whaydengilbert's review against another edition
3.0
If you enjoy reading, don’t ever become a teacher…as it will *zap* your will to read in your free time. As a matter of fact, just heed the advice of everyone in your life and just don’t become a teacher, period.
Charles Grant is great. Despite the 3/5 ratings I’ve given a few of his books, I love spending time in them. They are truly a pleasure. He was clearly inspired by Ray Bradbury, which is more evident in his Oxrun Station books, and even more evident in The Black Carousel—both the last of four novella collections that take place in the town, and the final book in the series overall.
I love the bookend chapters, where we are introduced to a couple of charming adult friends showing the new sheriff in town the ropes of the Station, spinning a few yarns to tell him what he’s in for. I don’t really know how well it works, since these 4 stories seem odd in that context (why would he care about some of these things, which we find out later, didn’t even have as dramatic of endings as their ambiguous final lines led us to believe? Why is a carnival so important to Oxrun Station all of a sudden? What even happens at this dang carnival?), but I digress. It’s pure Bradbury.
The stories inside are a little bit of a mixed bag, all well written, but some muddled and confusing thematic material. “Penny Tunes for a Gold Lion” is the first. It concerns a sad mailman who just feels stuck in a rut, hates his humdrum existence, doesn’t even notice the cute, timid teacher who’s got a crush on him, and who’s only solace in his miserable day-to-day are his flowers. That is, until he meets a hot, spunky redhead carny who whisks him away on airs begs him to come back to the carnival on its last night. Does this all sound like a lot? It kinda is. And I’m still not entirely sure what the point of the mysterious death of his garden has to do with anything.
The next is “Won’t You Be Mine?” From the looks of the few reviews I’ve scoured on GoodReads, this appears to be the favorite. I’m guessing that’s because the protagonist is a young kid, and everyone loves kid protagonists in horror stories. It probably is the best, too. It totally stands on its own, has a spooky twist, and overall feels like the best Goosebumps book never written. Kinda awesome. But the carnival is completely tangential to the story, and had me wondering if Grant did a little rejiggering to a story he already had just to include it and fill out the four-novella page count.
Thirdly is “Lost in Amber Light”. This one is really uneven to me, because it hit me the hardest as a man who struggled to feel independent throughout his young adulthood. But this is another one where the thematic dressing is just…odd. There’s a whole running thing with a cat that I just don’t get. I admit to getting a bit bored by the surreal, quasi-dream sequences throughout the latter half of the story, and I wanted to beat this kid senseless for not just marrying his friend. (Kids, just marry your best friend) for its faults, the ending hits hard, and I was left with a cold chill in my veins.
The final story, before the lovely final bookend, is “The Rain is Filled With Ghosts Tonight.” And I just want anyone who happens to read this review to pause, and just appreciate that title. Like, holy crap. Perhaps the “cellar door” of horror titles. Bravo, Charlie. The story it is attributed to is very sad, about an old man suffering from dementia, who cannot tell the different between what is real, what are memories, and what might perhaps be something else altogether. The major hurdle I had to cross for this one was that Grant’s writing usually makes you feel like you’re starting a few yards behind from the get-go. It takes a while for me to get my bearings when I start a story by him. That, on top of the surreality of the unreliable narrator we’re with throughout this story, I’ll admit I was completely lost for a lot of it and had to reread most of it. I felt real dumb, because in the end, it’s exactly what you think it will be.
I’ll always curse GoodReads for not allowing .5 stars on the rating. I can’t in all honestly go a full 4, but it is better than a 3, for sure.
Charles Grant is great. Despite the 3/5 ratings I’ve given a few of his books, I love spending time in them. They are truly a pleasure. He was clearly inspired by Ray Bradbury, which is more evident in his Oxrun Station books, and even more evident in The Black Carousel—both the last of four novella collections that take place in the town, and the final book in the series overall.
I love the bookend chapters, where we are introduced to a couple of charming adult friends showing the new sheriff in town the ropes of the Station, spinning a few yarns to tell him what he’s in for. I don’t really know how well it works, since these 4 stories seem odd in that context (why would he care about some of these things, which we find out later, didn’t even have as dramatic of endings as their ambiguous final lines led us to believe? Why is a carnival so important to Oxrun Station all of a sudden? What even happens at this dang carnival?), but I digress. It’s pure Bradbury.
