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Book Review: Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands by Chris Bohjalian


Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands by Chris Bohjalian

Doubleday, 2014

ISBN-13: 978-0385534833

Available: Hardcover, paperback, Kindle edtion, audio CD, Audible.com audio

 

After a nuclear reactor meltdown near her home in northeastern Vermont kills her family, troubled teen Emily Shepard is doing her best to disappear. The disjointed narrative of Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands is her story, told in bits and pieces, moving backward, forward, and sideways in time. Her memories of her parents, both good and bad; her time as a troubled teen; her journey from home to Burlington, Vermont; and her downward slide as a homeless teen fill up more than half the book. The rest is centered on her relationship with Cameron, a nine year old runaway, and her eventual trip back to where it all began.

Taking place in the aftermath of a nuclear explosion, I was surprised at how untouched the people around Emily seemed. Outside the “exclusion zone” near the event, there doesn’t seem to be the kind of panic or outrage you would expect nearby, or with refugees flooding in. They come, and then they’re gone. The environmental damage is localized, so once Emily reaches Burlington, there isn’t any imminent danger. It’s an apocalyptic story without much of the impact of the apocalypse visible to the reader, at least as we see through Emily’s eyes.

Emily herself is a perceptive writer with a love of Emily Dickinson, but as she tells her story, she’s oddly detached (not surprisingly, though, as it’s a reasonable strategy for dealing with grief when your priority is survival). While it’s understandable that she wouldn’t want to go into details of some of her experiences, it leaves strangely shaped gaps in our understanding of her. Emily lives through horrifying events and goes to some very dark places, both physically and emotionally, but while I couldn’t put this down, it’s more of a testament to Bohjalian’s skill in pulling me along than any sympathy I felt for her.

The ending is fairly predictable, with Emily returning home for closure and developing radiation sickness– it is the journey that kept me going. I wanted to know what happened next, to fill in the blanks of Emily’s story, and had to keep reading to find out if she would fill those in, and how. Bohjalian got a physical reaction out of me with his descriptions of Emily’s cutting and her encounters as a prostitute, and he certainly kept me going, but Emily herself, and the novel as a whole, were unconvincing to me. It just never seemed quite real.

I am a huge fan of Bohjalian’s The Night Strangers, so I know he’s capable of building atmosphere and doing detailed world-building, and Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands, while it kept me reading, does not measure up to it. The idea is great, but this isn’t his best work, and for creepiness and character building, it does not measure up to The Night Strangers. As he’s a fairly well-known mainstream author, and it’s overall a well written book, it’s worth it to have it in libraries, but horror readers may not want to put it at the top of their list. Recommended.

Contains: violence, sexual situations

Reviewed by Kirsten Kowalewski

Posted on May 1, 2015 by , Reply

RA For All: Horror: 31 Days of Horror Project

MonsterLibrarian.com was pleased to be included in Becky Siegel Spratford’s project 31 Days of Horror over at her blog RA for All: Horror. Becky is the expert in reader’s advisory in the horror genre, so if you haven’t heard of her and are looking for a great resource go check her blog out!

The post went up a couple of days ago. Click here to go directly to our guest post there. I hope you’ll also take some time to see who else is featured over there this month– so far, it’s been interesting! Or, if you would rather just keep reading, I’ll include what I wrote below, although none of the links that I included there are active. But you really should go check RA for All: Horror out.

 

TRENDS IN THE HORROR GENRE
By Kirsten Kowalewski

Many of the trends in horror fiction right now reflect trends in publishing and reading in general. Anyone who follows books at all, or has been to the bookstore recently, will note an overwhelming number of YA titles devoted to the supernatural, as well as dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction. So results of a recent study by Bowker Market Research, that show that 55% of YA books (targeted at ages 12-17) are purchased by adults reflect a notable trend not just in general but for the horror genre. The trend towards adults reading YA books is now so strong that popular writers of adult horror, such as Jonathan Maberry are now writing YA titles, and publishers of adult horror are now starting YA imprints–ChiZine Publications recently announced that it will introduce a new imprint, ChiTeen, in 2014.

Something to remember as you consider these numbers is that teens also read a lot of adult fiction. In her book Shelf Discovery, Lizzie Skurnick touches on this, as she recalls reading adult books like Jaws and raiding her parents’ bookshelves , in addition to reading contemporary YA fiction (and as Becky noted in this blog post, as teens are new to the genre, introducing them to these more mature titles is a great way to circulate your backlist). Many, many people start reading Stephen King and other adult horror novels as teens. What young adults read isn’t necessarily fiction targeted at young adults, any more than what adults read is targeted to them.

At MonsterLibrarian.com, we’ve reviewed books with monsters in them that fall all along the spectrum, and the most popular searches for book lists are for YA vampire books and paranormal romances. These are so popular that we started a blog, Reading Bites, just for this audience. However, there seems to be agreement between horror readers and librarians that the vampire novel, for the most part, has lost its bite; as one middle school librarian noted to me recently, middle school girls aren’t scared by a vampire who will take them to the prom. As vampires bleed into the genres of romance and mystery, hardcore horror readers, who prefer their monsters to be monstrous, have started to turn away from this subgenre. Make sure you know what a reader wants when he or she asks for a vampire book.

