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Book Review: Eynhallow by Tim McGregor

cover art for Eynhallow by TIm McGregor

Eynhallow by Tim McGregor

Raw Dog Screaming Press, 2024

Available: Hardcover, Paperback, Kindle edition

Buy: Bookshop.org  |  Amazon.com

 

 

Tim McGregor’s writing evokes the ghosts of 19th century English writers who captured the mystery of human beings and the wild forces of nature that remain untamed around us and in us. His latest book, Eynhallow, is an irresistible mix of science fiction and horror, with a twist of Gothic terror and a dash of old legends.

 

This story about an unusual, hardy woman opens in 1797 in the nearly deserted Orkney Islands, where four families are struggling to survive. Agnes, a devoted mother, has always acted out of necessity, the only reason she married and stays with her abusive husband. She now cooks and delivers meals to their new, wealthy neighbor, for a price. Her days revolve around family life, and occasionally helping to bring a neighbor’s child into the world. It is a monotonous existence, but Agnes has a curious and active mind that is constantly evaluating and analyzing everything and everyone around her. She also has many questions she feels she must answer about herself, what she wants, and whether she can have what she most desires.

 

As she pursues these answers, Tim McGregor’s atmospheric descriptions of the weather, vegetation, houses, characters, and even the church and food take on a life of their own, putting the reader into a state of growing uneasiness about Agnes’s safety and security. Slowly but surely, we discover that she has a role to play in another story, a famous one about a monster created from dead human body parts, who is now alive. McGregor brings the two stories together in surprising ways, reminding us of what we already know about Victor Frankenstein and his Creature, and filling in new details about the challenges of dealing with the monster’s demands and the unforeseen consequences of what Frankenstein dreamed would be the greatest scientific achievement of all time.

 

In the end, Eynhallow, meaning holy island, is far from it. It is a place of violence, pain, torture, and death. Just as Mary Shelley made her audience consider the boundaries between God and man, the spiritual and the scientific, and life and death, so too does Tim McGregor, but with an important difference. McGregor’s audience has had a much greater chance to explore these boundaries and observe their crossing. It is in that context, one of greater understanding, that we can truly see an earlier horror story becoming a contemporary one… and a permanent nightmare.

 

 

Reviewed by Nova Hadley

Book Review: Girls from the County by Donna Lynch

 

Girls from the County by Donna Lynch

Raw Dog Screaming Press, 2022

ISBN: 978-1947879478

Available: Paperback, Kindle edition

Buy:   Bookshop.org  |  Amazon.com

 

The city and the country are not the only dangerous places for a woman, according to Donna Lynch’s Girls from the County. In these poems, girls create a permanent connection to their landscape through the memories of places that “want to kill you” and the tragic deaths that result from ignoring ghostly warnings.

 

Lynch depicts the county as a haunted setting where people continue to tell the stories of horrible events involving nameless women whose lives have been destroyed there or, conversely, whose names became famous only because of the grisly details of their death. These are old stories, but also current ones, which show that some things do stay the same and that the only thing between you and disaster might be, as Lynch tells us, the words of your wise grandmother who knows how to survive. 

 

The county girl, as Lynch points out, soon realizes that what passes as tradition, ritual or symbol is darker than it seems and even darker when you trace it to its roots. Men play a big role in this hidden evil – of violence by the river,  “animal screams” mixing with unidentified screams in the woods, and things known by county girls that can’t be proven in order to save them or get them the justice they deserve. Even ordinary parties are characterized as events where county girls are likely to be “devoured” by men.

 

There is an occult connection between these horrors and old parts of a county – old burial grounds, old home sites now vacant, old houses where someone might think there was “something” scary in the window, old quarries and old cars that might be hiding dead bodies, and even gatherings of women trying to use the dark arts to protect themselves or to take revenge, not knowing whether they are really unleashing even more destruction.    

 

Lynch’s short, free verse poems that often read like prose narratives describe the county as a place where girls are held “in captivity” and want to escape, where the “beauty queen” finds out how her good looks are also a curse, and where people talk to you one day and disappear or abandon you the next. There are threats that make these girls stay silent about what they know, that warn them to avoid being “dramatic” by not making accusations without “evidence,” that cause them to be concerned about their safety if they are “pretty” or “sad” because being perceived in those ways opens them up to being targeted by a predator.

 

With menacing poem titles like “The Thing about Girls with Hammers” and “When the Cloud Comes for You,” a reference to a Dorothy in Oz who does not want to go home, Girls from the County depicts the county as a place where there is a barely contained fear, a lurking anxiety, a sense that every person, location, and situation is a potential threat to girls. In “Thirty-two Years (Eighteen Years Reprise)” the speaker worries, “What if / what we really saw / were all the things / we could not escape” and realizes that, ultimately, the “hurt” “waited for us in the trees,” and so, these girls have no choice but to run while the past always follows closely behind.

 

Reviewed by Nova Hadley

 

Book Review: Owl Manor: The Final Stroke (Book Three of the Owl Manor Trilogy) by Zita Harrison

cover art for Owl Manor: The Final Stroke by Zita Harrison

Owl Manor:The Final Stroke (Book Three of Owl Manor Trilogy) by Zita Harrison

Zealous Art Publishing, 2022

ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 979-8846446267

Available: Paperback, Kindle edition

Buy: Amazon.com

 

Crazy, murderous, and long dead Rafe Bradstone, the owner of Owl Manor, is still a threat to women in the final book of Zita Harrison’s Owl Manor trilogy, Owl Manor: The Final Stroke. Unfortunately for Didi, Rachel, and Karen, the entrepreneurial new residents of the ill-fated mansion, there is a very thin line between the reality of their lives in 1901 and the supernatural manifestations of the sordid events of 1874. 

 

Imagining that they can turn Owl Manor into a dinner theater and art gallery, this creative trio immediately begin to notice strange changes in themselves and signs of trouble in their environment. Childlike Kitty, who aspires to be an actress, becomes increasingly sexually provocative, and sees apparitions of a woman from another time dressed in red. Rachel really wants to open her own restaurant, but finds herself obsessively researching the history of Owl Manor in order to understand why the manor is being haunted and how dead prostitutes figure into it. The artist, Didi, suffers from nightmares in which she becomes the victims of actual brutal murders and reenacts the deaths. After each dream, she is compelled to paint the atrocities in vivid detail. 

 

Early in the book, the three friends are forced to realize that they must find a way to deal directly with the evil that is drawing out hidden aspects of their character and activating the strange behavior of the men who frequent their business. All of the action in the book is centered around working out this mystery and exploring why it is that the women involved have been deprived of their basic rights as people. All the while, the ghastly owls continue their odd surveillance of the characters and remind us of Rafe Bradstone’s past and his wife Eva’s struggles to become independent in the first book, and the sad life of their daughter Abigail in the second.

 

Owl Manor: The Final Stroke has the most compelling plot and characters of this suspenseful Gothic trilogy. Harrison blends the supernatural and real horrors of violence against women with the very relatable challenges of women from any time period who are in search of personal, creative, and financial fulfillment. What makes this book stand apart is its subtlety in bringing out the horrific truth that evil, even when not fully manifested through gruesome actions, can still be present and growing, and that it can be overlooked, misinterpreted, and normalized until, suddenly, we see the monster that has been among us and maybe in us.

 

Reviewed by Nova Hadley