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Mar. 17th, 2009 09:43 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsI haven't read much horror - my experience is pretty much limited to Stephen King (and those of you who are to blame for that, you know who you are) - but I ended up liking Tananarive Due's The Good House enough that I may have to change that. At least to the point of reading more by Tananarive Due!
The central plot is relatively standard psychological horror as far as I know: someone inherits an old house with a History! Some kind of force there makes people do bad things! Mud and blood appear in the walls where they should not! Etc. But there are a couple of things that made this really work for me, and that I think make it stand out from most horror in general:
1. The characters! The characters are very strong and well-drawn, and although it took me longer to warm to some of them than others, I ended up very fond of all of them. Angela, the protagonist, is a successful middle-aged black talent agent who's both strong and believably flawed - she's self-contained to a fault, commitment-phobic, slightly unstable even before huge amounts of tragedy her life, but she's also competent, skilled and intelligent. Her son Corey (whose perspective we also get, in flashbacks - the story jumps around between a couple of close third-person viewpoints) is a really smart kid with believable issues who is a would-be rapper/poetry-writing dork. And then there is my personal favorite side character, Angela's friend Naomi, a hot rising movie star who starred as Coretta Scott King, kicks ass at Scrabble, and brings her tiny poodle with her everywhere she goes.
1.a. And none of the characters are overly vilified at all, even the ones that it would have been very easy to turn into caricatures (ex. 1. the Evil Ex-Husband Who Is Not The One, Oh No, who here is actually a complex and interesting character who ~discovers the value of reading.~ Okay, that might be enough to win me over.)
1.b. And speaking of Naomi - hey, awesome Bechdel test passing! Naomi wasn't in as much of the book as I would have liked, but she and Angela have a great friendship, and Angela's friendships with other women in the town where she grew up are really emphasized as well. And her relationship with her grandmother is arguably the most important one in the book.
2. The backstory of the horror is really cool and - maybe the word I want is legitimate? I don't mean the form of the magic itself, really - it's strongly rooted in voodoo and I am so not qualified to comment one way or another - but the cause-and-effect nature of what happened means that it's not just, oh, a murder happened here a long time ago, sucks to be us getting stuck with this house! It's a serious consequence of a serious act, that is in itself not unjustified. Which makes the whole thing a lot more interesting for me.
If I have complaints - well, one of them is that the end might be considered kind of a cop-out. I didn't really mind it in terms of reading enjoyment, but aesthetically I squinted at it a little bit askance. The other is that I did not care at about the romance pretty much at all, but I think that is just me. Either way, I really like Tananarive Due's writing, and I will totally be seeking out more.
The central plot is relatively standard psychological horror as far as I know: someone inherits an old house with a History! Some kind of force there makes people do bad things! Mud and blood appear in the walls where they should not! Etc. But there are a couple of things that made this really work for me, and that I think make it stand out from most horror in general:
1. The characters! The characters are very strong and well-drawn, and although it took me longer to warm to some of them than others, I ended up very fond of all of them. Angela, the protagonist, is a successful middle-aged black talent agent who's both strong and believably flawed - she's self-contained to a fault, commitment-phobic, slightly unstable even before huge amounts of tragedy her life, but she's also competent, skilled and intelligent. Her son Corey (whose perspective we also get, in flashbacks - the story jumps around between a couple of close third-person viewpoints) is a really smart kid with believable issues who is a would-be rapper/poetry-writing dork. And then there is my personal favorite side character, Angela's friend Naomi, a hot rising movie star who starred as Coretta Scott King, kicks ass at Scrabble, and brings her tiny poodle with her everywhere she goes.
1.a. And none of the characters are overly vilified at all, even the ones that it would have been very easy to turn into caricatures (ex. 1. the Evil Ex-Husband Who Is Not The One, Oh No, who here is actually a complex and interesting character who ~discovers the value of reading.~ Okay, that might be enough to win me over.)
1.b. And speaking of Naomi - hey, awesome Bechdel test passing! Naomi wasn't in as much of the book as I would have liked, but she and Angela have a great friendship, and Angela's friendships with other women in the town where she grew up are really emphasized as well. And her relationship with her grandmother is arguably the most important one in the book.
2. The backstory of the horror is really cool and - maybe the word I want is legitimate? I don't mean the form of the magic itself, really - it's strongly rooted in voodoo and I am so not qualified to comment one way or another - but the cause-and-effect nature of what happened means that it's not just, oh, a murder happened here a long time ago, sucks to be us getting stuck with this house! It's a serious consequence of a serious act, that is in itself not unjustified. Which makes the whole thing a lot more interesting for me.
If I have complaints - well, one of them is that the end might be considered kind of a cop-out. I didn't really mind it in terms of reading enjoyment, but aesthetically I squinted at it a little bit askance. The other is that I did not care at about the romance pretty much at all, but I think that is just me. Either way, I really like Tananarive Due's writing, and I will totally be seeking out more.
