Rachel Manija Brown's Blog, page 40

Happy Hanukkah, Merry Christmas, and Happy Yuletide!

May you all have a happy holiday, whether it involves saffron buns, Chinese food and a movie, rolling around in fanfic, or some other celebration.

I received THREE Cass Neary stories, which are all so good that I am struggling comment on them in the way they deserve. But I now am showered and dressed and have fed the chickens, and I have a mug of coffee with a splash of Frangelico, and I am sitting down to re-read and comment at leisure.

I shall do proper Yuletide recs tomorrow. For today, please make my holiday that little bit more enjoyable and comment to tell me what you're going to eat today, if you plan to eat something special.

I'm having duck confit, salad, and potatoes I will dig out of the garden right before I cook them.

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Happy Yuletide Eve!

View Poll: #28065

And also, what have you noticed in the collection that strikes your fancy?

Of particular interest to some of you: I see seven Biggles stories, two Worrals stories (one in main, one in Madness), and SEVENTEEN Nirvana in Fire stories!

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Can I Get There By Candlelight? by Jean Slaughter Doty

An old favorite pony book of mine got a reprint!

Gail is a pony-loving girl in the 80s whose family moves to a new town. She misses her friends, but is somewhat consoled by their temporary residence, which they're living in for the summer while their new house is being built. It's outside of town in a forested area, perfect for adventurous rides on her pony Candlelight.

She finds a rusted-shut gate and, after getting it open, rides Candlelight through the woods and to a mansion she hadn't known was there, where she meets a strange girl named Hilary. Hilary is dressed strangely, is unfamiliar with Gail's clothes and slang, and only knows how to ride side-saddle. The girls bond over their mutual love of horses, while Gail slowly comes to realize/accept that the gate leads back in time to the 1880s.

Can I Get There By Candlelight? is a short, haunting, lovely book. The girls' friendship is beautifully evoked but not without edge. Hilary clearly needs Gail more than Gail needs her, because Gail has opportunities in life that Hilary doesn't, so what's a friendship for Gail is more than that for Hilary. (Re-reading it now, it also seems like Hilary might be in love with Gail, while Gail is at a pre-romance stage of life.)

The book has a shimmery, late-afternoon feeling; it's a bubble of time and space that's beautiful and real but inherently temporary. The ending is unexpectedly dark (but no animals die).

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I'm very glad the book is back in print, but I am DYING at its new blurb. It's not only insanely spoilery, states an ambiguous incident as a certainty, and does not make the book sound appealing, but it fails to mention a rather crucial aspect of the premise. If you want to read the book unspoiled, order it without reading the blurb.

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Chocolate Box Substitute Exchange

Chocolate Box is not running this year, but a this-year-only exchange has popped up as a replacement, candyheartsex . It is taking nominations now.

It's for art, fanfic, and original art/fic. It has a very short word count minimum - 300 words. It is a relationship-based exchange, so all requests must be for more than one character. The relationship can be romantic, friendship, enemies, or anything else.

It has the same rules as Chocolate Box, with one notable exception: you can request as few as one fandom if you like. So if you for instance, only want Biggles, or only want Biggles or Worrals, you can request only that. (However, if you do that and end up on the pinch hit list and nobody claims your request, and you are not willing to add more, the mods won't hold up the collection opening till you get a gift.)

This will be the last exchange I will do until I finish a non-fanfic novel. So if you want to have me write fic for you or to write fic for me in an exchange, this will be your last chance for a while.

The tag set is still taking nominations, but it's looking good so far! I see...

Biggles, with 12 sets of characters.

Worrals, with Worrals/Frecks and Worrals & Frecks.

Arthuriana under Arthurian Mythology and Phyllis Ann Karr's Idylls of the Queen (Kay/Mordred!) but no listings yet for Mary Stewart, Elizabeth Wein, T. H. White, or Aster Glenn Gray. YET.

The Tillerman Cycle, with 7 pairings.

Earthsea, with 10.

TV show nominations include The Leftovers, The Sarah Connor Chronicles, The Punisher (under Defenders), The Wilds, 陈情令 | The Untamed, and 琅琊榜 | Nirvana in Fire

And finally, I spotted this unexpected nomination:

The Chronicles of Prydain, with a single pairing of... Gwydion/Melyngar. His wife? A horse.

