Bitter In Black

Had a bout of insomnia the other night...so that means I got to finish another book so YAY!  This of course means time for a haunted rambling to continue our October of awesome.  The book is The Woman in Black by Susan Hill which is the inspiration for the movie by the same name.  Was I to scared to sleep?  Let's find out...as always SPOILERS AHEAD!

Arthur Kipp starts us off by telling us where he is at now.  He is happily married to his second wife after being widowed at a young age and now enjoys his later life with his wife, step-children and grandchildren.  The family starts telling ghost stories which triggers a pretty intense memory in our narrator Mr. Kipp.  He takes us back to his younger days where he was working on making partner at his law firm.  He ultimate goal was to provide a comfortable home for his fiancee Stella and their future family.  To this end he is sent by his boss to the remote town of Crythin Gifford and further out to an old manor Eel Marsh House.  A crumbling pile that is regularly cut off by the high tide.  Mr. Kipp's job is to attend the funeral and then the business affairs of the late Alice Drablow, the last remaining Drablow to live at Eel Marsh House.  Mr. Kipp finds himself quit comfortable in the little town and sets off with the local solicitor Mr. Jerome.  During the funeral Mr. Kipp see's a gaunt and wasted figure in all black.  He enquirers about her and only receives fear and silence in answer.  Mr. Kipp heads out to Eel Marsh House and again encounters the Woman in Black and determines that she is not only unhuman, but potentially malevolent as well.  As Mr. Kipp continues to go through the house he is stuck in a fog and in that mist he hears the sound of a pony and trap go off the road and the screams of a child as they are sucked down and drowned in the treacherous marsh.  Mr. Kipp is shaken up until he is picked up by his man and realizes that what he heard was not real.  He decides to get provisions and stay at the house until his business is complete.  To this end a new friend insists that he borrows his little terrier Spider to accompany him.  Mr. Kipp is woken in the night by a sound coming from a locked door.  He breaks it open and discovers the room of a young boy and a rocking chair in motion.  After going through various documents in between being scared and startled by various noises he finally get's the tragic story of Eel Marsh House.  Turns out that Alice Drablow had a sister Jennet who gave birth to a child out of wedlock.  Because of the circumstances and time period, Jennet was forced to give the child to her sister to raise.  Jennet could finally no longer stand to be away from her son and came to Eel Marsh House.  One day, while Jennet was standing at the window she watched in horror as her son, his nursemaid and the driver of the trap and pony lost their way in the mists and were instantly sucked down and drowned in the marsh.  These are the screams Mr. Kipp kept hearing in the marsh.  Jennet died 12 years after her son, bitter, angry and blaming everybody for her sons death, haunting the town many years after her demise.  After some more terror, Mr. Kipp is brought to his friends house to recover.  It is here that Mr. Kipp learns the horrifying aftermath to the story.  Apparently every time the Woman in Black is sighted, a child dies a horrible death.  Mr. Kipp goes back to London to try and forget the terror of his trip.  He marries Stella and they have a son.  One day Mr. Kipp, his wife and infant son are at a fair.  Stella takes their son on a carriage ride while Mr. Kipp looks on.  As the carriage rounds the corner on its return trip, Mr. Kipp sees the Woman in Black step in front of the carriage, causing it to crash into a tree.  Mr. Kipp's son is killed instantly and Stella is grievously injured.  After 10 months of pain, Stella finally succumbs to her injuries, leaving Mr. Kipp as another victim of the bitter and angry spirit of the Woman in Black.

World Building - The atmosphere created by the author of this book was complete and enabled one to get lost in the moody and damp landscape.  The only real issue I had with the world building was how much of the book was spent describing the environment instead of showing it.  It felt like at least a third of the book was just descriptions of the dank marsh and the spooky, musty house.  While making a complete world, this also had the detrimental side effect of making the first 3/4 of the book a bit boring.  That being said, the setting was pretty perfect for the story.

Story - The actual ghost story part of this book is pretty awesome.  It was a story that was scary on two levels.  One, the story made sense, you could understand why the ghost was so angry and why she got revenge the way she did.  The second level of scary is that it involved innocent children.  It's bad enough when an adult with resources and reasoning is haunted, but when you involve children the chill factor jumps a ton...at least for me.  As for the rest of the story, again, the first 3/4 of the book was long drawn out set up that made me want to skip pages.  It wasn't until the last quarter of the book where I got super engrossed in the story so...

Characters - The characters where pretty much your average ghost story characters, slightly naive man, haunted villagers unwilling to part with information, the convenient friend, the cold recluse old lady, the angry spirit.  Nothing spectacular.  Nothing bad, just no real character development in anybody other then Mr. Kipp.  It was nice to see that he had overcome his past to a degree and found some happiness instead of letting it destroy him, but other then that pretty run of the mill characterization.

Editing - The combination of having this book be narrated in the first person and wanting this to be a full length book made most of it angsty and boring.  I am torn between blaming the author and blaming the editor for the pacing of this book.  The contrast between the excruciating slow bulk of the book and the amazingly creepy end of the book left me pretty frustrated and wondering how most people got far enough in to appreciate the spectacular last fourth of the story.  I personally feel that this would have been perfect for an under 100 pages story but that's just me.

