Tag: Bury Me Deep

No Way Out

Work at home Friday, and I’ve already gotten my bloodwork done and my X-rays taken. It was amazingly easy and took very little time. I drove over to Touro this morning and was out of Quest Labs by 8:10, after which I took the pedestrian bridge across the street to Touro Hospital, and was all X-rayed and back in my car by 8:30 and home by 8:35! It all went so easily and quickly I never had a chance to open the book I brought with me–Megan Abbott’s El Dorado Drive–so that will have to wait until I take a break at some point today. I am very excited to have a new Megan Abbott to read; I’ve been a huge fan since I read Bury Me Deep for an award over fifteen years ago, I think? I have now read all of her works, and so always anxiously await the arrival of a new one. I think we’re going to Costco when I finish my work today, and this weekend we’ll be seeing Superman–the MAGA outrage only serving to whet my appetite for the film all the more. The apartment is, of course, it’s usual disaster area this morning, but the dishwasher is running and I’m about to start the laundry. Getting there!

I also need to get back on my writing horse. The headache (which I still have) this week has been highly annoying and has interfered with most of my intellectual pursuits this week, which truly sucks. I still get new ideas all the time–that curse will carry me to the grave, methinks–but I’m struggling to actually get writing done. This is what happens when you fall off the wagon and don’t write for a while; you get out of practice–at least I do, and it’s hard to get back into that groove again, which kind of sucks. I am hoping that this weekend will do the trick for me. I don’t feel tired this morning (just the damned headache), and actually feel pretty awake, so maybe today will be a good day.

I was groggy most of yesterday at work–that Thursday malaise–and made groceries on my way home from the office AND picked up the mail. Sparky was pretty needy and I was tired by the time I got home, so I just sat in my chair getting caught up on the news–always a depressing slog–until Paul got home. We finished MurderBot last night, and was sorry to see it end, frankly. Would I find Alexander Skarsgard as charming and likable if he wasn’t gorgeous? But the actor and character are certainly perfectly matched, and when I looked it up last night the show has been renewed for a second season, which could be difficult to pull off–given the finale of the first season. We’ll give it a go, of course–the one thing I prefer about Apple+ to Prime and Netflix is they give shows more than one season.

I wish they’d bring The Morning Show back for another season.

And football season looms just over the horizon, too.

And the demon cat has grown bored with attacking me and has disappeared. *Whew*, now I can get some things done without getting bitten and clawed. (He’s just playing, I know, but that doesn’t make the teeth or claws any less sharp and skin-piercing!) I feel pretty good–the coffee is hitting the spot and my breakfast is going down well. I’m not as hungry as I was since getting out of the hospital, so maybe my body is settling back into being what it normally was. I’ve not had dinner–or had any desire for it–since Monday night; which was also the last day I was on the steroid. Maybe the headache is steroid withdrawal? It could be.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Friday, and I’ll be back either tonight or tomorrow morning.

If Anyone Falls

I finished reading the new Megan Abbott novel, Beware the Woman, this morning during a marvelous, raging thunderstorm that filled the gutters and streets of New Orleans with dirty swirling water, cutting the temperature to something bearable for once this summer and cooling the interior of my apartment to the point I needed to put on a sweatshirt and a knit cap on my head. Curled under a blanket with a good book while a thunderstorm rages with a warm cup of coffee on the side table, tendrils of steam rising in curly-cues of white from the creamer-lightened pool of soft brown, is perhaps my happiest of places.

Hell, reading anything new by Megan Abbott is my happiest of places.

My first Megan Abbott novel was Bury Me Deep, which stunned me with its craftsmanship, its voice, its literate choices of words and sentences structures that are short yet lyrical, minimalist strokes painting a broad canvas of human frailty and contradiction, crime and desire that comes from a primal place within, almost inexplicable and unexplainable yet so easily understandable and recognizable. I went on from there to Dare Me and the rest of her all-too-short canon; admiring, loving, respecting and enjoying each book with its magical spell woven by a true master of the literary form, astonishing in its humanity and an exploration of what lengths her characters will go to in order to get the thing (or things) they want, need, desire and hunger for.