The stories inside are a little bit of a mixed bag, all well written, but some muddled and confusing thematic material. “Penny Tunes for a Gold Lion” is the first. It concerns a sad mailman who just feels stuck in a rut, hates his humdrum existence, doesn’t even notice the cute, timid teacher who’s got a crush on him, and who’s only solace in his miserable day-to-day are his flowers. That is, until he meets a hot, spunky redhead carny who whisks him away on airs begs him to come back to the carnival on its last night. Does this all sound like a lot? It kinda is. And I’m still not entirely sure what the point of the mysterious death of his garden has to do with anything.
The next is “Won’t You Be Mine?” From the looks of the few reviews I’ve scoured on GoodReads, this appears to be the favorite. I’m guessing that’s because the protagonist is a young kid, and everyone loves kid protagonists in horror stories. It probably is the best, too. It totally stands on its own, has a spooky twist, and overall feels like the best Goosebumps book never written. Kinda awesome. But the carnival is completely tangential to the story, and had me wondering if Grant did a little rejiggering to a story he already had just to include it and fill out the four-novella page count.
Thirdly is “Lost in Amber Light”. This one is really uneven to me, because it hit me the hardest as a man who struggled to feel independent throughout his young adulthood. But this is another one where the thematic dressing is just…odd. There’s a whole running thing with a cat that I just don’t get. I admit to getting a bit bored by the surreal, quasi-dream sequences throughout the latter half of the story, and I wanted to beat this kid senseless for not just marrying his friend. (Kids, just marry your best friend) for its faults, the ending hits hard, and I was left with a cold chill in my veins.
The final story, before the lovely final bookend, is “The Rain is Filled With Ghosts Tonight.” And I just want anyone who happens to read this review to pause, and just appreciate that title. Like, holy crap. Perhaps the “cellar door” of horror titles. Bravo, Charlie. The story it is attributed to is very sad, about an old man suffering from dementia, who cannot tell the different between what is real, what are memories, and what might perhaps be something else altogether. The major hurdle I had to cross for this one was that Grant’s writing usually makes you feel like you’re starting a few yards behind from the get-go. It takes a while for me to get my bearings when I start a story by him. That, on top of the surreality of the unreliable narrator we’re with throughout this story, I’ll admit I was completely lost for a lot of it and had to reread most of it. I felt real dumb, because in the end, it’s exactly what you think it will be.
I’ll always curse GoodReads for not allowing .5 stars on the rating. I can’t in all honestly go a full 4, but it is better than a 3, for sure.
verkisto's review against another edition
4.0
I've always been curious as to why Grant dropped the "L." out of his name later in his career. You can't see it on the cover for this edition of the book, but on the print edition you can see that he's just "Charles Grant" there. I noticed this on Robert R. McCammon's I Travel by Night, as well, and wonder what drives that sort of thing. Too much of a mouthful? Or are the authors trying to separate their careers using the slightly different names?
With The Black Carousel, Grant wasn't deviating from anything he had done previously; if anything, he returned to familiar ground. By the time this collection was originally published, Grant hadn't written anything about Oxrun Station for six years, and not only did he return to his familiar town, but he also wrote a book comprised of four novellas, like he did with Nightmare Seasons, The Orchard, and Dialing the Wind. And yet he still left out that "L.". Curious.
Anyway, this is another re-read for me, and I was looking forward to this one because I remembered liking this one a lot, even though I didn't recall many details about any of the stories. I remembered the feeling I had while reading it, and even recommended the book to some others folks I knew who were into horror. Plus, the theme of the dark carnival is reminiscent of Ray Bradbury and Something Wicked This Way Comes, so the collection had a lot to live up to just by association.
"Penny Tunes for a Gold Lion", the first story in the collection, was a little predictable, but effective nonetheless. The main character wasn't completely sympathetic due to his being a little pathetic, but still, he wasn't someone you wanted to see done wrong. Once things started going down a dark road, though, I could feel the mood of the story change. That's another one of Grant's skills, though -- how he can change how you feel about a story with a short turn of phrase.
The second story, "Will You Be Mine?", is the story I remember the best, because it's just so chilling. Grant was an expert at creating genuinely creepy moments, like the one from this story that actually made me shudder. He didn't use shock or graphic violence to convey that feeling; he just knew how to create the atmosphere and characters and set the scene to elicit the right response. And that ending . . . man, he sticks it like an Olympic gymnast.
