Well, I can't let Halloween slip by without recommending a few stories that might make you glance behind the shower curtain or check the recesses of your closet before going to bed.

Ever since I was a child, I've always liked being scared -- so long as it was a story that was doing the scaring. There's a measured amount of safety in experiencing terror while snuggled in flannel sheets. Whether you're peering from a secluded wood while Rumplestiltskin dances diabolically around a fire or sitting in an armchair sipping cognac and listening to the bizarre tale of a bodysnatcher -- you're facing the worst sort of fears with your imagination. And when that happens, the horrors of reality lose a lot of their potency.

After all, isn't that what Halloween is for: confronting and driving out the demons?

The characters in Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House (Penguin; $14) could do with a little exorcism. In a style faintly reminiscent of Henry James (but more modern), Jackson knows just how to wind up the thread of psychological tension. As if he were conducting a Victorian spiritualist experiment, Dr. John Montague, a professor of philosophy, rents the legendarily haunted Hill House and invites four, shall we say, "out of the ordinary" guests. Are the horrors that take place within the walls of this desolate abode the work of a poltergeist or simply the product of the guests' troubled psyches?

If you think S.T. Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (collected in Wordsworth and Coleridge: Lyrical Ballads, Routledge; $18.95) is scary only because it's written in eighteenth-century verse, think again. This is a classic chiller that will hold you in its thrall from the first stanza. A wedding guest, late to the party, is detained by a grizzled mariner who insists on telling his twisted tale. The wedding guest would rather be on his way, but for that mariner's "glittering eye."

Turns out the mariner had the bad sense to shoot a bird that brought favorable winds. The ship is stranded, the crew drops one by one of thirst and the mariner finds himself "Alone, alone, all all alone / Alone on the wide wide Sea." He's visited by more than one kind of spectre, alone with the metaphorical albatross hanging about his neck. (Yep. This is where the saying comes from.) All the while the mariner is telling his tale, the wedding guest pleads for his release. The narrative is carried along swiftly in a traditional ballad's meter and rhyme. A haunting moral tale for any age.

Perhaps the most frightening tale in this short run-down is a short story by the sometimes long-winded novelist, Charles Dickens. "No. 1 Branch Line: The Signalman" (collected, among other places, in a Dover Thrift edition: Classic Ghost Stories by Wilkie Collins, M.R. James, Charles Dickens and Others; $2). A railway worker receives three ghostly warnings on the secluded stretch of track he works alone -- on the nightshift. What's so creepy about this tale is the matter-of-fact way in which the narrator describes the ill-fate that befalls the lonely signalman. Even when you think you know what's coming, the end will leave you startled. And scared.

What am I reading as a treat this Halloween? Agatha Christie's Halloween Party. It's circa 1970, probably not her best period, and this one is out of print. But when a body turns up in the library where partyguests were bobbing for apples, Hercule Poirot find an interesting puzzle that will flex those famous little grey cells.

Happy Halloween,
Elizabeth Frengel

In a coup of numerological (and bibliographic) symmetry, Lemony Snicket delivered the final installment in the A Series of Unfortunate Events series this past Friday, October 13th -- 13 books, each with 13 chapters. Unlucky, indeed, for Snicket fans far and wide.

I celebrated the unhappy occasion by embarking on The Bad Beginning, the first book of the series. I admit I was reluctant to see what all the Snickety fuss was about. But Alexandra, head of book ordering here at the office, sung the series' praises so meliflously, that I couldn't resist. And she was right on key.



The Bad Beginning begins the saga of the Baudelaire children, an unfortunate trio whose parents meet their untimely death in the first pages. The orphans are shepherded to a specious "relative," Count Olaf, whose Machiavellian schemes to rob the children of the their fortune drive much of the action.

But Snicket's style is what makes this series remarkable -- and what gives it its ageless appeal. The Bad Beginning is firmly rooted in classic fairy tale. Time and place are obscured. For example, the Baudelaires are ferried to Count Olaf's over streets paved in cobblestones. They note the clatter of coach wheels and horse-hooves alongside the buzzing thunder of a motorbike. Creepily detailed illustrations by Brett Helquist (who is this mysterious man??) add to the fanciful gloom.

