Layla Martinez' WOODWORM (Tr Sophie Hughes & Annie McDermott; Narr Raquel Beattie)

How a novelist handles tension is everything in horror and suspense. Most of what I encounter in these genres lets tension build and build and build until it's pretty near unbearable and then releases it all in an ecstatic final climax. And that's fun and satisfying and takes a certain amount of skill and a sure grasp of one's story that I can only admire. 

Other authors, though, authors like Spanish novelist and essayist Layla Martinez, construct something more intricate, full of small winding bits and catches and very, very controlled little releases. I suppose people would describe this as "edging" but it's more interesting than that in Woodworm, with its pair of narrators (a grandmother and granddaughter) and its exquisite blend of supernatural horror, generational trauma, class resentment and elements of rural soap opera.

And it's short, not even 150 pages in Sophie Hughes' and Annie McDermott's English translation, which is full of interesting alliterations and rhythms that really translate wonderfully to the audio book medium, which is how I experienced Woodworm. 

But speaking of translation, one thing that gets lost in it here is the effectiveness of the book's title; in Spanish this book is called Carcoma*, which literally means "woodworm," but the onomatopoeia of the word spoken aloud is also a sound effect the author and the audio book narrator employ magnificently to convey many of the strange noises made by the ghosts and other malevolent presences as they go about their spooky business. 

For this is a haunted house story. The animated spirits of the dead, though, are the least interesting things haunting this house, originally built by a very bad man to contain -- really to entrap -- the poor woman he married in order to found the dynasty of unfortunate women condemned to live in the house and the nasty, gossipy, judgy and destitute Spanish village surrounding it.

The founding patriarch, by the way, made a habit of entrapping women, using his personal attractiveness, Andrew Tate-style, to draw in  many of them, only to manipulate them into prostitution to make him a small fortune, which in turn is how he afforded a fine house for the one he decided to marry, only to make her the most miserable of them all.

This pimp-patriarch (pimptriarch?) is the grandfather of one of our two narrators (unnamed; nobody in this novel has a first name and only one family -- significantly not the family living in the House -- gets a surname), a woman we only come to know as "The Old Woman" who has by reputation and necessity come to serve the region as a cunning woman, dispensing simple remedies and charms and curses to her neighbors, who despise and fear her, but not enough not to dispense with her services. The Old Woman is also subject to what we can only think of as absence seizures, in which supernatural beings "take her away" for hours at a time to share secrets with her. The Old Woman believes, or at least professes to believe, that these are saints, specific ones like Saint Lucy or Saint Sebastian (heavy on the martyrs with grotesque iconography, or who died by torture, or both), and further believes that it is via her prayers to them that her ill will against people who have wronged her, her daughter or her granddaughter, is put into effect. Enemies of the household accidentally break their legs in improbable accidents, go missing, get sick and die, all through her prayers to her "saints."

Of course the reader is skeptical, not about the reality of these "saints", but that they're really saints at all, especially when her granddaughter, "The Girl" who is our other narrator, reveals that their house is also visited by angels, and that angels don't really look at all like they do in Renaissance paintings and Catholic iconography. They're more like giant praying mantises with huge compound eyes. See the novel's Portuguese cover below.

Meanwhile, The Girl has grown up without parents; her teenaged mother was murdered (by one of two paramours) shortly after The Girl was born, and the girl's wealthy and privileged (probable) father has never acknowledged her, might not even know she exists for all that one of his family's many homes is next door to that of The Girl and The Old Woman. His is the family who gets a surname, and who long ago sought to employ the Pimptriarch's family members as domestic servants - a measure the Pimptriarch's pride would not permit, but one of which his descendants, including both The Old Woman and later The Girl, in turn, avail themselves, to the disdain of all. 

The inciting incident takes place in this rich neighbor's household, when The Girl allows, whether out of neglect or of simple and resentful malice, a great calamity to befall her cruel and snobbish employers, coincidentally at about the same time as The Girl first notices that her own mother's restless and fitful remnant is one of the many shades haunting her family's ancestral prison of a home. You know, the mother who got it on with the rich boy next door and then got murdered, either by him or by the boy she was gonna marry since the rich boy was leaving her to fend for herself and the baby...

It is left ambiguous as to what, if any of the weird and frightening phenomena that characterize the House can be attributed to The Girl's mother, whose ghost (?) is condemned continually to enter the place via the front door, versus the family's many other malevolent ancestors and their helpmeets of dubious nature and provenance. Something haunts a wardrobe in the bedroom The Old Woman and The Girl share; it does its best to lure people inside it, never to be seen again. Something else produces an apparition of a pair of legs that protrudes from under The Old Woman's bed. Then there are the aforementioned "saints" and "angels" who supply The Old Woman with endless gossip and the odd bit of important and actionable intelligence. All of these manifestations are barely regarded by the living women of the House, though The Girl, in her chapters, still expresses a certain pride in her ability to resist the wardrobe's blandishments and to ignore the whispers and cracks and carcoma/caruncho sounds that wake her in the night.

Woodworm is thus an incredibly effective and multilayered** bit of modern horror fiction, full of heavy emotional impact and genuine chills -- and surprises. It would have been so easy for Martinez to give The Girl a fate similar to her grandmother's or her mother's, the same only more brutal. Hints that this might happen abound. But while The Girl is as bound to the House as any of them, her own inner strength and resourcefulness let her remain her own character with her own agency and her own ideas about how to avenge her mother's family against her (probable) father's and against the villagers who have also done more than a little to add to their misery. Martinez and The Girl have other and more interesting plans, though, that lead to an even more satisfying conclusion than I felt I had any right to expect.

