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Chapelwood: The Borden Dispatches
Chapelwood: The Borden Dispatches
Chapelwood: The Borden Dispatches
Audiobook13 hours

Chapelwood: The Borden Dispatches

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

4/5

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About this audiobook

Birmingham, Alabama, is infested with malevolence. Prejudice and hatred have consumed the minds and hearts of its populace. A murderer, unimaginatively named "Harry the Hacker" by the press, has been carving up citizens with a hatchet. And from the church known as Chapelwood, an unholy gospel is being spread by a sect that worships dark gods from beyond the heavens.


This darkness calls to Lizzie Borden. It is reminiscent of an evil she had dared hoped was extinguished. The parishioners of Chapelwood plan to sacrifice a young woman to summon beings never meant to share reality with humanity. An apocalypse will follow in their wake which will scorch the earth of all life.


Unless she stops it . . .
LanguageEnglish
Release dateSep 1, 2015
ISBN9781494572471
Chapelwood: The Borden Dispatches
Author

Cherie Priest

Cherie Priest is the author of two dozen books and novellas, including the horror novel The Toll, acclaimed gothic Maplecroft, and the award-winning Clockwork Century series, beginning with Boneshaker. She has been nominated for the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award, and she won the Locus Award for best horror novel. Her books have been translated into nine languages in eleven countries. She lives in Seattle, Washington, with her husband and a menagerie of exceedingly photogenic pets.

