Customer Reviews

The Man on the Ceiling (Discoveries)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

It seems some people just didn't get this book. I suppose I understand their confusion. Its a very experimental book in how it combines autobiography and story all the while doing this as a collaboration. Its impressive considering how difficult a challenge this must have been.

I liked it. There were some deep insights in this book and they avoided giving easy answers or simple stories. Its not exactly a novel, but I wouldn't go so far to say the label doesn't apply. There are many stories within the book. More importantly, its about the process of making stories out of life experience and making sense of life experience through story.

There is a cleverness to this book, but it didn't seem pretentious to me. What the authors set out to do necessitated cleverness. I enjoyed how smoothly they mixed nonfiction and fiction.

I was satisfied enough with this book that I give it an overall good review. It was worth the money spent. It wasn't perfect, but its hard to imagine any two authors collaborating to create something better. I've never read anything that compares to this book and so reviewing it is difficult. Fortunately, I had no expectations going in and so I was able to judge it on its own merits. However, if someone buys it hoping for a normal novel, then they'd be dissapointed.

There is something specific that I appreciated the most. Horror is too often limited to the perspective of the individual. This book is about how closely related are love and fear.

Its a hard book to get a grasp of, but I think it will grow on me more and more. I immediately read back through the book after finishing it. I'm sure its a book I will return to many times.

Expanded from their novella of the same name, the Tems combine memoir, magic, and family myth in order to describe their household--in particular, the aftermath of their's son's death. I have not read the original novella, and was unable to finish this book: my review is based on the first 200 pages and the factors that made me close the book for good. This novel is a collection of thoughts and memories both real and imagined, unaided by plot. Without a plot, the writing is slow and unfocused. The novel tells, but does not show, and the absence of stories contradicts the novel's premise and makes for a dry, unconvincing book. I tried to enjoy this novel, but did not, and I have no desire to complete it. I don't recommend it.

The Man on the Ceiling is a rambling slew of thoughts and fragmentary memories without a plot to guide them. It is part factual and part imagined, but the difference between the two is intended to be immaterial because, as the Tems continually repeat, everything in the book is true, regardless of its accuracy. This concept intrigued me, and I enjoy books which break down predictable writing formulae--but I found The Man on the Ceiling unreadable. To be more accurate, the book is readable: the language is straight forward and, though the alternating speakers becomes confusing, the text is easy to follow. However, without anything resembling a plot, the book lacks direction and the reader is never compelled to continue. Worst of all, for all that the Tems talk about telling stories to create the truth, they do remarkably little storytelling. The stories are infrequent, brief, and plainly penned; thoughts and theories and explanations are much more common. More often than not, stories are cut short to explain what they "mean." This is a book of telling, and very little showing.

And that, ultimately, is why I gave up on it. I read 200 pages, pushing through despite the absence of a plot, hoping that something would intrigue me. The reading was slow: I was never eager to get to the next page, and each time I put the book down I had no desire to pick it back up. At the 200 page mark, a brief, largely summarized story concludes "...he was screaming *because* he understood how alone he was..." (202, emphasis mine), and I admitted to myself that the book would continue, undirected by plot, telling but not showing, and that I had no interest in continuing with it. Does the novel make a miraculous improvement in the final 150 pages? I don't know, but even if it does, 200 pages it too long to wait to see it.

I picked up this book on the basis of a reader's glowing review, and so it feels strange to report that I dislike the book too much to complete it. Judging by the Amazon reviews, readers are split between those who love the book and those who hate it. As such, the interested reader may still want to pick up this novel--in case they're one of the first group. Personally, I was entirely disappointed by The Man on the Ceiling. The prose is readable, and the concept is promising, but the execution fails entirely. A full novel's length is too long for a book to continue without some direction or forward movement; above all, a book about stories and truths must contain *stories*, and The Man on the Ceiling does not. I couldn't bring myself to finish this book, and I don't recommend it.