If there is a flaw in this work, it is in the audio book production. Raquel Beattie, the narrator, appears to be very much a go-to for Latina/Hispanic fiction and the narration thereof, especially if it requires an appropriate accent. But this is not a work of Latin American fiction, but of Spanish, so she uses her own standard American English speech patterns -- except for a rather cartoonish lisp, the kind that Americans who want to show off their sophistication affect when pronouncing place names like Ibiza (with a theta sound for the "z"). Which lisp she imposes throughout the text on all the ordinary English words of the translation, rather than on just the Spanish nouns and names. And she gives The Girl, who is rather more of an asexual Amazon than a nymphette, a breathy and sensual voice to differentiate her from The Old Woman (whose voice is ideal for the character, tough and serious and weary and protective and, yes, resentful) that really just annoyed me. So I kept being yanked out of this utterly incredible book by the narration. This would have angered me more if I hadn't just DNF'd another audio book that I stuck with way longer than I would have in print just because the narrator gave it a better performance than the material deserved. I figured they balanced each other out. 

And I never once considered setting Woodworm aside, despite my mild irritation at the audio. I would even listen to it again sometime, though I would really rather experience it as text. But Audible got me with an incredible sale price and Woodworm had been on my TBR for quite a long time, and...

Anyway, I sure hope Martinez, who seems more inclined to non-fiction than fiction of any kind, does decide to write another novel or two or three. I'm here for them if she does!

*It's even better in the Portuguese translation: Caruncho!

**I mean, I haven't even gotten into all the echoes of the Spanish Civil War and the Franco regime that echo through this tale. As my beloved Langdon from the Death//Sentence podcast observed of this book, it's the most Spanish thing imaginable. Well, at least since Guillermo del Toro's fairy-insect infested Pan's Labyrinth.

T. Kingfisher's A HOUSE WITH GOOD BONES

I come to the work of Ursula Vernon, aka T. Kingfisher, in somewhat backwards fashion. I knew her first as the "Wombat Test Subject" on her husband Kevin Sonney's podcast, Productivity Alchemy, on which show I've fallen way behind because I've pretty much given up on productivity but still occasionally enjoy, mostly for the stories of the couple's pets and livestock and Vernon's description of her writing and illustrating processes. She is a woman of considerable gifts and a singular speaking voice and is beloved of most of the people whose opinions on books matter to me, so got filed as "an author I know I'll like and I've got to try sometime" but that guarantee of quality somehow perversely reduces the urgency of sampling an author's work. See also Leonora Carrington, on whom I slept for years. 

Anyway then Vernon, writing here as Kingfisher, wrote a southern gothic novel A House with Good Bones, in which the heroine is not only an entomologist but an archaeological entomologist. Zoinks!

So of course I knew there'd be tension between the habits of skepticism and demanding evidence that are so deeply ingrained in most fictional (if not always in actual) scientists and whatever supernatural forces were supplying the horror; I was not ready for Kingfisher's very successful attempt to import the elements of gothic horror into a story set in a tract house built in the 1990s.

Our heroine, Sam, has had to leave her latest excavation while some human remains found there are investigated, so she decides to go visit her mother,  Edie, still living in the house Sam grew up in with Edie, Sam's older brother, Brad and, for a while, Edie's viciously unpleasant grandmother, whom Sam always called Grand Mae. Mae originally owned the house and ruled it with an iron hand and a shedful of garden tools for maniacally tending her flawless rose garden, demanding of her progeny an adherence to the impossible standards of 1950s TV family perfection that no actual humans ever achieved. After Mae's death, Edie made the house a bit more interesting and comfortable, with brightly colored paint on the walls and actually interesting art that didn't depict things like Confederate weddings hanging from them. 

So imagine Sam's surprise when she discovers her grandmother's nasty taste again dominating the house, and the kind of detail only someone like Sam would notice: a complete lack of invertebrate life in the rose garden.

Oh, and a local vulture -- as in the actual bird, not an epithet for a nasty neighbor, though there's one of them, too -- hanging out on top of the mailbox. Often more than one. 

The family secrets that emerge are straight out of the Women with Great Hair Escaping Castles playbook but don't feel forced into this very contemporary story; Kingfisher developed just the right background to explain the creepiness without having to resort to badly relocated Native American burial grounds or any of that foma, and in Sam and Edie gave us a delightful mother and daughter dynamic to enjoy while their world disintegrates around them. Even more delightfully, one of the vultures, named Hermes by his hedge-witchy keeper Gail, an older woman who worked in wildlife rehabilitation while she was Mae's much-disliked hippie neighbor but now lives the retired life of an herbalist with her last patient. Gail is pretty excellent, too, but Hermes' bizarre charisma always steals her thunder even before he earns his weird halo. Rounding out the duo is hunky, handy Phil, the grandson of the nasty neighbor who works as Edie's handyman and while there might be some romantic sparks between him and Sam, Kingfisher adds these with a light hand that never allows them to distract us from the thorny peril her characters are in.

So I'd recommend A House with Good Bones to anyone, but perhaps especially to the fans of John Bellairs; A House with Good Bones felt very much like a Lewis Barnavelt book for grown-ups -- though conversely, there's no reason, apart from occasional swearing, why a precocious kid fan of Bellairs wouldn't enjoy the hell out of this book. I could have used more insects, though. But we all know I'm rarely satisfied in that department. I'm glad that I got what I did, though, while on this wild ride of a story. Go get it!