Rachel Manija Brown's Blog, page 7

Witchcraft for Wayward Girls, by Grady Hendrix

A group of pregnant teenagers at a home for unwed mothers in 1970 learn witchcraft. Sounds pretty awesome, right?

The home is miserable and emotionally abusive. They're slut-shamed constantly, made to work like Cinderella, and banned from doing anything entertaining. There's a ton of horrific medical abuse. The girls are all given fake names and banned from telling each other their real names or anything about their real life. They all - every one of them - obey this absolutely, with the exception of a few slips. (VERY improbable! Not a single one of them says "Screw this, when we're in private you can call me Linda.") Their babies are sold to adoptive parents. Girls who want to keep their babies are threatened with everything from homelessness to being locked up for life in an asylum until they give them up. But then one of them gets a book on witchcraft...

Based on the premise, I thought this would be about the girls banding together to get revenge on their abusers and forge better lives for themselves.

Haha nope! It's 80% pregnancy/abuse misery, 15% pregnant girls being exploited by witches, and 5% MAX pregnant girls doing anything for themselves including revenge.

I am not big on pregnancy in fiction. I did love the premise, but I assumed it would more about pregnancy being the thing that trapped the girls in a bad situation, and less about the physical details of pregnancy. It is EXTREMELY about the physical details of pregnancy. It has the most graphic birth scene I have ever read, and that includes in literal guides to childbirth.

I was really surprised by how little witchcraft there is. It doesn't even get introduced until about a quarter of the way in, when one of the girls gets a book on witchcraft from a librarian who is also a witch. Then there's a ton of time before they actually try a spell. Then, after they do a very successful spell - that they even use a blinded study on to make sure it's not a coincidence - all but one of the girls lose all interest in witchcraft and there's no more spells for ages. I think there's only three spells done in the entire (long) book.

Given the emphasis on how incredibly bored the girls are and how much they hate the people running the home, AND that the one spell they master is a very versatile one (Turnabout - give something you're experiencing to another person), this seems less in-character and more like Hendrix really didn't want to write the witchcraft, much as an erotica author might think, "Oh God, not another sex scene."

The afterword mentions that the first two drafts of the book did not have witches. That explains a lot. The book is mostly an expose on the horrific injustices done to pregnant teenagers pre-Roe (very earnest - Hendrix got the idea because this happened to two women in his family - but bordering on misery porn as a reading experience), plus tacked-on witches.

The witches/witchcraft elements are very inconsistent, as if Hendrix didn't know exactly what he wanted to do with them. The book on witchcraft has the kind of sisterhood and female empowerment rhetoric that was what I expected Witchcraft for Wayward Girls to be about, but the librarian-led coven (which wrote the witchcraft book) is a rag-tag group of basically homeless women who mostly seem pathetic and whose only interest in the pregnant girls is using the most powerful one for their own selfish ends.

Sometimes witchcraft seems very powerful, sometimes it seems useless. The pregnant girls are mostly not interested in using it, and have no imagination in terms of what they might be able to use it for. At one point they have spells they could use to turn invisible, fly, etc, and they don't even bother to try them because there's no spell that fits a very specific goal they have -- without even considering trying out the magic they do have as part of an overall plan to accomplish their goal! They keep saying it's pointless to do magic because it can't get them money and a home, but some of the spells actually could do that, if they were willing to say invisibly rob a bank.

In general, the depiction of witchcraft is very negative. Most of what we see involves exploitation, self-mutilation, and general misery. The pregnant girls are miserable, but the witches are also miserable. The Magical Negro cook who helps out the white girls (the one black girl renounces witchcraft very early on) uses magic to fight the witches, but doesn't consider herself a witch and thinks magic is evil (I guess except the magic she uses? very inconsistent!)

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The overall attitude to witchcraft is both inconsistent and annoying. The end implies that it's a metaphor for female empowerment, but nothing in the rest of the book supports that. Most of the time, the witches are evil or pathetic or both. When the protagonist finally has her baby, she thinks that bringing life into the world is the REAL magic that puts witchcraft to shame BARF FOREVER.

