Book Review: Orpheus and the Pearl by Kim Paffenroth
Review by Dr. Royce Clemens
I’m not gonna bore you fine folks with my usual preamble, or an anecdote before I get to the review proper. You wanna know why I’m not recommending this book? Even apart from critically subjective reasons, here are a couple of cold, hard facts…
1. Orpheus and the Pearl costs $9.99.
2. Orpheus and the Pearl is only seventy pages long.
I wouldn’t pay ten bucks for just one short story, and neither should you. Not when you can get Everything’s Eventual, which contains a good three-hundred more pages for two less dollars. There are better ways to spend your money. Like a half a gallon of gas in your tank, if you’re unlucky enough to live in California.
However, if you are willing to spend ten dollars on seventy pages, spend it on a different seventy pages because Orpheus and the Pearl, quite frankly, isn’t very good. It’s not scary, which could be forgiven, were it interesting or even the slightest bit compelling. How a seventy page story could do so much pointless dawdling is beyond me.
In the nineteen-twenties, on the outskirts of Boston, Dr. Catherine MacGuire is summoned to a country house to assist another doctor, one Percy Wallston. The nature of her tenure at the house is unknown, only that she must tell no one else about it.
On her first night in the house, she is plagued by screaming and growling elsewhere in the house. She asks Dr. Wallston about it, and he tells her, in the most exposition-laden and awkward way imaginable, that he has reanimated his late wife into a colorless, near cannibalistic and alcoholic harpy.
Believe it or not, none of this is as fun as I’m making it sound. This is one of those precious little stories that make clumsy stabs at “respectability” by having no gore and not being actually creepy or frightening in any conceivable way. I will say that Kim Paffenroth’s (read review of his zombie novel, Dying to Live) writing style is elegant, after a fashion, but his sense of plotting and characterization is so ungainly, it’s not even funny.
The character of Dr. Wallston is less a character and more a handy-dandy plot-dump machine. Rather showing how he interacts with his late wife, or the lengths he went to in the hopes of reviving her to maybe, I dunno, get this to a length that conceivably warrants a ten dollar price tag, Paffenroth just has him blurt all this out in one monologue. He also works great as a plot sealant to handle any nagging questions, like where the “revitalization serum” goes once it’s dumped out of the vat his wife rests in.
And the character of Catherine is equally laughable, as Paffenroth sets her up as a wallflower with a raging sense of propriety that serves no other purpose than to waste time. A good two pages are wasted on Catherine not wanting to be seen in just her blouse in front of the doctor, which wouldn’t be all that bad, were the entire book not SEVENTY PAGES LONG!
After that, I didn’t know whether to be more aghast that any attempt at atmosphere is done away with in favor of exploring the walking corpse’s mommy issues (no, really), or that Orpheus and the Pearl is so obviously and single-mindedly in thrall to its influences that it actually LISTS THEM BY NAME IN THE CONTEXT OF THE STORY.
Look, I’m all for Gothic horror and not having viscera flung about the place, but a little bit of eloquence and only half an idea doth not a good book make. I came away from this book insulted, and the only thing more depressing than the fact that they’re asking you to waste ten bucks on it is the fact that I’m still wasting keystrokes.
NEXT!
Available from Amazon
Please check out Orpheus and the Pearl on Magnus Press’ website!
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