When a novel deals on an intellectual level with matters spiritual or supernatural, the urge to try and figure out what the author may be trying to tell us becomes irresistible. I may be wildly wrong, but I feel sure that Ann Arensberg intends some sort of meaning or message in her third novel, Incubus, but I’ll be, uh, damned if I know what it is.
Not that ambiguity in this arena keeps Incubus from being a successful novel. It is satisfying and creepily entertaining from its whisper-of-danger beginning to its thunderous War-in-Heaven-style end.
The story is narrated by Cora Whitman, recounting events of three years earlier, the summer of 1974, when she "spent three months in the underworld." Cora, in her fifties, is the wife of Henry Lieber, rector of an Episcopal church in Dry Falls, Maine. Henry is a clergyman rapidly running out of, if not faith, then enthusiasm for it. Cora is a materialist who maintains, "It was only the prospect of an afterlife that made Death fearsome." Strange things begin to occur. In the middle of April, Dry Falls is hit by a heat wave that, accompanied by a drought, continues through the summer. But only the inhabitants of Dry Falls, as if they were "living under some kind of climatic glass bell," experience the bizarre weather, which goes unnoticed everywhere else.
Then some schoolgirls, messing about in a graveyard at night, are frightened (and enthralled) by some sort of bogeyman. Henry and the other men of the town lose their sex drive. A large, menacing black dog is seen lurking about. Cora sees "signs of disturbance in the reproductive cycle" that indicate that "something in our neighborhood was hostile to females of all species."
Still more eerie: Women have nightmares of being oppressed by a vague but loathsome weight on their bodies during sleep. Things then go beyond the dream stage. Evidence of nocturnal sexual assault of the schoolgirls is found, and then Henry and others witness such an assault — rape, apparently by a demon, an incubus, of a sleeping woman who appears to be in stupefied ecstasy.
What are we to make of this abominable activity, which is real and actual, not some sort of mass hallucination? For an epigraph the author uses the eighth-century Irish prayer known as "St. Patrick’s Breastplate," then precedes each section of her book with a line from it — "Christ before us," "Christ behind us," "Christ within us," "Christ beneath us," and so forth — as if to signal that great faith must be used to protect against great evil.
But what great faith? Henry’s is fading, and there are indications that he is trading his doctrinal belief in the supernatural for a fascination with the supernatural’s current disgusting manifestations.
Cora has no faith. She is completely convinced that the planet has been invaded by something, but whatever it is, it either nullifies the claims of Christianity or is beyond Christianity’s universe.
And yet, at the end, there is a terrifying clash between what seems to be Earth and Hell in which Henry, in his church and for the moment refrocked, puts himself at eternal risk to protect the townspeople from a sort of supernatural Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
Well, it is entirely captivating, and to expect a Charles Williams-style allegory is probably pointless. With it all I can pick only two superficial nits.
One is that, unlike their Roman Catholic and Methodist clerical brethren, Episcopal priests normally are not assigned to churches by their bishops, as Henry is here, but are chosen ("called") by a committee of the parish, typically after lengthy internecine wrangling.
The other is that it stretches credulity to maintain that no one outside Dry Falls would notice a three-month abnormality in the weather and reproductive cycle. But then, I suppose, we’re not dealing with logic but with the demonic. And demons, like extraterrestrial aliens, presumably prefer to conduct their depredations in secret. Where is Kevin McCarthy when we need him?
Of all the quarantine reading and listening I’ve done, no audiobook has inspired more people to ask me for more information than You Never Forget Your First, Alexis Coe’s myth-busting biography of George Washington. Coe contextualizes and humanizes Washington’s victories and losses on the battlefield, his many (many) illnesses, his politics and home life in a whole new way, and it’s made all the more accessible by Brittany Pressley’s wry, clear narration. Most importantly, you’ll explore the hypocrisy in Washington’s fight for liberation from British rule while keeping black people enslaved. For readers interested in thinking critically about American history, this is a good start.