If you want a book where teenage girls get revenge and the upper hand, 99% of the book is not that. Also, the word "pregnant" is used about 5000 times, or maybe it just felt that way.

I generally like Grady Hendrix on women's issues, but WOW was this one a miss.

Content notes: Told not shown child sexual abuse. Upsetting depictions of medical abuse, emotional abuse, misogyny, slut-shaming, self-mutilation, and forcibly separating mothers from babies. THREE extremely graphic and horrifying birthing scenes. An absolutely classic Magical Negro. Pervasive and graphic pregnancy details.

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Dr. C. Lillefisk's Sirenology: A Guide to Mermaids and Other Under-the-Sea Phenomenon

By Jana Heidersdorf.



A gorgeous art-and-worldbuilding book - a small genre which I adore - purporting to be the sketch and notebook of a sirenologist studying mermaids. The mermaids are mostly not human-intelligent, or at least if they are, humans can't tell. Some are beautiful, some are eerie, some are strange, some are all three. The notes are fascinating, and the worldbuilding on mermaids is very original and interesting. Heidersorf put a lot of thought into how aquatic ecologies work, and there's a great balance of strange fantasy and inspiration from strange real creatures. The overall effect is like reading a guidebook to natural history from another world.

I loved this book and think it's absolutely worth the price.

This was based on her limited edition book "100 Mermaids", and you can see them here.

More mermaids, many of which didn't make the book but are just as cool as the ones that did.

https://www.boredpanda.com/weird-beautiful-mermaids-jana-heidersdorf/

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The Return, by Rachel Harrison

Elise, Julie, Mae, and Molly are best friends, until Julie vanishes without a trace. Two years later, Julie returns in very bad shape and claiming no memory of where she's been. Once Julie is more recovered, her friends arrange a girls' week at a fancy hotel to catch up and reignite their friendship.

It's immediately clear that Julie came back wrong, and there are strong suggestions that there's something wrong with the hotel too. But Elise, the narrator, and Mae, who arranged the trip, are extremely set on denying that anything is wrong. A lot of the book consists of Molly trying to get Julie to talk and trying to get the other two to admit that something is wrong, and Elise and Mae refusing to listen. This is the central issue of the entire book, which is about denial and trying to insist one's preferred reality into existence, but it's frustrating to read.

The September House does something similar, but it was a lot more tolerable as at least Margaret isn't denying that there's ghosts, she's just denying that the ghosts are a problem. In The Return, when blood drips from the ceiling, Elise insists that it's just tinted water from a rusty pipe. In The September House, when blood drips down the walls, Margaret cheerfully cleans it up and crosses her fingers that no one else will notice the stain.

The slow-burn horror is well-done and the truth about Julie is pleasingly weird and even kind of original. The ending is quite moving, and the friend group dynamics are plausible for a particular type of people who I find annoying - extremely self-obsessed people whose friend groups border on frenemies. (They're canonically in their late 20s, but they act more like they're in their very early 20s.) But ultimately it feels like Rachel Harrison moves in really different social circles than I do, and that's deliberate on my part because those people are maddening. They're basically the women that women's magazines are written for - not the actually good magazines like Teen Vogue, stuff like the modern equivalent of 1980s Cosmopolitan that assumes you have a high-powered job but are also very concerned with Goop, thigh-toning, and office gossip.



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Bury Your Gays, by Chuck Tingle

Misha, a closeted TV writer and screenwriter, has two characters he's been building up for a lesbian love story. This is personally important to him due to a traumatizing childhood experience with TV characters he thought might be gay before that rug got yanked, so when his producer orders him to either make them straight or kill them, he refuses. But then he starts getting stalked by the horror characters he created in previous movies...

This is a very fun book with a lot of heart-- it's both metafictional/satirical and very earnest. I enjoyed it quite a bit, but it suffered from being read immediately after Camp Damascus. The latter is just a better book. In particular, this book has several gaping plot holes while Camp Damascus didn't have that issue.