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Reviews for Chapelwood

Rating: 3.762295081967213 out of 5 stars
4/5

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  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Note: While this is Book 2 in the series, it reads just fine as a stand alone.Set roughly 30 years after the events that take place in Book 1 (Maplecroft), Lisbeth Borden is finding retirement lonely and boring. She orders books and papers, adopts feral cats, and keeps up an on going letter to her now dead sister Emma. Then the odd and gruesome events of Birmingham, Alabama catch her eye. Then an Inspector Wolf contacts her and asks her to join him on his investigation into the hatchet murders as he suspects that there is more to it, and also that Lisbeth has had some previous dealings with this particular evil.While I enjoyed Book 1 more than this book, it was still worthy. Book 1 had all the mystique of the Lizzie Borden historical case tied to it even before I cracked open the cover. This book didn’t come with that mystique, so the story in and of itself had to build the anticipation and it did a great job of it! It’s early 1920s and Prohibition is still firmly in place. In Alabama, we have the True Americans group, which is trying to look a bit more respectable than the Ku Klux Clan and yet still trying to push politics and civil rights in the same direction. Unwed daughters, despite their age, don’t have the legal right to go against their father’s wishes on where to live or work. Essentially, it’s a hotbed of angry, dissatisfied people. Perfect for the summoning of Cthulu monsters.Inspector Simon Wolf played a very small part in Book 1 but he is front and center here in Book 2. A dear friend of his, a Catholic priest, asks for his aid and he arrives too late to do much for his friend. But he does his best to assist the young lady (Ruth Stevenson) who befriended the priest. He often portrays himself as attached to a police office, but he’s not. No, his office investigates the unusual. Here in Alabama he’s still referred to as the Yank and he has to learn the niceties of Southern hospitality to get along with folks. Wolf is an interesting character being a gentleman, a man who enjoys a good meal, and the owner of a peculiar sense of humor.Ruth is in her early 20s and is determined to get away from her parents. On the surface, her father is the typical abusive domineering patriarch of the family while Ruth’s mom is this submissive servant of her husband’s orders. She’s tried running away multiple times, but she’s always dragged home. Legally, she can’t go against this because she isn’t married. Her Catholic priest friend helps solve that by finding her a kind (if older) husband. However, Catholics are not accepted by the mainstream Protestant Alabama society. Her father doesn’t approve of Ruth’s elopement to a Catholic Puerto Rican. But what’s more, he joined the Chapelwood church and Ruth was suppose to join too. She’s key to the church’s sinister endeavors. She’s no fainting lily. Betimes she’s scared but she acknowledges that and then pushes on. She also has a strong sense of her personal rights and that makes it ever so much harder for those who want to continue on with their human sacrifices.As you can see, we have an awesome setting. It’s a slow burn as all the people and aspects get into place. There’s plenty here to intrigue you so I was never bored with the book. Once we have everything in place, the pace picks up. Some of the characters already knew of the human-like monsters, while others have to be brought around to the idea. We even get to spend some time in the head of a former Chapelwood church member who feels the only way to hold off the tide of evil is to take out the designated Chapelwood sacrifices before Chapelwood can sacrifice them appropriately. Yeah. Totally chilling logic. It’s done very well and, as odd as it sounds, I saw why this character did what they did.This story is a great mix of historical fiction and slow-burn horror. The historical basis made the story that much richer. You can tell the author put quite a bit of research into what was going on in early 1920s Alabama and into understanding how those events and politics and social norms came to be. The horror aspect is not all gore and violence. It’s about things so beyond our understanding that it can push the limits of one’s sanity. It’s not done in some big dramatic way. This isn’t a slasher flick. There’s sound logic and deep thoughts that go into why our characters do what they do, for ultimate good or evil. These characters are complicated and that makes me love or hate them all the more.Plus the imagery of a 60 year old spinster taking up an axe to save the world is just too awesome! The Narration: Both our narrators did a great job with regional accents. It required quite a bit of subtlety at times and it made the listening experience worthy. James Patrick Cronin even varied the speeds of his dialogue based on the regional dialect he was employing. Julie McKay’s performance of Ruth was excellent with that Southern sass going on.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A follow up to her earlier work "Maplecroft", this book picks up the lives of Lizzie Borden/Lizbeth Andrew and Detective Simon Wolf in 1921. Seems there is another set of unsolved bizarre killings in Birmingham, Alabama that bear a striking resemblance to those we read about in Massachusetts. Inspector Wolf calls himself to do the inspecting, and Lizzie just can't stop her intuition telling her to leave her home and go find out what these newspaper articles are describing. The veterans form a natural alliance, with Detective Wolf "giving" Lizzie a new name, and they set out to learn about a Catholic Priest's murder, his aid to a young woman, and her father's brutal attack. Oh, and then there's this strange church on the outskirts of town, not to mention an axe-wielding murderer driven by numbers and one of his survivors who seems to have an insight into the beyond.There is a bit of formula here that Priest used to great effect with her first book; this one uses it because it works, but it leaves the originality of her earlier work a bit tempered. Still, the strange creature lurking is enormous and not at all like what they fought in Massachusetts. Or is it??
