The 764th Soundtrack of the Week Pete Knutsen's music
for Carl Gustav, the Gang and the Parking Bandits.
Andrew Neiderman's Brainchild shares with Celia Dale's A Helping Hand
the idea of home nurse as homicidal sadist, a plot that Stephen King would also
put a spin on in Misery.
All of these books are significantly different, though, and Neiderman's is an exploration
of a mad scientist premise, with the mad scientist being an 18-year-old girl,
a senior in high school.
By Lois. Since mom has been effectively sidelined and is even kept
drugged against her will. Now Lois has a perfect controlled environment and a helpless human
subject. It's a pretty horrifying situation and Neiderman presents it in fairly
matter-of-fact prose, simply letting events play out and describing
them in vivid yet understated writing. This is the kind of book that I would expect Grady Hendrix to
write about in his always amusing newsletters. Who knows, maybe he
already has? It's probably not quite bonkers or special enough to be a Paperback from Hell,
but it was worth reading. Thanks once again to Toronto's Little Ghosts horror book store and coffeeshop,
where we picked up this volume last month. The first line is "Billy Wilson squinted as he studied the small white
laboratory rat in the glass cage".
Foyles bookshop in London has always rewarded our visits.
Not only is it thrillingly well stocked, but it frequently offers up authors that, we fear, otherwise might not have come to our attention.
The most recent example is Celia Dale, whose book A Helping Hand caught our eye. It was in a brand new paperback edition with an intriguing “The queen of suburban horror” from The Times on the front.
That turned out to be quite apt, as was Ruth Rendell’s “quiet, clever, subtle — and terrifying”. Those are indeed the words.
2023 February 03 • Friday
2023 February 01 • WednesdayThe land that stretched around them was as featureless as themselves: fields of drab vegetables, sports grounds belonging to some nearby factory, a rubbish tip, a display ground for caravans, or just ground — stony, sparsely grassed, scattered with coltsfoot and shepherd’s purse, bounded by slack wire. And beyond it, flatter than the sea, flatter certainly than the Sahara, the unseen, omnipresent, vast void of the airport.
This description carries considerable impact in the book, appearing after a significant chunk of time is spent with the Evanses in sunny coastal Italy.
They’re on vacation but also looking for someone to be their next victim. They like to lend a helping hand, you see, to old women who live isolated lives but have some money to speak of in some combination of savings, pension and inheritance. They take them in as their Paying Guest and slowly, sadistically, insidiously kill them — but only after a slow murder of their spirit and intelligence.
Maisie Evans used to be a nurse and Dale lets that fact, remarked often by both Evanses, speak for itself. At no point is it said that poison or drugs are employed, or that Mrs. Evans knows how to destroy a body simply by isolating, confining and controlling it. But the reader will certainly have that impression.
Mr. Evans is disgustingly lusty and perverse. Inappropriate sexual impulses and fantasies dominate his thoughts and the occasions when he acts on them are stomach-churning.
Into their web falls elderly widow Cynthia Fingal and, a little later, another character who provides a shocking contrast to the placid drama of Mrs. Fingal’s gradual, inexorable, inhumane and all too believable destruction.
Dale is one of those writers whose every sentence has something to admire. And few can equal the precision with which she indicates how unpleasant people can be behind their masks, using the deftest and most minimal touches to direct our attention to deceit, manipulation and madness.
At some point in reading this novel you might start to experience serious anxiety about how it’s going to end. You should.
The first line is “Mrs Maisie Evans came into the lounge, pulling down the cuffs of her cardigan”.