Snicket explores the conflict between good and evil. And he philosophizes on the happenstance of ill-fate. Still, it's Snicket's dark irony that won me over.

As I said, A Series of Unfortunate Events holds appeal in equal measure for children and adults. Snicket takes the time to explain tricky words or sophisticated phrases, but he does so in a way that will give pause (and perhaps smiles) to even the most seasoned of readers, encouraging them to reflect on the layered complexity and nuance of our language.

As in:

This is one reason many lawyers make heaps of money. The money is an incentive -- the word "incentive" here means "an offered reward to persuade you to do something you don't want to do" -- to read long, dull, and difficult books.

Cultural and literary references also abound. The Baudelaires are warned, for example, never to let the exotic Virginian Wolfsnake anywhere near a typewriter. And I love the recurring theme of refuge the orphans -- especially Klaus -- find in libraries.

I also like how Snicket handles danger. If a character, such as the unfortunately named Dr. Montgomery Montgomery, finds his life in peril, rest assured that Snicket has given us plenty of warning. Yes, these are unhappy stories. Snicket warns us often enough that if we want a tale with a happy ending, we should read elsewhere. But what would be the fun in that?

Unfortunately, the series is addictive. Fortunately, we have the entire series, The Complete Wreck (Books 1-13) for $150. Or you can purchase these charmingly decorated hardcovers individually for just under $13 (HarperCollins) each.

If you like what you're reading, you may also try The Beatrice Letters , with poster,($19.99; HarperCollins) and Snicket's story in his own words -- Lemony Snicket: The Unauthorized Autobiography, by Lemony Snicket ($6.99; HarperTrophy).

Alexandra read The End and said that while the parting was sad, a few unanswered questions remain -- perhaps leaving open a door for more? And Snicket, never one to walk by a puzzle, leaves one last (hidden) clue.

I'm afraid that in this case, I must bid you unhappy reading. Until next time,

Elizabeth Frengel

'Attend to me, girls. One's prime is the moment one was born for. Now that my prime has begun -- Sandy, your attention is wandering. What have I been talking about?'

'Your prime, Miss Brodie.'

If that passage seems completely unfamiliar, then I envy you. The work of Muriel Spark will be a wonderful discovery.

Spark, born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1918, is the author of some 40 works, including biography, plays, children's books and poetry. She published her most famous novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (from which the above excerpt is drawn), in 1961.

It's the story of five girls: Monica Douglas, famous for mathematics and her fury; Rose Stanley, famous for her sex appeal; Eunice Gardiner, famous for her gymnastic feats; Sandy Stranger, notorious for her piggy eyes but famous for her English vowels; and Mary Macgregor, "whose fame rested on her being a silent lump." And, of course, their unconventional teacher, Miss Jean Brodie, a woman just entering her prime.

Miss Brodie (whom Spark based on Christina Kay, her teacher at Gillespie's High School for Girls in Edinburgh) is busy molding the Brodie set into the creme de la creme of the Marcia Blaine School for Girls, all the time raising the hackles of her more staid colleagues who frequently doubt the benefits of a Brodie-style liberal education.

Eventually, one of the Brodie set betrays their revered doyenne, a point on which the plot pivots. But don't expect a linear narrative.

Spark ranks among the best stylists of modern literature. She is a master at what literary critics like to call "time montage." In other words, time in the narrative does not move chronologically: e.g., first A happens, then B, then C. Rather time is splintered in this narrative, jumping from present to past to future, all in the space of a few pages.

But don't worry, the story is easy to follow, thanks to Spark's clever plotting and incisive characterization. But you learn that Brodie is betrayed almost as soon as you figure out all the members of her set. Still the time montage works for Spark's novels, which deal so much in memory. Disorder on the page functions as an artistic rendering of the disjointed ways in which we look back on something significant: a betrayal or a bombing, for example.

