Michael Barsa

If I am to be completely honest, I think this book is smarter than me. This happens when I read literary fiction whether it be an historical novel or this, my first suspense/thriller book in that genre. I get the feeling with these books that things are happening over my head and I’m missing important points and at times that the characters are laughing at me for my lack of insights.

That being written I did read the book even if I didn’t always understand what was going on. It is very well written. There is a lot going on within the book and a fair amount to keep track of which makes for a bit of a brain stretch. The main characters are a pair of siblings whose father is a famous horror writer. They are both a touch….odd. The family lived in a large, old house and kept pretty much to themselves. After the deaths the daughter starts on a big spruce up of the grounds, the garden in particular. Her brother is not pleased at all.

Then the weird begins.

I won’t get into the twists and turns of this intelligent and brain teasing novel. It is not a book you read with a lack of attention, you really have to stay in focus or you miss something that won’t become obvious until three chapters later. It’s a real kicker and it will stay with you for days after you read it. Quite possibly in your dreams…..… (altro)

Milo and his sister Klara have received the news that their parents have died in a car crash. Their father was a highly acclaimed horror fiction author. The car crash may or may not have been an accident. Milo continues to work on his model Greek warships, while his sister Klara turns her attentions to redoing the grounds of their home. She hires a gardener named Henri. Milo feels he knows this gardener and then realizes that the gardener reminds him of one of his father’s fictional psychotic characters. Are his father’s fictional creations now coming to life?

This book is chock full of unreliable characters and you never know who or what to believe. This is one very dysfunctional family for sure. The author has done a fine job of creating a haunting, unstable atmosphere that keeps the readers on their toes. While there’s a lot of dark humor in the book, I found it at times to be quite frightening and spooky and I don’t frighten or spook easily! One of the blurbs described the book as malevolent and that’s exactly how I felt about it. The story’s malevolence seemed to leap off the page and surround me with its evil. This book and its characters grabbed ahold of me and wouldn’t let go. A shiver just went up my spine just thinking about it.

Recommended.

This book was given to me by the publisher in return for an honest review.… (altro)

Reading American author Michael Barsa’s The Garden of Blue Roses, I was thoroughly enchanted. Quite the debut novel. Since so much of the tale lies in its style as much as its action, other than noting how the story is narrated by twenty-something Milo Crane in the aftermath of the death via automobile crash of his mother and father, a popular writer of horror fiction, and the ensuing events he lives through with Klara, his elder sister of seven years, I will link my comments with specific quotes from the book so as to share the distinct flavor of this unique work.

“The crying only became louder. Our house has strange echoes. It was coming from all over, like the walls themselves were weeping. I was tempted to run away, to avoid a future of such sounds.” ---------- If The Garden of Blue Roses was sheer pulp horror fiction, Michael Barsa’s inventiveness would be constricted within the boundaries of the genre. It is not. This is a work of true literature not pulp, thus its subtle poetry touches on the horrific but is not bound by it. The Garden of Blue Roses is in stark contrast to The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Psychopath, one of a number of hack works by Milo’s father, John Crane, a work cited throughout as literary counterpoint.

“I tried to focus on the trireme, something historical and real, but Father used to say that if you could imagine it, it was real to you, so I closed my eyes and tried to bury my imagination, to shovel it over with great mounds of earth.” ---------- An example of how the story is told with such rich imagery, many passages could be transposed with ease into lyrical poetry. Thus my reluctance to merely summarize the bare sequence of happenings.

“Every now and then she kept up the pretense of mothering by insisting we eat supper together. I’ve never understood this penchant for masticating as a social ritual. We don’t make other bodily functions like defecation or nose blowing into elaborate occasions of forced togetherness.” ---------- Ah, family! Milo provides the backstory, his own as well as other members of his family, to add weight to the unfolding drama. Milo was continually picked on and beaten up as a kid at school and when he attended a small liberal arts college for one term, the experience was so hellish he sought a correspondence course offering a college degree. Humorously, one of the thuggish dullards Milo was forced to deal with back at that small New England college was a big fan of, you guested it, John Crane horror novels.