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Regeneration (Movie 1997)

I still don't understand why it took me this long to discover that someone made this very faithful film of Pat Barker's novel, which is one of my very favorite books.

The novel and movie are based on the actual psychiatric hospital Craiglockhart, run by William Rivers to treat WWI soldiers with shell shock. Rivers revolutionized the recognition and treatment of what we would now call PTSD, using methods we still use today like talking about the traumatic event, its meaning for you at the time, what meaning you find in it now, and examining any feelings of guilt attached to it and whether or not they're based on anything that you actually could have done.

Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owens were at Craiglockhart at the same time. I can't even think of any comparable occurrence that could happen in modern times.

The movie by necessity lacks some of the psychological depth and also some of the events of the book. (The one I most missed was Rivers' visit to one of his former patients at the end). But it has beautiful performances by Jonny Lee Miller as the brittle, spooky-pretty Billy Prior, James Wilby as a properly charismatic Sassoon, Jonathan Pryce as the compassionate Dr. Rivers, and Stuart Bunce as an awkward and very lovable Wilfred Owen.

Owen and Sassoon have a very sweet and believable relationship, one which is simultaneously between two traumatized veterans at a mental hospital and mentor and protegee writers at a writers' retreat. Owens' poems are particularly well-used; one I hadn't heard before closes the movie with a very appropriate gut-punch.

Free on Amazon Prime.

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Biggles Flies South, by W. E. Johns

I recently obtained a set of random Biggles books via Etsy. There are others that look more objectively good, but I pounced on this one first as the back cover mentions that they are nearly eaten alive by ants. I immediately knew, via a misspent childhood in a country colonized by the British and so littered with elderly British pulp adventure novels, that this meant they would be staked out to be eaten alive by ants, possibly stripped naked and smeared with honey.

This book is sufficiently racist that I can't recommend it unless you really like batshit 1930s pulp (I do) or are willing to plow through or skim a lot to get to the good Biggles-specific bits. If you don't fall into either category, enjoy the "good parts" version here.

It starts off with a bang with this frontispiece. Click to see Ginger naked, yes really.

Biggles, Algy, and Ginger are hired by Kadar, a young Egyptian man, to help him find a lost oasis of archaeological significance. Kadar is a fun, likable character and about 90% non-stereotypical. He's not the problem. The problem is everything else, all the way down to a footnote explaining that "native tribes" commonly drink petrol. Uhhh I guess it's historically interesting to learn about a completely new stereotype? Anyway, they fly out in search of the oasis and promptly get stranded in the desert and attacked by everything but the palm trees.

I hereby reproduce my liveblogging, which gives you the experience of reading the book:

- The first two chapters take place in 500 BC. (As atmospheric setup, as the backstory for a treasure hunt.)

- Ginger chases a butterfly.

- Biggles just punched a bat.

- An ordinary bat, but part of an attack flock. They ran into the bats while fleeing an army of scorpions. Somewhere in there Ginger got sneered at by a crocodile.

- We've also had some presumed dead. This is not one of the better Biggles books but you can't say it lacks for incident.

- Now cobras are falling from the ceiling.

- As predicted, they have been spread-eagled and staked for the ants. Honey is involved. 🍯 🐜 🐜 🐜

- Here's Biggles when they've been staked for ants:

"Don't worry, you fellows," he said quietly. "It will soon be over."

No it won't, Biggles, the whole point of being eaten alive by ants is that it takes a long time!

- Biggles, Ginger, and Kadar are the ones staked for ants, while presuming Algy dead. Algy, who presumed them dead, comes to the rescue!

Algy reached Biggles first, and shuddered as he saw the broad, black line of ants hurrying towards him.

Biggles was far gone, but he managed to smile, and whisper, "Good boy."

I'M SORRY THE SLASH WRITES ITSELF. Though regrettably, they were staked out fully clothed and the honey was only smeared on the ground around them, as a lure.

- There is also some high-quality Algy whump. He wanders the desert desperately searching for the others while it's literally burning the soles of his feet!

- Biggles is hilariously grumpy in this book. He's in a bad mood for basically the entire thing. (I mean, understandable given the cobras and ants and all.) Kadar is a civilian archaeology enthusiast tagging along, which is really fun as he keeps forgetting they're in extreme danger and wandering off to enthuse about archaeological finds, to which Biggles responds by reminding him that they'll probably all die.

