Rachel Manija Brown's Blog, page 16

The Regulators, by Stephen King writing as Richard Bachman

A peaceful suburb in Ohio, at the height of a glorious American summer, is the victim of a driveby shooting from strange-looking vans. And then things start to get really weird, as reality begins phasing in and out, with the suburb sometimes becoming a caricature of a western town. And no one in the suburb, which is besieged by bizarre attackers, can get out or even call out.

Meanwhile, apart from all the running and shooting going on outside, a woman is trapped inside her home with her eight-year-old autistic nephew and the creature possessing him. This is the best part of the book, as it's the only one with emotional weight. Audrey and Seth love each other, but he's trapped by the thing possessing him and she's trapped by her refusal to leave him. (Is it a great portrayal of autism? Not really. Is Seth a character with his own agency and a personality that isn't just "autistic?" Yes.)

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The Regulators is loosely related to Desperation in some ways that are typical of a companion book - some shared characters, a very loosely similar plot - and some ways that I have never seen before, like characters who share names but are otherwise completely different people. In Desperation David is the son and Ralph is the father; this is reversed in The Regulators, and their personalities are totally different. In other cases, the characters have more similarities: Johnny Marinville, the asshole literary writer from Desperation, becomes Johnny Marinville, the good guy children's writer in The Regulators.

In general, I preferred the more normal sorts of similarities, like a different version of the same villain, to the weird ones like characters who share names but nothing else. What I'd have most enjoyed would have been the Desperation characters confronted with the Regulators situation, but we don't quite get that. The shared elements seem kind of random. The most interesting one is the implied similarity in setting, which suggests that a suburb isn't so different from a middle-of-nowhere small town.

The Regulators has a fun concept but it's all over the place and very thinly characterized. The prose isn't as good as in Desperation (the beginning tries for gonzo grandeur and mostly just hits florid), and, surprisingly, it's not about religion at all. As far as I could tell, it's not about anything in particular. The Audrey-and-Seth portions feel like an excerpt from another, better novel. Still, I have to give points to a novel where one of the ultimate weapons against the forces of darkness is a box of Ex-Lax.



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Desperation, by Stephen King

"God is cruel."

Three sets of travelers - a married couple, a family on vacation, and a self-important aging writer ("America's only truly great white male novelist") trying to revive his reputation by riding a motorcycle across America to write Travels with Harley - get arrested by a very strange cop and taken into the seemingly empty town of Desperation, Nevada.

This opening sequence is fantastically tense and sometimes darkly funny, tapping into the primal fears of being arrested, being framed, and being under the control of a malevolent and insane authority figure. It's my favorite part of the book. The cop is a bizarre and memorable character.

“You have the right to remain silent,' the big cop said in his robot's voice. 'If you do not choose to remain silent, anything you say may be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney. I'm going to kill you. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided for you. Do you understand your rights as I have explained them to you?”

This book is fun to read with no idea of where it's going, so I'm putting spoilers about the general plot and themes under a cut. It has some deep and serious themes conveyed by means of a pretty batshit plot, which is not uncommon with King but is taken to an extreme here; this is the same book where someone hurls away an attacking rat, and King describes the flying rat as a ratsteroid.

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Some of the prose is very beautiful, especially on grief, and there's two set-piece scenes that are outstanding. (The opening where everyone gets trapped, and the terrifying scene where Cynthia and Steve explore the deserted mine offices.) But overall, it's not one of my favorites.

The other interesting thing about Desperation is that King wrote a companion book to it, The Regulators, as Richard Bachmann. It's possibly one of the weirdest instances ever of a companion book, and I will review it tomorrow.



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Cold Moon Over Babylon, by Michael McDowell

Though she had no remembrance of her parents, Margaret Larkin never went swimming in the river, for fear that she would be dragged down to the bottom by her drowned mother and father.

The small southern town of Babylon contains the unsubtly named river Styx, in which Margaret Larkin's parents died in a peculiar accident involving a boat and a sackful of rattlesnakes. Margaret, age 14, lives with her adult brother Jerry, their grandmother, and a barely-hanging-in-there blueberry farm. Until Margaret is mysteriously murdered and tossed into the Styx...

