Review--All That Lives: A Novel of the Bell Witch of TN

[Ladybee]

I just wrote this review for the livejournal communities "hillbillies" and "folkmagic" but i thought this section of the KnoxGothic board might like reading it, too.

I just finished reading All The Lives: A Novel of the Bell Witch of Tennessee, by Melissa Sanders-Self, and i'd like to encourage people to run, don't walk, in the opposite direction if you see this book in the bookstore.

I was really excited to read this book, particularly because i grew up in Tennessee (spent the first 22 years of my life there) and am familiar both with the setting of the book and the folktale on which it's based. In fact, i don't quite remember when i first heard stories of the Bell Witch; it was something often told to children, and invoked by adults in situations like "you get back in the house before nightfall or the Bell Witch'll get you." So, when i first saw this book on the shelf at my local store, i was very intrigued by it, though since it's a trade paperback and costs $15, i waited a while and wound up getting it with an Amazon birthday gift certificate. Boy, am i glad i didn't spend my own money on this stinker.

I flew through it, not because it is good (it's not) or the writing is brilliant (it's stilted and horrible) but because i wanted to know how (if?) the author resolved the mystery of the Bell Witch at the end. Well, guess what? She basically doesn't. I'll leave it at that and not reveal spoilers in case people still wish to read it and judge for themselves.

The book is set in 1817, in Adams, Tennessee, and follows the lives of the Bell family. The plot slogs along like a mule in a mudslide, bogged down with a lot of really rather boring "encounters" with the "Witch" (which incidentally behaves more like what is more commonly termed a poltergeist, and not a witch at all, really), throwing things, slapping people, making creepy noises or singing dirty songs. The characters are all fairly flat and undeveloped, and are a panoply of thinly-veiled rural stereotypes: the fat pedlar woman who has praise-jesus conniptions in church, the cold and distant father who rules his tobacco farm with an iron fist and gropes his daughter after dark, the long-sufferin' farm-woman mom who puts her trust in the Lord and ignores her husband molesting the chilluns, the "I's a-fryin' up some o' dem chickenses right now massa" cook [1], the blonde haired wide eyed ingenue.

The author claims on her website that she was born in Tennessee, which implies that she has some knowledge of the area about which she writes, but if so none of it comes through in the book. She has failed at capturing the voice of the area in her dialogue, and the settings are so generically described they could be most any rural area. Nearly none of the natural beauty and spirit of the land is communicated in the text at all, and the author even freely admits in her introduction that she used the Foxfire books for references about (among other things) Tennessee herbs. Either she grew up blind to the country she was raised in, or she didn't live there long--or, i suppose she could just be incapable of infusing her prose with a sense of the land and culture in which she sets her story, which would be the saddest option.

Regardless, i was deeply disappointed in this book and wouldn't recommend it to anyone.

[1] I kid you not, the slaves in the book are the only ones whose speech is rendered in dialect. All the white folks speak, not in the beautiful indigenous phraseology with any kind of rural flavor, but like a bunch of Hollywood Amish: "'Tis true, he indeed cuts a fine figure of a man, verily," and such garbage.

[JaNell]

This is exactly the place to post reviews.

I agree that, from your description, the author seems to have garnered her information regarding speech patterns from bad Civil War books rather than actual experience living in Tennessee. While moutain folk here in East Tennessee do retain remants of Old English (and some words that I use that are laughed at by non-East Tennesseans, but are still valid in Britlish), the quote you offered really doesn't fit the dialect I know, at all.

It's really disappointing - we finally get past The Beverly Hillbillies (granted, more than a little truth there, but still...) and now we have that damn Johnny Knoxville impersonator jackassing us all over the screen...
*sigh*