Story for the Week
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about The Big Bang Theory, which Corinne and I had just finished binge watching. The show really went out on top. It was still popular. Ratings were good. The story line finished with Sheldon and Amy winning the Nobel Prize in Physics, surrounded by their friends. The characters had grown over the course of the series, but the writing never really lost momentum.
This is Us is another series like that. Granted, the creators designed it to be six seasons. Based on the flashbacks and flash forwards, they almost had to plan out the entire series in advance, especially since they had kids in the cast who grow a lot in six years. Since they needed the kids throughout the six seasons, they had to film many of the final season scenes in advance. Fans of the show (myself included) were sad to see it end, but the creators completed every character’s story. Some of them made me smile. Many brought tears. But the final season was a perfect cap to the series.
Some series, though…ugh.
The first example of a series gone wrong (in my opinion)…Lost. The series premiered in 2004 with a plane crash on a deserted tropical island. Survivors were forced to pool their talents and their resources to create a community until their rescue. It started as a plane crash, but it morphed into all kinds of mysticism, fantasy, spirituality, conspiracy theory chaos. I’m still not even sure how to explain the ending.
My husband gave up watching as soon as an evil, black “smoke” started infesting the island. One of my friends felt like I did. We had invested so much time into figuring out the series, we had to see it through to the end. I kinda wish I hadn’t because I was deeply disappointed, and I still really can’t make sense of it. They survived, they were rescued, they went back when they died. Or they died and they were in purgatory the whole time, and each one arrived in Heaven when they were ready. I…have…no…idea. And I felt like I had wasted six years on this series.
The other example I have is Joan of Arcadia. The two-season series centered on Joan Girardi, played by then 20-year-old Amber Tamblyn, in small-town Arcadia, Maryland. Joan made a deal with God that she would do anything He wanted if her brother survived a car crash. He was left a paraplegic, and God came to collect.
Appearing to Joan as different everyday people that only she can see and hear, He tasks her with different challenges. In one episode, He asks her to build a boat. In another, she joins the debate team. In yet another, she registers for AP Chemistry because God tells her to stop being such an underachiever. With every task, she learns a lesson, which is kind of the point.
Dennis and I looked forward to watching every week. I loved the idea that God would appear to someone in their everyday as just another human being. Joan thought the requests were ridiculous a lot of the time, but she always got something out of it. At the end of the first season, however, they wrote in a bit of a cliffhanger. Joan was suffering from Lyme disease, which would explain her unusual behavior and her mood swings. She begins to think that she hadn’t been seeing God all this time, that He was just a hallucination.
That ruined it for me. Season 2 ratings were bad, and the show was cancelled, but I don’t think I watched more than a few episodes of the second season. I was no longer invested because the basic premise of the show was suddenly in question.
I felt the same way about the book below. 🫤
Book Review
⭐⭐⭐
3 Stars for The Stranger Upstairs by Lisa M. Matlin
288 pages
Publisher: Bantam
Publication Date: September 12, 2023
I received an advance copy of this title from NetGalley and Random House Publishing Group – Ballantine, Bantam in exchange for an honest review.
Publisher’s Description
A therapist and self-help writer with all the answers, Sarah Slade has just bought a gorgeous Victorian in the community of her dreams. Turns out, you can get a killer deal on a house where someone was murdered. Plus, renovating Black Wood House makes for great blog content and a decent distraction from her failing marriage. Good thing nobody knows that her past is just as filthy as the bloodstain on her bedroom floor.
But the renovations are fast becoming a nightmare. Sarah imagined custom avocado wallpaper, massive profits, and an appreciative husband who wants to share her bed again. Instead, the neighbors hate her guts and her husband still sleeps on the couch. And though the builders attempt to cover up Black Wood’s horrifying past, a series of bizarre accidents, threatening notes, and unexplained footsteps in the attic only confirms for Sarah what the rest of the town already knew: Something is very wrong in that house.
