Build Your House Around My Body by Violet Kupersmith

Her House is haunted by ghosts and monsters

Published in 2021 when she was 32 years old, Build Your House Around My Body is Violet Kupersmith's first novel. Her mother fled Vietnam in 1975 following the fall of Saigon. Violet, who is half white and grew up in Pennsylvania, spent a year teaching English in Vietnam on a Fulbright scholarship in 2011. All of those experiences feed into this astoundingly well-written debut novel. 

Review

Having just finished the book, I feel as if I would probably only fully appreciate it if I were to go back and read it again -- though it isn't at all hard to follow on first reading. The story stretches across several decades (from the days of French Indochina until 2011) and is told in a non-linear fashion, jumping back and forth across the years and recounting events in the lives of characters whose relationships to each other aren't clear at first. (The author says she was inspired by David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas.)

The way Kupersmith structured the novel is impressive as narrative revelations always seem to come at just the right time no matter how out of temporal sequence they may be. My one small criticism of this novel is that, in her assiduous determination to weave together every character's relationship to the others, it gets a little tedious in the final third. The conclusion is quite satisfying, though.

The first character we meet is Winnie, who arrives at the airport in Saigon from the U.S. planning to stay with a great aunt and teach English at a small language school. Even though the novel features an ensemble cast of characters, Winnie will remain central because every chapter is situated, not just in its geographical location, but also in relation to the day she disappeared. So, as you are reading the book, you are constantly reminded that something (presumably bad) is going to happen to Winnie. She is, however, not a sympathetic character. She's lazy and doesn't even try to be a good teacher. She'll do whatever she must to get by with the least amount of effort. She's dishonest and slovenly -- kind of a rat.

Winnie's brother, Thien, pesters her to meet up with an old friend of his from medical school who is living in Vietnam now. "He'd be more than happy to show you the ropes." Winnie finally accedes to her brother's request and meets Dr. Sang. It turns out that Sang set up his practice in Saigon because it's a place where he can pursue his "other interests," besides being a doctor. Drug dealing is one of those interests. Human trafficking is another. During their brief time together, Sang takes Winnie to the snake house at the zoo where he shows her a two-headed cobra that he himself donated to the zoo. That cobra and many others will play a crucial role in later developments.

Winnie will eventually visit the Café Max, which is the headquarters of the Saigon Spirit Eradication Co. We're told that Vietnam is rife with ghosts, so chasing them away is a sought-after service. The company is headed by the Fortune Teller, who is helped by his (possibly clairvoyant) First Assistant and (bumbling) Second Assistant. The Fortune Teller is good at fortune telling and removing ghosts, but he is somewhat embarrassed by his affliction, which is that he is possessed by a monster. The Fortune Teller once encountered a young girl named Binh and two boys (Tan and Long) who were her accomplices in a graveyard extortion scheme, but he scared them off by unhinging his jaw and opening his mouth wide enough to swallow them all. Binh, Tan, and Long will all become involved with Winnie in different ways.

Kupersmith writes beautifully, and her fecund imagination weaves complex and convincing backstories for her characters. She also departs from mimesis and imbues the novel with supernatural elements. A copper-colored smoke monster roams throughout this novel, inevitably bringing to mind the smoke monster in the TV show Lost. We're told it has no memory because it is itself a memory. Once it takes possession of you, it gives you the ability to move from one body to another. 

Maybe that's a metaphor for the way that reading a well-written novel lets you move from one life to another. Kupersmith certainly accomplishes that here, and I can only imagine the heights to which she'll ascend in future works. 

The Cry of the Owl by Patricia Highsmith

Not sure why but this is my favorite picture of Patricia Highsmith

Patricia Highsmith's 1962 novel The Cry of the Owl provokes anxiety in the reader from the outset, and that feeling doesn't let up until the very end. You may find that it doesn't even let up for a while after the end.

Review

Robert Forester has moved from New York to a small town in Pennsylvania where he has taken a job as a draftsman for an aeronautical engineering company. Robert is getting divorced from Nikki. It was a short, unhappy marriage, and he feels depressed, lonely, and at loose ends living in a strange town. One night he happens to drive past a house where he glimpses a pretty young woman in her kitchen. For reasons he doesn't quite understand, he's so taken with the scene that he turns his car around, parks down the block, and walks over to stand in the shadows and watch her through the window. 

