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Blind Walls
It's a monstrous maze of a mansion, built by a grief-ridden heiress. A tour guide, about to retire, has given his spiel for so many years that he's gone blind. On this last tour, he's slammed with second sight. He sees the ghosts he's always felt were the bedeviled heiress, her servants, and a young carpenter who lands his dream job only to become a lifelong slave to her obsession. The workman's wife makes it to shore, but he's cast adrift. And the tour guide comes home to his cat.
228 pages, Paperback
Published June 1, 2019
88 people want to read
About the author
Conrad Bishop
21 books126 followers55 years of theatre work & writing in collaboration with Elizabeth Fuller. Ph.D. Stanford, but left college teaching to found a professional theatre ensemble, Theatre X, then formed The Independent Eye, now in its 41st season. 60+ plays & revues produced, both by the Eye and theatres nationally, as well as 4 public radio series. Bishop & Fuller twice recipients of NEA writing fellowships. Many years of national touring. Raised in Midwest, lived in Chicago, Milwaukee, Lancaster, Philadelphia, and now Sebastopol, CA. Began writing prose fiction in 2012.
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January 1, 2020[Disclaimer: I know the authors, so no star rating, just some thoughts.]
This third Bishop/Fuller novel is adapted fairly closely from their 1997 play Hammers , which I liked a lot. The overall approach of the adaptation makes sense to me, with the opportunity to dig deeper into the backgrounds and points of view of the main characters and flesh out their day-to-day experiences; my problems with the book mostly boil down to it badly needing an editor. It's full of strong ideas, which might be enough to carry it successfully for most readers; being very familiar with the play and its development, I'm maybe a little too close to this material to avoid being frustrated by the presentation.
Like Hammers, Blind Walls is inspired by Sarah Winchester's mansion in San Jose, constructed eccentrically over 38 years, and the legend that she did this to placate the ghosts created by her family's weapons business. The legend is almost certainly false, and the book's "Sophia Weatherlee", while she's an emotionally haunted person in general, is basically doing this project just because she can—or at least that's a reasonable guess, because Sophia is one of the main characters whose point of view we don't get; she's sort of an immovable object that the other characters run up against, whose decisions might have some kind of internal logic or might just come from bitter boredom, and ultimately all that matters is that other people have chosen to do whatever she says. The main such person is Chuck, a young carpenter who gets hired early on and soon realizes that he can make a whole career out of this house as long as he sacrifices his standards, his judgment, his time, his happiness, and other people's lives... which he does. The house isn't built because of ghosts; it's haunted because it was built.
That's a powerful tragic arc, with a lot of allegorical potential. Chuck's relationship to Sophia's little world is a lot like how we all relate to larger systems that we've struck some kind of bargain with: a company, a career, or a country. Each compromise seems to make sense at the time, and the fact that the whole project might be totally nuts seems harmless enough as long as it keeps people employed (one of the best and saddest ideas is that Chuck originally likes the job not just because it's steady work, but because the lack of real deadlines means he can actually do good work), and once it's clear that it's not harmless it's too late. The details of how things get worse one step at a time are well thought out, and the changing power dynamic and semi-friendship between Chuck and the guy who hires him are really interesting.
However, this is only indirectly Chuck's story. The frame story is that Raymond, a very weary blind man who has spent as much time being a tour guide for the present-day version of the house as Chuck spent in the past building it, is leading one last tour before retirement when he starts to have visions of Sophia, Chuck, Chuck's wife Dee, and the whole tragedy. The tour guide was a minor character in Hammers and Raymond is much more vivid, but he also embodies something about the novel that I find frustrating: a kind of wheel-spinning and inability to commit to doing one thing versus another. Is Chuck's story real? Is Raymond just dreaming it? Are the tourists also seeing it? Was the house built last century or recently? The authors clearly felt there was value in keeping those things ambiguous (they talk about it in the afterword), but while I can imagine a magic-realist approach like that working, for me it's undermined by repeatedly pointing out the ambiguity and repeatedly reminding us of the questions that won't be answered: over and over again in virtually the same words, Raymond wonders why he's seeing these ghosts, are they real, why should he even care about them, why is the timeline so vague, etc. Every time that comes up again feels like a missed opportunity for Raymond to actually do something or have a different thought.
