From Screen to Page #2

I'm back today with another instalment of From Screen to Page! You can find the first post in this little series here.

In my experience, dramas with the BBC can be a bit of a hit or miss. The Tudors? Yes. The White Queen? No. The Crimson Field? Yes. Birdsong? No. You get the drift.

Thankfully, if you're into period or historical dramas, whether they're original scripts or an adaptation of a book, the BBC is one of the best places to turn to. I've lost count of the amount of books they've adapted at this point. This year alone they've adapted Poldark, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Partners in Crime, Lady Chatterley's Lover, The Go-Between, An Inspector Calls and Cider with Rosie, and will soon be broadcasting The Last Kingdom, an eight-part adaptation of Bernard Cornwell's Saxon Stories, and an adaptation of War and Peace this winter.

They're well-known for their 1995 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice and their 2008 adaptation of Sense and Sensibility, and let's not forget their incredibly popular 2006 adaptation of Jane Eyre. On top of that there's all their original drama, like The Scandalous Lady W.

Basically, the BBC are no stranger to a period drama. In 2011, BBC Films produced The Awakening, an original British drama and ghost story. I love ghost stories, particularly haunted house stories, so I knew I was going to watch this. I didn't watch it straight away, I'll admit; I'm a bit of a wuss and, even though I love ghost stories, they do still give me the heebie jeebies, but then one summer it happened to be showing on the BBC, so I decided to sit down and watch it. And I thoroughly enjoyed it!

The film is set in 1921 and follows Florence Cathcart, an author whose fiancé was killed during the First World War and who now works with the police to expose supernatural hoaxes. She is visited by a teacher, Robert Mallory, who works at a boy's boarding school in Cumbria where a child has recently died. Everyone at the school believes that the building is haunted and that this haunting may have had something to do with the recent death, so Florence is hired to investigate.

If you haven't seen this film, I recommend checking it out. Perhaps I'm biased but I really enjoy British films and dramas, particularly ghost stories like this one, and it's an ideal watch for this time of year! I recommend curling up with a blanket and a hot chocolate. If you have seen this film and you'd like to experience more stories like this one, then there's a book you simply have to read.

The Little Stranger was first published in 2009 and is Sarah Waters' fifth novel. Sarah Waters is one of my favourite authors; she writes historical fiction set in the 19th and 20th centuries, and The Little Stranger is the only one of her six novels that doesn't have a queer female protagonist. Tipping the Velvet, Affinity, Fingersmith, The Night Watch and The Paying Guests all have LGBT* characters in the leading role.

You can check out my review of The Little Stranger here!

While The Awakening is a post-WW1 story, The Little Stranger is a post-WW2 story. Our protagonist is the middle-aged Dr Faraday, who finds himself becoming increasingly involved with Hundreds Hall, an old Edwardian house that is crumbling into ruin, and what remains of the aristocratic family who live there: the Ayreses.

Hundreds Hall is an eerie building, and the servants are convinced its haunted. What's wonderful about this story, though, is that it teases you - is there really a ghost, or are the Ayres family simply the unfortunate victims of mental illness and coincidence?

I adore this book. It's one of the best books I've read this year - I haven't been able to stop thinking about it since I put it down - and if you enjoy atmospheric, 20th century ghost stories like The Awakening or The Others you simply have to check this one out. It'll creep under your skin and take root there, and with Halloween on the way could you really ask for anything more than that?

Review | Horrorstör by Grady Hendrix

Horrorstör

by Grady Hendrix

My Rating: 

Something strange is happening at the Orsk furniture superstore in Cleveland, Ohio. Every morning, employees arrive to find broken Kjerring bookshelves, shattered Glans water goblets, and smashed Liripip wardrobes. Sales are down, security cameras reveal nothing, and store managers are panicking.

To unravel the mystery, three employees volunteer to work a nine-hour dusk-till-dawn shift. In the dead of the night, they’ll patrol the empty showroom floor, investigate strange sights and sounds, and encounter horrors that defy the imagination.

I am in no way a horror connoisseur, in fact I'm pretty sure I scare more easily now than I did when I was a little girl, and I scared fairly easily as a child. You might think I'm exaggerating, but I don't even like to watch Shaun of the Dead on my own; I hate dead, decaying things and the noises zombies make are enough to give me nightmares for weeks, and there was that time when I was about eight years old that my family watched I Know What You Did Last Summer - a film I ended up watching with them, probably because I was too stubborn to go to bed - and it terrified me that much I haven't been able to watch it since, which is ridiculous considering it's just another teen slasher movie.

