So after getting back to school, I took out all the novels McFarland had written from the UCSB library and planned to go through them chronologically. This plan would serve two purposes: satisfy my appetite for the McFarland style and through this process develop a good feel for what the McFarland style is. I'm not a very literate person so rarely have I ever explored any one author's works extensively. Around February, I finished School for the Blind. It was good but in retrospect, makes a lot of sense as a first McFarland novel. I thought it much less polished than The Music Room.

And just a bit ago I finished A Face at the Window. It is slightly more gripping and surreal than School for the Blind and closer to the McFarland I loved so much in The Music Room. AFATW contains more compelling intrigue and characters than SFTB. Children ghosts also remind me of Turn of the Screw, though it isn't technically the children who are ghosts in the James. The classic McFarland introspection is at work here once again too. In a way, the introspection is almost what generates the events of this book (one possible interpretation is to relegate all supernatural phenomena to the psyche of the narrator).

Slightly better than SFTB, I'd give AFATW a 7.5 to 8. Singing Boy is next in the McFarland cycle, concurrent with Calvino (which is giving me hard looks for stopping halfway through), Dorothy Parker stories/poems (which I keep dipping in to), and an urge to reread some good sci-fi like the Foundation or Rama triologies.