Review: Ghost Wall

Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"Ghost Wall" had a beautiful cover and a constant flashing banner advertisement on the Lit Hub website, so when I saw that my library’s online collection had a copy, I said let’s give it a whirl. And what a whirl. Even at a brief 152 pages, this book flies by so quickly and is so densely packed with forceful writing that it feels less like a snack and more like a meal. While it had every opportunity to skew YA fiction rather than adult lit (teen protagonist, forays into bildungsroman style flashbacks), the tone of this novel is as mature as blue chip stock. I LOVED it, even as I was unnerved by some of the behaviors of the characters and eventually shocked by the denouement. Good shocked, but shocked.

The story is told in first person from the perspective of Silvie, a twenty-first century teenager on an Iron age re-enactment trip with her parents, an archaeology professor, and a handful of students from a local university. The group is living in an encampment in the English countryside and attempting to follow ancient folkways practiced by the Britons in the time period—hunting and foraging for food, wearing long itchy tunic shifts over bare feet, sleeping in a communal hut, cooking by a fire. Silvie’s father, Bill, is not an academic, but an almost obsessive amateur enthusiast, who has dragged his family along for the experience. As the story progresses, it becomes more and more clear that Silvie’s normal life is not all that normal, lived in the shadow of her physically abusive, emotionally manipulative father and a cowering, complacent mother. Her parents’ behavior on the trip mirrors their home dynamic, just with even less places for Silvie to go to escape the scrutiny and the threat of discipline. She makes quasi-friends with one of the college students, a free-spirited girl named Molly who questions many of the strictures placed upon them for the immersion experience, sneaking off to a gas station when the mood strikes her to get some very non-period junk food snacks. Molly’s confidence and carefree attitude seem to both attract and frighten Silvie, who worries constantly about “getting in trouble” even when no one is watching or should care. Something about the idea of Silvie seeing a possible version of herself, stripped of the worry and doubt that comes with being under the thumb of a domineering, abusive parent, in Molly is very touching at the same time as it is very sad.

I was interested in some of the class differences explored in the book— the parents speak in a strong Mancunian accent from the north of England which seems accurately reproduced in the book without feeling like you’re wading through a soup of regional dialect. Silvie several times mentions the students’ accents as “sounding posh” as if they were somehow putting on in a way that Silvie and her parents were not, and Molly at one point makes a stab at imitating Silvie’s mother’s accent, which is not well received by Silvie herself. The students all seem relatively disinterested in their studies in spite of the opportunities they’ll afford them as university graduates, while Silvie mentions that she doesn’t see a point to going to university, and will probably just start a job after she finishes high school. Silvie’s father’s place in the field trip, as a lower working class, weekend aficionado of the armchair variety rather than a practicing professional, leaves him open to a kind of posture-off with the actual professor on the trip, and you can’t make out if the blustering is part of Bill’s bullying personality or an effort to establish his authority on the subject despite his lack of formal education. A particularly telling exchange happens when he brings up an obscure Celtic warrior queen in the midst of a historical discussion and the professor corrects Bill’s pronunciation before responding. “Boudicca, said the Prof, we call her Boudicca these days, it seems a more accurate rendition.” What a pill, I thought. The man drives a bus five days a week and somehow still finds time to know as much as you do about something you have a terminal degree in, Professor Whateveryournameis. But I digress.

As the book progresses, you can almost feel a knot tightening in your stomach, as nothing so much about the circumstances but everything about the voice and style of the writing points to dread. I remember being shocked/weirdly thrilled by this sentence in the second chapter, which is casually dropped in between some lines about the roughly built period-correct shelter: “Some of the Iron Age people kept their ancestors’ half-smoked corpses up in the rafters, bound in a squatting position, peering down empty eyed. Some of the houses had bits of dead children buried under the doorway, for luck, or for protection from something worse.” Well! This macabre tidbit gives you good idea of some of the tone of the book, which in some sections has the eeriness of a dream coupled with the banality that comes with spending a large portion each day walking the countryside searching for edible berries or setting traps for rabbits… the days seem as boring as they are surreal, in a way, each action or plot point strangely seems to anticipate the next. Also, the frequent references to the bog bodies—human cadavers that become mummified by peat bogs and are present an invaluable resource to the archaeological/anthropological community in reconstructing the lives of Iron Age (and later) peoples—don’t really do anything to lighten the aforementioned kind of ghastly vibe. The story is semi-haunted with the idea of death and brutality of a time period long since passed.

