The House that Horror Built; The Canceling of the American Mind

 

This was a fun one. Harry is a single mom living in the Chicago area with her teenage son, Gabe. After the pandemic shut down the restaurant where she worked, she felt lucky to land a job cleaning house for Javier Castillo. Castillo is a horror movie director and has a house full of memorabilia and props, including a rather creepy costume from one of his movies that seems to move on its own. Harry is about to be evicted from her apartment (the landlord sold it to a developer) and is panicking about finding a new place she can afford. 

Harry is a really good mom. She doesn't want to worry Gabe and she sacrifices everything to make his life better. Which is why she reluctantly accepts Castillo's offer for her and Gabe to move into his big house temporarily. 

Castillo has a dark backstory: his son was wanted for questioning in a young lady's murder, and he disappeared, along with Castillo's wife. Castillo fled L.A. and moved to Chicago. Harry is convinced the house is haunted. The pacing on this book was super slow until almost the very end, but other than that I enjoyed it. 

It seems like no one is immune from Cancel Culture. A seemingly minor mistake made decades earlier as a teen can come back and destroy your life. It's a scary thought. I wish there were better solutions then just "raise your kids not to run to adults to fix everything" and "wait it out". I have no solutions, but I'm holding out hope someone does. 

Demon of Unrest

Sadly, I didn't love this one as much as the last few by Larson. It was still good, just a little disappointing. It felt like he was really reaching at times. 

Larson looks back at Fort Sumter and how the Civil War officially began. He describes events leading up to Lincoln's election, how the North and South started splitting apart long before 1860. President Buchanan, who preceded Lincoln, had a few opportunities to do something and instead decided to ignore the turmoil and let the new guy deal with it. Which he did, of course, and quite well. The most striking figure in the story is Major Anderson, who held the fort against all odds. It was, without a doubt, one of the saddest stories I've read, knowing the outcome and how many lives were lost. It was a shame that the South couldn't be persuaded to peaceably free the ones they'd enslaved. 
 

Mecca

 

I heard author Susan Straight speak at an event and was intrigued by the excerpt of this book that she read out loud. It sounded very interesting, so I checked it out. It was pretty good. 

Motorcycle CHP officer Johnny Frias rescued a woman who was being assaulted back in 1999. He ended up killing the abuser, but the woman took off before he could say anything to her. He buried the body and discovered the woman left behind her purse. He tried a few times to deliver it to her, only to be thwarted. 

Twenty-one years later, it's 2020 and the pandemic hits. Johnny is still with the CHP, helping his dad out in the canyons of Southern California, where he and all his friends grew up. There were a lot of threads woven together in this story, including the woman who Johnny rescued. I really like Straight's writing style, she's very descriptive without being repetitive. She is coming out with a sequel to this book, so something to look forward to!

Princess of Las Vegas

 

I enjoyed Bohjalian's latest, the "Princess of Las Vegas". Crissy is an impersonator at an off-strip hotel called the Buckingham Palace, and as you might have guessed, she recreates Princess Diana. Her younger sister, Betsy, is a social worker in Vermont who just adopted a thirteen year old foster kid named Marisa. Betsy's new boyfriend, Frankie, is into cryptocurrency and convinces Betsy to move to Las Vegas with him. 

Betsy and Crissy aren't exactly close, despite the fact that they look alike (this fact was overemphasized, so I knew it would come into play later on in the book, and it did). Frankie is in deep with some dangerous people and he needs Betsy's help to stay out of it.  Unfortunately that means framing Crissy. It was interesting, didn't delve too much into the nitty-gritty of crypto (which I have no desire to know more about), and had a satisfying ending.