I'm not hysterical - the Scream franchise doesn't bother me and I really enjoyed The Cabin in the Woods - but I have an overactive imagination which likes to frighten me even more when I'm tucked up in bed and all the lights are out. Sometimes, though, I like scaring myself. I think we all do, otherwise why would the horror genre exist? I'm not big on gore - I'm not all that squeamish when it comes to blood and guts, thanks to an upbringing filled with a lot of historical dramas where people were hanged, drawn and quartered left, right and centre - mainly because I think psychological horror is so much more skilful. I think frightening people with a gratuitous use of violence is a rather neanderthal approach to horror.

I've always loved ghost stories, though. I've been fascinated by ghosts since I was very young, and when you grow up in Yorkshire it's hard not to find them all the more interesting; York is said to be the most haunted city in Europe, if you like to believe in that kind of stuff (which I do). I love haunted house stories in particular, so when I stumbled across Horrorstör, described as a haunted house story in a department store, I had to have it.

Orsk is a furniture superstore that's not quite IKEA - it's cheaper, and the furniture's not quite as good - but it's certainly trying to be IKEA. Bless it.

At this particular superstore, however, things are becoming a little odd. Sales are down despite customers constantly buying, and every morning employees arrive to find mirrors and cabinets destroyed and a pungent, swamp-like smell seeping into some of the furniture. Recently the employees have been receiving one word text messages from an unidentifiable number: help.

Our protagonist, Amy, hates working in retail, but life hasn't been kind to her these past few years. Add to that a feeling that the world owes her something and she's not a happy bunny. She can't stand her manager, Basil, who seems to think Orsk is the centre of the universe, but when he offers her extra money and a transfer in exchange for her to work an overnight shift with him and one other employee, Ruth Anne, to find out who's breaking into the store, she agrees. And that's when the trouble really begins.

The first thing I have to say is that I LOVE the way this has been published. The book is formatted to look and feel like a department store catalogue: inside there are diagrams of the furniture, a map of the store, adverts for upcoming sales and even an order form. It's adorable, and I love it when publishers put effort into the way a book is produced. I'm glad to own this book just so I can take it off my shelf and go 'LOOK AT THIS IT'S LIKE A CATALOGUE'.

Reading Horrorstör felt like reading a horror movie. It doesn't mess around, it just pulls you into the story; like many horror films all the action takes place over the course of one night, and all you have to do is sit back and see who survives.

I loved the idea of a haunted furniture store - a haunted house story 'for the modern age' (though considering we still live in houses I'm not sure what to make of that statement) - but sadly I was a little disappointed by it. I was looking forward to discovering why a furniture store was being haunted; was it going to be a secondhand furniture store full of misplaced ghosts from other houses, or was it going to be something completely new? Instead it went down the (in my opinion) over-done route of a building 'built on haunted ground', which I thought was a shame.

I didn't hate it by any means, as you can see by my rating I enjoyed the book, I was just hoping for something a little different.

I wanted the characters to succeed - Amy, Basil, Ruth Anne, Trinity and Matt are all people you don't want to see get hurt, unless you're particularly sadistic - but sadly I didn't feel totally connected to them. Like I said, reading this felt like watching a horror movie, a movie like Scream or I Know What You Did Last Summer, where the characters could be characters from any other 'try and survive the night' story. There were little sections that fleshed them out, but I would have liked to have known them better because what I did discover I found pretty interesting. Amy in particular isn't the typical sweet and virginal heroine you usually find in the centre of horror stories, and that made for a nice change.

One thing I must say is to stay away from this if you're not a big fan of gore. I was a teensy bit disappointed that Horrorstör seemed to rely more on physical horror than psychological horror for its scares. It's nothing hugely gratuitous, but if you find the description of someone's fingernail peeling off 'like a wet stamp' then you might want to give this one a miss.

So, I didn't love this book but I did like it. It's a great read for this time of year, and it's also a great read for readers who really like horror movies; if you're a big fan of slasher movies or games like Until Dawn I think you'd like this book, and even if you don't end up loving it I think it's so fun to have it on your shelf because it's testament to what publishers can create.