The book builds to a climax which, as I said before, makes sense in the context of the story but is shocking in its execution—I won’t spoil it for you, but get ready for weird to meet weird to meet unreasonably weird. I thought at the beginning of the book I might like to go on a similar field trip and experience what it was “really like” during such a different time period, but I now decline any going offers, thanks the same. If you’re looking for sensitive, incredibly well crafted storytelling with a sidecar of can’t-put-your-finger-on-it apprehension, "Ghost Wall" is your book.


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Review: In the Dream House

In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Carmen Maria Machado’s “In the Dream House” is technically a memoir, but don’t expect to open to the table of contents and detect a linear path from Machado’s childhood to her current status as happily married graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. What Machado has done with this book is a truly expert level of deconstruction, to both the story of her own tortured love affair that forms the basis of the book and the structure of memoir itself. I was equal parts intrigued and delighted by her efforts and if you’re at all interested in the subject, you will be too.

Sectioned off into one page, one paragraph—sometimes one sentence—long gulps of prose, the book is formatted into capsules titled “Dream House as _____” (Dream House as Epiphany, Dream House as Lesson Learned). Each title is a wry statement on the subject of the confession, criticism, recollection that follows, lined with witty footnote references to fairy tale tropes. The capsules piece together and pore over the details of a relationship Machado had in her twenties’ and the nightmarish psychological and verbal abuse that accompanied it—the tense feeling of dread you get as she falls in love with a beautiful girl who adores her, and as that girl gradually becomes a monster, is as unnerving as an actual horror story. Yet, because it’s real life, there are horrible moments followed by mundane ones, and peaks of ridiculousness (arguments that start over nothing and end with Machado literally having to lock herself in a bathroom away from her girlfriend like Shelley Duvall in The Shining) followed by plateaus of semi-normalcy. The book gives you a teeth-clenchingly realistic idea of what it is like to be in the slow boil of non-physical abuse—because Machado’s girlfriend never hits her, and because Machado truly wants to hang on to the relationship and the love and acceptance she’s found in it, she thinks she can manage her behavior and change her reactions enough to make the girlfriend stop losing her everloving mind on Machado for such tiny indiscretions as “falling asleep while watching a movie with her roommates and not immediately answering her girlfriends calls”. As any survivor of this kind of a relationship could tell you, it was never about the unanswered calls, and it would never not be about SOMETHING.

Taking advantage of the dip and dive of the story structure, Machado incorporates everything from literary and film criticism (discussing Ingrid Bergman’s performance in Gaslight, for example, a movie that lends its name to the current psychological term for being manipulated into questioning your sanity by someone for their own gain) to research into the issue of underreported domestic violence among lesbian women into her narrative. To the latter point, I thought of just how many heterosexual, male-on-female stories of violence there are in mainstream literature, news headlines, etc—how the battered-by-a-man battered woman is a familiar trope in books and media. Conversely, I had trouble trying to think of a famous case of a lesbian relationship shaded by violence (though Machado brings up several in an insightful section on historic cases of female-on-female abuse or murder). She goes on to consider how personhood, and the right to even BE in a public or legal binding relationship, is such a comparatively new concept in the lesbian community that the more nuanced, and even negative, views of members of this group have yet to come to popular acceptance. Hopefully, with this book and with the encouragement of other voices from people with similar experiences, that will begin to change.

By telling her story in such a rivetingly original way, Carmen Maria Machado has created with In the Dream House both an intensely personal and a compulsively readable account of her attempt to “make sense” of a love affair gone wrong, and a thought-provoking meditation on the idea of the way in which a fairy tale romance can turn into a nightmare. Once I started reading it, I had to stay up to see what happens, and if that isn’t the highest form of praise an author can get from me, I don’t know what is. Check it out.


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