That's one major area where editing might have helped; another is the overall tone of the prose. It's not unusual here for every single sentence in a paragraph to contain one or two new metaphors or similes, just mentioned in passing but elaborate enough that they make you stop to unpack them, so the flow is very choppy. One by one these are often vivid and funny; in this quantity, they're exhausting. And in the context of a first-person narration (Raymond) or close third-person (Chuck), they often clash with the characterizations: we're told that Raymond doesn't like fiction and Chuck doesn't like metaphors, and a lot of this stuff doesn't sound like anything either of them would think or say, it's just compulsive elaboration by an authorial voice. You will know within a few pages whether this is a problem for you; it's pretty consistent throughout.
The main exception is in the parts about Dee, where another style comes forward, simpler and more assured. As in the play, Dee's role is at first mostly reactive as Chuck gets himself more and more lost; but once it's clear that there's not much more she can do, she develops an independent story that keeps edging toward tragic clichés but then reframing them in surprising ways. It's a necessary counterpoint to Chuck's grim one-way march and Raymond's stuckness: when committing to a bad idea for the sake of security isn't an option, then what does insecurity and freedom actually look like? This is the most grounded material in the book (along with Chuck's early chapters where he's still just a young guy doing construction work in a realist mode), which is good and bad; the bad part is that the huge contrast in style with everything else makes it harder to see Dee's and Chuck's stories as parallel in any way, like maybe the problem is not just that Chuck made certain life choices but that Chuck decided to be in a completely different book by different authors.
Despite those complaints, I can certainly say it doesn't remind me of any other novel and there's a lot to chew on. I definitely recommend reading the script of the original play, which is online, and if that grabs you then you should read this.
This third Bishop/Fuller novel is adapted fairly closely from their 1997 play Hammers , which I liked a lot. The overall approach of the adaptation makes sense to me, with the opportunity to dig deeper into the backgrounds and points of view of the main characters and flesh out their day-to-day experiences; my problems with the book mostly boil down to it badly needing an editor. It's full of strong ideas, which might be enough to carry it successfully for most readers; being very familiar with the play and its development, I'm maybe a little too close to this material to avoid being frustrated by the presentation.
Like Hammers, Blind Walls is inspired by Sarah Winchester's mansion in San Jose, constructed eccentrically over 38 years, and the legend that she did this to placate the ghosts created by her family's weapons business. The legend is almost certainly false, and the book's "Sophia Weatherlee", while she's an emotionally haunted person in general, is basically doing this project just because she can—or at least that's a reasonable guess, because Sophia is one of the main characters whose point of view we don't get; she's sort of an immovable object that the other characters run up against, whose decisions might have some kind of internal logic or might just come from bitter boredom, and ultimately all that matters is that other people have chosen to do whatever she says. The main such person is Chuck, a young carpenter who gets hired early on and soon realizes that he can make a whole career out of this house as long as he sacrifices his standards, his judgment, his time, his happiness, and other people's lives... which he does. The house isn't built because of ghosts; it's haunted because it was built.
That's a powerful tragic arc, with a lot of allegorical potential. Chuck's relationship to Sophia's little world is a lot like how we all relate to larger systems that we've struck some kind of bargain with: a company, a career, or a country. Each compromise seems to make sense at the time, and the fact that the whole project might be totally nuts seems harmless enough as long as it keeps people employed (one of the best and saddest ideas is that Chuck originally likes the job not just because it's steady work, but because the lack of real deadlines means he can actually do good work), and once it's clear that it's not harmless it's too late. The details of how things get worse one step at a time are well thought out, and the changing power dynamic and semi-friendship between Chuck and the guy who hires him are really interesting.