This is not a story in which a girl dies to motivate some man to avenge her. It's a story about how a dead girl, with the help of the river, avenges her own murder.

The identity of the murderer is revealed fairly early on, so we get to enjoy watching Margaret serve cold, muddy revenge on him. (Her family helps.) A review I now can't locate called this book something like "the scariest book I ever read about squishing sounds," which is largely true. Cold Moon Over Babylon is all about luxuriating in prose and atmosphere and building dread leading up to a satisfyingly batshit climax in which river water isn't the only thing that squishes.

I have now read three books by Michael McDowell, all three of which I greatly enjoyed, and can say confidently that he was the go-to author for atmospheric southern gothic horror with slow-burn creepiness and dark comedy stemming from sharp observation of character and setting. It's not just that his settings are characters in their own right, but the combination of a place and its inhabitants and culture is also its own character.

Content note: rape (not graphic), gleefully gory violence.

Cold Moon Over Babylon by Michael McDowell





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This Wretched Valley, by Jenny Kiefer

Dylan, a professional rock climber who just got signed to represent a sports gear company, travels into the wilderness of Kentucky to be the first to climb a newly discovered rock wall. She's accompanied by her boyfriend (and his dog), the guy who found the wall, and a biology student.

Seven months later, three of their corpses are found in very odd and inexplicable states. One of them is reduced to a polished skeleton, with no signs of violence and every bone in perfect order! Others have parts missing but are weirdly well preserved! The book then flashes back to the four of them setting out...

The Dyatlov Pass-like premise, the intriguing and very specific rock climbing details, the author being a rock climber herself, and the killer cover tempted me to read this book. It starts off well, with the four discovering a creepy valley full of poisonous plants, many not native to Kentucky, and spooky timey-wimey effects. Apart from some terrific climbing scenes, everything is downhill from there.

I wouldn't call the book wretched, tempted as I am, but it's not very good. The characters are very thin. Bad things happen to them, they run around and scream and throw up, and that's about it. The extremely compressed time scale - the entire trip only lasts about three days - means they spend most of their time trying and failing to leave, with no room or time to develop relationships, attempt to fight back against whatever's keeping them there, try to figure out what's going on, or develop any plans beyond "hike out" and "climb to try to get a cell phone signal." And the explanation of why their bodies were in the shape they were in is a let-down.

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Also, the prose is not good. For instance, a character hears pangs and howls in the night. A pang is a feeling, not a sound.

Hell of a cover, though.



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Getting Off, by Lawrence Block

scioscribe mailed me this book a while back, which has been lurking on my shelves until the moment when I felt like reading "the butt knife book."

Lawrence Block wrote some trashy lesbian pulp novels under the pseudonym of Jill Emerson when he was knocking out pseudonymous pulp. Getting Off, rather inexplicably, was a revival of the pseudonym written in 2011 for Hard Case Crime. Possibly he just wanted a Hard Case Crime cover with a butt knife. (Understandable.)

The protagonist is a young, gorgeous, hot serial killer who fucks men and murders them immediately afterward. Before she got into the habit of ALWAYS killing after fucking, there were five men she fucked who she didn't kill for various reasons, mostly because circumstances intervened to prevent her. She didn't keep track of them at the time, but when the book opens, she's decided that she really ought to keep her perfect fuck/kill record by tracking them down and killing them.

This plus Block's snappy writing would have made a fun pulp novelette. Unfortunately, it's a full-length book and not even a particularly short one. It feels very padded. There's only so many murders of douchey dudes you can read about in a sitting. It's like eating an entire box of Sees chocolates in a sitting, if they're all the same one and it's not even your favorite.

My other problem with the book is her motivation, which is that her father was raping her for her entire childhood, she eventually kills him, and after that murder gives her an erotic thrill. There isn't a ton of detail on the child rape but even a little is more than I wanted. I'd have preferred that either there's no trauma and she kills people because she's a homicidal maniac, or that she thought the world had too many assholes and she was on a mission to thin them out, or really almost anything other than child rape. That's a realistic explanation but it's otherwise not remotely a realistic book.

The lesbian angle comes in about three-quarters of the way in, when she falls for another woman who is totally fine with murdering. Unfortunately, by then I was pretty done with the whole thing.

