supernatural

Claire de Lune

admin — Sun, 04 Jul 2010 08:00:00 +0000

Claire de Lune, Christine Johnson’s debut novel, is a good, but not standout, addition to werewolf lit. The simple way that this twist on werewolf lore is presented will make it a quick and satisfying read to ardent werewolf lovers, though it will have a tougher time winning the hearts of others.

In Claire de Lune, Johnson introduces us to a different type of paranormal world, in which only females can be werewolves. It’s not a feminist book, per se, but the dynamic that this sets up allows Claire to grow into a strong and self-reliant girl/werewolf. Here, it’s the girl protecting the boy, not the usual other way around.

Having a girl be the strength in a relationship would be a great story, but the book never fully lives up to its potential. Outside of Claire, I found the characters difficult to get to know, most of them only fitting roles expected to appear in a paranormal romance: the tensions among the werewolf group members, the love interest’s villainous father, the head-butting mother. I never found myself fully immersed in Claire’s family dynamics, with her mother’s Type A “bad parent” personality and their rather inconsequential au pair (who’s more a red herring than a useful character). All of Matthew’s father’s supposedly malevolent machinations and campaign against werewolves remained in the distant background and never fully took on immediacy.

I guess I’m just extra cynical when it comes to paranormal romances nowadays: it’s going to take a lot to make something stand out for me. Claire de Lune never reaches that point, but I have no doubt that it will find its audience as scores of werewolf lovers prowl the shelves for something equally supernatural and romantic after watching Twilight for the twenty-eighth time.

Written by: Steph Su Reads, July 4th 2010

Shark Girls

admin — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 17:01:00 +0000

By Jaimee Wriston Colbert

Livingston Press

Shark Girls presents the reader with something horrific, and turns it into something humane. When a shark attacks eight-year-old Willa, her older sister Scat realizes that their lives are about to shift. At school, Scat becomes the one made fun of, because her peers don’t know what to do with the traumatic situation, but they know it would be mean to make fun of the victim of a shark attack. They have to place their confused and scared feelings somewhere, and so Scat becomes the bearer of their vulnerabilities.

As the sisters age, they both respond to the traumatic event in their own ways. Scat becomes a photographer of disasters and a pretty good drunk. Willa becomes more of a mythological force in the novel, as the media and her community label her “Shark Girl,” and believe that she has supernatural powers. While Willa and the shark attack are central to the story, the novel becomes more of a story about dealing with trauma, and learning how it affects all areas of our lives. Disability and the physicality of bodies is beautifully wrestled with throughout all of Shark Girls_, as they create visual reminders of tough emotional realities.

While the aftermath of the shark attack is the main setting to this novel, there is a cursory character development in the story that intrigued me. The girls’ mother, Jaycee, is a woman of her own actions. She has her children call her “Jaycee” because her name is not and never will be “Mom.” After giving birth to each one of her three children, Jaycee allowed herself the space to feel depressed, and didn’t push herself to be a mother until the wave of postpartum depression rolled over her. Jaycee comes off as being harsh and possibly uncaring, but I think there is also something be said here about how a woman can choose her life even in the face of motherhood. How much should a mother have to sacrifice her own identity in order to be viewed as a “good” mother?

Feminism is slowly making its move into the lives of these characters, but in the mix of trying to figure out what that means, the shark attack occurs and finding identity takes on a new path. Shark Girls_ reminds us that we haunted by our own pasts. But more than a story of personal ghosts and tragedy, we are reminded that the fragility of our bodies can become something to be in awe of, something we can be frightened of, and something we can try and forget in order to keep on living. Either path we choose, however, is a path that will always lead back to where we came from.

Written by: Chelsey Clammer, January 26th 2010

The Box

admin — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 11:55:00 +0000

Directed by Richard Kelly

Darko Entertainment

Norma (Cameron Diaz) and Arthur (James Marsden) receive a small box with a red button on top delivered by a mysterious man (Frank Langella) with half the left side of his face missing (gruesome, courtesy of CGI). It’s a Faustian deal. Press button and receive a million bucks. The catch: Someone unknown to you dies.