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I also liked the Camp Damascus characters and setting better. (Tingle said in an interview that he wrote them both more-or-less at the same time.) That being said, Bury Your Gays is good and inventive and worth reading in its own right. I particularly enjoyed all the media within the book - not just Misha's movies, but his once-beloved X-Files-ish childhood TV series and a homoerotic horror movie where sweaty Marines have to strip each other to cut out a deadly worm.

Content notes: Some intense violence, including a very graphic torture/murder scene. Upsettingly realistic flashbacks to being a queer kid in a homophobic environment.

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I think he would have appreciated this

I dreamed last night that I was working on a David Lynch movie. It was called Slow Loris, and was a horror movie about a slow loris. He had fallen in love with the loris playing the loris, and went everywhere with it clinging to his shoulder, its enormous eyes slowly blinking.

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Trail of the Lost: The Relentless Search to Bring Home the Missing Hikers of the Pacific Crest Trail

Park ranger and search & rescue leader Andrea Lankford gets interested in three seemingly unrelated disappearances of hikers on the PCH, and launches a multi-year effort to find them.

This is conceptually very up my alley and is an interesting topic, but I didn't love the book. Some of the details were intriguing, but Lankford's style bugged me. It's a bit melodramatic and promises things that are not quite delivered. For instance, early on she makes a big point of "ARE these cases unrelated? Isn't it suspicious that three unmarried young men vanished on the PCH, exactly one per year?"

No. No, it isn't. Hiking the PCH is an extremely strenuous, time-consuming, and male-dominated hobby involving being gone for up to six months. It self-selects for people who are young, unmarried, and male. That's not victimology, that's statistics. Also, there are others who vanish on the trail but eventually get found in very non-suspicious circumstances, and it's not uncommon for people to die on this fairly dangerous hike, so... no! It's not weird that some bodies don't get found.

Lankford makes a big deal of there being criminal activities and cults in the area, but the cult turns out to be pretty benign and not kidnapping anyone, and the big crime she uncovers is mushroom poaching. There's interesting stuff going on - her effort helps to uncover two other missing people, one dead and one mentally ill - but it feels like she wants to write a true crime book when there's nothing suggesting there ever was a crime. She also comes across a bit self-congratulatory.

The book is also not very well-organized. I kept losing track of which hiker they were doing what to find.

In the end, (  Read more...  )

I file this with The Cold Vanish as a "missing persons in the wilderness" book that could have been better.

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The God of the Woods, by Liz Moore

Owning a bookshop is GREAT for reading extremely new books.

Title notwithstanding, nothing supernatural happens in this novel. A much more appropriate, though less cool, title would be Self-Reliance, which is both the name of the summer camp where much of the book takes place and a quality frequently evoked by the characters in varying contexts.

God of the Woods is partly a mystery and partly a family saga about a wealthy family who has two children disappear, a son aged eight in 1961 and a daughter aged thirteen in 1975 at a summer camp they founded. It's also the story of a second-generation Polish immigrant who's the only female investigator on the police force, the lesbian camp leader whose family is intricately tied to that of the vanished girl's, the other girls and their counselors at the camp, the many people who become collateral damage of the investigations, and, almost incidentally, a serial killer who - coincidentally? - is on the loose during both disappearances.

This is a kind of book which I often enjoy but have not read many of recently, an immersive historical with a large cast, lots of details of place and culture, and many characters all trying to forge their place in the world under difficult circumstances. In this case, it's all wrapped around a central mystery or possibly a pair of them - one of the big questions is whether the two disappearances are connected. The mysteries are nicely constructed and do get satisfying solutions, though ones which probably put the book more in the "literary fiction" shelf rather than "mystery." They do have clues and are at least partially solvable in advance, but the nature of what happened feels more "fiction" than "mystery."

I was most captivated by the story of Barbara, the punk vanished girl, whose parents neglect her when they're not trying to force her into a mold she doesn't fit; her painfully shy bunkmate Tracey, who has her own problems at home; their counselor Louise, who makes a number of extremely bad decisions because she's so desperate to escape poverty; and Judyta, the second-generation Polish-American investigator who has to manage hostile co-workers and supervisors, parents who think they know best, and her own insecurities and inexperience.

