Joyland by Stephen King, Narrated by Michael Kelly

Review by Kelsey O.

From the pulp crime novel cover to the creepy tagline, one can tell you are about to step into the mind of Stephen King. King’s narrator is Devin Jones and he takes the reader back in time to when he worked at the amusement park, Joyland. Devin meets a great group of friends that help him past his break up (because in your twenties any break up seems like it is the end of the world). He also discovers the secret of the Horror House ride…it’s haunted.

The story goes that Linda Gray came to the fair with her boyfriend. The boyfriend takes her on the Horror House ride and halfway through, slits her throat and tosses her out. All he leaves behind is a bloodied shirt and a pair of gloves. Now it is believed that Linda Gray haunts the ride waiting for her killer to be found.

This story intrigues Devin and he decides to dig deeper to see if he can discover the identity of the killer. This fascination leads Devin on an interesting adventure that ends up putting him and his new found friends in danger.

King has a way of making two complete different storylines come together flawlessly in the end. At times while you are reading you start to wonder what the importance of a scene is, but as long as you put your trust in King, he won’t let you down. This is definitely not a hard core horror novel as most are used to from King but it isn’t intended to be. This is just a story of love, loss, death and a bit of supernatural. I consider it a nice light mystery to read on a cold rainy day and hopefully will resonate with the younger readers and introduce them to the mastery of Stephen King.

The audio version featured a great narrator, Michael Kelly. His youthful sounding voice was fitting for the age that Devin was.

The Moving Toyshop by Edmund Crispin

Review by Matt B. (BuffaloSavage)

The Moving Toyshop is a locked room mystery starring the series-hero, English Language and Literature don Gervase Fen. Reminding us of Nero Wolf, he’s less a character than a collection of mannerisms and stock pfui-like ejaculations such as “Oh, my paws!” Fen does show a dark side like the early James Bond, when he waterboards  a close-mouthed witness — actually, holds the guy’s head six times under water till he gets talkative — so same same.

This one is considered a classic, but for me, well, it takes a long time for things to happen in this mystery. Mainly due to Dickensian descriptions like this:

Down the Woodstock Road towards them an elderly, abnormally thin man was pedalling, his thin white hair streaming in the wind and sheer desperation in his eyes. Immediately behind him, running for their lives, came Scylla and Charybdis; behind them, a milling, shouting rout of undergraduates, with Mr Adrian Barnaby (on a bicycle) well in the van; behind them, the junior proctor, the University Marshal, and two bullers, packed into a small Austin car and looking very elect, severe and ineffectual; and last of all, faint but pursuing, lumbered the ungainly form of Mr Hoskins.

Edmund Crispin (Robert Bruce Montgomery) did not write many mysteries but he is still in print and remembered for his locked room mysteries a la John Dickson Carr, elaborate set-ups a la Dorothy Sayers, and a quirky detective hero a la Dame Agatha and Rex Stout. Like Michael Innes, the mystery writer for intellectuals who sheepishly admit to reading mysteries, he naturally uses ink-horn terms such as myrmidons, cachinnation, and saturnine. As Julian Symons says in Bloody Murder (1985), “Crispin’s work is marked by a highly individual sense of light comedy, and by a great flair for verbal deception rather in the Christie manner… At his weakest he is flippant, at his best he is witty, but all his work shows a high-spiritedness rare and welcome in the crime story.”

The Murder of My Aunt by Richard Hull

Review by Matt B. (BuffaloSavage)

Set in Wales, this 1934 mystery takes place in the country town of Llwll. Our comically obnoxious and self-absorbed narrator Edward Powell cluelessly lets his anti-Welsh stereotypes show. He takes pains to point out how unspeakable Llwll seems, in terms of both its pronunciation and its dullness. The maritime weather is cloudy, windy, and as wet as the bottom of the ocean. The men are all built like rugby-players and their speech has an “ugly Welsh lilt.” Worse, they are browbeaten by Welsh women who tend to be small but make up for it by always taking charge. Edward’s Aunt Mildred recruits the local farmers and merchants in efforts to man Edward up into a real Welshman.

Indeed, Edward has serious need of manning up. Like many narrow-minded idlers, he is a selfish narcissist. As lazy as a toad, he only grudgingly helps in the garden. He’s happily jobless, content to live on an allowance doled out from his dead parents’ fortune. He nags his aunt to improve the stodgy interior decoration of the house. He keeps a Peke named So-So, spoils it rotten, and lets it kill his aunt’s pigeons. With no girlfriend in sight, he reads French smut. Even more alarming than his admiration for British fascist Sir Oswald Mosley is his fancy for wearing sweaters the color of crushed strawberries.

Aunt Mildred continually harangues him for his acne, foppishness and incompetence at bridge. With so much bad blood between them, their sick sad relationship, we feel, can only get worse. Edward is caught out by his aunt in a series of pointless lies, vandalism, and farm animal endangerment. Aunt makes him pay, literally, and so he decides to murder her and inherit his parents’ fortune. His attempt to kill her fails. And fails. And fails again. The plot twists are funny in a mordant, ironic way. Edward’s sulky egotistical explanations for his repeated failures are a hoot.