In addition to her modernist mastery, Spark is also famous for biting wit and the distinctive tell-it-like-it-is quality of her prose. Critic Frank Kermode writes that "for Dame Muriel one of the prime duties of the artist is to clear away as much as possible of the monstrous accumulation of stupidity in our world. Hence a certain ruthlessness of tone, a steady refusal to countenance failures of common sense."

Like leanings are apparent in the character of Jean Brodie. Watch her in action in the classroom:

'Hold up your books,' said Miss Brodie quite often that autumn, 'prop them up in your hands, in case of intruders. If there are any intruders, we are doing our history lesson ... our poetry ... English grammar.'

The small girls held up their books with their eyes not on them, but on Miss Brodie.

'Meantime I will tell you about my last summer holiday in Egypt ... I will tell you about care of the skin, and of the hands ... about the Frenchman I met in the train to Biarritz ... and I must tell you about the Italian paintings I saw. Who is the greatest Italian painter?'

'Leonardo da Vinci, Miss Brodie.'

'That is incorrect. The answer is Giotto, he is my favorite.'

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (HarperPerrennial, $12.95) and The Girls of Slender Means (Norton, $10.95) are my two favorites, but Spark has served up a smorgassboard of excellent works on which to feast. She wrote a biography of Mary Shelley, and some critics consider Memento Mori (Norton, $12.95) -- a story about an elderly set who each receive a mysterious telephone call stating "Remember, you must die." -- to be among her best work.

Spark, who was made Dame of the British Empire in 1993, continued writing to the very end. She published The Finishing School (Anchor, $12.95) in 2003, to much acclaim in the U.K., but with a little less enthusiasm in the States. (I liked it.) Spark died just this past April at her home in Tuscany.

Happy reading,
Elizabeth Frengel

Strange how coincidence works.

Normally, I don't find myself thinking much about theoretical mathematics. But as it happens, I picked up The Oxford Murders, by Argentine writer Guillermo Martinez, just after reading a New Yorker profile of Grigory Perelman, a Russian mathematician who is supposedly the first to have proved the Poincare conjecture -- a problem that's puzzled mathematicians and cosmologists for more than a century ("Manifold Destiny," Aug. 28, 2006). Perelman's story had all the narrative suspense of a good murder mystery. And it put me in just the right frame of mind for Martinez's little mathematical murder game.


In The Oxford Murders an unnamed narrator from Buenos Aires wins a scholarship to study algebraic topology at Oxford. There he crosses paths with the renowned logician Arthur Seldom -- at the scene of a murder. Someone sent Seldom a cryptic note that foretells the slaying. At the bottom of the note rests a small, perfect circle.

The symbol is meant to be the first of a series. But what kind of series? Numeric? Alphabetic? And how does the symbol connect to the killing? That's the puzzle that Seldom and the narrator must figure out before word of the murder spreads through Oxford and upsets the scholarly serenity of the town.

In the mean time, Seldom lays out interesting logical puzzles for his foil and readers alike. If, for example, you were given the following three symbols:

what symbol would logically follow? Are three symbols enough to give an accurate prediction of the next item in the series?

A stimulating challenge, to be sure. Nevertheless, I have two complaints about The Oxford Murders. To begin with, Martinez describes the women in this story first and foremost in terms of the their sexual attractiveness -- the length of their legs, the come-hither look in their eyes. While the female characters include a professional cellist, an accomplished tennis player, even a woman mathematician who serves as the narrator's adviser, it's difficult to get past the narrator's objectifying point of view. And the woman mathematician holds no more than a walk-on role.

Second, much of the plotting of The Oxford Murders rests on coincidence -- coincidence that skirts contrivance. Everyone with a speaking part in this story is up on his Pythagorean history.

Even so, it's a compact novel (a trim 197 pages) and the pacing is right. And just when you think you know whodunit ... think again. Martinez manages many keen observations on human nature and illuminates the allure of closed societies, like the mathematical world at Oxford. I also like the literal play on words: a serial killer who teases justice by leaving behind parts of a series.

A softcover version of The Oxford Murders (Penguin, $13), skillfully translated by Sonia Soto, is available at an Olsson's near you.

Until next time,
Elizabeth Frengel