The Winter People – A Page-Turning Supernatural Thriller

Jennifer McMahon’s chilling novel, The Winter People (2013) is set in the eerie small-town of West Hall, Vermont, surrounded by dark woods and a source of weird folk tales. The collective psyche of the town’s inhabitants believes in vengeful ghosts and unexplainable monsters roaming around the creepy atmosphere of forests. And like every small-town we read about in novels, strangers rarely trespass the territory while the townspeople pass of their knowledge and sense of dread to the dwindling populace of descendants. Of course, teenagers rebel and question the elders’ belief in such ridiculous fairy-tales. It leads to unveiling the truth, which only further leads to discerning the necessity of maintaining the dark secret. The Winter People follows this basic structure, a Stephen King-like story that alternates between the past and present to explore the town’s legend of ‘sleepers’.

“The first time I saw a sleeper, I was nine years old,” writes Sara in her diary, one of the grieving heroines of the novel. The ‘sleeper’ or ‘Winter People’, as named by Sara’s little daughter Gertie, are people who have been recalled from the dead by their beloved ones. And we inherently know nothing good can come from awakening the dead. Sara Harrison Shea’s story is set in the year 1908. She lives in her remote farmhouse (which belonged to her deceased father) with her husband Martin, and six-year-old daughter Gertie. Gertie was born after many years of failed pregnancies and loss. Sadly, the little girl too perishes in an accident and madness seems to have taken hold of Sara. In order to get her daughter back, Sara performs a ritual, the knowledge of it passed on to her by a mysterious aunt. Soon, she believes her girl has come back, whispering to her, and leaving strange notes.

In the present, Nineteen-year-old Ruthie wakes up one morning to find that her mother, Alice has disappeared. For years, Ruthie and her little sister Fawn are living off-the-grid with their mother. In her search for clues to find her mother’s whereabouts, Ruthie stumbles upon Sara Harrison Shea’s diary (actually it’s published into a book by Sara’s niece Amelia years after her aunt’s grim fate; people read it as a good horror story, although Amelia believed it to be true and adjudges that some of the diary’s ‘important’ pages are missing). Ruthie also comes across other mysterious items in her mom’s closet which pushes her to take a short trip with boyfriend Buzz. In a parallel story, also set in the present, a grieving wife and artist named Katherine has recently moved to West Hall. Her photographer husband, Gary is recently killed in a car accident, supposedly shooting for a wedding. But she discovers there was no wedding and learns that Gary visited a woman in a café in West Hall. Katherine is desperate to understand the reason for her husband's visit. These two stories in the present are of course connected to the strange life and death of Sara Harrison.

The first-half of ‘Winter People’ is really absorbing, transplanting us to the snow-covered small-town Vermont setting. The construction and execution of atmospheric horror in the early chapters is beyond excellent. The description of wintry woods, the arduous farm-life, the pale ghostly figure spotted between tree trunks, tales of  people disappearing without a trace, and all other chilling elements are superbly built up by Jennifer McMahon. Sara’s tale is full of dark foreboding and heart-breaking developments, and it’s easily the best among the three story-lines. The novel’s major themes deal with mother-daughter relationship which is well-realized in both the timelines plus the hold grief has over the humans. The characters are also very well developed (especially Ruthie Sara, and Katherine). Moreover, the clues and red-herrings deeply engages us. However, the novel sort of implodes in the last-third, as guns are brought into play. I particularly abhorred the Candace character whose actions and behavior are jarring enough to adversely impact the novel’s tone. The interactions also become very stiff in these parts, sounding too formulaic. The conclusion was also not convincing, and all these factors considerably bring down the novel’s quality (because the first-half was so propulsive). Still, it will be a captivating page-turner for mystery and thriller aficionados.

