The Call of the Wild

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Finishing a book and then going in search for another is probably one of the hardest things to do. Unless, at some point during your last book you developed a craving or idea of what to read next, one can spend hours staring at titles, spines, and authors’ names and never find inspiration. When that happens, I make a grab; usually something small that I know I can read in a week so as to have a new review posted on time. This method of book choosing led me to read an undervalued classic in literature this week: The Call of the Wild.

Set during the Klondike Gold Rush of the 1890s, the book tells the story of household pet Buck, who’s cushy, civilised life is turned upside down when he is kidnapped, sold, and put to work pulling a sled in the frozen Canadian wastes. Adapting to the rules of this new dog-eat-god world, Buck begins to change as the domesticated years of his breed are slowly shed and the underlying primordial instincts of his ancestors begin to take over.

Call of the Wild is one of those rare and delightful books that seem as though they’d appeal to a certain audience, but then prove to be the exact opposite. Like Orwell’s Animal Farm, London’s semi-anthropomorphic tale told in the third person omniscient empathising with the perspectives of the canine protagonist, seems like it could be a children’s tale, only to dash that initial impression with macabre and horrific descriptions of savagery and brutality, almost like a horror novel.

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However, this impression also gets pulled apart by London’s dramatic, rhythmic, and gorgeously crafted prose that romanticises the wild and the wilderness, painting it as something both beautiful and terrible. One cannot help but become completely mesmerised by Buck’s transformation as he moves further and further away from ‘man’s best friend’ to the epitome of the untamed wild.

A breathtakingly beautiful yet harrowing depiction of ingrained identities, nature vs. nurture, and a universal ‘animal’ instinct that resides in all life, The Call of the Wild is a surprising and deeply stirring book.

The Call of the Wild was written by Jack London in 1903. It was serialized in The Saturday Evening Post, and first published by Macmillan (New York).

Skuludggery Pleasant: The End of the World

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Sometimes it’s a healthy and wise idea to take a break from a constant stream of deep and dramatic excitement: cue Derek Landy’s Skulduggery Pleasant novella, The End of the World.

This sweet and small hundred-pager follows the adventures of Detectives Skulduggery Pleasant and Valkryie Cain as they endeavour, yet again, to save the world from a group of evil people who want to destroy it… just because they can.

Landy’s novella comes at an opportune time in the series, as things start to get dramatic with Valkyrie being the sorceress who’ll destroy the world, finding out horrible things about her hero and best friend, learning about China’s terrible secret la la la.

Image credit: Skulduggery Pleasant Wiki-Fandom

Sitting snugly between Death Bringer and Kingdom of the Wicked, The End of the World is a return to the nonchalant escapades of two of the most dramatic characters in YA (young adult) fiction that got people hooked onto the series in the first place. Whilst describing exciting battles, a race against time, and the ever-classic quest to save the world, the novella works as a reminder to readers that it’s ok to take a break from the bigger battles and settle down with something small… in fact it’s good for you, especially in a society where we binge, binge, binge!

Despite its short length, the book covers a sizeable adventure and successfully introduces and builds some strong characters, even though we probably won’t ever see them again, and while it’s not necessarily part of the series, it’s a return to fun and less dramatic beginnings and works as a refreshing break.

The End of the World is a Skulduggery Pleasant novella written by Derek Landy and published by HarperCollins Childrens’ Books in 2012.

The Yellow Wallpaper

The first reading of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s little literary masterpiece of a woman’s descent into madness puts us in mind of a genetic splice between Poe and Woolf. But in the hours you spend thinking about it after turning the last page, you realise that there is so much more going on. 

One of the most compelling works of feminist literature, The Yellow Wallpaper tells the story of a wife and mother who is forced into an isolated country holiday by her physician husband to cure a nervous breakdown. The nameless heroine, starved of intellectual stimulation, chronicles her feelings in secret as well as documents her feelings towards her bedroom’s repellent yellow wallpaper and her descent into madness as the patterns on it begin to consume her mind. 

