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Patching up each day
The last day and a half have been much less fun and productive than I was hoping, because I got reinjured during a PT session—which strikes me as the precise opposite of the intended effect—and therefore I have spent far more time than planned lying down under a pile of sheep. Fortunately, some of the time I have been able to do so on a couch in front of which is a TV playing the 1967 BBC The Forsyte Saga.
Agatha Christie's By the Pricking of My Thumbs (1968) is well-named; it's a mystery, but it builds like a horror story, gathering half-remembered urban legends of children who were lost or mothers who went mad into the reality of a village scarred by a never-solved spate of child killings which may or may not parallel the suspicion of a sequence of murders at a nursing home, female figures flickering in and out of the recollections of various characters as if some weird maiden-mother-crone is presiding over echoes of the historical event that must lie at the heart of the puzzle into which our protagonists stumbled for the most prosaic and yet thematically apt of reasons, visiting an elderly aunt. There's some business of a crime ring, but the key is a house in a painting that looks as though no one has ever lived there, even though some people demonstrably do. To my knowledge, Christie never wrote much straight supernatural fiction beyond the collected stories of The Mysterious Mr Quin (1930), but she would have knocked it out of the park if she had made it her specialty.
As we appear to have all three requisite forms of sugar in the house, I am going to see about making cinder toffee.
Agatha Christie's By the Pricking of My Thumbs (1968) is well-named; it's a mystery, but it builds like a horror story, gathering half-remembered urban legends of children who were lost or mothers who went mad into the reality of a village scarred by a never-solved spate of child killings which may or may not parallel the suspicion of a sequence of murders at a nursing home, female figures flickering in and out of the recollections of various characters as if some weird maiden-mother-crone is presiding over echoes of the historical event that must lie at the heart of the puzzle into which our protagonists stumbled for the most prosaic and yet thematically apt of reasons, visiting an elderly aunt. There's some business of a crime ring, but the key is a house in a painting that looks as though no one has ever lived there, even though some people demonstrably do. To my knowledge, Christie never wrote much straight supernatural fiction beyond the collected stories of The Mysterious Mr Quin (1930), but she would have knocked it out of the park if she had made it her specialty.
As we appear to have all three requisite forms of sugar in the house, I am going to see about making cinder toffee.
no subject
It is creepy! And it has an explanation, but it almost doesn't need one, because it's built up all the slant rhymes, the half-correspondences that you get in horror and weird fiction where things hang together not through linear narrative but nightmare logic. I am used to suspenseful atmosphere from Christie, but this was actually different. I must have read the novel before because it's one of the Tommy and Tuppence, but I didn't remember this aspect of it at all. (To be fair to past me, I would have read it in high school when I read almost no horror; I would have had no gauges by which to evaluate it at all.)
And Then There Were None is terrifying though not supernatural.
I have not read that one in years; I should. I remember the conceit and the cause, but almost none of the details.
She has a handful of supernatural short stories; they're creepy.
And they've been collected, too!