Rachel Manija Brown's Blog, page 50

My stories for Summer of Horror

For the ballad Twa Corbies (the second time I've written a story based on it)

Our Dinner Sweet. The corbies feast well throughout the years. 320 words. The corbies eat corpses, but there's no graphic details.

For Biggles, Red as Blood. Biggles and von Stalhein take shelter from a blizzard in a strange castle. 3095 words. Nothing graphic, it's a fantasy story with some dark elements.

My laptop died when I'd written the beginning and end but not the middle, and I had to dictate the middle. Definitely my most hair-raising exchange experience.

The Wilds in the world of the Annihilation movie:

Will you bloom bright and fierce. Martha in the Shimmer. 345 words. Body horror, but the sort that's as beautiful as it is horrific.

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In That Endlessness, Our End, by Gemma Files

A collection of horror stories, most of which involve some aspect of nested stories or metafiction, from framing stories, media like films or the internet, family legends, or folklore. There's also a lot of cosmic horror, F/F relationships, and fraught family relationships.

It's a very strong collection with lots of variety in terms of subject matter, but a unified voice/tone; there were only one or two stories I didn't like, and a number that were outstanding.

My favorites were "This Is How It Goes," "Venio," "Cuckoo," "Look Up," and "Thin Pale Hands."

"This Is How It Goes" is a very strong start to the collection. The premise is that people start twinning, with their doppelgängers bursting from their skin. The twins always, immediately, attempts to kill each other; usually only one survives. The narrator first sees this on the internet before it comes home to her; she finds that pre-existing anxiety eases once the apocalypse actually arrives... or was it that the twin she killed took it with her?

This is one of the most unusual causes of an apocalypse I've ever come across. I could read an entire book about this fascinating premise.

"Venio" begins with a writing exercise where everyone weirdly writes the same premise, and devolves into something incredibly chilling. It's another one of my favorite horror tropes, a group of sympathetic characters who accidentally summon something horrific.

"Thin Cold Hands" is about motherhood, and the truth behind fairytales, and changelings, in an unusual way. There's a description of finding the bones of a kind of terrifying Tinkerbell that is a beautifully precise and spooky piece of writing that I will probably remember for the rest of my life. It has one of my favorite things in horror, a somewhat sympathetic monster who seems to just want to survive.

"Cuckoo" is another changeling story, but from the perspective of a being approached by parents who want to switch out their troublesome child for an improved model. It's an excellent paired reading with "Thin Cold Hands."

"Look Up" has a more lush tone than the rest of the stories, and also has a quite different ending. It's folk horror about a creepy family and an even creepier vampire. The descriptions are horrific and gorgeous.

"The Church in the Mountains" and "Cut Frame" both involve creepy movies and nested stories. They're both excellent and quite different from each other, though both deal with some of the same territory as Experimental Film.

"Cut Frame" is about a movie, told in the form of an interview. The main characters never appear in person, per se, but are seen at a distance, in the memories of people who knew them. It's very atmospheric, with a fascinating main character, an actress with an interesting effect on those around her.

"The Church in the Mountains" is folk horror meets film horror, is even more atmospheric, and has one doozy of an explanation for what's actually going on, but felt somewhat incomplete.

"Bulb" is a somewhat traditional Lovecraft via technology story, defamiliarized by it being told in the form of an interview and web posts. The main story is very effective, with plenty of haunting details, but the final section (a follow-up web post) didn't feel necessary.

Other stories feature haunted houses, a haunted AirBnb, bad therapy, more doppelgangers, and a missing planet. If you like Gemma Files' work at all, definitely grab this. Thanks to scioscribe for giving it to me!

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Summer of Horror Recs

The collection is open! Browse! Enjoy! Please comment if you like something.

Despite extreme difficulties (wrist problems AND my laptop screen died halfway through a story I was writing and was then in the shop for TWO WEEKS, I wrote three stories. Can you guess which ones?

This was a particularly strong collection, and I haven't even read everything I intend to yet - I haven't even started on Original Works or anything in the MCU, for instance. (I'm also behind on commenting. SORRY YOU WILL ALL GET THE COMMENTS YOU DESERVE. SOON.)

I got FOUR fantastic gifts! Plus several stories that weren't gifted to me, but might as well have been. Here's my recs from the collection. I'll say if you need to know canon.

