Books: Wicked Stepmother by Axel Young (1983)

“Seducing a proper Bostonian was easy. Making him die of a heart attack a week after the wedding was hardly any trouble at all. Now she has money, social status, everything she has cunningly schemed to get since she was a poor little girl. Everything except the Brookline mansion and the multi-million dollar trust fund left to the three children. But what wicked stepmother couldn't get rid of three children? Jonathan, too smart for his own good and suspicious about his father's death, has to be the first to go. Then there's pretty, spoiled Verity, hooked on cocaine and perpetually drunk - who'd ask any questions if she died suddenly? And clever Cassandra, just out of college and beginning a career as a literary editor, will simply have to get over being dead.” 

Much of Wicked Stepmother plays out like parody of early trashy Jackie Collins tales of the uber rich and their personal problems about how they can stay rich and what they’re willing to do make sure the money never dries up. Written by Michael McDowell in collaboration with Dennis Schuetz, it’s lacks the depth and breadth of Blood Rubies, but I think that’s the point. It’s supposed to by campy fun and neither writer disappoints. It’s a fast paced thriller, populated with characters that you either love, or love to hate. It has sex, drugs and rock and roll. It has money, power and real estate. It’s like Dynasty only classier. 

It does come up short of being perfect, and everyone seems a bit blissfully ignorant about what is going on here, and then there’s a 20 bedroom house of unbelievable coincidence that begins to pile, which no one seems to gleam onto (the deaths don’t seem to pique the interests of the police), but the wry humor and social satire is makes up for some of it. But the naivety of the siblings is pretty staggering.

 

Books: The Bee Sting by Paul Murray (2023)

“The Barnes family are in trouble. Until recently, they ran the biggest business in town, now they’re teetering on the brink of bankruptcy – and that’s just the start of their problems. Dickie and Imelda’s marriage is hanging by a thread; straight-A student Cass is careening off the rails; PJ is hopelessly in debt to the school bully. Meanwhile the ghosts of old mistakes are rising out of the past to meet them, but everyone’s too wrapped up in the present to see the danger looming.”

 

While I do enjoy books about dysfunctional families, and sometimes-sad ones at that, but when I’m committing myself to a long book (which I’m increasingly divesting from as I grow older), I’m also looking for a bit of happiness within this 650 page tale. It’s there, but it comes more reflectively from each of the characters past. And in the present, set around the global 2008 recession, future happiness seems not be forthcoming in anyone’s life.

 

All of Barnes family has some issues and all seem impossible to fix. Still, they’re all identifiable problems. We have Dickie’s hidden past that rather explains his current problems (and despite his sort unlikableness, he is, for me, gets more interesting as the book progresses). His wife Imelda, who was expected to marry Dickie’s younger (and more popular) brother Frank until his tragic death, who then deals with her marriage with Dickie by shopping (and who has a sort of puppy-love for Maurice, the boys very successful father who upped and moved to Portugal).  Cass, the straight A student who wants to escape her dull small town life for Dublin with her friend Elaine (who she might have a crush on), and PJ the preteen schoolboy who is a slave of his mobile phone and playing games, and who seems a bit lost.

 

A few things in this overlong book bother me, mostly in the way Cass treats her parents. While both Cass and PJ are millennials, and both Dickie and Imelda seem to be not fully invested in their kids, but I’ve grown weary of the smart-mouth kids. It’s funny on TV and movies, and I guess, this novel, but It makes me glad I never had kids (my own mother might disagree with the fact that all my siblings and I waited until we were grown adults to take my Mom to task).

 

In the end, while I had some tribulations of whether to finish this brick of novel (it sometimes went on and on and on), but I was curious how this would all end. Good or bad, though, writer Paul Murray keeps the ending ambiguous.