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fabulousfunk's review against another edition
dark
emotional
mysterious
sad
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.5
otterno11's review
dark
emotional
mysterious
sad
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.0
The Broken Hours is a claustrophobic, atmospheric ghost story whose stifling atmosphere and ominous style on the haunted figure of H.P. Lovecraft in the last year of his life. I really appreciated Baker approaching her tale of Lovecraftian horror in a refreshingly different way, exploring the classic ghost story rather than shoehorning in yet another “Lovecraft was right'' Cthulhu mythos romp. Narrator Arthur Crandle, destitute and separated from his wife, finds himself in a dreary Providence, RI circa the spring of 1936, employed as a secretary for the reclusive horror author. He soon finds that his employers’ oppressive but mostly unseen presence and his fraught family history echo Crandle's own relationship regrets.
Even as Crandle befriends Flossie, a vibrant young woman and another tenant of the mysterious apartment, as the spectral form of a child haunts his dreams and his waking hours alike he begins to lose track of reality. However, this ambiguity in many of the scenes began to make the novel feel a little vague and I never felt like I really understood who Crandle even was, as narrative threads appeared only to be dropped without any resolution. With dialogue indicated only by italics, much of the Crandle’s conversations with Lovecraft and other characters feel surreal and dreamlike, in particular. Lovecraft’s presence highlights broken relationships and hereditary madness, with Crandle and Flossie serving as pawns in this fraught personal history. The ghosts that float through the novel reckon with the vision of Lovecraft as a ghost himself, a man tormented by his family's demons, mental illness, and personal tragedy. All in all, a creepy but enigmatic work that leaves much to the readers’ own interpretations.
I write about other works that use Lovecraft as a fictional character in my article Lovecraft Reanimated at Fandom Fanatics.
Even as Crandle befriends Flossie, a vibrant young woman and another tenant of the mysterious apartment, as the spectral form of a child haunts his dreams and his waking hours alike he begins to lose track of reality. However, this ambiguity in many of the scenes began to make the novel feel a little vague and I never felt like I really understood who Crandle even was, as narrative threads appeared only to be dropped without any resolution. With dialogue indicated only by italics, much of the Crandle’s conversations with Lovecraft and other characters feel surreal and dreamlike, in particular. Lovecraft’s presence highlights broken relationships and hereditary madness, with Crandle and Flossie serving as pawns in this fraught personal history. The ghosts that float through the novel reckon with the vision of Lovecraft as a ghost himself, a man tormented by his family's demons, mental illness, and personal tragedy. All in all, a creepy but enigmatic work that leaves much to the readers’ own interpretations.
I write about other works that use Lovecraft as a fictional character in my article Lovecraft Reanimated at Fandom Fanatics.
abookishtype's review
3.0
H.P. Lovecraft is experiencing a revival. The strange author of even stranger stories had a life, it seems, that was crying out to be turned into fiction. Within the last year, I've seen Lovecraft turned into a character in stories based in his fiction. His settings have been revived for even more novels. Jacqueline Baker's The Broken Hours is a literary turn on this little renaissance. Her novel is set in the last year of Lovecraft's life, when he was furthest down on his luck and dying of cancer. The Broken Hours sent me scurrying to Lovecraft's biography more than once—and, consequently, had me wondering what was fictional and real more than once, too...
Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from Edelweiss for review consideration.
Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from Edelweiss for review consideration.
evatj's review
5.0
This book was a brilliant selection after my reading dry spell created by my job, more specifically year end. The Broken Hours is beautifully, horrific (I know that sounds odd). I won't bother with a synopsis as both Goodreads and others have already provided that, and honestly almost irrelevant as this book is an evocative, poetic description of madness. Immensely readable, incredibly well written, and so atmospheric, I do definitely recommend. I have been purchasing a large quantity of books over the last year, so that majority of the approximately 600 books I own have not been read but my intent is to read and cull so that my library will not be about a quantity of books but about books that I love. This book is definitely a book that will be a permanent part of my collection.
docperschon's review
5.0
I dislike giving the impression I'm a literary snob, so let me set the record straight, immediately: I love horror, and I love good writing, and I'm as likely to read Stephen King as a I am to read Shirley Jackson. Nevertheless, there are some who question if modern horror can ever transcend its genre ghetto, and having just finished Jacqueline Baker's The Broken Hours, I'm optimistic it not only can, but already has. Google literary horror, and you'll get lists pointing you toward Edgar Allan Poe, Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, and Joyce Carol Oates. With rare exceptions, these lists don't contain anything written in the past 30 years, as though literary status is denied to horror until it's aged sufficiently to have lost much of its potency. However, like SF and Fantasy, literary writers are turning their attentions towards horror. And since I finished it with Halloween just a few days hence, it is my recommendation for those who not only appreciate good storytelling, but careful wordsmithing and poetic prose.
