A worthy effort: Shepherd's Warning by Cailyn Lloyd

Thanks as always to NetGalley for allowing me to read an early version of this book.

It is to this writer's credit (and those of her editors) that I did not realise that this novel was self-published until the last page. It is a passable horror story centred around a haunted Elizabethan mansion in Wisconsin USA. I seem to have hit a slew of books lately where the protagonist is particularly unmemorable and, unfortunately, this novel is no exception. For all of her seventh sight, incipient epilepsy and love for her granddaughter, I found it very difficult to get emotionally invested in Laura McKenzie. Her breakup with her husband should also have been emotionally wrenching to lend the tale more excitement but was just sudden and rather dull. Sometimes the prose is also quite tedious, the "room cants sideways" numerous times as our heroine hits the concrete, or should that be the wooden flooring? Also, it was never clear to me why she seemed to be the sole custodian of her granddaughter following her son's death... Where was her daughter-in-law? Oh well.

For all of that it was pretty readable although I would hardly describe it as unputdownable.

Tricky: Trixy by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps

I admit that when I first saw this book posted on Netgalley since I was at bit of a loose end I decided to take it on as a sort of challenge. Trixy is a novel first published in 1904 and this, obviously, is a re-edition with an academic purpose which is in part to rehabilitate Elizabeth Stuart Phelps and also take another critical look at the development of the animal rights movement. But for me the question was, could I finish it?

Eventually the answer was "Yes", but not without a long hiatus in the middle in which I read a few other books which were more to my taste. The problem with Trixy is that it is very much of its age, it is melodramatic, over-sweet and has some very dense patches of purple prose, at crucial stages it also elides certain information by openly stating something along the lines of "I cannot describe this , it will be too hard on my readers" which I found patronising and somewhat insulting.

The first problem I had was with the heroine, who is not Trixy (Trixy is actually a little white poodle), but a very tenderhearted young lady of some means. She is a very stereotypical character which very few novels would get away with today. She is the amiable landlady of a bunch of 'umble tenants who for some reason that escapes me, love her to bits, oh, sorry that's right, they love her because she's so kind! Among her tenants is a frail crippled lad who is Trixy's owner as a way of making some sort of living he has taught the poodle to perform some tricks. This young lady is also courted by two gentlemen, one is a doctor and the other is a lawyer.

In a fairly novel approach, which is a former lawyer I cannot but applaud, the doctor turns out to be a baddie and the lawyer a goodie. For the simple reason that the doctor is a vivisectionist. At a crucial point, Trixy disappears, and well... You'll have to read the book as I did.

Apart from the melodrama the purple prose the hackneyed plot, this novel does have some redeeming features, that is a very good study of the coarsening of some members of the medical profession. I've had quite a few illnesses of my own in my time and therefore I've met many doctors physicians and nurses, most were fairly nice human beings, some were superb, and others, how shall I put it? Didn't seem to give a fuck. Phelps portrays this very well and in my view rightly attributes this deficiency to two main causes, the first being that some members of the medical profession are not very nice people to begin with and have joined the profession as a means of enhancing their status, exercising power or even giving free rein to their sadistic impulses. The second, and most original approach in my view, is that they have been bent and twisted and rendered indifferent by having too much power over animals and people. This group started off well, but had to harden itself in order to progress and have lost touch with an important part of their humanity.

For me this insight seems to be more valuable than the author's all encompassing anti-vivisectionist stance. At some point in the book she hints that she is condemning only unnecessary vivisection... But it doesn't seem to me that she modulates this. I am a pet owner I love animals but that is not the same as failing to recognise that in many instances experimenting on animals has helped medicine progress, indeed this is an argument that she puts in the mouths of one of her doctor characters but she actually only does so to discredit it.

There are some good scenes in this novel, one in particular I think will always stick in my mind. And as I said above it is in some ways very perceptive, but I am not sure that overall these two traits overcome the setback of what is a very dated text.