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Post by dem on Jul 30, 2013 18:09:58 GMT
Francis Cottam - The Resident (Hammer, 2011) Blurb: Every year, three million single women in America move into an apartment for the first time. Few of them change the locks.
Juliet Devereau can't believe her luck: after weeks of looking for a place to live, she's found a beautiful spacious apartment overlooking Brooklyn Bridge. It almost seems too good to be true.
It is... Over the weeks, a chilling sense of being watched stalks Juliet. Strange sounds wake her in the night, the mirror in the bathroom trembles, and doors she thought shut are open. Then the silhouette of a man standing in her living room makes her realise that she's not alone in there. But what's haunting her is far more terrifying than a malevolent spirit; it's alive, strong and obsessed. Suddenly Juliet is caught up in a deadly game of cat and mouse, and there's no guarantee that she'll come out alive...Seem to recall The Resident drew some negative comment on the Hammer Books thread, so, in the interests of objectivity, etc, will be avoiding that for time being. The prologue swipes an infamous scene from a very famous psychological horror film and dirties it up in the most un-Hammeresque fashion before we launch into the story proper. New York. Dr. Juliet Devereau has just endured a tough day at the Hospital, culminating in her being knocked senseless by a stressed, meningitis-stricken patient. Her superior, the sagacious Dr. Holstrom, diagnoses mild concussion, insists on sending her home in a taxi with orders to take a few days rest. Still a little disorientated, Juliet walks in on novelist husband Jack as he's screwing some blonde bint from the tennis club. To find the love of her life has been unfaithful with a "trophy blonde" is too much to take. She walks out in tears. At first Juliet stays with best pal Sydney and her husband, Mike, but with Syd's first baby imminent, she has no wish to impose, and sets to seeking out her own accommodation. Her misadventures in apartment hunting are grimly hilarious - one property was once home to notorious Giuseppe 'The Palermo Killer' Forno, a Sicilian assassin who favoured the garrotte (he eventually hung himself in bizarre fashion in the very room she viewed). Dr. Holstrom is increasingly concerned that, without a secure home, her work will eventually suffer and gently hints that she makes finding a flat her first priority. What is she to do? And then, as if by divine intervention, a handwritten note appears on the staff bulletin board. Only 50 pages in, and, so far, so Psycho with added, well, spunk and shit. Am quite getting into it.
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Post by dem on Aug 1, 2013 13:29:13 GMT
"Even now he could be squatting in the basement, guzzling wine straight from the neck of the bottle, singing to himself. Bob Dylan, I would imagine. Actually, more like Leonard Cohen, going on the look of the guy ..." - Mike's jokey assessment of Juliet's knight in shining armour.
Up to p160 (of 298). Not having seen the film (or read any reviews of same) is possibly an advantage, as my closest reference point is the third series of Whitechapel, specifically the two-parter built around the Ratcliffe Highway Murders, wherein a gifted handyman's creative use of dead space spells misery for his clients.
The Brooklyn appartment is exactly what Juliet has dreamed of all these years, and the rent proposed by Max, the owner and maintenance man, is so ludicrously low, it requires all of her self-restraint not to bite his hand off. He's a complex one, is Max. Genial, shy, industrious and very capable with his hands, he is completely bereft of a social life. Juliet supposes this is on account of August, his live-in invalid grandfather, whose age, she estimates, is somewhere around eighty. If she's honest with herself, the old guy gives her the creeps. it's not just the welcoming gift of expensive toiletries and his near-desperation for her company, or his fondness for whiskey. It's not that his room is essentially a junkyard, his personal demeanor often similar. It's just .... Juliet can't put her finger on it, but she often gets the feeling that there's somebody hidden in her appartment, spying upon her around the clock, enjoying a voyeuristic perve as she pleasures herself in the bath. Still, better this than the Mafia hit-man's old haunted house ...
Knowing her friend won't let go of Jack and the past until she has a new man in her life, Sydney drags Juliet kicking and screaming to an art exhibition on opening night. Juliet is so out of practice, she's forgotten how to socialise and the event is torture until some clumsy idiot bumps into her. Max! Except, rather than the paint-splattered version in overalls, this incarnation is the suited, booted, devilishly handsome property owner about town. Juliet realises the truth. She badly wants a fling with him! But the night ends on a fumbled kiss and he avoids her for the next three days.
Max phones Juliet, assuring her that his absence has nothing to do with the other night and everything to do with his grandfather. August is dead. Would she attend the funeral? It will be very low-key, like, just the two of them.
