My Year in Books 2022: October

It's a little late, but here's my list of books I read for fun in October. I've decided not to include the books I chose for my October readalong and story-a-day, because I feel like I talked about them a lot throughout the month! And I haven't included the Halloween book that I started in October, but didn't finish till the first week in November (that one can go on next month's post). That leaves three novels to talk about in this month's post.

In case you're interested, here are my posts from the rest of the year: January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September

The Temple House Vanishing by Rachel Donohue (2020)

The first one on this month’s list is another library book. Again, this is one I picked because my quick glance at the blurb was intriguing (I didn’t know anything else about it before I started). Donohue’s novel is told through two different narrators and times. In the present, a journalist begins to investigate a twenty-five-year-old disappearance. And then in sections set twenty-five years earlier, we see events that led to that disappearance. Louisa is a scholarship pupil at a prestigious Catholic boarding school. Although she doesn’t fit in well with her fellow pupils (or the nuns who teach them), she immediately falls into the orbit of an enigmatic girl called Victoria and a charismatic teacher called Mr Lavelle. As we know from the start, Louisa and Mr Lavelle are going to disappear (the ‘vanishing’ of the title), and Victoria is going to be left with unresolved issues (is it guilt? or heartbreak?) as a result. I have to say, though the book is well-written, the story isn’t particularly original. There are shades of a lot of other poor-student-at-an-elite-school fiction here, and the revelations that come at the end aren’t a huge surprise. I guessed quite a bit of the ending early on. That said, I enjoyed the character of Victoria and the explanation towards the end as to what was really going on with her was plausible in a kind of chilling way. Overall, this one is readable and quite enjoyable, but it didn’t set my world on fire.

Slade House by David Mitchell (2015)

Aside from the books I chose for my October readalong and my story-a-day, I had two books lined up for Halloween reading this month (though I only finished one in October… the other will have to wait until November’s post, as I didn’t quite finish it before the 31st!). I can’t remember how I stumbled on Slade House, as I’ve not read any of Mitchell’s other fiction, but I think it probably popped up on a list of suggested seasonal reading somewhere. The book begins in 1979, with a young boy called Nathan Bishop being taken to attend a party at the eponymous house by his mother. As soon as they arrive, it’s clear that there’s some off about it all, and we fall Nathan’s perspective as he falls deeper and deeper into a bad thing. The book then moves to 1988, and then 1997, and so on, giving us short little stories about the various people who have visited Slade House and encountered the bad thing. I have very mixed feelings about this one. In places, the writing was just so good, and I found myself completely immersed in the prose. On the other, it doesn’t really work as a ‘horror’ novel (despite having all the trappings of one), as the bad thing never really grabbed me, and it certainly never scared or unsettled me. The other frustrating thing, for me, was that the antagonists had a Bond-villain tendency to give lengthy exposition to their victims before dispatching them.

A User's Guide to Make-Believe by Jane Alexander (2020)

This next book was another library book, and for once I’m pretty sure I know why I picked this one! The blurb suggests a sort of Black Mirror-type tale about virtual reality gone band. And that’s exactly what it is! Alexander’s novel follows Cassie, a former employer of Imagen, the tech company behind the wildly popular VR experience ‘Make-Believe’. At the novel’s opening, Cassie is persona non grata at Imagen, as she has misused her Make-Believe account (breaking the strict user limits on how much time can be spent ‘Believing’). She attends an addiction support group, where she meets a fellow Make-Believe ‘addict’ – Lewis – who starts to convince her that there might be something going on with Imagen and their VR programme. What follows is an investigative thriller, with Cassie desperately trying to get to the truth (and there’s a very personal motivation to her quest, which I won’t explain here as it’s a bit of a spoiler). A User’s Guide to Make-Believe is definitely very readable and the pacing is spot on. Cassie’s character is interesting. I found her frustrating at times, but that’s mostly because she makes some questionable choices. And, given what she’s done to her own mind, that’s not exactly implausible! But the thing I really liked about this book was the way the more sinister side of Imagen is handled. Alexander avoids heavy-handed dystopia clichés in favour of a much more insidious and unsettling quality that feels worryingly believable. Overall, I really enjoyed this one.