Hawkes Harbor

This was, pretty much, the worst book I've ever read, or at least the worst book I finished. And no, I wasn't hoping for the new Outsiders, or a typical SE Hinton (although I did pick it up because of the author).

But I love pirates and vampires and homoerotic undertones, so I thought great! How can it miss?

(By a wide margin, apparently.)

I really felt that, after the author had completed the first third of a book about a kid who becomes a pirate, she couldn't figure out where it was going, so she shelved it. Then, years later, she learned that vampires were the in thing, so she tacked on the middle third of the book. Then she realized that her vampire was really evil, and people these days expected them to be nice, so suddenly the show more vampire that imprisoned and literally tortured the MC for the middle third of the book was suddenly kind to him and took care of him.

I like a plot twist as much as anyone, but these aren't plot twists; this is a novel that is completely directionless. show less

What comes to mind when I say “S.E. Hinton”? The Outsiders. Pony Boy. “Nothing gold can stay.” Maybe Rumble Fish. Or Matt Dillon.

But what about…vampires?

After Susan (!) E. Hinton’s iconic books, The Outsiders (1967), That Was Then, This is Now (1971), and Rumble Fish (1975), she kept writing. And one of the novels she wrote, in 2004, was Hawkes Harbor.

I listened to this book on CD. After the first disc, I thought I’d be listening to the tale of a troubled young man, very similar to those titles I just mentioned. We get a glimpse of Jamie Sommers’ childhood, then his wild times as a sailor and smuggler. We know he has gotten into trouble because he’s telling all this to a psychiatrist in a mental institution.

However, show more on disc two, things get weird. The book becomes a classic tale of…boy meets vampire.

TL;DR ***SPOILER ALERT*** Boy meets vampire. Vampire enslaves boy. Boy goes crazy. Vampire commits boy to asylum. Both boy and vampire are cured. They become besties and live happily ever after.

WHAT the WHAT???

First of all, vampire gets cured? I had to make sure I hadn’t skipped a disc when this just casually came up. While Jamie is “away,” the vampire somehow meets AND IS CURED BY a doctor/historian named Louisa.

So the relationship of SLAVE to MASTER becomes just another friendly employer/employee, roommates in a big, haunted house kind of thing, with a casual mention of Stockholm syndrome. No big deal, right? The two men even go on a cruise together, where they both find romantic and sexual adventure.

My only way of processing this is to think that Ms. Hinton was somehow, consciously or unconsciously, writing an allegory about child abuse. Our vampire, Grenville Hawkes, is the abusive parent, and Jamie the child. Jamie is absolutely traumatized by Grenville’s abuse, is helpless to escape it, and therefore copes as best he can. However, when Grenville “reforms,” Jamie gradually comes to trust him, and they have a mutually respectful relationship. Is this possible in formerly abusive parent/child relationships? I don’t know if it’s common, but I’ve heard of it in my own extended family.

The attempt falls flat, though. Too much telling, not showing, especially about important relationships. For example, you can never tell if Louisa’s attitude toward Jamie on a given day will be bossy or fond. No real development happens for her, she just shifts personalities as needed for each scene.

So anyway, if you want to read a vampire tale that does not have sparkly skin or werewolves, but does have male bonding on a cruise ship, give it a try. It may be the weirdest book you’ve read all year. show less

This book started as one thing and turned into another halfway. It's almost as if the author had been sketching lots of different stories and then had a not so brilliant idea to put them together. There's some adventuring at the sea, a pinch of psychological horror with a young man in a mental institution and all leads to a weird combination of relationship drama, coming of age story and vampires. The outcome is incoherent and a bit pointless. The most interesting things are happening off-screen, like a vampire being cured from vampirism. In my opinion the author focused on the wrong story and protagonist.

This book, S.E. Hinton's first in many years, is not a YA novel; rather, it is a strangely-hard-to-categorize book about a young man and his ties to a wealthy and eccentric vampire. I enjoyed this book, although Hinton's spare style meant that a great deal went unexplained, such as why Jamie's childhood was imprtant to the story. The Publisher's Weekly review said it was "dark, funny, scary, and suspenseful," and even though I would only agree with half of that, I did enjoy reading it.

The quote from the new York Times on the cover ('Vampires, pirates and lusty French socialites') led me to expect something very different. I found the beginning with it's disjointed flashbacks a bit forced. But once the action moved to Hawkes Harbour, I was enthralled by the story. An interesting new take on the relationship between a vampire and his prey.

From my perspective, Hawkes Harbor could essentially be described as a re-telling of (or a story inspired by) the gothic television soap opera "Dark Shadows" storyline (1966-1971). Where "Dark Shadows" was told from the perspective of the governess Victoria Winters, Hawkes Harbor is told from the perspective of Jamie Sommers (i.e., in the series, Willie Loomis) who was bitten by the vampire Grenville Hawkes (in the series, Barnabas Collins). The appeal to Dark Shadows fans is imagining how Willie ended up coming to Collinsport (Hawkes Harbor) in the first place and, later, what might have happened to him and Barnabas, after the series ended in 1971. As a Dark Shadows fan, overall, I enjoyed reading Hawkes Harbor; knowing the show more relationship between the characters Willie Loomis and Barnabas made the ending of Hawkes Harbor a moving and unexpected one. show less

I listened to this book on CD and had to force myself to keep going past the first couple of disks, since I was finding it not to my taste. But I persisted - moving from boredom through dismayed surprise at the turn that the plot took midway through, when the main character opened up a casket to find a vampire in it! - and finally, to real enjoyment of the way that the lives of the main character and his employer changed, grew, and interwined. I continue to be surprised at the plot device that the author uses that somehow turns the vampire back into a human being, but I guess that's just an acceptable fictional device?