Back before I left the bookstore, Darcy Coates had been getting some recognition for her supernatural spooky books. I’d avoided them because horror isn’t really my thing. But now that I’m doing a book club, it seemed like a waste to not try some seasonal book themes. Though Craven Manor didn’t make the cut for our book club read, the synopsis got me intrigued and I decided to give it a try.
Daniel is struggling to get a stable life. His cousin, Kyle, rescued him from living on the streets, but sharing Kyle’s apartment is far from living the dream–especially since Daniel’s income comes from one-off janitorial jobs. So when a mysterious letter offers Daniel a job as groundskeeper of a long-abandoned mansion, he’s just desperate enough to check it out.
Daniel quickly realizes that the list of rules– don’t invite anyone to the house, don’t go outside after midnight, keep the curtains closed from midnight to dawn–aren’t simply the quirks of a reclusive landowner. But the more Daniel uncovers Craven Manor’s secrets, the more invested he becomes. And it just might cost him his life.
Coates’s story is more gothic horror than demonic or possession horror, which I think is why I was able to read the book quickly and not get freaked out by it. The less-than-human characters guarding their centuries-old secrets weren’t dabbling in the occult, they just sort of got trapped.
Though the book contained a few errors/typos, and I personally think it could have been polished up a little more, overall I enjoyed the story and the gothic atmosphere. Coates wove several spooky encounters together to create an interesting, if not particularly suspenseful, story.
I’m not at the point of getting all her books from the library just yet, but I am definitely interested in reading more of her work.
Do you ever have a true life story that you know is popular and kind of want to read, but in some way, shape, or form it just hits too close for you? That was I’ll Be Gone in the Dark for me. The book garnered a lot of popularity a few years after publication when California law enforcement finally got the break in the case they needed and made an arrest for the rapes and murders committed in the ’70s and ’80s. While I obviously wasn’t born then, there was something really eerie about living just a few hours away from where the retired predator was hiding.
Published posthumously, I’ll Be Gone in the Dark is writer Michelle McNamara’s obsessive detective work to uncover the identity of the rapist-turned-murderer she called the Golden State Killer. In his heyday, the man terrorized victims up and down California. He committed at least 50 rapes and 13 murders over the course of his nearly 20 years of criminal living. Yet, due to comparatively primitive technology (and a few law enforcement bungles) the man was never caught and went to ground in the mid/late ’80s.
McNamara was just one of many armchair detectives online who spent an inordinate amount of time combing through old case files and documents, hoping to identify the guilty man. Their efforts, in large part, helped keep the cold case alive. Though McNamara didn’t live to see the justice she sought, her efforts are remembered by her fellow sleuths–official and unofficial alike.
Most of I’ll Be Gone in the Dark was written by McNamara–an established writer and owner of the True Crime Diary blog. It is part investigative journalism and part memoir, as McNamara weaves in bits of her own history and how she became obsessed with unmasking the killer and getting justice for his victims.
I haven’t read a lot of true crime authors, but McNamara’s writing style highlights her investment in the case. She isn’t writing about others’ trauma in order to make a buck, she was writing to invite others to join in the search, to tap into every possible avenue to get justice and some kind of peace for the victims’ families. As author Gillian Flynn says in her forward for the book, McNamara was a true crime author that a person can read knowing they are making a conscious, ethical consumption choice.
The book is wrapped up with some final notes and information compiled by two of McNamara’s closest researchers and fellow sleuths, as well as an afterword written by her husband (I’m sure later printings of the book include some sort of additional afterword regarding the 2018 arrest of the perpetrator, but if not, plenty of information is available online). Though this is my only encounter with McNamara’s writing, she shines through it enough to make my heart just a little sad that she didn’t live long enough to see the conclusion finally come through.
The last thing I expected from this book was the overwhelming frustration and the questioning of whether I can and should trust many of the well-known names I’ve always grown up with (not to mention the ideas that I accepted as true interpretations of scripture). Beth Allison Barr doesn’t hold back in The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth. She draws on her knowledge as a historian to look at women and religion throughout the millennia to debunk the myths that so many of us accept as truth.
Whatever denomination of Christianity a person subscribes to or is familiar with, the idea of submissive women is bound to be prominent. Drawing from the writings of Paul and even the creation story in Genesis, scholars and leaders throughout the generations have come to believe that a Biblical woman is domestic, submissive, quiet, even. Women have no place as prominent church leaders and teachers (read: women have nothing of value to offer or teach men). But what Barr reveals and backs up with history is that women have always had a prominent place in the gospel. Women have taught and led (and no, not just when men were to weak to do it). And women have been written out of these roles throughout history as men have worked to stabilize and consolidate their religious power.