Max now has the unenviable task of decluttering his Granddad's room/ museum and gifts Juliet the old man's bed among several items of antique furniture. We learn that Max's parents died when he was six - he witnessed the terrible event, poor kid - while Juliet is the daughter of two after-the-event hippies, both long since gone to the great Woodstock festival in the sky.
As a 'thank you' to Sydney and Mike, Juliet asks them over for a housewarming. She thinks better of inviting Max to spare his embarrassment - he really isn't happy in crowds, however small. Mike senses the watchful presence while he's taking a piss, and it upsets him for the rest of the evening. There's something not quite right about Juliet's dream home. In chapter 18, we finally get to know who and what she's up against .....
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Post by dem on Aug 2, 2013 14:27:22 GMT
I'm about half way through this, and my advice would be - don't bother. It is incredibly slow, with zero sense of suspense. And really badly written, with embarrasingly horrible, clunky phrases on every page. It reads like it was written in a major hurry, with no attempt to polish up the first draft. I can imagine the author in front of a TV screen, watching 10 minutes of the film, pausing it, typing for a few minutes, then re-starting the film and repeating the process. I really enjoyed Cottam's first couple of books ( House of Lost Souls & Dark Echo) but he seems to have really lost it. His last one ( Brodmaw Bay) suffered from a lot of the same problems as The Resident - too much time spent trying to give the characters a rich emotional back-story, that ultimately had very little to do with the main action of the plot - but this is one of the worst things I've read in a long time. Did you get to finish it? Could be that I was in the mood for something grubby, but it hit the spot. I'd agree that we should put out a missing persons report on the proof-reader, but, once the psycho stalker is out of his closet, the novelisation picks up pace. My main problem with The Resident is Juliet. Maybe Cottam troweled it on a bit thick, but, for all that she is the injured party, I didn't warm to her in the slightest and couldn't care what happened to her. The messed-up, sleazy psycho-stalker at least has the good grace to entertain. |
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Post by Dr Strange on Aug 24, 2013 14:41:11 GMT
Yeah, I finished it. I suppose it wasn't at all helped by the fact that I'd seen the film, but I wasn't impressed. I completely agree with what you say about Juliet, she's so unbelievable as a character that I really didn't care about her. Actually, it's a bit of a recurring problem in Cottam's books - he just isn't very good at believable characters. And he really struggles with believable dialogue. I'd still rate his The House of Lost Souls as one of my favourite horror novels of recent times though.
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Post by dem on Aug 24, 2013 17:07:57 GMT
Have seen The House Of Lost Souls around here, either in the library or the Spitalfields Crypt charity shop, and as luck would have it, they're both open on Sundays, so will let you know if I have any joy. Of those four and a half new Hammer's i've read to date, The Resident would finish behind Guy Adams loose, modern-day reinventions of Hands Of The Ripper and Countess Dracula, Shaun Hutson's labour of love The Revenge Of Frankenstein and Mark Morris's Vampire Circus (was going great guns with that until I left it alone for too long), but that's not to say I detested it by any means.
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Post by DemonSpawn on Aug 27, 2013 22:48:47 GMT
Have seen The House Of Lost Souls around here, either in the library or the Spitalfields Crypt charity shop, and as luck would have it, they're both open on Sundays, so will let you know if I have any joy. Of those four and a half new Hammer's i've read to date, The Resident would finish behind Guy Adams loose, modern-day reinventions of Hands Of The Ripper and Countess Dracula, Shaun Hutson's labour of love The Revenge Of Frankenstein and Mark Morris's Vampire Circus (was going great guns with that until I left it alone for too long), but that's not to say I detested it by any means. |
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Post by Mike Brough on Apr 1, 2014 6:47:28 GMT
Yeah, I finished it. I suppose it wasn't at all helped by the fact that I'd seen the film, but I wasn't impressed. I completely agree with what you say about Juliet, she's so unbelievable as a character that I really didn't care about her. Actually, it's a bit of a recurring problem in Cottam's books - he just isn't very good at believable characters. And he really struggles with believable dialogue. I'd still rate his The House of Lost Souls as one of my favourite horror novels of recent times though. I've just finished reading Dark Echo and I was quite impressed by the characterisation, both of the hero and of the heroine (are we allowed to distinguish between the sexes these days?). The villain wasn't so well-drawn and never really scared me but the two main characters were sympathetic and I did care about them. The main problem with the story is that so many important and sinister events are just skated over or mentioned in passing. Stephen King or Peter Straub would have stretched the book out to twice this length and, probably, to better effect. The ending is also rather rushed. Saying that, his writing is strong and engaging and I'd like to give him another chance. The choice is between The House of Lost Souls and The Waiting Room. I've read that Dark Echo is just The House of Lost Souls at sea. Anyone able to comment on whether it's different enough to make worthwhile reading? |
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Post by Dr Strange on Apr 1, 2014 14:44:46 GMT
Yes, Dark Echo is a bit like House of Lost Souls with a haunted boat instead of a haunted house - maybe my preference for Lost Souls is just down to the fact that I read it first but, anyhow, I still think it's the better book. The Waiting Room is OK-to-goodish, maybe a bit slower paced than the others and a bit less coherent - I'd say it's definitely worth reading though, if only so that I can get someone else's take on the ending, which is either preposterous or daringly original (or possibly both). I've also read The Magdalena Curse, which was so-so, and Brodmaw Bay, which really disappointed me (it seemed a decent idea for a short story, spoiled by loads of pointless padding and back-story). He's got at least one other horror novel (The Colony) that I would like to give a go, but can't because it only seems available as an e-book. His latest (The Summoning) appears to be a shift into something closer to fantasy (but I haven't read it).
