It's All About the Book

The Room in the Tower by E.F. Benson

In high school, I went on a bender for vintage ghost stories, primarily due to MaryAnn Satter, my English teacher at Nazareth Academy who also loved a good ghost story. She introduced me to authors such as J. Sheridan LeFanu, Ambrose Bierce, Edgar Allan Poe, Algernon Blackwood, and E.F. Benson. When I came across The Room in the Tower by Benson in my search for a title published in 1912, I was reminded of the fierce and cold terror many of these authors wrote into their stories and decided I had found my entry of 1912.

The Room in the Tower is a short story, but it packs a whole lot of terror into a few pages. The narrator describes a terrifying recurring dream he’s had for years, where he finds himself at a lovely country home with an old school acquaintance and his family. The dream begins with tea or some sort of gathering with all the guests and family, and invariably ends with the hostess, Mrs. Stone, getting up and telling the narrator “Jack will show you your room. I have given you the room in the tower.” Those words start the shivers up the narrator’s spine, which only worsen as he follows Jack up the stairs to the room in the tower. The dream ends as the door is closed and locked behind the narrator.

The dreams recur until the day he finds himself face to face, in real life, with the tower and the country home. As in the dream, he is led up the stairs to the room in the tower, where he and his friend find comfortable lodgings, with the exception of a creepy looking portrait of Julia Stone, the former owner of the property. The portrait is removed and carried to the hall, where both men find their hands covered in blood. That night, the narrator is awakened by a horror too awful to comprehend, Julia Stone come back from the grave.

I know this sounds like a typical ghost story, but what I always found unique about Benson’s writing is how he was able to build that swell of terror while describing ordinary activities and objects. By the time the narrator is awakened by the ghost, I was gripping my Kindle so tightly my fingers were white. Contemporary authors who do as good a job with that are Stephen King in Pet Semetery  and Peter Straub, with Straub’s Ghost Story is equal to Benson’s best work.

Definitely recommended for ghost story and horror aficionados.

4 out of 5 catalog cards.

My Antonia by Willa S. Cather

My friend Paula, a Nebraska native, has been after me to read this book for years and now I understand. I’d been spending nearly all of my reading time with early 20^th century mysteries and, quite frankly, they’d become tedious. After forcing myself through The Red House by A.A. Milne, I really felt like I needed a change of pace. I had downloaded a whole bunch of free books to my Kindle for this reading project, and My Antonia just happened to be at the top of the list, so I casually opened it one night a week ago to see what it was all about.

I found a beautiful, heartbreaking, luminous story that captivated me from the first page. Cather tells the story of Antonia Shimerda, a headstrong, handsome Bohemian girl whose family is transplanted to Black Hawk, Nebraska in the 19^th century.  Antonia’s story is told through the eyes of Jim Burden, an orphan who also arrives to live with his grandparents in Black Hawk on the same train as Antonia and her family. The two become fast friends whose lives twine around each other over the course of a lifetime.

The interesting thing about this story that is so different from what I’ve been reading is that there really isn’t a storyline. This is a memoir, a re-telling of a bucolic if hard childhood on the prairie, coming of age in a small mid-western town, and adulthood not yet devoid of childhood innocence and affection between lifelong friends.

I was reminded of two stories as I read this one – Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder and the 2010 Newbery winner Moon Over Manifest by Clare Vanderpool. The sod houses of Wilder’s early books are here, as is the red prairie grass, snakes, farms, and family devotion. The similarity to Manifest, Kansas is more in the characters drawn by Cather and Vanderpool than in the story. However, all three books share the same comforting, lovely tributes to the importance of family and friends.

Cather’s characters, from Antonia and her regal but defeated father, to the foreign farm girls who go to town as “hired girls,” to Antonia’s husband and colorful tribe of children, to the narrator – Jim Burden himself – are finely drawn and developed with care and compassion. She captures the tender friendship between Antonia and Jim, which becomes the thread that twines through the entire story and ultimately makes it successful.

A beautiful book that will stay with me for a long, long time.

5 out of 5 catalog cards

The Red House Mystery by A.A. Milne.

