Rachel Manija Brown's Blog, page 67

Night of the Mannequins, by Stephen Graham Jones

So Shanna got a new job at the movie theatre, we thought we'd play a fun prank on her, and now most of us are dead, and I'm really starting to feel kind of guilty about it all.

The narrator, Sawyer, and his friends decide to prank Shanna by taking a mannequin they found in a creek bed and taking it to see a movie with them. Things go horribly wrong from there.

This novella started very strong and has some terrific writing, but ended up feeling one-note.

( Spoilers! )

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A small whine

I cannot believe how much work unpacking is. I've been doing basically nothing else for days and there's still so much left.

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Last chance for King of Exchanges!

Signups for kingofexchanges close today at at midnight EST.

You will need a minimum of three different Stephen King canons to request and offer (requests and offers do not need to be the same). Nominations are running concurrently with signups, so if what you want isn't in the tagset, you can add it.

AO3 Collection

AO3 Tagset

Schedule:
Aug 21: Sign-Ups & Nominations Close
Aug 23 (or earlier): Assignments Go Out
October 1: Assignments Due
October 8: Work Reveals
October 15: Creator Reveals

Everything at 8:00 PM EST.

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Available Dark, by Elizabeth Hand. Audiobook read by Carol Monda.

Cass Neary, now wanted for questioning regarding the events of the previous book, is offered a nice sum of money to evaluate some photographs owned by a fashion photographer who's famous for a unique kind of lens flare. She can guess what sort of photos they are, tells him she won't do kiddie porn, and agrees to do it once she's assured it's not that. The photos are beautifully staged scenes of gruesome murders with the iconic lens flare. Cass thinks they're brilliant and says so, with no intention of looking any deeper into how he took them and why he was there.

However, a call from a long-lost lover and a few brutal murders send her to Iceland, which is both freezing and in the middle of a financial crisis. Everyone is depressed and cold, so it's perfect for Cass. But soon she gets involved in a complicated plot involving the murder photos, Icelandic folklore, Scandinavian death metal, and a cult.

The story really takes off at about the halfway or two-thirds point, when Cass is ditched in a blizzard and left for dead. In a moment which is both ingenious and darkly hilarious, ( Read more... )

I enjoy the deniable fantasy aspects of the series. This book had some slow-ish stretches in the middle but the mystery aspect worked better than in the first book, and the setting was very cool. The weird and morbid Scandinavian black metal scene was a very appropriate backdrop:

According to various sources, Euronymous took bits of Dead's skull and made them into necklaces for members of the black metal scene, including the band's drummer Hellhammer. Necrobutcher, the band's bassist, was so disgusted with Euronymous' actions that he left Mayhem. He was replaced by Burzum's Varg Vikernes, who murdered Euronymous two years later.

Dead, Dead, he was almost certainly not good in bed.

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A Candle in her Room, by Ruth Arthur

This unusual novel melds evil doll horror with a family generation saga, told in three POVS over three generations of girls and women in Wales.

At the turn of the century, three sisters are moved to Wales by their doctor father when he inherits a three-hundred-year-old house which used to be the place where prisoners--including witches--were held. The youngest, Briony, finds a creepy doll in the attic. It's made of a single piece of wood, DIDO is carved down its spine, and it has a beautiful face with an evil smile. It seems to have a bad affect on Briony's personality, until the oldest sister, Juniper, takes it for her own. It has an even worse effect on Juniper...

Dido, who presumably was a witch's poppet, is distinctly unsettling. Her effect is to influence people to cut themselves off, to obsess over her, and to be cruel to family members. Juniper had tendencies in that direction already, so Dido found her fertile ground.

There's a lot going on that's not about Dido's influence, though that's a thread running through the book. It feels like one of those sprawling family sagas where the characters get married and have children, and war breaks out and people discover unexpected heroism and some of them die, and then life goes on for the survivors. Only this was published as a children's book, so the story is relatively short rather than the usual 600 pages, and also there's an evil doll. It's a weird concept but very well-done.

I found this book at a library book sale. Shows the benefits of frequenting those; I'd never heard of the book or author before.

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Dear King of Exchanges Creator

Thank you for writing for me!

My requests are for fic, but if anyone feels moved to make me an art treat, I would be delighted.

For any prompts where I say it would be OK to mix-and-match the character sets, or if it would make sense to include more characters in your story, feel free to include any characters from any of the fandoms I nominated characters from.

I would be happy with a story of any length, from an epic to 500 words exactly. Of course, as a King fan, I adore long stories. However, some of my favorite exchange stories are extremely short, and that length is especially good for horror. So seriously: anything is fine.

If you'd like to do a crossover that isn't requested, go for it. I'm always happy to see characters or canon from Carrie, Cujo, The Dead Zone, Doctor Sleep (book or movie), Dolores Claiborne, Duma Key, Firestarter, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, the Holly Gibney books (but I haven't read "If It Bleeds" yet), The Institute, It, The Langoliers, Later, Lisey's Story, The Long Walk, Misery, Needful Things, Pet Sematary, Rose Madder, Salem's Lot, The Shawshank Redemption, and The Shining.

( General DNWs )

( Crossover Fandom )

( Dark Tower - Stephen King )

( Gerald's Game - Stephen King )

( The Stand - Stephen King )

( The Stand (1994) )

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Guts: The True Stories Behind Hatchet and the Brian Books, by Gary Paulsen

I was upside down in a pile of dogs, all howling over the roar of the engine, when I heard the pilot scream, "There's too much weight in the tail! Throw the dogs forward or we're going down!"