The is more a book of memoirs of dreams and fears and memories. Only these memoirs are really not interconnected in any chronological order. It is well written and some entries are disturbingly emotional, but there is no "overall" story here. I thought this was a novel when I commenced my reading, but was soon to find out this is the farthest you can get from the structure of a novel. And I really hate when the authors repeatedly tell you "that everything we are about to tell you is true". After the 5th or 6th time it loses its ironic charm. So if you are looking for a nice story to read, look elsewhere. But if you are looking for an interesting book of mementos both real and imagined, check it out. Its a quick read, I finished it in a day and a half.....so at least its got that going for it.....

[This review was originally written in February 2011 and has been revised for its appearance here.]

I've never been much given to philosophical ruminations on the "nature" or "purpose" of horror or dark fantasy or any type of speculative fiction. It's a large, abstract question, and like most large abstractions it bores me silly. Such questions invite the answerer to indulge in banal, often self-serving generalities, offering nothing that's interesting or really, deeply true. Beyond that, I have little interest in the metaphysical, the metaphorical, the spiritual as ways of approaching human existence.

How, then, to explain my enthusiasm for The Man on the Ceiling, a 2008 novel by Steve Rasnic Tem and Melanie Tem that expands on their 2000 novella of the same name? Novel and novella alike are, among other things, an attempt to explain why the Tems write dark fantasy and what doing so means to them, in terms that often brush up against the laden metaphors I so dislike. What makes the difference, I think, is the sentiment that appears in the first line of the novella and on the first page of the novel.

"Everything we're about to tell you is true."

And it is. The authors go on to say, "Don't ask me if I mean that 'literally.' I know about the literal. The literal has failed miserably to explain the things I've really needed explanations for. The things in your dreams, the things in your head, don't know from literal." That's another sentiment I ought to despise. Maybe this is a sign of my own limitations, but I've never needed any frame of reference beyond the literal to make sense of the world. So why don't I despise it? Because, while some of the book may not be "literally" true, much of it is. As the back cover of the novel versions notes, this is a work that "blurs the line between memoir and myth, where story and reality blend to find the one thing that neither can offer alone: truth." The Tems are not merely spinning abstractions about the purpose of writing. They are explaining, with reference to the tragedies and joys of their own family life, as precisely as they can, what their writing means to them.

It would be easy to be glib about this. Too often the presence of a fictionalized version of the author in horror fiction is a gimmick, a way to provide a veneer of "reality" to a ghost story or something similar. One could dismiss the way the Tems use "the man on the ceiling," a shadowy figure seen by night, as a metaphor for the fears and weaknesses that lie beneath the surface of even the happiest family's day-to-day existence. But there's a directness to way they write here, a poetry of simplicity that makes the metaphor work.

"I follow the man on the ceiling around the attic of our house, my flashlight burning off pieces of his body, which grow back as soon as he moves beyond the beam. I chase him down three flights of stairs into our basement where he hides in the laundry. My hands turn into frantic paddles that scatter the clothes and I'm already thinking about how I'm going to explain the mess to Melanie in the morning when he slips like a pool of oil under my feet and out to other corners of the basement where my children keep their toys. I imagine the edge of his cheek in an oversized doll, his amazingly sharp fingers under the hoods of my son's Matchbox cars.

"But the man on the ceiling is a story and I know something about stories. One day I will figure out just what this man on the ceiling is 'about.' He's a character in the dream of our lives and he can be changed or killed."

The original novella, slightly altered, makes up about 50 pages of the 370 page novel version. The new material continues the examination of the Tem's lives through the framework of story, of their lives as an act of storytelling, of storytelling as one of the ways in which people keep themselves alive. There are times, it is true, when this longer version seems too long: too diffuse, too repetitive, too reductively aphoristic. But there is always the pull of family history to give the novel a shape, to remind us that this is not merely writerly contemplation but real human beings confronting their real lives.

"Moments cast in amber. Invisible rooms. Reality puddling. Breakthroughs from and into the divine. I hasten to protest: Steve and I don't always live like that! Not everything is fraught with Meaning. Like everybody else, we bumble through most of our daily lives attending to basic maintenance: doing laundry, going to the dentist, stocking up for whatever disaster might come, getting a haircut, walking the dogs, earning a living.

