Rachel Manija Brown's Blog, page 44

My Trick or Treat Stories

I wrote three treats for Trick or Treat.

Annihilation (Movie)

The Journey, for Rhizophora. 1366 words.

Lena explores the beach by the lighthouse.

The prompt was "I just want to see Lena exploring more of the Shimmer." Irresistible.


A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin

Five Times Balerion Saved Rhaenys and One Time She Saved Him, for coaldustcanary. Balerion | Rhaenys Targaryen's Cat & Rhaenys Targaryen (daughter of Elia). 5153 words.

A butterfly flaps its wings, a kitten chases the butterfly, and a girl and her cat get a different destiny.

Rhaenys Targaryen was Elia and Rhaegar's daughter, who named her black kitten Balerion after the dragon. She was murdered as a child in the sack of King's Landing. It's implied that the huge ferocious black tomcat who prowls the keep is her Balerion, grown up; Arya catches him as part of her training. The prompt was for more of Balerion, and perhaps an alternate fate for Rhaenys.


The Stand and some other Stephen King works

Flagg by Night, for skazka . 748 words.

Randall Flagg takes a trip down memory lane.

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Winter is Coming

This morning Alex dove between my ankles and bolted out the door. He's better at predicting snow than that groundhog. I'm now lugging bundles of summer clothes to the shed and winter clothes to the house.

Also this morning, I saw the coyote sniffing around my chicken coop. At 11:00 AM! Very odd. The raccoon was out in the day, too. They were both acting perfectly ordinary so I don't think it's rabies or any other disease. Maybe just the darker days?

It's the beginning of my second year in the house and will be my second winter. For all of Crestline's flaws (there are exactly two decent restaurants), I love it here. There's something beautiful and new on my land every day, there's wildlife, and there's always some pleasant physical job that needs doing.

Today I planted two blueberry bushes and the last of the native plants from the native plant sale, put down a few more rocks on the paths I'm making, bundled all the chickens but Uncatchable Sally into the chicken tractor so they can munch on weeds, dumped cardboard over some ivy to get rained on tomorrow, and am taking a brief break before I lug the outside furniture cushions into the basement for the winter.

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Garden Update

We had autumn for about one week, and then jumped straight into winter. Snow is expected later this week. Alas for my morning glories which will never get a chance to blossom.

Raccoon and garden photos.

I've been slowly working away at my garden, collecting rocks from landslides and using them to shore up crumbling slopes and create paths. I've planted some native plants, and have bulbs coming in that I will plant on an otherwise boring and weedy slope.

Paths and leaves.

I have created a small orchard of two apple trees (Gala and Gravenstein), two cherries (Bing and Rainier), a nectarine, and a Carpathian walnut. Hoping to plant some pluots and maybe hazelnuts this spring, if I can get the local nursery to order them.

The blackberry hedges are once again totally out of control. Thorny green vines have gotten into a nearby tree and drop down like snakes, then root. I'm hoping to dig up and replant some along some fences.

Things which grow well here: Asian greens, miners' lettuce, chickweed, blackberries, corn, tomatoes, potatoes, shallots, garlic, blueberries, thimbleberries.

Things which do not grow well here: Honeyberries - dropped dead. Bell peppers - total failure with multiple attempts. Salal berries, salmonberries, golden currants - very spindly and pathetic. Peas - probably too cold. Melons - NONE of them ever sprouted, and I planted a lot. I had thought also morning glories, except those refused to grow at any point when they'd have had time to grow, then suddenly sprouted and grew vigorously one month before the temperatures hit freezing. Very annoying.

Questionable: Raspberries. The bushes grew okay, but I didn't get much fruit.

The hens continue to lay. Kebi keeps warning me they'll stop for winter or molting or something, but so far they've always staggered that so I get a regular egg supply even if a couple of them aren't laying.

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Art and Fic Recs

Some of these are my birthday gifts, some are from the Trick or Treat Collection, and some are just things I recently enjoyed. I hope you find something to enjoy too. If you do, please kudos or comment and make the creator happy.

(I did not sign up for Trick or Treat this year, but I did write three treats (can you guess which they are?) and I've been enjoying browsing the collection.)

(You will note a lack of Biggles. This is because I have enough Biggles fic recs for its own post.)

Art and Fic

Watership Down - Richard Adams. Rabbit-of-the-Moon, by Zdenka. 100 words + art. Silverweed dreams of the moon.

Art

There was a ton of art I loved in the Trick or Treat collection. To browse just the art,

Star of the Ballet. In another universe, Degas paints darling gorilla girl ballerinas.

The Endless Halloween. Sandman TV. A lovely autumnal portrait of Death, in an outfit she would TOTALLY wear.