Baker's writing has always been haunted. From her short stories in A Hard Witching to her stark vision of Canada's western prairies in The Horseman's Graves, there's always a sense of the uncanny stalking at the edges of the page. In those works, her ghosts are more subtle. In The Broken Hours, they take center stage in a tale about a man who comes to work as a personal assistant for H.P. Lovecraft. In Baker's hands, the setting of Providence, Rhode Island during the Great Depression is haunted enough, and so the first 96 pages read much like her previous work, albeit in a more compelling, concise fashion. It wasn't until that 96th page, when I read the words "It was in my room," that I felt the chills crawl up my spine. But don't expect that The Broken Hours suddenly becomes a Cthulhu-inspired horror-fest at that point. There are no Elder Gods in these pages, no physical portals to worlds of madness, though Baker's creation of Lovecraft's voice feels terribly authentic. Instead, Baker slowly doles out the remaining moments of atmospheric horror in small doses, slowly revealing the presences behind closed doors, in the darkness on the landing, in the garden out the window, or in the blinking lights of the castle-like structure across the city.
One of my favourite passages in The Broken Hours speaks to the desire for horror, but also demonstrates what sets reading Baker's horror from writers like Dean Koontz.
"What is it about the darkness which draws us? At once inward and outward. I had always been too easily drawn, too easily, Jane would have said, too easily enveloped. I, who feared once, as a child, not the witching autumn, but spring, that clear-lighted season of ghosts when Jesus rose from the tomb, bloodless and terrible, rolling away the stone in the sunlight with his own deathless hands. I imagined Jane's shock at hearing such a confession.
Oh yes, the darkness drew me. Had drawn me always.
There was something in me, I knew, something perhaps in us all which, no matter our rational selves, was haunted."
It is this beautiful prose, this beautiful terror, which makes The Broken Hours my top literary recommendation for the Halloween season. While the chills of The Broken Hours are admittedly slow in coming compared to King or Koontz, once they arrive, they are the kind that creep up to leech the warmth and light from a bright autumn afternoon, an experience I was shocked to have on my way to pick my children up from school. Scaring a reader in the night watches is relatively easy - scaring a reader in broad daylight, especially one who cut his horror teeth on King's Pet Semetary is another. And yet there I was, reading while walking, the hair on my arms standing on end, the sun shining down on me. And unlike recent King or almost all Koontz, Baker knows how to end a book, leaving me lingering over the last page, reading it over several times, to let it sink in, beneath the skin.
Baker's writing has always been haunted. From her short stories in A Hard Witching to her stark vision of Canada's western prairies in The Horseman's Graves, there's always a sense of the uncanny stalking at the edges of the page. In those works, her ghosts are more subtle. In The Broken Hours, they take center stage in a tale about a man who comes to work as a personal assistant for H.P. Lovecraft. In Baker's hands, the setting of Providence, Rhode Island during the Great Depression is haunted enough, and so the first 96 pages read much like her previous work, albeit in a more compelling, concise fashion. It wasn't until that 96th page, when I read the words "It was in my room," that I felt the chills crawl up my spine. But don't expect that The Broken Hours suddenly becomes a Cthulhu-inspired horror-fest at that point. There are no Elder Gods in these pages, no physical portals to worlds of madness, though Baker's creation of Lovecraft's voice feels terribly authentic. Instead, Baker slowly doles out the remaining moments of atmospheric horror in small doses, slowly revealing the presences behind closed doors, in the darkness on the landing, in the garden out the window, or in the blinking lights of the castle-like structure across the city.
One of my favourite passages in The Broken Hours speaks to the desire for horror, but also demonstrates what sets reading Baker's horror from writers like Dean Koontz.
"What is it about the darkness which draws us? At once inward and outward. I had always been too easily drawn, too easily, Jane would have said, too easily enveloped. I, who feared once, as a child, not the witching autumn, but spring, that clear-lighted season of ghosts when Jesus rose from the tomb, bloodless and terrible, rolling away the stone in the sunlight with his own deathless hands. I imagined Jane's shock at hearing such a confession.
Oh yes, the darkness drew me. Had drawn me always.
There was something in me, I knew, something perhaps in us all which, no matter our rational selves, was haunted."
