Micro Mention "Joyland"

Sure, when Stephen King’s protagonist gets a summer job at a tourist destination in “Joyland,” they embark on solving a neat murder mystery involving ghosts. All I got when I did something similar was the knowledge that 2-day-old popcorn doesn’t taste right.

But upon reflection, given a choice between the two, I'd probably take the stale popcorn, at least it doesn't try to murder you. Much like an actual funhouse hall of mirrors, King throws some serious misdirection in this novel, more than once.

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Author's Website: https://stephenking.com/

Micro Mention "So Cold the River"

"So Cold the River," by Michael Koryta is a ghost story that is also a bit of a mystery, but the thing that impressed me the most about this novel was his descriptions of the West Baden hotel, which is a real place, and you should look it up.

If you go in for the audiobook version, I feel the little sound effect touches and musical flourishes are really well done. It's one of my favorite things about audiobooks and this one specifically.

There is a moment that snapped my suspension of disbelief, though, in this novel. A character is thrown from a moving vehicle, breaks her collar bone, and then like an hour later in the story, is performing CPR on someone. So, no, that's not a thing. Chest compressions are hard—like you've got to break someone's ribs to do it right—hard. If you've got a broken collar bone, I don't care how tough you are; you aren't pulling that off. 

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Author's Website: https://michaelkoryta.com/

Micro Mention "The Turn of the Screw"

The scariest thing about "The Turn of the Screw" is the governess's inappropriate relationship with those kids. I think the ghosts were there because they were like, "someone should call child services from beyond the grave. Oh, it's 1898? Someone should invent child services."

I found her relationship with the young boy in her charge to be the most disturbing because this story is all from her point of view. It's just that some of the things she says about him don't fit for what is essentially a nanny/teacher relationship with this kid. Maybe I'm bringing too much modern suspicion, colored by countless news stories about teachers having inappropriate relations with their students, into my reading of this old ghost story. But I've read this novella twice now and still can't shake off the perception.

"The Turn of the Screw" is just old enough of a story that its language is just out-of-date to the point before being antiquated that it requires extra focus to understand the story. It was the reading equivalent for me of watching movies in standard definition instead of HD. So overall, the experience was more frustrating than frightening for me.

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Micro Mention "A Halloween Wraith"

"A Halloween Wraith" by William Black, to be honest, is a thoroughly forgettable short story. It takes place for the most part in Scotland… so there's that.

It's proof that just because something is old, that doesn't make it a "classic." What it is—is mostly a meandering political scree from the 1800s with a ghost costume thrown onto it, and I have a feeling it was boring even then. The biggest claim I can make about this story is that it is hard to find, and it is actually truly pretty obscure. 

So there you have it. It just took twenty-two months of this blog with obscurity in its name to finally get to a piece of fiction that is genuinely obscure, other than my own fiction, of course. That's WIO's promise for you; if you consider it in terms of geological time, I delivered you actual obscurity almost instantly.

Back on topic, where could you find this story? No idea. First off, I'm not sure why you want to, and I only stumbled upon it because it was included in a collection of horror stories in the public domain, made cheap, sold on audible for a few months, before going defunct, and was taken down.

Micro Mention "The Phantom of the Opera"

I came expecting music, maybe a little spooky romance with this book and discovered that the phantom, or opera ghost, is really a cross between a vampire and jigsaw. Armed with only dim memories of the musical, which I saw as a child and clearly didn't remember very well, I was surprised by how there is so much less singing in the novel than I expected and far more murderous sadism.

With the novel version of the Phantom, as my only point of reference, I don't get how people can sympathize with him to the point where they felt Christine should be with him. He's a genius, sure, but he's also psychotic and vicious. I get it. He's lonely, his deformity makes it hard for him to integrate into society, but you know what? He's also managed to hold down more than one steady-paying job, so clearly, he's figured out how to get by in society before. Why didn't he think to perfect that instead of building an opera house on top of a death maze/labyrinth? I don't know what I would have done exactly in his position, but I feel like: build an underground torture warren would be low on that list.

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"Wuthering Heights," by Emily Bronte--Fiction Review

Let’s be romantic this Friday, my beloved obscure readers, with Emily Bronte’s “Wuthering Heights,” a book about love, hate, and occasionally ghosts—for some reason. 

***The Non-Spoiler part of this review***

What I love about this book:

I love a good ghost story, and even though that aspect of the story isn’t the main focus of the tale, it’s still a major component. This book begins and ends on this note, though, which speaks to my love of horror. The supernatural element is one of the reasons I like this era of novelists from time to time—for example, and more famously, Charles Dickens was known to throw in ghosts into his stories, and he lived at the same time as Emily Bronte. It was often treated as mental furniture in the background, like today we’re talking about interwoven love stories, set amongst a generational family drama—and oh yeah, ghosts are totally real and about, but don’t focus on that.    

Unlike many romances set in Victorian or Victorianesque times and places, where the protagonists usually fall in and out of love because of simple misunderstandings but in the end are typically good people at heart—“Wuthering Heights” doesn’t do that. They’re certainly complex characters, and I found myself even sympathizing with all of them at various points. Most of them share one defining character trait, though—they’re all miserable bastards. It’s hard to say why I love this about them, but there’s just some morbid, ephemeral quality about Bronte’s characters that I like. They’re like passionate shooting stars, and that passion could be love, or more often than not, bitter hate.   

What I don’t love about this book:

Emily Bronte died young, and this is her only novel, which is upsetting because, as far as first novels go, “Wuthering Heights” promises a grand career for Bronte, which sadly never came to pass. It isn’t that it’s set up for a sequel or anything. Her writing is just so compelling that I would have wanted to see what she would have done next in novel-length. 

On to the weakest character of this novel, Lockwood, who is the principal protagonist we’re viewing events through at the beginning of the book and the end of the novel, isn’t really a character. He’s a story device—specifically, his function is to be told the story of the various inhabitants of Wuthering Heights. This makes him feel vestigial at best. We learn a few things about his character in the beginning, but ultimately since he isn’t in most of the narrative, it’s easy to forget he exists.

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***The Spoiler part of this review***

***Ye be warned to turn back now***