With every passing moment, Sarah’s life spirals further out of control—and with it, her sense of reality. But as she peels back the curling wallpaper and discovers the house’s secrets, she realizes that the deadly legacy of Black Wood House has only just begun.
************
Main Characters:
- Sarah Slade – bestselling self-help author, therapist, recently purchased Black Wood House in the upscale Australian town of Beacon, where a wife was killed by her husband in a murder/suicide 40 years prior; plans to renovate it with her husband and sell it for a profit
- Joe Cosgrove – Sarah’s husband of three years, works as a bartender, tries to stay out of the spotlight
Sarah and Joe bought Black Wood (the murder house) with the intent of renovating and selling it for a profit. Seriously…who wants to live in a house where someone was murdered, and the blood stain is still on the floor? Also, throughout the book, the author offers tidbits of information indicating that Sarah and Joe are not really who they say they are. We hear about Sarah’s sister Lizzy, and there are references to “something” happening to her prior to the present day. These are the things that hooked me and made the book a decent read.
Sarah doesn’t garner any empathy from me though, even though she is a classic unreliable narrator (see spoilers below). Sarah Slade is a judgmental, arrogant, and narcissistic phony. She is completely unlikeable, and I had a really hard time feeling bad for her situation with the house that will be a money pit, her failing marriage, and her questionable career.
***SPOILERS*** SPOILERS***SPOILERS***
At the end of Part One, we find out that Sarah isn’t Sarah. Sarah is Lizzy, who stole her sister Sarah’s boyfriend, AND stole Sarah’s identity after Sarah “committed suicide” (in quotes because the suicide is also questionable). Five years prior to the beginning of the book, Sarah and Joe left their hometown, ostracized over what they did to the real Sarah. Oh…and Joe’s name isn’t Joe either.
As Sarah lives in the murder house of Black Wood, her grasp on reality becomes increasingly tenuous. She (and her cat) hear noises in the attic, and she can’t tell if they’re real or her imagination. Someone keeps leaving notes for her inside the house. She misses day after day of work without even realizing it. Interspersed between the chapters, we are provided with future-dated news articles about unidentified bodies being found on the property. Did someone else kill Sarah and Joe, or are Sarah and Joe murderers?
At some point, Sarah discovers that someone named Amanda, who she resembles, lived in the house for a few weeks before she and Joe purchased it but after the murder 40 years before. Her mental state, however, makes her wonder if it’s true or not. She really completely loses her grip on reality.
I made a lot of notes on what could have been happening. Is Sarah really Jane, the child who escaped the house 40 years before? (This would have made a great plot element.) Does Sarah have a secret life and she posed as Amanda several weeks before she and Joe moved into the house? Is Emily, one of the other therapists in her office, really Jane? There are so many possibilities, which is why I gave this 3 stars instead of less.
BUT…what ruined it for me was the reason Sarah was losing her mind. It was not, we assume, a haunted house with spirits that didn’t want to be disturbed. No one was hiding in the attic or sneaking into the house to leave notes for Sarah or poisoning her cat. There were telltale signs in the attic of a carbon monoxide leak, which was slowly poisoning Sarah the whole time.
So she was an innocent victim? Not really because she did “steal” her sister’s identity. She did decide to leave Black Wood and take on Emily’s identity. She did let her estranged husband be accused of her disappearance and murder. Sarah IS a bad person. I would have liked it better if Joe had been the one to go crazy and actually killed Sarah because of the house, repeating the pattern from 40 years before.
AND THEN…in the Epilogue, a new family moves into the run-down house, and there are no signs of a carbon monoxide leak. “You’d swear the house was doing it on purpose. You’d swear the house wanted to be left alone. Undisturbed.” I didn’t like this as a “twist,” where we think it’s the house, then we’re told it’s a carbon monoxide leak, and then oops…it’s the house. Gotcha!
I felt like this could have been really great if the author had settled on one idea and just followed through with it.
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