Review | The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters

The Little Stranger

by Sarah Waters

My Rating:

One post-war summer in rural Warwickshire, Dr. Faraday is called to a patient at lonely Hundreds Hall. Home to the Ayres family for over two centuries, the Georgian house, once impressive and handsome, is now in decline. Its owners-mother, son, and daughter-are struggling to keep pace with a changing society, as well as with conflicts of their own. But are the Ayreses haunted by something more sinister than a dying way of life? Little does Dr. Faraday know how closely, and how terrifyingly, their story is about to become intimately entwined with his.

After I read Fingersmith (reviewed here!) I had a craving for two things: 1) more historical fiction, a genre I feel as though I haven't read much of this year, and 2) more Sarah Waters. I own four of Waters' novels - Affinity, Fingersmith, The Night Watch and The Little Stranger - and, having already read Affinity and Fingersmith, the book that most called to me was The Little Stranger. I couldn't remember the last time I read a ghost story, possibly last year when I read The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, and as autumn draws closer I was in the mood to get started on my Halloween reading.

The Little Stranger is a ghost story, but it isn't the kind of story that goes 'boo!' or frightens you with jump scares, it's psychological. So psychological, in fact, that it isn't always clear if there really is a haunting or if the family who live at Hundreds Hall, the Ayreses, are just the unfortunate victims of coincidence and mental illness.

Our protagonist is the middle-aged bachelor Dr. Faraday who finds himself slowly being pulled into the lives of the Ayres family at Hundreds Hall. Once a beautiful stately home, the Hall is falling into disrepair, as is the Ayres' way of life; the Second World War is over, and coming from a high class family no longer means what it used to. All that's left of the Ayres family are Mrs. Ayres and her two grown children, Caroline and Roderick. Roderick has been left scarred by the war and is struggling to keep the estate running, while the outgoing Caroline has returned from a life in the Wrens, which she loved, to help her mother and brother cope.

I feel as though I can't say too much about The Little Stranger without spoiling it. Not because it's particularly shocking - compared to the previous two Waters' books I've read, the storyline of The Little Stranger is fairly straightforward - but there's something about the atmosphere of this book that means it has to be felt. This is a superb ghost story, and I'm not at all ashamed to say that it gave me the heebie jeebies. One night I genuinely considered keeping my light on when I went to bed. Though I am a massive wuss.

I felt just as invested in the Ayres family as Dr. Faraday. It would have been so easy for the Ayreses to be a stereotypical ghost story family, but Waters once again succeeded in writing people rather than characters, and I fell in love with all three of them. I loved Caroline in particular, so much so that there were times when I wished she was the protagonist, but I could understand why she wasn't; with a story like this, you need a protagonist who is an outsider, and Faraday is certainly that.

It was due to Faraday that I wasn't sure how to rate this book at first. As the book went on I began to dislike him more and more, and I wasn't sure I could give a book five stars when I didn't like the main character, but the more I thought about it the more I realised how important that was. By the end of the story I'm not sure that Faraday is supposed to be likeable, or that whether or not the protagonist is likeable is important to a story like this one. As a ghost story, this book is one of the best I've ever read, so how could I not give it five stars?

Waters seamlessly includes detail in her narrative without ever bogging the story down, and I loved the way she tipped her hat to some of her influences, from Charles Dickens' Great Expectations to Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca to Edgar Allan Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher.

Stunning novel. I highly recommend it!

Review | The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman

The Graveyard Book

by Neil Gaiman

My Rating: 

After the grisly murder of his entire family, a toddler wanders into a graveyard where the ghosts and other supernatural residents agree to raise him as one of their own.

Nobody Owens, known to his friends as Bod, is a normal boy. He would be completely normal if he didn't live in a sprawling graveyard, being raised and educated by ghosts, with a solitary guardian who belongs to neither the world of the living nor of the dead. There are dangers and adventures in the graveyard for a boy. But if Bod leaves the graveyard, then he will come under attack from the man Jack—who has already killed Bod's family . . . 

After spending the majority of my teenage years struggling to read Neil Gaiman's work and convinced that he wasn't for me, I've managed to read three of his novels this year. My first read of 2014 was American Gods (reviewed here!), then in April I read Stardust, and now, as Halloween approaches, I thought it was finally time to read The Graveyard Book which, before this month, I'm fairly certain has been unread and sat on my shelves for almost ten years. Oops!