Not one of Block's better books but its existence is probably worthwhile given that it brought us all the butt knife.

BEHOLD THE BUTT KNIFE!



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My Father's Dragon; Elmer and the Dragon; The Dragons of Blueland, by Ruth Stiles Gannett

In the first book, a boy named Elmer Elevator is tipped off by an alley cat to rescue a baby dragon who's being held captive and used as free transportation by a bunch of mean animals on an island. In the second book, Elmer and the baby dragon help an island of escaped canaries, including one who used to belong to Elmer's mom before it flew the coop, uncover a long-hidden secret. In the third, Elmer helps the dragon rescue the rest of his family from hunters.

A charming and whimsical set of children's fantasy books from the 1940s, which unlike almost every English-language children's book from the 1940s, manages to HAVE an island and NOT HAVE racism. Two islands, even!

These books, with equally delightful illustrations by the author's step-mother Ruth Chrisman Gannett, are funny and sweet and have excellent kid-logic. Elmer packs pink lollipops (handy for bribing crocodiles) and tangerines (he eats the inside, while the baby dragon prefers the peels). Escaped canaries live together on an island. The baby dragon's mother is blue while his father was yellow, so his brothers are blue and yellow in configurations ranging from horizontal stripes to vertical stripes to patchwork to speckles, while his sisters range from blue-green to yellow-green. I only wish that particular illustration had been in color, but it's very adorable even in black and white.



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Safely You Deliver, by Graydon Saunders. Chapters 1-4.

In which Dove, Edgar, Zora, Chloris, and a mystery guest continue their studies, leading up to their magical thesis project, a personal examination of worthiness by the Shape of Peace, and a metaphysical transformation which they must make or die. Also, there is a unicorn.

This is the sequel to A Succession of Bad Days. strikeslip described the series as "Imagine the Shire, but it's populated by six-foot-something very strong green people who drink poison, and also the rest of the world is Mordor. The shire-orcs spend their time trading pickles, designing short-range missiles, and having strong opinions about propriety re: who cooks and eats the latest giant monster. The author really *really* likes canals."

I'm re-reading this before I move on to the next book, and will put up discussion posts for the chunk I've read so far. Since I can't predict in advance when I'm putting up posts or how big the chunks will be, spoilers are likely to be incomprehensible without context, and events often only make sense in retrospect, it's fine to discuss the entire book in comments. No need for rot13 or anything like that.

They're really good about trying not to fill the link up with inarticulate expressions of joy.

The book opens with Zora taking a walk in the snow to escape the intense togetherness of the rest of the students, who have formed a polycule and are madly in love. This is probably the single most personally relatable moment for me in the series so far.

Most of this book is narrated by Zora, the youngest and least powerful of the students, the only one not in the polycule, and the only non-militant. (In this context, non-militant means psychologically incapable of using magic to kill... an intelligent being? Anything but a weed? Something like that.) Her magic involves doing things with objects and living things, and if that seems a bit vague, that's concerning to her too. The others seem to have largely figured out what their magical talents are, and she still hasn't. She's seventeen, everyone is in love but her, she's staring down the barrel of an immortality that means she'll outlive her family, and she has to grow up or die.

In the previous book, I liked Zora a lot but found her the least interesting of the group (well, after Kynefrid), as she had no trauma and didn't seem to have significant inner conflicts. My level of interest in her skyrocketed in the very first chapter.

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Dark and Magical Places: the Neuroscience of Navigation, by Christopher Kemp

Not long ago, I spent a week in a vast, sprawling Mexican resort. On one side, the ocean was a glimmering, nonnegotiable border. Inland, the resort was a green network of undulating paths--like a golf course without any holes. There were swimming pools everywhere. It was like being trapped in a David Hockney painting. I was lost for a week. One hot afternoon, lost yet again on my way back to our room, I realized that, earlier that day, I had used an iguana as a landmark--and it had moved.

A fascinating and beautifully written book on the neuroscience of how humans (and some other animals) find their way and get lost. Christopher Kemp is a molecular biologist specializing in neurodegenerative diseases, and has absolutely no sense of direction and significant anxiety about getting lost.

