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Come Closer, by Sara Gran |
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Written by Gwenyth Love
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Thursday, 09 October 2008 01:24 |
“What we think is impossible happens all the time.”
Amanda is happily married, likes her job, and enjoys her life. But if everything is so perfect, then why the sudden violent temper, and the obscene thoughts? Why the unsettling urge to harm the people she loves? What are those strange tapping sounds in the walls? And just who is that woman who’s following her?
Certainly there must be a perfectly reasonable explanation for what’s happening to Amanda. There is...
This book hit so close to home, it scared the sanity out of me. Everything about Amanda reflected major aspects of my life onto the page, pulling me in like an invisible lead on a collar. I couldn’t help but fall in love with her. Some people might call her plain, or boring. I, however, found her “normal” nature and “normal” issues to be an intriguing characteristic in this type of novel. Too often characters in this genre are so over the top that they become completely unbelievable, unreal, thereby crushing any credibility the story might have held. Amanda couldn’t be more real if she sat snuggled up beside you on the couch, breathing softly against your neck as you read to yourself. All the characters are realistic. These people could be co-workers, friends or even family; I feel I know them so well.
The story on a whole rarely came off sounding false. I had to keep pouring back over events in my own life to see if perhaps I could be suffering from a similar scenario. Evil is everywhere. It could lurk inside your mailman, your pharmacist, your daycare worker or nanny. No one is immune. Who knows, perhaps there’s a demon inside me right now screaming to be let out, and you wouldn’t even know it until it was too late. Is there one in you? There are no flowers or puppies or choirs of angels in this story, so break out the pitchfork and welcome to Hell!
There was no fluff to this novel. Clocking in at a scant 192 pages, the pacing was perfection. Sara Gran expertly uses the rule that states you should only write to advance character or plot, nothing more.
I was extremely ecstatic to find that the author followed through all the way to the end, tying everything off exactly the way I hope. This woman has balls and isn’t afraid to write the way the story should be told, rather than the way the Powers That Be want it told. Her writing style flowed with ease, making for an effortless read.
The only thing that grated on my nerves, like fingernails on a chalkboard, was Amanda’s husband, Ed. An annoyingly anal-retentive hard-ass, he is overly observant and prone to picking at details, but conveniently becomes blind to the glaring differences that manifest in his wife. I found it very hard to swallow that he could so easily overlook certain actions that should have alerted him to Amanda’s plunge into despair, such as the sudden reintegration of habits that she had given up years ago to better their relationship.
I give this book 4 flaming pitchforks. It was so close to perfection, (minus the hubby slip), that I would encourage everyone to rush out and grab it now--grab it in trade paperback, don’t wait for the mass market edition. Indulge yourself, read it over and over, and descend into darkness.
Come Closer, by Sara Gran
April 2006
Berkley Trade, A Division of Penguin
Trade Paperback
192 pages
$17.00 (Can) ~ $13.00 (US)
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Last Updated ( Thursday, 09 October 2008 01:31 )
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Written by Justine
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Saturday, 27 September 2008 23:16 |
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The Heroin Diaries, Nikki Sixx (with Ian Gittins) Pocket Books, 2007 I have a soft spot for the overblown, energetic lunacy of eighties hair metal, and having been unable to put down The Dirt—Motley Crue’s official biography, told, for better or worse, in their own words—a couple of years ago, I recently bought on impulse The Heroin Diaries, the chaotic, heartbreaking, and terrifying account of bassist Nikki Sixx’s heroin (and other) addictions at the height of the Crue’s fame. (It actually came out in 2007, but let’s face it, if I were the kind of person to keep current, I wouldn’t have been listening to Motley Crue when the rest of my classmates in high school were donning flannel shirts and slicing up their 501s with razor blades in the first place.) Like the band itself, The Heroin Diaries is as much about production as about content: its thick, shiny pages in three colours feature nightmarish cartoons, snippets of lyrics, low-res snapshots of tits and arse… and in the middle of it, Nikki Sixx himself: by turns sympathetic, tragic, infuriating, and always thoroughly compelling. The book centres on the journal that Sixx kept for a year between 1986 and 1987—a year in which he spent several minutes clinically dead after overdosing and being thrown in a dumpster by his nervous dealer. It also features interviews with a ton of the people who were around him at the time: managers, band-mates, musicians, ex-girlfriends and wives all put their two cents in regarding Nikki’s state at the time (as he does himself). It’s a helluva state, as well; in an era of heavy metal excess, Motley Crue went out of their way to be more extreme, more obnoxious, more outrageous, and more vicious that any other act that was or had been, and Sixx was the angriest and most self-destructive of the four. The contradiction between his public life as a rock star whose band was nightly filling stadiums across the world, and his private life, much of which he spent shooting up in his bedroom closet alone, paranoid, and depressed, is frightening in and of itself. This is the kind of book that leaves a grimy residue on your brain. Even if you’re not a metal fan, this is a gripping account of addiction and self-destruction; I couldn’t put the damn thing down. (There’s a good article on The Heroin Diaries by Sixx’s editor, Ian Gittins, here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2007/oct/27/popandrock)
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Last Updated ( Sunday, 05 October 2008 20:14 )
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Written by Jessa
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Wednesday, 24 September 2008 04:41 |
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A Hybrid Mag With Zero-Omissions
Fall/Winter Issue #23
Carousel Magazine covers all the bases; somehow, Mark Laliberte and the group of volunteers behind Carousel cohesively weave (actually) funny comics, intense art, sharp poetry, prose and inventive journalism into one streamlined (and masterfully printed) volume.
Last week, some anonymous book elf kindly placed this piece of 'zine queen eye candy on top of a pile of to-be mailed invoices and to-be filled magazine orders that threatened to bury my desk. My day was instantly brightened by a whack of ultra-graphics. Highly and instantly addictive. I wanted to plaster my walls with the pictures and burn the poems to the inside of my eyelids; I didn't get past the editorial without jumping online and hooking up to a subscription.
Carousel Magazine publishes twice a year - Fall/Winter, Spring/Summer - and much to my delight, this issue was seeping through with creepy skeletons and zombie mayhem; featuring an article on the ever-growing Zombie Walk by Claire Horsnell (also a regular contributor to Rue Morgue Magazine), the undead theme creeps right through the issue, setting the mood for Halloween. http://www.carouselmagazine.ca/
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Last Updated ( Wednesday, 24 September 2008 04:42 )
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