Rachel Manija Brown's Blog, page 42

Biggles Defends the Desert aka Biggles Sweeps the Desert, by W. E. Johns

"I'm no lover of a camel."

This WWII adventure has a remarkable introduction by the author in which he says that most of Biggles' exploits are based on real wartime incidents, and if anything have been toned down:

Again, I should blush to dress my hero, after he had been forced to land on the wrong side of the lines, in girls' clothes, and allow him to be pestered by the unwelcome attentions of German officers for weeks before making his escape. The officer who resorted to that romantic method of escape is now in business in London. In business as WHAT?

Biggles and his crew have been sent to the desert to figure out why British planes have been disappearing while flying over that area. Adventure ensues.

I don't want to give away too much of the plot, because there's a number of really fun twists and unexpected incidents. So above the cut, I will only say that there are fantastic aerial combat sequences (Johns hopefully suggests in the introduction that perhaps Biggles' combat techniques will be helpful to readers who end up in the cockpit of a fighting aeroplane), daring rescues, daring escapes, getting lost in the desert without water, and a camel chase. As always, Johns never fails to lean into his premise; this book has absolutely everything you could possibly want from a desert-set WWII adventure.

When I picked this book up I had thought it was the one where Biggles gets in a dogfight while he has malaria, but it's actually the one where he gets in a dogfight while he has a concussion and almost passes out in the middle of it. It's a great sequence.

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An anonymous friend sent me this with the following delightful dad joke:

Did you know that the propeller on a small plane is actually there to keep the pilot cool? Just watch, when it stops spinning the pilot will start sweating like crazy.

Thank you, anonymous friend!

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Biggles Fic Exchange

It's on! Biggles Holiday Airdrop

You can see the current requests here.

The tag set is still accepting nominations.

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Biggles Fest

sholio is throwing a winter Biggles exchange with a short minimum word count.

Come vote on specifics if you're interested.

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The Haunting of Hill House, by Shirley Jackson

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

Dr. Montague, a psychic researcher, decides to investigate Hill House by staying over with a small group; this goes as well as that always does.

Luke is a charming young man who will inherit the house; his presence was a condition of anyone being allowed to stay. Theodora is mildly telepathic, sophisticated, and almost certainly a lesbian. Eleanor is a painfully lonely woman who was the center of a poltergeist episode as a girl, spent her entire adult life caring for her sick mother, and has been relegated to a cot in her sister's house once her mother died. She flees to Hill House with a head full of fantasies and a desperation for escape, love, and a home. Bad move.

The haunting starts out merely unsettling, with doors that close by themselves, a freezing cold spot, and weird geometry that makes it easy to get lost. It ratchets up and up, with some very memorably terrifying moments.

(( Read more... )).

The moment I found creepiest was when Theodora and Eleanor run through a ghostly picnic that isn't scary by itself other than that it's a scene from the long-gone past; Theodora tells Eleanor not to look back and she doesn't, but when they arrive inside the house, Theodora is in hysterics, repeating, "I looked back." What did she see?

I knew the general plot and lesbian barely-subtext from having seen the movie The Haunting, which is excellent and very faithful, so what I was most struck by when reading the book were the things I didn't expect so much.

The four inhabitants spend a whole lot of time getting to know each other before things start going noticeably bad, and it's very charming and sweet and often quite funny. The housekeeper who keeps darkly proclaiming that no one can hear you scream in the dark is downright hilarious, and so is the late-arriving Mrs. Montague and her obsession with non-existent nun ghosts. Terrifying things happen too, and there is definitely an air of building doom, but it's also surprisingly funny in parts.

The Haunting of Hill House is as much a psychological novel and a character portrait as it is a horror novel. The house is definitely and unquestionably evil, but it didn't seem to be doing much until Eleanor showed up. There's a lot of poltergeist-type phenomena; is it the house doing it to get Eleanor, or Eleanor doing it herself unconsciously, or the house tapping into Eleanor's powers to do things it couldn't do by itself?