Here’s a good thing about The Box: The special effects water and its climax are très cool. Would that the rest of the flick were as compelling.

The melodramatic plot of nosebleeds, the afterlife, lightning, zomboids, Mars hokum, and the CIA borders on incoherent. Certain plot points in The Box are so problematic, silly, or contrived that you are lurched outside the tale. You will laugh, or else scratch your head and think, “Huh, what?" You will also wonder why you should empathize with the principal characters—who have good jobs and a nice home—when they would bump off a stranger in order to bridge a rough financial patch and be even more comfy in the future than they already are. Richard Kelly, the director and screenwriter, seems to have forgotten that—unless you’re Brecht and consciously demolishing the fourth wall—such maladroit lurchings shatter the willing suspension of disbelief.

Then there's the pacing—mostly glacial—and not interestingly glacial as in an Andrei Tarkovsky or Terrence Malick film, just leaden. Then there’s the dialogue. Every neophyte drama student knows that exposition creates backstory. The trick with exposition is to bury it in dialogue so astutely crafted that an audience is not aware that it's absorbing past facts crucial to an understanding of the present story. Exposition in The Box is often obvious and crudely dispensed (and there’s lots of it in an attempt to make the opaque plot transparent).

The film’s faults might be forgiven if it lived up to the raison d'être of its genre. The Box is supposed to be a supernatural/sci-fi thriller wrapped around a morality tale. Thrillers must have thrills. I don’t know about you, but my indispensable criterion for thriller thrills is whether the suspense is so fraught that my skin crawls and I’m perched on my seat’s edge. Attendant to this crawling and perching, I want to flee the theatre because I can’t stand one more second of apprehension. Yet I can’t leave. I am riveted to my cushion. The Box riveted me to my cushion twice. The several times I wanted to leave the theatre were occasioned by boredom.

Of many wasted efforts in The Box, Cameron Diaz is the most misused. Diaz is a game comedienne; she can also deglamourize and disappear in a part not seemingly meant for her—as she proved, respectively, in The Mask and Being John Malkovich. One automatically thinks of her as beautiful in the tall, blond manner. In The Box, sometimes she does appear lovely, but sometimes her face betrays her typecasting and seems close to ugly. Such a complex look is fruitful for an actress because she can use it to embody all the hope, love, joy, disappointment, sadness, and tragedy life brings. Her face sets Diaz apart from, say, Jennifer Aniston, who is merely pretty and—so far—only middling good at her craft.

Furthermore, Diaz has aged beyond being even a youngish romantic comedy lead. In The Box, she’s the mother of a pre-pubescent son. This aging is her and our blessing. It would be a marvel to see her on stage as Nora in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. She deserves, at least, a complex film role that struts her stuff as an actor capable of the most profound incarnations of multiple truths that drama can provide. The Box, however, is so vacuous that she has nothing worth playing with or for, though now and again you can see in her performance what might await. Let us hope she gets a great part soon, so she can triumphantly mark her development for all of us to witness. Meanwhile, spend your money elsewhere (see Bright Star again!) and hope that Mystery Science Theatre 3000 will be revived so The Box can receive the lampooning it deserves.

Written by: Neil Flowers, November 19th 2009

Cosmic Connection: Messages for a Better World

admin — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 23:12:00 +0000

By Carole Lynne

Red Wheel/Weiser

Cosmic Connection is a difficult book. Difficult because if you are not used to thinking about the world in multiple dimensions, the physical and spiritual, you will be taken aback by the author’s basic assumptions about life. If you are not initiated into the ideas and lingo of mediums, psychics, and the whole section of our culture with their ears attuned to another world, you will probably find this book to be “way far out there.” Author Carole Lynne tells the story of her journey as a medium, and reveals her experiences traveling through multiple dimensions and dreams. The book provides transcripts of the author’s communications with spirits or energies like “The Energy,” a “higher being” that she and the other mediums talk to.