I think that part of my issue with his characters is that he does seem to have a habit of repeating the same basic type - the hero in at least 3 or 4 of his books is an ex-soldier with access to firearms - I've compared Cottam somewhere here before to Robert E. Howard; basically saying that he is updating the old sword and sorcery genre, with lone warriors fighting supernatural evil. OK, in Dark Echo he went for something slightly different - the promising ex-amateur boxer - but if I remember right, REH also wrote a load of boxing stories. Maybe if his characters were a bit more varied across the books, then I'd have to retract that criticism (he's really not very good at dialogue though). What I have really liked about much of his writing is the way he interweaves historical facts into the stories.
Bottom line - I'd say go with House of Lost Souls. The basic plot may be similar to Dark Echo, but the historical references are different and the story is good, old-fashioned, occult horror. The Waiting Room is something a bit different... but you may hate the ending.
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Post by Mike Brough on Apr 1, 2014 18:36:30 GMT
I've just had a reply from FGC on my Goodreads review of this book. Seems like a nice guy - it wasn't just a cookie-cutter response.
I basically said the same there as here, especially around what should have been set piece highlights being covered by retrospective exposition.
He's replied to say that it was a question of balance. He'd already shown a few set pieces that established the character of the antagonist. Mainly, though, the story belongs to the two protagonists and he didn't want Harry Spalding hijacking this.
Fair point. I might have written it differently but it's his book written his way. The book has stayed with me and I'm a bit loath to start anything new in case it interrupts the mood!
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Post by Mike Brough on Apr 2, 2014 18:33:51 GMT
He's got at least one other horror novel ( The Colony) that I would like to give a go, but can't because it only seems available as an e-book. I've downloaded The Colony and have read the first dozen 'pages'. An interesting premise. Fingers crossed. |
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Post by Mike Brough on Apr 19, 2014 19:11:01 GMT
Apologies for replying to my own post.
I've finished The Colony and it was...okay. I'll post my GoodReads review here.
A good story, well told.
The only problem, and it was an important one for me, was that there were too many lead, point-of-view characters. They were all introduced up front but this was in a bit of a torrent and I found it tricky to remember who was whom. It wasn't until (view spoiler) that I started to cope. As a result, I found it difficult to get involved initially or to sympathise with anyone until around halfway through.
Still, it's the kind of story I like with all of the pre-requisites in a good haunted house (island)tale - a group of people cut off from outside help, historical secrets, gradual exposition, strong female characters...and the ending didn't wimp out!!! Too many modern horror stories have weak endings but this one didn't.
Like the previous Cottam book I read (Dark Echo), the book could have done with being 100 pages longer. This would have given more time to develop and differentiate the characters and to explore some of the areas that were perhaps glossed over.
While I only gave this one 3 stars, I'm quite a tough marker. 3 stars is still enough for me to seek out more of Mr Cottam's books.
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Post by Mike Brough on Jan 7, 2016 19:09:24 GMT
Repeated apologies! I've just finished one of Cottam's new novellas, The Going and the Rise, and I'd recommend it to any of you who enjoy a good ghost story in the modern idiom''. It features a bit of a return by the Jericho Society and, saints be praised, a believable and sympathetic protagonist. More importantly, it features the kind of love interest that makes an older man wish he were a younger man. Ruthie sounds... desirable. Nothing's perfect - there's a cracking piece of bad grammar that has you believing some women iron their decolletages, but I'll let him off with that. I bought it for Kindle on Amazon but it looks like it's free at F G Cottam |
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