Rachel Manija Brown's Blog, page 139

The Embroidered Sunset, by Joan Aiken

Lucy Culpepper, an orphan pianist with a heart condition and crossed incisors that make her look like a squirrel, was raised by her asshole uncle who squanders her inheritance. All she wants is to study piano from a dying pianist in England, but she can't afford to go... until said asshole uncle sends her on a wild goose chase to see if her ninety-something great-aunt Fenella, an unrecognized genius outsider artist who does painted/embroidered/multimedia Biblical paintings, is actually dead and someone else is cashing her minuscule pension checks.

Lucy goes and meets the dying pianist, and they fall in love. They then spend the entire book apart as he's too sick to travel and she's trying to track down her great-aunt, who lived her whole life with another woman who recently died falling off a cliff. Or maybe her great-aunt is dead and being impersonated by her partner. Or maybe it is the great-aunt pretending to impersonate her partner! A farrago of bizarre events follows, including many strangely charming meetings with a Turkish doctor (unless he's just pretending to be Turkish), several old people's homes, a trio of escaped convicts, a cat everyone wants to kill (which does get killed, FYI), a cat that may or may not have died years ago, and a live cat that may or may not be the killed-by-a-fox-years-ago cat.

I almost forgot to mention that Lucy becomes psychic when she has a migraine.

I'm calling this a Gothic because it was published as one and the cover depicts a woman fleeing a menacing house. However, as I guessed before reading it based on the author, it's actually very hard to categorize generically, is both very funny and very dark, and parodies everything from Gothics to British food to outsider artists to seductive Turks in romances to the sort of idyllic English towns also parodied in Cold Comfort Farm, which this book also slightly resembles. In fact I'm sure it contains many parodies that I didn't catch as I'm unfamiliar with the originals.

I enjoyed this a lot. It's funny, sad, and very very strange. Also very very Joan Aiken.

I am going to quote ALL the Goodreads reviews of this book, including one mostly in German, because all of them together give you a good idea of what it's like to read this book:

Three stars. What a strange novel. It drew me in immediately, and left me thinking after I finished it.

One star. So terrible.

Three stars. Such an odd book this, but written well...Joan Aiken is impressive. I wish I could have had a chance to hear her speak about her books and to ask her some questions. I do very much like definitive answers. lol. One thing is for sure, it is not the kind of novel that I forgot about the next day when moving on to my next. In this respect, she achieved something that other gothic novelists are not known for doing. Get to the ending yourself and we will "talk". :)

Four stars. ich würde auch 5 sterne geben wenn das ende nicht so...so...so "wait what? wtfh???" gewesen wäre. an sich war das buch toll, sehr leichtfüßig und spannend geschrieben, die netten charaktere waren sympathisch und die bösen böse wie es sich gehört. aber das ende, man, man, man.

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Call for Submissions

Sherwood Smith is accepting submissions for an anthology about balls and ballrooms, any genre, happy endings preferred.

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Annihilation, by Jeff Vandermeer

I read this because the movie was pretty great. It turns out that almost everything I loved about the movie isn’t in the book. Also, his prose style still bugs me.

What the movie took from the book: A group of female scientists, including a psychologist, venture into a mysterious area from which previous expeditions either didn’t return or came back changed. The protagonist’s husband was on a previous expedition, and returned in bad shape and unable to say what was there. When the women go inside, they find weird shit, a lighthouse, and accounts by previous expeditions, and mostly don’t survive. Nothing is really explained; it’s all about exploring the mystery.

What’s in the movie that isn’t in the book: Virtually all of the specific things they encounter inside the area.

What surprised me about the book: It’s a Cthulu mythos story. That is, Cthulu isn’t namechecked, but the book is very directly inspired by Lovecraft. The movie does have some Lovecraftian elements and themes, but the connection is loose enough that it didn’t even occur to me when I saw it, while it was instantly obvious when I read the book.

I had the same experience with this book as I’ve had with everything else I’ve tried by Jeff Vandermeer: it’s well-crafted, it’s clearly doing what he wants it to be doing, it’s intellectually interesting, and it's not my cup of tea.