Ghost Story - Let's get back to the ghost story part of this book for a minute shall we?  I was seriously scared for this part of the book.  After a ton of pages of feeling like I just wanted to put the book down it got really scary very quickly.  I really loved how squirmy and heart in the throat this part of the book made me.  I was in bed and even had a big strong Marine sleeping next to me and I STILL had the covers over my head!  This is what I look for in a good scary story.  Blood and gore don't really do it for me, but a great ghost story gives me all the chills.  I am pretty stoked that after slogging through so much blah, the pay off at least was pretty awesome.

The Movie - I loved the newest movie adaption of this book.  They definitely changed some things, but I felt, especially in movie format that the changes made the story even better.  In fact I liked the movie so much it inspired me to go hunt down other great ghost stories.  I totally got where the book inspired the creepiest parts of the movie, and the Eel Marsh House and surrounding environs were spot on match for the book.  Overall for a movie adaption I would strongly recommend it to anybody who prefers atmosphere and story over blood and gore for their chills.

Cause and Effect - I think the reason the actual ghost story part appeals to me is that it follows my own personal appreciation of cause and effect.  My favorite stories are ones where I can follow a reason for something to happen.  Many times, especially in supernatural tales, a ghost or spirit or monster is malevolent just because it makes the story scarier.  In stories like this, human actions have long term consequences AND the consequences are logical (or a logical as a bitter child killing ghost can be) to the actions that spawned them.  In this story a woman was forced to give up her child then had to watch him die a horrible death.  The consequences are that she now takes children away from their parents...makes sense in a way.  To me this is the potentially scariest thing ever 'cause it means that you have to be responsible for your actions or you or potentially innocent people will suffer for it.

Overall Impression - This is another case of a book I wanted to like a lot more then I did.  It was really excruciating to get through the majority of this book and the awesome chills I got from the last part may or may not make up for it.  In all honesty I will probably just skip to the good part if I ever read this book again.  I recommend it for anybody who has patience...or doesn't mind skipping right to the end.  I am torn because it was almost like reading two books, so I guess I give the first 3/4 of the book a 4 out of sheer boredom and the last 1/4 a 9 'cause it was super awesome...which averages to I don't know...maybe a 6 or 7 unreadable gravestones.  Anyways Happy Reading Everybody!

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo Or The Most Disturbing/Boring Book I Have Read

Saw the trailer for the American version of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson the other day, and it got me wondering how the movie will work.  I have read the book and it was the weirdest mix of disturbing imagery, major violence, and a lot of really boring blahness. Keep in mind, I am not a squeamish person, about violence or sex especially if it has a point, this book just seemed to use it in place of well everything. The book focuses on two main characters Mikael Blomkvist who is a publisher for an independent magazine called Millennium who is persona non grata for losing a libel suit against Hans-Erik Wennerström a billionaire investor.  The other character is the title character Lisabeth Salander, who is by far the most interesting character in the book.  She is a genius computer hacker who has been in Sweden's child social system for many years.  This book essentially tells the story of Harriet Vagner and her disappearance from her family home many years ago.  Blomkvist is hired to write the biography of the family as a cover to investigate Harriet's disappearance.  Salander gets hired by Blomkvist to help with the research and they eventually end up as uneasy lovers.  One of the main subplots is Slander's time in the System and the horrific brutalities she endures after her original case worker and protector Holger Palmgren has a stroke.  Her new "guardian" Nils Bjurman is a sick and twisted man who forces Salander to perform demeaning and painful sex acts to gain access to her own money.  After a couple of episodes she sneaks into his apartment and gets her revenge by tattooing "I am a sadistic pig, a pervert and a rapist" on his chest after recording one of the abusive sessions for blackmail. The reason she was placed in custody in the first place is revealed in the next book.  The disturbing violence continues as we learn more about the Vagner's history.  Turns out that Harriet's father and brother sexually abused her to the point that she arranged to disappear of the family island, never to return.  As they investigate Blomkvist and Salander discover a journal of Harriet's listing names of missing women.  Turns out that her brother Martin (who until now seems like the normal, stable one) has built himself a twisted playroom in his basement where he keeps kidnapped women to act out his twisted fantasies on, and then murders them.  At the climax of the book Salander saves Blomkvist's life, Harriet is found and the mystery is solved.  All of this disturbing action takes up about half the book.  The other half is devoted to long exposition on the political and financial history of Sweden and all the complicatedness that was part of the initial libel suit that placed Blomkvist in the position he was in.  It was weird to read a book that was so boring and so disturbing at the same time, it was one of those books you wanted to get to the end of just so you knew the mystery was solved, but at the same time was tempted to just skip to the end.  The exciting parts were very exciting and the boring parts were very very boring.  It was kind of like taking an upper and downer at the same time.  I think the book suffered in editing, the author died while the books were still in manuscript form and I think it would be interesting to see what he would have kept and what he would have gotten rid of if he had lived to work on the final edits himself. The mystery itself was pretty good, I think I would have liked it more with some better editing.  I think I will try and  watch the Swedish version of the movie so I can compare it to the book and the American movie and see how they portray all the sexual violence and get through the long winded exposition.  Let me know if any of you have read the book, or seen the movie. Let me know if you think I am being to hard on the book, or if you too found it a really long read.
Update:  Swedish movie wasn't half bad, they cut a lot of the exposition about the economy and such, and didn't show to much of the childhood torture of Harriet.  Noomi Rapace who played Lisabeth Salander was not bad, even if she looked a little old for what I had in my head, but all in all I liked it, even forgot that it was in Swedish after a while.