Elizabeth Hand and John Crowley discuss Curious Toys and speculative vs. historical fiction

Boston Review featured a review of Curious Toys and a discussion between Elizabeth and author John Crowley, touching on speculative vs. historical fiction, Darger as a character, the outlandish and outsiders, and much more.

John Crowley: Historical fictions are designed largely as a sort of medley: true details of time and place, actual persons of the period treated as fictional characters with their own point of view, invented persons who interact with the historical ones, real events that will form memories for the real people and for the fictional ones. You’ve long been drawn to this kind of fiction and its possibilities. What do you think its power is, for writer and reader?

Elizabeth Hand: Well, as you know yourself, history is an immense sandbox for a writer to play in. I would add “fulfilling,” but can a sandbox be fulfilling? I love research, searching for and delving into primary sources in hopes of discovering some nugget of information that’s somehow gone unnoticed, that I can then use in a story. And while I always try to create as authentic and absorbing a portrait of a period as I can, I love playing with all the what ifs of history. Darger and Chaplin and Hollywood screenwriter Ben Hecht and others were all in Chicago at the same time: what if their paths crossed in some way?

Read more at Boston Review.

Best Of Lists & More Reviews for Curious Toys

Happy 2020! Curious Toys is still receiving reviews and making best-of lists well into this new year, so here’s a round-up:

First up, Curious Toys made the 2020 Locus Poll and Survey for Best Horror Novel.

CrimeReads included Curious Toys on their Best Books of 2019: Historical Fiction:

From an author who has achieved acclaim for stories of crime, horror, and fantasy, comes a new tale of intrigue and murder that checks off many of my favorite boxes. It’s got: lady detectives, old seaside amusement parks, the Gilded Age, silent film, women who disguise as men to embed in male-only groups, women who look out for other women, obscure real-life artist and writer Henry Darger.

And the Curious Toys audiobook, narrated by Carol Monda, made Slate’s Best Audiobooks of 2019:

Monda, my preferred narrator for any story with a noirish flavor (including Hand’s fabulous Cass Neary series), at first seemed an incongruous fit with the historical setting, but the world Henry and Pin inhabit is a hard-knock one, and within a few chapters it was impossible to imagine this story read by anyone else.

More reviews

Portland Press Herald: In a 1915 Chicago amusement park, a teenage girl makes a terrifying discovery:

Amusement parks are generally rich settings for murder and mayhem. Think Stephen King’s“Joyland” or “Slayground” by Donald Westlake, writing as Richard Stark. Places like Riverview both attract and repel us, offering a bit of sleaze gussied up with some cheap effects. Hand gets the details exactly right, finding the tawdry magic that animates such venues, but striking a balance between her research and the narrative momentum of the novel.

Los Angeles Review of Books: Dark Ride—On Elizabeth Hand’s “Curious Toys”:

The novel’s overarching ambiance of terror is never sacrificed during its more idiosyncratic historical detours. “Dark ride” doesn’t just describe the lurid indoor amusements contained in Hell Gate — it’s an apt summary of Curious Toys and all its shadowy diversions. These crop up in herky-jerky rhythms, lurching out at the reader like midway barkers or costumed nightmares stalking a haunted house.

Wylding Hall: The Perfect Horror Novel for Libras

Bustle includes Wydling Hall in a fun list matching a horror novel to a zodiac sign, deeming the novella ideal for Libra:

Like many other signs, Libra fears being alone in this world. But this sign is unique in that, in addition to fearing an unbalanced life, which is just so Libra, it also worries deeply about breakups — both romantic and platonic.

See the rest of the list at Bustle.

Tor.com Calls Wylding Hall "An Under-appreciated Gem"

A few months ago, Emily Hughes included Wylding Hall in a “best folk horror” edition of her fantastic Nightmare Fuel newsletter. Now she has written an article of horror recommendations “for all tolerance levels” at Tor.com and includes Wylding Hall as a “medium tolerance” read for fans of films like Jordan Peele’s Get Out and Us.

This short, engrossing novel is an under-appreciated gem, and the perfect creepy October read…

This book is tense and creepy throughout, but there’s one culminating scare that I still find myself thinking about when I’m staring at the ceiling at 3am.

See the entire (excellent!) list at Tor.com.

Read Cass Neary if you like Veronica Mars

In honor of a new Veronica Mars season hitting Hulu, Literary Hub lists “11 Books to Read if You’re an Adult Who Loves Veronica Mars”. The list includes Generation Loss alongside works from Tana French, Sue Grafton, and Shirley Jackson.

If you wish Veronica were actually punk, and not just Neptune punk, you may just fall for Cass Neary, a skilled photographer in the 1970s New York music scene who bottoms out and, years later, finds herself investigating a murder.

You can read the entire list at Literary Hub.

Nightmare Fuel includes Wylding Hall in "best folk horror" list

In honor of the impending release of Midsommar—director Ari Aster’s follow-up to Hereditary—Nightmare Fuel, a dark lit newsletter by Tor senior marketing manager Emily Hughes, has included Wylding Hall in a list of best folk horror.

Hall appears alongside Andrew Michael Hurley’s The Loney, Thomas Tryon’s Harvest Home, and Kai Ashante Wilson’s The Devil in America.

The book is written as an oral history, a series of interviews with the surviving band members, their manager, and a journalist who profiled the band that summer, which I love as a narrative choice, because you’re immediately plunged into a plethora of narrators of varying degrees of unreliability. Add that to the fact that the interviews are taking place forty years after the events of the story, and you’ve got a nice haze of uncertainty over what actually happened at Wylding Hall.

You can read the entire newsletter over at Nightmare Fuel on Substack, and subscribe to receive future editions (it’s free!).

Cass Neary series named a touchstone in "hipster mystery" canon

Lisa Levy of Crime Reads has assembled a list of canon texts for what she coins "Hipster Mystery” (or “hipstery”)—crime novels featuring “hipster” characters (are they in a band? were they in a band? do they wear band t-shirts?) or set in notoriously hipster scenes or cities and neighborhoods (Brookyln, East Village, London).

Levy includes the Cass Neary Crime Novels in her canon, citing Cass’s gritty, punk aesthetic, and the scenes Cass finds herself moving through:

In her adventures we not only see underground NYC but the speed metal culture of Scandinavia and Iceland, a 1960s communal Maine idyll gone wrong, and the dank basement clubs of contemporary London.

You can read the entire article over at Crime Reads.

The Lineup Podcast Play podcast Three Glowing Lights - Episode 6

In this episode we join author Elizabeth Hand in the snow-covered fields of upstate New York where one childhood ritual at twilight awakens a strange presence in the woods. Afterward, we sit down with Elizabeth to discuss the experience and its impact on her life and work.[x_audio_embed][/x_audio_embed]