Driving into an unfamiliar city evokes sweaty, dry-throated, full-bodied, hyperventilating, white-knuckled, existential dread. Doom. Baroque panic. Gargoyles circle overhead.

Research shows that people tend to accurately estimate their sense of direction. Amusingly, every time Kemp quotes or refers to a scientist he spoke to himself, he puts their self-estimated ability to navigate in parentheses.

This is a fairly dense book so any attempt to summarize will be simplified at best; if you're interested, you should read it. The things I found most interesting were various examples of the brain having specific sets of cells or specific areas that do extremely specialized navigational work, like one set of cells that fires for being in a specific area (ie, in the kitchen) and another set that fires for directions (ie, north), and how much of this had been discovered relatively recently, as in the last 5-10 years.

A lot of neurological experiments involve doing bad things to rats, mice, and in one instance, ants, so there's a fair amount of that referenced. I was relieved when we got to an experiment recent enough that it was mentioned that the experimenter had to rework part of their experiment because the review board decided that the first draft would break rules about cruelty to animals.

If you're OK with that, this is a pretty great book, with lots of fascinating information and interesting anecdotes ranging from death by GPS (don't drive into a lake just because your GPS told you to) to attempts to train people with severe directional problems to get better at mental mapping. Directional issues are largely hereditary; Kemp's mother has the same problems he does, but his children don't, probably because his wife is far above average at navigating. (He tries the directional training, but it doesn't do much.) He also profiles several impressive cases of people getting lost, such as Amanda Eller, who was also profiled in The Cold Vanish for getting lost for 17 days in Maui.

It's hard to read this book without pondering one's own directional (4 out of 10) and mental rotation (7 out of 10) abilities. This is unusual; typically that group of spatial abilities clusters together, so the majority of people are either good or bad at both. I'd also give myself a 8 out of 10 in visualization, but a 1 out of 10 in knot-tying - both of which are also spatial abilities which tend to cluster together with mental rotation and sense of direction.

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Rustle in the Grass, by Robin Hawdon: DNF

A Watership Down-esque epic fantasy about an ant colony under threat.

I don't expect talking animal books to be totally faithful to actual animal behavior, but I do want them to at least evoke the general concept of the animal in question. Peter Rabbit may wear a blue jacket, but he also sneaks into danger to get carrots. T. H. White's ant colonies are strictly regimented, with dissent literally unthinkable; they're metaphors for fascism, but it feels intuitively correct that ants could sort all things into DONE/NOT DONE.

The closer the animals are to actual animals, the more faithful I expect them to be to actual animal behavior. I expect less rabbit-ness from Peter Rabbit, who wears a blue jacket, than from the Watership Down rabbits, who don't wear clothing and live in burrows. If the animals are clearly intended to more-or-less be real animals, I definitely expect their biology/anatomy to be correct. Even Peter Rabbit shouldn't have an exoskeleton or thumbs.

Hawdon's ants are clearly intended to be real ants, except talking and intelligent. They climb blades of grass. They live in a colony. They are in danger of being stepped on.

1. WORKER ANTS ARE ALL FEMALE, HAWDON. YOU DON'T GET TO MAKE ALL THE ANTS MALE EXCEPT FOR THE QUEEN JUST SO YOU CAN AVOID HAVING MORE THAN ONE FEMALE CHARACTER IN THE ENTIRE BOOK.

2. Ants do not have lungs.

3. Ants do not have skulls.

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The Cold Vanish: Seeking the Missing in North America's Wildlands, by John Billman

A journalist's account of people who go missing in the American wilderness, often in national parks. Billman interweaves accounts of assorted missing people with an extended story about one, Jacob Gray, a young man who disappeared in Olympic National Park, leaving behind his bicycle and camping equipment - most spookily, a bow, a quiver of arrows, and four arrows stuck in the ground in a line. Billman befriended Gray's father Randy, and half the book is about Randy's search for his son, which involves getting to know psychics, Bigfoot believers, and other odd folk.

Billman has a quirky style, which is sometimes put to good use and sometimes annoying. The search for Jacob Gray was the less interesting part of the book for me; it has an aimless feeling despite its urgent purpose. It also quickly became clear to me, though not to Randy, why Jacob had vanished. He had begun to show textbook signs of schizophrenia, accompanied by depression, and by far the most likely explanation was that he had either gone off to die or had been driven by delusions or hallucinations.

