Incubus

Rating:
Summary: Too mundane for horror genre
Review: Cora's endless details of her mundane life drag this story down. The interesting scenes are buried in and amongst the chit-chatty monologues about her mother's garden, (...), her cooking, and the weather.

I tried my best to get into this book but after 200 hundred pages, the horror bits were just too far and few between. There was too much local gossip. I think the author was trying to write in the style of Lovecraft but she kept getting bogged down in too much detail.

Rating:
Summary: A horror novel that makes you think
Review: I had to add my two-cent worth and agree with those readers who reviewed this book and found it to be a wonderfully written novel of a woman's, and a towns, descent into hell. Arensberg has taken the myth of the incubus, (an evil spirit that lies on women in their sleep, pinning them down to have sexual intercourse with them), and has asked the question "What if?". What makes this story truly frightening is the way she blends the myth of the incubus into a 21st century setting, a small town in Maine in 1974. Told in retrospective by Cora Whitman, the wife of the local Episcopal minister, she begins to notice the subtle changes that are happening to the people of Dry Falls. But then things take a nasty turn, and Cora finds herself a victim of the evil that has settled over Dry Falls. Arensberg writes with a slow, matter of fact pace yet she is able to evoke a sense of doom and despair. She is a wonderful writer, the scenes she creates pull you in with characters that are real and fully developed. Arensberg has written a horror novel of a higher caliber, and she is one hell of a storyteller.

Rating:
Summary: Disturbing but a tad too slow for my tastes
Review: I managed to find the book both compelling and, at the same time, a bit tedious. The underlying story was interesting enough for me to want to continue turning the pages while I often became frustrated at Cora's rambling style of telling the story and her lengthy descriptions of everything surrounding her. Some details were interesting (gardening) while others made me smile (especially those of her friends sex lives) but many were just plain dull. This tidbit, taken from a scene where Cora is describing herself, could just as well describe the author's method of telling her story: "When he (Cora's husband) told me a story I made him repeat himself. When he baptized an infant I asked him to describe the christening dress." (...)Guess this book disturbed me on a level that I wasn't aware of! And, here I thought I was too jaded to be bothered by a story.

Rating:
Summary: It stinks!
Review: I read several recommendations on this book and it sounded like a good read. However, I found the pace way too slow and filled with uninteresting and unnecessary fillers. The supernatural aspect of the book didn't really fit with the small-town feeling I got from it in the beginning. I enjoyed the first half but found the last half dull and unbelievable within the context of the story. It was okay, but I wouldn't recommend it.

Rating:
Summary: Good but not great...
Review: I was expecting a ton of "scares" but only really got a a small handful. There was an amazingly intense scene involving a dog, and that one scene alone is worth a star! But, the author spent way too much time talking about "cooking and gardening" that it took me out of the main storyline. She brought up a number of very interesting ideas and concepts that I would have liked to see explored more, but...and the ending left me a tiny bit confused. Overall, I would recommend the novel, but it could have been great, when it ended up being good!

Rating:
Summary: Incubus:Proof you shouldn't write in a genre you don't like
Review: The Incubus is an example of what happens when a person who's never read horror tries to write horror. The only horror novel Ann Arensberg admits reading is Dracula, which is about as scary as a rerun of Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman. It shows. The Incubus doesn't work as a horror novel because Arensberg ignores the rules of the genre. Passive characters; lack of suspense and mounting tension; a garbled, confusing climax (what happened?); worst of all, an unsatisfying ending. What were the creatures that invaded Dry Falls? What attracted them? Why did they leave? We never find out, and that's a major let-down. Why does the author think we've read 300+ pages? People who call The Incubus a classic horror story probably don't like horror, and thus haven't read much in that genre. This is really literary fiction, disguised. It's not Ann Arensberg's fault the book is being marketed as a horror novel. If you read literary fiction, give The Incubus a try. If you read horror, save your money.

Rating:
Summary: Nice story buried by pretentions
Review: There are moments in Incubus that will have you rivited. The problem is these moments are few and seperated by a whole lot of uninteresting self indulgence.
While Arensberg can obviously write (there are three great, creepy scenes) her book is bogged down by an over all feeling of "I'm better than this genre". Her best scenes are the ones dealing directly with the demon/supernatural, yet she seems to be trying her hardest to rise above this. By avoiding sensationalizing, she had robbed her story of narrative power.
One last note: Would it [hurt]Arensberg to give us one likable character? If given the choice, I would stay in a room with the Incubus rather than spend any more time with any character in this novel.

Rating:
Summary: Mulder and Scully In Monster-Haunted Maine
Review: This is the best low-key, adult supernatural horror story since Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House, and is told in very much the same style. The horrors it paints are initially presented in suspensefully suggestive backdrop, mounting gradually to a graphic and dramatic conclusion.

Narrator Cora Whitman is a pastor's wife in rural Dry Falls, Maine, which in 1974 suffers from a non-stop blighting heat-wave. It also suffers from something more sinister: an invisible menace that sexually molests sleeping women and maturing girls. Cora is far more reluctant than her falteringly religious husband, and his paranormal-researching circle of friends, to accept that the reported nocturnal assaults are the work of some supernatural agent - until she becomes its target, herself.