I didn’t think it was possible to be more chained to my phone—and thus, more uncomfortable with my relationship to social media—but here we are in a pandemic, and nearly all our social interactions are now on screens. Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing has helped temper those feelings by providing guidance to resist the guilt of feeling unproductive and the demands on our attention. I find Rebecca Gibel’s narration to be hypnotic in its dryness, allowing me to reprioritize and realign where I give my focus.
My thoughts have increasingly strayed to the week each year my family spends at a condo on the Florida gulf—specifically, to the books I read on last summer’s trip, one of which was Casey McQuiston’s Red, White & Royal Blue, which feels like an Aaron Sorkin production with the more melodramatic moments of “The Crown.” When I decided to reexperience it via the audiobook, I’m not sure whether I was motivated by a desire to return to the world McQuiston’s ebullient romance between the president’s son and an English prince, to return to the beach itself or to transport myself to a happy moment in a simpler time. Probably a bit of all three. Regardless, the absorbing and rapid-fire story, paired with Ramón de Ocampo’s warm, exuberant narration (and fantastic British accent, when performing Prince Henry’s lines) made for the perfect, swoonworthy escape.
Ninth House is an addicting mystery set at a magical secret society at Yale University, author Leigh Bardugo’s alma mater. Narrators Lauren Fortgang and Michael David Axtell alternate between Galaxy “Alex” Stern and Daniel “Darlington” Arlington; of the two, Fortgang is the standout. Her performance is as sharp as Alex herself, who’s been through a lot before arriving at Yale. Scenes where Alex lets her rage and trauma surface are riveting as Fortgang snarls and performs through clenched teeth. Fortgang’s visceral performance of Alex’s anger makes the rare moments of genuine affection that Alex permits herself—particularly toward Hellie, a close friend, and Pamela Dawes, the society’s in-house researcher—moving in their tenderness, as Fortgang softens her voice to convey Alex’s vulnerability. Anyone looking to be swept up in a story of dark magic in which nothing is as it seems should give Ninth House a try.
I read a hard copy of Kiese Laymon’s memoir Heavy when it came out in 2018 and loved it—in that had-to-lie-down-for-two-and-a-half-hours-afterward kind of way. (The book is aptly named.) When my professor assigned it for a graduate class I took this spring, I decided to give the award-winning audiobook a try for my second reading. Hearing Laymon’s words in his own voice was even more affecting than reading them on the page. In the audio version, you get the full playfulness of he and LaThon’s middle school riffing on words like “galore” (gal-low), “meager” (mee-guh) and “y’all don’t even know.” You also hear the full tenderness of Laymon’s conversations with his mother, in which they try to tell each other the truth about addiction, abuse, deception and love. When I finished listening to Heavy this time, I still had to lie down afterward to digest its contents—white supremacy, disordered eating and violence against Black Americans, among other things—but since a late afternoon stress-nap was already a staple in my quarantine routine, it turned out to be a perfect pandemic listen.
I was two chapters into my hardcover of Trick Mirror when the audiobook became available to check out from the library. (Apparently, I had placed it on hold during pre-COVID times and then, along with all the other trappings of normal life, forgot about it.) Jia Tolentino’s nuanced essays are the sort of reading you want to absorb every word of, so I wasn’t sure the audiobook would be the best fit. But out of curiosity (and a desire to make good on the library’s monthslong waitlist), I checked it out and grabbed my headphones. Next thing I knew, I was three hours in and plumbing the depths of my to-do list for more things to work on so I could keep listening. With an engaging balance between the personal and the reported, Tolentino’s exacting explorations of feminism, the internet and the self lend themselves nicely to audio, as it turns out. And as for my to-do list, her intellectual, no-frills narration provided the perfect soundtrack for taking a walk, doing the dishes, brushing the cats, making banana bread and mending that tear in my duvet cover.