Eleanor, who has been extremely socially isolated and subsumed into her mother's life, is trying out both social interactions and selfhood for the very first time at Hill House. There's a number of striking bits of writing in which she is consciously trying to find her own self:

Eleanor found herself unexpectedly admiring her own feet. Theodora dreamed over the fire beyond the tips of her toes, and Eleanor thought with deep satisfaction that her feet were handsome in their red sandals; what a complete and separate thing I am, she thought, going from my red toes to the top of my head, individually an I, possessed of attributes belonging only to me. I have red shoes, she thought-that goes with being Eleanor; I dislike lobster and sleep on my left side and crack my knuckles when I am nervous and save buttons. I am holding a brandy glass which is mine because I am here and I am using it and I have a place in this room. I have red shoes and tomorrow I will wake up and I will still be here. 'I have red shoes,' she said very softly, and Theodora turned and smiled up at her.

Unfortunately, Hill House is the absolute worst place for that. Eleanor wants a home and to be wanted; Hill House will provide. Unlike almost any haunted house book I've read, she is often very happy at the house and finds it cozy and comfortable (when it isn't being terrifying), which says something about Eleanor and something about the house's relationship with Eleanor.

Eleanor gloms on to Theodora, and they have some very charming interactions on the fuzzy border of instant BFFs (they pretend to be cousins, it's adorable) and lovers-to-be. The house itself seems to be pushing them around, sometimes together and sometimes apart and sometimes into a spooky melding of identity; Theodora's clothes are drenched in blood, so she has to wear Eleanor's.

Eleanor is all too relatable, at least to me. But she's both lovably awkward and creepily stalkery; late in the book she says she'll follow Theodora home, and she means it. Theodora explicitly calls her out for going where she's not wanted.

Eleanor smiled placidly. "I’ve never been wanted anywhere," she said.

It's heartbreaking and I wanted her to be wanted, but unfortunately Hill House is what wants her. In the end, her exploration of her own self fuses with what the house wants for her: it knows her name.

I am really doing it, I am doing this all by myself, now, at last; this is me, I am really really really doing it by myself.

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The Tribulations of Ned Summers, by Shawn Inmon

Ned Summers is a teenager in the small Oregon town of Middle Falls in the 1950s. His life gets knocked off course when he goes on one date with Mary Malone, a girl he barely knows, who gets murdered later that night. The police chief tries to pin the murder on Ned. He fails, barely, due to the intervention of Ned's loving father. But Ned is so shaken by the experience that he becomes a hermit in the woods for the rest of his life. (My single favorite moment in the entire book is when hikers put up a sign near his cabin reading THIS WAY TO THE HAIRY MAN.) When Ned dies at the age of 66, he wakes up in his teenage body, the day before his fateful date with Mary Malone...

Ned tried repeatedly to save Mary's life, but is hampered by having no idea who really killed her, and by the police chief's consistent-across-lifetimes attempts pin the murder on him. After several lifetimes' failed attempts, he begins to wonder if it's possible to save her, and whether he should even keep trying.

This Middle Falls time travel book tied with the first one for my least favorite so far in the series; it's ambitious in some ways but suffers from a not-very-distinctive protagonist, not enough attention paid to side characters, a theme poorly integrated with the plot, and a climax in which the Universal Life Center angel Semolina (yes really) descends and just tells Ned what lesson he needs to learn in order to stop repeating his life. (Not the only book where that happens, either!)

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On the plus side, this book did remind me of the things I usually enjoy about this series, and it put me in the mood for a good one. I might try the one with a con man protagonist as a big part of the issue with this one was that the hero was boring. I don't think I've ever encountered a boring con man character.

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Happy Turkey Day!

I have a woodburning stove!

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The glass for the windows hasn't been installed yet, so it's not yet usable. However, we lit a tiny fire as a test and it works beautifully, with a small but lovely view of flames.

The stove is from 1978. The handyman was very taken with my cabin on his first visit and apparently spent some time finding a stove that was 1) small enough to fit, 2) matched my general aesthetic. He found this little beauty and fixed her up for me. I can't wait to sit in front of a crackling fire and watch snow falling outside.

He's definitely coming back with the glass. I haven't paid him yet.

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The handymen are here!

Handily installing the wood-burning stove. I hope. They are encountering some complications. It may not actually be usable till after Thanksgiving. Pray for it to actually work.

Alex is delighted with the handymen, who like cats and let him jump on their shoulders. I gave one of them a cup of coffee and warned him that he shouldn't let Alex jump on him while he was drinking it. He assured me he'd hold it out of Alex's way. Next thing I knew, Alex had launched himself off his shoulders in an apparent attempt to swan-dive into the cup. Coffee EVERYWHERE.

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Fic in a Box

Fic in a Box is open!