Ladies' Games. House of the Dragon, Rhaenyra/Alicent. A great example of how hot a scene can be when everyone is modestly clothed, seen from the waist up, and not doing anything overtly sexual.

a delightful family portrait and a study in badassitude. SPY X FAMILY. I don't know the show but the art is GREAT.

Similarly, I bounced off the Locked Tomb books but I still enjoyed this cool animation of Gideon and this lovely portrait of Nona.

Haircare. Alien vs. Predator. Continuing the theme of me living under a pop culture rock, I've never seen the movie but clearly you don't need to in order to enjoy this tender portrait of a Predator doing his beloved's hair.

Fic

Candyman (Original). the girl made of fire. 348 words. The stories they tell about Helen.

Earthsea - Ursula K. Le Guin. tomorrow will not be too late, by victoria_p (musesfool). A beautiful look at Tenar through the years.

Original Works/Lovecraftiana. A pair of delightful Original Female Character/Eldritch Horror With Lots of Tentacles stories, both sweet and hilarious. In which Shoggoths have nothing on grad school and Roommates-to-lovers on Halloween.

Julius Caesar - Shakespeare. for always I am Caesar. 532 words. Gorgeously written.

Iron Fist. Pumpkin Problems. 991 words. Ward gets turned into a pumpkin. Need I say more?

Rebecca - Daphne du Maurier. As Sank I Senseless by the Dreadful Shore. 1587 words. Absolutely pitch-perfect narrative voice, a chilling post-novel story.

The Sandman TV. A Place For One (Or Two). 852 words. A lovely and very cozy story about Dream and Lucienne's developing friendship.

The Stand - Stephen King. Cheap Thrills, by Maidenjedi. 1354 words. An unsettling, wistful look at one of my favorite pre-flu characters, Maria the Oral Hygienist.

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The White Vault (Season Three) by K. A. Statz

I am so obsessed with this show. It continues to have great and very likable characters, a compelling story, and tons of wilderness survival and heroism and creeping dread.

Season three launches with a new set of characters exploring a different area. This team is also international, but with a quite different character and mission. They're academics plus one guide tasked with exploring a remote area of Patagonia where some strange glyphs have been found, in order to do an archaeological survey and also see if it's suitable for tourism. There's two Spanish-speaking professors and two grad students, Eva and Simon. Eva is fluent in Spanish, Simon is hilariously not. There's also a linguistics professor from China who thinks a recently discovered site in China may be relevant; everyone else seems to think she's a brilliant crackpot.

At this point I realized that her Chinese site is covered in one of the bonus episodes, Imperial, and backtracked to listen to that. Afterwards I understood why everyone who gets her report on the Chinese site thinks it's a hoax.

Similarly to season one, it took me a couple episodes to get into this, though for a different reason. There's a wind effect in I think episodes 2-3 or so that makes it very difficult to understand what people are saying when they're shouting over the wind. Thankfully that goes away soon.

This season has an interesting set of challenges that I thought were handled very well. Unlike seasons 1-2, at this point the listeners know much more than the characters. There's much more of a "No! Don't go in the cave! Don't touch the statues!" vibe, because we already know something about their discoveries based on similar ones made in the earlier seasons by different characters. (The Patagonia characters don't know about the Svalbard characters.)

But what you gain in dramatic irony, you lose in freshness. We already know what the heartbeat means, and that the statues move. This season introduces some new bits of creepiness to preserve the element of surprise and the unknown, most prominently bugs. FUCKING BUGS.

Then episode five has a reveal that literally made me scream aloud. (With glee, not terror). It was all up from there, though all down for the characters.

SO EXCITED for season four. Consulting with the timeline, I will listen to the bonus episode Iluka first.

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Biggles, Foreign Legionnaire, by W E Johns

Biggles and Ginger are recruited to join the French Foreign Legion to help uncover a conspiracy which is recruiting pilots to desert and do nefarious things. He does so, giving himself the very impenetrable false name of... Biggs. Ginger Hebblethwaite's fake name is Hebble. Very clever, guys. I guess Algy and Bertie weren't in on this part because they'd be Lac and Lis, which was presumably vetoed as improbable.

This book has some really great bits but also a very big caveat. The wealthy globalist starting wars for money is named Julius Rothenberg W E JOHNS DID YOU HAVE TO? In a book where there are multiple references to Hitler and anyone working with him being the worst, too. Also, while there are definitely Johns books that are worse in terms in racism, this one has it sprinkled in throughout the entire book, and more than sprinkled in the last fourth or so.

That aside, I fucking love W E Johns' plotting. Every single book of his that I've read to date has a minimum of one excellent, unexpected, yet logical twist. I guess except for the ones where the twist is electric centipedes controlled by underground monks, which is.... well, for sure nobody expects monk-controlled electric centipedes!

There's a sequence in this book that exemplifies this sort of thing.

