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Book Review: In the Vines by Shannon Kirk

Cover image of In The Vines by Shannon Kirk

In The Vines: A Thriller by Shannon Kirk (Bookshop.org | Amazon.com )

Thomas & Mercer, Seattle, 2018

ISBN-13: 9781503901940 (hardcover)

ISBN-13: 9781503900752 (paperback)

Available: Hardcover, Paperback, Kindle edition, compact disc, MP3 CD

 

In The Vines: A Thriller by Shannon Kirk is a murder mystery with a sprinkling of horror and gore. Fans of Edgar Allan Poe will recognize the technique of peeling away the layers of an onion, slowly revealing past sins, guilt, self-doubt and escalating violence. The main characters are Mary Olivia Pentecost, aka Mop, and Lynette Viola Vandonveer, aka Aunty Liv. They are descendants of Boston Brahmins, both with scions  who seem to have guilty secrets, as well as privilege and power. Their character traits and secrets lead to tragedy.

 

Mop is a recent college graduate searching for her own identity She is to marry her childhood sweetheart, a son of a nouveau-riche family with an adjoining estate in Rye, New Hampshire. Aunty Liv is an unmarried nurse having an illicit affair with a Boston surgeon, and is spying on her lover’s wife. The novel begins with Mop bleeding from a leg wound, dragging an unconscious, unnamed companion out of hiding during a nor’easter. An unidentified, shrouded figure wields an ax over them. Who are they? How did they come to this? What will be the story’s denouement?

 

The author uses the voices of Mop and Aunty Liv to narrate the story. The story jumps back and forth between scenes from the present, two years in the past and two weeks ago. Kirk’s technique is disconcerting, but it is important in slowly revealing the characters’ secrets and building a sense of frustration, anxiety and anticipation in readers. The main characters are well-drawn, and readers will understand why they make seemingly bad decisions that often lead to disaster.  The author describes the ocean, beach, rocks, cliffs, trees and brambles of New England’s coast beautifully. They become participants in the story. Highly recommended for adults.

 

Contains: Moderate gore, moderate violence, mild profanity

 

Reviewed by Robert D. Yee

Posted on June 7, 2020 by , Reply

Book Review: The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires by Grady Hendrix


The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires by Grady Hendrix

Quirk Books, 2020

ISBN-13: 9781683691433

Available: Hardback, Kindle edition, Audible audiobook

 

It’s the 1990s in Charleston, South Carolina. Patricia Campbell gave up her nursing career to do what proper Southern white women were expected to do: marry a successful man (in Patricia’s case, an ambitious doctor), and then soon after become a mother. She thought that with this little family she would have the perfect life. In reality, her husband spends long days and nights at work, her daughter seemingly doesn’t need her mother anymore, her son is obsessed with Nazis, and her mother-in-law, Miss Mary, who suffers from dementia, needs constant care. She can’t keep up with her to-do list, let alone finish anything. Even with a new caretaker, Mrs. Greene, in the picture, she is still overwhelmed with domestic life. She’s not alone.

Patricia joins a book club with fellow housewives Grace, Kitty, Maryellen, and Slick. They bond over true crime and domestic not-quite-bliss. In their meetings, the women indulge in conversation and friendly debate regarding the FBI’s siege of Waco, Ann Rule’s friendship with Ted Bundy before and after she discovered he was a serial killer, and more.

After one of their meetings, Patricia ventures outside in the dark to take the trash out, only to be attacked by an elderly neighbor, Mrs. Savage, who is digging through the garbage and snacking in the innards of a dead racoon. She charges and attacks Patricia, tearing off part of her ear. Patricia is left with graphic memories of the attack, as well as feeling terrible for the old woman who was responsible for it, despite her being rather disagreeable in life. Soon after, Mrs. Savage’s enigmatic and charismatic nephew, James Harris, moves into the neighborhood. Patricia is intrigued by the newcomer, especially being the first of the book club to meet him in a rather unconventional way. She notices red flags immediately, but ignores them, thinking that maybe she’s letting the true crime books get the better of her. Suddenly, the book club meeting topic changes from discussing true crime to speculating on this stranger in their midst. Everyone seems to be talking about him. Even Miss Mary has something to say about him, although she calls him by a different name and accuses him of horrible things.

Then, children on the other side of town in Six Mile, a struggling Black community, start to go missing. Police write off the cases, claiming suicides or drugs are behind the disappearances. Patricia, desperate to get to the bottom of the disappearances, makes her way into the community where her mother-in-law’s caretaker lives to get more information and discuss her suspicions about James. What she discovers as the story unfolds is that James is far more sinister than she realized, and a real monster.

The friendships depicted are strong, and they go through their ups and downs as any adult friendship does. It is refreshing to read that none of the women, or the men for that matter, are perfect, despite the culture telling them they need to be. Slick blurts out at a book club meeting that she freezes sandwiches for her children’s school lunches just to save time. Grace works to maintain order and cleanliness in her house to an agonizing degree. To get out of the house to attend the book club meetings, Slick tells her husband that it’s a Bible study group. Those are only a few examples of what is expected of the housewives.

The Southern Book Club to Slaying Vampires is a fast read, with interesting and realistic characters, a solid storyline, and well written horror with the right amount of humor mixed in. Hendrix has been a favorite author of mine since Horrorstör, and this novel does not disappoint.

Contains: blood, gore, implied domestic abuse, rats and roaches, sexual assault, dismemberment, body horror

Highly recommended

Reviewed by Lizzy Walker

Posted on June 6, 2020 by , Reply

Book Review: Clear by Ray Leigh

Clear by Ray Leigh

Bad Press Ink, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-9168845-1-3

Available: Kindle

 

Twenty years ago, writer and then youth worker Ray Leigh saw firsthand the brutal lives of addicts, dealers, prostitutes, and thieves, as well as police and “government men” gone bad, and wrote Clear to capture the dark side of 1990s London. Leigh writes in a style he calls “distilled prose” which seems like a hybrid of a long narrative poem and a screenplay. The text is arranged to cross the length of the page rather than the width, and transitions in the action, dialogue and descriptions are marked by small, black daggers.

 

In a patchwork of quick scenes and character sketches, Clear captures the conflict, violence, dread, and horror in a part of the city that some people only glimpse on the news and that other people actually experience as a nightmare they are trying to get “clear” of but never will. Leigh includes the expected crime and poverty, but he also makes the fragments of story poignantly relatable by incorporating the ordinary parts of the characters’ day, things like what and where they eat or their interaction  with their children. This is a dysfunctional community with its own definitions of life, relationships, and values.

 

Leigh suggests that this work is, in part, a “love story.” That makes sense because there is so much attention paid to the heartbreak, sadness, and disappointment of these people that it is easy to conclude that Leigh knew and cared about them. Clear is so terrifying because there is a certain normalcy to this nightmarish flip-side to typical city living. To fully realize that both the typical and nightmare lives go on simultaneously, each a sort of parallel universe, is chilling and should only be the stuff of science fiction. Recommended.

 

Contains: violence, sex, crude language, adult subject matter

 

Reviewed by Nova Hadley

Posted on June 5, 2020 by , Reply
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