However, this is only indirectly Chuck's story. The frame story is that Raymond, a very weary blind man who has spent as much time being a tour guide for the present-day version of the house as Chuck spent in the past building it, is leading one last tour before retirement when he starts to have visions of Sophia, Chuck, Chuck's wife Dee, and the whole tragedy. The tour guide was a minor character in Hammers and Raymond is much more vivid, but he also embodies something about the novel that I find frustrating: a kind of wheel-spinning and inability to commit to doing one thing versus another. Is Chuck's story real? Is Raymond just dreaming it? Are the tourists also seeing it? Was the house built last century or recently? The authors clearly felt there was value in keeping those things ambiguous (they talk about it in the afterword), but while I can imagine a magic-realist approach like that working, for me it's undermined by repeatedly pointing out the ambiguity and repeatedly reminding us of the questions that won't be answered: over and over again in virtually the same words, Raymond wonders why he's seeing these ghosts, are they real, why should he even care about them, why is the timeline so vague, etc. Every time that comes up again feels like a missed opportunity for Raymond to actually do something or have a different thought.
That's one major area where editing might have helped; another is the overall tone of the prose. It's not unusual here for every single sentence in a paragraph to contain one or two new metaphors or similes, just mentioned in passing but elaborate enough that they make you stop to unpack them, so the flow is very choppy. One by one these are often vivid and funny; in this quantity, they're exhausting. And in the context of a first-person narration (Raymond) or close third-person (Chuck), they often clash with the characterizations: we're told that Raymond doesn't like fiction and Chuck doesn't like metaphors, and a lot of this stuff doesn't sound like anything either of them would think or say, it's just compulsive elaboration by an authorial voice. You will know within a few pages whether this is a problem for you; it's pretty consistent throughout.
The main exception is in the parts about Dee, where another style comes forward, simpler and more assured. As in the play, Dee's role is at first mostly reactive as Chuck gets himself more and more lost; but once it's clear that there's not much more she can do, she develops an independent story that keeps edging toward tragic clichés but then reframing them in surprising ways. It's a necessary counterpoint to Chuck's grim one-way march and Raymond's stuckness: when committing to a bad idea for the sake of security isn't an option, then what does insecurity and freedom actually look like? This is the most grounded material in the book (along with Chuck's early chapters where he's still just a young guy doing construction work in a realist mode), which is good and bad; the bad part is that the huge contrast in style with everything else makes it harder to see Dee's and Chuck's stories as parallel in any way, like maybe the problem is not just that Chuck made certain life choices but that Chuck decided to be in a completely different book by different authors.
Despite those complaints, I can certainly say it doesn't remind me of any other novel and there's a lot to chew on. I definitely recommend reading the script of the original play, which is online, and if that grabs you then you should read this.
April 1, 2019
Blind Walls is an unusual story narrated by a character named Raymond Smollet. He is a dour, middle-aged creature with a penchant for drinking away his troubles each night and chasing a life of regret as a tour guide for the Weatherlee Mansion. He is legally blind and in his perception this has limited his career options and perhaps his personal ones too?
I struggled to feel close to Raymond, because by the time we meet him in many ways he is more “dead” than the ghosts who arrive to speak to him in his final day at a job that clearly does not fill the gaps in his life.
The historic mansion is a dark and ominous character and is loosely fashioned after the infamous Winchester House in San Jose, California.
Sophia Weatherlee the famous recluse and Weatherlee widow is introduced to the reader via a ghost that emerges to tell the story of the house through the eyes of its owner. A woman in black who still wears the Victorian style mourning attire and comes off as selfish, petulant and emotionally unstable with a fierce need to control everything around her.
A blue-collar man named Chuck emerges who becomes in many ways married to the house that seems to expand and suck everyone into its vortex. Who initially sees his job as the foreman a blessing, a curse, then a defining aspect of who he was and who he has also become.
At the point in the story when the vision of Chuck arrived, I had a tough time trying to decipher who was speaking to and in some ways I was a bit lost in the images which were very strong and powerful as in, Tiffany windows, stairways to nowhere and the endless rooms and galleries.