As time goes by, Robert becomes addicted to watching the woman (and her boyfriend) through the front windows of her house. The young woman's name is Jenny; her boyfriend is Greg. They've been together for a while and seem to be moving toward a formal engagement. Robert has no intentions toward Jenny. He doesn't want to hurt her or have sex with her or even meet her. Just watching her gives him a sense of calm and well-being. More than once, however, when he's moving around in the shadows he accidentally makes noises that lead her to think there may be a prowler outside. Sometimes she sends her boyfriend out to search the property; but Robert always manages to avoid getting caught.

After a while, Robert realizes he has to stop peeking into Jenny's house. If he gets caught, he would likely be arrested. He could lose his job. His soon-to-be-ex-wife would ridicule him. One evening he goes over to Jenny's house for what he tells himself will be the last time. As he watches, Jenny comes out of the house with some trash that she dumps into a container and sets on fire. As she stands there contemplating the blaze, Robert falls into a reverie watching her... until he realizes Jenny is looking right at him. He awkwardly spreads his hands and says hello. She asks him if he is the prowler she keeps hearing. He admits he is but promises he'll leave and not come back. A conversation ensues, and Jenny eventually invites him into her house. They talk for a long time and lay the first foundations of a friendship.

As time goes by, Jenny confesses that she's not sure she loves Greg enough to marry her. Robert understands but impresses on her that he is not interested in a romantic relationship; nevertheless, she begins to fall in love with him. Greg doesn't take well to being dumped. When Jenny can't explain how she met Robert, Greg becomes convinced that Robert was the prowler and that he's some kind of dangerous kook. As he goes through various machinations trying to scare Robert away, Greg eventually gets in touch with Nikki to try to learn more about him. Nikki, not to put too fine a point on it, is a perverse narcissist who takes pleasure in destroying other people's lives. So, of course, she gleefully feeds Greg everything he wants to hear. 

One night Greg runs Robert off the road in a lonely stretch of highway that goes by the river. They get into a fight, and, although Greg is the bigger of the two, Robert has had military training and holds his own. At one point they tumble down the bank into the river, where Greg apparently hits his head on some rocks and becomes groggy. Robert pulls him out of the water and leaves him sitting on the river bank. He drives away to meet Jenny, and he tells her what happened.

This is the point at which the story makes a big turn. Greg's abandoned car is found by the river the next day, but Greg never shows up. Robert goes to the police and tells them what happened. But days and weeks go by, and Greg is never seen again. Suspicion falls harder and harder on Robert that the version of the story he told isn't true, that Greg ended up in the river drowned. Maybe it was manslaughter; maybe it was deliberate murder. In his efforts to break up Jenny and Robert, Greg had told the prowler story to anyone and everyone who would listen. People begin to wonder about Robert's character. Even Jenny begins to wonder. Weeks later a badly decomposed body washes up downriver. Robert's life spirals more and more into a hell of uncertainty and suspicion, and even attempts on his life. 

Throughout the book, Robert remains a decent person. He isn't a good man turned bad, like, say, Guy Haines in Strangers on a Train. Instead, he's an innocent who keeps unintentionally causing bad things to happen to innocent people, who has enemies who want to destroy him for no good reason, and who almost everyone comes to regard with hostility and distrust. Because Highsmith has done a brilliant job of putting you in Robert's shoes, you squirm anxiously with every twist and turn of the narrative.

Paradoxically, you race from chapter to chapter just to find out how much worse things can get. Robert comes off as a two-dimensional character, but I believe Highsmith made him that way to emphasize the idea that the universe is fundamentally indifferent to our moral character. 

As for how it all works out, I will only say that the book does finally climax in a glorious Grand Guignol blood fest that is quite satisfying. 

Parts of this book are a bit mystifying. You may feel some sympathy toward Robert even as he becomes a Peeping Tom because you understand his loneliness and pain. But when he inadvertently gains Jenny's love, inexplicably he doesn't want it. He just wanted to admire her from a distance, nothing more. He seems almost asexual. He's coming off of a bad marriage, but his ex-wife Nikki wasn't just a bad match for him. She is actually one of the most hateful characters in literature. Her vindictiveness and cruelty exceed all limits of rationality, making Medea seem placid in comparison. 

Unlike Roland Barthes, I think knowing a few details about the author's life can sometimes help you appreciate a book. Here are a few tidbits via biographer Joan Schenkar. 

Highsmith was once smitten by a pretty young blonde and spied on her voyeuristically. As her misanthropy increased, Highsmith eventually found that she enjoyed looking at pictures of attractive women but had no interest in actual relationships with them, just as Robert enjoyed admiring Jenny in the window but wanted nothing else from her.  