Some of the earlier reviews I saw for Beware the Woman painted some parallels between the book and what is perhaps my favorite novel of all time, Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier…which had me intrigued and interested even more than usual.

But more on that later.

“We should go back,” he said suddenly, shaking me out of sleep.

“What?” I whispered, huddled under the thin bedspread at the motor inn, the air conditioner stuck on HI. “What did you say?”

“We should turn around and go back.”

“Go back?” I was trying to see his face in the narrow band of light through the stiff crackling curtains, the gap between every motel curtain ever. “We’re only a few hours away.”

“We should go back and just explain it wasn’t a good time. Not with the baby coming.”

His voice was funny, strained from the AC, the detergent haze of the room.

I propped myself up on my elbows, shaking off the bleary weirdness.

We’d driven all day. In my head, in my chest, we were still driving, the road buzzing beneath us, my feet shaking, cramped, over the gas.

Our main character here is Jacy Ashe, a pregnant wife in her early thirties, married to a neon sign artist, Jed, and working as an elementary school teacher. They are en route when the story opens to the remote upper peninsula of Michigan (primarily known to me from Steve Hamilton’s novels) to visit Jed’s retired doctor father, who lives up there in what used to be the family summer place, with his housekeeper, Mrs. Brandt. This is one of the classic set-ups of one of my favorite subgenres of crime fiction–the Gothic–as well as placing it strongly into another category I love, domestic suspense. This novel has echoes of du Maurier, Phyllis A. Whitney, Dorothy B. Hughes, and Margaret Millar…blended seamlessly together into a classic yet modern novel that updates and reinvigorates both subgenres, bringing them into the modern era and proving they are still just as relevant and important as they have ever been.

(Aside: I do not know where Abbott came up with the name “Jacy,” but it’s one I’ve always liked and wanted to use in my own work since first reading Larry McMurtry’s The Last Picture Show and seeing the Bogdonovich film based on it; I smiled and wondered if that was where Abbott got the unusual name from.)

The Gothic set-up is there, and I can also see the slight echoes from Rebecca: the brooding remote house in the country where tragedy has occurred in the past; the mysterious housekeeper who doesn’t seem to like our heroine very much; the slow-burn of slow revelations of secrets from the past; and the creeping paranoia and potential gaslighting of Jacy…often explained away as her pregnancy hormones or a reaction to the medications after she has a pregnancy complication. One of the strengths of Gothics, for me, is that question of paranoia vs. reality; the gaslighting that is always a hallmark of a Gothic novel. After all, what reason could either Jacy’s father-in-law or husband have for wanting to drive her mad and risking her baby’s health and well-being? She feels her husband slipping away from her and no one seems to believe her…this is probably one of the best depictions of a paranoid pregnant woman in literature since at least Rosemary’s Baby.

Someone once said the Gothic and domestic suspense novels were “women’s noir,” because the danger to them always arose from them being women and doing women’s things; a reaction to the terror of getting married and placing (until very recently) all of your agency into the hands of your husband–and what if you chose poorly?

Abbott takes the best elements of noir and combines them with the foundations of domestic suspense and Gothic to explore what it is like to be a woman, how it is to be a woman, and the trap of societal and cultural expectations for women.

And there’s a reason why the cops always look at the husband first when a woman is killed.

This is a brilliant novel, with many layers to unpack and unravel through its deceptively simple voice and brevity of language. Megan Abbott is a sorceress, a Scheherazade of crime fiction to whom you simply cannot stop listening. Read it, cherish it, love it.

Sugar Walls

Sunday morning. Yesterday wasn’t nearly as productive as I would have hoped; but I am pleased to report that “My Brother’s Keeper” is finished,  and “Don’t Look Down” isn’t nearly as big of a mess as I thought it was before reading it from beginning to end. It needs some serious polishing before I can consider it to be done–or read it aloud–but I think another push on it today and it will be done. I also started writing yet another story yesterday–“This Thing of Darkness”–which is kind of an interesting idea. We’ll see how it goes. My goal for today is to finish “Don’t Look Down” and “Fireflies” today so they are ready for the read-aloud. And, of course, once “Don’t Look Down” is finished, my collection will be as well–which is kind of exciting.