Alice, Barbara's mother, is not a particularly nice person but when we see what she went through in the fifties, which is basically every bad thing that could happen to rich white women in the fifties, it's deeply tragic. Judyta's hopes for the future, in 1975 when it looks like things are really breaking open for women, come across as a lot more sad now than I think the author intended.

In particular, [big spoiler] (  Read more...  )

Recommended if you like this sort of thing. It feels to me like it's in the same genre as The Secret History, though it has a completely different tone.

Content notes: domestic violence, emotional abuse, period-typical homophobia and misogyny, child death, addiction, hunting for food, extremely heartbreaking depiction of mother-child separation and socially enforced bad parenting. There's zero details on the serial killings; the killer is plot-relevant but that's it.

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No Apparent Danger: Volcanic Disaster at Galeras and Nevado Del Ruiz, by Victoria Bruce

A really interesting, gripping nonfiction book about two deadly volcanic eruptions in Columbia, how many of the same people were involved with both, and how what happened with the first one influenced social reactions to the second. Unexpectedly, there is also volcanologist drama.

Bruce begins with an account of Columbia's depressing colonial history, which was very intertwined with its geology - in addition to being tectonically active, it has lots of gold and gemstones, or at least it did when the Spanish invaded. Then she proceeds to the story of a young geology student, Marta Calvache, who briefly studied volcanoes in New Zealand before returning to Columbia. In 1985 the volcano Nevado del Ruiz began showing signs of unusual activity. This is when Calvache discovered that she was literally Columbia's leading volcano expert by default.

She and other Columbian geologists tried to get help from actual volcanologists internationally, but due to political violence in Columbia and mass incompetence/uselessness of various countries' governments, this was inadequate. Nevertheless, they did manage to get some experts in who warned them that Nevado del Ruiz was liable to erupt soon, and that this could cause massive mudslides in nearby towns. Unfortunately, government uselessness/corruption struck again, not helped by international experts contradicting themselves in public, and the towns in danger were basically jerked around and given conflicting information, while Marta and other geologists desperately tried to gather information and warn people.

The volcano erupted in November, causing a massive mudslide which killed 23,000 people. This was followed by a completely botched relief effort. You may have heard of it because of Omayra Sanchez, a 13-year-old girl who was trapped in a pool of water for days and could not be rescued, despite many people trying, as they didn't have the necessary equipment; she was the subject of a haunting photograph. Bruce doesn't even mention her, but instead recounts the story of two young geology students who were the sole survivors of their class, and got to see the lack of useful help firsthand.

Marta Calvache, horrified, threw herself into the study of volcanoes and ended up in charge of a research station by Galeras, another active volcano. She corresponded with international volcanologists, one of whom discovered that a particular signal seemed to correspond with an imminent eruption. So the science was progressing. But "imminent" can mean anything from "in five minutes" to "in five years." Because of this, a village was evacuated, then stayed evacuated for ages, causing major economic damage from a volcano that never did erupt - because the scientist who said it would had not actually looked at any data. Unsurprisingly, this caused a lot of public bitterness.

In 1993, a number of volcanologists, geologists, chemists, etc held a volcano conference at the Galeras research station. Despite indications that Galeras might erupt very soon, a number of them decided to tour the crater to do various scientific tasks.

In a phenomenon which has also been a factor in a number of fatal aviation accidents, the people who giving the warnings were lower-ranking and less respected than the people who wanted to go ahead, and so were ignored or brushed aside. Calvache's warnings were disregarded by the more famous American chemist Stanley Williams, who wanted to lead a crater trip. She did at least manage to limit the number of people going to the crater, and told them to get in and out as fast as possible. They did not do this. Also, despite repeated warnings, the government had refused to close the volcano to tourists, and so a local man and two teenagers took advantage of the handy ropes left by the scientists and followed them into the crater.

KA-BOOM!

