The Reapers are the Angels

The Reapers are the Angels
by Alden Bell


Publisher's Blurb:

Zombies have infested a fallen America. A young girl named Temple is on the run. Haunted by her past and pursued by a killer, Temple is surrounded by death and danger, hoping to be set free.

For twenty-five years, civilization has survived in meager enclaves, guarded against a plague of the dead. Temple wanders this blighted landscape, keeping to herself and keeping her demons inside her heart. She can't remember a time before the zombies, but she does remember an old man who took her in and the younger brother she cared for until the tragedy that set her on a personal journey toward redemption. Moving back and forth between the insulated remnants of society and the brutal frontier beyond, Temple must decide where ultimately to make a home and find the salvation she seeks.

My Reaction:
I had a mixed reaction to this book.  It was very well written-- much more elegantly (if not realistically) presented than your average zombie novel.  I admired the strength of our young heroine, Temple, and was always interested in what would happen next.  And yet... Something was missing.  Emotion... I didn't have an emotional response.  For whatever reason, it left me, if not quite cold, at least a little cool.  As a result, I have to give a half-hearted review.

Caveats aside, I would recommend the book to fans of zombie/post-apocalyptic fiction who are looking for something less pulpy, more literary.  Though in some ways it seems like YA literature, some of the rough language and themes (not to mention the violence) make it inappropriate for younger readers.  Best for only the oldest teens and up, imho. 


Tidbits (with SPOILERS):
--  I liked Temple best in the very first section of the book and somewhat less as the story went on.  (Not a good sign...)

--  Temple drags out some odd words for a girl who apparently has had so little formal education.  (She's street smart, but illiterate.)

--  It's always interesting to see how characters in a zombie novel label the zombies.  (Seems like they very rarely call them "zombies".)  In this book, we have "slugs", "meatskins", "creepers", and "gobblers".

--  Temple was born into the zombie-infested world.  She doesn't know anything else, and so she's more at home in the new landscape than are adults who remember how things used to be.  She's exasperated with people who sigh over the past and creep through the present with fear and loathing-- or act like they expect the world to somehow change back, if only they wait long enough.  She, instead, is the ultimate pragmatist.  The world is what it is; she's alive now, and she accepts her reality with no qualms.  That's a fascinating perspective, and one I don't think I've seen addressed in other zombie books. 

--  Not a huge fan of the present tense in fiction.  Eventually, I got used to it, but I still don't love it.  Similarly, not impressed by the lack of quotation marks. I mean, why?  It just makes the book more difficult to read.  (Of course, I think e.e. cummings was pretty ridiculous for eschewing capital letters.  My tolerance for nonsense is low.)

--  The Biblical references... Not sure I have much to say about them.  Ta-da.  They were there. 

--  "In her own experience, she's learned that happiness and sadness find their own level no matter what's biting you, mosquitoes or meatskins."

--  I was amazed to read reviews that faulted Temple for killing Abraham Todd.  She could've called for help, yes, but she's a teen-aged girl, he's a grown man, she's in an unfamiliar place, and help might not have come in time, if at all.  Also, she didn't try to kill him.  He suffocated while she was fighting him-- after he first tried to force himself on her, then tried to slice her open when she punched him in the groin.  It's not like she planned to kill him, but you know what?  I wouldn't feel particularly upset with her if she had killed him on purpose.  Think of all the other poor girls or women he might have abused in the future.  This is the post-apocalyptic world, guys.  There's not a judge sitting in the courthouse waiting to sentence him to time in jail.  You try to rape or kill someone, you get what's coming to you.

--  All that said... "She shakes her head.  I liked this place too."  ...Scary girl.

--  When Temple and Maury stop at the gate of Belle Isle, the manservant/butler comes out to speak to them... Temple rather presumptuously invites herself inside: "...How about lettin us come in and get some rest?  We're just travelin through, and it looks like you got some hospitality to spare."  The servant politely replies that this is a private residence.  Temple's having none of that: "Private residence?  Where you from anyway?  ... There ain't no private residences anymore, mister.  There's just places where slugs are and places where they ain't."  ...This does nothing to endear Temple to me.  Look, honey, it may be the zombie-apocalypse and all, but maybe you ought to take a lesson in manners and diplomacy.  ...And no such thing as a private residence?  There's no way you'd be getting in my house after that.  Heels, dug in.  Umbrage, taken. 

--  There are plenty of gaps in our understanding of this version of the world.  For example, who's keeping the electricity going (in places)? 