- I just hit the moat full of snakes.

- Ginger is sleeping with his head on Biggles' leg while Biggles sits and smokes a cigarette.

- Also someone was sacrificed to a crocodile.

- (They have now been separated from Biggles).

The absence of his dominating personality and cheerful optimism made their own position seem so much worse.

What cheerful optimism? Not in this book! Dominating personality... Well, there was that "Good boy."

- Guess who utters this immortal line? "Frizzle, you blighters, frizzle!"

- Okay, this book has possibly the single most spectacularly batshit climax of anything I have ever read.

I am going to excerpt parts of the climax below, but seriously, if there's any chance you'll actually read this book, it's so much more amazing if you encounter it yourself. Warning: involves cruelty to animals (IMO Biggles is a bit out of character at points in this book) but in a cartoony way.

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I used Dragon Dictate to dictate that bit so I wouldn't have to write it out, and it was very difficult as I kept cracking up. Ever since I read it, at least once a day I have remembered it and laughed out loud. I am certain that Johns chortled to himself as he wrote it.

Content notes: About 30% racism by weight. Violence. Somewhat graphic deaths of attacking animals.

I quite like this cover, which would make a good icon.

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This cover better conveys the tone of the book.

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Notes From A Young Black Chef, by Kwame Onwuachi with Joshua David Stein

I first saw Kwame Onwuachi on Top Chef and thought he seemed interesting, which is why I wanted to read his book. Having now read his memoir, he's so much more interesting than I realized.

He grew up splitting his time between an abusive father and a mother in the catering/restaurant business. At age ten, he was sent to Nigeria to live with his grandfather for a while. When he returned to America, he got thrown out of private schools (basically for trauma-related acting-out while Black), got involved in a gang, went to college and got kicked out for dealing drugs, had a life-changing experience as a cook on an oil boat, decided to become a chef, hustled candy on subways to pay to attend the CIA, worked at some of the top restaurants in America, and ran headfirst into a glass ceiling of racism over what Black chefs are and aren't expected to cook.

So this guy had a sufficiently interesting life before he turned thirty that he decided to write a memoir, an experience with which I can identify. It's vividly written and compelling - my favorite part was the oil boat experience - and also raw and upsetting at times. A lot of his restaurant experiences made me want to punch someone, and that's not even getting into the prejudice and complete lack of opportunity that stalled out the lives of a lot of his friends. I really appreciated his point that we should not put up with levels of abuse in the kitchen that we wouldn't accept in other workplaces. (I have personal experience with parallel issues in Hollywood.)

The first two-thirds of the book were more interesting to me than the last third, which deals with the failure of a fine dining restaurant he opened that was soon closed. One of his backers absolutely sounds like a racist asshole and there were a lot of factors out of his control working against him, but overall it felt like he needed a little more distance from the events - something that the earlier parts benefited from - to make it as solid a piece of writing as the rest of the book.

In addition to everything you want in a chef memoir (food porn and kitchen details), this memoir is a very well-written exploration of persona and identity, which he links to the experience not only of the multiple cultures he's from, but of the experience of being a person of color in America. He's very conscious of his own story and various personas, how he chooses between them, how people relate to them, and how he can present and fine-tune them to get opportunities. It's a fascinating topic and not one I often see explored in memoir, probably because it's basically inviting people to call you insincere and manipulative. Many if not all of us do that to some degree or another, but it's really taboo to admit to it.

Content notes: Physical abuse by a parent, violence, drugs, animal slaughter for food, vivid depictions of racism and toxic workplaces.

This memoir includes a recipe after every chapter. I haven't tried any yet but I have my eye on the shrimp etoufee. The audio version read by the author is also excellent, and includes the recipes in a pdf.

A gift from landingtree - thank you so much!

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Worrals Flies Again, by W. E. Johns

"I'm afraid you're right," agreed Worrals sadly. "Excitement is like a drug. The more you have the more you want, and when you can't get it the old nerves begin to twitch."

