The Haunting of Maddy Clare
By: Simone St. James / Narrated By: Pamela Garelick
Length: 9 hrs and 53 mins
The debut of author Simone St. James, and you can tell… plus? Oy, Garelick!!!
Oh goodness! I love Simone St. James, and upon starting the listening of The Haunting of Maddy Clare? I’d shot off an email to a good friend titled: Spoooooky!!! Cuz, dude! it was creeping me out! Upon finishing it? Well, all I can tell you is that, judging from her later works? Thank GOSH St. James listened to her audience, and thank GOD!!!! her work has been done by different narrators!
Dreary, dreary, wet and dreary England in the 1920s, just a few years past WWI. Sarah Piper is barely making ends meet by being a temp worker, so when she gets a call to see, posthaste! a very strange man who’s asking for some very strange things? Well, she’s heard of THAT type before, but danged if she’s in a position to say no.
She trots off to the coffeehouse to meet one Alistair Gellis, a man of boyish good looks, earnest, exuberant, and oh? He wants her to come help him with a haunting he’s super duper keen to document. He needs an assistant, you see, because his usual assistant is off on personal matters, and besides, he MUST have a female. Whyyyyy?
We’ll come to that, and it’s kinda a surprise to Sarah when she’s thrown into the lion’s den, headfirst and armed with only a newfangled camera and recording device. Alistair was hired to check out Maddy Clare’s ghost, now living in the barn where she hanged herself. Maddy had turned up at the house, speechless, terrified, much abused and violated. She’d been able to utter the single word, Maddy, and the household just took it to be her name. She’d lived with the family as a maidservant for seven years, silently performing her duties, causing a ruckus only now and again (And usually after a male not known to her was seen), but never really relaxing or finding peace. Her body was found dangling from the rafters, an ominous note about Killing All left beside her.
Oh, and?
She haaaaaates men!
So you’re up, Sarah Piper! Good luck to ya, and document everything while you’re at it, okay?
Sarah is soooo not up for all of this, but she doesn’t believe in ghosts, soooo… yeh, she’ll give it a go. ImMEDiately, however, Maddy makes herself known in not such nice ways. With footsteps, and heels hitting the walls, with the destruction of property, with the barn bursting into flames. Sarah, near terrified to death, makes it out in one piece only to discover? It was a hallucination; the barn is fine. But now? Oooooh, Sarah, meek and mild Sarah, is wondering, and she’d reeeeally like to know what’s going on.
Soon, the little village’s folk are taking notice and talking about the now trio (The usual assistant, the gruff Matthew Ryder, has joined them for this historic haunting), and rumors begin flying around. Complicating things? Sarah’s room has been broken into, her paltry few garments and belongings trashed, and no, really! she’d really! really! like to know whattheheck is going on. And just what happened to Maddy when she was 12? What are all these weird-patoot messages and visions that she’s sending Sarah?!?
So all this is well and good, no problem, total creepfest. Adding to the richness of the writing is St. James fleshing Alistair and Matthew as veterans of horror show campaigns during the war. They’re up for hauntings cuz they’ve alREAdy seen the worst man can do to man; they’ve alREAdy seen ghosts aplenty, lives cut short, all on the battlefields of WWI. They’re scarred, Alistair with a trashed leg, and Matthew with a viciously burned and scarred body.
The problem?
The romance for one. Okay, usually not toooo much of a problem, and as my introduction to Ms. St. James was with Silence for the Dead, which also had some romance going, I thought this time it’d be handled just as gingerly as that one handled it. There, but not overbearing.
Here? Good golly gosh, nooooo! Nipple-sucking, nails raking the back (And dude, isn’t his scarred flesh tender back there? Just askin’), engorged members being grabbed, clothes torn asunder. Nooooo!!! Say it ain’t so! But it is, and as neither Sarah nor Matthew have ever truly been in love, and as Sarah is just a tad needy, and Matthew is just a tad desperate, it happens more than once, and it ooooozes into the main creep show.
The other problem? OY! Narrator Pamela Garelick sounds waaaay too old for this tale of young folks. Sarah? A growly older woman?! I think NOT!!! And good cow! The men she does! She makes Alistair sounds like a hyper terrier with the zoomies, and Matthew? Egad!!! He just sounds like a gruff brute, slightly stupid also. And don’t even get me started on the femme fatale of the story, she sounds like a drunken ox laboriously slurring through poetry.
Okay, so only TWO things (Terribly!) wrong with what is yet another good old fashioned haunting. If you like eerie and atmospheric writing, and if you can stomach all the doffing of clothes whilst in frenzied passions? You’ll DEFinitely love this. But I suggest reading it, or speeding up your listening speed to where sexy women don’t slur tooooo much, and to where gruff men don’t sound like oafish morons toooo much. That said, upon speeding it up? P’raps it tipped Alistair over the edge into yappy dog territory, so maybe?
My Bad on that score…
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