The Accursed – Joyce Carol Oates

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ImagesThis book was a disappointment.  It had an intriguing premise of some sort of curse (presumed to be vampiric) on the upper crust of Princeton, New Jersey in 1905-1906.  And the bouncing around several different stories by a ditzy "historian" narrator promised to be a good way of presenting a horror story, in much the same way that the epistolary narrative in Dracula did.  

But instead of presenting a coherent story, the book presented fragments of the horror story (albeit well-done fragments), loaded down with two completely unrelated stories – one of the academic struggles of Princeton university president Woodrow Wilson and another with the socialist advocacy of Upton Sinclair, who was living in Princeton at the time.  I kept waiting for the stories to intertwine, but they never really did.

 

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Michael C. Smith

Marshall, Texas lawyer. I post on things that attract my interest while puttering in my study. Mostly family, books, home, history, World War II and scale modeling.
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