Since Worrals acquitted herself so well in the last two books, she's asked if she'd be willing to fly a tiny unarmed plane with foldable wings (the better to hide it) to occupied France so she can fly messages back from a French spy network. Naturally, she brings Frecks. (Poor Frecks, no authorities ever seem to think she was the key to victory even though she often is.)

Worrals and Frecks set up at a decrepit chateau, which they are nonplussed to discover is also inhabited by 1) their main contact, a depressed and apathetic old man, 2) his not-all-there son given to frequent fits of maniacal laughter, 3) an unexpected squad of Nazis. Not what you want when the only place you have to park your airplane is the chateau's immense wine cellar...

Homing pigeons, presumed dead, atmospherically melancholy chateaux, death by antique crossbow, and a Gestapo officer disguised as a nun: this book has it all. It's particularly good with spy vs spy shenanigans. At one point Worrals muses that of five people in a room, all but maybe one were using false identities. Later, we have an English spy pretending to be a German spy pretending to be an English spy.

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Like the other Worrals books I've read, this one is not only implicitly but explicitly feminist. While Worrals is perfectly willing to use Nazi preconceptions about women to her advantage, she does not tolerate anyone on her own side viewing women as less capable than men or implying that her success was due to chivalry rather her own efforts.

Johns has a surprisingly good understanding of what it's like to be a minority in this context and have to simultaneously deal with risking your life, not being allowed to do things solely because of your gender, having some people assume you're not as good as a man and others try to overprotect you, and, in particularly low moments, wondering whether maybe everyone is right about what women can and can't do.

It's accurate to describe the Worrals books as "Biggles, but with women," but it's equally accurate to describe them as "Biggles, but on extra-hard mode." I assume through conversations with his female pilot buddies on whom he based the characters, Johns has a surprisingly sensitive understanding that Worrals and Frecks can do everything Biggles and his crew can do, but they have to do it backwards and in high heels.

Possibly relatedly, Worrals and Frecks have yet to actually kill anyone, though they've both made very solid efforts in that direction. (In the first book Worrals shoots down a plane but the pilot survives, in this one a male ally kills the Nazi before Frecks can brain him with a poker, etc.) I wonder if that was a bridge too far for Johns' publishers? It really doesn't seem like Johns himself would have a problem with it. Frecks is ferocious in up-close combat, and Worrals has the cool nerve of a fighter pilot.

The ebook includes the original illustrations, of which my favorite is a Gestapo officer disguised as a nun. You can obtain it for free at Faded Page

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Smile (2022 Movie)

I watched this horror movie based on its deeply creepy trailer. It is, indeed, sometimes very scary. Unfortunately, that's the only thing it does well. Smile is wrong about human behavior, it's wrong about police procedure, it's wrong about hospitals, and it's incredibly wrong about mental health care, which is unfortunate as its protagonist is a psychiatrist. Probably. One of the many things this movie doesn't know is the difference between a psychiatrist and a therapist.

Smile is basically three or four great scares and 50 pounds of WTF in a trenchcoat.

Dr. Rose Cotter is a doctor working in the psych ward of a large hospital. A young woman is brought in, apparently traumatized after witnessing a bizarre suicide. Rose interviews her in what seems to be their standard interview room. It's huge and empty, with two chairs in the middle like the cubicles in Severance, plus a convenient china vase in case some suicidal or homicidal person would like to break it and obtain a sharp object.

After saying that she sees creepy smiling people everywhere, the woman breaks the vase, smiles creepily, and cuts her own throat. There is a bright red emergency phone, but it's on a wall in a room the size of a warehouse, so Rose is unable to get from the chair to the wall in time to get help.

This is not the only ginormous empty room with two people huddled in the middle in this movie. Another one turns up later in a prison, of all random places. I have no idea why the director thought this was a thing.

Rose gets interviewed by a douchey-looking cop whom I will call Douchecop, who turns out to be her ex-boyfriend. She then has an encounter with another mental patient, who yells at her and freaks her out. She shouts, "I need a 5150!"

A 5150 is an involuntary detainment in a mental hospital. The guy she wants it for is already a live-in patient at a mental hospital. So she's basically saying, "Put him where he is some more!"