--  Am I bothered by Temple's habit of calling Maury "dummy", before she knows his name?  Well, I don't love it, but I don't think it's intended to be mean-spirited.

--  As soon as we read that "their poor father isn't well at the moment", there might as well be a big sign in flashing lights, reading "He's a zombie"...

--  There was a momentarily confusing typo-- "Mrs. Grierson and her son look at her", when surely it should be "grandson" (because, yep, her son is zombie-ing around in the basement).  All said, though, there were very few typos or errors of that kind.

--  Somehow Temple knows that she "can't have babies", but we never learn how she knows that, or what happened to prevent it.

--  Ok.  The whole Moses Todd storyline.  ...I guess we're not supposed to overthink it, because it's simply crucial that these characters should behave as they do, for the story to flow to its eventual conclusion.  But.  I'm not good at letting these things go.

Moses chases Temple down and tells her that he intends to kill her in revenge for the death of his brother (the wicked Abraham).  Temple of course explains that Abraham had been threatening her, but Moses has already guessed as much-- and it doesn't change his perspective:  "That boy was my flesh and blood, idiot or no.  Yeah, he wasn't a good man.  But that don't make no difference.  And you know it."  *eyeroll* ...I guess there are (still) people like that, but... I just find them hard to believe.  You know your brother was a good-for-nothing abuser and you still blame this girl for killing him in self-defense?  To the point that you'd kill her for revenge?  I don't get that level of blind family loyalty.  I love my family, but if I knew that a sibling had died as a result of trying to hurt someone else, unprovoked, I couldn't blame the other person for fighting back. 

...I think the problem is that Moses seems reasonable in so many ways.  He's not an evil person.  He intends to take Millie back to her people (um, before he kills her in a fit of vengeful rage), and he takes over the care of Maury for Temple's sake.  And yet in this one area of his life, he's just insane.  He knows his brother was asking for something bad to happen to him-- he grows fond of Temple, admires her-- but he can't just let it go and move on with his life...   It is frustrating.

Similarly, I'm frustrated by Temple's unwillingness to... "do away with" Moses, once it becomes clear that he's obsessed with killing her.  Maybe it's noble of her to refuse to kill him when he's bound to a chair, but... the man is promising to come after her and finish her off!  "You ain't done nothing to me," she says, to which he replies, "Not yet.  But I give you another guarantee-- my word as a man under the gray heaven of death.  The next time I see you, I sure am gonna kill you."

Of course, it turns out that because she refuses to kill Moses at that moment, he's alive later to save her from another enemy.  (Because that's how these things usually turn out.)  And then when she and Maury are escaping from this new mutual enemy, she leaves Moses behind in his prison cell-- but not before slipping him a weapon so he'll have a fighting chance.  And again, all this as he's still promising to kill her as soon as he can.  (Argh!)

In the end, though Moses doesn't strike the fatal blow, he might as well have.  Millie kills Temple, and Millie wouldn't have been there if Moses hadn't brought her along.  And Temple wouldn't have run out into Millie's line of fire if she hadn't been fleeing Moses, trying to draw him away from Maury.

It feels like we're supposed to respect Temple's integrity, but instead, I find the whole situation difficult to believe.  I guess I'm a worse person than Temple, because I think I'd have killed Moses, if he insisted that he would (eventually) kill me if I didn't kill him first.

--  The mutant hillbilly section of the book was... odd.  It doesn't make much sense.  Seems like it was put in just to add another layer of horror and to give Moses a chance to (temporarily) save Temple-- and for Temple to go into "psycho kill mode", followed by giving Moses another chance to escape and come after her.  (~grumble~)  Anyway, it was weird.  When I say that it felt too far-fetched and science-fictional to fit smoothly into a zombie novel, I hope I make my point.

--  Temple and Maury share a boxcar with some refugees who are "huddled and helpless", looking at her "through eyes that seem to predict death".  "Temple hates them instinctively."  She may be right, but it doesn't make her very sympathetic to the reader. 


...And I guess that's about it.  I wanted a happy ending for Temple, just on principle, but in the end, I still didn't get that painful lump in my throat that I never fail to get for Old Dan and Little Ann (Where the Red Fern Grows).  Temple holds everyone out at arm's length, and it's hard to be emotionally invested in a character like that. 

Drowned Hopes

Drowned Hopes 
by Donald E. Westlake


Publisher's Blurb:

An old cellmate asks Dortmunder for help robbing a reservoir.

