Rachel Manija Brown's Blog, page 101

Money Shot, by Christa Faust

Money Shot starts with a bang, with the heroine left for dead, shot and tied up and locked in the trunk of a car, struggling to break free. She’s Angel Dare, a middle-aged former porn star who now runs an adult modeling agency. An old friend from her porn days called her up and begged her for a favor, and things went downhill from there. Once she’s out of the car, she ends up on the run and looking for revenge…

Faust is a former pro dominatrix and peep show girl, and the way she writes about the porn and sex work business is wildly different from the way male writers who’ve never been involved in it, except maybe as a customer, do. The content is the same, but the attitude is wildly different; the gaze isn’t on women as objects, but on women as people.

The sex and porn workers are sharply evaluated in both human terms and how they approach their work; the consumers are examined with an even more merciless eye, to see what buttons to push to extract money while avoiding violence. But it’s not purely monetary or purely subsistence work; sexuality is also something Dare enjoys and is driven by and understands.

The world is dark, dark, darker than black. If someone seems awful, they are. If they seem okay, ten to one they either die or betray you. People are used and abused, bought and sold. But the prose style and insider’s attitude and Dare’s hard-bitten, wiseass narration made this a book I read in a single gulp.

He looked like one of the first three guys the hero has to fight before he can get to the real bad guy.

A dominatrix specializing in medical kink, whom Angel gets taken to for medical care since she can’t go to the cops, remarks of her security man, “I removed a bullet from his right thigh two years ago. That was amazing. Well, for me, anyway.”

Money Shot (Hard Case Crime Book 40)[image error]

[image error] [image error]

comments

The Magic Grandfather, by Jay Williams

A charming fantasy about a boy whose eccentric grandfather turns out to be a wizard. When Sam’s grandfather gets accidentally sucked into another dimension, he turns to his cousin Sarah for help. Not because she knows anything about magic—her ambition is to become the first woman locomotive driver—but because she’s the most practical and determined person he knows.

She was afraid of only three things in the world: firstly, that many other girls would beat her to it, and secondly, that when she was grown up there wouldn’t be any more railroads, and lastly, of spiders.

Sarah scorns Sam’s protests that he has no magic talent himself. The next thing he knows, he’s studying to be a wizard with her help, and both of them are evading concerned parents, nosy landlords, and an extremely annoying boy named Wendell who finds out their secret and blackmails them over it.

This book unexpectedly has one of the most realistic-feeling depictions of someone learning magic that I’ve read. It involves a lot of actual studying, and an extremely cool scene in which Sam uses a passage from The Wind in the Willows to practice visualization of written description. It also has an unexpected “TV is bad” message. But mostly it’s just a lot of fun. The annoying Wendell gets turned into a TV set (and then end up even more annoying as it can’t be turned off), adults are helpful in the ways that only adults can be in stuff like telling other adults to go away, and a spider-alien who throws on a bathrobe to do a quick impersonation of a human is appalled to then have to maintain it for a game of gin rummy.

Also, Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine is a book that exists in this world.

Magic Grandfather[image error]

[image error] [image error]

comments

Trick or Treat!

I wrote four stories for Trick or Treat this year, with the themes of "Stephen King" and "cats."

Nine Lives - Sandman - Neil Gaiman.

One day in every century, Death takes on mortal flesh. Human flesh, that is.

At intervals known only to herself, Death becomes a cat for a day.

Thanks to sholio and scioscribe for suggesting several of the scenarios!

A Girl and Her Cat - Pet Sematary - Stephen King.

Church doesn't get put down, and Ellie Creed grows up with an eternal undead cat companion.

Number-One Fan - Misery - Stephen King.

Paul goes to a book signing.

Sophronia - Misery - Stephen King.

Annie Wilkes conjures up Misery Chastain out of the power of fan love.

comments

Trick or Treat Recs

I got a late treat, and an absolutely marvelous one.

Sun and Rain - X-Men comics, Lorna Dane/Alex Summers. An interlude from their time by the Rio Diablo.

A beautiful slice of life about two grad students in love who also happen to be superpowered mutants, living in the desert, studying the landscape, and coping with trauma-related nightmares when you have magnetic powers that can trash your appliances. An absolute delight. I don't think you need to know the canon to enjoy it.

And more excellent stories for your enjoyment:

For Sale: Baby shoes, Never Worn (Reasons Vary). Five not depressing but rather perfectly normal (and one not so normal) ads someone might post to sell a pair of baby shoes that have never been worn.

What it says on the can. And also, this sort of thing is what fandom is for.

