“Ominous, fantastic, and wonderfully malevolent…. I felt the spirits of Shirley Jackson, Edgar Allan Poe, and Albert Camus’ Meursault, whispering to join the fun.”— Alice Sebold, best-selling and award-winning author of The Lovely BonesA car lies at the bottom of an icy ravine. Slumped over the steering wheel, dead, is the most critically acclaimed horror writer of his time. Was it an accident? … Was it an accident? His son Milo doesn’t care. For the first time in his life, he’s free. No more nightmarish readings, spooky animal rites, or moonlit visions of his father in the woods with a notebook and vampire make-up.
Or so he thinks.
Milo settles into a quiet routine—constructing model Greek warships and at last building a relationship with his sister Klara, who’s home after a failed marriage and brief career as an English teacher. Then Klara hires a gardener to breathe new life into their overgrown estate. There’s something odd about him—something eerily reminiscent of their father’s most violent villain. Or is Milo imagining things? He’s not sure. That all changes the day the gardener discovers something startling in the woods. Suddenly Milo is fighting for his life, forced to confront the power of fictional identity as he uncovers the shocking truth about his own dysfunctional family—and the supposed accident that claimed his parents’ lives.
“[A] taut mystery about how the lives we lead are forever changed by the stories we tell and the secrets we keep.” — Ramona Ausubel, award-winning author of Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty and No One is Here Except All of Us
“[T]his rich neo-gothic novel…captures us with an eerie power exactly like Henry James’ governess and the stressed-out, dreamy extremists of Poe. Milo, the son, the brother, the watcher, the spy, had my sleeve fiercely in his fist the whole way.” — Ron Carlson, award-winning author of Five Skies
“[B]rilliantly probes the authorship of horror in its many arenas: history, war, parenting, nature, love, the imagination.” — Michelle Latiolais, award-winning author of Widow and She.
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This was a wild, weird read – in a good way but also in a confusing one… I met the author via GoodReads after a comment revealed that we had a mutual admiration for the indomitable Shirley Jackson. That led to him mentioning his own book – which is definitely in the SJ vein. Like Ms. Jackson, Barsa blurs the lines between reality, perception, and imagination – and he does this with his own flair, which I enjoyed. There were times I felt a bit lost though – the story travels through perspectives and time, and I occasionally felt like I needed a signpost to help me stay on top of things…
The pacing was also a little uneven for my taste – I would be utterly enthralled for dozens of pages, then feel like I was plodding through a handful until it picked back up. This was unsettling and left me feeling a bit off-kilter – although in hindsight, that may have been the point. This is a tale that is decidedly unsettling and off-kilter, after all, and the format may have been designed to reinforce those feelings. If so, it did a damn good job – I was a little creeped out (and then eventually a LOT creeped out) through much of the book.
I really enjoy psychological thrillers where you are unsure about everyone’s motivations and where the truth is to be found amidst the lies. Barsa delivered that in spades, and it more than made up for the unevenness of pacing even if it was not intentional. Still, I felt a little oddly uncertain at the end, like things didn’t tidy up quite as I’d have liked. I can’t pinpoint exactly where or why that feeling arose, but it did. The pat snarky attitude of the protagonist felt a little too pat and snarky in the final paragraphs. He went from being more than a bit to the left of center throughout the book, to acting/thinking like Kaiser Soze – it felt like a rather seismic change, and left me wondering if the entire story was a construction or if he simply underwent that magnitude of change because of everything that happened. I don’t mind an uncertain ending – particularly when, as here, it confirms that unsettling off-kilter feeling that existed throughout – it just wasn’t what I was expecting. And that, right there, sums up this book for me: not what I was expecting, in an original, disturbing fashion. Brava Mr. Barsa – Ms. Jackson would be proud!
My review copy was provided by Edelweiss.
But wait, you say, you’re the author…. Let me explain.
Sometimes love happens all at once. There it is: Boom! LOVE! Other times it’s a more gradual recognition, a process of allowing yourself to fall into the feeling—it’s a form of humility really, saying to yourself: right here, in this messy reality, is where I’ll choose to reside. This is how I’d describe my complicated feelings about my own writing.
