Thrills and horror and murder... at the ballet
Thrills and horror and murder... at the ballet
Megan Abbott's The Turnout & Dario Argento's Suspiria.
Hi, friends,
I hope all is well with you. I had a week off from work recently, and I spent it reading and watching movies and cooking and baking and doing lots of cozy things.
When I got back, my co-worker told me about this exchange that she had with a patron:
Patron: Do you have the new Megan Abbott book?
Co-worker: Yes, but it’s out. Would you like me to put it on hold?
Patron: Yes, please. Have you read her?
Co-worker: No, because EVERY SINGLE TIME Leila recommends one of her books, the person she recommended it to comes back practically the next day and demands her entire backlist! I have too many other authors to obsess about, I can’t add another one to my list!!!
Patron: *backs away slowly, clutching three more Megan Abbott books*
So, you know, good to know that I can troll my poor co-worker even without A) being in the building, and B) trying. It’s the little things, right?
Reading: The Turnout, by Megan Abbott
The first chapter of The Turnout ends with this:
It was the three of them. Always the three of them. Until it wasn’t. And that was when everything went wrong. Starting with the fire. Or before.
As expected, I was VERY INTO The Turnout.
Megan Abbott is best known for her female-centric crime novels, and her more recent ones are set in contemporary, highly competitive, female-dominated spaces: Dare Me covers cheerleading, You Will Know Me covers gymnastics, and The Turnout covers ballet. (Give Me Your Hand, which tends to be the one I give to patrons first—at the library, we refer to it as the Megan Abbott Gateway Drug—is set in a medical research lab, which isn’t a traditionally female space, but the research they’re doing is very very female-centric.)
They all deal with hugely weird power dynamics and power struggles, with extremely messy relationships, with characters who push-pull-push-pull-push-push-push-pull, back and forth and back and forth, attracting and repelling and loving and hating, in ways that wind me up and stress me out.
When the deaths come—and they always come—they come with a sense of wonderful horrible inevitability.
I love them.
(The books, I mean. Not necessarily the deaths.)
The Turnout follows Dara and Marie Durant, who inherited their mother’s ballet studio some years ago, after the deaths of their parents. They run it with Dara’s husband, Charlie, who had been, along with the sisters, a student at the studio.
After a fire in the studio, they bring in a contractor to do some repairs and renovations… and with him comes change, upheaval, destruction, danger, and more than one long-overdue reckoning.
Oh, wow, friends. This was the EXACT POINT that I started hoping for a death in this book:
His tone, his demeanor felt new, felt smug, less salesman, more something else. Dara watched as he choked up on the copper pipe, gripping it like a bat, swung it casually, like a ballplayer on deck.
“You know what my old man used to say?” he said, the whir of the pipe in his hands. “Watch out for a bad woman, and never trust a good one.”
In this moment, the contractor—Derek—is so threatening, so subtly overbearing and aggressive and manipulative and awful, that I had to slam the book shut and walk around the house for a bit. It’s been a while since I engaged with a character who I so totally loathed, who felt so predatory and gross and REAL that he made my skin crawl. He made me worry on behalf of the other characters, yes, but he also made ME, PERSONALLY, feel unsafe.
And so, for me, when the crime-y part of the book kicked in, it was a RELIEF, because the tension leading up to it had me fully climbing the walls. Abbott’s books understandably get slotted into the crime/thriller family, but this one gave me some horror vibes, too, largely because it made me feel so incredibly claustrophobic.
On one hand, I’d love to read a million more books that I love as much as I love Megan Abbott’s books, but on the other, I don’t know if I could handle more than one a year?
Added to the TBR:
The List of Unspeakable Fears, by J. Kasper Kramer
The Sister Who Ate Her Brothers, by Jen Campbell
Root Magic, by Eden Royce
Watching: Suspiria (Dario Argento, 1977)
Is Suspiria kind of an obvious pick to pair with a ballet-themed thriller? Sure.
Do I care? No. Because I’ll take any opportunity, use any excuse, to re-watch Suspiria.
As I’d seen the rad 2018 remake—in which Tilda Swinton plays not one, not two, but THREE characters—more recently, I went back to Dario Argento’s classic story about a dance school run by witches for the 9,000th time.
And this time through, it wasn’t so much the deaths—although I never fail to forget how visceral and awful the first two are—and it wasn’t so much the maggots raining down from the ceiling or the pit full of razor wire.
No, this time it was the sets and the lighting that got me. In addition to using what I assume was ALL THE RED LIGHTBULBS IN ITALY—the movie is set in Germany, but was filmed in Rome—I was just AGOG at the interiors. Like this one:
Nightmare fuel, sure—I mean, I wouldn’t want to live in that space—but it is SO. RAD. and visually such a treat.
Here’s another angle of the same space:
Beyond the ballet connection, there were a few moments in The Turnout that made me think specifically of the 2018 remake. This passage, in particular, made me think of the piece that the students are working on throughout the movie:
Their mother once confided to Dara that Marie was not a lovely dancer—not like you, my dear—but she was a memorable one. She danced, their mother said, with the intensity of a bad dream. You did not forget her.
A few links:
NPR: A Texas lawmaker is targeting 850 books that he says could make students feel uneasy. [Note: This article includes a link to the full list of books. It is very much worth a look.]
Chron: Authors react to investigation of their books in Texas schools.
SLJ: YA Author Ashley Hope Pérez Responds to Viral Video that Calls for the Banning of Her “Out of Darkness.”
TLT: Just As You Are: Church Kids and Purity Culture in Never Saw You Coming by Erin Hahn.
Instagram: My favorite Halloween costume of 2021.
The Horn Book: Roger Sutton is retiring.
MSP Mag: Anne Ursu’s Magical Thinking.
The Guardian: A werewolf Thelma and Louise: how we made cult horror film Ginger Snaps.
PW: In Defense of Mean Girls in YA Literature.
Crime Reads: Horror Fiction in the Time of COVID: A Roundtable Discussion.
Vulture: Why Michael Hobbes Won’t Tell You You’re Wrong Anymore.
If you’ve got more stressful dance stories, I’m here for them.
Talk to you soon,
Leila