Chronicle of a Blood Merchant – An Artfully Written Story of a Family’s Will to Survive Malevolent Forces of History

“Since it’s my birthday, I’m going to cook a meal for each of you with my mouth, and you can eat it with your ears. You won’t be able to eat it with your mouth because there’s nothing to eat, but prick up your ears, because I’m going to start cooking any moment now…”

In the 1980s, Yu Hua wrote short stories that were known for its ‘incisive lyricism’ and established himself as a key figure in Chinese avant-garde literature. Born in 1960, Yu Hua was working as a dentist when he started publishing stories. In 1990s, there was a major shift in the author’s style as he wrote two best-selling novels, which depicted the extraordinary struggles of the ordinary Chinese men and women. To Live, Yu Hua’s first novel (published in 1993), was adapted into a critically acclaimed movie by Zhang Yimou. His second novel, Chronicle of a Blood Merchant (published in 1995 and translated to English by Andrew Jones in 2004) follows a small-town factory worker, from his youth to old age in the second half of the 20^th century – a period that marks the early days of Chinese socialism (1950s), the ambitious yet brutally forced collectivization of the Great Leap Forward (in 1958) and the famine that ensued as a result, the bloody Cultural Revolution (1966-76), and the relatively better (economically) post-Mao era.

Like To Live’s central character, the no-good-gambler Fugui, Xu Sanguan of Chronicle of Blood Merchant is a unheroic figure, molded by the regressive sociocultural practices and restricted by financial instability. He earns meager wages, working as a cart-pusher in a silk factory, situated in his small rural town. Xu Sanguan hears from his favorite fourth uncle that people in their village sell blood to hospital and earn money, the amount even if they toil six months in the field can't dream to earn. Selling blood was traditionally a taboo subject in China, but in the 1980s Chinese authorities and commercial companies set up a network of blood plasma collection stations in public hospitals especially to tempt the impoverished peasants. When Yu Hua wrote this novel the malpractices and corruption surrounding the system didn’t come to light (the unhygienic blood-buying practices led to HIV infection, afflicting at least half a million peasants in Henan province). Yet, Yu Hua’s portrayal of Xu Sanguan giving blood till he is too weak to even stand presents an alarming picture.

Earlier in the novel, the writer treats us to painful description of things-to-do before donating blood. Xu Sanguan meets two peasants on the road who asks him to drink lots of water to dilute their blood so that there’s more to sell (“drink until our stomachs are so swollen that it hurts and the roots of our teeth start to ache”). Chronicle of a Blood Merchant, however, isn’t a story steeped in misery and melodrama. Yu Hua details Xu Sanguan’s crisis-ridden life in the provincial village with a caustic wit. He is definitely not a likable character in the early chapters. Learning that the first of his three sons, Yile, is actually the child of his rival, He Xiaoyong, he abuses his wife Xu Yulan and bullies the boy. At one point, Xu Sanguan calls up his sons, Erle and Sanle, to promise him that they would rape He Xiaoyong’s daughters when they have grown up.

Xu Sanguan also often offers his twisted logic on why he can’t treat Yile as his son (ladened with casual misogyny). He leaves Yile at home during the famine and takes the rest of the family to eat noodles at a local restaurant. The image of hungry Yile stumbling through the streets, searching for his family, enrages us. Quite a few readers may get offended by Xu Sanguan’s absurd logic and callous deeds (strengthened by regressive social and cultural thinking). Even the other characters’ behaviors and motives may baffle our politically correct bourgeois sensibilities. But gradually Xu Sanguan takes the path of redemption that largely avoids blatant sentimentality. And as the state deprives the family of private existence, the political and social turmoil of the nation also invades their domestic space in myriad ways.    

Despite a clear-sighted portrayal of a vicious totalitarian world, what distinguishes Yu Hua’s novel is the humane portraits of the unenlightened people, who gradually learn to set aside their prejudices and false sense of pride. With this novel, the author has deftly mixed his humanistic notions with his early stylistic innovations (credit also belongs to the translation work of Andrew Jones). The result is a vivid story of flawed people who emerge from the period of intense fear, finding joy in small things and solace in family unit. 

