Book Review: Pleasant Valley Lost

A Real Life Lost Horizon (5 stars)

I enjoyed reading Joseph J. Swope's poignant and bittersweet 'Pleasant Valley Lost'. The small daily triumphs and the relentless eventual tragedy that overcomes the extended Swope family (and all of Pleasant Valley) is richly portrayed here. They became like a second family as I read this – parents, uncles, aunts, cousins, friends, and shopkeepers take their place around the reader as they swirl around the story’s narrator, young Eddy Swope. This first person voice works very well. By seeing this family farm and community through the eyes of an adolescent we experience its innocence, and the loss becomes more poignant. As the narrator becomes a young adult the language shifts a bit, and we then see the tragedy through Eddy's eyes as an adult. 

This story summoned memories of my own early years, suggesting by gentle example how to live with loss. It becomes much more than a story about the coming of a dam and its effect on a community.

Many of the characters have only a single characterizing trait, thus bordering at times on caricature, perhaps of necessity due to the vast number of characters. One solution is to foreground fewer characters, and invest each with several key traits. 

That said, the writer succeeds in bringing virtually everyone into the foreground of this portrait. Perhaps that's why it feels like a saga covering decades when in fact the key action covers about five years. The story leaps ahead to show what happens in the lives of all the characters. It’s harrowing, poignant, and life-affirming. It’s been years since I read such a wonderful family saga.

From the Book Description:

Set amid the turbulent times of the late 1960s, Pleasant Valley Lost chronicles the last days of a family dairy farm condemned to destruction by a federal dam project. As the family struggles to find a new home and build their future, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers moves into Pleasant Valley, ruthlessly destroying a community and its history.

'Pleasant Valley Lost' is based on the true story surrounding the author's childhood farm. Originally part of the estate of Pennsylvania's fifth governor, the farm had been in the Swope family since 1939 and was located in one of the most fertile areas of the region.

Pleasant Valley Lost also recounts the family's long-suffering devotion to baseball and the Philadelphia Phillies. Following many years of losing seasons, the Phillies finally provided cause for celebration when they claimed their first World Series title in 1980.

Today, Pleasant Valley and the Swope farm are submerged under the Blue Marsh Dam.

Book Review: 'Dusgadh Essence of Life'

A Chilling Supernatural Horror (4 stars)

In this first book in Margaret A. Daly's 'Awakening' series not only does the story’s hero, Ember, face a horrific series of attacks, she faces a worse series of revelations about her real identity. As the story is told in the first person, we learn each emerging truth as Ember does. For her and us nothing is what it seemed. This layering of violence, emotion, and a deeply compromised reality makes this a compelling dive into the supernatural. 

Our engagement with Ember would have been stronger if Act 1 had been given over to her earlier normal life. We’re thrown immediately into her struggle against occult surprises at every turn. By seeing and sympathizing with her as a normal young woman we’d have felt even deeper the onslaught of occult forces. 

That aside, the portrait of ruthless evil in the book is very powerful. It overwhelms, exploits, and physically and emotionally ransacks its victims. This is very convincingly and chillingly portrayed. I was very drawn into seeing how Ember would fare against such horrific treatment. 

From the Book Description:

Ember Malloch has no idea her life is about to get turned upside down. Besides the fact that she sees the dead on occasion, she lives an ordinary mundane life. 

Her sister warned her not to provoke the spirits, but Ember has a mind of her own and she defies Becky at every turn. Now, her life as she knows it will be changed forever, as an unbridled strength is unleashed upon her. She will have an awakening like no other as she learns her past, and discovers who she is.

Book Review: Silvia Villalobos' 'Stranger or Friend'

A Compelling Mystery Thriller (5 stars)

Part murder mystery, part psychological suspense, ‘Stranger or Friend’ is a well-told story of one woman’s struggle to make sense of the forces arrayed against her. The mystery begins when her best friend is murdered not long before Zoe’s return to her Wyoming hometown. 

The psychological element is Zoe’s journey back to the place and forces that molded her into the woman she’s become. The stranger or friend of the title refers in part to the identity of Lori’s murderer, but also to how she came to be a stranger to herself, and to those around her.

The only caveat in the novel is that in her search for answers Zoe follows up on a few too many leads, and some in too much detail. The Act 3 climax brings the mystery to a satisfying resolution, but it too would be stronger if events were accelerated.

That aside, the writing effectively evokes a dark, slightly off-balance tone of menace, confusion, and distrust. This tone is present in her discomfort in the too-open Wyoming landscape, in the friends and strangers living there, and especially in the crime that turns her life upside-down. The many varied characters are all clearly drawn; they speak and act differently, revealing something of their personality. 

‘Stranger or Friend’ makes for an exceptional and entertaining read. It brings you a hero you’ll care about, and tells a story that will keep you guessing until the end.

From the Book Description:

L.A. lawyer Zoe Sinclair finds her Wyoming hometown reeling from the murder of its most popular resident: her best friend, Lori. Not less unnerving are the strange cries coming from the woods. The lawyer inside the woman is prompted into action, but she meets resistance from a town wary of outsiders. 

