18. The Auctioneer by Joan Samson

excellent cover design

This is a resurrected horror classic that was making the rounds on booknerd social media a few years ago. It was featured in Paperbacks from Hell and then Valancourt released a new version as part of their Paperbacks from Hell series.  I am proud to say that I found an original paperback in quite good condition.  Horror and rural horror especially are not really my jam, but the premise sounded intriguing and it is considered a classic, so I added it to my list.  

This is one of those books that I can say is a legitimately good book but at the same time I really did not enjoy it.  I've read a few other reviews and my concerns are shared, so it's not just that I don't love horror.  It's a frustrating, helpless read that is still kind of realistic so you keep turning the pages to find out what happens (and what is happening).  It takes place in rural New Hampshire in the early 70s (Vietnam war and hippies are mentioned).  The story centers around a small, poor family living on a subsistence farm:  John the dad, Mim the younger and once beautiful wife, their sweet child Hildie and John's mom, Ma.  The land has been in John's family for multiple generations.

One day, the sheriff shows up, talking about this new guy in town who bought a nice house and is organizing an auction with the funds to pay for a bigger police budget.  He's looking for donations of old stuff to sell, so they give him some broken down furniture.  He comes back next week asking for more.  Gradually, but pretty blatantly, it evolves into a gentle extortion, where they "give" more and more of their possessions for the auction.  There is no blatant coercion at first, but the family feels compelled to keep giving and at some point, they do start hearing about accidents in town to people who refused.  But the pressure is much more psychological.  The auctioneer, Perly Dunsmore, is always smiling and positive and talks about small-town values while he slowly takes everything from the families of the town, selling them off to urban sophisticates looking for antiques and more.

It's very disturbing as you read it.  You really feel for the family who are truly trapped, though there is an argument that the John character is also a critique of loud, empty masculinity. He refuses to resist for fear that something will happen to the women around him.  It just goes on and on and keeps getting worse and worse, which makes for a not pleasant read, at least for me.  It is well interested and themes are compelling and painfully relevant.  This process of the American people blindly giving up their power to a manipulative shuckster is exactly what we are living through right now.  It's tough to read it in allegory at the same time.

 

17. South by Java Head by Alistair Maclean

Word on  the streets is that you want to read Alistair Maclean books from the first half of his career, not the second, though I am not quite sure what the dividing year is.  I should not have picked this book up but I couldn't resist an older Fontana with that gorgeous yellow.  I justified by noting it took place in Singapore after the Japanese had just invaded (an inherently interesting setting ripe for adventure) and was written in 1958.

It only begins in Singapore.  At first, there are a lot of threads, which give a good and harrowing picture of Singapore, emptied out and awaiting the arrival of the victorious Japanese in 1941.  It's a bit confusing at first, including a bit with an elite spy who reveals he has the stolen plans of the Japanese invasion of Australia and they must get to London, which seems to be the main story.  There are also a group of lost nurses, an abandoned English toddler and the British crew of a tanker full of oil who need to try and get out.  The groups eventually, through a pretty damned exciting rescue at sea, end up together on the tanker.  That is the main part of the story, this group trying to get away from the Japanese and into friendlier waters.  

The first two-thirds of the book is a lot of fun.  A ton of crazy action happens.  Maclean does sea stuff so well.  The Japanese are comically portrayed.  All their leaders speak excellent, flowery Bond-badguy English and are ruthlessly cruel but not super bright.  Even the German spy reveals himself to be morally repulsed by the Japanese penchance for evil.  The ending is also action-packed but starts to tip over into unrealistic, where the threats are so extreme (to the love interest and the little boy) that you know Maclean won't actually carry them out because the hero will have to win.  So a bit goofy at the end, but the ride there was quite entertaining.

16. A Gift upon the Shore by M.K. Wren

This is what I would call C-PA, Chick Post-Apocalyptic.  It's a refreshing approach after the last two PA books I read, tainted with loser nerd fake manliness.  I'd been looking for it for a while (its recommendation lost to the mists of time) and found it in excellent possibly unread condition, but with too many price tags, at Dark Carnival.  The apocalypse is a general end of times collapse (economic and social collapse, pandemic followed by nuclear exchange).  It takes place mostly on the Oregon coast where two women manage to survive.  It has an excellent and detailed look at that survival but the real conflict is between rationality and religious fundamentalism.

