Cowslip

Rating:
Summary: Gritty journal-style novel proves creepy and compelling
Review: One way or another, Cowslip, by Kirk Sigurdson, will affect you. You might feel unsettled, you might feel uplifted, you might become a vegetarian - all are possible responses to this powerful literary cocktail.

The setting is Portland, Oregon, where we peek behind the scenes of the music industry as Julia Fleischer makes a name for herself. She's hot, dynamic, and has a voice that starts a bidding war among record labels.

She also has only a few months to live.

Julia is a victim of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD), a fatal brain disorder related to mad cow disease. It's a short stay on death row, and causes rapid, progressive dementia and neuromuscular disturbances.

In Julia's case, it causes terrifying hallucinations of demons and shadow people who observe her every move. We watch as her brain decays, as the hallucinations become more real. But are they really hallucinations? In Julia's reality, she is communicating with supernatural beings - demons and later, angels, from the great beyond.

What makes Julia's version of reality so compelling is the way the story is told. Almost the entire book takes the form of journal entries, so the reader gets the impression that Julia is speaking directly to them. It's conversational, natural, and highly personal.

Sigurdson has no problem writing in the voice of a 22-year-old female music star. She sounds exactly as she should, telling all the gritty details of wild LA parties, hard drugs, sex, whacked-out musicians, and a secret sexual longing for her best friend Ruth.

All the while, the CJD is perforating her brainmeats. But Julia is determined to live intensely and fully, despite her collapses and increasingly frequent encounters with the darkness and light beyond the grave.

Aside from the compelling format, plenty of clues point the reader towards believing Julia's version of reality. She records encounters with apparitions of people she knows, for example, then finds out that they have just died. More subtle clues are embedded in the shadow creatures' language. I did a quick Internet search for one of the words, and came up with one hit: Charms and conjurations of Hungarian Gypsy magic. The word meant "shadow." (If these were simply hallucinations, she would only hear words she understands, or nonsense.)

Sigurdson does an expert job of suspending our disbelief and seriously creeping us out. Ultimately, it's a love story, but with a backdrop of hard-driving, cranked-up-to-11 music; afloat in gin and champagne; tripping on smack; ... and always, always the shadow creatures just under the surface. ...

by Paige Terneur

Rating:
Summary: Long Strange Trip
Review: This novel takes the reader on a ride through faith and doubt, chemical excesses and painful sobriety, group sex and isolation--in short, it is a feast or famine, depending on how you look at it. I was shocked at the realistic sex scenes. As a veteran rock n' roller, myself, I wonder if Sigurdson, the author, has really lived the wild life portrayed here.

Cowslip goes beyond the veneer of the imagination into something more real, and ultimately, terrifying. Make no mistake about it: this is a work of horror in the strongest sense of the word, but it is also literature, not mere genre.

All passages dealing with the supernatural are reigned in. The control is admirable and something that Stephen King and HP Lovecraft could have learned from. I would say this novel can hold its own with Henry James' Turn of the Screw any day. And like James' masterpiece, the reader never really knows if the angels and demons are real or not, but there are some tantilizing clues that they are.

While Sigurdson occationally indulges in the quim of adolescence, and the book teeters on the edge of minutae, it is never boring. Indeed, these details combine to make it uncomfortably real. Once you start reading, you can't put it down, even though the end product leaves a strange taste in your brain. You'll be chewing your mental "cud" for days after this one. Good luck.