All Things Cease to Appear
now a major Netflix new release Things Heard and Seen
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4.0 • 7 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
'Ghosts, murder, a terrifying psychotic who seems normal, and beautiful writing. Loved it' Stephen King
'Can make you gasp in astonishment or break your heart with a single line' Wall St Journal
'Superb. Think a more literary, and feminist, Gone Girl' Vogue
BASIS FOR THE NETFLIX FILM THINGS HEARD & SEEN
This begins the morning Catherine Clare died.
The day her daughter spent in the house with her.
The evening her husband came home to find her.
This becomes the tale of their marriage,
and the ones around them.
A tale of bonds between families,
between lives living and lost
and of the lonely ones that share no bonds at all.
Who should be pitied.
Who must be feared.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Brundage's (bestselling author of The Doctor's Wife) searing, intricate novel epitomizes the best of the literary thriller, marrying gripping drama with impeccably crafted prose, characterizations, and imagery. In 1978, Ella and Calvin Hale respond to their farm's failing fortunes by committing suicide. As their sons, Eddy, Cole, and Wade, are taken in by nearby relatives, their farmhouse in upstate Chosen, N.Y., is bought by outsiders. College professor George Clare, his beautiful wife, Catherine, and their toddler, Franny, buy the house and seem picture-perfect, but appearances deceive. George, an expert in Hudson River painter George Inness (an actual figure, whose artistic theories and Swedenborg-influenced philosophy run through the novel) is a dark soul with a young mistress and a violent history; insecure Catherine takes his abuse until the women's movement helps empower her to leave him. Then George appears at a neighbor's door, announcing that he has found Catherine murdered in their bedroom. Though locals blame him, the crime remains unsolved. Seen as cursed and haunted by its dark history, their house sits abandoned until 2004, when Franny, now a surgical resident, re-encounters painful memories and her former babysitter Cole Hale on a trip to empty it. Moving fluidly between viewpoints and time periods, Brundage's complex narrative requires and rewards close attention. Succeeding as murder mystery, ghost tale, family drama, and love story, her novel is both tragic and transcendent.
Customer Reviews
Not what it appears
The author is American. I enjoyed her latest novel The Vanishing Point. This, the previous one, was adapted by Netflix into a film Things Heard and Seen. I haven’t. Seen it, that is. Thought I’d read the book first.
In brief
It’s the late 1970s when college prof George, his missus Clare and 3-year-old daughter leave the big bad city for a historic rural farmhouse in upstate New York. He comes home from work one day to find her with an axe in her head, and his daughter locked in her room adjacent. Runs to neighbours for help. Police investigation ensues with George the chief suspect. His parents spirit him and the daughter away to their beachside place and lawyer up. Turns out George was having affair with younger woman (ho hum) and marriage was on rocks. In parallel, we hear about three boys, one in particular, who grew up in the farmhouse back in the day when it was a dairy farm that went bust. The boys go into care after both parents die, but still feel attachment to the house Mum where killed herself. Yada, yada back and forth in time as frustrated policemen struggles to gather sufficient evidence to prove his case. (Spoiler alert: he fails) For years, no one wants to buy the place where two people croaked, and where ghosts might or might not be present, but market forces eventually overcome supernatural ones. The daughter, now all growed up and in college herself, comes home to clean up and makes a discovery among Mom’s personal effects that the cops missed. Multiple times if you can believe it. I couldn’t. Maybe, ghosts put it there.
Writing
Ms B writes beautifully and evokes mood with the best of them. However, rapid changes in POV and time with precious few signposts to the transitions, combined with zero punctuation dialogue, means even readers with their thinking caps firmly in place may struggle. Mention of someone wearing a Guns N Roses T shirt in 1978 grated too. (GNR weren’t a thing till 1985). The blurb associated with this includes words like thriller, gothic, and noir. It is none of those things, but did remind me of drawn out, dark-toned, ambiguously-concluded Netflix shows I have watched, or given up watching.
Bottom line
Slow, but worth reading for the prose, once you master the lack of punctuation with dialogue.