Cora begins her story with Charles Fort's most famous quote - "I think we're property" - and an enumeration of paranormal events in our time and before our time, before walking us through her own voyage from skepticism to belief. Her perspective enables the reader to witness events that could be nothing more than overactive imaginations or sexual frustration (all the women in Dry Falls are suffering from an epidemic lack of sexual interest from their husbands), but gradually become more indicative of supernatural intrusion: one woman feels as if a masculine presence was in her room, but sees nothing; another senses a vague shadowy outline in the door, while suffering apparent sleep-paralysis; a third has chunks of flesh gouged out of her scalp, by nails sharper than she possesses, and is certain an unseen male figure was in her room. Even after several girls from the nearby prep-school are found, in the same room and on the same night, sleeping as if drugged and sexually hyper-excreting while seeming to respond to bedpartners, Cora and the Dry Falls townsfolk manufacture rationalizations to account for the phenomenon. Eventually, however, too many people witness events beyond any natural explanation, and Dry Falls becomes a town besieged by fear.

What makes this novel work is the understated, first-person approach. Daily events are described in mundane fashion, with the odd occurrence here and there sandwiched in, mulled over for a moment, and then forgotten - until the next. By the time Cora is convinced that outside entities have targeted Dry Falls, so is the reader. She and her husband come off very much as a Scully and Mulder pair, the story itself feeling a great deal like a well-written episode of The X-Files. In fact, the presentation of paranormal researchers and their techniques is spot-on accurate, and completely believable for it. The tone and style have almost a documentary feel, and the illusion of reality is exceptionally well sustained.

The Reader's Guide/author's interview at the end of the book reveals that Arensberg was consciously drawing from lore of historical fairy abductions, demon hauntings, and contemporary reports of UFO entities in crafting her tale, and she presents them extremely realistically. Literarily, she sought to emulate Nathaniel Hawthorne and Shirley Jackson, and she succeeds fabulously.

This is thinking-man's horror, for mature readers only.

Rating:
Summary: Don't call me horror!
Review: To catagorize this book in the horror genre would be misleading and disappointing. Even though something horrible does happen to the women of Dry Falls, fans of classic pop horror authors such as King, Koontz, Barker and Rice might not find the book "meaty" enough. Personally, I thoroughly enjoyed this book (even though I myself am a horror fan) and found it a refreshing read since it is rather short. The dialogue is clipped but this may be due to the New England dialect, and by extension, the New England culture portayed in the book. There are very good descriptions of the psychological make-up of the main characters and I found the relationship between the main character's mother and sister thoughtful and compelling.

Rating:
Summary: Post-Modern Battle Between Good and Evil
Review: Whatever the larger story, allegorical or not, that Ann Arensberg weaves within the more than competent text of her horror novel "Incubus", her lack of sustaining the suspense and her inability to create an empathic connection with any of the ravaged women in her Hawthornian-cloned New England town, renders that second literary dimension where "message" and "symbolism" may be concealed, too obscure and tedious to determine.

Is "Incubus" on a literary level, a retelling in reverse of one of Hawthorne's dark contemplative tales pitting good against evil? Is it like "Young Goodman Brown", the short story of a psychological journey where middle-aged faithless Cora, wife of an Episcopalian minister has been so inured by the late 20/21st century fascination in all things New Age mystical that her innate skepticism turns her towards finding an explanation for the odd occurrences in Dry Falls, Maine in the realm of aliens and UFOS rather than in believing in an actual manifestation of good old fashioned evil of the-tempting-by-Satan brand? Christianity and its traditions are not strong enough or viable enough to conquer the oddball extra-terrestrial imaginings that it does not define; its function is to save the soul. But what if you don't have a soul to save? What good is Christianity then?

What a great concept for a story. If only it had worked on a purely suspenseful level. But, alas, I must submit to the bewilderment conjurred by Arensberg's mundane style that works when describing gardening hints, recipe advise and disdain over husband Henry's lack of interest in the more intimate realms of married life. Does she employ this same straight-forward technique when describing her coupling with the incubus of the title simply because she wants to appear 21st century jaded, immune to the truely horrific after a steady diet of the likes of Hannabal Lector and Freddy Kruger in all their graphic gory splendor? Perhaps. Or maybe she is just giving a respectful nod to old Nathaniel, imitating his 19th century style.

And how this would have worked, if only the story had taken on big black leathery bat wings and soared into that part of the psyche that shakes weak traditions and the most steadfast of religious foundations. "Incubus" just doesn't go there---and I am not talking about Stephen King territory; throughout my reading of this novel I felt the need to beg for some episode which actually left my skin in a goosebump state on a purely mind game level. All of Arensberg's clever little Hawthorne reversals travel within a medium which doesn't have the clout to deliver any impact. We, the readers, wallow in our own jadedness, we wait for something to happen, some momentous moment where it will all click and allow some back-pedaling insight to wash over the montony of the story. This never happens. Alas.