Bookworm, no. 67
Bookworm, no. 67
Alexander Sallas reviews ghost stories by Leanne Shapton. Cheryl Bell on Christina Myers’s “Halfway Home.” A page from “The Horse.” Poetry by Mary MacDonald. Inside the November issue.
A Boo(k) Review
Guestbook: Ghost Stories
Leanne Shapton
Macmillan Publishers
320 pages, softcover and ebook
It’s easy to imagine Leanne Shapton narrating Guestbook under cover of darkness, with an upturned flashlight beneath her chin. These thirty-three (very) short stories about “guests” from the other side (read: ghosts) deliver thrills and chills, paired with thought-provoking symbolism. More cerebral (think: Rosemary’s Baby) than schlocky (à la Friday the 13th), the collection serves as a spooky Halloween treat, with enough intellectual meat on the bone to satisfy a literary crowd.
A blood-curdling tale of psychological horror, “Billy Byron” centres on the titular tennis champion. A ghost named Walter tells him where the ball is going, but only when Billy pushes himself to the point of exhaustion. After he overexerts himself, he falls into a coma. A researcher in “bicameral psychology” hypothesizes that the star athlete has experienced “sensed presence,” a phenomenon where spirits assist people under extreme pressure—or so it appears. In the gloomy “Patricia Lake,” a lonely New Yorker describes a surprise visit from an apparition of his long-dead mother. They converse for a couple of hours, “then just as suddenly she was not there anymore and he cried and cried.” Elsewhere, a miner dies in an accident but returns to earth that night and sleeps beside his eight-year-old daughter; a forlorn phantom spies on her surviving partner and son; and after a boy drowns, a new family moves in to his now-haunted house, where the lights flicker, the temperature fluctuates, and the dog barks at nothing.
Much like a visitor from the beyond, Guestbook is fleeting and elusive. Shapton tells her eerie tales in sparse, concise prose accompanied by black and white photos, blueprints, and original watercolours. The layout incorporates generous negative space, as if to hint at hidden meanings, details unseen, ghosts lurking outside our vision. Even apparent emptiness, she suggests, may hold spirit(ed) significance. It all adds up to a collection that would suit a lecture hall as well as a campfire.
—Alexander Sallas
Like a Half-Eaten Box of Chocolates
Halfway Home: Thoughts from Midlife
Christina Myers
House of Anansi Press
200 pages, softcover and ebook
As Christina Myers wrote Halfway Home, she told curious friends that it would be about plenty of things: “Being a woman, having a body, mothering....aging and wrinkles and periods and menopause and fat phobia. Oh, and witchcraft. Sex. And climate change. The end of the world.” She did not, however, hint at the array of sharp insights her subjects would conjure.
The essay collection comprises three sections. It begins with youth: the author’s experiences with adolescent friendships and pressures to conform. She recounts painful lessons about early romances, the embarrassment of bra shopping with her mother, and time spent with her eccentric grandmother, who talked to plants, animals, and Jesus. In the second section, Myers has reached her late forties. When she discovered she had a potentially fatal heart blockage, she saw herself anew: “I want to believe that my heart-attack-that-was-not-a-heart-attack has some meaning, not just an early road sign of my mortality.” At the same time, she learned to accept the obsolescence of parenthood, renounced her baggy black wardrobe by purchasing electric-blue leggings, and embraced the “most kinky version of myself” when she briefly sold sex toys.
In the final section, Myers muses that “an unexpected side effect of getting older is that you start measuring all sorts of decisions by laying them alongside your remaining time.” These range from whether to buy a new sofa or finish an unsatisfying book to “determining which one single life I will have to squeeze my existence into.” Epiphanies abound in Halfway Home. Some are bittersweet, many are funny, and most will give readers pause, if only to see that others grapple with such thoughts too.
—Cheryl Bell
Book Tasting: The Horse
Amid the sickening bloodshed and twisted wreckage of the First World War, medical teams enlisted heroic horses to produce miracle vaccines for the severe bacterial infections tetanus and diphtheria, which had fatality rates between 10 percent and 20 percent. Prior to mass immunization programs beginning in the United States and Canada in the mid-1920s, diphtheria was the number one killer of children under fourteen years of age. Roughly 20 percent of those under five (and over forty) who contracted the disease died.
German Nobel Prize winner Emil von Behring, known as “the savior of children,” isolated the antitoxin, or antibody, serum for both diseases from horses during the 1890s. As a result of his groundbreaking experiments, serums from specifically farmed horses were collected and used to successfully inoculate humans against both tetanus and diphtheria. By 1900, the mortality rates in New York City had been cut in half. The First World War intensified ongoing research and marked a watershed in military medicine.
In preceding conflicts, roughly 65 percent of all fatalities were caused by disease. During the Great War, this was reduced to 20–25 percent, including the 1918 influenza epidemic. Given that the bacterial spores that cause tetanus are commonly found in soil and manure and enter the body through cuts or punctures from contaminated objects, bullets, bayonets, and shrapnel were potent delivery systems. Noble steeds harboring lifesaving serum came to the rescue of frontline soldiers.
The ungainly, tousled little horse Brick Top (specimen T#17), at Connaught Laboratories in Toronto, for example, was hailed in 1918 as a real warhorse for having supplied enough antibody serum to treat fifteen thousand soldiers during his four years of service. Thanks to this unlikely hero, and his comrades, the rate of tetanus infection among wounded Canadian soldiers was reduced to a trifling 0.1 percent. Brick Top’s American counterpart, “Old Dan the Retired Fire Horse,” was given credit for saving one hundred thousand of Uncle Sam’s finest, while Jim, a former milk wagon horse, produced eight gallons of diphtheria vaccine.
—Timothy C. Winegard
Excerpted with permission from The Horse: A Galloping History of Humanity (Penguin Random House Canada). Read more about Timothy C. Winegard’s book in a physical copy of the latest Literary Review of Canada.
Poet’s Corner
How the Hair Comes Off
A beating heart in the last stage must learn
to brace the fiery final stretch.
Autumn was the time she regrets
not standing in line not taking advice
that night when her neighbour’s hair flew off
in chunks during a last ride in her cabriolet.
A considerable portion of her admires monks
shaving their heads as an act of devotion.
In the chilling hour, she thinks of Samson, who lost
his hair while he was sleeping.
At the salon sink, a rough pair of hands shucked
her head like an oyster. It is me sobbing.
All this is me. At the end of growing season.
I bury my scalp into the earth’s golden plumes.
—Mary MacDonald is the author of The Crooked Thing. She lives in Whistler, British Columbia. Find more of her work in a physical copy of the latest Literary Review of Canada, on newsstands now.
Inside the November Issue
“There are many degrees of worseness in modern music.” John Allemang on David Pate’s The Worst Songs in the World: The Terrible Truth about National Anthems.
Frances Bula reviews Scott Higgins and Paul Kalbfleisch’s The Joy Experiments: Reimagining Mid-sized Cities to Heal Our Divided Society and Patrick M. Condon’s Broken City: Land Speculation, Inequality, and Urban Crisis.
“A work of detailed scholarship.” Jeffrey Simpson on James B. Kelly’s Constraining the Court: Judicial Power and Policy Implementation in the Charter Era.
And much more!