New Book Alert: Nightmares in Aston: Wicker Village by Michael J. Moore; Kids Mystery Adventure Takes A Dark and Disturbing Turn

 

New Book Alert: Nightmares in Aston: Wicker Village by Michael J. Moore; Kids Mystery Adventure Takes A Dark and Disturbing Turn

By Julie Sara Porter

Bookworm Reviews

Spoilers: Michael J. Moore's novel Nightmare at Aston: Wicker Village starts off as a kid's mystery adventure not unlike a Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mystery or the '80's films, The Goonies or The Monster Squad where kids come face to face with something weird or spooky and they encounter creepy adults who are behind the weirdness or are monsters themselves. However what sets Wicker Village apart from its predecessors is that at about the halfway point things take a dark and disturbing twist that opens up some very dark, very adult, and very existential conflicts, concepts not experienced by similar books and movies within this subgenre.

The Narrator, Jaunito, is a young boy who lives in the Wicker Village Trailer Park with his parents and baby sister. They had moved to Aston from their home in Seattle with Juanito still struggling to adjust to the move. He also feels like an outsider since they appear to be the only Mexican family in the small farming community. One night he comes across a frightening sight in which he dubs the Boogeyman (though for all he knows it might be a Boogeywoman). It is a swarm of bees that form the shape of a large man. (Insert obvious Nicolas Cage Wicker Man reference here.)

 Shortly afterwards, he is attacked by an elderly possibly drunk and certainly temperamental man. 

Of course when Juanito tells his parents, right on cue, they don't believe him.

Things take a turn for the seriously creepy when after everything is settled down and Juanito is convinced the strange apparition wasn't real, he hears the same buzzing in his own bedroom, meaning the Boogeyman got inside and could be standing over his bed. He also has dreams about a girl named Sarah who is running away and is terrified.

Well these experiences are enough to give a person nightmares but the next part is even weirder. Juanito worries that he might be schizophrenic and hallucinating people made out of bees and girls in trouble. So he does what any modern kid does to research information: In a very creepy moment in a book that is filled with them, he watches a video of a doctor with surrounded by visuals including a snake which forms from his mouth. The doctor addresses Juanito by name and welcomes him to Wicker Village. A YouTube video is made with complete knowledge of Juanito and where he lives and is rigged just in time to appear based on his search terms. 

Even stranger, later when Juanito searches for the video, it's gone even from his previous searches and history.

Juanito makes new friends, Pinky, Lauren, and Bobby. They hang out at their fort and share spooky stories when they are interrupted by a strange man who is looking for a young girl. What is particularly compelling is that he resembles the man from the schizophrenia video that Juanito just watched and is now gone.

The book does some interesting things with its storyline. At first it seems relatively harmless, like a Scooby Doo episode in which the sharp savvy kids investigate strange hauntings and the ghost is revealed to be Old Man Marley dressed in a rubber suit trying to scare people away from his criminal dealings. It's almost paint by numbers, with stereotypes that can be found in any of these type of adventures: the leader, the best friend who sometimes acts as comic relief, the lone girl who is sometimes as tough and tomboyish as the boys, and the big brother figure. Of course they are the frequent targets of local bullies. It's almost predictable but there is something in the air that makes one think that the predictablility is almost too intentional.

I can't reveal too much about the developments for spoiler's sake so the only thing that I can do is give generalities. Let's just say that something occurs that makes the story darker and more complex than initially believed starting with the supernatural occurences.

There are real questions, even from Juanito himself most notably with him watching the YouTube video whether the odd happenings are real or not. The video that he searched for no longer exists and disappears from his search engines like it never was. The Bee Creature only appears at certain times and only in front of certain people. Sarah only appears in his dreams. So how can we be sure that what is going on isn't in someone's head maybe even Juanito's?

Here's an even creepier thought, if the monsters aren't real how do we know what if anything in Wicker Village is real? Could Juanito and his friends be acting like typical adventurer kids because they are made to act that way in  someone else's fantasy? 

There is another possibility that these things are psychic impressions that someone is sending telepathic signals in the hopes that someone anyone will hear them and rescue them. So if they dreamed of the monsters, did they dream up their rescuers too and let them act and behave in a way that they recognized from popular culture? Are these kids acting in someone else's mind but are unaware of it?

Wicker Village starts out as a fun romp. However, the more one reads, the more they become involved in Existential nightmare fuel.