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SO ANYWAY, Biggles, Ginger, and von Stalhein end up besieged in an ancient stone fortress. This part is great. I think it's the only time in the series that Biggles and von Stalhein are forced to cooperate while they're still enemies, and it's terrific. They share their last cigarettes! They are deeply respectful of each other! We also get a bit that really encapsulates where they both are emotionally at this point in time:

Biggles: "So what does everyone think we should do now?"

Von Stalhein: "Let's have a suicide charge! We'll go out together in a blaze of glory, and take some of the enemy with us!"

Biggles: "...okay, you do you, but I'm going to eat dinner and go to sleep."

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A Garter as a Lesser Gift, by Aster Glenn Gray

A short, charming retelling of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in which Arthur and his knights are RAF pilots in WWII who get interrupted at the pub by a strange man dressed all in green.

If you're not familiar with the original story, and you will enjoy this book a lot more if you are, it goes basically like this. A Green Knight marches into King Arthur's court and challenges his knights to an exchange of blows. Sir Gawain accepts the challenge and beheads him. The Green Knight puts his head back on and tells Gawain that in one year, they must meet at the green chapel and Gawain must accept an equal blow from him. One year later, Gawain goes off to search for the chapel, and ends up a guest of Lord and Lady Bertilak. He agrees to an exchange of gifts with the Lord - whatever he's given in the castle, he must give to Lord Bertilak in turn - and then finds himself in a quandary when Lady Bertilak kisses him...

A Garter as a Lesser Gift feels something like a fairy tale, though one conscious of itself; the pilots are amazed by the green man's ability to survive a mortal wound, but accept it more easily than if this was a more straight-up historical fantasy, and Gawain keeps an eye out for animals in trouble he could help, as that seems to work in fairy tales. It's also something like The Once and Future King, with its layered references and understated glimpses of terrible things, like a conversation between Gawain and Lord Bertilak about how being a fighter pilot is something like being a hunter; Gawain refers to his prey as airplanes, Bertilak points out that it's really airmen, and Gawain says he prefers not to think of it that way.

A Garter as a Lesser Gift is light on the surface, full of coziness and good food and longing, but it has substance underneath. The knights other than Gawain make brief appearances, but they're all immediately recognizable and not just by their names. However you interpret the weird original poem, it's about (if not only about) the juxtaposition of life in the form of sexuality and love with sudden violent death and the dread of death, and living life while facing mortality. This novella gets at that without getting too dark; the RAF pilots face their own deaths and the deaths of their friends every day.

The Bertilaks are fascinating creations, both down-home and otherworldly, worthy of longing but also dangerous, within time (they're subject to rationing rules, sort of) and without it (Gawain has to explain to them that they're hunting game that no longer lives in England.) Their library is full of mystery novels, but their own mystery is not so easily solved, and maybe doesn't need to be. The resolution is very satisfying, but I'd love to read more Arthurian tales within this setting.

Disclosure: the author is osprey_archer and a friend of mine.

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Dark Matter, by Michelle Paver

In 1937, three Englishmen go on a scientific expedition to the Arctic. They are Algie, who we know from a note at the beginning is the one who's left to tell the tale; Gus, the golden boy leader; and James, whose diary makes up all the rest of the book, a desperate working class man who resents the others.

They plan to make their camp at Grukuken, which is in Svalbard, Norway. (Svalbard is also the setting for seasons 1-2 of The White Vaults.) The captain of the ship they hire to take them there warns them in very strong but vague terms not to go to Gruhuken, and even tries to back out of taking them there. They ignore him. Bad move. Gruhuken has a ghost.

Once on Gruhuken, James is terrorized by the ghost he sees but is afraid to tell them others about, and simmers with repressed love for Gus and resentment of Algie. He also, in my single favorite plotline, reluctantly bonds with the huskies they brought with them and one in particular, Isaak.

Isaak is an extremely good and very convincing dog who does things like fall into the bay and get his head stuck in a pemmican can, and he was my favorite character. (I stopped reading at that point to look up spoilers. Isaak does not die and has a happy ending.) Gus is kind of perfect other than his rich guy privilege, which James lectures him on in between pining. Algie bumbles around getting on James' nerves and killing things, including committing and threatening deeply disturbing acts of cruelty to animals.

Gus and Algie leave for a while, leaving James alone. Bad move. All else aside, it's really hard to write as compellingly about a person who's alone than a person who can interact with others. Of course, he does have Isaak and the other dogs... and the ghost.

I enjoyed this novel while I was reading it but was also a bit underwhelmed. It had the misfortune of getting to me when I was listening to The White Vault, an absolutely outstanding fiction podcast that was also a spooky Arctic story and even set in the same general location, and also after recently reading several also absolutely outstanding horror novels. Dark Matter is an uneven novel with some very good elements, but the comparisons I couldn't help making didn't work in its favor.