The book initially takes place about 40 years after the nuclear war.  A very small "family" of people live on a small farm on the Oregon coast, trying to maintain and reproduce.  Mary Hope is the matriarch and we don't know much about her at first except that she is the last one who lived through the actual collapse.  Her one goal is to educate the children, but this is starting to be threatened by this nasty Christian extremist bitch Miriam, who is trying to oppose stricter and stricter religion on the rest of them, including stopping them from learning the blasphemy of an actual education.  Mary is trying to teach the oldest boy, Stephen, and the one she deems to have the most potential to be a future teacher himself, while Miriam is trying more and more aggressively to stop it.

This outer plot is a framing device to tell us Mary's story (as she tells Stephen), how she first came to the farm and met her own mentor, Rachel.  This part of the story is really well done.  It begins with her on a bus from Portland to the Oregon coast where she has decided to take over the house left to her by her aunt.  Shit goes south right away as a gang of Rovers attack their bus.  The perspective is from Mary and her emphasis on the human relations (thus, C-PA) so we don't get any kind of overview of everything that goes down, but the parts we learn are dark and realistic. Eventually, after barely surving a nuclear winter (which was only one year; seemed short) we end up with just Rachel and Mary, doing their best to survive. More importantly, Rachel wants to keep a legacy of human intellect.  She has a collection of books that they work on encasing in wax, wrapping in tinfoil and then putting into a vault.  Their lives are changed when a starving young man shows up on their beach.  He is a basically decent guy but came from an inland religious commune of extreme Christians who took set up before things went really bad.  He's been sent to find other people, especially women who could reproduce.  

He is in their world so they are able to confront his dogmatic mind in a relatively gentle way.  The real trouble is to come when Mary goes back with him to his community. The leader is a doctor who is basically a cult leader.  He is not inherently abusive, as long as everybody toes his extreme line, which includes things like not leaving the compound nor questioning the bible (the only book they are allowed to read).

I very much recognize the themes set up in this book. I grew up on the west coast in the '80s when these extremists were a thing.  The Satanic Panic originated in Victoria, B.C. and we had an attempt to shut down an after school D&D program that turned into a local controversy.  Evil Christians are often the antagonists in Stephen King books.  They are just the worst.  Sadly, they are in an ascendancy of power currently in the United States and threatening here in Canada.  This book was triggering for me, I kind of wanted to blame the book but other than a couple points where Mary tries to argue logically with the Doctor (which felt like a bit of unnecessary didacticism by the author; we know now logic does not work with these assholes), it's just because it's a disturbingly realistic portrayal of how ignorance can continue to take root even when society is starting over again.

The end of the book surprised me as it climaxed with a pretty tense and exciting suspense/action roll-out that I hadn't expected and wrapped up quite nicely.  I wouldn't go so far as to call A Gift upon the Shore a PA classic, but it is definitely an important work in the canon of the sub-genre.  I'm glad I read it.

15. The Body on the Bench by Dorothy B. Hughes

Also known as The Davidian Report, this original paperback has held up quite well.  The book opens well, with a vague protagonist, Steve Wintress, whose flight to LA is delayed by fog.  He is clearly suspicious and careful, you can't tell if he is paranoid or if this is just the Cold War early '50s.  He is on a mission to meet a man who will give him info about another man, Davidian, who has a report.  The delay and subsequent introduction to a too friendly Federal man (named Haig Armour), a shy young girl and a keen soldier named Reuben (a rube, get it).  When he does finally get to the airport,  he finds his friend and the man who was supposed to meet him, dead outside at a picnic bench.  Now he has to find the missing man with the report himself.

I was mildly annoyed reading this book.  It takes place in the universe of I was a Communist for the FBI, a universe I can never be sure really ever existed or was mostly made up by McCarthy and keen fiction writers.  The Commies are everywhere, but especially running used bookstores and sidewalk popcorn machines.  And once you join them, the party is ruthless and there is no escape.  It's a nice set up for a hard-boiled protagonist, as there is no escape, but I'm not entirely convinced.  The other annoying thing is that Hughes doesn't let the reader know what the protagonist is doing and who he actually is until well into the story.  I guess we are just to assume that the Commies want something and the FBI wants to stop them and that is sufficient for the 1952 reader.

