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sammaywin's review
dark
mysterious
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
3.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Medical trauma, Child death, Violence, Terminal illness, Racism, and Police brutality
xterminal's review
4.0
Dale Bailey, House of Bones (Signet, 2003)
Ladies and Gentlemen, let me make this clear from the outset: Dale Bailey is the real deal. This is good, solid haunted house horror that will keep you up late at night turning pages.
The mark of an author who knows what he's doing is the ability to draw you in without you knowing exactly where you got drawn in. King does it well, when he doesn't grab you with the first sentence. Carson McCullers was a master at it. Bailey is the heir apparent. I'm not sure where it happened, but somewhere between pages 25 and 65, I found myself wanting to not eat, not sleep, and not do much of anything else until I had finished this book. (I ended up doing so less than forty-eight hours after that. It would have been less if not for a crisis at work.)
Dreamland is your basic housing project. Except for Building Three, where a whole lot of bad things have happened over the years. Dreamland is slated for demolition, but an eccentric billionaire named Ramsey Lomax has bribed the city to halt the demolition of Building Three and allow him to move into it for two weeks. He contacts a number of seemingly diverse people to spend the time with him, investigating the presence of ghostly activity. Four respond: a journalist who spent the first tree years of his life there, a discredited medium, a veteran with a shady past, and a young doctor on the verge of losing her career. The five lock themselves (with the aid of a convenient blizzard) in Dreamland, and the fun begins.
Put together the words "Chicago" and "projects" and the first thing likely to come to any horror or true crime fan's mind is Cabrini Green. Bailey pulls a nice sleight-of-hand, recognizable only to those of who who've seen it before, to differentiate the two, but there are still obvious comparisons. (Some of the events leading to the ghostly activity have shades of real-life crimes committed at Cabrini Green, as well; readers of the works of Peter Sotos will recognize a few of the things Ramsey Lomax points out as he guides his compatriots on their first tour of Dreamland.) There are a few minor loose threads involved with this angle of things (an aerial photo of Dreamland is referred to as looking like Stonehenge, which Bailey draws attention to, and then it's never mentioned again, for example), but nothing that can't be explained away as a red herring.
Where Bailey's writing suffers, and let me rush to say I use the term "suffers" when benchmarking this stuff against classic haunted house literature that makes everyone and their mother's 100-best lists, is that his characterization is developed a bit on the, well, leisurely side. In other words, by the end of the book, you have three-dimensional characters, but in some cases you have to wait till the end of the book to get there. I understand this is a device for hooking the reader, but (a) it's overused and trite, and (b) Bailey's already got more hooks than the slaughterhouse in the remake of Texas Chainsaw Massacre. As passe as it may be, this is one place where Bailey could take a few new tricks from the old dog himself, Stephen King (who was, is, and always will be a master of characterization in a few concise lines).
That aside, I cannot say enough good things about Dale Bailey. Read this. You will not regret it. If you download it free online or get it out of the library, I'll even offer a money-back guarantee. ****
Ladies and Gentlemen, let me make this clear from the outset: Dale Bailey is the real deal. This is good, solid haunted house horror that will keep you up late at night turning pages.
The mark of an author who knows what he's doing is the ability to draw you in without you knowing exactly where you got drawn in. King does it well, when he doesn't grab you with the first sentence. Carson McCullers was a master at it. Bailey is the heir apparent. I'm not sure where it happened, but somewhere between pages 25 and 65, I found myself wanting to not eat, not sleep, and not do much of anything else until I had finished this book. (I ended up doing so less than forty-eight hours after that. It would have been less if not for a crisis at work.)
Dreamland is your basic housing project. Except for Building Three, where a whole lot of bad things have happened over the years. Dreamland is slated for demolition, but an eccentric billionaire named Ramsey Lomax has bribed the city to halt the demolition of Building Three and allow him to move into it for two weeks. He contacts a number of seemingly diverse people to spend the time with him, investigating the presence of ghostly activity. Four respond: a journalist who spent the first tree years of his life there, a discredited medium, a veteran with a shady past, and a young doctor on the verge of losing her career. The five lock themselves (with the aid of a convenient blizzard) in Dreamland, and the fun begins.
Put together the words "Chicago" and "projects" and the first thing likely to come to any horror or true crime fan's mind is Cabrini Green. Bailey pulls a nice sleight-of-hand, recognizable only to those of who who've seen it before, to differentiate the two, but there are still obvious comparisons. (Some of the events leading to the ghostly activity have shades of real-life crimes committed at Cabrini Green, as well; readers of the works of Peter Sotos will recognize a few of the things Ramsey Lomax points out as he guides his compatriots on their first tour of Dreamland.) There are a few minor loose threads involved with this angle of things (an aerial photo of Dreamland is referred to as looking like Stonehenge, which Bailey draws attention to, and then it's never mentioned again, for example), but nothing that can't be explained away as a red herring.
Where Bailey's writing suffers, and let me rush to say I use the term "suffers" when benchmarking this stuff against classic haunted house literature that makes everyone and their mother's 100-best lists, is that his characterization is developed a bit on the, well, leisurely side. In other words, by the end of the book, you have three-dimensional characters, but in some cases you have to wait till the end of the book to get there. I understand this is a device for hooking the reader, but (a) it's overused and trite, and (b) Bailey's already got more hooks than the slaughterhouse in the remake of Texas Chainsaw Massacre. As passe as it may be, this is one place where Bailey could take a few new tricks from the old dog himself, Stephen King (who was, is, and always will be a master of characterization in a few concise lines).
That aside, I cannot say enough good things about Dale Bailey. Read this. You will not regret it. If you download it free online or get it out of the library, I'll even offer a money-back guarantee. ****
audreyintheheadphones's review
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.
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