Taken straight from her own experience, the story has a lot going on considering its length (a mere thirty-six pages long). On the surface, it reads as a Gothic horror complete with a nameless and faceless ‘unreliable’ narrator (unreliable as we quickly learns she’s going insane, though there’s an irony here that I’ll delve into later) a la Edgar Allen Poe. The short sentences and jagged paragraphs, never housing more than two or three sentences, are definitely not the lengthy and long-winded streams of consciousness that colour Woolf’s work, but still serve as a strong depiction of the heroine’s mind as well as tells entire stories and histories with few words. Through these techniques alone we are captivated and wrenched almost forcibly into a world seen through the heroine’s eyes. 

And this is where the true brilliance of the book comes through. The heroine becomes fixated on the wallpaper: hating it, being terrified of it, and then finally desperate to free the women trapped behind it that shake the patterns and make them move. Instantly, the wallpaper becomes a metaphor for marriage and the attitudes of a patriarchal society towards women. Victorian marriage and the demands on women to be wife, mother, and nothing more suddenly become the central villain of this chilling tale and there’s an eerie dramatic irony in the idea that this heroine (who is actually going mad and hallucinating) is simultaneously seeing the world for what it truly is: a structure of patriarchal inequality and female subjugation. Suddenly, everything you’ve read in the pages before takes on a different colour and a strong social commentary comes bursting out of the paper (to take an image from the story). 

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s use of a popular mass-read genre, techniques reminiscent of other writers, and then brilliant use of metaphor makes The Yellow Wallpaper a wonderfully modern book as well as one that deals with themes that are relevant to this day. Everything from sexual to social attitudes are represented here, as well as perfect depictions of the relationships and attitudes between the sexes: not just men towards women, but also women towards women. It truly is a masterpiece that has not gotten the recognition that it deserves and I would strongly encourage people to change this by taking a mere hour out of their day to sit down and read it. 

Author: Charlotte Perkins Gilman 

Published: 1892

Different Seasons

From the narrative master of horrors and thrillers comes this collection of four novellas that exhibit the lighter side of Stephen King. To give some perspective as to the types of stories we’re talking about, two of these tales were made into the cinematically brilliant and critically acclaimed films TheShawshank Redemption and Stand By Me! In Different Seasons, it’s a change of pace for King and a different type of story than we’re used to reading from him, making the book refreshing, confronting, and compelling. 

Hope Springs Eternal (‘Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption’): This story chronicles the journey of federal prison inmate, Andy Dufresne, from his arrival in Shawshank Prison to his eventual escape. 

Narrated in the first person, it’s told from the point of view of inmate, Red, who observes Andy’s story with much detail and interest. Whilst it is technically a first-person register, the story does have this third-person omniscient tone that King manages to create beautifully in Red’s narration. In this way, readers get to learn so much intimate detail about two characters rather than just one and it’s this and Red’s relationship with Andy that makes the tale so beautiful. 

But despite the clever blend of the first and third person omniscient narration, I did find that sometimes the pace of the story would slow and become a bit of a drone making it hard to continually pick up and read. It pays to watch the film first as the scene-by-scene reruns that the mind is capable of adds to the page-turning inspiration. 

But negative aside, it’s a story of patience, bravery, incredible discipline and determination, and hope and it makes for a very compelling read. 

Summer of Corruption (‘The Apt Pupil’): Tells the story of a young, talented, and promising student who, out of some morbid fascination, tracks down a war criminal and entices him into a strange union that threatens them both as it progresses. 

Written in the third person, this story begins a little slow and then starts to heat up when the past of the elderly man that the boy befriends is revealed and their relationship starts to develop. Taking a sharp turn away from the hopeful feelings inspired by Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption, this story explores the corruption of innocence and young potential in a really shocking and confronting way. 

King’s incredible attention to detail works to make the more dramatic and confronting scenes really gut-churning, whilst the nonchalant way in which he describes events through the alternating tones and perspectives of the two central characters, establishes a strong and growing sense of dread and serious disturbance. It’s gritty, and shocking, and so damned compelling. 