I didn’t work on Scotty yesterday; I am going to hold off on going back to work on him until tomorrow. I want to get this collection finished, and he needs to sit for another day. I may go back and reread what I’ve already written; the first fourteen chapters, so I can figure out where, precisely, this next chapter needs to go.

I also finished reading Megan Abbott’s amazing Give Me Your Hand last night.

29569206

I guess I always knew, in some subterranean way, Diane and I would end up back together.

We were bound, ankle to ankle, a monstrous three-legged race.

Accidental accomplices. Wary conspirators.

Or Siamese twins, fused in some hidden place.

It is powerful, this thing we share. A murky history, its narrative near impenetrable. We keep telling it to ourselves, noting its twists and turns, trying to make sense of it. And hiding it from everyone else.

Sometimes it feels like Diane was a corner of myself broken off and left to roam my body, floating through my blood.

On occasional nights, stumbling to the bathroom after a bad dream, a Diane dream, I avoid the mirror, averting my eyes, leaving the light off, some primitive part of my half-asleep brain certain that if I looked, she might be there. (Cover your mirrors after dark, my great-grandma used to say. Or they trap the dreamer’s wandering soul.)

Megan Abbott has been a favorite of mine, since years ago when I first read Bury Me Deep as a judge for the Hammett Prize. A period noir, set in the early 1980’s and based on a true story, I was blown away by its deceptive simplicity and hidden complexities. It echoed of the great noirs of James M. Cain and great hardboiled women writers, like Margaret Millar and Dorothy B. Hughes; a tale of desperation and love and murder, crime and ruined reputations, as it delved into the complex emotions that could lead a woman to commit a horrifically brutal murder; its exploration of small-town corruption was reminiscent of Hammett’s Red Harvest. Over the years since that first reading, I’ve gone on to read Abbott’s other brilliances: This Song is You, Queenpin, Dare Me, The End of Everything, You Will Know Me. Her women aren’t victims in the classic sense of victims in crime fiction; her women have agency, they make their decisions and they know their own power; a common theme to all of her novels is the discovery of that power and learning to harness it; whether it’s sexual power (The End of Everything), physical power (You Will Know Me), cerebral (Give Me Your Hand), or inner strength (Dare Me).

And somehow, she manages to continue to grow and get better as a novelist, as a writer, with every book.

She is probably the greatest psychological suspense writer of our time; her ability to create complex inner lives for her characters, to explore the duality of weakness and strength we all carry within us, and the delving into the complicated nuances of female friendships, with all their inner rivalries and passions and jealousies and affections, is probably unparalleled. Her books are also incredibly smart and layered; this one has references, both subtle and overt, to both Hamlet and Macbeth seamlessly woven into the text; the dual, competing themes of inertia despite the knowledge of a crime versus unfettered ambition; and what to do when faced with both. How do you decide? And what does your decisions say about you as a person?

Give Me Your Hand is set in the world of research science, which may seem a weird setting for a crime novel…but competition for research funding and positions, for advancement in career, the thin veneer of civility and camaraderie between co-workers angling for plum research assignments, is at its very heart, noir. One of the characters, Alex, says at one point, jokingly, “we’re a nest of vipers”…and it turns out to be very true.

The novel follows the complex friendship between the main character, Kit Owens and Diane Fleming, who first meet as young teens at Science Camp, and again later their senior year of high school. They become friends, with similar interests; Kit and Diane push each other to be their very best. It is the friendship with Diane that sets Kit on the road to  her career as a research scientist; yet their friendship is blown apart by a secret Diane shares with Kit,  and the knowledge of that shared secret haunts both women for the rest of their lives. Their paths cross again years later, working in the same lab and competing for a limited number of spots on a new, important research project having to do with how excessive premenstrual syndrome: premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD). The book also offers two timelines: the senior year, with its heavy influence of the Hamlet theme, and the present, which is more on the lines of Macbeth. Blood also is used, repeatedly, brilliantly, as an image; the study is on a disorder caused by menstruation, and of course, blood as in relatives, as a life-force, as a motivator.

The book is slated for a July release; usually when I get advance copies I wait until the release date is imminent for me to blog about these books. But this one couldn’t wait; I’ve not been able to stop thinking about it since finishing it late last night.

Preorder the hell out of this, people.