Biggles - W. E. Johns

There are five Biggles stories and I enjoyed them all. I think all you need to know to read them is that Biggles is a British WWI pilot who becomes a general flying adventurer and Erich von Stalhein is a German spy who becomes a general ne'er do well; they're enemies who admire each other to a ridiculous degree. "Nor Any Drop" is based on their canon meeting in which Biggles is a double agent pretending to be a turncoat named Brunau.

ALL the Biggles stories

Bluebeard

To All My Wives I Loved and Love. A short account of his wives, from Bluebeard's POV; even more spectacularly fucked-up than that summary suggests.

Ready or Not - Movie

this surely is a dream. Dreamy, atmospheric Grace/Daniel. You need to know canon.

Revelator - Daryl Gregory

There are THREE stories for this book, one for me but they might as well all be for me, and they're all brilliant. They are all set at least partly post-canon, are spectacularly spoilery, and will make no sense if you haven't read the book. As a delightful bonus, two of them are takes on the same prompt but do extremely different things with it.

ALL the Revelator stories.

The Ritual - Movie

Moder. I GOT ART OF MODER AND IT'S AMAAAAAAAZING.

Sundial - Catriona Ward

From hope and fear set free. A gorgeous, moving, darkly comic fix-it, perfectly in tune with the book and what a fix-it even means in this context. Extremely spoilery for the book and won't make sense if you haven't read it.

Us - Movie

Everything Is Fine Now. Umbrae follows Zora home. (Can Zora keep her? Should she?)

SOMEONE FINALLY WROTE MY UMBRAE PROMPT AND IT'S GREAT. This will not make sense unless you've seen the movie, but if you've seen the movie, you have GOT to read this.

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A Personal Memoir, by Sandy Dennis

I bought this book at a library sale for fifty cents and by accident - I thought it was a memoir by Sandy Denny the 1960s singer, not Sandy Dennis the 1960s actress. I almost donated it unread when I realized, then decided to read the first chapter just to see, as I often enjoy showbiz memoirs.

It is not a showbiz memoir. She never even mentions her film career or how she got started in acting, and mentions her career in theatre only in brief, glancing anecdotes that are about things other than acting, like how she fell in love with the set of an unnamed play she performed in on Broadway for a year. So this is another bait-and-switch book - a double bait-and-switch, at that - but a marvelous one, the kind in which what you get is different but unexpectedly much better than what you were promised.

Dennis wrote this book, which is very short, mostly while she was dying of cancer. It's partly about dying, not much at all about cancer, and mostly about her beloved cats (she had forty rescue cats), and how cats come to her; about her garden and her sadness at a nearby forest getting cut down; about strange shimmering moments, observed with great delicacy and precision but left unexplained.

Her book reminded me a bit of Ray Bradbury and a bit of Banana Yoshimoto and a bit of Tove Janssen, sometimes earthy and sometimes ineffable. What it did not remind me of was any other memoir by an actor. She says that she's always been a very secret person; few people knew she was writing a memoir, and the manuscript was only discovered after her death. The blurbs on the back, all by famous showbiz people she knew, are stunned and touched and bewildered to have read an unexpected masterpiece by someone they loved but never felt they quite knew, and whose inner life they discovered for the first time in these pages.

Content notes: Skip the first page of the chapter titled "The I Will Remember" if you don't want to read a description of a dead cat, hit by a car, that she finds and buries in her backyard.


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Summer of Horror

The summerofhorrorexchange collection opens at 11:59 EDT tonight. You have 12 hours to write a treat! No word length minimums for treats! You can see all the requests at the app linked above.

I wrote a short treat using Dragon Dictate and cutting and pasting from my phone, then editing in AO3. So if I can do that under supremely adverse circumstances...

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This is just to say

My laptop is in the shop till Thursday so I will be scarce online till next weekend.

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Darkfall, by Dean Koontz

ANOTHER bait-and-switch! Though this time, not the author's fault. My edition has this on the back cover:

Winter gripped the city. Terror gripped it, too. In a city paralyzed by a blizzard, something watches, something stalks.

There's plenty of watching and stalking, but I would not have even registered that it was snowing if the back cover hadn't told me; the only times the weather comes into play is when there's spooky cold drafts. I was expecting winter survival horror, and that is not an element.

It is, in fact, a mostly terrible horror novel about voodoo. (Almost all horror novels about voodoo are mostly or entirely terrible). If I'd known there was voodoo, I would not have picked this up.

(Spelling used to indicate the trashy horror use, not the actual religion.)