The Loss of Innocence (‘The Body’): This exhibition of bildungsroman (more or less ‘coming of age’) is the best in the book I think! It tells the story of four boys on the cusp of adolescence venturing into the woods to find the body of a missing boy, discovering life, death, and the loss of innocence along the way. 

A riveting story told in the first person register as a flashback, it’s one of King’s most intimate stories: entirely character-driven with an impeccable attention to detail of the culture being described. You do feel as though you are there in that town, in that year, at that time. Yes, of the four this is the best! 

A Winter’s Tale (‘The Breathing Method’): Depicts a man telling the story of a man who told a most incredible story about an unmarried pregnant woman determined to give birth…no matter what. 

Admittedly the weakest story in the book, this is the classic story within in a story and one thing that it does achieve quite successfully is create a sense of dread and anticipation without providing payoff at the end. Readers are left with so many unanswered questions, which is probably for the best, and no sense of justification for the effort put in to reading the story about the pregnant woman. 

Having said that, the story about the pregnant woman does provide some weird and horrible closure in the form of blood and horror, which King does all very well. 

It’s simply written and we don’t really get a good sense of any of the characters depicted, so it’s hard to say what it is that keeps us turning the pages. But we do. 

Amongst the intimate registers, empowering tones, and incredible and graphic detail, King also subtly references the tales within each other, which brings another level of enjoyment to the whole thing. Keep an eye out for references to Andy in ‘The Apt Pupil’: particularly enjoyable. 

Filled with action, violence, drama, suspense, growth, despair, and even a little comedy, Different Seasons is an apt title for this collection of novellas that demonstrate King’s ability to write stories with heart as well as horror.

Four Past Midnight

At midnight comes the point of balance. Of danger. The instant of utter stillness when between two beats of the heart, an alternate reality can slip through, like a blade between the ribs, and switch you into a new and terrifying world. 

Written by Stephen King, Four Past Midnight is a collection of four novellas that each explores the fragility of the human mind and how everything can change in that split second. The book is a delightful mixture of terrors on numerous fronts. 

Our first tale, The Langoliers, tells the story of ten passengers on board a plane that wake up to find the plane mysteriously empty of its pilot, cabin crew, and all the other passengers. The motley crew of travellers then proceed to discover with increasing horror that they have slipped through a crack in time and must get back to the present before they become the past. 

A surprising science fiction thriller, this story is one where King plays to the readers’ most primal of senses: curiosity. The writing is a little all-over-the-place and pockmarked with King’s undeniable and sometimes infuriating frankness and brutality and, to be honest nothing hugely engaging happens for the most part, but for whatever reason, be it the love for the writer or the unyielding niggle that says that something really good is going to happen, you continue to power through the book at three times the speed of sound, avidly taking in everything on the page in front of you. 

Filled with action, madness, violence, science fiction, horror, and even romance, The Langoliers is a very interesting story that opens up a lot of doors in your mind about the fragility of time; so much so that it can even be argued that it redefines what it means to time travel. It definitely throws the whole concept into a whole new light. 

Our second story is Secret Window, Secret Garden and this story tells the grizzly and terrifying tale of Mort Rainey, a divorced writer who is thrown into a violent and horrifying spiral when a man comes to his doorstep and accuses him of stealing his story. Although Mort goes to great lengths to prove his innocence the accuser, named John Shooter, proves impossible to sway and things soon become terrifyingly dangerous as Shooter’s path to revenge becomes littered with blood and dead bodies. 

My whole reason for buying this entire book was because I was desperate to read this story after I saw the movie: Secret Window, which starred Johnny Depp and John Turturro. It’s a fantastic psychological thriller with appropriate levels of suspense and gore and, not since The Shining have I been that frightened when reading! Reading the climactic part at 4 in the morning and a dog suddenly barked down the road…. I jumped, almost tumbled right out of bed! 