“Even in his absence he was everywhere – in the creaking floors, the grandfather clock, the footsteps and shadowy trees, in the books crowding the living room shelves and appearing, like not-so-subtle reminders, on end tables or our pillows before we lay down at night. Not just his own books but the ones he thought we ought to read – Dickens and Hawthorne and Charles Brockden Brown – books to mold our imaginations to some uncertain and terrifying end.” ---------- Any booklover will love the frequent references to authors and titles sprinkled throughout. Additionally, in keeping with that longstanding Gothic trope - witchcraft, magic and occultism – the presence of John Crane continues to manifest in more ways than one.

“Surfacing from memory is like coming up for air. There is that same exhausted relief, the wonder at being alive. Also the same moment of doubt, of whether this is really the dream and that other realm, the murky one of shifting shapes and swaying sunbeams, is the one you inhabit.” ----------- When we read typical Gothic horror pulp, do we usually encounter reflections and musings rendered in such beautiful language? I don’t think so! The philosophic dimension of The Garden of Blue Roses was one I found particularly appealing.

“Beauty without context. I saw how Klara hung on his every word, how her breath fluttered like an excited bird’s. Was she blinded by his cheap charm? Or by a misguided sense of beauty: the prospect of transforming our grounds into some hideous floral theme park?” ---------- Yet again another thread of the this blossoming yarn is the psychological probing into the mind and heart of older sister Klara.

“She looked at me, and that’s when something came over her, because she gripped my shoulders hard and continued in a shaky dramatic whisper: “The devil?” ---------- What's a good ole Gothic tale set in the land of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Young Goodman Brown without at least one reference to the evil one? Moreover, that classic Hawthorne is cited directly - some tales continue to cast a long shadow, a very long shadow.

“Yes, the more I thought about it, the more I realized this might be a classic John Crane plot, where nothing was what it seemed. . . . Had Father finally realized the power of his fiction – the power to literally create a life that leapt off the page and crossed over into the so-called real world? ---------- Oh, my. A narrator questioning the solidity of his world. Is this beginning to sound like another one of those prime Gothic tropes - a confusion over what is real or unreal that just might touch on madness? To find out, I highly recommend treating yourself to Michael Barsa's fine novel.… (altro)

But wait, you say, you're the author…. Let me explain.

Sometimes love happens all at once. There it is: Boom! LOVE! Other times it’s a more gradual recognition, a process of allowing yourself to fall into the feeling—it’s a form of humility really, saying to yourself: right here, in this messy reality, is where I’ll choose to reside. This is how I’d describe my complicated feelings about my own writing.

For years I would have given everything I wrote one or zero stars, and deservedly so, because for years everything I wrote was terrible. I took uncommon glee in reading through a 300 page manuscript that had taken me more than a year to write, and deciding that the only thing worth saving was the opening paragraph (yes, this happened). It’s taken a painfully long time to learn to recognize that, well, not EVERYTHING was terrible, that here and there a paragraph or a phrase or more might be salvageable if I only came back to it later with a bit more patience, and that sometimes I ought NOT to trust my most savage and critical instincts. In other words, I had to learn to love my creations, to give them a chance, because sometimes good writing doesn’t happen all at once, sometimes you’ve got to keep coming back again and again and not give up and just hope you reach a point where something breaks through your own skepticism and allows you recognize that yes, this is getting somewhere, and yes, it’s not half bad. So I’m giving this 5 stars because I can finally say I’m proud of something I wrote. It’s not perfect, sure, and it might fail for some, but I love it all the same, because I’ve watched it grow up from nothing, from an inchoate burbling notion that I had no idea how to handle into a piece of fiction that now exists on its own in the big bad world, without my worrying and nagging guidance.… (altro)