Mrs God

Rating:
Summary: Started out as exciting but became terribly convoluted
Review: I was looking forward to this tape but after the first half hour it sank into a morass of death metaphors and insecurities. Although I adore the work of Kevin Spacey, not even his considerable efforts could save this choppy audiotape.

Rating:
Summary: Aickmanesque
Review: I'm glad to see that everyone else gave this book a low rating, too. I don't think I've ever given a book one star. I would have given it negative stars if possible. I listened to the book on tape and the selling point was that Kevin Spacey (the actor) was the one reading the the book. Since I always enjoy the movies Kevin Spacey acts in, I thought that I'd enjoy a book he narrated. Not so. The book is about a professor that gets the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to travel to the United Kingdom to do research on his favorite author who, I believe, is a relative of his. He is chosen as the privileged professor for that year who gets to stay in this enormous mansion and use their one-of-a-kind library. Things get a little weird. He rents a car from the airport and encounters strange people along the way. And when he finally gets to the mansion, the people living there are even stranger. You've got mysterious figures in windows, cobwebbed passageways, and a room full of dozens of miniature replicas of the mansion. The description of the book sounds interesting and eerie enough, but the author is confusing. He adds elements to the story that make no sense. You go over a passage in the book and go over it again without being able to figure out what in the world the author is trying to say. Is it fact or fantasy? What actually happened? Did anything happen? Where did the concentration camp people come from and what do they have to do with anything? What's the story about the mysteriously dying children mean? I suppose it's supposed to be a ghost/horror story. And I suppose that the author knew what he was talking about in his own mind, but he is unable to put pen to paper and make the story make sense to the reader. It seems as if the author got tired of writing and decided to resolve everything all at once so that he could leave this mess of a book behind him. Maybe he should have just stopped completely.

Rating:
Summary: Pretty Awful
Review: I'm glad to see that everyone else gave this book a low rating, too. I don't think I've ever given a book one star. I would have given it negative stars if possible. I listened to the book on tape and the selling point was that Kevin Spacey (the actor) was the one reading the the book. Since I always enjoy the movies Kevin Spacey acts in, I thought that I'd enjoy a book he narrated. Not so. The book is about a professor that gets the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to travel to the United Kingdom to do research on his favorite author who, I believe, is a relative of his. He is chosen as the privileged professor for that year who gets to stay in this enormous mansion and use their one-of-a-kind library. Things get a little weird. He rents a car from the airport and encounters strange people along the way. And when he finally gets to the mansion, the people living there are even stranger. You've got mysterious figures in windows, cobwebbed passageways, and a room full of dozens of miniature replicas of the mansion. The description of the book sounds interesting and eerie enough, but the author is confusing. He adds elements to the story that make no sense. You go over a passage in the book and go over it again without being able to figure out what in the world the author is trying to say. Is it fact or fantasy? What actually happened? Did anything happen? Where did the concentration camp people come from and what do they have to do with anything? What's the story about the mysteriously dying children mean? I suppose it's supposed to be a ghost/horror story. And I suppose that the author knew what he was talking about in his own mind, but he is unable to put pen to paper and make the story make sense to the reader. It seems as if the author got tired of writing and decided to resolve everything all at once so that he could leave this mess of a book behind him. Maybe he should have just stopped completely.

Rating:
Summary: Aickmanesque
Review: MRS GOD was Peter Straub's attmept at the kind of story Robert Aickman is known for: one where everything happens belows the surface of the story. That said, neither Aickman nor this story are for everybody. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that most people shouldn't bother with reading this. It really is a complex story. The audiotape no doubt contains the version included in Straub's "Houses With Doors" anthology, which is actually an easier, more reader-friendly, version of the story. For the true masochist, track down a copy of the Donald M. Grant (publisher) hardcover of the story. That nut's hard to crack! As to what the story is actually "about"...well, I won't give it away, but it has a lot to do with the troubles between the hero and his wife.