The rest of the book, a rather scattershot set of accounts of other wilderness disappearances, was more interesting, though mostly as a basis for a late-night internet hunt as a number of them had either been found since the book was published, or they'd been found years before the book was was published and Billman just didn't bother to mention the outcome.

A lot of people vanish in the wilderness and are never found, and there isn't a national database tracking them. There are often jurisdictional issues for that, and some people get searched for a lot more than others. Indigenous women, women of color, people of color, homeless people, etc, often don't get searched for at all. White people, rich people, white women, and particularly rich white people may get massive search efforts.

There's a small cottage industry of woo and grifting centering around missing people, in which a key figure is the "Missing 411" guy, David Paulides, who is also a Bigfoot enthusiast. If you want to continue holding out hope for the existence of Bigfoot, don't click on this link.

Billman is skeptical of Paulides, but doesn't get into any depth as to why. This is the basic problem with Billman: no depth on the details. For instance, he says that a missing man's camera was found and the last pictures on it indicated that he was succumbing to hypothermia, but doesn't say what the pictures were!

I will give a little detail on my own skepticism about Paulides, and about woo-woo missing persons theories in general. Paulides says that the national park service is involved in a vast conspiracy to cover up disappearances (maybe partially true; there might be efforts to cover up incompetence or racism), and strongly implies that missing people were taken by UFOs, dimensional portals, and/or Bigfoot. He presents misleading statistics about missing people to make it seem like something spooooooky is going on, such as that they're often found near boulder fields (a very common feature of wilderness) or granite (the world's commonest rock) or water (can't imagine why a lost person would seek out water) or berries (ditto), and were seen by someone shortly before they vanished but then vanished the instant they were no longer within view (DUH), are often found naked or with missing clothing (paradoxical undressing), are found in an already-searched area (people are surprisingly hard to find in dense wilderness) etc.

In spooooooky missing persons cases in general, it is a very disappointing pattern that when you dig into the cases, it often turns out that the spooooookiest details are simply.... wrong.

Spooky detail: A man got on a bus which made no stops, but had DISAPPEARED FROM HIS SEAT by the time it arrived! His belongings were found on his seat! Passengers heard a loud, metallic snap right before he vanished!

Actual facts: He was last seen getting on the bus. That's it, that's the story. The rest of it didn't actually happen.

Spooky detail: A promising young producer suddenly fled a set, looking terrified for no reason whatsoever, and rushed madly down a cliff and into the woods, and was NEVER SEEN AGAIN!

Actual facts: This is true. The part that wasn't mentioned is that he was having serious mental issues preceding this. He probably had a panic attack or psychotic break, and got lost in the woods.

Spooky detail: The last known radio transmission of a vanished plane was "Danger like a dagger! I cannot escape!"

Actual facts: That didn't happen.

Spooky detail: A three-year-old child was found days after his disappearance, and said a bear took care of him. Definitely Sasquatch! Or A MAN IN A BEAR SUIT. Eeek!

Actual facts: This one is true! I think it's probably a case of the Third Man phenomena. A lost child seems likely to be comforted by the idea of a big, warm, friendly animal companion.

A lot of spoooooky stuff involves people not understanding how wilderness and getting lost in it operate. They find it suspicious that children are found alive more often than adults. How can a young child possibly survive??? Must be Bigfoot! This is pretty straightforward, IMO: children will get a huge search effort launched very quickly, as there's no chance of them having just gone to Vegas/a crack house/on a long trip, and their disappearance will be noticed almost immediately. Also, children have less ego involved and are much more likely to stay put once they realize they're lost.

The wilderness is huge and dense and easy to get lost in. Things that disappear in it can be very hard to find. People who are found alive often report that they saw helicopters or planes searching for them and failed to get their attention before one did spot them.

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I don't particularly recommend this book but I would love to read something on the same topic but better. Ideally something that takes a skeptical position on Bigfoot, dimensional portals, and other woo. My absolute ideal would be a book or website or article (etc) that analyzes cases where the initial disappearance seemed very mysterious, then explains what actually happened and the reasons for the mysterious elements.

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