Most people know A.A. Milne as the creator of the beloved children’s story Winnie the Pooh, but Milne published mystery stories before he created Christopher Robin, the Hundred Acre Wood and the ubiquitous Pooh himself. The Red House Mystery, published in 1922, is typical of the Golden Age of British mysteries and is heavy on old school chums, amateur detectives, a “locked room” mystery, and a mysterious disowned relative who returns from a long banishment to Australia. The story begins with the murder of Robert Ablett, prodigal brother of Mark Ablett, country house squire and frequent house party host. The murder occurs during a house party and draws in household staff, a paradoxical cousin, and the aforementioned amateur detective who just happens upon the scene. There are secret passages, missing guns, a vanished suspect, and gossiping housemaids – all the necessary elements of a 1920s mystery.

The major flaw here is that there are too many characters who all sound alike, making it hard to follow the plot. I found the story to be overly wordy and way too long, with most of the action concentrated on the Ablett estate. I found myself skimming over multiple pages at a time looking for some action and finding little. I normally enjoy Golden Age mysteries, but this one left me cold.

1 out of 5 catalog cards

The Wild Olive by Basil King, published 1910 by Harper & Brothers.

I thought I’d start with a book published in 1910 to get myself warmed up for my 100 Years. 100 Books reading project, which begins in January 2011 as part of the 100th anniversary celebration of the Rochester Public Library.

The Wild Olive was a best seller in 1910 and I can understand why. It has all the classic elements of good fiction – likable protagonists, exotic locales, a “good man gone wrong” plot, and, of course, a love story.

We begin with a condemned man’s desperate flight through the wilds of the Adirondacks, from a logging town where he was found guilty of murdering his uncle, to a secluded mansion inhabited by the judge who passed sentence on him, to a tiny hidden room in the side of the mountain where he is kept hidden by a mysterious girl, to the bustling, newly opened ports of Argentina.

Nory Ford, a pampered city boy from New York, finds himself shipped off to live with an uncle in a remote logging town in northern New York, where he finds little welcome from his cruel relative. Nory is accused and found guilty of murdering the old man, but is helped to escape by the residents of the town who apparently all hated the uncle. As fate would have it, Nory finds himself on the doorstep of a grand mansion perched high above a pristine lake, a mansion that just happens to be owned by the very judge who sentenced him to hang by the neck until dead.

There’s a nice little interlude where Nory and the judge converse about the nature of good and evil and right and wrong, highlighted by this wonderful passage:

The law assumes all men to be equal…Just as it assumes all men to be intelligent–only they’re not. The law is a very fine theory. The chief thing to be said against it is that five times out of ten it leaves human nature out of account. I’m condemned to death, not because I killed a man, but because you lawyers won’t admit that your theory doesn’t work.”

The two continue to argue the law, with Nory claiming to have been found guilty only because the law in the town couldn’t find anyone else to pin the crime on. Finally, Nory’s attention is captured by the appearance of a woman in white, beckoning him from the drawing room to the woods outside. He eventually finds the girl waiting for him in front of a lovely little, hidden cabin that she has made into an art studio. There she conceals him for several weeks until the search for him is called off. She refuses to tell him her name, so he eventually comes to think of her as the “wild olive” – the olive that is grafted into the olive of the orchard and introduces a new strain of flavor.

The girl eventually contrives to get him away from New York and from his death sentence. She just so happens to be independently wealthy and arranges passage for him to Ireland under the name Herbert Strange.

Eventually, Strange ends up in Argentina working for a firm that the Wild Olive had mentioned in passing. He works his way up from dock worker to manager, and on the way catches the eye of the company owner. Throughout the story, Nory/Strange struggles with the feeling that he has been discarded by organized society and forced to live just outside its reach.

Just as Strange begins a courtship that may bring him inside that organized society again, the Wild Olive makes a reappearance in his life and it all falls apart. However, the two declare their love for one another and vow to stay together and fight for Nory’s/Strange’s freedom back in New York.

Convoluted? You bet. Full of coincidence? Absolutely. Indicative of the times. Yes indeed.

Good Man Gone Wrong Saved By the Love of a Beautiful Woman.

The writing is also indicative of the time. Very flowery and descriptive, with lots of philosophy thrown in for good measure.

Not something I would normally pick up and stay with, but I plowed through and could imagine the appeal to young lady readers swooning over the handsome Mr. Strange.

A suitable warm up to 1911. I think this project is going to give me a solid grounding in the changing literary styles in 20th century American writing.