House of Stairs

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I do love unreliable narrators, but, my, when you keep company with a narrator who is blazingly honest about his hopes, fears, shortcomings etc and shows the reader his wonderful heart, you just surrender and go along for the anxious ride. Peter is a follower and lacks confidence, Lola is a doer, confident and looks for a way out, Blossom is a fat spoiled girl who grew up with wealthy politicians and seems to have learnt to manipulate people by dividing them against each other. I thought it was interesting that, with the exception of Blossom, each person had a doppelganger of sorts.

Review: Five orphans, named Lola, Peter, Blossom, Abigail and Oliver, all aged 16, suddenly find themselves in a weird place where there are no walls, floor, rooms or anything normal. Except for Lola and Peter who realise that it's not right to go against each other, the remaining three do anything and everything for their hunger. Bittersweet Ending: Peter and Lola have been released from the House, are recovering from their ordeal, and their rejection of the experiment has at least slowed it down.It is always understated, laissez fair events, in which controversial topics are seamlessly woven into the narrative without fanfare or bells going haywire. The whole setup (which is thoroughly, if somewhat clunkily, explained at the end) is about conditioning, and changing people's personality through stimuli and reinforcement to make them behave as desired.

now, even if i do consider this book an my all-time-favourite, i recognise that certain phrases, observations, and or lines of dialogue are decidedly representative of both of the time in which the story is set in (60s/70s england, a lot of white middle-class or otherwise well-off characters) and the time in which it was written (80s). Unlike the movie Cell, of which this will no doubt remind many modern readers, the cause and purpose of the teenagers’ predicament is revealed in the conclusion. Seeing Bell is the catalyst that makes Elizabeth recount her story (transporting us to the late 60s and early 70s) but even if she knows the identity of Bell’s victim she does not share the details of this fateful event with the readers, preferring instead to play her cards close to her chest.

Just a few years prior to its publication there was also the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment – a study designed to ostensibly observe the effects of becoming either a prisoner or prison guard. These intricate processes required much time, and over his career of 60 years he produced 448 incredibly precise prints- an average of only 7 or 8 a year.

Peter and Lola, in contrast, remove themselves to a distant part of the maze, supporting one another in the decision to starve rather than become monsters. In this book, the horrors that these five teens go through are part of a deliberate state-sanctioned experiment in human conditioning - a kind of horrible, Pavlovian Breakfast Club.The disgusted tone of the author seems to me quite inappropriate, especially in a book aimed at teenagers. kleine Lagerspuren am Buch, Inhalt einwandfrei und ungelesen 241632 Sprache: Englisch Gewicht in Gramm: 75. America in the distant future is a Crapsack World with little room to live, hardly any food to eat and even less to go around for the disadvantaged. Eventually they find it is only possible to get this meat machine to operate via abusing each other which Peter and Lola refuse to take part it.