Classics Corner: I Never Promised You A Rose Garden by Joanne Greenberg; Disturbing But Memorable Novel About A Woman Struggling With Schizophrenia

Classics Corner: I Never Promised You A Rose Garden by Joanne Greenberg; Disturbing But Memorable Novel About A Woman Struggling With Schizophrenia




By Julie Sara Porter

Bookworm Reviews




Spoilers: No this book has nothing to do with the classic country song of the same name by Lynn Anderson except sharing a title.

Instead I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, shows what happens when a highly creative person has schizophrenia. The hallucinatory world that they create in their mind could be a peaceful retreat one minute and a walking nightmare of frightening creatures and self-destruction, the next.

16-year-old Deborah Blau is being taken to a psychiatric hospital. She has hallucinations of a fantasy world of her creation called Yr and has lately been cutting herself in punishment because the Yrian creatures order her to. At first her parents are in denial. They are a typical suburban family. They worked hard to get to where they were and to avoid prejudice from their Antisemitic neighbors. This shouldn't happen to them. But it does and when Deborah keeps harming herself, they realize that they have no choice but to send her to the hospital.

The book is fascinating as we get into possibilities of the cause of Deborah's schizophrenia and why it began so early. After all schizophrenia doesn't usually begin until one reaches their late teens or early twenties. There are many probable causes such as an operation to remove a tumor from Deborah's brain, the family going through a period of poverty and having to live with a strict Old World grandfather, and a stint in summer camp where she was bullied by anti-Semitic campers and teachers. There wasn't one specific reason, but several.

Of course psychological studies marched past the book's 1962 published date and it's late 1940’s setting. We now realize that exterior situations may not be the only causes for psychiatric disorders. Sometimes it's neurological or genetic reasons that are the cause.

However, it is human nature to look for reasons and explanations behind the unexplained. Why would a bright talented young woman suddenly withdraw into herself and succumb to hallucinations? There must be a reason and Deborah, her family, and psychiatrist Dr. Fried are determined to find it.

I Never Promised You a Rose Garden also shows how the mind of a schizophrenic works by using their delusions to protect oneself and create barriers and prohibitions from the outside world. It also shows the difference between creative imagination and psychological hallucination and delusion. Nowhere is this most prominent than in Deborah's brain creating Yr.

When she's a child, Yr is a place that she retreats to in times of comfort. She believes that the characters protect and love her. She created little interesting details like a language called Yrian and the world's separate time frame. She has a strong creative artistic mind that could write fantasy stories if properly used. However, when Yr takes on a sinister tone is when the depths of Deborah's mental illness reveals her private Paradise is instead a private Hell.

As she grows older, Deborah's delusions become more terrifying as Yrian characters threaten her with punishments as she cuts and burns herself to acquiesce to their rages. This shows that while there is nothing wrong with creating an imaginary world, what made Deborah's world a product of insanity is that they wanted to hurt her or rather her own fears and insecurities manifested themselves as beings to hurt her.

Fried helps her recognize the monsters found in Yr were created by her own psyche. For example, she reveals that one of the Yrian characters is actually a stand-in for Deborah's strict grandfather.

Since Deborah's fantasy life is such a large part of her mental illness, Fried has to help Deborah see through her delusions by using reality. Once, Deborah reveals that the Yrians are punishing her because she almost threw her baby sister out of a window. Dr. Fried uses simple logic to help her realize that since Deborah was five years old at the time, she could not have lifted the baby and opened the large heavy window by herself.

Above all, Deborah receives the courage to silence her hallucinations and to accept a world beyond them. In the psychiatric hospital, Deborah makes friends with other patients who also have mental illnesses such as one who believes that she is married to the abdicated King Edward. Deborah and the other patients call themselves “nuts” and “sickos” and mock the orderlies and patients who aren't as mentally ill as they are or worse than them.

However, they want lives outside the hospital. The patients look on with envy at Doris, a patient who left the hospital and started a new life. When Doris returns after a relapse, they react with fear that if that happened to her, it could happen to anyone. However, Deborah wants to recover to succeed when Doris did not.

When Deborah strives to recover, she has to take the good and bad of the real world around her. When she argues about a friend's punishment, Fried quotes the book's title and says that she never promised life would be perfect or fair. There will always be hardships, violence, and hatred. People will mess up and sometimes the wrong people will get in trouble.

The difference is that Deborah can choose to live in that world instead of one ruled by her mental illness and the fear it represents.