This Week in Books | 17/01/18

This week I'm joining in with Lipsy @ Lipsyy Lost & Found to talk about the books I've been reading recently!

NOW: I loved the new adaptation of IT last year and decided to try the book, which is also in keeping with one of my reading goals to not be intimidated by the longer books on my shelves, and at 1,166 pages this is one of the longest books I've ever attempted to read. I'm not the biggest fan of Stephen King but I'm enjoying this one so far and enjoying taking my time and making my way through a book. Yes, parts of it are problematic and, no, I don't think I'm going to consider it a masterpiece when I finish it but I'll be very pleased with myself when I finally get through it.

THEN: I finished listening to A Natural History of Dragons in my car and really enjoyed the experience of listening to it. I'd like to listen to the other books in the series but I'll have to wait until I can afford the audio CDs to play in my car - they're so expensive!

NEXT: It's become something of a tradition for me to read a Binti story at the beginning of the year. I believe The Night Masquerade is the final book in this little trilogy and I'm looking forward to finishing the series and seeing how Binti's story ends - I'll probably pick this one up and whizz through it while I'm continuing to make my way through IT.

What have you been reading recently?

Has IT reignited my love of horror?

I've never liked clowns. If someone has to paint a smile on then I can't quite bring myself to trust them - even Ronald McDonald has always had me a bit suspicious. My true fear of clowns began, however, when I was very young - around five or six, I think? - when my parents took my sisters and I to the circus. The clowns didn't freak me out until my dad was picked for a trick - you know the one, where the 'victim' has to stand up against a dartboard, surrounded by inflated balloons, and the clowns throw knives - and, being only around five or six, I didn't understand that this was a trick. I genuinely thought there was a chance my dad was going to be injured and it upset me a lot.

'Please don't hurt my daddy!' I cried, and one of the clowns turned on me and shouted at me, 'comically', to shut up. I've hated them ever since and I don't think my parents ever took me to the circus again.

Like many people then, Stephen King's IT has always scared the living crap out of me. I tried reading the book and didn't get past the prologue, the adaptation starring Tim Curry scared me for a long time because he looked so, well, clownish, and then a remake, directed by Andrés Muschietti and starring Bill Skarsgård as the titular character, was announced and, like the glutton for punishment that I am, I decided to go and see it.

The result? I loved it. In fact I think IT is my new favourite horror film.

That's a weird thing for me to admit for several reasons: firstly, I'm not sure I really have a previous favourite horror film - The Silence of the Lambs would have been my previous answer if I had to think of one, but I think of The Silence of the Lambs as more of a thriller than a horror - because I don't tend to watch many of them, which leads me on to my second reason which is that I don't actually like horror films that much. I'm a big, big wuss. Every now and then I like scaring myself, all while knowing I'm probably not going to sleep properly for a couple of weeks.

I've always liked spooky things, though, even though I've always been such a scaredy-cat. I was obsessed with ghost stories as a child and there are plenty of horror films I've seen which have scared me because, like I said, I am a massive wuss, but they've always left me a little disappointed, too. So many horror movies, especially the teen slashers that spawn sequel after sequel, churn out the jump scares and the gore without any real substance, and for so long I've been yearning for a horror movie with characters I genuinely care about and worry for. Enter IT.

That all of IT's cast, aside from the titular monster himself, are children certainly doesn't guarantee the film's success. There are so many fantastic child actors out there, but unfortunately there are just as many films starring children who can't really act. This isn't the case here, I loved the kids and the chemistry between all of them is superb.

I haven't watched the show yet myself, but I have it on good authority that if you're a fan of Stranger Things you'll love this movie and these kids. Bill Skarsgård is brilliant as Pennywise but the kids, their relationship and their personal stories, are what makes this film and that's why I loved it as much as I did.

This is horror how I like horror, with the emphasis on the people having to deal with a terrifying place or scenario or person or entity rather than on that terrifying thing itself. IT has helped me realise that I don't stay away from reading horror because I don't like horror, but because years and years of bad movies have made me suspicious of the genre. Is that fair when books and films are completely different mediums? No, not at all, but life isn't fair.

So I'd like to read some more horror, because I think I'm going to find more books like IT than movies - though, ironically, not the original IT as I'm not the biggest fan of Stephen King's writing style. I want character-driven, character-focused horror, and if it happens to involve ghosts or witches and female leads I'll be even more inclined to read it.

Do you have any recommendations? Are you a fan of horror or is it a genre you stay away from? Are you planning to see IT? I can't recommend it enough, go and check it out!

You'll float, too.

Book vs. Adaptation | Carrie by Stephen King

Today I'm back with another Book vs. Adaptation post! So far I've done Sarah Waters' Fingersmith (here!), Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey (here!), Neil Gaiman's Coraline (here!) and Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca (here and here!), and today I'm going to be talking about the 2013 adaptation of Stephen King's debut novel, Carrie.

I read Carrie for the first time last month - it was one of the books on my Halloween TBR - and you can check out my book review here. I'd never seen any adaptations of Carrie before, I wanted to read the book first, and once I'd read the book I decided to seek out the most recent adaptation.

Carrie was published in 1974, and is the novel that started Stephen King's impressive career. The most famous adaptation is the one that followed two years later, in 1976, starring Sissy Spacek, but when I sought out an adaptation I immediately gravitated towards Kimberly Peirce's 2013 adaptation, starring Chloë Grace Moretz as Carrie White and Julianne Moore as her mother, Margaret. Why? Purely because I really like Julianne Moore and Chloë Grace Moretz, neither of whom are strangers to book adaptations.