The locations and the writing is quite strong.  The characters are also substantive so it's a mostly enjoyable read. I just couldn't get deeply connected to the actual quest, and less so to the human connections around it.  Steve is slowly revealed to be the grizzled hero that one could like, but it's too little too late.  This is later in Hughes' career and she is much more in command of her material than her earlier works, but it still feels like she is searching for something that she can't quite find.

14. Get Carter by Ted Lewis

Another classic find that I've been reluctant to read is now behind me.  I had been saving this one first because it took me so long to hunt down and because it is in quite delicate shape.  My new rule of simply reading my on-deck shelf from right to left has helped break through the hesitation of indecision and it has been rewarding.

I'm not sure how well this book was received when it came out, but I see why they wanted to make a movie of it.  It's hard, probably impossible, to read this book without thinking of the movie.  Certainly, Jack Carter in the book is 100% Michael Caine in my mind.  I think this is both a testament to the character himself, who almost seems to have been written with Caine in mind and to Caine's performance, which while very Caine-esque still captures the nuance of the Carter character:  both a step above his adversaries because he is just such a ruthless badass but also having the advantage of being hometown boy and London-trained.  So unlike some other books, having the character's image in mind already because of the movie was not a bad thing.  The movie, though, did trigger some distracting comparisons when it came to the plot.  

The first half is pretty much the same, with Jack coming back to his hometown of Newcastle (though I don't think the town is ever actually named) to find out why his brother, normally a very careful and temperate man, would have gotten blindingly and obviously drunk and driven off a cliff.  It's a great set-up, because Carter, while not in a management position is clearly extremely good at his gangster job and important to his London bosses, who he suspects may be involved as they discourage his trip home.  He is a professional and plays it very carefully arriving in town, while also knowing the town very well.  There are many classic crime themes at play here:  the criminal returning to his roots and seeing how pathetic it all was, the slick urban mob versus the regional gangsters and of course the lone wolf badass who is a total bastard but you can't help rooting for him.  It all takes place in a rich portrayal of the commingling of English class dynamics and the grittiness of 70s British Crime.  Oh man, the depiction of the pornography is just so pathetic and deeply disturbing.

I really loved the first 3/4 of the book, but found it ended somewhat anti-climactically.  It felt a bit forced (not unlike Parker's originally intended ending in The Hunter, before Westlake's editor made one of the greatest edits of all time) and not in line with the tone of the rest of the book.  I actually think the movie ending makes more sense.  Still a fantastic book.

 

13. Jalna by Mazo de la Roche

Due to my lack of planning, I was not prepared for Black History Month, so it has been a fail for me on the reading front.  I've made note of a few books by Black authors I will read in the future, but right now I am staying committed to reducing the on-deck shelf.  Instead, February has somehow become Canadian Literature Month, as I end the month with my third Canadian classic or near-classic.  It was my mother who first told me about Jalna. She just sort of mentioned it out of the blue several years ago as a series of books that everyone was reading.  I've been looking for them for several years and finally found this first one in Vancouver.  

This is what you call a novel.  It's about an eccentric family in the Niagara Valley in 1926 and their various domestic dramas.  The oldest, Grandmother, settled here with her Colonel husband from India via London.  The name Jalna is the name of the fort where they met and married.  She is now left with two brothers, 5 grandsons and a granddaughter, each one a unique character.  They all live together in this aged, stuffed manor and running the farmlands around them.  They are a kind of local, Canadian gentry.

It's a thick book, like the decor in their house, but it moves fast.  Each character is so richly portrayed and interesting in their own right that you want to learn about each of them.  It's written in a florid, descriptive style that is still somehow quite breezy. There are many storylines that all intertwine but probably the major catalyst is the poet son coming back from New York with a young, educated bride.  Her background is much more protestant and calm, and she is both overwhelmed and fascinated by this loud, aggressive family who fight and kiss in equal measure.

My mother did not exaggerate.  Jalna was a huge success and lead to 15 other books, selling over 11 million copies in multiple languages.  It's odd that it isn't better known. It is subtly proudly Canadian.