They Return to the Sea - Original Work. The Ghost Jellyfish rise.

100 words of ghost jellyfish, what more can you want?

Adrift. Original Art. What unfinished business could a jellyfish possibly have?

Ghoooooost Jeeeeeeeellllyfiiiiiish.

Walking the Floor - The Addams Family. Gomez takes a turn with baby Wednesday.

300 words, every one of them a delight.

Bright Side - Defenders. Jessica gets a Halloween job. She may or may not regret this.

Jessica Jones and Ward Meachum at a kiddie Halloween party. 'Nuff said.

The Distant Triumph Song - Doomsday Book - Connie Willis. “So you’re saying Montoya unearthed a medieval virus,” Kivrin summarized. “And my parents told me my degree would never be good for anything in the real world.”

Lovely, heartbreaking twist on the themes of the book.

The Katabasis of Mrs. Pollifax - Mrs. Pollifax series - Dorothy Gilman. In which Mrs. Pollifax descends to the Underworld to rescue a friend.

Everything I wanted when I prompted "Mrs. Pollifax deals with the supernatural."

Wolves of Ice - Thor: Ragnarok. It walks the dark halls of the ship, they say. It is larger than a bilgesnipe, but it is not a bilgesnipe. It is cold as ice. Its claws clatter on the metal decking and leave frost in their wake. Its eyes glow in the dark.

Well-written, well-plotted, emotionally resonant Thor & Loki story with a really terrific premise.

Under So Many Lids - Twin Peaks. Cooper was far away, and he stood at the foot of a staircase, in a tower made of steel.

Absolutely gorgeously written noir fairytale.

comments

The Magic Meadow, by Alexander Key

Five paralyzed kids live in a miserable room in Belleview, where they never get visitors or to go outside or have any activities, and the staff is largely uncaring. Their one consolation is that they have each other, one kind nurse, and their imaginations. But when Belleview is condemned, they're threatened with being broken up and each placed in different hospitals.

Brick, one of the boys, longs so hard to be somewhere else that he unexpectedly finds himself in a new world, where he sees flowers and sunrises for the first time. And some more mysterious things as well. He also finds that the world has healing properties--not an instant cure, but enough that them all going there and surviving there is feasible. He manages to teleport his friends and their nurse, who loves them and also longs to escape, to the world. But once they're there, they find new dangers they need to survive...

I loved this weird little book. It's full of things I love - psychic kids, healing and recovery, survival, suspense, portals, exploring a strange new world, outcasts, friendship, and coziness coexisting with danger. It's slightly dated but not as much as you might expect - racial diversity is described in somewhat dated ways, but the characters aren't stereotypes.

There is magical disability healing, but it happens slowly enough that the entire book is still about disabled characters doing stuff, and they're never seen as lesser because they're disabled. (They clearly could have stayed paralyzed but still had happy lives on Earth if their circumstances weren't so awful - if they could have stayed together, been treated well, and been taken out to spend time in nature.)

The book ends at a "and there will be many more adventures" point which is sudden but satisfying; I would have liked to have read more, but if there had been more, I'm pretty sure I would have still liked the first part best, while they were all just exploring the new world and figuring out how to survive in it.

Only $1.99 on Kindle!

The Magic Meadow[image error]

[image error] [image error]

comments

A handful of book links

mme_hardy contemplates women written by men looking at themselves in the mirror. (Ambiguity intentional; the male writer also seemed to be observing himself rather than his characters or real women while writing.)

telophase seeks a definition of grimdark...

...which reminded me of The Newbery Award Generator.

Caddie's Cactus

In the beginning, an abandoned young child travels to the time of WWII after accidentally killing her entire family in a car crash. Things seem to be looking up when she befriends the rabbits in a warren slated for gassing. But when her new friend is eaten by wolves, she learns a valuable lesson about terrorism and that there is no such thing as vegetable lambs.

comments

The Man Who Could Not Shudder, by John Dickson Carr

From my giant birthday box o' books from iknowcommawrite ; thank you very much! (No, this is not the butt blade book.)

Carr was a Golden Age mystery writer particularly known for locked-room mysteries. I’d never read anything by him before, though I’d always vaguely intended to. And now that I have, I understand who the Golden Age critics were talking about when they parodied absurdly complex, artificial, and implausible mysteries peopled by characters who appear to have been written by an alien who read a book about human behavior.