It is this beautiful prose, this beautiful terror, which makes The Broken Hours my top literary recommendation for the Halloween season. While the chills of The Broken Hours are admittedly slow in coming compared to King or Koontz, once they arrive, they are the kind that creep up to leech the warmth and light from a bright autumn afternoon, an experience I was shocked to have on my way to pick my children up from school. Scaring a reader in the night watches is relatively easy - scaring a reader in broad daylight, especially one who cut his horror teeth on King's Pet Semetary is another. And yet there I was, reading while walking, the hair on my arms standing on end, the sun shining down on me. And unlike recent King or almost all Koontz, Baker knows how to end a book, leaving me lingering over the last page, reading it over several times, to let it sink in, beneath the skin.
fluffysaurasrex's review
4.0
Building on the reality of the last year of H.P. Lovecraft's life, author Jacqueline Baker crafts a classic ghost story about Arthor Crandle, a man sent to help H.P. Lovecraft with household duties and typing his handwritten letters and work. Crandle is drawn in to the strange world that Lovecraft lives in, digging up family secrets while also crafting a few secrets himself.
As I've never actually read anything by Lovecraft, I couldn't say whether it would fit his style, but I've seen and read enough ghost stories to know when someone is doing it just right. Baker serves up a number of mysterious questions without fully delivering the answers, leaving it up to us to decide between what is real and what may be madness.
It's a story filled with grief and regret, deception and dread, and it's written very poetically. Buildings take on lives of their own, and the world around the characters becomes its own pained figure, desperate to release its secrets, but unable to find the right person to reveal them to. I feel this would be the written equivalent of the film The Changeling, which should give fans of the film a good idea of what they may enjoy here.
As I've never actually read anything by Lovecraft, I couldn't say whether it would fit his style, but I've seen and read enough ghost stories to know when someone is doing it just right. Baker serves up a number of mysterious questions without fully delivering the answers, leaving it up to us to decide between what is real and what may be madness.
It's a story filled with grief and regret, deception and dread, and it's written very poetically. Buildings take on lives of their own, and the world around the characters becomes its own pained figure, desperate to release its secrets, but unable to find the right person to reveal them to. I feel this would be the written equivalent of the film The Changeling, which should give fans of the film a good idea of what they may enjoy here.
daisyheadmaesie's review
5.0
4.5 flickering lamps out of 5
I remember, when reading the collection of works on Cthulhu, being caught up in the mystery of H. P. Lovecraft. Such a somber, misunderstood man he seemed to be— as most famous literary types, I suppose.
This was a delicious read indeed, albeit intensifying that curiosity more than satisfying. Its deeply melancholic atmosphere, accompanied by a quick-witted and nearly frenzied dialogue, is reminiscent of The Great Gatsby. So much so that I wonder if Baker has Fitzgerald on her list of favourite authors. He most definitely figures on mine, so it’s no wonder why I was instantly entranced by her writing style.
To those looking for a gentle thriller with a relieving ending should put The Broken Hours down at once. This cast of characters, all mourning a loss of their own, is desperate for importance, for luck, for a colorful future that will outshine their bleakly grey lives. Toying with the reader’s understanding of imagination and reality, Baker reminds us that the worst kind of ghost is the living kind.
The reason it did not receive 5 stars is because I was truly hoping for some answers regarding two specific characters that were introduced. I feel their presence left me confused, their reactions/motives not justified. Though maybe that was the point, I feel like I would’ve better grasped the ending had I received more information on them in those final pages. If you’ve read this book and would like to discuss it, message me! :)
“When I crossed the room and shut the door, the hair stood on end all up the back of my neck. Though it was light outside, the shadows hung heavily in the corners. I felt a thickness in my throat, as if I could not swallow: that presence I had felt always on the landing and the second floor, it had followed me inside.
It was in my room.”
I remember, when reading the collection of works on Cthulhu, being caught up in the mystery of H. P. Lovecraft. Such a somber, misunderstood man he seemed to be— as most famous literary types, I suppose.
This was a delicious read indeed, albeit intensifying that curiosity more than satisfying. Its deeply melancholic atmosphere, accompanied by a quick-witted and nearly frenzied dialogue, is reminiscent of The Great Gatsby. So much so that I wonder if Baker has Fitzgerald on her list of favourite authors. He most definitely figures on mine, so it’s no wonder why I was instantly entranced by her writing style.
To those looking for a gentle thriller with a relieving ending should put The Broken Hours down at once. This cast of characters, all mourning a loss of their own, is desperate for importance, for luck, for a colorful future that will outshine their bleakly grey lives. Toying with the reader’s understanding of imagination and reality, Baker reminds us that the worst kind of ghost is the living kind.
The reason it did not receive 5 stars is because I was truly hoping for some answers regarding two specific characters that were introduced. I feel their presence left me confused, their reactions/motives not justified. Though maybe that was the point, I feel like I would’ve better grasped the ending had I received more information on them in those final pages. If you’ve read this book and would like to discuss it, message me! :)
claben's review
3.0
An extremely quick read, capable of keeping this reader engaged even though ultimately the final twist managed to be predictable and at the same time not very psychologically plausible. Not a classic for the ages but good entertainment for the train.
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