Perhaps the most powerful point Barr makes and explores is that, while Christians embrace the call to live differently in the world, in the suppression of women we have largely compromised and adopted cultural norms. The unfortunate reality is that by making the labels of wife and mother the pinnacle of Biblical womanhood, women are excluded from all other kingdom work that all Christians are called to.
It’s really hard sometimes to read these kinds of books. They challenge and question beliefs. They push us to explore and investigate for ourselves. They point out how, despite the general continuity of Bible translations throughout history, interpretation is largely what defines religious experiences. And they point out that we can’t put our trust in other humans, because we’re all fallible.
A few months ago I had been talking about some of this stuff with a couple friends, how many women in our mothers’ generation really internalized the messages that good Christian women are primarily wives and mothers (the Cult of Domesticity, as it’s called) and how it’s discouraging to see how Biblical submission now looks like a man’s authority over his wife, as opposed to a man’s responsibility to his wife. And while I’ve heard pastors preach that women are called to submit only to their husbands, the reality is that even in some churches, men are given authority over all women within the congregation.
Barr looks at this particular issues primarily through the lens of women as teachers and pastors (this is actually what led her to write the book; her husband was fired from his job as a youth pastor because they as a couple pushed against the church’s stance that women are not allowed to teach men, and that any male 13 years old or older is considered a man). There has always been back and forth about whether women are allowed to preach and teach and hold church offices. All I will say about that is that I’ve heard many female teachers who are leaps and bounds better than male pastors. Gender doesn’t have anything to do with it, it’s simply teaching style and how deeply engaged with the passage and the people a teacher is.
Barr’s book highlights the drastic need for each person to investigate and study for themselves to know the truth. To take another person’s word for it is to allow yourself to be pulled into their own personal interpretation, which may or may not accurately reflect the word and heart of God.
Having read The Making of Biblical Womanhood, there are still some passages I need to further research, taking into account the audience and historical context. But what I do see is that, by excluding women from roles of leadership through teaching, we become largely excluded from Jesus’s final command to go and make disciples. If I am not allowed to teach a man, then by that logic I cannot share salvation, because that would be to teach him about Jesus. And while a part of me wouldn’t have such an issue with that (“sorry, I can’t go street evangelizing, I’m a woman.”), the truth is that Jesus didn’t exclude women. So the church should think very, very carefully before it does.
You know that feeling when you read a classic book and feel like it’s gone way over your head? Yeah, that’s how I felt about Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness.
Genly Ai has been living on the planet Winter for a while, sent as an emissary to the people of Karhide, in hopes that they will agree to join the Ekumen of Known Worlds. But things begin to fall apart when his main supporter, Estraven, is exiled. Hoping to salvage the mission, Genly crosses the border to bring his proposition to Karhide’s rivals. But when the political tide there turns against him, too, Genly’s very life is at risk. The last person he expects to come to his rescue is Estraven, and yet the alien pulls Genly from prison and proposes an impossible journey across the ice and back to Karhide. Though dangerous, it may be the only way to save their lives and the mission.
The story is engaging and interesting, filled with political intrigue and the discomfort of being the only one of your kind among an alien society. Le Guin drops her readers into the thick of an established world and story. Genly has been on Winter for some time before the story begins, and so readers must pay attention to pick up on the culture and society instead of experiencing its newness from Genly’s perspective.
Le Guin’s introduction talks about how all fiction in a metaphor, but one that is impossible to explain outside of the metaphor. Which then led me into the book expecting to be changed or challenged in some way. I feel like I missed the point, though Le Guin also plainly states that her story isn’t prescriptive or predictive, just descriptive of her imagined world.
Taken on its own as a science fiction story, it’s interesting and engaging. The androgynous nature of the Winter natives compared to Genly’s human biology (though it’s implied, I think, that Genly is not a human from earth, but another alien species) is the primary difference that the story revolves around. To Genly, the people of Winter are strange, cyclical creatures. Whereas, to the people of Winter, Genly is a perversion of nature, and probably sex-crazed, to boot.
If there’s a specific message meant to be gathered from this book, I probably missed it. I’m not always good at picking up on the metaphors and allegories authors use, unless it’s really clearly spelled out somewhere in the end. So while this wasn’t my favorite science fiction read, I’m not going to write off all of Le Guin’s works just yet.
Reading, writing, living 