Members of the Mafia are found bitten to death in locked rooms; two cops investigate and find a trail leading to a bocor with a grudge. There's a houngan who helps the cops. You can tell Koontz is vaguely gesturing in the direction of sensitivity but it doesn't really help. I skimmed rather than DNF'd, which meant that I got to the ending where the hero hurls holy water into a pit, then closes it with his own blood which is holy because he's a good guy, yes really.

The best part is the first chapter, in which the hero's daughter hears a creepy noise in her bedroom at night. I kept reading way past when I should have given up on the strength of that first chapter. I'm not saying it's well-written, or even good, really. But it's got that grabby, compelling quality that makes you read on.

That first chapter shows the power of two techniques: having something that's scary but unknown and unseen (once we see the voodoo critters, they're no longer scary), and moment-to-moment writing. The latter is something used a lot in horror and also in romance - two genres which depend largely on evoking emotion. You follow the character in real time, getting every moment, every detail, every thought, every feeling. It's extremely granular. You might spend a paragraph describing them reaching for a light switch: every fumble, every texture, every worry that it won't turn on.

This can be done badly, but it's incredibly effective when done well. You can wring more suspense out of someone trying to reach a glass of water with their hands tied than from fifty giant explosions. Dick Francis and Stephen King are masters of this technique. And this one chapter in a pretty crummy book, in which a girl hears rustling noises and pokes at them with a plastic baseball bat, is an example of how effective it can be even when it's nowhere near that level.

If you want to take a look, here's the link to the Kindle edition which has a Look Inside: Darkfall: A remorselessly terrifying and powerful thriller

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An Onion in My Pocket: My Life with Vegetables, by Deborah Madison

Look! It's a bait-and-switch memoir! It's been a while since I encountered one of those.

Madison, a chef and author of vegetarian cookbooks, opens her memoir by saying that there is a twenty-year gap in her resume. It's a time she rarely speaks of, she says, but which completely shaped her life. It was the twenty years she spent as the cook for the Zen Center in San Francisco.

How fascinating, I thought. I am always a sucker for the minutiae of daily life, especially when it involves cooking or nunneries/monasteries. Plus, I've had some of the best meals of my life in Buddhist temples. I bought the book after reading that intro on Amazon.

The rest of the book is Madison's life story, mostly not about the twenty years at the Zen Center. That gets about two chapters. She explains why she left in literally one sentence, referring to "a scandal involving the abbot," with no further detail.

Her prose is good, and I enjoy reading food descriptions, so normally I will enjoy any chef or food-centered memoir. But while any given page is fine, the overall effect is regrettably boring.

For a book called "my life with vegetables," it's less about vegetables and her feelings about vegetables, and more a recounting of her life which largely involves vegetarian cooking. I was expecting rhapsodies about the specific delights of leeks and lotus root, and I got endless descriptions of life in California, "and then I cooked this and then I ate that, and mostly it was vegetarian."

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California Bones, by Greg van Eekhout

In an alternate Los Angeles, there are canals instead of freeways (but the boat traffic jams anyway) and osteomancers gain the powers of ancient animals by mining the La Brea Tar Pits and eating their bones. The magic then settles into their bones, leading to a highly unfortunate situation in which you can gain the collected power of an osteomancer by eating... them.

In this fantastically realized alt-historical/urban fantasy setting, Daniel Blackland is the son of a famous osteomancer who infused him with power before getting killed and eaten by the current ruler of Los Angeles, the Hierarch. Rather than seeking revenge, Daniel laid low and became a highly skilled but basically mid-level thief, running a crew consisting of Jo (a shapeshifter), Cassandra (a safecracker/sharpshooter), and Moth (a fighter who can regenerate like Wolverine.)

But there's another man who also had a parent killed and eaten by the Hierarch. Gabriel Argent also sought survival over revenge, but took a completely different route. He works for the Hierarch as a highly skilled but basically mid-level investigator, whose true love is bureaucracy and city planning. When his sharp eye for oddities puts him on Daniel's trail, he borrows Max, a Hound - a highly trained and specialized slave, treated like a police dog only with less kindness. Gabriel sees potential in Max, a highly competent depressed nihilist who is under a death sentence for murdering his original handler. Their relationship was tied with the worldbuilding/magic system/sense of place for my favorite part of the book.

sholio has a review with way more detail on Gabriel & Max.

This book is basically a cross between The Lies of Locke Lamora minus the misogyny, a visit to the La Brea Tar Pits, and my "i love la" tag.