There was an interesting play on who was alive and who was no longer living as the story of Chuck, Dee and Joey move to the forefront and basically took over the plot as Seymour the tour guide is beset with images so powerful that he heard conversations and saw inside the lives of the people who had once worked in the house.
In essence this story was one of deep regret, choices, obsession and loneliness. It touched on many aspects of the human condition, but more often than not they were focused on the unhappy ones. I expected to have more of a ghostly aspect rather than harsh realism where ghosts are wallowing in the mistakes they’ve made.
The character development was exceptional for Chuck as the affable, nice guy who made his way in the world and felt guilty as he laid down his hammers and became more of a white-collar figure and suffered imposter syndrome as he became more affluent.
The second character that stood out was Sophia Weatherlee. It was difficult to know if she felt guilt for the deaths her husband’s arms companies assisted with by making munitions used in warfare or if she was always about her own needs and wants and used this to manipulate other people’s feelings?
Although this novel was well developed and very well written, I struggled to get through it, because it was more about the grim aspects of real-life relationships than the ethereal and commonly assumed adventures of ghosts or spirits and where they might travel to once the body is gone.
I actually felt badly for Raymond who spent his life retelling the history of the house for minimal pay and the ghosts hijacked his personal story on his last day which quite overshadowed his part in the story.
Thank you so much to the publisher and Netgalley for offering me a free ARC copy in exchange for an honest review.
I struggled to feel close to Raymond, because by the time we meet him in many ways he is more “dead” than the ghosts who arrive to speak to him in his final day at a job that clearly does not fill the gaps in his life.
The historic mansion is a dark and ominous character and is loosely fashioned after the infamous Winchester House in San Jose, California.
Sophia Weatherlee the famous recluse and Weatherlee widow is introduced to the reader via a ghost that emerges to tell the story of the house through the eyes of its owner. A woman in black who still wears the Victorian style mourning attire and comes off as selfish, petulant and emotionally unstable with a fierce need to control everything around her.
A blue-collar man named Chuck emerges who becomes in many ways married to the house that seems to expand and suck everyone into its vortex. Who initially sees his job as the foreman a blessing, a curse, then a defining aspect of who he was and who he has also become.
At the point in the story when the vision of Chuck arrived, I had a tough time trying to decipher who was speaking to and in some ways I was a bit lost in the images which were very strong and powerful as in, Tiffany windows, stairways to nowhere and the endless rooms and galleries.
There was an interesting play on who was alive and who was no longer living as the story of Chuck, Dee and Joey move to the forefront and basically took over the plot as Seymour the tour guide is beset with images so powerful that he heard conversations and saw inside the lives of the people who had once worked in the house.
In essence this story was one of deep regret, choices, obsession and loneliness. It touched on many aspects of the human condition, but more often than not they were focused on the unhappy ones. I expected to have more of a ghostly aspect rather than harsh realism where ghosts are wallowing in the mistakes they’ve made.
The character development was exceptional for Chuck as the affable, nice guy who made his way in the world and felt guilty as he laid down his hammers and became more of a white-collar figure and suffered imposter syndrome as he became more affluent.
The second character that stood out was Sophia Weatherlee. It was difficult to know if she felt guilt for the deaths her husband’s arms companies assisted with by making munitions used in warfare or if she was always about her own needs and wants and used this to manipulate other people’s feelings?
Although this novel was well developed and very well written, I struggled to get through it, because it was more about the grim aspects of real-life relationships than the ethereal and commonly assumed adventures of ghosts or spirits and where they might travel to once the body is gone.
I actually felt badly for Raymond who spent his life retelling the history of the house for minimal pay and the ghosts hijacked his personal story on his last day which quite overshadowed his part in the story.
Thank you so much to the publisher and Netgalley for offering me a free ARC copy in exchange for an honest review.
