(Jen also reviewed this book back in 2006. -Editor)

Here is another review of a book that was recently turned into a movie and the movie was actually a pretty good adaptation. In the first chapter of the book Susie Salmon is murdered in the cornfield on her way home from junior high school by her neighbor Mr. Harvey. The entirety of the book is told from Susie’s point of view looking down from her heaven watching how her death affects her family and the friends she had made. We also learn a bit about Mr. Harvey’s background and his serial raping and murdering of young girls. The crux of the story, though, is how Susie’s family deals with her death.

Susie’s dad had a very close bond with her in life. She would help him with his hobby of building sailboats into bottles. Her own hobby and aspiration was to become a wildlife photographer and she liked to take pictures of everything. When Susie died, he smashed all of his bottles and became obsessed with finding her killer. With a little help from Susie’s spirit in heaven, he became convinced that Mr. Harvey was the one who had done it, but he had no evidence to prove it except for a gut feeling. Susie’s mom withdrew into herself and became distanced from the rest of the family even having a brief affair with the detective on her daughter’s case. Susie’s sister Lindsay was on her dad’s side in the matter. Susie watched her sister grow up, and was proud of her gifted intelligence and prowess in running. Finally there was Susie’s little brother Buckley who was too young to understand about murder and death at the time Susie died. How the family dealt with Susie’s death was probably the most interesting thing about this book.

Susie also had friends at school. At the time of her murder she had just recently experienced her first kiss from a boy named Ray Singh. Unfortunately Ray became one of the first suspects in the investigation because of this relationship, but it was clear that he was not involved and he even had an alibi of being out of town when the murder took place. From heaven Susie would watch her family and friends grow up, go to high school, and have experiences she wishes she could have also taken a part in.

I thought this was a pretty good book, although it was a tear jerker at times considering the whole topic. There was only one kind of weird thing at the end that veered a little bit toward the supernatural where Susie takes control of a body of Ray’s friend (they are not exactly girlfriend and boyfriend at this moment) to make love to Ray one last time. It was an interesting scene, but kind of weird in the scope of the rest of the book. However, the ways different people cope with death and especially a death as grisly as Susie’s was very interesting.

Since both of these are really short novellas and are included in the same book, I’m going to review both in this posting. The Day of the Locust takes place in Hollywood during the 1930′s where the main character Tod Hackett is a set and costume designer. Over the course of the novella, he falls in love with Faye Greener, an aspiring actress who lives in his apartment building with her father Harry Greener. Harry was a former vaudeville clown who now sells polish door to door and is also kind of sickly. Faye Greener has a lot of suitors though including Earle, a cowboy, and Homer Simpson. Homer was from the MidWest and caught a cold and later pneumonia and his doctor told him he should move out to California to get some rest. However, Homer doesn’t do much but sit on his patio and watch a lizard. He is also a bit depressed and cries himself to sleep. The more colorful character in this story is Earle Shoop. He came to Hollywood to work in Westerns, but he hangs out with a couple of Mexicans who camp out in the hills and take part in cock fights. There is a very memorable scene toward the end of the book where Earle and the Mexicans are living in Faye’s garage and Tod brings a friend over to watch a cock fight. West describes in detail how they tie these razor blades to the rooster’s wings and the dominant rooster will stick those blades into the breast of its opposition. It is a pretty gruesome scene. The comic relief in this scene is a dwarf who is also with them and is either trying to pick fights with the bigger guys or is placing bets on the roosters. That part of the book was absolutely nuts!

The story is mainly about Tod trying to win Faye, but how he ends up just making friends with and hanging out with her other suitors. Faye apparently just sees Tod as a friend. The title comes into play at the very end of the book where Tod gets caught in a mob of the poor and downtrodden outside a big movie premiere in Hollywood. It was an interesting story if only for the crazy characters that Tod finds himself getting mixed up in.

Whereas The Day of the Locust takes place on the west coast and was written much later when Nathaniel West lived in Hollywood, Miss Lonelyhearts takes place in New York City and was the second book West published. Again the characters come from a class of people who are the downtrodden. Miss Lonelyhearts is actually a man who writes an advice column for the newspaper. He gets the most depressing letters from people. Examples include a woman who is in so much pain with her kidneys but her husband keeps making her pregnant with 7 children in 12 years or a letter from a sixteen year old girl born without a nose who wants a boyfriend but nobody will even look at her because of her condition. Miss Lonelyhearts doesn’t know how to answer all of the pitiable pleas for help. His boss makes a lot of Christ jokes at him. The turning point in the novel is when Miss Lonelyhearts gets a letter from the wife of a crippled man who is not getting her needs satisfied and Miss Lonelyhearts actually pays her a visit and they end up having an affair. This sets the ball rolling for the tragic outcome of the story. Miss Lonelyhearts doesn’t really help anyone from what I gathered; he just writes a column invoking Christ as the answer. He, himself, wanders throughout the story in his own despair even though his girlfriend tries to take him away from it all by driving him out to her farmland in Connecticut. When he returns, it is just back to the letters.

If I were to pick a favorite out of the two novellas in this collection, it would probably be The Day of the Locust due primarily to the unforgettable cock fighting scene and the cast of crazy characters. Miss Lonelyhearts was interesting, especially the letters West includes in the story, but was ultimately too much wrapped in despair. I gave the whole collection 3 stars in GoodReads