I've always loved bizarre, peculiar and spooky stories, so you'd think The Graveyard Book would be right up my alley, but the last time I tried to read it (several years ago now) I just couldn't get into it. In fact I struggled to get into the majority of Gaiman's stuff when I was younger; in the words of C. S. Lewis, I think I needed to wait until I was "old enough to start reading fairy tales again."

When I was compiling my Autumn TBR for Top Ten Tuesday I decided to include The Graveyard Book in the hope that I'd finally read it this year, and after I finished Blood Sinister (reviewed here!) that's just what I did.

My verdict? I loved it! In fact reading this book a second time made me wonder how I couldn't get into it the first time around, because once I'd begun I didn't want to stop. I didn't want this book to end.

I loved the idea of a child being raised by ghosts, and all of the characters were exquisite. Bod, in particular, is a charming protagonist. Gaiman's imagination is just so vast and wonderful that I feel as though I could bump into any one of those characters in the street - including the dead ones! From Silas to Miss Lupescu to Elizabeth Hempstock, I loved them all.

The story ended up being told differently to what I'd expected, but that was definitely a positive thing! I assumed that the majority of the book would revolve around Bod's quest for vengeance rather than Bod's childhood spent on a graveyard and all the adventures and peculiar characters he meets, and I'm so glad it was the latter - I can't remember the last time I read a book starring a younger protagonist that was so told so simplisticly but so beautifully. I wasn't bored for a second.

I'm torn between American Gods and The Graveyard Book as to which is my favourite Gaiman book; they're both such different stories, and while I adore American Gods and think it's Gaiman's masterpiece, I think The Graveyard Book might just be my new favourite. This book reminded me of being a child again. It's melancholic, and has a haunting fairy tale quality to it that swept me up and took me away from everything for a few hours.

I loved it. If you haven't already, read it!

J.

Review | Printer's Devil Court by Susan Hill

Printer's Devil Court

by Susan Hill

My Rating: 

A mysterious manuscript lands on the desk of the step-son of the late Dr Hugh Meredith, a country doctor with a prosperous and peaceful practice in a small English town. From the written account he has left behind, however, we learn that Meredith was haunted by events that took place years before, during his training as a junior doctor near London’s Fleet Street, in a neighbourhood virtually unchanged since Dickens’s times. 

Living then in rented digs, Meredith gets to know two other young medics, who have been carrying out audacious and terrifying research and experiments. Now they need the help of another who must be a doctor capable of total discretion and strong nerves. 

What's this? A book review on a Sunday! I know I don't usually post anything during the weekend, but I finished this little book this morning and found myself reviewing it over on Goodreads so I figured I might as well share it here, too. Especially as Halloween is approaching!

I like Susan Hill. I first came across The Woman in Black when I was about 15 and it scared the life out of me. When it comes to the traditional ghost story, Hill is up there with the best. Sadly, this story really disappointed me.

I hadn't realised Hill had released a new ghost story until I stumbled across it in my local library, and as Halloween is approaching I figured now would be the best time to borrow it. I'm a big fan of Gothic Literature that deals with themes such as re-animation and medical advancement gone wrong, like Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Robert Louis Stevenson's The Body Snatcher, so I was excited to read Printer's Devil Court and be thoroughly creeped out.

Sadly, it just didn't work for me. I didn't find the story spooky in the slightest, though there were some parts that made me a little sad. For the most part I was just bored. It isn't a long story at all, and yet it took me two days to get through it because I didn't feel like I had to know what was going to happen next. In fact if it were any longer I probably would have given up because I found the narrator so dull - he could have been any narrator from any story and I wouldn't have noticed the difference - and there was also the unfortunate inclusion of the "beautiful dead woman", which is a trope I am so tired of seeing in stories. Especially stories with male protagonists. It's creepy, and frankly if I saw someone dead or almost dead my first thought wouldn't be to mention that they're hella cute.

On top of that the edition I read had quite a few mistakes and typing errors throughout that just threw me off. I don't expect to find so many mistakes in so little a book, especially not when it's been published. That's more the editor's fault than anyone else's and I know it doesn't really affect the story in any way, but I found it distracting.

Sadly, it just wasn't for me, but I'll still read more Hill in future.