"But even in the daily doing of what must be done, transcendence finds a way to creep in."

The capturing of such moments of transcendence-- joy and grief alike-- is the virtue of The Man on the Ceiling. The original novella version was perhaps the more powerful work; this expansion extends the metaphors and family histories without breaking new ground. But the stark, searing honesty is as moving as ever, and readers of surreal, emotionally resonant dark fantasy should seek this novel out.

This is an odd little book: a biographical, explorative discussion of the imagination, of the story we build in our lives to explain various anxieties. The un-marked balance between fact and fiction occasionally distracted me, despite the book's assertion that everything is "truth". The self-involved nature of the book (the authors writing about their imaginations) sometimes distracted me too. But, most of the time, I found it a compelling form of narrative, fascinatingly interstitial. It is definitely worth reading for those who want to explore the many shapes a novel can take, the many aspects it can tug into itself. Genre lines are refreshingly absent.

Don't let the pretty cover and the boasting name of Neil Gaiman recommending this book fool you. In fact, look closer, Gaiman lavishes praise for the chapbook form novella, not the novel itself.

The book is, as I made mention in the title, pretentious. You follow the fictional memoir of the Tems, how they met, their children, their grandchildren and their fear of the anthropomorphic personification of illogical fear. Now, the premise sounds cool, I mean, you think you're going to be reading about a man and wife that adopt these children, one of them dies, possibly by accident, and there may or may not be this shadow that steals from their lives living in their walls. But instead you walk away feeling as if all you really read was how clever at writing the Tems are, with their alternating voices and pseudo spiritual philosophy of life.

Honestly, it's like reading the works of middle school kids who love theater, art and writing, but do horribly at all of them while thinking themselves progressive.

Chapter 4 is the basically the novella. It's probably the only good thing.

The Man on the Ceiling is a true masterpiece of domestic horror - frequently sad, deeply moving, and scary. If you care one iota about literary horror fiction, read this book.

Just finished "Man on the Ceiling" by Steve and Melanie Tem . . . and it was brilliant. Comparisons to Bradbury's "Dandelion Wine" come to mind, but this is far darker and intensely personal . . . actually, if I may blaspheme for a moment here, I'm of the opinion that it is BETTER than Bradbury.

Mantralike, the Tems repeat the phrase "everything we're telling you here is true" . . . and I believe them. Sure, lots of metaphors and flights of fancy, but the "characters" are the Tems and their extended family, and the vignettes are all based upon real events. Furthermore, having extensive experience with similar matters myself, I can attest that the "hallucinatory delusions" of the Tems are commensurate with the clairvoyant perceptions of others, rather than some pathological folie a' deux.

You see, there exists more around us then the mortal eye can readily perceive . . . our 3-dimension "reality" is but a world within yet another world that is hidden from us. These invisible intelligences and subintelligent astral fauna pass by and through us, manipulating events in our lives and influencing our mood and behavior to no small extent. The average person is blissfully unaware of these external stimuli. The "seer" is also unware of 90% of these spirits, catching but mere glimpses of those who choose to manifest or otherwise interact with us . . . but that's "crazy talk," right?

This is a rich and touching blend of fact and half-fiction based upon alternate realitiesw and possible futures. This new Discoveries edition is an expanded version of the tale originally printed in chapbook form -- I have not had opportunity to see the "condensed" version, but it won multiple literary awards. I'm honoured to be the first reader to review this new expanded edition for Amazon, and am thankful to have discovered the Tems.

Like the reviewer above, I was comforted by the Neil Gaiman blurb on the front, I love Neil's works and thought that his comment on the front might equal endorsement of a good story. However, after reading this book, I feel as if I may have missed something in the text that would have made me enjoy the book, but I don't want to put myself through reading it again just to find out what I could have missed. I can't put my finger on whatever it is that I did not like, but it could have something to do with the comparisons of fear and parenting, and since I have no children I am unable to relate? I wish I could be more helpful, but the bottom line is that I would not recommend this book.