In his day, Tom was a hard man. He came up with Dillinger in the 1930s, and pulled a lot of high-profile jobs before the state put him away. They meant it to be for good, but after twenty-three years the prisons are too crowded for seventy-year-old bank robbers, and so they let the old man go. Finally free, he heads straight for John Dortmunder’s house.

Long ago, Tom buried $700,000, and now he needs help digging it up. While he was inside, the government dammed a nearby river, creating a reservoir and putting fifty feet of water on top of his money. He wants to blow the dam, drown the villagers, and move to Acapulco. If Dortmunder wants a clean conscience to go along with his share, he needs to find a nice way to get the money before Tom’s nasty instincts get the best of both of them.

My Reaction:
(This was a "shared read" with Donald-- my first time reading a Westlake novel.  Donald had listened to a couple audiobook versions of other "Dortmunder" novels, so we chose this based on those experiences.  As always, a shared read means no nit-picking witty, insightful, and detailed reactions.)

We laughed a lot during the reading.  That's a good sign in a comedic "crime caper" novel.  I could easily imagine this book being turned into a film.  (And that's a compliment, in this case.)

I think we both agree that the book was a little on the long side (400+ pages) for reading together, which always slows down a reading even further.  There were parts that probably could've been edited out.  Personally, I felt my interest wander whenever we got paragraphs of descriptions of the particulars of "how stuff works"-- or how the zany gang was physically arranging things.  Yeah, I don't really care about that sort of thing, and I don't have much success in visualizing it, honestly.  I'd much rather read dialogue than descriptions of objects being maneuvered.  Fortunately, those boring bits were fairly few and far between.

The characters (according to Donald) are mostly the same recurring cast from the rest of the Dortmunder series, but apart from one or two references to previous books, I didn't feel like I was stepping into the middle of a story without knowing the background.

Drowned Hopes was first published in 1990.  Now, I remember 1990-- or parts of it-- quite well, so it pains me to realize that a novel published that year should seem slightly dated at times.  Not in any way that is detrimental to the enjoyment of reading it, but yes, dated.  (It's like when I watch a re-run of Seinfeld, laugh at some outdated piece of technology or hairstyle-- or Jerry's "mom jeans".  I think, "But it hasn't been that long since this show was on..."  And then I do the math and realize that, yes, it has been 25 years since the first episode aired, and gosh, I'm not getting any younger, either.  Yikes.)

So, final word:  The story was amusing-- very funny in parts-- and certainly good enough that I'd read more by the author.  (But maybe further down the road, because it felt like this one took quite a while to finish, and I'm ready for something different.)

"Niemandswasser"

"Niemandswasser"
from Cold Hand in Mine
by Robert Aickman


Synopsis:
A strange tale of a German (I guess?  or is he Austrian?) nobleman and the ominous patch of "No Man's Water" in the lake near his home.


My Reaction (with SPOILERS):
I don't know what to make of this story.  It's amorphous, with a plot that drifts along like the shifting thread of a dream.  At various points, I thought maybe it was about to start making sense, but no.  It never truly did.  I have to say, I'm not particularly impressed.  Maybe I'm missing something that would elevate it to greatness, but if it's that subtle, it may not be for me.  Call me lazy, but I don't want to work that hard for my "pleasure reading". 

That said, there were some interesting passages and frightening nightmare-moments.  The sensation of the depth and darkness of the water... The sudden loss of the oars... That horrific image of the woman...

I'm taking a break from this short story collection.  Maybe if I come back to it later, I'll enjoy it more.


Tidbits (with SPOILERS):
-- I am entirely befuddled by Elmo's relationship with Viktor.  "...In Viktor for the first time he had found a friend who actually enhanced (instead of slightly spoiling and diminishing) the experience of boating on the lake, more often than not at night.  Viktor, who was olive-skinned and black-haired, sometimes dressed as a girl for this purpose, and it was as if Elmo had mysteriously, albeit but momentarily, acquired the sister he had so much lacked."  ...Um, what?  I'll admit that I'm conventional in this respect (in that I like men to look like men), but why was Viktor dressing as a girl?

--  "...The hand that the relaxed Victor was gently trailing through the water was, with all quiet around, suddenly bitten half away." ... "One of the doctors with whom Elmo spoke expressed the medical view that the entity which had inflicted the terrible injury had also infected the entire physiology of the victim with some bacillus, perhaps unknown, which had in a measure unbalanced his judgement."