Kal Penn as Dr. Desai, her supervisor and the only person in the movie who 1) can act, 2) reacts like a human being, puts her on leave. Rose goes home to her fiance who can't act and to her cat. At this point scioscribe , who was watching this with me, confirmed that the cat dies and how its body is found - this will be relevant later. (I only realize now, while writing this, that having seen the entire movie, I have no idea who killed the cat.)

Rose then starts having spooky smile encounters. One of these is an absolutely brilliant scary scene involving a call to home security. Like I said, the scares are mostly good to excellent. It's everything else that's the problem.

Rose goes to her own psychiatrist, where a scene ensues which gets like sixteen things wrong about therapy, trauma reactions, medication, etc in ten minutes.

Her psychiatrist condescendingly chides Rose for diagnosing herself and requesting medication for what she thinks are post-traumatic hallucinations, saying, "I don't think this is about the woman who killed herself in front of you. You only knew her for about ten minutes. I think this is really about your mother's suicide."

WHEN SOMEONE SLASHES THEIR THROAT IN FRONT OF YOU, IT DOESN'T MATTER HOW LONG YOU KNEW THEM.

The psychiatrist then says she can't be hallucinating because she's clearly not psychotic (PTSD-based hallucinations are not the same as psychosis, and people who have any kind of hallucination can seem perfectly fine at other times) and refuses to give her meds. GIVE THIS POOR WOMAN SOME XANAX.

I forgot to mention that basically everyone but Kal Penn is randomly mean. Douchecop is randomly mean, not in a scary cop way but in a petty whiny way. Rose's sister and her husband are randomly dicks to her. I would call this a theme, but this movie doesn't have themes, so it's more of a pattern with no apparent reason.

Things get even more batshit from here on out. Cut for spoilers and the only dead cat scene I've ever enjoyed, because it's accidentally hilarious.

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Of all genres, horror is perhaps the best at constructing a story around a single powerful image or concept that represents its central theme: the Tethered in Us, the biological blending of the Shimmer in Annihilation, the sexually transmitted curse in It Follows. All of those concepts also represent the themee of the movies. The image Smile is built around, the smile, has nothing to do with trauma or anything else.

The credits have three completely random music/sound cues play over them: first "Lollipop," then a song I forget, then screeching and mumbling that I assume was Douchecop's soft metalcore band. (You just know he had one.)

Smile a movie made by someone with a real skill for being scary, which is not easy, and apparently no experience whatsoever with human beings or their institutions. Smile is about 1% brilliant, 9% very good, 90% terrible, and 100% batshit. I have never laughed so hard at a dead cat.

In conclusion, "Mental illness is hereditary! I looked it up!"

https://amzn.to/3FQiCO3

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My Heart is a Chainsaw, by Stephen Graham Jones

Jade Daniels is a half-Blackfeet teenage girl who's obsessed with slasher movies. She goes to sleep with them playing, she plays slasher-centric pranks in school which do nothing to endear her to the administration, she writes term papers on them for her history class (we get to read a bunch of these and they're both hilarious and very plausibly written by a bright teenager), and when weird events start happening in town, she's convinced that it will all unfold according to the slasher movie beat sheet... and she can't wait to see it happen.

Jade lives with her awful alcoholic father, probably isn't going to graduate from high school, and works a depressing job as a janitor with a guy who sexually harasses her, so you can see why she'd like to see it all explode in a shower of gore.

This book works as a slasher novel in book form. It's also a really interesting example of an unreliable narrator, as Jade is an obsessive teenager who sees everything according to her own preconceived ideas... which isn't to say that she's always wrong. She's a memorable, unusual character and I love her so much. There's also a lot of fascinating metafictional stuff going on, and an unexpectedly moving story. And despite a lot of dark stuff going on, Jade is often hilarious and so is the book.

My Heart is a Chainsaw is, maybe appropriately, a much messier book than The Only Good Indians, and is in a horror subgenre that I don't like as much. But I think if you like the latter, you'd like the former, and vice versa.

If you have already read this, please join the spoilery discussion going on in the comments of sholio 's excellent review.

After you finish the book, read the acknowledgments. They're actually a lovely short essay on how Jones came to write the book, his feelings about horror, and the people who helped him along his way.

Content notes: Very gory, gruesome, and gross. Jade attempts suicide in chapter one. (She's in a better frame of mind for the rest of the book). Sexual harassment, sexual abuse, domestic violence.

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