Highsmith had a two-year affair with another author, the lesbian pulp fiction writer Marijane Meaker, who wrote under the pen name Vin Packer. Highsmith was extremely bitter over their breakup, and the hideous Nikki is probably a projection of Highsmith's feelings about Meaker. 

Mine by Robert McCammon

McCammon turns the suspense up to 11

The author dedicates this book "to the survivors of an era when the whole world was watching." He is, of course, echoing the chant of anti-Vietnam War demonstrators in 1968, and some aspects of the book probably resonate best with those of us who remember the unrest of that era. Nevertheless, it's a gripping thriller, lacking in any of McCammon's usual supernatural elements, and the core story could easily happen today.

Review

Mine is the story of two women. The first, Mary Terrell, is a former left-wing, violent radical who has been wanted by the FBI since 1969. Back then she was called "Mary Terror" because she was an effective soldier in the war to take down the system, an enthusiastic participant in bombings and shootings. She was also in love with a charismatic radical leader they called Lord Jack. She even became pregnant with Jack's child but miscarried during a violent shootout with the feds. 

Twenty years later, Mary is living a marginal life under an assumed name, one in a series of false identities. She's good at disguises, good at acting, having taken drama classes in college, though she can never hide the fact that she's six feet tall. Mary has become more and more divorced from reality, however, as time has gone on. She's paranoid and schizophrenic. She has a closet full of mutilated baby dolls that she "raises" as she fantasizes of returning to Jack with their baby and living out the idyllic hippie marriage to him she had always imagined. They're mutilated because her violent temper always overcomes her, and she ultimately "murders" each of the dolls.

Laura Clayborne, the other woman in this story, is 36 years old and pregnant for the first time. Laura had been a bit of a hippie herself back in the day, but now she's a senior reporter and book reviewer for the Atlanta Constitution's lifestyle section. Her husband Doug is a stockbroker for Merrill Lynch. She drives a BMW; he drives a Mercedes. From the outside they have a good life. They don't really love each other any more, but they have a baby boy on the way and maybe that will make things better. (Doug is having a secret affair, though.)

After an evening of dropping acid and having sordid sex, Mary comes across a cryptic message in the back of Rolling Stone she'd bought earlier that day. "Mr. Mojo has risen. The lady is still weeping. Does anybody remember? Meet me there. 2/18, 1400." Mary instantly recognizes these as coded terms used by her group, Storm Front (a hyper-violent offshoot of the Weather Underground). The author of the message is proposing that the old team get back together on February 18 at 2PM. Twenty-six days from now! Mary knows where the "weeping lady" is. And she is doubly sure the writer is Lord Jack himself. Mary is going to reunite with the love of her life, the man she still thinks about every day, after twenty years. And, she decides, she's going to bring their baby back to him. Mary is happy and begins to lay plans.

Doug is with his girlfriend the night Laura's water breaks. She knows because she followed him. But now she has to get herself to the hospital fast. It is a difficult delivery. When it is over, Laura leaves a message for her husband on the home answering machine, knowing it is over between them. Her baby, David, is only two days old and resting on Laura in the hospital bed when a tall nurse enters the room and tells her she needs to take him to be weighed. Mary has used her skill in deception to case the hospital, modify a nurses' uniform to match theirs, and take the baby out a back door with a disabled alarm. She wasn't after Laura's baby in particular, but stealing a boy baby is a real bonus. She knows Lord Jack will be pleased to have a son!

Mary begins her cross-country trek to find Lord Jack. Laura is at first hysterical with fear, rage, and grief, but she pulls herself together and develops a steely resolve to get her baby back. And thus begins the chase. The cops are useless and her husband is out of the picture, so Laura takes matters into her own hands, chasing down the clues to Mary's past, ferreting out the surviving members of her terrorist group, and following her trail. Mary Terror is no easy target, however; she's already left several people dead in the wake of her journey, and more will die before it's over. All the while, the newborn baby in her possession pushes the levers of her violent temper with his crying, raising the specter of those mutilated dolls even as Mary tries to remember that she's doing it all for Jack. 

Mine consists of 400 pages of nerve-wracking suspense interspersed with nail-biting scenes of violent conflict and gore, parallels, reversals, and twists. If that sounds good to you, I'd suggest starting it on an evening when you don't have to get up early the next day.