--  "...the imminence of spring, the worst quarter of the year for the sensitive, the period of most suicides, the season of greatest sadness..."  Is that true?  It sounds vaguely familiar... Ok, I looked it up, and it is supported by research-- but of course no-one's sure what's behind the phenomenon.  I enjoy spring itself, but not as much as autumn, because I know it will soon be summer (my least favorite season)-- but I was under the impression that most people enjoy and look forward to summer nearly as much-- if not more-- than spring. Of course, if you're suicidal, you're not experiencing things the way "most people" are, anyway...

--  "'We are most of us two people, your Highness. ... And the two people within us seldom communicate.  Even when both are present together in consciousness, there is little communication.  Neither can confront the other without discomfort.  ... Life, as we know it, could hardly continue if men did not soon slay the dreamer inside them.  There are the children to think of; the mothers who breed them and thus enable our race to endure; the economy; the ordered life of society. ... If any man examines his inner truth with both eyes wide open, and his inner eye wide open also, he will be overcome with terror at what he finds.'"  ...and... "'Women have no inner life that is decisively apart.  With women the inner life merges ever with the totality.  That is why women seem to men either deceitful and elusive, or moralistic and uninteresting.  Women have no problem comparable with the problem of merely being a man.'"  *snort*  Yeah.  Whatever. 

-- So, out there on the lake, in No Man's Water, men are supposed to "encounter the image within them", right?  So... Elmo's image within himself is a lady with "large eyes and a large mouth", which is "open, showing white and pointed teeth, as many teeth as a strange fish"-- not smiling.  ...What in the heck am I supposed to make of that?  Was it Elmo's "inner image" that bit off part of Viktor's hand?  Why did he see the inner image that night/morning when he was about to kill himself?  What does it have to do with Elvira?

--  "The few remains were far beyond identification.  The body had been gnashed and gnawed and ripped, so that even the bones were mostly sliced away and splintered.  And, of course, there was no proper head.  All had in truth to be guesswork. 'There's nothing in that coffin,' men mouthed to each other when, in a few days' time, the hour came for the noble ceremony."  ...So did Elmo's "inner image" somehow gnaw his body, splinter his bones, and eat/destroy his head?

Meh, I give up.  It doesn't make sense to me-- not even the bizarre sort of "sense" that strange/horror stories generally do. 

"The Real Road to the Church"

"The Real Road to the Church"
from Cold Hand in Mine
by Robert Aickman


Synopsis:
A tired, withdrawn, aging-but-not-old woman learns that her residence is located in a spiritually significant place.  Though she scoffs at first-- after all, she's been living there a year and has yet to see or hear anything strange-- she soon begins to wonder if the tale is more than mere mystical gossip.


My Reaction (with SPOILERS):
I don't know what to say about this story...

I gather that all of these stories will be lacking in easy, straightforward explanation; there is even a quote at the beginning of the book to that effect.  (“In the end it is the mystery that lasts and not the explanation."--Sacheverell Sitwell)   I think I may be hard (impossible?) to please, as far as "explanations" go.   If there's none at all-- and if I feel unsure what conclusion to draw-- I often feel cheated.  On the other hand, if the explanation is too detailed and precise, I label that a flaw.  It's rare that an author walks the line to my pure satisfaction, though I will usually enjoy some aspects of a story, despite faults.

...Anyway, we're probably not meant to expect much in the way of explanations, but sometimes that leaves me with nothing to say...

So... In the end, Rosa sees her soul, looking as her body looks now-- no younger, no older-- being borne by the men she's "loved and left" in years past, then passed over to a new group of "porters".  Rosa's soul tells her that they will see one another again, "one day", and that until then, Rosa should "forget and live".  Rosa goes back inside with intentions of packing the next day and re-entering the world (in this case, London).  "It was impossible to know where she would go thereafter."

Somehow, parting from her soul was her way of letting go of the past and preparing herself to move on-- to continue living instead of hiding away from the world for the rest of her days.  I get the idea of letting go of the past, forgetting mistakes and regrets.  I can see why that might lead some readers to describe this story as having a hopeful, relatively upbeat ending-- EXCEPT.  Except for the fact that Rosa's now separated from her soul... ?  I mean, how can you be you without your soul?  Seeing your soul depart seems pretty creepy and ominous to me-- decidedly not uplifting, if you're still alive.  I mean, how would that even work, assuming you believe in the existence of the soul?  It's just a head-scratcher for me. 

Not a fave. 


Tidbits:
--  "Conventions are, indeed, all that shield us from the shivering void, though often they do so but poorly and desperately."