The premise is delightful: a mysterious wealthy dude, Clarke, buys a haunted house and invites seven people, each chosen to represent some facet of human psychology when faced with the inexplicable, for a weekend visit. The first third of the book, in which the haunted house does creepy things, is atmospheric and compelling. And then the mystery aspect begins…

To start with, the whole idea of people reacting to the inexplicable in individual ways, doesn’t get followed through at all. The characters are puppets who move around doing things and saying things that make no sense on any level except that they make the plot happen. This goes far beyond common Golden Age character issues, like being stereotypical or sketched-in or subordinate to the plot.

And then there’s the mystery and its solution, which is convoluted, implausible, and bizarre.

( Fucking magnets, how do they work? )

Carr’s atmosphere in the early part is great, and his writing style there is very appealing. But I’m just as happy this style of mystery has fallen out of fashion.

Man Who Could Not Shudder[image error]

[image error] [image error]

comments

Danny Dunn and the Automatic House, by Jay Williams and Raymond Abrashkin

Professor Bulfinch creates a fully automatic house to be shown at the state fair. Meanwhile, Irene babysits a toddler who speaks a language only she can understand and can summon dogs with an ultrasonic scream. These plotlines come together when Irene, Joe, Danny, and the toddler accidentally get locked inside the house.

Not the best of the Danny Dunn books. There are some funny hijinks but the actual premise (trapped in the automatic house) doesn’t occur until too late in the book. Though it’s satisfyingly disastrous when it does, as the house is over-efficient in all the wrong ways: trying to vacuum them, hurling them out of bed, etc.

What’s most striking is that Williams predicted a bunch of things that really did get invented, and which would have seemed extremely prescient… except that he also said how they’d work, and was invariably wrong about that. For instance, he correctly predicted that frozen food could be cooked in minutes, but by a super-oven rather than a microwave. He predicted that we could have libraries to read on a screen at home, but specified that they were in microfiche. If you want to avoid datedness when you write about future technology, it's probably best to just say what something does and not explain how it does it.

However, I note that Williams was 100% correct about several of the problems with making things high-tech when they don't really need to be. A manual garage door can be always be opened, but an automatic one can trap you if the power goes out or the opener malfunctions. And effective measures at keeping thieves out can be equally effective at keeping you out... or in. (Though that isn't just a technical problem. Manual booby traps also tend to be sprung by the people who set them.)

The entire Danny Dunn series is now available on Kindle for $3.99.

Danny Dunn and the Automatic House[image error]

[image error] [image error]

comments

Fellside, by M. R. Carey

By the author of The Girl with all the Gifts. Not as impressive, but it does share the propulsive storytelling quality and the weirdly moving ending.

Jess is a heroin addict who wakes up badly burned in a hospital, and is told that she started a fire which burned down her building and killed one of her neighbors, a ten-year-old boy. She doesn’t remember any of this, but her boyfriend testifies against her and she’s so horrified at the idea that she killed a child that she refuses to fight back. She’s convicted of murder and sent to Fellside, a women’s prison, where she promptly tries to starve herself to death.

I was puzzled by the extreme hatred directed at her by not only the general public but also the other prisoners, as even in the worst case scenario presented at her trial (she tried to kill her boyfriend) she still didn’t intend to kill a child, and in the more likely scenario (she tried to burn some photos, then nodded off) she had no intention of harming anyone. In the grand scheme of things people do that cause the death of a child, you’d think the trial of a woman who did it completely by accident, with zero malicious intent toward the child, wouldn’t even make headlines, let alone cause that level of outrage. As for the prisoners' reactions, wouldn’t there be other women in that same prison for murdering a child deliberately or through abuse?

Once Jess recovers from her suicide attempt, the story broadens to become an ensemble story about the prisoners and employees at Fellside. There’s the woman convict who’s running a drug ring with the help of one of the warders, the doctor blackmailed into taking part, the tragic lesbians... and the ghost of the boy Jess killed, who also can’t remember exactly what happened on the night he died.

As you have probably already guessed, it does of course turn out that she didn’t set the fire. This is strongly hinted at right from the beginning, so I don’t think it’s spoilery. The actual mystery is what really did happen, and what’s up with the ghost. Unfortunately I didn't find either of those all that mysterious either.

The story of Jess and the ghost is compelling enough that I finished the book, and it has a very moving ending. But it didn’t overcome the large amount of page space devoted to the drug-smuggling storyline, which I didn’t find interesting, the level of whump Jess is subjected to, and the implausible degree to which she goes from being an ordinary woman with an addiction to being a saintly martyr.

Fellside[image error]

[image error] [image error]

comments

Yuletide signups close in 36 hours!

yuletide_admin has all the links and how-to.

Anyone signing up for the first time, or the first time in a while?

comments