The Keep by F. Paul Wilson

F. Paul Wilson was a practicing doctor throughout most of his writing career

The Keep by F. Paul Wilson was published in 1981 and became an immediate bestseller. A movie based on the book was released two years later. (We'll come back to that.) It's easy to see why the book hit the bestseller lists. It has all the right elements, including an intriguing premise, spooky supernatural happenings, a passionate romance, and a fast-paced, easy-to-absorb narrative style. Wilson says his inspirations for the novel were the works of Robert Ludlum, Robert E. Howard, and H.P. Lovecraft. As unlikely a mixture as that may sound, all of those influences are clear in the text.

Review

As the story begins, the young Sturmbannführer (Major) Erich Kaempffer, of the SS, has been chosen for an important post in Romania. He'll be in charge of opening a death camp in Ploiești -- a real feather in his cap! But before he can take up his post, the German High Command wants Major Kaempffer to look into (and resolve) a small issue of some concern. Captain Klaus Woermann, of the regular German army, has been posted to a small castle-like structure in the Carpathian Mountains, where he and his men are to guard a strategic pass from the Russians. Woermann's men, however, are being killed, one by one, each night, and he can find no answer to what's causing those deaths. The Captain has, therefore, asked permission to move his men out of the keep. This is unacceptable to High Command, and, therefore, Major Kaempffer has been tasked with investigating the matter and putting an end to the killings.

Kaempffer finds this annoying for two reasons. First, it delays him from taking up his real work, which will advance his position in the party. Second, he has a history with Captain Woermann, whom he dislikes. The two men's distaste for each other adds an extra level of conflict throughout the book.

Back when Woermann arrived at the tiny village in the Dinu Pass, he discovered that the keep was maintained by a caretaker named Alexandru and his two sons. Alexandru warned the Captain that he and his men would not be able to stay in the keep. When asked why, the caretaker told him that bad dreams drive people out. Woermann, of course, found this amusing, dismissed the warnings, and had his men begin setting up electrical lights and generators, weapons emplacements, and barracks in the keep. As for who owns the keep and pays for its maintenance, Woermann could find no answers.

It is at first assumed that some kind of resistance movement must be behind the deaths of the German soldiers in the keep. When Kaempffer arrives, he uses brutal SS tactics to terrorize the villagers into giving up the rebels. But it becomes obvious that something else is in play when Kaempffer is confronted one night by the animated corpses of two of his own men.

Woermann and Kaempffer learn from the local innkeeper Iuliu that a Jewish scholar from the University of Bucharest, Professor Theodor Cuza, is an expert on the history of the region and may be able to help them figure out what's behind the killings. Although Kaempffer is unhappy with relying on a Jew, the dying Professor Cuza and his daughter Magda, who takes of him, are quickly brought to the keep against their will.

Cuza is highly resistant to the idea that he can help the Nazis in any way, but he becomes intrigued despite himself when he is brought a cache of books that had been found hidden in a small chamber in one of the walls. This is one of my favorite parts of the book, though it may pass right by non-fans of H.P. Lovecraft. As an in-joke on the author's part, all of the books and manuscripts that are brought to professor Cuza are directly taken from Lovecraft's work or other writers who participated in the Mythos-related writings. For those who are interested, here's the list:

• The Book of Eibon "du Nord translation" (from Clark Ashton Smith)
• De Vermis Mysteriis by Ludwig Prinn (from Robert Bloch as Mysteries of the Worm)
• Cultes des Goules by the Comte d'Erlette (from Bloch)
• The Pnakotic Manuscripts "in scroll form" (from H.P. Lovecraft)
• The Seven Cryptical Books of Hasan (from Lovecraft)
• Unaussprechlichen Kulten "by von Juntz" (from Robert E. Howard as Nameless Cults)
• Al Azif (from Lovecraft, original Arabic name for the Necronomicon)

The Ludlum influence becomes obvious at this point in the narrative. When Molasar, the evil presence trapped in the keep, reveals himself to Cuza, he asks questions about the Nazis who have invaded his domain and soon proclaims his desire to drive them from Romania and to kill their leader, Hitler, in Germany. Of course, Cuza becomes eager to ally himself with Molasar and to help him escape the keep. F. Paul Wilson does a masterful job of compounding lies with deceits with trickery and then slowly opening the reader's eyes to what's really going on.

Meanwhile, as these events transpire, in Portugal a red-haired man called Glenn has undertaken an arduous journey over land and sea to the Carpathian Mountains. In the course of his journey, it becomes clear that Glenn has not only an implacable will but superhuman strength. When he arrives at the keep, his mission is clouded in secrecy. He forms an uneasy alliance with Magda (who is a scholar in her own right), and eventually the two of them fall in love with each other. Together they will stand against Molasar (and Magda's father) in a battle with the highest stakes possible.

