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A review by audreyintheheadphones
House of Bones by Dale Bailey
4.0
This was really a hard one to rate. First off, holy crow: what a stellar example of the Midwestern Gothic, American horror, eco-horror and haunted house genres. Like, should be taught in schools stellar.
Second off, oy the refrigerators.
Let me explain.
While not necessarily an easy or enjoyable read, this book is nonetheless one of the most skillful stories I've ever read. I stayed up past 2 last night reading, then when I woke up this morning all I could think about was finishing the book. It's very, very well done. The characters are interesting, the back-stories are compelling, and the setting is wonderfully horrible. Bailey does a lot of work here with haunted places, the house as body (and vice versa), scars on the American psyche, the gaping wound of urban planning, and race relations in this country and the conventional horror narrative.
He also stuffs women into refrigerators like it's going out of style, which, hopefully, it is.
I loved so much about this book. It's horrible. It tears off a prime American scab from the sixties and pokes a finger in the wound. So much progress from the post-Depression era fell prey to corruption and inner-city blight in the sixties that it drove a knife into the softening flesh of this country, and we're still trying to clean that wound. The rise of ghettoes and the rise of white people's concepts of and disdain for ghettoes, paired with the brutalism of '60s architecture needs more discussion. We need to talk about this, and a truly frightening ghost story like this one is a great place to start.
But we also need to talk about misogyny in horror culture and the media in general.
While there's all this awesomeness about Bailey's novel, there's also this huge problem with women: they exist as sexual objects, to be fucked or raped or shot (don't get me started on Freud there) or fantasized about. They're drunken, failed mothers, or drunken prostitutes, or drunken girlfriends to be taken advantages of. They're victims, whose inevitably tragic and innocent demises provide all but one of the main characters with motivations for revenge.
Stop and think about that for a second. That's really fucked up.
I mean, I just read nearly 400 pages about an urban housing center that ostensibly comes to life, possesses people and kills them off with a Lovecraftian disdain for emotion, that cosmically large, reptilian uncaring for the human state, and yet while working with all these huge, lofty themes, all but one -- four out of five protagonists lug a woman-in-a-refrigerator behind them through the course of the story.
I call bullshit on that nonsense.
But this is still one helluva good book.
Second off, oy the refrigerators.
Let me explain.
While not necessarily an easy or enjoyable read, this book is nonetheless one of the most skillful stories I've ever read. I stayed up past 2 last night reading, then when I woke up this morning all I could think about was finishing the book. It's very, very well done. The characters are interesting, the back-stories are compelling, and the setting is wonderfully horrible. Bailey does a lot of work here with haunted places, the house as body (and vice versa), scars on the American psyche, the gaping wound of urban planning, and race relations in this country and the conventional horror narrative.
He also stuffs women into refrigerators like it's going out of style, which, hopefully, it is.
I loved so much about this book. It's horrible. It tears off a prime American scab from the sixties and pokes a finger in the wound. So much progress from the post-Depression era fell prey to corruption and inner-city blight in the sixties that it drove a knife into the softening flesh of this country, and we're still trying to clean that wound. The rise of ghettoes and the rise of white people's concepts of and disdain for ghettoes, paired with the brutalism of '60s architecture needs more discussion. We need to talk about this, and a truly frightening ghost story like this one is a great place to start.
But we also need to talk about misogyny in horror culture and the media in general.
While there's all this awesomeness about Bailey's novel, there's also this huge problem with women: they exist as sexual objects, to be fucked or raped or shot (don't get me started on Freud there) or fantasized about. They're drunken, failed mothers, or drunken prostitutes, or drunken girlfriends to be taken advantages of. They're victims, whose inevitably tragic and innocent demises provide all but one of the main characters with motivations for revenge.
Stop and think about that for a second. That's really fucked up.
I mean, I just read nearly 400 pages about an urban housing center that ostensibly comes to life, possesses people and kills them off with a Lovecraftian disdain for emotion, that cosmically large, reptilian uncaring for the human state, and yet while working with all these huge, lofty themes, all but one -- four out of five protagonists lug a woman-in-a-refrigerator behind them through the course of the story.
I call bullshit on that nonsense.
But this is still one helluva good book.