June 1, 2019
Many people have heard of the strange Winchester home with its stairwells that led to nowhere and all kinds of bizarre architectural features with no purpose—or was there a purpose? The paranormal fiction account of the house and the weapons heiress behind its creation is expertly imagined by the authors. Bishop and Fuller weave a ghostly account about more than one character who goes mad by giving their lives away to a house built to appease the dead—victims of the weapons created.
Mrs. Weatherlee, the elderly, eccentric heiress responsible for endless building onto her house, feels guilty. How many people died because her family created something destructive that made them rich? Sadly, she drags others into her world, innocent, likeable characters who are drawn by the hands of experts. Every character in this novel is unique, and we are made to see each of their points of view.
Occasionally, I was confused by the timing. There is a lot of switching back and forth between eras, but the overall effect of this was good for the plot and creating a sense of different values.
The characters drive this story, but the setting is critical. This tale could not be told around any but this one-of-a-kind, constantly enlarged, creepy house with the power to ruin people.
The stories of the characters—past and present—overlap and moves the suspense at an ever increasing pace. Themes of family versus work penetrate every pore of the tale, and a psychological drama plays out. It really is unpredictable. How could this possibly end? We learn a little about motives and come to understand irrationality a touch by delving into the lives of these people. The style is realism, an ironic thing for a paranormal story, but symbolism enhances the plot. The mood is somewhat tragic but interesting. I recommend this story for people who love memorable characters and settings and stories told without holding back the punches.
Mrs. Weatherlee, the elderly, eccentric heiress responsible for endless building onto her house, feels guilty. How many people died because her family created something destructive that made them rich? Sadly, she drags others into her world, innocent, likeable characters who are drawn by the hands of experts. Every character in this novel is unique, and we are made to see each of their points of view.
Occasionally, I was confused by the timing. There is a lot of switching back and forth between eras, but the overall effect of this was good for the plot and creating a sense of different values.
The characters drive this story, but the setting is critical. This tale could not be told around any but this one-of-a-kind, constantly enlarged, creepy house with the power to ruin people.
The stories of the characters—past and present—overlap and moves the suspense at an ever increasing pace. Themes of family versus work penetrate every pore of the tale, and a psychological drama plays out. It really is unpredictable. How could this possibly end? We learn a little about motives and come to understand irrationality a touch by delving into the lives of these people. The style is realism, an ironic thing for a paranormal story, but symbolism enhances the plot. The mood is somewhat tragic but interesting. I recommend this story for people who love memorable characters and settings and stories told without holding back the punches.
May 5, 2019
Seriously great writing skills and such an eye for description. The characterisation is perfect, all characters so unique and distinguishable from each other. This book really has the potential to be a five star, if it wasn't for one issue - the tour guide. Don't get me wrong, he's a great character, but not for this story. The real story was Dee and Chuck. The tour guide genuinely, to me, looked like he was just there as a way to piece the main story together. He had no relevance at all. Every time I'd be getting into the story, he would pop up again, distracting me from what I really wanted to read. And when he did pop up, it wasn't like he should be there, it was more a case of he popped up just so you wouldn't forget about him. Shame, without him I would have given it a 5 star rating.
April 15, 2022
I’m a little torn on this one - on the one hand, overall, the plot was fairly interesting. On the other, I’m not crazy about the main character (unsure if that’s intentional). I liked the ghosts, and found their stories to be quite interesting. Overall, a solid read, with both high and low points.
June 16, 2021
A blind man finally sees the ghosts he knew all along lived there. The story is intriguing. Blind Walls is a great read.
Quite enjoyable novel and highly recommend.
Quite enjoyable novel and highly recommend.
April 10, 2019
Blind Walls was such a struggle to finish. I was excited to read this book , but was so disappointed because it was so slow.
May 18, 2019
A relentlessly surprising super-natural thriller that is fantastically terrifying. Blind Walls accounts the series of mind-bending realities that provoke past fears, both realized and unknown.
Biship & Fuller will not just hold your attention cover to cover, but will continue to confront you far past the last sentence.
Biship & Fuller will not just hold your attention cover to cover, but will continue to confront you far past the last sentence.
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