you know this used to be a writing blog?

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DK sent me an email yesterday:

As I recall you are not particularly fond of writing short stories, but I thought this might present as a good opportunity for you to get something published. Check it out.

http://www.escapepod.org/2007/01/06/300-word-flash-contest/#more-185

I have several thoughts on this. First, I wonder if DK has some kind of stock in escapepod.com, since he's mentioned it to me three or four times, apropos of nothing each time. Second, I worry that the state of publishing is even worse that I suspected, because I see several "names" on the lists of escapepod's fiction list, and I know that even the award-winning midlist authors are scrabbling for publication space/money, so I really doubt that my odds would be better in this venue vis-a-vis any other.

Thirdly, I really love it when people (men, generally) who don't know me send me little pearls of wisdom about how I could get published, when the pearls they send me are in no way related to anything else they've seen me do, and frequently reveal the sender's own ignorance about writing and publishing. What's the goal in this? Winning my undying gratitude? Hoping to siphon off some vicarious fame? But then, DK once wrote to Tom Clancy suggesting they write a book together, or barring that, could Mr. Clancy please forward copies of all his research so DK could write the book? Honest to God.

Weary indignation aside, I've been wondering in a more general way if audiobooks are going to continue to grow the way they have. I wonder if publishers have any hard numbers about how consumers are using books; so much media is throwaway or background noise these days. The emphasis is on portable entertainment--of which a book is the original format--but you can listen to a book while driving, or working out, or whatever. Even I'm hard-pressed to sit down and read these days. I wonder if I'd be more inclined to listen to a story, if there were more of the kind of story I want, available? Or would I simply be annoyed by the background noise, the way I so often am with music, these days?

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My writer's meeting was last Saturday. We had a bit of material to cover, too, after a long dry spell. Three of our members have been going through household changes this year; the other three are just having really bad luck (car accidents, surgery, settling the estates of parents). But this time, Jan brought a nonfic article for her art history class, about the late-19th-century Japonisme fad, and how Japanese art influenced western art (especially the Impressionists, which is hard to fathom), decor, and dress. I knew a bit about this peripherally, because of my cultural research, but it was interesting to see a more in-depth article. I wrote several comments on her paper, and she wrote me a very nice thank-you. I love that. It's so nice to hear when my crits have been appropriate and helpful. Makes me feel like I've got a handle on this writing thing.

My contribution to the group was about 7 pages of a new story I'm working on, a little urban fantasy/slipstream/horror thing. Kinda Ray Bradbury, without the sugar coating. More Shirley Jackson, I think, which makes sense cuz I've been reading her.

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I finished reading We Have Always Lived in the Castle. That is some disturbing stuff. It's not supernatural in the slightest. It concerns a pair of sisters, the only survivors of a poisoning that killed the rest of the family (the elder sister was tried and acquitted of the murders). The girls have a symbiotic relationship that's all the more twisted and awful for all its surface normalcy. Jackson's style is tremendously clean, straightforward, and readable. It's like being stuck in a nightmare, where everything makes perfect sense even while you know it's wrong. I admire it greatly.

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I also finished The Knife Man (see sidebar). Good reading. Fascinating insight to the state of medicine on the cusp of science. Made me grit my teeth many times at the pigheadedness and shortsightedness of the establishment, who always want to do things the way they've always done them, a system that rewards mediocrity and resists any kind of change for the better.

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My writer buddy Rob loaned me Other Powers, by Barbara Goldsmith. It's a social biography, if you will, of Victorian Woodhull. I knew of Woodhull as an early proponent of birth control and the first woman to run for the American Presidency, but the last time I read about her I was in the seventh grade, I think, and the library books at that level were somewhat more sanitized than this account. To my delight, I find that the meat of Woodhull's life and biography center around the American Reconstruction era, and among other things she was a spiritualist. Looking forward to these pages.