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Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill

Jude Coyne is an aging rock star with a perchance for the macabre. He has a collection of gruesome artifacts, including such things as a cannibal cookbook, a snuff film, a used hang-man’s noose… so when his assistant sees an auction for a suit claiming to contain a dead man’s ghost, Jude has him use the “buy now” button to purchase it.

When the suit arrives, Jude finds out that it’s claim is true. When he contacts the seller, he discovers that he has been set up to buy the suit from an ex-girlfriend’s sister, and that the dead man now haunting him is the dead girlfriend’s stepfather, who was a powerful hypnotist and spiritualist. The ghost and his family tell Jude they blame him for the girlfriend’s death, and have come to exact revenge on him, and anyone who helps him, including his present girlfriend.

As Jude and his girlfriend seek to find a way to stop the restless spirit, they realize not only things within themselves, but within the haunting family as well.

The story has a good plot to it, and the characters are well written. I had a hard time getting past the beginning of the story, where Wiccans and Satanists were lumped into the same category, and almost stopped reading it because of that inaccuracy. However, if you can push past the stereotype, it has a nice story that will have you double checking that reflection in the window-pane.

Bone Gardenby Tess Gerritsen

Newly divorced Julia is digging in the yard of her recently purchased house when she finds an old skeleton that dates back to the early 1800’s, and has evidence of murder. She is contacted by a living relative of the original owner, who has boxes of stuff dating back to it’s origin. Inside are letters from an O.W.H to the original owner, and it contains a tale of murder and deception.

The letters follow a young woman named Rose, and medical student Norris Marshall. When Rose’s sister dies of childbirth fever, Rose takes on the young baby. Suddenly, she finds herself being followed by people trying to take the baby from her. When a serial killer begins killing people, Norris and Rose become the only witnesses to the horrible creature, and soon find themselves as prime suspects. As the link between baby and murderer becomes evident, Rose and Norris find themselves working together to find the real culprit, as well as discover the meaning behind why someone is searching for the child.

The characters are amiable enough, but I found the story slow to capture my interest. The plot seemed somewhat rushed, and while enjoyable, did not make me take any special notice of it. I found some of the ideas far-fetched, and it seemed to leave many questions unanswered. It had the feeling of a first-time novel, though it appears it is not.

I do not necessarily recommend it, but do not warn against, either. It would be a good “beach read” maybe.

  My recent read was The Eyes of the Dragon by Stephen King.  It was a reread, and an old-time fallback favorite. 

  Our favorite bad guy, Flagg, is back in King’s fantasy tale about a kingdom and Flagg’s attempt to destroy it.  For fun, of course!  When King Roland falls ill, his advisor Flagg decides the time is at hand to find a way to destroy the first born and noble son, Peter, in favor of the more gullible and easily manipulated Thomas. 

 Flagg devises a scheme to poison King Roland, and frame Peter for the crime.  His plan works flawlessly, and Peter is sent to “The Needle”, which is a prison room atop a skyscraper tower in the center of the plaza.  Thomas is crowned king, and Flagg immediately begins to assert his domain over the frightened, weak young boy.  While Thomas becomes immersed in self-pity and wine, the kingdom begins to sway under the burden of fierce taxing and regular be-headings.   Peter begins his plans for escape, and finds help in loyal friends who are still on his side. 

  While definitely a break from King’s normal realm of storytelling, this is an easy read that is captivating in it’s almost simplicity. 

I finally got around to reading The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett. I don’t know why it took me so long to read this book. Although it is completely out of my normal genre (although, I may have to change what I consider that to be, considering the wide array of literature I’ve delved into lately), it is a fantastically written book!

It is about a little girl, Mary, who, though spoiled completely rotten, has no relationship with her mother, who would rather frolic amongst her social gatherings than deal with a little girl. When the cholera wipes out her household in India, she is sent to live with her uncle in England. Her uncle is a hermetic, cranky old man, who lives in a vast mansion with hundreds of rooms that are not even used. The estate is surrounded by gardens- one of which has been sealed off and the key buried in the soils. This forbidden garden is where his late wife spent all her time, and her love, and died in.

While Mary is wandering through the gardens one day, she happens upon the buried key, and then finds the hidden doorway to the garden. It becomes her secret, that she eventually shares with Dickon- a free spirited boy who befriends wild animals. After one of her investigations of the house in the middle of the night, she happens upon another young boy, Colin, who she discovers is her uncle’s son, hidden away thinking himself crippled, sick, and fearful of looming death. Mary brings Colin into her secret, and the three of them transform not only the neglected garden, but the neglected childhood within them, and watch with amazement at the life that blooms not only within the garden walls, but within themselves as well.

