claire_fuller_writer's reviews
1030 reviews

According to the quote on the front of this book of short stories, Donna Tartt thought they were 'terrifying'. I'm not sure I agree. None of them would have stopped me sleeping, but most of them were creepy with a satisfying and unexpected twist at the end. These are the ones that worked best for me; those that started with a fairly ordinary person, doing a fairly ordinary thing. The girl who runs away from home (Louisa, Please Come Home), the man who buys chocolates for his wife (Paranoia), the husband who seems to think his wife is having an affair (The Good Wife). The ones which worked less well were those where Jackson sets out for the story to be spooky from the very beginning: The Story we Used to Tell, or The Man in the Woods.
But if you like these, the thing you should really read of Jackson's is We Have Always Lived in the Castle.

Well, I did finish it. I did want to find out what happened, but I didn't enjoy this very much. Scored maybe 1 on the scary scale (out of 5). Because each chapter is about a new character reaching Slade House, I never got to meet any of them for long enough to care what happened to them. And because each of them end up in the attic where a particular scene is played out, we read that scene almost five times. One of those characters is an autistic boy, another a black woman, there's a fat teenage girl, a lesbian, a white middle-aged man - anyone would think David Mitchell was trying hard to be diverse.
The world Mitchell creates for the two main characters - twins - is too complex for so short a book, so that towards the end the twins are having conversations with each other about the rules of that world for the sake of making things clearer for the reader. But it comes out as a stream of operandi, glyphing, orisons, psychowaves, psychovoltage, lacuna, banjax... too much.

I really enjoyed this - a great idea for a novel (something out there turns you mad if you look at it) where the characters are trapped together inside a house, and every time someone else knocks on the door asking to be let in, you don't know who it's going to be. Malerman handles the tension incredibly well; slipping between three time periods to keep me turning the pages.
It's not literary, and doesn't try to be (but I do generally prefer my books with more crafted sentences). There were a few times where the dialogue (or dialogue as exposition) clunked, but it didn't spoil the book for me.
I wasn't terribly scared; it only scored 3/5 on the scary scale for me, but I was anxious and tense, and thoroughly enjoyed those feelings.

I've been looking for books that will scare me, even a little, and I got this on the back of a glowing review in The Guardian. It didn't scare me at all, and I think I'm going to give up looking now. This wasn't a book for me - no tension, and everything very underwhelming. I did finish it though, and I can see that a lot of people love it.

2.5 stars. This novel features a difficult narrator to be inside the head of, and difficult subject matter to read, but neither of those two things put me off. And I quite liked the gothic, old-fashioned feel of the narration, even though the setting is fairly contemporary. There were two problems for me - the first was that we know what will happen during the whole of the second half from the outset. This isn't really a spoiler because it is in the first few pages, but just in case...

Spoiler

the narrator tells us he performs a laryngectomy on the twins, then he kills and buries them, and goes back inside to Karen. So none of this comes as a surprise or a shock in the second half and I was just waiting around for these things to happen.

. The second issue was the coincidences. Yes, they happen in real life, but in books they are often difficult to believe. For example, near the end, the narrator says he rarely gets a local paper, then one day he decides to, and what do you know,

Spoiler

the death of Karen's son is front page news that week.

. Another example: the narrator meets Karen, a woman with a mute son, and a few pages on, he meets a mute vagrant woman. I understand that is what the book is about - language, communication etc - but really, how many mute people are there out there for odd-balls interested in studying mute people to come across.
Perhaps I'm being unduly mean. Luke was an interesting, creepy man; the writing and especially descriptions of landscape were often very beautiful. Just not for me overall.

Lots to think about in this novel about a stay-at-home father, whose eldest daughter's heart stops when she is at school, and has to be resuscitated. The stories we tell ourselves to get through the day, how we can keep those we love safe, how the world views a stay-at-home father (and how he views himself). As well as the story about Adam and Mimi, and the rest of the family, we learn about the bombing and rebuilding of Coventry cathedral, and the story of how Adam's American father came to England from America. Although these latter sections were short, for some reason it was these that I enjoyed the most.

Dulcie is 29 going on 70, she becomes obsessed with her friend's previous employer and finds out everything she can about him, including going to the church where is brother is a vicar, and the seaside hotel that his mother runs. It's an odd book. I like Pym's style of writing, and stories about ordinary people, but this one didn't quite get it right for me. Excellent Women was better. There are too many coincidences and the end is wrapped up ridiculously neatly. But still fun to read.
www.clairefuller.co.uk

I really enjoyed this - a superbly researched, in-depth look at one of my favourite writers. Although I've also read the one other biography on Shirley Jackson, I learned many new things about her. But it's a long, dense book, and I wonder if you would already need to be a fan of Jackson's work to sustain your interest?
Some minor quibbles: too long spent on the houses at the beginning, even though Franklin clearly identified houses as a theme in Jackson's work, and too long spent on Hyman (Jackson's husband) near the beginning. Obviously he was a huge influence on her, but there was a chapter or two where it seemed to be more about him than her.
However, highly recommended.
www.clairefuller.co.uk

Well, I liked it. The writing was good, the story intriguing, but I didn't love it, like I know some people do - certainly the person who lent it to me said it was one of the best books he's ever read. I liked how Toibin played with the story of Jesus,

Spoiler

at the end of her life Mary tells the story of her son at the end of his, and how he isn't the son of God, he was a young man with crazy followers who refused to listen to his mother and was crucified

but it was a story that I happen to believe (not the biblical one, but the one Toibin tells) so although it was interesting to see this expressed it wasn't anything new for me.
Perhaps I'm missing something.
www.clairefuller.co.uk

I read William Trevor's Summer and Love some time ago and can't remember much about it except I didn't understand what all the fuss was about. But now I'm going to go back and re-read it, because I happened to pick this up, really because of William Trevor's recent death, and my goodness, I LOVED this.
I love its understated quiet story about Irish aristocrats gone to seed. There is a mystery, but interestingly this isn't at the heart of the book, when all is revealed at the end there was no big aha! moment, and I liked the book all the better for it.
I love the focus on the detail - the building of the bridge that will join the island Carriglas sits on to the mainland, the blousey boardinghouse landlady who counts her money, Tom who hides in the trees and watches the wedding guests, and tries to avoid 'Holy Mulligan' who says no one will want to touch Tom because he is illegitimate.
The novel meanders slowly upstairs and down, over the island and across to the mainland, so lazily, so beautifully.
I would like to reread this immediately, but first I'm going to go and find Summer and Love.
www.clairefuller.co.uk