Every year, as Halloween approaches, literary thoughts turn to Edgar Allen Poe, Bram Stoker, and Stephen King.
Roundups of classic haunting and thrilling stories that appear like clockwork in late October have been pretty male-dominated, even though women have been diving into the uncanny valley since the 19th century (see later in this post).
The following sampling of classic novels and stories by women (by no means exhaustive) will send shivers up your spine while giving your taste for great language a thrill.
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From the original review in the Indiana Gazette, April 1974. The seventeen short stories in Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, a collection by Grace Paley are not conventional ones, but for those interested in an impressionistic form of writing filled with lucid images and true dialogue, they are well worth the reading.
Miss Paley has chosen New York City to celebrate in her work, and it is her impressions of the many kinds of people who make up the city, as well as the city itself and the interplay between the two, which are distilled to make stories vivid.
As for the writing, it is often chatty, but never garrulous, saying exactly what the writer wants it to say and perhaps a little more to the reader who care to think about it a bit. Read More→
For The Glass-Blowers (1963), one of Daphne du Maurier’s later novels, the author drew upon her own family history. Her ancestor, Robert Busson du Maurier, who was in the glass business, escaped to London from France at the start of the French Revolution.
The story is through letters written by Sophie Duval, the sister of the fictional version of Robert (also so named). They follow the family trajectory from her mother’s marriage into the family of glass blowers in 1747 through Robert’s death in 1811.
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Adapted from the 1999 Little, Brown edition of An Unfinished Woman by Lillian Hellman: The plays of Lillian Hellman — The Little Foxes, Watch on the Rhine, The Autumn Garden, Toys in the Attic, and all the others — speak eloquently for themselves and for Miss Hellman’s life in the theatre. An Unfinished Woman speaks for her life in the world outside.
It is in no sense a predictable theatrical memoir. Instead, she offers a detailed, unsparing self-scrutiny and a passionate, sometimes comic, always candid account of her experience, whether in New York, New Orleans and Hollywood, in Spain during the Civil War, or in Moscow and Leningrad during the Second World War and twenty years later. Read More→
From the original review in the Daily Independent Journal, San Rafael CA, September 1967). In several respects, Those Who Walk Away by Patricia Highsmith is extraordinary. The scene is Venice.
The two protagonists are Ray Garrett, an American whose young wife has recently committed suicide, and his father-in-law, Ed Coleman, who blames his son-in-law bitterly for his daughter’s death.
It soon becomes apparent that Coleman’s embitterment has become a madness, and that he is determined to kill Garrett. This novel deals with the ensuing hunt. Read More→
From the original review in The Oakland Tribune, Nov. 1926: In the eighties the theatre-loving world was on what might be termed a Pinafore jag. Light opera troupes, specializing in the presentation of the Gilbert and Sullivan musical hit, toured the land by the dozens. Some were good, many were bad, and a few were excellent.
The latter, however, never found their way back into the Middle West or back country sections, but the former did in scattered bands. And it is with this little known phase of early American middle western life that Maud Hart Lovelace deals in her novel The Black Angels. Read More→
Mandala: A Novel of India by Pearl S. Buck (1970) is unusual among this author’s novels, which are most often set in China or the U.S. In this story, Maharana Prince Jagat and his wife, Moti, learn that that their only son, Jai, has been killed by the Chinese in a border dispute.
The distraught parents wish to bring their son’s spirit home. It’s an exploration of Eastern and Western thinking, how they overlap, and the ways in which they conflict. The plot weaves in the mysticism and mysteries of life in India in a time and place that was contemporary to when the author wrote this book.
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From an original review of the film, based on the 1950 book of the same title by Patricia Highsmith in The Bridgeport Post, July 1951:
Warner Brothers presents Strangers on a Train, a screenplay by Raymond Chandler; from a novel by Patricia Highsmith. Starring Farley Granger, Ruth Roman, and Robert Walker. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock.
An offbeat story of murder, Strangers on a Train draws its appeal from the suspense it creates rather than from cold-blooded killing. The audience knows the slayer from the start, so interest is created through a series of tense situations and unexpected twists that keep the action moving toward the climax. Read More→