I was still wearing my full winter gear, which included a down parka, and the dogs bit me and the pilot and ripped my parka so that soon the plane was filled with small white feathers and flying dogs and swear words and blood.

Only Gary Paulsen. He's to wild winter tales what Adrian Tchaikovsky is to bugs.

The true stories behind his books are much more OTT than the books themselves. I hate to doubt a person's word just because their stories seem unlikely considering how much hard-to-believe stuff has actually happened to me, but I can't help wondering if Paulsen just heard some stories and then said he saw them happen. Specifically, the plane he witnessed crashing in the ocean when he was a child on the boat that went to rescue the survivors, only to witness them all get eaten by sharks a la Quint's story from Jaws. ("The sailors were literally pulling people out of sharks' mouths." REALLY?) Or the kid he saw get killed by a deer he was feeding in front of a "Don't Feed The Deer" sign. I 100% believe the dog-and-plane story though.

Be that as it may, this book is pure distilled essence of Paulsen: nature and its dangers and beauty and grossness and violence, hunting and survival and life and death. And flying dogs.

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Pet, by Akwaeke Emezi

Lucille is a city built by angels who fought a revolution to destroy the monsters and create a paradise. Angels fight for equality and peace and justice; monsters oppress people and hurt the innocent. Angels are activists and revolutionaries; monsters are abusers and oppressors.

Jam was born in Lucille, a child of angels. The children of Lucille never knew the war, only its fruits. In Lucille, guns are banned, all people are equal, and everyone is accepted. The monuments are of heroes and the victims of monsters. Lucille has no police or prisons, which were the things of monsters; the monsters themselves were sentenced to rehabilitation. There are no monsters in Lucille.

Jam, a Black trans girl who uses sign language, is happy in Lucille with her painter mom Bitter and her best friend Redemption. Until she accidentally sheds blood on a painting her mother is working on, and a frightening creature emerges. Pet is instantly recognizable to the reader, if not to Jam, as an angel - not a human activist, but the mythological kind. And Pet has come to Lucille to hunt a monster...

An ambitious, didactic children's novel with some elements that worked for me and some that really didn't. Pet is a fascinating character, Jam is very likeable, there's some gorgeous descriptive scenes, and Lucille is an intriguing setting. Attempts to imagine actual utopias always interest me, because it's such a difficult thing to pull off if you're trying for something other than a completely fake happyland in which everything is actually secretly terrible. (Lucille is not that.)

The things I did not like about the book are spoilery, other than the minor issue that Jam is said to be sixteen but if that hadn't been stated, I'd have assumed she was about eleven.

( Spoilers for the entire book, including the ending. )

This book won a ton of awards, so my opinion is definitely a minority one.

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Generation Loss, by Elizabeth Hand. Audiobook read by Carol Monda.

Cass Neary was involved in the New York punk scene of the 70s, photographing junkies, corpses, and herself as characters; think Weegee meets Cindy Sherman. She published one cult classic book, then was raped by a stranger at knifepoint. Things stopped for her, and the world moved on and left her behind.

Thirty years later, she's still living in the same apartment, still drawn to dead things and damaged people, doing any drug she can lay her hands on, having fucked-up relationships with men and women, and indulging in random petty theft. When her drug dealer offers her a gig interviewing a reclusive and retired woman photographer whom Cass admires, she goes for it because she really needs the money.

The gig is on an island in Maine, and the chilly atmosphere makes you cold just reading it. Cass discovers that the job isn't what she thought, the area has a whole lot of disturbing history, and there may still be a killer on the loose. The mystery is less than mysterious, but the book is about character and atmosphere and suspense, not puzzle-solving.

Cass is self-destructive and unlikable in a way one doesn't often see with middle-aged female characters who are the protagonist of their own book. That is, I actually did... maybe like isn't quite the right word... but I did find her compelling and rooted for her, even when she was doing objectively terrible things like photographing dying people rather than calling 911. "Generation loss" is a photography term, and she's extremely convincing as a photographer. A big part of why I enjoyed spending the length of a book in her dark, depressed, nihilistic head was that it means you see through her photographer's eyes.

Monda is an excellent narrator for Cass Neary. I first encountered her in Grady Hendrix's We Sold Our Souls, and she's great here with an extremely different type of hard-edged, ground-down middle-aged woman who was famous in a niche way many years ago.

There's some light "is it fantasy" elements, which I enjoyed. Cass has some experiences in childhood which might be glimpses of cosmic horror or might be hallucinations or have other mundane explanations. She can sense people's damage or at least believes that she can, which again might be a very specific psychic gift or just a very specific type of intuition/keen observation. Or maybe she just thinks she can sense damage, and she's never proved wrong because who isn't damaged, especially in her social circles?

(Personally, I vote for "yes, she looked into an actual cosmic horror and it looked back which explains a lot" and "specific intuition/observation plus hang out with dealers and addicts, and it's not hard to find damaged people.")

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Signups are open for King of Exchanges!

kingofexchanges , a low-minimum (300 words or a sketch) exchange for all things Stephen King. Sign ups will close on Aug. 21 at 8:00PM EST.

You can still nominate during the sign-up period. I am going to do that myself.

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