Clare L. Deming

I’m going to spend at least one of my posts each week catching up on my backlog of book reviews for things I read last year. This is one of those posts.

Medusa’s Web is the first book by Tim Powers that I’ve read. I came across this author when I heard him speak as a guest-of-honor at a local science fiction convention several years ago (paid links). This was also a selection for one of my book clubs. I listened to the audiobook edition of this, narrated by Chris Sorenson. Read on below to see what I thought.

Here is the blurb:

In the wake of their Aunt Amity’s suicide, Scott and Madeline Madden are summoned to Caveat, the eerie, decaying mansion in the Hollywood hills in which they were raised. But their decadent and reclusive cousins, the malicious wheelchair-bound Claimayne and his sister, Ariel, do not welcome Scott and Madeline’s return to the childhood home they once shared.

While Scott desperately wants to go back to their shabby South-of-Sunset lives, he cannot pry his sister away from this haunted “House of Usher in the Hollywood Hills” that is a conduit for the supernatural. Decorated by bits salvaged from old hotels and movie sets, Caveat hides a dark family secret that stretches back to the golden days of Rudolph Valentino and the silent film stars.

A collection of hypnotic eight-limbed abstract images inked on paper allows the Maddens to briefly fragment and flatten time—to transport themselves into the past and future in visions that are both puzzling and terrifying. Though their cousins know little about these ancient “spiders” which provoke unpredictable temporal dislocations, Ariel and Claimayne have been using for years—an addiction that has brought Claimayne to the brink of selfish destruction.

As Madeline falls more completely under Caveat’s spell, Scott discovers that to protect her, he must use the perilous spiders himself. But will he unravel the mystery of the Madden family’s past and finally free them. . . or be pulled deeper into their deadly web?

This is a novel that I would categorize as horror or gothic fiction, and this isn’t a genre I typically enjoy. However, being part of a book club pushes me out of my comfort zone and gets me to read novels that I wouldn’t otherwise consider. However, this book ended up being a disappointment to me.

I didn’t like any of the characters in this story. Scott and his sister didn’t do anything terrible, but I never cared about what happened to them. The “spider” images functioned like a hallucinogenic drug but also let the user’s awareness travel into someone else’s body, I think. This was confusing and I had a hard time keeping track of who was who and when everything occurred.

This book does use a time travel aspect and that was interesting to me. However, it touched on film history and Hollywood references that I didn’t understand, so I suspect that I missed some of the author’s intent. In the end, I probably wasn’t the right audience for this book, but I’d consider reading something else (non-horror) by this author.

Have you read anything by Tim Powers? What other books by him would you recommend? Let me know in the comments (above).

Find more of my reviews here.