It’s a shame there are so many charlatans posing as psychics or mediums, because it definitely hurts the credibility of the entire group. It’s unfortunate for both the author and most readers that these exploitative few have given our society such a suspicious and negative view of “supernatural” occurrences because the message the book offers is a truly positive and unifying one. Lynne posits that, with the many problems of the modern world, humans need to reach out to each other and open themselves up to a spiritual life to truly evolve. It’s hard to argue with the idea that our interconnectedness, or “Oneness,” gives humans a special interest in ending war, poverty, and pollution.

I approached Cosmic Connection with skepticism. Its content is outside of anything I’ve experienced (or anyone I know has experienced). Some of the terminology and visions that Lynne described seemed a little bit clichéd or implausible, and I found that I couldn’t discern a difference in the voice of “The Energy” Lynne channels and her own authorial voice. That said, Lynne’s acknowledgement of her uniqueness and the obvious sincerity with which she tells her story make it a compelling and interesting journey.

Written by: Jennifer Wedemeier, June 10th 2009

Skylight Confessions

admin — Sun, 06 May 2007 12:30:00 +0000

By Alice Hoffman

Little Brown and Company

After eighteen novels and eight children’s books one might think Alice Hoffman would run out of material in which to write, but her new book, Skylight Confessions, proves this theory wrong. She takes an everyday, dysfunctional family and breathes her own twist into it, coupled with a splash of supernatural.

Skylight Confessions is set in a house appropriately named The Glass Slipper because it is constructed of metal and glass panes. This metaphor of a glass is what gives this novel substance and allows the readers to watch this family from a safe distance. Arlyn Singer is a beautiful redheaded seventeen-year-old with seventy-six freckles on her face, who plants herself on the stoop of her father’s house on the eve of his funeral. She promises the next man who appears will be the man she marries. So begins the turbulent relationship between John Moody and Arlyn.

Arlyn was an optimist, who saw life in a much different way than John. “She was young enough not to see a glass as half empty or half full, but as a beautiful object into which anything might be poured.” With this beautiful language, which often resembles music, Alice Hoffman tells this story of pain, deceit, betrayal and death. Her use of mystical and supernatural experiences in her novels has brought much interest to her work. She does not fail the reader in this novel.

As the reader moves through this world of broken glass, stones and secret, winged men from Connecticut, they find an endearment to Sam, Arlyn and John’s son, who is charging down a road to annihilation. Life stories are never as simple as the telling, and this book brings this to the forefront of the reader’s mind. One tiny forgotten fragment can change one’s whole life.

The use of symbols - whether intentional or just plain, good writing - is strong and will leave the reader viewing things like soot, blackbirds, pearls and shattered china in a new light. I strongly recommend this book be added to summer reading lists. This reader loved it so much she read it twice.

Written by: Ann Hite, May 6th 2007

No Humans Involved

admin — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 00:46:00 +0000

By Kelley Armstrong

Bantam

A home in Brentwood, California is being used to house the stars and staff of the TV reality special Death of Innocence, where three mediums demonstrate their powers. Only one of them Jaime Vegas is the real thing, a talented necromancer who can see and talk to the dead. The climax of the special is to contact Marilyn Monroe, but Jaime’s interest in the show is that she is touched by ghosts and hears their chatter, but can’t make out what they are saying, which has never happened to her before.

She can’t reach out to them, but through empirical evidence she comes to the conclusion that they are children who were killed using blood magic. They are stuck in between places and neither another medium nor Jaime’s ghostly friends can reach them. The demon Aratron tells Jaime that the magic being used to keep the children in limbo is something unheard of. Now Jaime and her allies and her werewolf lover Jeremy, the North American alpha werewolf, try to set a trap that would bring the magic practitioners out of hiding so that Jaime can find a way to let the children pass over.

Jaime has some interesting allies on both sides of the veil including a half demon with chaos powers, a spirit in life that was a practitioner of the dark arts and now works for the Three Fates, and a werewolf. All of these characters are well developed, play significant parts in the story and are powerful beings not to be trifled with. Kelly Armstrong writes spellbinding supernatural fantasy in the tradition of Laurell K. Hamilton, Kim Harrison, and Charlaine Harris. There is plenty of action and a heated romance in No Humans Involved.

Written by: Harriet Klausner, April 18th 2007