Chloë Grace Moretz is something of an adaptation veteran; she's been in Let Me In (2010), Diary of a Wimpy Kid (2011), Hugo (2011), and If I Stay, and she'll soon be hitting our cinemas in the starring role of J Blakeson's adaptation of The 5th Wave. She was even considered for the part of Katniss - speaking of The Hunger Games, Julianne Moore is well-known for playing the part of President Coin in the franchise, and she also played Clarice Starling in Ridley Scott's adaptation of Hannibal. Both of them are pretty great actresses, so I was eager to see their portrayals of Carrie and Margaret White.

My dad and I sat down and watched this on Halloween - what's Halloween without a fitting film after all? - and the two of us enjoyed it!

Honestly? I actually enjoyed this more than the book, though if you've seen my review you'll know I found the latter half of the book to be a bit of a shambles. This film is a lot more concise, and I loved the extra scenes that were added; in the book the story is interspersed with pieces of 'non-fiction' all about telekinesis, and I was wondering how that was going to be included in this film. Unlike the book, which is set in the '70s, this adaptation is set in our present day, meaning there's more technology; characters have iPhones and Carrie uses YouTube to research telekinesis, which I thought was a really nice touch. In the book she does practice her own gifts, but she doesn't seem to wonder if anyone else is like her which I thought was a little odd.

I think this adaptation is acted very well, too. Moretz is a heart-breaking and believable Carrie and, after her portrayal of Mia in If I Stay, has cemented herself in my list of brilliant young actors. Naturally Julianne Moore is a fantastic Margaret White, and I thought the other cast members were great; Ansel Elgort was a charming Tommy, which I wasn't expecting if I'm perfectly honest, and I loved Judy Greer as Miss Desjardin and Portia Doubleday as Chris Hargensen.

I know quite a lot of Carrie fans were disappointed with this adaptation because they felt that too much was cut, but I don't think this film lost anything; I love a good disaster sequence as much as anyone else, but there's only so much I can watch before a film starts to get boring and repetitive, and for me this adaptation is a perfect balance of the horrifically sublime and the tensely subdued.

Whether you've read the book or not I recommend this adaptation! It's a particularly good film for people out there who don't like horror films - I guarantee this won't scare you.

Review | Carrie by Stephen King

Carrie

by Stephen King

My Rating: 

Carrie White is no ordinary girl.

Carrie White has the gift of telekinesis.

To be invited to Prom Night by Tommy Ross is a dream come true for Carrie - the first step towards social acceptance by her high school colleagues.

But events will take a decidedly macabre turn on that horrifying and endless night as she is forced to exercise her terrible gift on the town that mocks and loathes her...

This is a very frustrating book.

Throughout October I'm trying to read as many spooky books as I can, so I figured now was as good a time as any to cross Carrie off my TBR. It's only a little book, after all, and it was King's debut novel, so I was interested in reading the book that began his impressive career.

It's no secret that I'm not a big Stephen King fan. I think the guy's pretty amazing - he's one of those authors who's really managed to make a career out of writing - but I don't get on with his writing style. The only book of his I'd previously read and enjoyed, and actually managed to finish, is Misery, but other than that he and I just don't gel. That being said, I'd been wanting to read Carrie for a while; Carrie is the prom night gone wrong kind of horror story. Not only that, but I was eager to read a story by King where the main character isn't a male writer. He has a lot of those.

I didn't go into it with high hopes, so you can imagine my surprise when I found myself enjoying it. The story is pretty straightforward - it's probably the most linear of King's novels not that I'm an expert - but I liked it. I loved the themes of religion with Carrie's insanely devout mother, and the connection between puberty and the realisation of Carrie's previously latent telekinetic powers. It's twisted, but I wanted to see Carrie's fellow students punished because, let's face it, they all treat her diabolically. By the time they've learned to fear her - respect her - it's far too late to make amends.

I really enjoyed the way the book was set out, too. It alternates between the actual story - we see Carrie, her mother, her teachers, the other pupils - and then several non-fiction books within the book that are talking about Prom Night. There's one book all about telekinesis which talks about Carrie's past and the genetic aspects to the ability, and another which is an autobiography of one of Carrie's classmates who survived. There were times when I found the 'non-fiction' more interesting than the story because I liked the way King tried to find a scientific explanation for telekinesis.

Then the second half of the novel happened, and everything I'd liked about the first half just unravelled. It's only about halfway through the book that Prom Night happens - it literally says: 'Part Two: Prom Night' - so I assumed that the majority of the latter half of the novel was going to be Carrie wreaking her revenge on the entire town, and in a way it was, but it didn't feel quite as tight as the first half. King wrote about a lot of the events in hindsight, writing about police reports and witness testimonies, and I thought the scene in which Carrie killed the people who'd pulled the final prank - coating her in pig's blood - was very weak, and not written all that clearly. I was hoping the rest of the book would be formatted like the first, with the odd bit of 'non-fiction' but mostly Carrie destroying the town and everybody in it. Instead, it was rather underwhelming.

I didn't dislike the book, but I didn't love it either which is a real shame because I think I could have if bits of it were a little neater or a little tighter or a little better. It's a story with a lot of potential, but, for me, that potential wasn't realised.

I did enjoy it, though, and I think it's a good read for this time of year. I'd like to check out the 2013 adaptation with Chloë Grace Moretz and Julianne Moore soon!

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.