The LA-ness was SO GOOD. It feels 100% local and real and lived-in, not the sort of outsider's view of what's important about LA and its history that you often get. I literally knew EXACTLY where most of it was taking place, down to random warehouses. At one point Tito's Tacos makes a crucial appearance. That's that taco joint by the freeway three blocks from my old apartment! I cracked up that Daniel also thinks it overrated, which is a very unpopular opinion.

I also liked that okay, you get some world famous Hollywood figures, but you also get William Mulholland as a water wizard controlling the Department of Water & Power (both kinds of power), and the whole plot turns on things like the La Brea Tar Pits and LA not naturally having water.

The social/political aspects really worked for me. The central problem, which is the literal devouring of natural resources until the powerful are literally eating the powerless, is makes sense both as a metaphor and as a reality within the world of the book.

The magic system was fantastic. There's aspects which are underexplained (mostly non-osteomantic magic), but overall it's clever, evocative, original, and generally delightful. If you want super-strength, you get it from specific animals, so they're forever battling people imbued with the essences of short-faced bears, saber-tooth tigers, and, memorably, an entire herd of mammoth!

The parts of this book that were good were A+. However, it had some flaws that knock it down from excellent to very good. I think it needed one more editing pass. Several extremely important emotional moments occur entirely off-page, some of the characterization is very thin, and the crucial matter of the connections, history, and emotional bonds between Daniel and his crew are told in summary rather than shown, which made those feel thin too. There's also some significant pacing issues - the book needed at least one more chapter between the action climax and the last chapter, among other things.

My big issues fell into two general categories: important things occurring off-page, which affected the characterization and general emotional tenor, and pacing.

The book would have been SO MUCH BETTER if we'd gotten full chapters of flashback for each of Daniel's crew as actual scenes rather than Daniel narrating what happened in summary. A lot of anime/manga does this really well. It would have made the revelations seem cooler, and added a lot of depth to the characters, and given a certain spoilery revelation more punch.

Jo especially was thinly characterized, which was frustrating as it also isn't explained at all in this book how shapeshifting works and how it's different from osteomancy. A flashback chapter in which we see Daniel meet her would have helped a lot.

The explanation of why Moth can regenerate is interesting (more so in retrospect after a certain revelation, actually) but I was wildly curious while it was still a mystery, and then disappointed when Daniel just summarizes it. If it had been a flashback chapter and shown rather than told, it would have been much more satisfying.

In general, Daniel's crew is supposed to have incredibly tight and long-lived relationships, but their characterization felt thin and so I wasn't very invested in them for a lot of the book. Whereas I was extremely invested in Gabriel and Max, partly because they were cool, unusual characters, but also because they meet in the present day so we actually see their relationship develop rather than it being summary + wisecracks.

(Daniel wisecracks a lot and not very funnily. For a lot of the book he was my least favorite character.)

Other issues are super spoilery. There's one twist that made my jaw drop - it was startling, logical, perfectly done, and illuminated a whole lot of things that had happened before. I recommend that you read the book first, if you want to be surprised. But I know most of you won't, so I'll try to talk around it a little bit.

Content notes: Cannibalism, injustice, torture, police brutality, depictions of racism/colonialism, environmental issues. The book is generally very fun, but it doesn't whitewash social issues.

( Read more... )

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Cats are assholes

It's 89 F/32 C and I'm lurking inside with the curtains drawn. (Thank goodness I replaced the nasty old plastic blinds with fake velvet blackout curtains! It makes the house look nicer and they cool it down a lot when closed, in addition to warming it when it's cold outside.)

I went out for FIVE MINUTES to feed the chooks some carrot peels and make sure their drinking water was cool. I came back and discovered that the doormat had gotten caught in the door when I closed it, allowing Alex to pry it open and let himself and Erin out.

I caught Erin quite quickly - she doesn't really like the outdoors and only goes out to annoy, because she knows it teases.

Alex is another matter. He strikes out for the wild blue yonder. I once caught him three houses away! (In eight inches of snow OFC.)

Luckily, at this point I know he consistently heads to the backyard, and strikes off from there. I caught him examining the compost heap. Quite fascinating I'm sure.

I was outside for ten minutes total, five for chooks and five for cats, of which maybe three was direct sun exposure, but I could literally feel it burning my skin. I'm going to put ice cubes in the cat water, not that they deserve them.

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