King has an innate talent for writing scenarios that are happening in reality and in the characters’ mind simultaneously. The writing in Secret Window, Secret Garden greatly and very clearly imprints the images in the mind of the reader and, with the violent horror and gore of the story written very bluntly and simply, it repulses and shocks you just enough to make you want to read on instead of putting the book down with a grimace and a flip of the stomach. The entire story is an intrinsic web of misdirection and deception and, filled with violence, murder, gore, and heaps of horror and suspense, it’s a story that you won’t want to put down! 

Our third story is The Library Policeman, which tells the traumatic tale of Sam Peebles, a real-estate agent who is roped into doing a speech for the Rotary Club. To liven up his speech Sam goes down to the local library, a feat in itself as he has a fear of libraries that stems from a long time ago, and here he meets Ardelia Lortz the librarian… and his troubles begin. There is something strange about Ardelia, even more so when Sam discovers that the woman has been dead for years. Yet she soon begins to start hounding Sam to return his library books, threatening him with the “Library Policeman”. Sam begins to panic when the books go missing and true terror takes hold when the dark, shadowy and menacing Library Policeman comes to his house… 

I found this story rather hard to get through as it takes an inordinate amount of twists and turns, not just of the plot, but of the genre of story as well. It begins as a sort of ghost story with Sam entering a ghost library and being served by a woman who, according to the rest of the word, died years ago. But then it escalates into a sort of alien story with Ardelia being some sort of otherworldly vampiric monster. And then finally it takes a detour down the thriller lane with Sam’s own personal tale of childhood trauma. I found that, with so many changes to the story’s style, I kept getting lost and not having a clue as to what was going on. 

Having said that though, once we get into the more climactic part of the tale, the recounting part where everything finally gets explained to the reader, then it becomes a rollercoaster of terror and fright. This is also the first King story I’ve read that features a little bit of subtle humour, sort of like that used in The Seven Year Itch, in which Stephen King uses his own name amidst some of the great horror writers that Ardelia lists for Sam. 

What I also liked about this story was that it was one in which the author could easily convey messages about reading and the general power of stories, in the case of this book: fairytales. When you get down to brass tax, fairytales, the original and un-Disneyfied ones, are really scary and not really for children at all. They were originally written to scare children into being good and that purpose serves King’s monster-mistress in this story very, very well. 

Filled with childhood trauma, violence, horror, romance, comedy, and heaps of suspense, The Library Policeman is a strange, but ultimately very engaging story that takes some time to get into, but once you’re in, there’s no hope of getting out. 

And the fourth and final story in this collection is The Sun Dog, which I have to admit I didn’t understand at all. This story tells the tale of Kevin Delevan and a camera that his parents give him for his fifteenth birthday. At first he’s very excited, it’s just what he wanted, but then the camera proves to have a fault: it takes the same picture over and over again. As if this isn’t enough the picture it takes is of a mongrel dog and what makes it more disturbing is the fact that in every picture that’s taken, the dog appears to move, getting closer and closer. With the help of his father and a seedy town crackpot, Kevin initiates an investigation into the phenomena and discovers that the dog really is moving and has one thing in mind: to escape from the Polaroid world and kill him. 

I found this story to be boring and made up of nothing but suspense. What compels you to keep turning the pages is the built-in expectation that everything nonsensical and boring that happens in the beginning and middle is only leading up to a fantastically scary and brutal climax. Unfortunately, this is not the case for this story. I just found that I couldn’t understand what the horror was and, maybe this is just a fault on my side, but I just found this story to be boring and I only read it because I hate not finishing a book. 

Having said this, I must admit that I did enjoy the horror-dog theme that King goes on in this story. We see open references to Cujo and then The Hound of the Baskervilles, which I quite enjoyed. 

Overall, Four Past Midnight is a great collection of stories that each explores the fragility of the split second and the what-if possibilities of other worlds and the human mind. 

Filled with violence, horror, romance, and a few clever bouts of comic writing, I quite enjoyed it. I’d read some of those stories again.