Sun 9 Dec 2007

Review of Cherie Priest Books

On one of my trips to the US earlier this year, I picked up Cherie Priest's Four and Twenty Blackbirds for the long flight back. I'd been reading her blog for a while, mostly because I'm a closet writer groupie, and whilst I'm not normally a horror novel fan, I wanted to see what her professional writing was like. Loved it! Knocked off the book in the first few hours of the flight.

A few weeks back, I ordered the remaining two books in the not-quite-trilogy from Amazon: Wings To The Kingdom and Not Flesh Nor Feathers (couldn't find them on Australian shelves, which wasn't entirely surprising). Similarly great. Some kind of review is therefore in order so that others might avoid the mistake I made of putting off reading these novels for too long.

The three books are connected via their location and main characters, particularly Eden Moore, the 20-something lady from whose viewpoint the books are written. However, they're not really a trilogy, since each book closes off reasonably completely and you could probably read book two or book three without having read the predecessors (although a couple of the story lines would seem a little sparse on background details in that case).

These are essentially ghost stories set in the south of the United States. Primarily around Chattanooga, Tennessee, although there's a quick dash through Florida and into the swamplands at the end of Four and Twenty Blackbirds. As I said, I'm not a big horror fan, although I don't avoid the genre on principle or anything. I just find a lot of horror books to be too obsessed with their own gore and creepiness factors to be really interesting character stories. Not so, in the case at hand.

The three books are really about Eden Moore and her life at the time of the books. The fact that she can see ghosts is just another fact of life and whilst it does provide the motivation for the adventures in the books, they're pretty good stories about a very kind-hearted person — she's always going out of her way to try and help her myriad of friends and live up to commitments — who sometimes tries to help out by solving the current haunting problem, whatever it might be. That sentence unfortunately trivialises the clever way Priest weaves her tales throughout the books and I wish I could communicate my feelings a bit better here. Suffice it to say that I felt a bit sorry and certainly sympathetic for poor, hectic Eden as she continually rushed about. Particularly in the second and third books, she was always helping others whilst trying to achieve her own ends as well, no matter how unreasonably whiny some of her friends' (and slightly odd relatives') requests were.

I've never been to the south-eastern parts of the US — I think I accidentally wandered into Virginia once when exploring around the DC area, but that's as far as I've gotten on the coast. So I have no personal experience of the towns Priest is writing about. However, it's easy to imagine the settings. Whether or not my imagined images match reality is, to some extent, irrelevant, because my imagined world — based on the descriptions in the book — were perfect for the characters to move around in. Eden lives a bit out of town on a mountain, she's constantly having to haul herself back and forth between the town, friends places and parties on the other side of town, and her aunt's place, where she lives, up on the mountain. The scene-setting is very well done, at least for me. I have a fairly low tolerance of long-winded descriptive prose and so I often realise I've missed some important details about the environment when I'm really racing through a good book. In this case, even though I was eager to get ahead in the stories, the universe sucked me in. Some of the scenes towards the end of the second act in Wings to the Kingdom when the main characters were in a forest talking to an ancient spirit were slightly spooky, particularly as I was finishing that book at about two a.m. one morning. That's good writing.

I guess the other aspect of these novels that prevented it from crossing my "farcical barrier" for supernatural books, is that the ghosts were never really the enemies. There were a couple of evil spirits, but by and large, the bad guys were flesh and blood humans (okay, a couple of them were over 100 years old and kept alive by more than just good clean living, but they were still people). The ghosts were more characters for Eden to try and help or understand. In the first book, she's working out why three dead sisters are following her around. in the second, Civil War ghosts are rising on an old battlefield which is now a memorial park, with amusing (for the reader) affects on the picnicking families. Only in the third novel does it seem like the ghosts are attacking and even killing, but all is not as it seems there, either.

[Aside: The Civil War ghosts trying to communicate with the tourists is the start of Wings to the Kingdom. That whole chapter is online if you're interested in seeing how it plays out. That's pretty much it for "first-person ghost" perspective in that novel, as we then switch to Eden Moore's point of view and one other secondary character's for the remainder of the novel.]

Over the course of the three novels, the stories become a bit more layered and less guessable in their results, which was nice. The first book was a good introduction to Eden, her family, her history and how she came to be the person she is in the later novels. Then we move onto more complex interactions with the world around her, since we already know a lot about Eden (and this is why starting from Not Flesh nor Feathers or Wings to the Kingdom might result in some dissatisfaction). I couldn't work out how Not Flesh nor Feathers, the final book, was going to be resolved until pretty much as it was being explained to me on the page. In retrospect, it made sense and possibly if I had a better appreciation of southern US history it might have been easier to guess, but I liked not being able to work it out too far in advance, whilst also not being frustrated at the lack of information and clues.

A quick note on the books' physical production. Binding and typesetting and all that jazz was good and not particularly remarkable. A couple of things do stand out, though. The cover art by John Jude Palencar is thoughtful and appropriate. I guess it's a little tricky to depict dead people on the cover whilst still being appropriate to be shelved face-out at the local Border's store. In this case, the ghosts on the covers don't quite match the descriptions inside, but it's a forgivable variation. I kept turning back to stare at the covers and notice how cleverly they were done. Unfortunately, there don't appear to be any high quality pictures up at Cherie Priest's website at the moment, but there's a photo she took when the third book was released that gives you some idea of the style. Initially (until I bought the first book), I wasn't so impressed with the artwork, since they looked a bit like Penguin Classics to me and that brought back memories of high school and forced reading assignments and things like that. Glad to be wrong about that!

[Updated: Here's a better picture of the three covers.]

Also, a picture I posted yesterday is related to this review; the front page of each chapter has a nice floral design that is subtle enough not to be a distraction and visible enough to be impressive. A little thing that you wouldn't miss if it wasn't there; still, a nice touch.

All up: a great set of books. Very enjoyable to read the first time around and I suspect I'll read them again in the future, even if only to work out how she manages to write descriptive prose about Tennessee that doesn't make me want to skip over to the action bits. Highly recommended. Lots of stars or rubber ducks or whatever it is we're using to evaluate books these days.

Topics: books/reviews