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Priest returns to Lizzie Borden’s fight against the Lovecraftian horrors from beyond the stars. Thirty years have passed and Lizzie has to head down South to investigate another series of axe murders. It was okay, but I didn’t feel like it was necessary to Lizzie’s story.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    It's not a bad sequel, but it didn't pack as much punch for me as the first novel. For one, Lizzie didn't really appear in the book all that much, and when she did, she didn't really have much to do (I appreciated her mentioning Emma and Nance often, but I would have rather have seen them make an appearance in the book instead!). The story is okay, nothing too complicated, but I felt like most of the characters were just so bland. It was hard to feel much for them while reading.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Fair Warning: This book is the second in the Borden Dispatches series, and so this review will unavoidably contain spoilers for the first book.___________________________Thirty years have passed since the events of Maplecroft. Emma Borden is dead, as is the good doctor Seabury. The town of Fall River is quiet and peaceful, and Lizzie Borden (now going by Lizbeth Andrew) has settled into quiet infamy with a great many cats.But a new celestial threat is rising in Birmingham, Alabama of all places. A shadowy group calling themselves The True Americans, supported by a strange new church known as Chapelwood, is looking to cleanse Birmingham of its undesirables, namely blacks, Jews, Catholics, and those who don’t want to see the world end screaming in the tentacles of an Elder God.Called in by her old aquaintance Inspector Simon Wolf to help solve the murder of a local priest, which may or may not be tied into the nighttime activity of an ax-murderer known as Harry the Hacker, Lizzie Borden must shoulder her ax once more to defeat a cosmic evil growing strong in the dark southern soil.I began this series because I could not say no to a Lizzie Borden-Cthulhu mashup (who could?). The first book in the series was enjoyable (though with some tweaks to the mythos and to geography that irked me a bit). The second in the series is weaker, less cosmic horror, more plain old crappy human beings. I will say, however, that I enjoyed the Ku Klux Klan as despotic bringers of the elder god apocalypse angle. That part of the story was done quite well, and should resonate with anyone who’s been following American politics recently. Though I will say that it made this book a bit of a dud when it comes to escapist fiction (but not entirely in a bad way).In all, if you enjoyed the first book, this one is a different creature altogether, but still worth your time. New comers to the series should definitely start with the first book, both because that one is a bit more in the Lovecraftian style, and because you will be thoroughly lost if you try to start this series in the middle.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I didn't like this one as much as the first book in the series, but maybe that's because it was just Too Real for me right now -- a racist church trying to awaken dread Cthulu. But I also felt that the returning characters weren't as strong as they could have been, although I did like our new heroine Ruth very much.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    With this novel we return to the story of Lizbeth Borden, a generation after the demise of love and family, when duty calls again to see about strange affairs down in Birmingham, Alabama. Affairs that Lizbeth hopes will shed some light on what happened to her beloved. As is often the case one should not ask questions one does not wish the answer to. Still, this is really the story of Ruth Stephenson, a young woman with a gift who is trapped in an abusive family and who is the piece on which all events balance. As with the other stories by Priest that I've read, I often find her scenarios aren't quite as well served by characterization or language, but I'm happy to have read this book and will be interested in how she moves forward with this series; she certainly made the most of the milieu in terms of social commentary.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The second book in the Borden Dispatches takes up Lizbeth's tale 20 years after the events of the first book. She's living a quiet life with a house full of cats, still in Fall River, using the last name of Andrews, when she begins to hear inklings of strange goings on down in Alabama. Inspector Wolf is drawn in after the murder of an old friend of his, a Catholic priest who married a young woman to a day laborer to free her from the clutches of her abusive father and the sinister cult at Chapelwood. He calls in Lizbeth since there's also been a series of axe murders and a sketch was made of Nance by one of the survivors. The KKK and the True Americans are working hand in glove with the cult at Chapelwood to undo the progress that has been made in Birmingham, and yet the cultists are the greater threat, trying to bring about the annihilation of the whole world via calling the Old Ones. This book didn't quite have the pervasive sinister feel of the first one, the eerieness is concentrated at Chapelwood where the action rarely goes, plus we get chapters from the points of view of the bad guys and are a bit forewarned of their plans. The characterisation is top notch though, she has an uncanny ability to get into the mind set of people slowly (or quickly) going mad due to glimpses of eldritch forces. The moment when Lizbeth finds an axe in the dark as enemies are closing in on her gave me chills. There's a lot more to this book than I'm mentioning here, from the conversations addressed to the ghost of Emma, the strong young woman who's the next target of the cult, the obsessed yet deposed city officials, and a mysterious evidence storage room that seems to consume information that is left in it for too long, and Lizbeth's feelings about the events of 20 years ago.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I am a huge fan of Priest's writing, and this was an excellent, creepy novel that kept me turning the pages!It's 30 years after the events in Maplecroft, and Lizbeth Andrews (Borden) has mostly retired from the world... except for her research, including reading newspapers from various other areas. And now, events in Birmingham, Alabama, start sounding a bit too familiar...I think it is safe to say that the menace is Lovecraftian, and that the Elder Ones seem to be revealing their will via math. This leads to a dryly funny situation in which the only guy able to understand and interpret breaks off and starts doing his own thing to prevent the gates opening (to borrow terms from "Lonesome October", and no one else has the math chops to effectively replace him. This is not played for laughs, but I found it understated humor.As usual for Priest, the various character's voices are very distinctive- one can open the book at random and within a few paragraphs identify who is the POV character there. Very rare, and high praise!The plot was a very creepy mix of mundane and supernatural horrors and menaces, including not only creatures from the Dungeon Dimensions but more mundane threats like the Ku Klux Klan and its control over the legal system... not to mention the risk that wealth can buy the government. While the more practical issues are not resolved- as they were not historically- they make an effective context for the events in the novel.I always try to read a few creepy novels during October, and I feel very lucky that this one came out just in time! Highly recommended for the plot, characterization, and setting.