Last Request: A Victorian Gothic
By: Jeff Chapman / Narrated By: Caprisha Page
Length: 1 hr and 32 mins
Kinda sorta: Meh, and I think that’s cuz o’ the narration…
Just a bit of time ago, I listened to The Great Contagion by author Jeff Chapman and was so delighted by it that I went out and bought Book 2 in The Merliss Tales. It was that good, that creepy, that gory. It was also enough that I dashed to my laptop to find out what-all else Chapman had out there. Enter: Last Request, which had a completely and unutterably creeped out storyline.
Uncle Silas is dead, and his will is being read.
Uhm, he’d like to be beheaded upon entering his crypt.
Cuz see, he’d had this hORRible fear of enclosed spaces during his life, had a dread of being buried alive, unable to move, to save himself, and a good old hacking of his head from his body most surely means that he is indeed dead.
Naturally the family is aghast. But young Anna, an orphan who lives with her dithery aunt, found the only love and affection in her life from dear Uncle Silas, wherein he CONstantly told her the tale of just why he’s so terrified. He’d told it to her as she was a youngster; she told it back to him when he was aged and unable, now that she was a young woman.
And thus begins her journey to see that Uncle Silas’s last request is carried out. It’s a very gothic tale, fraught with learning to wield a heavy knife to hack up chickens, going on to a full moon-ed dash to enter the crypt, and then going on to what happens on that moonlit night that stretches on and on and on (This when, really, it shoulda only taken maybe 1/2 an hour and some gritting of the teeth to get ‘er done).
When all was said and done, I finished up this totally short Listen feeling very much: Meh. I’d liked Caprisha Page’s performance okay. She did dialogue well, and I liked her voices and tones all right. So I didn’t know what the problem was.
So I listened a second time, focusing on the text to see if the writing was lacking. And no, it wasn’t. I’d thought maybe there wasn’t much of a sense of foreboding, that no other eerie things were happening, that perhaps there could’ve been more atmospheric creepiness in Anna’s surrounding environment.
And nope, Chapman’s got ALL of that: The writing is rock solid for this verrrry short bit of a Listen. Spookiness abounds, all sorts of things are brieeeefly seen in the moonlight; all sorts of things are bumped into or glancingly felt in the oh how dark it is crypt. Characters are well-developed for such a short story.
So I listened a third time, focusing on the nuances of the narration. And maaaaybe that’s where there’s the miss as Ms. Page does certain things well enough, but all those hints of horror are delivered in rather flat tones, thereby causing the listener to miss it all entirely. And when the end comes, with it’s quirky li’l twist? Nuh-uh—There’s only a focus on vocal shift for the character speaking rather than on the wryness of the words.
All in all, this was a disappointment for me, but it in no way has turned me off my eventual-to-be listen of Book 2 in The Merliss Tales. Chapman obviously has no problem going for the gore and the horror, is willing to go for the creeped-out low-blow.
And that has me quite looking forward to the next…!
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