Wilson isn't afraid to make use of some horror movie tropes that may make you shake your head at their cheesiness, but nobody said this was high literature. If you're in the mood for a good thriller with a side helping of the supernatural, this is a fun read. And, spoiler, don't worry, the Nazis in the keep all come to a hideous end. 

-----

After reading the book, I decided to rent the movie on Amazon Prime because I was curious to see how it made the transition from page to screen. As I watched, I kept thinking F. Paul Wilson must have felt like he'd been stabbed in the heart. Michael Mann, who wrote and directed the film, threw out almost everything that was good about the book and turned it into a disjointed, incomprehensible mess. Avoid it at all costs. 

Blacktop Wasteland by S.A. Cosby

 

African-American noir in a fast-moving car

Blacktop Wasteland is a heist novel that centers on the wheel man, the getaway driver, like a more realistic version of Edgar Wright's Baby Driver but just as exciting. I don't know anything about S.A. Cosby, but I assume he must be a car enthusiast because his descriptions of engine mechanics and driving seem to come from a place of personal knowledge rather than just research. 

Review

Cosby builds the novel on the classic crime noir setup. Beauregard "Bug" Montage, got off to a bad start in life doing petty crimes as a teenager until a job gone wrong ended him up in juvenile detention. By the time Bug got out, his father, Anthony (aka "Ant), had disappeared, never to be seen again. The only thing Ant left Bug was the souped-up Plymouth Duster they both loved. Bug turned it into a legendary street-racing machine and had the chops to drive it like no one else could. 

After the stint in juvie, Bug went straight. He bought an old garage and turned it into an auto repair shop. He remarried. (The first marriage had long since dissolved; they were both teens at the time.) And he had a successful business until a rival shop run by a franchise called Precision moved into town and undercut his prices. 

Because he couldn't beat Precision's prices, he lost customers and fell behind on his mortgage payments. Meanwhile, his son Darren needs glasses. His other son Javon had to get braces. His daughter Ariel, from the first marriage, is smart enough she could go to college and make something of herself if only she could afford the tuition. To top it all off, his mother is in a convalescent home, and he's just learned that there's a discrepancy with her Medicaid policy for which he now owes the government $48,360.

Bug is in desperate straights financially when Ronnie Sessions shows back up in his life. Ronnie is a redneck drug addict and career criminal who's always looking for the next score. He's also the screw-up who masterminded the job-gone-wrong that put Bug in juvenile detention way back when. But this time he's got a foolproof scheme. Ronnie's girlfriend Jenny is working at a jewelry store that is going to be temporarily holding $500,000-worth of uncut diamonds, and with her help they are going to take advantage of that window of opportunity to steal the diamonds. Reggie knows a guy who can fence the goods, giving them a clean $250,000 which Ronnie, Bug, and the gunman on the team, Quan, can split three ways. Eighty thousand dollars would go a long way toward solving Bug's problems.

But he quit the life. He has a wife and two sons he loves, a daughter he rarely sees but cares about, a difficult mother to take care of, an employee (and childhood friend) named Kelvin... he can't blow it all by getting caught or killed in a holdup. Bug's wife Kia tries to convince him, instead, to sell the beloved Duster, which is legendary in the county and would bring a very high price. Bug can't let go of that link to his father, though. So he tells himself that if he fully takes charge of the job, checks out everything personally, makes sure absolutely nothing can go wrong, then it's just one last job, and he'll be out of the life for good. 

You know this story, right? The "one last job and then I'm out" story? It's a good one. A classic, in fact. 

Ronnie and Quan both promised Bug they would stay away from coke for the duration of the job, but they lied. Ronnie also lied about the value of the diamonds, which was really more like $3,000,000. (If you were smarter than Ronnie, it would make you wonder why jewels that valuable would be passing through a rinky-dink, small-town jewelry store and who would be behind it.) In fairness to Ronnie, though, there's no way he could have known the fat lady who was Jenny's boss at the store was also a stone-cold killer. I won't tell you anything about what happens next except for the one thing you already know -- once the robbery starts, everything goes to hell big time, real fast. 

S.A. Cosby is a terrific writer. With this novel, he's already in the realm of the likes of Elmore Leonard, Dennis Lehane, and George Pelecanos. The story is peopled with a fully realized cast of characters, the small-town Georgia settings feel lived in, the action sequences and tense encounters are white-knuckle stuff. If you like hard-boiled noir fiction, this one's for you.