The Novel Cure: From Abandonment to Zestlessness: 751 Books to Cure What Ails You (38 page)

The apparent ease of this refocusing certainly gives one pause for thought. Does the feeling of hate have anything to do with the object of hate at all? Does it not perhaps have more to do with a determination to find
any
object on which to unleash one’s ire? If this resonates, it’s time to take a break from your hatred, and take a long, hard look within yourself.

See also:
Anger
•
Bitterness
•
Judgmental, being
•
Murderous thoughts
•
Rage

The Woman in Black

SUSAN HILL

•   •   •

Beloved

TONI MORRISON

I
f you count yourself among the haunted, one of your problems will be getting others to take your tales of the haunting seriously. So give them
The Woman in Black
by Susan Hill. Set in Eel Marsh House, a lonely abode that is cut off by the tide twice a day, this novel recounts the story of Arthur Kipps, the solicitor called in to clear up the estate of the house’s recently deceased mistress. He has no idea what the extremely bitter
spirits that haunt the place have in store for him—especially one particular ghost, a woman dressed all in black. The story cannot fail to send multiple chills down your spine, and while doing nothing to cure you of your own haunting, it will persuade your friends to listen to you a bit more closely.

For you, we prescribe Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize–winning
Beloved
. Sethe is an ex-slave living with her teenage daughter Denver—and the ghost of her dead baby. They have grown used to the presence of the spiteful spirit, which shatters mirrors, makes baby handprints in the icing of birthday cakes, and creates puddles of red misery in the doorway that visitors must wade through to come inside. Indeed, most people give the house and its occupants a wide berth. But when Sethe’s old friend Paul D reappears after eighteen years, the ghost seems to go quiet. Until, that is, it returns in human form.

Beloved walks out of the river as a fully clothed adult. She spends a few days summoning up the energy to open her eyelids while her dress dries and her perfectly unlined skin grows accustomed to the sun. Her voice is peculiarly low, she is eternally thirsty, and she seems to possess superhuman strength, able to pick up her older sister with one hand. But Beloved is not a positive force. She drinks in her mother’s love like the milk she never had enough of. She pushes Paul away from Sethe while forcing him, against his better judgment and desire, to “touch her on the inside part.” She gorges on life like a blowfly. We know this cannot last. Sethe has within her the means to placate Beloved, but first she has a difficult truth to acknowledge to herself.

Hauntees, take heart. Whatever haunts you cannot only be faced, but spoken to, negotiated with, even loved. If your ghost wants to come and live with you for a while, spend all your money, and drive your loved ones away, so be it. Once it’s got over itself, you can send it back to where it belongs.

See also:
Demons, facing your

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea

JULES VERNE

H
ay fever can ruin entire summers. When the itchy eyes, streaming nose, tight chest, and difficulty breathing get too bad, you long to plunge into a cool, clear pool—somewhere no pollen can reach you. Or, even better, to hitch a ride in a submarine and go live at the bottom of
the ocean. Perhaps it was hay fever that drew Captain Nemo, the mysterious nautical traveler of the most famous of Verne’s novels, to his peculiar underwater existence. The misanthropic captain shrugged off “that intolerable earthly yoke” and took to living in a “sea unicorn of colossal dimensions” (which naval observers at first took to be a giant narwhal), shunning everyone and everything apart from the sea creatures he studies (see also: Misanthropy). His ship,
Nautilus
, travels at incredible speeds and is capable of scientific wonders far beyond the technological know-how reached on land, since Nemo is both explorer and inventor. He dines off sea cucumber preserves that he believes even a Malaysian would declare to be unrivaled, sugar from the North Sea fucus plants, and marmalade of sea anemone. Nemo is not shy about his success as an underwater despot, calling himself “The Man of the Waters, the Spirit of the Seas,” recognizing no superiors, and confident that he could pay off the ten-billion-franc national debt using the treasures he has found beneath the waves.

Whenever those pesky pollen motes threaten to invade your head, grab Jules Verne and escape to the airlessness of Captain Nemo’s underwater kingdom. You never know—it might inspire you to strap an oxygen tank to your back and take to the depths yourself.

Snow

MAXENCE FERMINE

S
now falls; flame-hair Snow steps light through air.

Bed of ice. Resting blind.

Mind pure.

See also:
Pain, being in

Downriver

IAIN SINCLAIR

I
f you suffer from hemorrhoids, it’s unremitting agony. And we all know about those medical cures. Tie an elastic band around them till they drop off. Freeze them off. Have them amputated. Stuff them back into your arse. Ignore
them. Walk around wanting to shove a cactus up your bum. Have colonic irrigation.

A more gentle cure is to read Iain Sinclair’s novel
Downriver
. In twelve interwoven tales, stretching from the tragic sinking in the Thames of the
Princess Alice
in 1878, when 640 people drowned, to a near future in which the Thatcherite-style government policies of the “Widow” have inexorably destroyed life along London’s river, Sinclair’s enigmatic narrator takes us on a waterside tour. He travels mainly by foot—for Sinclair is the “walking author,” renowned like Dickens for his London perambulations—and in the company of a motley collection of friends: actors, secondhand book dealers, tour guides. We visit a world of criminals and vagrants obsessed with the occult—a London that most of us know little about. His prose is dense and witty, sending your imagination ahead of your feet. Play it as an audiobook and walk as you listen. You’ll be so well entertained that your mind will be taken off your bottom.