October 2024 Book Reviews (1 Good 2 Garbage)

Currently Hating Charles L Grant and Christine Stead

Oct 27, 2024

The Grave by Charles L. Grant

According to Wikipedia, Charles L. Grant was the master of “quiet horror.” That's one way to say boring horror. Horror that never fucking goes anywhere. What would I think about this book if it wasn't advertised as horror? Would I have more patience with Jack, the detective who finds odd things and his romance with Andrea, the woman who keeps taking off her clothes whenever he seems close to finding a clue?

I doubt it.

The mystery elements might not have been so annoying were they not hitched to a horror novel. There's a car accident with an arm missing a body. An old woman disappears from the hospital even though she couldn't walk. Had I read a book called “Jack, Finder of Lost Things” or “The Mystery of the Plow,” I would not have spent half the book hoping for zombies.

Even worse, the “romance” with Andrea is little more than a plot device. Nothing about her is believable as anything but a sex fantasy. Sometimes she complains about her father being too demanding, but most of the time she's taking off her clothes. I spent most of the book going “ok ok, Jack loves Andrea. I get it. She's the killer or werewolf or ghost.” If you read any pulp books from the 70s or 80s, you are going to encounter that trope. The evil monster or wicked ruler is always going to be the character that the protagonist befriends early and trusts most. I doubt even Chalker thought he was fooling anyone.

Andrea is draining the life from townsfolk to live forever. At a certain point, she convinces Jack that her “father” is the killer so she can have sex with him one more time. Then she turns old and Jack kills her. Even thought I skimmed half, I finished this tedious little number angry that I had wasted so much time with it.

The Man Who Loved Children by Christine Stead

This book is 500 pages of two idiot parents. The dad talks in baby talk and the mom is perpetually angry. So it's like Everybody Loves Raymond, but with more laughs. Unfortunately, it has nothing else to say about these characters except that Henny is a raging bitch and Sam is a childish asshole. Many years ago, I reviewed Paula Bomer's Nine Months on Amazon. I thought that I was being fair. I liked the opening chapter. I thought that it was brave to write about such a self-involved creep. However, the protagonist was such a self-absorbed gentrifying Brooklyn idiot that I couldn't imagine anyone wanting to be trapped with this woman for 350 pages. Paula Bomer saw it and sent me a nasty message on Facebook before blocking me.

Happily Christine Stead is not on Facebook. Because she's dead. So I can safely say that I can't imagine anyone who would want to spend 500 pages with these assholes. After about 100 pages of pain, I skipped to the end where the oldest daughter, Louisa, decided to kill her parents by giving them cyanide. Sadly, the Everybody Loves Raymond writers never wrote that ending.

Louisa chickens out and only kills her stepmother. And even then, she claims that Henny knew all along. The afterword seems to think that Henny committed suicide. That was confusing because it seemed like Louisa just killed Henny. Perhaps, I missed he part where Henny went “oh that tastes like cyanide. Thanks! I've always wanted to drink cyanide!” before dying.

This book was published in 1940, disappeared for decades after poor sales and then came back into the mainstream. Then it faded again. Either way, it kept that creepy title. Was there ever a time in history when a book could be titled The Man Who Loved Children and not sound like the kind of book for pedophiles? I suppose Sam's behaving like a child even though he's a grown ass man implies that Sam probably shared more traits with Michael Jackson. It was definitely a manipulation.

Top of the Heap by Erle Stanley Gardner

By the author of Perry Mason! I'm so grateful to Hard Case Crime for reprinting this out of print title, especially after I suffered through The Grave and The Man Who Loved Children. I might forget this book in a few months, but happily I read all 222 pages within two days because I actually wanted to see where this one was going. It's a detective novel in the Raymond Chandler style and as much as we want originality in our fiction, there's a comfort in reading a novel that hits all the familiar beats.

Erle Stanley Gardner was one of those writers who wrote dozens of books and then got famous for a TV show. He wrote at least a dozen books in the Cool & Lam mystery series in which Donald Lam works with Bertha Cool, a woman too greedy to turn down the obviously sketchy clients. Bertha Cool is predictable. She's going to rage against Lam when he seems to lose money but she's going to be very friendly when he's making money.

A rich guy asks the agency to find the women he spent time with on Tuesday night, the same night that a gangster's moll disappeared. Lam investigates and finds the women. Only, he finds them too easily. So he keeps asking questions. Then things go bad, but never too bad. This is a detective novel in a series after all. It's not a James Ellroy Noir that kills off the protagonists. Donald Lam gets most of the answers to the questions. He gets roughed up but not permanently damaged. By the end, he finds a way to tell the local police (and the reader) everything that's been going on.

The last half gets a bit bogged down in detective cliches, but overall, this is a fun quick read. Fun quick reads don't get the respect they deserve. But try reading boring horror with turgid prose or boring literary books about unpleasant assholes and you too will be desperate for a fun quick read.

Existential Angst and Plushies - Tim Lieder's Substack

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