--  As always, the mention of Sweden causes a perking of the ears... "At one period, Rosa had lived in Stockholm with an actual Swede (far and away the worst year of her life-- or more than a year: it had all ended in her breakdown), but the language of Sweden (and never would she forget the pitch of it) seemed to have nothing whatever in common with the language of Mrs Du Quesne and her friends." ... and later... "...that big, fat Oskar had been actually killed, Scandinavian-style, in a fight, and a fight that was at least partly about her."  I had no idea it was the Scandinavian style to be killed in a fight over a woman!  This is all very interesting.

-- "He always professed a special concern with such things, and could certainly talk without end about them, though perhaps without much meaning either."

--  "She had always found life to move by contraries, usually pretty ones, though sometimes not; and, as often before when she had been depressed, now found herself surprised that she looked as well as she did.  She had long ago learned that it was when she had been feeling more confident that the sight of her appearance came always as something of a shock.  Life evens things up or down; in small matters and in large (even though Rosa would have hesitated to distinguish between the two)."

--  "She had long ago made a decision to defer talking to herself for as long as she could."  (Ah, one of my pet peeves!  The popular insinuation that speaking aloud when there's no-one to hear but yourself is somehow undesirable.  What's the problem with soliloquies, pray tell?  I like 'em.)

--  "'...Mrs. Hughes, your whole life has been a quest for perfection.  You have always been concerned only with perfection, and as in this world there is no perfection, you are sad.  Sadness can be a very special-- shall I say, concession?'"  ...Hm.  No offense to Mrs. Hughes/Rosa, but is drifting from man to man for most of your adult life really a "quest for perfection"?  I guess you could argue that she was searching for the perfect man, but...

-- "'We control nothing of importance that happens to us.'" A fatalist, eh?

"The Swords"

"The Swords"
from Cold Hand in Mine
by Robert Aickman


Synopsis:
When a young man working as a traveling salesman happens upon a shabby tent on the edge of a small fair, he finds a bizarre and life-altering show already in progress.


My Reaction (with SPOILERS):
The subtitle of this collection is "strange stories", and you couldn't ask for more accuracy.  Strange, indeed! 

The author provides no outright explanation or summing up of the weird events described in this story (and which I won't bother detailing).  I expected the revelation that "Madonna" is a mannequin of some sort-- a dummy-- a life-size doll stuffed with sawdust or somesuch.  A lifeless thing that has been spelled or built into a faithful imitation of a woman.  Something that can be ordered around without back-talk, wounded without bleeding, dressed up (or undressed) and used with no risk of recrimination.  Maybe that's what we're meant to infer, but it's left entirely up to us to draw what conclusions we will.  No tidy ending, here.

(Incidentally, "Madonna" reminds me very much of certain characters in a Swedish drama that Donald and I have been watching-- Äkta Människor (Real Humans).  The program is set in an alternate reality in which "hubots"-- extremely lifelike and highly functioning robots that look and sound like humans-- exist alongside the "real humans", fulfilling their every wish on command.  Of course, there are complications...)

Apart from the bizarre sideshow and the narrator's even stranger private interactions with "Madonna" (can't help it; must put her name in quotation marks; blame it on Madonna the singer), the most striking thing in the story is the constant and unfailing undercurrent-- no, it's not subtle enough to be an undercurrent-- flood of sordid details.  The world of this story is filthy-- both literally and figuratively.  From the uncle who sends his young nephew to stay in seamy hotels (possibly run by said uncle's former "lady friends") to the description of our narrator vomiting into an old-fashioned, flowered washstand basin, it's one nasty image or insinuation after another.  (The one exception that comes to mind is the "roundabout"-- carousel-- which is "pretty... with snow-queen and icing sugar effects in the centre; and different colored sleighs going round", run by an equally pretty girl.)  Otherwise, the world is "dingy", "off-color", "chipped", "broken or defective", and populated almost completely by the vulgar and the unsavory.

Curious about other readers' interpretations of the story-- and I haven't found much, so far, at least partially because I'm avoiding spoilers for the rest of the collection-- I came across a horror cinema blogger's thoughts on the subject.  He describes "The Swords" as "a melancholy but pointed social criticism of the way men use and violate women as if they were bloodless, fleshy objects. It illustrates how this attitude is enculturated through communal forces, and also how such an attitude's grim results-- loveless, violent, queasy, and crushingly lonely-- may dispirit or shame a young male like the story's protagonist, but only for a brief beginner's moment: 'After the first six women, say, or seven, or eight,' the narrator tells us, 'the rest come much of a muchness.'"

Interesting take... Unsettling oddity of a story.