Tansy Undercrypt

The headmistress at Gothic Charm School gave a surprisingly good review for the film, so I went after swearing off the trailer. DS purist that I am, I came away liking about 1/3 of it; Depp plays it odd but straight, Michelle Pfeiffer makes a fine matriarch, Gulliver McGrath offers a terrific David – and there are some clever plot details (e.g., whatever happened to: Victoria Winters, Maggie Evans, and Laura Collins). I’m grateful they made Barnabas an actual vampire and blood is shed. As for the rest of it, it either tries too hard or not hard enough. The other characterizations vary from weak to pointless; Eva Green (Angelique) struggled with her applied American accent so much that I felt sorry for her (cripes, either hire an American actress for the role or let the chick be French) and Helena Bonham Carter as Dr. Julia Hoffman is just … embarrassing. Still, the whole package is intriguing enough to make a nice rental; I give Tim Burton’s “Dark Shadows” a reaper rating of 2 (Suspicious Circumstances). It wants to entertain and sort of does.

A recipe for Cold Blood:

• 1.5 parts ginger ale
• 1 part ruby port
• 1/4 part orange juice
• serve over ice garnished with cherries or apples

She loved parties – the drinking and dancing and attempted murder! Someone would invariably serve her a glass of punch laced with some horrible thing, but she’d been ingesting poison in trace amounts since she was a child; she tolerated everything. She’d drain her glass, bite the callus on her tongue to make her mouth bleed, then have arrested all who looked her way eagerly with delight. Lucrezia Borgia would wipe her mouth, giggle, and order them decapitated.  “Amateurs!” she would yell out to the crowd, laughing.

When Poe’s regrets were delivered, Mrs. Hurlington huffed about and made no mystery of her displeasure.  “What is so tremendously arduous about paying a call on your greatest patron?” she railed to no one in particular. “Well, I promise you that he’ll not see another invitation or penny from this moment on!” Her exotic birds, flustered by her tone, flapped about their cages. Only the raven, set in the shadows by the heavy velvet curtain, was calm. It tipped a red eye towards her and whispered “Nevermore.”

Marilyn stepped forward bravely when the police arrived. She looked at the shocked, sad faces of her family and burst into tears. They had never seemed to mind the stares and whispers of others; didn’t even notice how cruel people could be. The neighborhood children were by far the worst, with their nasty rhymes and mean chalk drawings; she had grown to hate them. “it was me, not Eddie,” she sobbed to Aunt Lily, “I fed those little bastards to Spot under the stairs.”

Nicole Girtman of the Geek Girls Book Club told me today that Stephen King is writing a sequel to “The Shining”.  Apparently, this new book features Danny as a very messed up (and I think we understand why) psychic of 35.  Holy buckets.  I don’t know whether to sit very still or run in circles.

Billy went blind in one eye at age 3 (BB gun pellet); it went all milky. That’s when the real sight found him (his grandmother said). At 8, a drifter came begging for a meal and almost got in. Billy’s mother rose to answer the knock. “He’s holding the wood axe from the shed behind his back,” her son whispered, meeting her gaze with his left eye now clear as the other. “He’s real evil crazy, Ma.” The eye began to frost again and Kaylene turned away from the sound with a shudder.

The next time she appeared, the parlor had been returned to the splendor of some 184 years before. His research had been meticulous, his taste exquisite. “For you, dear Beatrice,” he whispered. “Please consider staying on here … with me. I take such delight in your company.” He bowed his head for a moment before continuing. “I shall not pressure you, of course; I know that I am not a handsome man.” She went to him then, taking his rough hand tenderly in her ghostly one.

“The house was trying to kill her. She was absolutely right about that.” Clark was stunned. “You’re joking?” “No, not in the least; it’s alive and, it would seem, entirely vengeful. The vines in the carpet tried to trip her down the stairs, the shower curtain to hold her down and drown her, the pillows to suffocate her, etc. Ultimately, what it needed to succeed was someone to help direct it, think ahead, plan the steps, guide it.” “Who on earth?” Clark asked, incredulous. “The one person who would know it best – the butler did it.”

Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves is the hottest property in horror right now, so I queued up my request at the library and waited with glee. The story at its heart involves a house that is bigger on the inside than the outside, and it is truly terrifying. Danielewski has Lovecraft’s gift for describing the oppressing gloom and icy terror of vast spaces; this is brilliantly done. But this is also a tale within a tale within a tale, dropped into a dizzying construct (e.g., pages printed backwards, upside down, with only one line on the page, and reams upon reams of footnotes that form a kind of side plot). I understand that the art direction of the book itself mirrors the labyrinth described in the core story, but I found it cumbersome and too distracting. I found myself skipping huge chunks just to keep my reading continuous on one storyline, revealing that I’m kind of a purist when it comes to delivery of the goods.  Now I know.

From me, “House of Leaves” gets a Reaper Rating of 3: Timely Departure.  An incredible literary debut and an amazing premise that really delivers in a construct that’s difficult and distracting.