Or should I call it Biggles in a Box? Because there are EIGHTEEN Biggles stories in the collection!

I have not yet read them all (though I will!), but all that I have read are great. If you like Biggles, go forth and read!

If you don't like Biggles or like other things in addition to Biggles, the collection is a gold mine of delightful things. It's not limited to fic, so there's comics, cocktail recipes, cross-stitch patterns, and other charming things.

I wrote eight stories for the collection. At least one is Biggles, unsurprisingly. They are not all Biggles. See if you can spot them!

My marvelous gifts:

Bread at Midnight. Two beautiful and adorable pictures based on my Pern story "Cakes at Midnight." Menolly and Mirrim bake bread; their fire lizards help.

Lifeline. A truly epic story in which Biggles can see ghosts and Sakhalin is LITERALLY a hellhole.

Biggles often saw ghosts. Men he'd flown with and seen shot down in flames, crossing the street a few yards away or sitting in the far corner of the Aero Club on their own. Pilots he'd last seen leaping off into space, checking the weather reports in the squadron office. Young mechanics who'd been in the wrong place during a bombing raid, polishing fuselage quietly in the corner of his eye.

Life calls the tune, we dance. A lovely canon AU in which a very Biggles-typical action leads to von Stalhein coming back with him earlier; this doesn't mean anything is easy for either of them.

At one point he had been lying propped up against von Stalhein. The sensory memory threw him. It had a touch of unreality to it; this wasn't something that could happen between him and Erich.

(Very funny that both my Biggles stories have titles beginning with "Life.")

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Verity by Colleen Hoover - UPDATE

So a little while back I read this absolutely batshit contemporary mashup of Jane Eyre and Rebecca called Verity, by ginormous bestseller Colleen Hoover. Do not click on this or any links unless you're OK with spoilers for it.

Then cahn read Verity.

Then snacky also read Verity.

And then! snacky made an amazing discovery! COLLEEN HOOVER WROTE A NEW EPILOGUE FOR VERITY. It's posted on Reddit, in two parts, and the three of you who have read Verity or the many of you who just read the spoilers need to read it immediately and discuss in comments to this post.

Absolutely no need for rot13 or other forms of spoiler protection in the comments! Don't read the comments unless you want to be spoiled for the new epilogue!

New epilogue, Part I

New epilogue, Part II

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Ghost Wall, by Sarah Moss

17-year-old Silvie lives in a three-person cult run by her father, who forces her and her mother to live in his imaginary version of Iron Age Northumbria, which is suspiciously similar to his racist, sexist worldview. They're joined for the summer by a professor and three students who are doing an anthropology course. While foraging and washing in a creek is Silvie's ordinary life, it's a game to the students, who let her see her father through others' eyes and make her realize that she could have a different life.

But while Silvie is starting to see the problems with Iron Age re-enactment, the professor and some of the students are getting scarily into it. Especially the parts about human sacrifice...

Ghost Wall is a dense book with a lot going on thematically and a very small scale in terms of action. It's told in Silvie's stream-of-consciousness, which does not use quote marks for dialogue. I listened to it in audio as that's hard for me to read, and I really wanted to read this book as it involves aspects of cults, folk horror, nature, and historical re-enactments - all things which I'm very interested in.

As it turns out, it's actually primarily about something else I'm interested in, which is breaking free of an abusive environment. Unfortunately, like many books of that sort it ends as soon as Silvie gets out, when I would have really liked to see what happened to her afterward. (Maybe next Yuletide.)

Some of the most interesting and perceptive moments involve the difficulty of understanding, let alone recreating the ancient past, even when done by more disinterested parties than Silvie's awful father. A local woman points out that Iron Age people lived in a completely different environment which had far more biodiversity, and so it may have had much more plentiful foraging and hunting opportunities. No one knows why the bog people were sacrificed, or what the victims believed about it - was it a blood sacrifice or domestic violence or something modern people have never even guessed at?

It's an interesting, worthwhile book with a very distinctive and well-done voice, but probably not something I'd re-read. (Not because of the subject matter. Stream of consciousness, especially without dialogue tags, is not my favorite style.)

As a result of reading this, I picked up Paleofantasy by Marlene Zuk, an apparently exhaustively researched look at what we actually know about early humans. It's very interesting so far; if anyone would like, I can post on it as I go along as it's not a read-in-one-sitting type of book.

Just look at that gorgeous cover design. So clever and beautiful.

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