The characters are unnamed in the book, by command of the organization that sent them and for unclear reasons; they go along with this partly, I think, because the psychologist has hypnotized them, and partly because they are strange, detached people. In fact they seem to have been selected partly on this basis. In terms of the effect on the reader, the lack of names and the affectless characters adds to the sense of weirdness and makes you read the book as if you too are a detached scientist/explorer; the characters feel like specimens to be studied rather than people to sympathize with.

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I liked the ending and a lot of the scenes were cool and trippy, but overall Vandermeer isn’t for me. I’m really glad I got to see the movie, though, because I think it made me feel the way people who loved the book felt when they read it.

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March For Our Lives

Today I registered and pre-registered voters via Swing Left at the rally and march for March For Our Lives in Santa Clarita, CA. (I was there because it's part of District 25, a swing district I'm trying to flip. I think the incumbent should be very afraid.) I also nabbed four people who want to volunteer. It was a large-for-the-area, enthusiastic crowd, full of teenagers, children, and parents.

It was freezing when I left, and the forecast said it would be 40 degrees all day. So I wore a heavy coat, thermal tights, and thermal socks. It was not 40 degrees all day, and I regretted all my thermal life choices about 10 minutes into the long and sunny march.

In CA and some other states you can pre-register to vote at age 16, and will be automatically registered when you turn 18. I met a lot of teenagers raring at the bit to vote.

Did any of you attend a march?

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Annihilation

The film opens with a fiery, asteroid-like body striking a lighthouse somewhere on the Gulf Coast, leaving not destruction and calamity in its wake, only a prismatic, oily aura. (Right then and there, Annihilation announces itself as less of an explosion movie and more of an unexplainably unsettling oily aura movie.)

- Vulture review

Five female scientists venture into the weird bubble; only one returns. What's inside is both beautiful and horrific; they and everything inside are changed in beautiful and horrifying ways.

"Take a dangerous trip into an unknown place surrounded by mystery, from which few or none have ever returned" is one of my favorite tropes. Over-explaining is the death of it. Frederik Pohl's Gateway, in which people set out in abandoned alien spaceships for unknown destinations, hoping to get rich but mostly dying or never coming back, was throughly satisfying because it explored the mystery without ever solving it. The sequels explained everything and were terrible. Annihilation, very satisfyingly, delves into the mystery without dissipating it.

I think today is the last day it's in theaters in the US. I saw it last night because it sounded like the sort of movie you should see on the big screen if you want to see it, and that was a good choice. I hadn't intended to see it as I didn't like the preview and thought it was more of a standard horror movie than it is; consequently, I read a lot of spoilers that then convinced me to see it. Knowing a lot of what happened didn't ruin it for me, nor did it really prepare me, as it's not so much about what happens as how it happens and what it's like to watch it unfold.

Annihilation is a science fiction/horror movie loosely based on a book series I haven't read because it's by Jeff Vandermeer, whose prose style bugs me. Apparently the director, Alex Garland, read the first book and then made the movie years later without re-reading it, based on his recollections. Based on seeing the movie, this sounds extremely plausible. I don't mean that as an insult. It feels like a dream recalled.

If you're trying to decide if you want to see it based on how scary/gross it is, it has some very scary moments, some very gory moments, a lot of body horror and disturbing imagery, and implications ranging from unsettling to nightmarish. It does not have jump scares. It also has a lot of very beautiful imagery (much of it also unsettling/creepy) and a lot of sense of wonder. It's mostly slow and meditative and about exploring a strange new world.

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Quick writing question

The eighties are famous for huge hair that now looks hilariously terrible. What decade is famous for dyed hair that now looks hilariously terrible? And also, what accessory or clothing item would have gone with the hideous dye job at the time?

(I'm going for something along the lines of "Nice bob, all you need is a flapper dress." Only for a terrible grown-out dye job.)

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Not Enough Picnics

Osprey Archer writes in reference to Susan Coolidge's Clover, You know what is wrong with modern-day books? Not enough picnics. It’s like at some point someone said “You know, people find it really boring when the characters have a good time,” and therefore good times were banished from books FOREVERMORE, even though really picnics and tea parties and canoe excursions is often exactly what I want.

I also enjoy many old and old-fashioned books like Clover for that exact reason: they have picnics. Picnics, and rambles in the woods, and decorating one's house, and long conversations that are not arguments, and other scenes which are not based on interpersonal conflict. These books generally also have interpersonal conflict. But they have long stretches without it.