Pro: The nature descriptions are gorgeous, it's got that page-turning quality, and I loved the relationship of James and Isaak. I liked that it involves queerness. The ending is very good. There's some individual very unsettling moments; my favorite involved, in retrospect, a painting in James's miserable city room.

Con: The ghost doesn't relate to the themes of the book, except in a general "human society can be terrible" way. But it doesn't have any personal relationship with the men, and its story isn't a parallel with any of their stories, again except in the extremely general theme of social alienation. I like it when the supernatural elements are more related to the characters.

Of the three characters, only James is really developed. I liked that he was in love with Gus but I also felt like more could have been done with that. The story slows down enormously when he's left alone, and all relationship development stops because no one else is there anymore.

The letter at the beginning had no point or callback other than to establish that things went very badly, which we can figure out anyway as it's a horror novel. The ignored warnings about Gruhuken are very horror-typical, and I'd have liked that element to be a bit more original or better or something.

The other things I didn't like are spoilery.

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This is a perennial small fandom. I shall check out the fic for it.

Paver's other books include Thin Air, which sounds exactly like Dark Matter only set on Everest, and Wakenhyrst, a Gothic that sounds more interesting. Anyone read either of those?

Content notes: The main dog doesn't die. Two other dogs also survive. The fate of the other dogs is unclear. There's a very disturbing animal cruelty scene on the October 1 diary entry, and another one later one (I forget exactly where). James is mean about Algie being fat.

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Happy Birthday to me

It's my birthday! I did my celebration with friends in LA yesterday, with a lavish spread of assorted lunch things and Sweet Lady Jane's triple berry cake. Today I'm driving home with a ton of leftovers, including half the cake, to quietly celebrate at home by gardening, writing fic, reading, petting my cats, and generally enjoying my beautiful home.

If you would like to help me celebrate my birthday, here are some helpful suggestions:

1. Tell me in comments if I've made your life (or just day) happier or better in any way.

2. My Amazon wishlist

3. Write or draw or create me something! Original or fanfic. If you click on my "fic exchange letter" tag, you will find a ridiculously long list of everything I've ever been into, all of which I'm still into, complete with prompts.

4. Review something interesting or amusing.

5. Recommend something you think I'd enjoy.

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The White Vault (Seasons One and Two), by K. A. Statz

The Terra Nova expedition meets House of Leaves meets cosmic horror, but modern day and with women and people of color involved.

An international crew goes to an Arctic research station in Norway to do some quick repairs. They are trapped by a blizzard, and then weird things start happening. Followed by very weird things. Followed by extremely weird and also fucking terrifying things.

This is a fictional podcast made of found footage from the doomed expedition. The doom isn't a spoiler, as you can immediately figure out that if someone is reconstructing what happened from the crew's reports, recordings, etc, complete with notes like "This journal entry was found crumpled under a chair in the common room," it's because no one is around to explain things.

This podcast is spectacularly well-done - exactly what I wanted and didn't get from the terrible The Nox. It combines the best elements of horror, survival/exploration, and found footage/epistolatory fiction into a genuine tour-de-force. (I struggle with found footage movies as shakycam gives me motion sickness, so getting to enjoy this genre with actors was a treat.) It won me over even though I very rarely enjoy fiction podcasts - in fact this is the first I think I've ever enjoyed.

It did take me a couple episodes to get used to everyone's voices and catch up on who was who - I read transcripts for the first few episodes after watching them. But once it gets going, it REALLY gets going. I had to hurriedly turn off one episode because I was listening after dark and that was a mistake.

The multi-lingual cast is using their actual accents and languages. I really loved that aspect. The acting is extremely good, as are the sound effects. But the story is best of all. I ended up really liking the characters, especially Graham Casner and Dr. Rosa de la Torres, and feeling for them. Though the story is horror and everyone is probably doomed from the start, it's not the kind of horror where everyone and everything is terrible. It's the kind of horror - and also the kind of survival/expedition story - where basically decent and competent people try their best, but it doesn't work out because sometimes life is like that. Nature does not forgive, and neither does cosmic horror.

I really enjoyed going into this almost completely cold and I recommend it. Seasons one and two constitute a single arc. It doesn't wrap everything up as there's still a ton of mysteries which presumably continue into the next season, but it does complete the story of that particular expedition.

Content notes: Monster/horror-type violence. Body horror (within my tolerance levels.) Brief, non-graphic mention of sled dogs getting killed by a creature (they're not dogs we know.) No sexual or human-on-human violence. In general, it's more on the suggestive rather than graphic end of things.

( Spoilers! Spoilers! )

recessional , thank you SO MUCH for reccing this. I'd never even heard of it before.

The White Vault. There's lots of places to listen to this. I listened on Audible and also joined the Patreon to get bonus episodes.

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