Six scientists and the three tourists were killed, including Calvache's friend and co-worker who had worked on Nevado del Ruiz with her, and six scientists were seriously injured. Calvache and another woman scientist climbed into the crater despite not knowing if it would erupt again, and carried out the leader of the crater expedition, Stanley Williams - a task which took two hours due to the extreme difficulty of the terrain.

By this point a lot of Columbians were so furious with the government and volcanologists that the general reaction to this was basically "Fuck around, find out."

And now we get into the absolutely bizarre surprise twist! Stanley Williams gave a number of interviews where he claimed to be the sole survivor of the eruption. People who knew him first thought he was mistaken, then worried that he had brain damage from his head injury. As time went by and he continued to make that claim, they largely decided he was just an asshole.

Victoria Bruce, the author of this book who at that time didn't know about this controversy, heard that Williams was looking for a ghostwriter. Excited at the idea of working with him, she met with him to suggest herself, but he already had someone. A volcanologist heard of this meeting and contacted her to basically say, "Everyone hates this guy, he's at least partly responsible for multiple people getting killed, and he keeps spouting blatant lies about the incident. And also, he's a research thief! He stole the research of the guy who actually did predict the Galeras eruption! Lemme introduce you to literally everyone else involved."

Bruce then talked to several other people, got interested in working with them, and based on this book seems to have gotten interviews with nearly everyone involved except Stanley Williams. Their books came out at the same time and they both got sent on tour, presumably not to the same places at the same time or I assume there would be an afterword about a book tour brawl. I'm now curious to read Williams' book and get his side of the story.

Content notes: Some pretty gruesome descriptions of death by volcano.

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Fantasticland, by Mike Bockoven. Audiobook by Angela Dawe & Luke Daniels

When 300 employees of a giant amusement park are trapped there for over a month due to a hurricane, they form tribes and slaughter each other. So basically, Lord of the Flies at Disneyland, in the form of an oral history. I do not generally like Lord of the Flies stories, but I LOVE fake oral histories. Also, many people said the audiobook was outstanding.

The audiobook is indeed outstanding. I thought it had a cast of like 30 very talented actors, and was astonished to discover it was only two. It was extremely compelling, entertaining listening, and I sincerely recommend it on that basis if you like horror/thrillers/oral history, are okay with graphic violence, and need something really engaging to listen to for a couple hours.

The book itself... well...

This is the basic story, told by multiple characters involved from the owner of the park to visitors who were evacuated to disaster relief workers to the people involved:

A giant hurricane hits Florida and other areas, causing so much damage that many areas are not reached by rescue workers for a month or more. Fantasticland, the amusement park, is a low priority because the park management had a disaster plan, which was to stock up the park with food, water, etc, and get 300 park employees to volunteer to stay to maintain the park and prevent looting. As the 300 employees actually did have several months' worth of supplies for all of them, they were a low priority. Honestly, all this seems totally plausible.

Spoilers for how everything goes down. (  Read more...  )

So, the book has some pretty big issues, but it's also got some significant good points.

Pro:

As material for audio storytelling, it's terrific.

Bockoven put some actual thought into some aspects of what might really cause this situation to happen, and some of it is pretty plausible. (Some. Not all. But some.) The part I thought was really plausible was that if you trap a bunch of people in an area with no outside authority, and one of them is a charismatic sociopath, then he absolutely could quickly form a rape-and-murder cult with a number of the young men. It's obviously quite easy for a male leader to attract a subset of men and egg them on to rape women, and fairly easy to get a subset of men to commit horrifically violent acts, murder included. We see this happen in RL all the time. This part? TOTALLY believable.

I also liked that he did not do the usual thing of "when there's scarcity, people become vicious." There is no actual scarcity of food and water, and everyone knows that. People could share if they wanted to, and no one would go without. But some people prefer to sit on top of a giant pile of everything, and leave others with nothing.

One of the chapters, involving the only character who's smart enough to go to a hotel on the grounds and hole up there, is an outstanding work of creeping horror. It functions as a short story, but gets a lot of extra impact from being completely different from any other chapter in the book, so where it goes is much more unexpected than it otherwise would be.

