Book Review: THE STEPFORD WIVES, by Ira Levin

I bet you didn't even know this was a book, huh?

I didn't. Not 'til I found it for $.99 at Goodwill. And guess what? I've never seen the movie.

Which made reading the book extra fun. Really it's more a short story, and it's wholly engrossing--I couldn't stop reading STEPFORD, not even when I was at work. I'd sneak back to the break room to read a page or two at a slow moment because it was so stinking good.

Levin is sneaky with his story, he builds the suspense without letting on that there's stuff to worry about. I had this slightly uneasy feeling as I read--not a "What's wrong with those creepy wives?" feeling, nothing that clear--but a little prickly sense that something was off, much as Joanna herself must have felt, because who would jump to a conclusion so sick and wrong right off? Who would really think that something so bad was happening? Sometimes the reader has the distance to see more outlandish possibilities in a story than the characters can, but Levin is masterful at holding the reader right in with the characters.

You all know the plot, so I won't summarize, but I will mention that I think the men get a bad wrap in this story. Yes, there's all that Women's Lib stuff and the women are the ones victimized, but what happens to the men in that creepy building that makes them want this? Is Levin hinting that deep down men want wives like this, but most never act on it, or what? This matter intrigued me, though I can't make heads or tails of it.

Either way, good story. Very good.

RATING: 3

Book Review: INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE, by Anne Rice

I had a long weekend this weekend, and so I was hungry for something trashy and absorbing.

Enter INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE.

Now, this is one of those books that has been nearly eclipsed by the movie it inspired (nearly, but not so much as Fight Club, or worse still, The Stepford Wives), and as I began reading it I remembered vaguely that I had in fact seen the movie long ago, and that many scenes struck me as eerie and familiar. I kept picturing Tom Cruise as...somebody, though I couldn't remember who he played. Occasionally he showed up as Lestat, occasionally as Louis. Antonio Banderas was always Armand.

But this is beside the point, really. What I didn't remember from the movie was all the good vs. evil debates, Satan vs. God, the rather interesting theology that appears in nearly every sentence Louis utters. I found this quite intriguing for the better part of the book, but I tell you, by about two-thirds of the way through (roughly the point at which they reach Paris), I was bored out of my mind by Louis' sensual brooding, and by all the "dusky shadows" and moist, pouting lips and the beckoning and the "salty perfume" of victims' flesh and so on. The book picked up again once Louis and Armand stopped staring at each other longingly and characters started dying and the ending, depressing as it was, was somehow gratifying because it was unexpected and because I never really liked Louis much anyway (I'm not spoiling anything for you, don't worry, and besides, you've probably seen the movie already). An interesting point or two was made about mortal life in Rice's explorations of the immortal life, but by the time The Point was reiterated on each of, oh, the 346 pages, it was significantly less interesting.

A good long weekend read, yes. I enjoyed it, yes. Mostly I'm just complaining, and probably I'm not being fair because I bought the new Jonathan Foer (in paperback!) when I had 100 pages of vampires to go and so I was getting antsy to read that one but Rice kept going on and on about evil and killing. But still, I'd be willing to bet that some of Rice's later stuff is better, more to the point, because the potential in INTERVIEW is enormous--just weighted down by a lot of words.

RATING: 3