The trend in YA fiction towards dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction, influenced by The Hunger Games, also seems to frequently take on a romantic angle, and often portrays the main characters as catalysts for societal change. Post-apocalyptic fiction seems to be mainly reflected in adult horror in the subgenre of zombie fiction, where the focus is usually on the survivors of a post-apocalyptic event doing their best to survive a zombie invasion. Lovers of this subgenre are sometimes content to read the same kind of story over and over—they like the fast-paced action and gore and aren’t necessarily interested in character development—but in recent years there have been some fresh takes on a genre that, while popular, was starting to get a bit stale (you can see what I mean by checking out our list of zombie titles). Mad science is also taking off in interesting directions, with plague viruses, technology gone mad, genetic manipulation, and man-made monsters showing up with frequency in both YA and adult fiction. One of the scariest books I’ve read in the past twelve months was Kenneth Oppell’s This Dark Endeavor (reviewed here), a prequel to Mary Shelley’s classic horror story Frankenstein. Both Oppell’s short novel and Shelley’s original appeared together in the same ebook. Now that’s a hook! The Frankenstein story takes a totally different turn in Neal Shusterman’s UnWholly, due out later this month. And these days many zombie books start with some kind of virus or plague, with the search for a cure a significant storyline.

Another trend in publishing and reading that is affecting horror fiction is the popularity of ebooks and self-publishing. At the time that we started MonsterLibrarian.com, horror fiction had more or less lost its home in mainstream publishing and migrated to small presses that often specialized in printing collector’s editions—beautiful, but expensive, and not easily available to the average consumer. Some of them, like Cemetery Dance and Bad Moon Books have done very well, but many times books from small presses are only available by direct order, which makes them hard to find.

As ebooks and self-publishing have exploded, horror fiction of all kinds has become much more readily available. Short pieces that weren’t exactly what a publisher was looking for, or were by unknown authors, could be (and are) presented in ebook format, and find an audience. This is great for horror readers who are loyal to a subgenre that isn’t being promoted in mainstream publishing , like werewolf fiction. There is a strong minority of readers who love werewolf horror (enough that we hosted a Werewolf Month for several years), but there are few current werewolf horror books (here’s our list of werewolf titles). A search for “werewolf horror” on Amazon.com brings up over 1,000 titles, mostly self-published ebooks. It’s hard to know what the quality of a self-published book will be before you read it, but many ebooks are very low-priced. Some authors are now publishing serials, with an attempt to hook an audience with episodes of a continuing story. Authors whose rights have reverted to them can introduce their books to a new audience. Small presses sell books in ebook format as well as collector’s editions, making those available to a wider audience. And current mainstream authors (like Stephen King) are finding a demand for shorter pieces . The ways that ebooks are changing publishing in general and horror in particular are many, and it’s very exciting. Unfortunately for libraries and their readers, most of these won’t be easily available through a service like Overdrive. The conundrum of how libraries can help horror readers connect more easily with ebooks doesn’t seem like one that can be solved easily.

A final trend that I see affecting the way people experience horror fiction is the way it is sweeping the media. Television shows like The Walking Dead (originally based on a series of graphic novels) have made zombies more mainstream. Movies such as Joss Whedon’s Cabin in the Woods draw in reluctant viewers (see what blogger Barbara Vey wrote here). Apps allow you to take the experience along with you. The brand-new book Horrible Hauntings by Shirin Yim Bridges uses augmented reality technology to extend the reading experience; ghosts leap out at the reader when you point your cell phone camera at the pictures! Horror is such a visual genre that the way other media are giving readers to experience it is nothing short of amazing.

Getting the horror reader in the door can be a challenge. But the real challenge is this: with so much horror outside mainstream publishing, once you get the reader in the door, how are you going to manage to give them what they’re looking for?

Posted on October 7, 2012 by , Reply

Little Apocalypses

There’s something that makes people want to read about the end of the world. Maybe it’s because reading about it insulates us from our genuine fears that the end is coming, maybe sooner than we think.

The most terrifying end-of-the-world scenarios, in my opinion, aren’t destruction on a worldwide level. When that happens, I don’t think I’m going to be around long enough to feel the horror. They focus on things that are unstoppable, unknowable, personal, possible.

When fiction captures the heartbreak, fear, and panic caused by natural disasters, incurable diseases, unknown causes of terrible events,  and the effects of these things on hope and community, on the people touched by these events, it’s describing the little apocalypses that shake us in personal, everyday ways. It stays with you when you face the end of the world.

This week, a lot of people have faced the end of the world. Tornadoes devastated Indiana, leveling  the town of Henryville. Here’s an astonishing first person account by someone who was very near there, shared with me by a friend. So very close to disaster, without any way to communicate with the outside world, but still, everyone pulled together.  Here, I waited at the bus stop for my son in the rain, unaware that the buses had been delayed due to a tornado watch. When the bus finally pulled in the sun was shining. It’s completely random that the weather skipped over us and decimated other areas of the state. The tornadoes also touched down in nearby Kentucky, where some of our reviewers reside. I was very relieved that they all were fine! Here’s a link if you would like to donate.

More terrifying than the weather was the news that the three year old son of someone I know had died, with no apparent cause (it has since been identified as RSV). He just didn’t wake up. When you have a tiny baby, you constantly worry about this, but it isn’t supposed to happen at this age for no reason. This is a parent’s nightmare, that when you put your child to bed safely at night it isn’t really safe at all. As much as we want to protect our children(or, sometimes, our parents), sometimes it’s beyond our ability to do so. Sometimes there doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason, and sometimes there is a reason, but things are still out of our control.

This fear and pain and feeling of helplessness is at the center of the scariest of end of the world scenarios- the end of YOUR world, and what you will do to get past it to the next thing. It’s the little apocalypses that are at the heart of horror, both in life and in fiction. It is so important that there are writers who get it down on paper, and amazing people of all kinds who help us through the end of the world, however difficult that may be. Thanks to all of you who bring help and hope to others facing circumstances that shake their worlds.

Posted on March 7, 2012 by , Reply
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