A beautiful story that made me want to run outside and dance in the fresh air, soak up the sun, and dig in the dirt! Fabulously created characters that jump to life off the page and linger in your imagination. A sweet way to rediscover the child within yourself.

A must-read!

“Once upon a cruddy time on a cruddy street on the side of a cruddy hill in the cruddiest part of a crudded-out town in a cruddy state, country, world, solar system, universe…”

The book starts off with a suicide note, asking the reader to not blame the drugs. 

Cruddy by  Lynda Barry is a fictional story about a girl named Roberta.  Five years prior, Roberta was found wandering the desert covered in blood, holding her dog, Cookie.  She was the only survivor from what the newspapers declared “The Lucky Chief Motel Massacre”.   She has never spoken about what happened there.

Now sixteen years old, Roberta lives with her mom and sister on the aforementioned cruddy street in the cruddy town.  She has had her first experiment with drugs, and it is a whopper.  She meets some interesting people, who are also what you would call “misfits”.  The book jumps back and forth between her intoxicated journey with these kids, and the blood filled adventure she went on with her father five years ago. 

I found it a bit hard to grasp at first, but as I continued on, the story reeled me in more and more, until I had to stay up the rest of the night to finish the book. 

I recently finished the autobiography “My Lobotomy” by Howard Dully.  

  Dr. Walter Freeman has been termed “The father of the American Lobotomy”.  He came from money, surrounded by a strict mother and father and a family history centering around medicine.   He went to Yale, and afterwards enrolled in the Pennsylvania Medical School, where he became fascinated with the brain.  After medical school, he traveled the world studying neurology and psychiatry, and he visited various asylums. 

  It was a time of neurology and psychotherapy.  Sigmund Freud was publishing his theories on human emotion, and were gaining widespread acceptance.   Dr. Freeman, however, was not interested in Dr. Freud or psychoanalysis.  He thought this approach was actually dangerous.  Instead, he believed there were biological explanations for various mental diseases, and therefore must be surgical treatments. 

Over the next decade he experimented on mental patients with various new treatments, including massive doses of insuling, Metrazole (a stimulant drug), or electroshock therapy.  He was not very successful as a doctor, but was a huge hit as a teacher. 

In 1935 while visiting London, Dr. Freeman attended a presentation on chimpanzees whose frontal lobes were operated on, and they became passive and subdued.  A Portuguese neurologist named Egas Moniz also attended this presentation, and upon his return to Lisbon, began performing similar experiments on humans.  He called it “psycho-surgery.”  These experiments involved drilling holes in his patient’s heads, and making cuts in their frontal lobes.  He used a tool he called a “leucotome”, and dubbed the procedure a “leucotomy”. 

Dr. Freeman read of the experiments in a French medical journal, and decided this was what he wanted to do.  He contacted the company that supplied Moniz’s leucotomes, and ordered himself some.  He and a surgeon partner began practicing on cadaver brains.  Shortly after, he performed his first leucotomy. 

They deemed this surgery a success.  He then began performing these operations often on many patients.  He changed the name of the procedure to “lobotomy”.   Many of the procedures had poor results, but Dr. Freeman made excuses for these failures and looked over them. 

In the early 1940’s, an Italian surgeon was attempting to refine the prefrontal lobotomy by entering the brain through the thin bone of the eye socket, thereby not having to drill through the skull.  Freeman read up on the experiment, and in early 1946 he conducted America’s first transorbital lobotomy. 

  Dr. Freeman performed a multitude of these transorbital procedures.  His youngest patient was 12 year old Howard Dully.  Howard’s mother died when he was very young, and his new stepmother was not a nice woman.  She was strict, and cruel.  And she did not like Howard, since he did not fit her vision of a perfect child.  Howard was constantly in trouble, whether he had done anything wrong or not.  She took Howard to various medical doctors, trying to get him institutionalized, and when the doctors disagreed with her, then she would drop their care, and take him elsewhere.  Eventually, she came to Dr. Freeman.   After just a few short visits, Dr. Freeman diagnosed Howard as being schizophrenic and recommended the transorbital lobotomy.   His father took only two days to agree to the operation.

This book covers Howard’s journey through life leading up to, and after, his lobotomy.  When the lobotomy did not produce the results Howard’s new mother wanted, they found a way to give him over to the state.  It follows his paths through different homes, and how he tries to find a way to gain the love and companionship of his parents as he is shifted from place to place.  

It was a deeply disturbing look at how society viewed mental therapy in those days, and how little involvement or choices there were for the authorities in those days.