Judging by the fact that Hull’s first novel has been released in more editions than his fourteen other novels, The Murder of My Aunt remains his best-known and best-regarded work. Hull worked as a full-time accountant. Writing was in his moonlighting job, so his hyper-articulate prose is a wee bit stiff and feels labored by the end. This is balanced by his ingenious plotting and black sense of humor. The first-person narrative is amusingly unreliable.

Knowledgeable fans and critics regard The Murder of My Aunt as a classic of the inverted mystery. It appears on “The Reader’s List of Detective Story Cornerstones.” Critic-historian Howard Haycraft called this mystery “a classic of its kind; an intellectual shocker par excellence.”

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel by Deborah Moggach

Review by Mirah W. (mwelday)

No doubt thinking about aging and potentially living out our final days alone can be daunting.  Some people hope there will be friends and family to help care for them and that doesn’t always come to fruition.  Some hope their life savings or pensions will be enough to live on comfortably and that doesn’t always come to fruition, either.  In Moggach’s novel a few British senior citizens have decisions to make about where to spend their twilight years.

In the novel, the characters are looking for a retirement home for various reasons: Evelyn is a widow who does not have as much money as she thought she would have to live on; Norman has been evicted from numerous retirement homes; Muriel makes news headlines and calls into question the effectiveness of the healthcare system when she’s left unattended in a hospital for more than a day.  These are just three of the characters searching for where they belong in this novel.

Norman’s son-in-law, Ravi, is at his wit’s end when he confides in his cousin Sonny about the situation in his home with Norman.  After Norman’s most recent retirement home eviction he moved in with his daughter and son-in-law.  Ravi is constantly annoyed by Norman and can’t stand the arrangement another day.  Ravi and Sonny create a plan to open a retirement home in India where costs would be cheaper and the culture welcomes the British.  The result is The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, which is probably not the best or most exotic place to be in Bangalore, India.  But in spite of its shabbiness, the residents who choose to retire there (including Evelyn, Norman and Muriel whom I mentioned above) learn to appreciate the quaintness of the hotel and camaraderie they build with one another.

Moggach is a talented storyteller and I really enjoyed this book.  I read it after I saw the movie and at first I was disappointed at the disparity between the two stories.  But after getting several chapters into the book, I couldn’t put it down.  The characters are a collection of quirky, realistic, annoying, frustrating, honest, relatable, and humbling personalities and I needed to know what would happen for each of them.  And, I have to admit, I think a part of me is a little whimsical about the idea of spending my own twilight years in another country, living out my days exploring new places, eating the food, smelling the flowers.  I’ve joked with my husband several times that we should retire to Thailand but maybe India wouldn’t be too bad, either…provided there’s an Evelyn I can be friends with living there, too.

Turning Points of the Civil War by James A Rawley

Review by Thomas F. (hardtack)

We are now in the middle of the 150^th anniversary of the four-year American Civil War.  As such, a good, readable, relatively short (200 pages) book on its turning points might be a valuable addition to your reading list.

James A Rawley is professor emeritus of history at the University of Nebraska. Although his book was originally published in 1966, it has aged well in its coverage of the war. Those struggling to understand how the war progressed and why it ended the way it did, will find that Rawley answers their questions. Although his seven essays should be read in chronological order, each may also be read independently. He also provides an Introduction and Afterword.

The turning points Rawley covers include:

Kentucky and the Borderland – Lincoln said the war was hopelessly lost without Kentucky.

Bull Run – The first battle changed our nation’s attitude towards war.

The Trent Affair – How the U.S. almost went to war with Great Britain.

Antietam – A strategic Union victory that restored confidence in the war and allowed Lincoln to release…

The Emancipation Proclamation – This document changed the moral reason for the war, especially for Europe.

The July Days – The Union victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg were the beginning of the end of the Confederacy.

The U.S. Election of 1864 – A nation chooses to continue the fight.

After reading about the Civil War for over 50 years, I was appalled that I had missed reading this book until now.

A South Divided: Portraits of Dissent in the Confederacy

by David C. Downing

Review by Thomas F. (hardtack)

This volume is actually a very good introduction to the many reasons why the Southern Confederacy really did not have a chance to succeed. And the sub-title, Portraits of Dissent, is especially fitting, in that numerous individuals, groups and events are described in just enough detail to satisfy your curiosity, but also hopefully whet your interest for further detail.

Probably all of the different chapters and sections in this book are covered in much greater detail in other books. There are entire books written on Confederate deserters, Elizabeth Van Lew and other active southern Unionists, North Carolina holdouts, escaped slaves enlisting in the Union Army, political unrest in the South, women’s riots and their ‘traitorous letters’ to the soldiers, and more. As an avid reader of Civil War history, I have read many of these books as I try to obtain a greater understanding of the political and social side of the War.  Based on my reading of those books, the author did an amazing job of covering most of the reasons why the Confederacy failed due to dissent within. He also covers the executions of those Southerners who were caught in active conspiracies against the Confederacy, and even those just suspected of ‘treason’ or simply just trying to escape the Confederacy.

During the current 150^th anniversary of the Civil War, it is fitting that Americans understand that the Confederacy was destroyed just as much from within as from its battles against Union Forces.

David Downing is a professor of English in Elizabethtown College, Pennsylvania, and his background helped him write a very readable book in this area of Civil War history. So much so that A South Divided was nominated for the Lincoln Prize, which is sponsored by the Civil War Institute at  Gettysburg College.