Osprey Archer's point about picnics struck me because I had recently had a long discussion over email with Sholio regarding romance novels. We were giving someone notes on their romance novel, and we'd both thought that the balance of interpersonal conflict to the couple having fun together and enjoying each other's company needed to be shifted away from the former and toward the latter.

I realized that this is a thing that writers are often taught not to do. Everything in the story must advance the plot or it should be cut! Every scene must contain conflict! You can't just have characters hanging out together and that's the entire purpose of the scene!

But in a lot of romance, the engine that drives the story isn't conflict, it's relationship development. And conflict (including internal conflict) is not the only way to make that happen. Play is another one: the couple engages in some form of fun shared activity together, character is developed and bonding occurs through that, and the relationship is moved forward. That can also happen based on increased knowledge (getting to know you conversations, or meeting other important people in your loved one's life).

If you're not used to reading romance or have only experienced the high-conflict, slap-kiss type, this can feel very counter-intuitive as a writer and weird as a reader. It feels like you or the writer is doing it wrong. They're not. They're just doing it differently.

The "secret garden" genre, which is a personal favorite of mine, is even less conflict-based than romance. That's the one where a sad, lonely, troubled, or unfulfilled person discovers a garden or some other private space, renovates and spends time in it, and finds their psyche blossoming along with their garden. This genre can have external conflict, and often includes some element of "can I keep this space?" But it's not the primary driver. Neither is internal conflict: the character is typically not conflicted at all about their desire to explore their garden and nourish themselves. The driver of this genre is emotional healing, environmental exploration, and character development.

Conflict is not the only way to build a story. Some stories are primarily driven by other factors, and that's okay. Even in a conflict-driven story, you don't necessarily need it in every scene. (If your book feels exhausting, maybe you need a break from all that conflict; if you want the conflict to count, giving it a rest rather than belaboring it may help.)

I wish more writers felt free to write picnics.

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Registering teenage voters at high schools

I spent today registering and pre-registering high school students to vote during their walkout and lunch period. In California and some other states, you can pre-register at 16 and be automatically registered when you turn 18. You can do it online here. Please spread the word to eligible teenagers or parents of eligible teenagers you know.

We registered or pre-registered about 40 students, and then ran out of registration forms and their lunch period, pretty much simultaneously. However, I spoke to the principal and intend to return. This is something you might be able to do at high schools in your area. It's worth asking.

In between the walkout and lunch, I lurked in the library as it was pretty cold and windy outside. When I sat down in a convenient chair, I spotted my novel Stranger[image error] in the spinner right in front of me. It was such a funny coincidence that since I'd had to explain to the librarian what I was doing there, I mentioned it to her. She opened it, saying I should autograph it, and said, "This is the wrong book."

I looked inside. The book had the cover of my book, and the contents of Maggie Stiefvater's Blue Lily, Lily Blue, which is book three in a series in a different genre from mine. The librarian grabbed the book with that cover from the shelf, and found mine inside. She had accidentally switched the covers. Despite this, both books had been checked out several times. I am still wondering what in the world the hapless readers thought if they began to read without checking the title page. (I personally am not typically in the habit of ascertaining that I'm reading the correct book before I begin to read.)

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Why I love being a writer

I just emailed a friend this question in complete seriousness:

How many miles do you think is vaguely plausible for people to think they can walk in a blizzard if they have supernatural resiliency and can also turn into snow leopards?

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Fantastic article

This New Yorker article by Kathryn Schultz with the amazing title When Twenty-Six Thousand Stinkbugs Invade Your Home is the sort of writing that makes me happy that nonfiction exists. It's disgusting, hilarious, informative, disturbing, extremely well-written, and definitely should not be read by insect-phobes. It is the exact opposite of the book in my last nonfiction entry: an article about something I have no pre-existing interest in and felt that perhaps I would be happier knowing nothing about it, which sucked me in by sheer force of writing and made me delighted that I had read it. And also gave me a new phobia. Thanks Kathryn!

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I was so impressed that I looked up Kathryn Schultz's nonfiction book, Being Wrong, and discovered that it is currently $1.99 on Amazon. Snatched it up, can't wait to read.

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