For years I would have given everything I wrote one or zero stars, and deservedly so, because for years everything I wrote was terrible. I took uncommon glee in reading through a 300 page manuscript that had taken me more than a year to write, and deciding that the only thing worth saving was the opening paragraph (yes, this happened). It’s taken a painfully long time to learn to recognize that, well, not EVERYTHING was terrible, that here and there a paragraph or a phrase or more might be salvageable if I only came back to it later with a bit more patience, and that sometimes I ought NOT to trust my most savage and critical instincts. In other words, I had to learn to love my creations, to give them a chance, because sometimes good writing doesn’t happen all at once, sometimes you’ve got to keep coming back again and again and not give up and just hope you reach a point where something breaks through your own skepticism and allows you recognize that yes, this is getting somewhere, and yes, it’s not half bad. So I’m giving this 5 stars because I can finally say I’m proud of something I wrote. It’s not perfect, sure, and it might fail for some, but I love it all the same, because I’ve watched it grow up from nothing, from an inchoate burbling notion that I had no idea how to handle into a piece of fiction that now exists on its own in the big bad world, without my worrying and nagging guidance.
You have to engage your brain to read this book: Barsa’s vocabulary, the whorly plot of his unreliable narrator named Milo, the insanity of several characters, and Barsa’s turn of phrase are at times hard to follow, but it’s so, so worth it.
This is psychological horror at its best. The Garden of Blue Roses is a Gothic tale with a creepy protagonist, a dysfunctional family, riches and greed, a decaying, old mansion, and the intrusive memories of Father and Father’s fictional characters. (Dad was a novelist.)
The prose is poetic, a treat to read. Also, it’s fun to follow a plot told by an unreliable narrator. This is LITERARY horror, nice and meaty. The pace is slower which fills you with breath-holding dread as you read the book.
A decadent, 5-star read!
I needed something completely different to read and so picked up my Goodreads friend’s novel The Garden of Blue Roses. I found it to be a stylish, creepy story with an unreliable narrator who may be insane. Thankfully, the atmosphere of horror and mayhem is mostly in the narrator’s imagination, but for a final bloody deed. The story moves at a good clip, nicely suspenseful.
The novel opens just after the narrator Milo and his sister lose their parents in a freak car accident. Their father was a well-known horror writer. Both children are damaged by their childhood with a distant mother and father who used them in various nefarious ways.
Klara decides to create a garden. Milo does not support her idea, and worse, he distrusts the gardener she has hired who seems to use his charms to manipulate women clients. Milo is convinced that Henri is mimicking one of his father’s murderous creations.
With many twists and turns, the plot resolves without just deserts, the wily villain mastering all.
Michael Barsa grew up in a German-speaking household in New Jersey and spoke no English until he went to school. He’s worked as an award-winning grant writer, an English teacher, and an environmental lawyer. He now teaches environmental and natural resources law. His scholarly articles have appeared in several major law reviews, and his writing on environmental policy has appeared in The Chicago Tribune and The Chicago Sun-Times. His short fiction has appeared in Sequoia. The Garden of Blue Roses is his first novel.
My Rating:
3.5
Favorite Quotes:
Mother drove us to the wedding in the Volvo… She dabbed her eyes and distractedly jerked between lanes at fantastic speed. She must have imagined she was on the Autobahn. Even the notorious Boston drivers seemed terrified. She squealed into the parking garage and nearly ran over a man in a wheelchair. “He’s got to learn to share the road,” she muttered as he flapped his arms like a bird.
She’d occasionally dressed this way after her divorce. She called it “retro” but really it was like Emily Dickinson in her Sunday best. It was as if she rejected not just her ex-husband, but the entire era in which he lived.
I knew right away what it was. Why are unmarked cars so obvious? The police ought to use beaten -up little Fiats.
My Review:
This was undoubtedly one of the most frustrating, grueling, and confusing books I have ever read, while at the same time, I was unable or unwilling to walk away in defeat. This book held some type of evil voodoo that kept me in place, although it also made me itch. Yet I could not and would not let it get the best of me! In trying to make sense of the disjointed ramblings I read slowly but will confess to becoming utterly lost several times within the incoherent and disturbing narrative. And it was quite distressing at times as the highly intelligent main character possessed a wild and vivid imagination and was prone to hallucination, delusions, paranoia, and lost time. Some of the issues I struggled with the most were: figuring out which events were real and which were merely delusional; and which one of this bizarre clan was the most impaired. No spoilers – but it turns out, they all were more than a bit off the charts with a vile and severely warped family dynamic. The plot was elaborate and the writing was gripping, intriguing, maddening, and frequently hard to follow. While on one hand, I’d like to give him a good pinch or ten, I also have to give this confounding and fiendishly twisted wordsmith his props as I couldn’t leave it alone, his clever tale continued to beckon until I saw those two most highly desired words of the day – The End.