"It would bring bad luck, they said. But she split her pair of ruby earrings and gave one to each of her beautiful twin babies. Within hours she was burned to death in a fire. The twins lived. Katherine is raised by a poor, childless couple. Katherine was shy and withdrawn, except in her love for the Sisters of the Immaculate Conception. It’s there she finds respite from her parents arguing, their disdain, their often black heartedness of their adopted daughter. So in her heart, Katherine had found God. In her father’s heart, they found a butcher knife. Meanwhile, Andrea grew up with all that money could buy. She was pretty and popular and went to the best schools. Her parents loved her dearly, and gladly did anything to please her. But what made Andrea happy would make them dead. In the dark of sleep, Katherine and Andrea had terrible dreams of being the other. Until the hand of evil that guided their waking lives brought them face to face with each other... and the crossed fate of horror awaiting them both."
Blood Rubies is less a horror tale and more a psychological thriller, a melodrama that resembles the late 70s or early 80s TV miniseries that would’ve probably starred some daytime soap actress in a dual role, making her prime time debut. I also read somewhere that this book (and 1983’s Wicked Stepmother) by Axel Young –who were, of course, Michael McDowell and Dennis Schuetz- was parodying the trashy novels of Sidney Sheldon others of who wrote tales of this ilk during that period. McDowell considered him to be a commercial writer, focusing on making the impossible feel inevitable. He believed in creating accessible, fast-paced narratives designed to be bought, read, and enjoyed immediately rather than writing for the ages, often blending intense gore with mundane, with atmospheric Southern life. I think it’s unfair description (but artists never see their true geniuses), because yes, he was prolific, but everything he did was pretty original and often a bit ballsy.
So Blood Rubies is a fun book, dark and unpredictable. It does have what I found consistent in his works, a lot of pious, delusional, and short-tempered women and men, as well.
While the writers create what seemly rings true (I’m a lapsed Catholic, most of the rituals have been purged away) Katherine’s involvement with becoming a nun gets a bit much, lots of details about getting into a nunnery and it drags for a while. But what works is both authors get inside Katherine’s head and highlights her disconnect from her desire to be a nun and things she must do to get away from her parents at any cost.
In the second half we have the other twin, one Andrea LoPonti and her well-to-do family. They too are devoutly Catholic but there the similarity ends. As Andrea grows up and moves into her college years, we get a look at the dark underbelly of suburban life near the city of Boston. Here the authors give us a harsh look into the 1970s singles’ bar scene before the onslaught of AIDS. Andrea and her BFF Marsha take a deep dive into both casual sex and drugs with little or no remorse. It’s their goal to worldly, and that means doing dangerous things through the city of Boston, as well as Europe. But things go awry when Andrea becomes involved with the leather-clad bad-boy Jack, and all too soon, she becomes worldly in ways that sets up a tragic and (rather) abrupt ending for her and Katherine.
In a lot of ways, this book reminds me of my coming of age in the late 70s and early 80s, when my fascination with books took hold. Where I started with novels like Flowers in the Attic and segued into other horror novels like the works of Stephen King and John Saul. I probably read them way to early, but those books, and this book, set me on the course I am today. There is so much out there, you know?
And it kills me knowing I’ll never get to everything.
No comments:
Post a Comment