 

12. Morgan's Castle by Jan Hilliard

Well looks like I've hit the big time.  Those who follow me closely will have spotted Brian Busby's generous offer to send me the latest Ricochet Books release in the comments section of my review of The Three Roads.  Busby has his own excellent blog and is also the editor at Ricochet Books is an imprint of local publisher Véhicule Press and they do great work, finding and re-releasing in lovely paperback (proper paperback size too, none of this trade paperbacks nonsense) a range of Canadian genre novels, mostly excellent crime and pulp fiction from the mid-20th century.  Go check out their catalogue, it's amazing.  Well he very kindly followed up on his offer and sent me an efficient little package containing this lovely paperback reprint of a lost Canadian semi-classic.  It was surprisingly thinner than I had expected and I jumped right in.

I find it difficult to characterize this novel.  As a rule, I don't read introductions or afterwords (and even try to avoid blurbs) of a book until I have finished the book itself.  The idea is to avoid assumptions and just approach it as directly as possible.  I realize that even with those rules, I had several unexamined assumptions in my head and they were wrestling with the text itself in my brain as I read it.  This is particularly the case with the "gothic" novel.  The famous cover conceit of women with great hair fleeing a castle/manor/cabin with one light on has overshadowed the actual genre itself, one that was already problematic to define.  Morgan's Castle is certainly gothic adjacent in its setup, but the tone and unfolding of events are very different, almost like a dark comic social satire of gentile Canadians behaving badly.

The story takes place in rural Ontario in the early 60s and involves a teenage girl, Laura Dean and her widower, artist father. They live in survivable genteel poverty with better off family members not too far away.  Her aunt Amy as well as her adult brothers are all concerned about her future in about the most selfish way possible:  they want to ensure that she is quickly married off so none of them have to deal with the responsibility of supporting her.  They seem awful right from the get-go.  At first I thought it would be a kind of father and daughter against the world set-up, but her father is portrayed just as negatively.  He is a completely self-obsessed, indulgent and shameless dilettante who only seems to care about his daughter's future in how it will impact him (negatively if she leaves him alone but positively if she can marry into money from which he could benefit).  I'm seething against all these people just a few chapters in!  Laura herself is somewhat of a cypher, a sweet and pleasant girl but still very young and inexperienced.  Though the book is mostly from her perspective, the reader never really gets any sense of her character.

Her aunt Amy is very close friends with Charlotte Morgan, who is the matriarch by marriage of Hilltop House, a mansion overlooking the winery that brought her dead husband their wealth.  Charlotte's lone son Robert's wife was recently made a widower himself (by either an accidental or suicidal ingestion of arsenic sprinkled on berries) and she has designs on making Laura his new bride.  So she invites Laura to spend the summer with her at Hilltop House (or Morgan's Castle as the townsfolk call it).  We get this great set-up where the dad also comes, though very much unwelcome, and refuses to leave ostensibly to watch over his daughter but really because he gets luxurious room and board.

This is where my expectations became confounded.  There is no suspense in Morgan's Castle.  Right away, you hate Charlotte and Amy for their conspiring to manipulate this maiden's future.  Laura is sort of isolated the way you might expect in a gothic thriller but she really isn't as there are so many people around all the time.  It also becomes pretty obvious that the various deaths around Hilltop House could only be the responsibility of one person and the omniscient text all but confirms this.  There is some tension with timing at the end but ultimately this more like a social drama with a psychopath in the middle of it all.

Busby's introduction, which is mostly about the author's life and work than a dissection of the book itself, describes at is having the richest vein of black humour of all her books.  I think perhaps I should have read the introduction first (there are no spoilers, which I appreciate, as this is so often not the case), as I might have picked up on that. I wonder if this book is inspired by a savage critique of uncaring families, perhaps of one that Hilliard (actually Hilda Kay Grant) herself had experienced?  Every single character, except the young and a few side characters (whose best trait may be cluelessness or deliberate obtuseness to avoid social discomfort) are utterly self-serving.  The meagre reputation of small-town Ontario is the ultimate priority.  This rings true to my own upbringing in small town Vancouver Island.

I'm not sure I loved this book.  It was enjoyable and very well-written.  The pastoral Niagara Valley is richly portrayed and the people feel very real (and really awful).  As I said, I was a bit muddled with expectations as I was reading it but I think ultimately the heroine is too vacuous a character for me to have cared for her and the denouement does nothing to fill this out.  There was no satisfying punishment for the bad done, which is not a critique of the book (perhaps some might find this a superior conclusion), but also not to my simple tastes.  You should buy this book to judge for yourself at is nonetheless an important work in Canadian literature.