NOT A BOOK REVIEW

We were out and about this afternoon, doing a few chores and picking up some groceries at Costco. I love to peruse their book section and where else can you buy new releases for almost half the cover prices? I already own The Painted Girl by Cathy Marie Buchanan, so I kept shuffling along, dodging around shopping carts and children nagging their parents for toys and snacks.

And then I saw it--The Accursed, by Joyce Carol Oates. JCO is one of my favourite authors. Who can deny the brilliance of The Gravedigger's Daughter and We Were the Mulvaneys? 

The jacket blurb of The Accursed sounded promising with its Gothic setting, vampires and ghosts set in the early 1900s, but still I hesitated. 

You see, I'd given up vampire literature. I have nothing against vampires. Some of my favourite characters have fangs. One of the best novels I devoured in a couple of sittings was Interview With the Vampire by Anne Rice. I read it when it was first published in 1976. I was young and impressionable and there hadn't been any novel like it since Bram Stoker's Dracula. 

I'm sorry to say that vampires have been overwritten and oversold ever since Anne Rice opened the door to modern vampirism.

But there was still something about The Accursed that intrigued me. I loved the cover art and the 600 pages didn't deter me since I love long, historical novels with multiple viewpoints and supernatural elements. My gut feeling told me to buy it, but I didn't, mostly because my hubby hates shopping and he was waiting, not so patiently, with the shopping cart. When we got home I hurried to my computer and looked up The Accursed and discovered that it's a revised and retitled edition of The Crosswicks Horror, which is on my list of must reads.

Thirty years ago, Joyce Carol Oates wrote a sequence of five Gothic novels. Bellefleur, 1980, became a bestseller, but the next two, A Bloodsmoor Romance 1982 and Mysteries of Winterthurn, 1984, were less successful and the final two, The Crosswicks Horror and My Heart Laid Bare, were not published. 

Joyce Carol Oates revised My Heart Laid Bare and it was published in 1998, and now she has revised and retitled The Crosswicks Horror. 

So I've been bitten by the vampire craze once again and I'll be returning to Costco in the very near future to buy The Accursed.