"Lost in Amber Light", the third story, was odd in its imagery and its theme, but it used the idea of the carnival to full effect. It hit a little too close to home for me, for various reasons, which made it even more disturbing, which in turn made the story successful, but I'm not sure it would resonate with other readers with different life experiences. Regardless, it was an effective story for me.
"The Rain Is Filled with Ghosts Tonight", the last story, is a melancholy story of ghosts. Maybe. It's also a story about a man dealing with the onset of Alzheimer's, so it's hard to say whether the ghosts are real (in the sense of the story) or just old memories. That question alone makes this story unnerving, which is just the right mood for it, ghosts or otherwise.
I continue to get frustrated with these e-books, too, since little care was put into proofreading them. It's clear that these were created by scanning in a printed book, since there are a lot of OCR errors scattered about the book: "dose" instead of "close"; "mom" instead "morn"; and so on. Plus, paragraphs are created at the wrong place, or aren't indented properly. When I pay money for a file, I expect that file to be accurate, you know? The errors just take me out of the story.
Regardless, this is the best Grant book I've read thus far. I'm glad to see that my memories of this book hold up some twenty years later. I can see how Grant's skills developed over time, and how his style developed into something smoother and more accessible, and I'm happy to say that I would still recommend this book to someone looking for "good horror".
With The Black Carousel, Grant wasn't deviating from anything he had done previously; if anything, he returned to familiar ground. By the time this collection was originally published, Grant hadn't written anything about Oxrun Station for six years, and not only did he return to his familiar town, but he also wrote a book comprised of four novellas, like he did with Nightmare Seasons, The Orchard, and Dialing the Wind. And yet he still left out that "L.". Curious.
Anyway, this is another re-read for me, and I was looking forward to this one because I remembered liking this one a lot, even though I didn't recall many details about any of the stories. I remembered the feeling I had while reading it, and even recommended the book to some others folks I knew who were into horror. Plus, the theme of the dark carnival is reminiscent of Ray Bradbury and Something Wicked This Way Comes, so the collection had a lot to live up to just by association.
"Penny Tunes for a Gold Lion", the first story in the collection, was a little predictable, but effective nonetheless. The main character wasn't completely sympathetic due to his being a little pathetic, but still, he wasn't someone you wanted to see done wrong. Once things started going down a dark road, though, I could feel the mood of the story change. That's another one of Grant's skills, though -- how he can change how you feel about a story with a short turn of phrase.
The second story, "Will You Be Mine?", is the story I remember the best, because it's just so chilling. Grant was an expert at creating genuinely creepy moments, like the one from this story that actually made me shudder. He didn't use shock or graphic violence to convey that feeling; he just knew how to create the atmosphere and characters and set the scene to elicit the right response. And that ending . . . man, he sticks it like an Olympic gymnast.
"Lost in Amber Light", the third story, was odd in its imagery and its theme, but it used the idea of the carnival to full effect. It hit a little too close to home for me, for various reasons, which made it even more disturbing, which in turn made the story successful, but I'm not sure it would resonate with other readers with different life experiences. Regardless, it was an effective story for me.
"The Rain Is Filled with Ghosts Tonight", the last story, is a melancholy story of ghosts. Maybe. It's also a story about a man dealing with the onset of Alzheimer's, so it's hard to say whether the ghosts are real (in the sense of the story) or just old memories. That question alone makes this story unnerving, which is just the right mood for it, ghosts or otherwise.
I continue to get frustrated with these e-books, too, since little care was put into proofreading them. It's clear that these were created by scanning in a printed book, since there are a lot of OCR errors scattered about the book: "dose" instead of "close"; "mom" instead "morn"; and so on. Plus, paragraphs are created at the wrong place, or aren't indented properly. When I pay money for a file, I expect that file to be accurate, you know? The errors just take me out of the story.
Regardless, this is the best Grant book I've read thus far. I'm glad to see that my memories of this book hold up some twenty years later. I can see how Grant's skills developed over time, and how his style developed into something smoother and more accessible, and I'm happy to say that I would still recommend this book to someone looking for "good horror".
dadoodoflow's review
dark
emotional
mysterious
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
4.0
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