 

Newcomer – Yet another Cleverly Plotted and Emotionally Involving Keigo Higashino Mystery

“Aren’t you supposed to be investigating her murder, Detective?”

“Oh, I am investigating the murder; of course I am. But my job as a detective should go beyond that. People who’ve been traumatized by a crime are victims, too. Finding ways to comfort them is also part of my job.”

I love reading Keigo Higashino mysteries from the time I first read The Devotion of Suspect X. His simple, to-the-point prose (translated by Alexander O. Smith or Giles Murray), his attention to details, the way he generates deeper questions out of seemingly insignificant actions, and his fly-on-the-wall observations of the idiosyncrasies of Japanese culture and society are all my favorite aspects in the tales of mystery master. Moreover, there’s unparalleled humanist quotient in his novels which most of the procedural authors drop off in an effort to construct a ‘cerebral’ mystery. Higashino’s whodunits or howdunits does possess an inscrutable crime and an ever-deepening conundrum at its center, but what I eventually take away from his tales are the moments of grace and humane gestures which gives off the feeling that an order is restored and the chaos of reality temporarily averted. 

Newcomer is the eighth novel in his Detective Kyoichiro Kaga series (published under the title ‘Shinzanmono’ in 2009). But it’s only the second Kaga series novel to be translated to English (in November 2018 by Giles Murray), following Malice. Kaga is an eccentric sleuth who despite his uncharacteristic clothing sense (a blue short-sleeved shirt over a t-shirt) is good at tracking down the truth using his Holmesian skills. While his methods are laser-focused, Kaga is also very good at discerning people’s emotions. In Newcomer, Kaga is recently transferred to the Nihonbashi precinct, a district in Tokyo where old and new Japanese culture intersects. The story sets in motion when another newcomer to the district is murdered in her apartment (strangled to death). Forty-five year old Mineko Mitsui, a divorcee living by herself, is the murder victim. Teamed with the Tokyo Metropolitan Police, Kaga scrutinizes every aspect of the woman’s lives, starting with the people she met or called on the day of her murder to the objects found in her small apartment.

Newcomer is structured in the form of (eight) intricately connected vignettes, each answering the different strange aspects in the case and eventually points to the perpetrator. Kaga’s investigation first unfolds by him tracing the truth behind little discrepancies surrounding the case. An insurance agent’s lie, a man who has supposedly the last person to visit Mineko, takes Kaga to a rice-cracker shop run by an ailing old lady and her caring motherless granddaughter. A wasabi-spiked sweet pastry found in Mineko’s apartment brings Kaga to investigate the restaurant’s owner. Most of the vignettes are seemingly unrelated to the central mystery of Mineko’s killing. Yet by solving these mysteries, Kaga gets to know the area (like us readers). The wit and humanity of all these shop owners, apprentices, and clerks whom Kaga repeatedly investigates (or nags) keeps us thoroughly hooked, even though it is only in the second-half of the novel, Mineko’s recent past and possible motives for her murder are explored. And in each episode, Kaga comes off as the guardian angel bearing good news. Since the Japanese family dynamics revolve around some unwritten rules of etiquette (where lot of things are left unspoken), the truth Kaga unearths comforts these disparate set of people.

Few of the episodes (especially towards the end) could be accused of being too sentimental. But most of these stories of failed relationship, unexpressed love, and sacrifices carry the scope of mystery/crime novels beyond gory details and last-minute twists. At its core, Newcomer is a microcosmic as well as a dramatic examination of the Japanese family dynamics, the good, the bad, and the ugly parts of it. Adding to the fun is the author’s portrayal of the uniqueness of Nihonbashi district (it’s social and cultural relevance).Kaga’s impressive observational skill generates one intriguing small mystery after another. And every time we think of a loose-end, Higashino comes back and ties it all neatly (up until the last page). Some of the answers to the mysteries in Higashino’s novels may seem mundane or too simple (considering the built-up). But the author’s stories are never boring and offers good emotional payoff (especially for a procedural about solving crimes).