Review: Original and Innovative
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 08 8, 2013
I was caught completely by surprise by John F.D. Taff's The Bell Witch. Although I'm a fan of Taff's writing, I have to admit I went into this book expecting the familiar narrative that is the standard way of telling a poltergeist-type story. What I had no idea was coming was that the vengeful spirit was going to be a well-developed, sympathetic character with its own voice. Where a lesser writer would have left the spirit with little more than constant malevolence and perhaps a touch of sympathetic justification (to sell its spiritual unrest, but not the bad things it does and to whom), Taff writes the spirit as a CHARACTER with a personality, feelings, and a point of view. He then takes that character and makes her deal with as much uncertainty and mixed emotions as the people she's tormenting. Every time I expected him to zig, Taff zagged, keeping the story fresh and innovative. The Bell Witch is surprising and satisfying and made me reevaluate the way other books and movies ought to be presenting ghost stories.