The Hacienda & My Best Friend’s Exorcism
the twist is this post isn’t even about spooky books, this is about finding my personal limits for audiobooks
Did you know that instead of giving Amazon money, you’ve already (via taxes) probably paid for a shitton of perfectly good audiobooks through your local library? Just a friendly reminder. Presumably a bunch of people know this already, since wait times for audiobooks tend to be a bit longer than the wait time for an eBook*. But then again I can listen to an audiobook while doing the dishes, so the time kind of balances out maybe? Right?
(*Although eBooks from the Brooklyn Public Library often come via Kindle, so, idk, maybe all money goes to Amazon no matter what you do.)
Except I’ve found that I don’t get much out of audiobooks when the book is supposed to be scary. I’m genuinely not trying to knock any books for not being scary enough, just that I’m wondering why – based on an extremely small sample size – someone reading a scary story to me doesn’t do it for me.
I thought my girlfriend had recommended My Best Friend’s Exorcism (Grady Hendrix) to me and then when I finished it and mentioned it, she had no idea what I was talking about, no idea where the recommendation came from (maybe this is the real spooky story, whoa). It was not totally my cup of tea, kind of leaning too heavily on the 80s nostalgia/pop culture reference porn that tends to the point where I check out of… many stories. Some of the scares in this were vivid, though. When it was scary, it was kind of engrossing? Maybe because overall the mood wasn’t constant tension, constant spooky, so when you did realize you were in a horror scene, you had a bit of that delicious sensation that it’s already too late – although much of the humor fell flat for me as well. Although it did suggest to me that I should reserve another of the authors’ books (that my girlfriend insisted she might have recommended) from the library as a regular-ass book instead.
I accidentally A-B tested my theory with The Hacienda (Isabel Cañas) by – and I appreciate this might be the scariest detail of this post about horror books depending on your personal relationship with: books – switching between reading it on my girlfriend’s old Kindle and listening to the audiobook when I made it through the library’s waitlist. And then, not wanting to travel with two eReaders over Christmas, I finished it just on the audiobook. I loved the first time it started to get spooky, when maybe-visions are starting to happen in the house, when I was reading. Although I also had a hard time getting into the book in the first place during this same non-audiobook period. My girlfriend posed a theory that the book is also just very overwritten, the kind of overly flourished writing where there are 10 words where only 1 is needed, and when you’re listening to an audiobook, you can’t just skim over excessive prose. I wondered if the story just lost me when the ratio of horror sections to romantic longing bits skewed heavily towards the latter. This was also a book club read and people brought up a lot of very interesting themes the book touches on that some of us completely missed, leaving all of us wondering if there was a much better book in here than some editor wound up letting through.
Last fall I got similarly lost in the audiobook of Our Wives Under The Sea (Julia Armfield). Much like The Hacienda, my experience with it left me wondering if an audiobook just isn’t the medium for these stories, for me, for some combination of the two, and feeling like I should try reading it again, with my eyeballs, see if this is really a me problem. This month I started reading The Only Good Indians (Stephen Graham Jones) as a regular-ass book because the Barnes and Noble near me had a moving sale and I am pretty sure it’s just the best book of the bunch, but also I am deeply enjoying the horror in this one, the regular-ass book. More on that one when I finish it, probably, idk, ReadOnly has no rules yet except for what it says on the tin.