When a second body is found and Zoe is threatened, the case turns personal. Under pressure from the sheriff to leave the probing to the police, and taunted by the killer’s subtle messages, Zoe finds herself trapped in a game of hunter and prey.

Book Review: Sidney Williams' 'Night Brothers'

Exemplary Horror Thriller (5 stars)

Night Brothers - A Vampire Novel is a chilling blend of straight-up occult horror with the pacing and excitement of an action thriller. The pace accelerates smoothly and in the story’s latter stages moves to its climax at breakneck speed. Alison and Travis have settled down to manage a small-town newspaper when mysterious and lethal animal attacks start occurring. Parallel with that we are shown Navarra’s occult practice, controlling animals to attack residents as cover for her taking their blood to continue her life-in-death. In the story’s middle she takes an interest in Alison, and this unfolds in a superbly controlled manner redolent of such spiritual horror as Henry James' Turn of the Screw. 

Most impressive was the detail and backstory given for all the characters, even relatively minor ones. It’s done with deft and swift economy, never impeding story flow. I realized as I read this how much more powerful mystery and action in any genre become when the reader is given a fuller picture of each character. Thus do character motivation, desire, regrets, preferences, fears, and all the panoply of human emotions percolate in the background as the action unfolds. That said, the story has a multiple protagonist, an ensemble of characters who work together opposing the antagonist, Navarra, and those retainers she gathers about her. Usually I prefer a single heroic protagonist, but this approach works well here.

The story exhibits a rare blend of physical horror, the psychological horror of Navarra’s selective control of minds, and the spiritual horror of her origins, especially in the lengths she’s gone to over the centuries to maintain her line.

Book Review: Jeffrey Goff's 'Hope 239'

Brave New Home in the Hope System (4 stars)

Hope 239 is a SF space resettlement story with a difference. A 15-mile long ship from Earth arrives in the Hope system after a centuries-long journey, not to transplant their civilization but to plant the seeds of a new series of human settlements (Neolothic-era) on different Hope system planets.

The plot is satisfyingly intricate, akin to the traditional Chinese boxes, one within another in a series. The residents of the one hundred Neolithic village units on board ship have no knowledge of the ship they’re on, its crew, or the command oval officers who ostensibly manage it; even the command oval, while having the most knowledge, are ultimately kept in the dark by ship’s computer about vast parts of the ship. Each ‘box’ is unaware of many of the other boxes. Records of the past are regularly deleted, and mission plans for the future after the resettlement are unknown. The reader however sees most of these levels (or boxes) operating within their narrow cells as laid down by the mission’s originators centuries earlier. This is one of the best story setups I’ve seen. 

Nor are characters neglected in the story. The command oval officers are well-drawn, detailed, and their motives complex but clear; the crew less so; and the few villagers we meet even less so. Thus the story’s characters are presented in a manner that reflects the different levels of knowledge in the story. Moreover the protagonist is an ensemble of several characters at different levels, each curious and seeking the knowledge withheld from them. The antagonist is those now-absent originators of the ship and its resettlement mission. 

'Hope 239' is a clever, well-told story about the dangers of control, regardless of the benign motives involved. I look forward to a sequel to this fine addition to the genre.

Book Review: P. A. Ruddock's 'Not What You Thought?'

A Good Helping of Story Twists (4 stars)

Not What You Thought? and Other Surprises  Note that proceeds from the sale of this diverse collection of short stories  support a charity for homeless ex-servicemen. The stories here all have a 'not-what-you-thought' twist ending. Most genres are represented – SF, war, romance, horror, adventure, spiritual, magic realism, and more. 

In my experience what often makes short stories compelling is they are analogous to the precise, contained, Act 1 ‘Inciting Incident’ scene in a novel. That is the scene where a hero encounters a life-changing problem that he spends the rest of the story trying to come to terms with. Many of the stories here are good examples of this. In each story one or two characters are introduced in the context of a problem; they proceed on a short path to a reckoning of one sort or another; and the twist is a re-framing that removes or resolves the original problem, and points to others, larger and very different. Thus such contain the seed, the core dilemma a protagonist would face in a novel-length treatment of the story idea. I especially enjoyed the twist most of these stories end with. For me the twist means the depicted events have two unambiguous meanings: the flow that events would have taken without the twist, and the actual flow they will take as a result of it. These stories crack open a world just long enough for a quick glimpse at a critical moment in the hero’s life. The reader fills in the rest, the implied story. 

I won’t comment here on specific stories except to say I admired how self-contained and compressed they are. I particularly enjoyed ‘Call of Duty’, ‘First Impression’, ‘Temptation’, ‘A Good Man,’ ‘The Spectre’, and ‘Lottery Loser’. This collection won’t disappoint fans of the short story genre. 

Live the Scene As You Write It

No tears in the writer, 

no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.”

ROBERT FROST

goodread: Robert Frost quotes