It is WAY better with having female characters who do things than its closest comparison, World War Z.

Bockoven does a good job of portraying how different characters and different tribes react differently and come up with different strategies: the maintenance staff hides out in the maintenance tunnels for almost the entire duration and is mostly fine, the special effects artists scare off everyone else with special effects and are mostly fine, etc.

Con:

Very anti-climactic climax. The National Guard shows up and arrests everyone, and no one fights back.

Some of the book is SPECTACULARLY stupid.

Multiple characters say there was no sex AT ALL, just a little light kissing and making out, because there were no condoms (none of the mostly 18-24-year-old employees carried any?) and everyone was worried about pregnancy and STDs. Uh, WHAT? Everyone is merrily slaughtering each other, but they have WAY more sexual self-control than the average non-slaughtery American? If they're lying, why would they confess to murder but insist that they definitely didn't have sex? Meanwhile, the pirates were dragging off women constantly, so... there was tons of rape but no consensual sex? Makes no sense.

(Several reviewers thought Bockoven was trying to say there was no rape, but this doesn't make sense because it was specifically women who the pirates kidnapped. Also, multiple characters are worried about rape, and the only person who specifically denies rape is a pirate who is clearly downplaying everything. What were the pirates doing with the kidnapped women if they weren't raping them? A little light forced kissing and making out?)

In terms of actual events, everyone in the book agrees that, with a few specific exceptions, the pirates were consistently the aggressors and everyone else was mostly just defending themselves. But when they talk about it in the abstract, everyone talks like it was a total free-for-all where everyone just murdered everyone at random. And again, this is everyone in the whole book. Literally no one takes the position that what basically happened was that a bunch of people got trapped with a murder cult and ended up essentially in a war with them, which again based on the actual events, is 90% of what was going on. This is America! People believe that it's legally and morally okay to kill in self-defense! They might feel guilty about it, but at least some people should make the point that it is not illegal/morally wrong/abnormal to defend yourself from someone who's trying to kill you.

If Bockoven wanted to write about a free-for-all murder chaos zone, he should have portrayed a free-for-all murder chaos zone, not a situation where there was basically a war going on between one aggressor tribe and multiple defender tribes.

And then there's the "but the real enemy was the social media we posted on along the way." Something like half of the total characters say that a major or the main cause of what happened was that kids nowadays are internet addicts, and without their phones they became dissociated and savage. At the very end of the book, the guy who is putting together the oral history concludes that insofar as we can understand a basically senseless occurrence, internet addiction was the main culprit.

Apart from that this is stupid on the face of it, the hurricane affected a big chunk of America. Tens or hundreds of thousands of people were without power or internet for months, and no one else went feral like this. If all kids are so addicted to social media that they lose their minds when the internet is cut off, then why didn't they lose their minds in any of the MANY other places where the internet was cut off? If losing internet access makes young people go feral, there should have been rape-and-murder cults everywhere, not just Fantasticland.

Content notes: extremely graphic, visceral violence.

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Before the Coffee Gets Cold, by Toshikazu Kawaguchi

At a very special coffee shop in Japan, you can time-travel into the past, as long as you sit in a particular chair and don't move from it, and only for as long as it takes for your coffee to go cold. You can't change the past, you can only travel within the cafe (so anyone you want to visit in the past must have also visited the cafe), and a ghost is already in that chair so you have to wait till she gets up to go to the bathroom.

This book sounded very charming, but I got off on a bad foot with it because it took FOREVER to explain the rules before anyone traveled. When I learned that it originated as a stage play, that made more sense - the back-and-forth about the rules was probably very funny with good actors. In book form, it was interminable.

The vignettes are touching, but in a manufactured tearjerking way, like the woman who will die if she gets pregnant so of course she decides to keep her pregnancy so her baby will have a chance at life or the woman whose sister storms out angrily after a fight and immediately gets killed in a car crash. I was expecting Banana Yoshimoto and I got Jodi Picoult.

Maybe later books in the series are better, or at least don't spend so long explaining the rules.

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