Rachel Smith's Blog: Guinea Pigs and Books, page 11

Dwindling power.

4. Snow Drowned – Jennifer D. Lyle

Fall Island has big snows, big history involving a surviving group of religious zealots and a cave system, and a creepy nun. If you’re from here, as in part of those original founding families, you might have a sigil for your family and you might be invited into the church. It’s obviously a cult, though, and based on what you learn about it later in the story, it’s having a recruitment problem on the island for sure. I mean, at some point you run out of people if it’s only for founding families.

Anyway, Grace was born on the island and she doesn’t get along with her mother, her father’s from off island, and she’s still doing the Sunday flowers for her grandmother’s grave when she runs into said creepy nun, Sister Francis. She was a great character. After trying not to talk to Sister Francis like her grandma told her not to, she also runs into the son of the foundingest of the founding families and then several dead sheep and a guy with his eyes gouged out covered in sigils. So, that’s different.

This was definitely different and unexpected for me. I’ve been disappointed a lot by recently published horror lately but this was certainly YA horror and not focused on a budding romantic relationship either. A weird church, lots of snow, ritual murder, and random sarcastic humor – this was a winner for me. It read quickly, it had a fun take on some very old ones topics, and it had a good ending too.

 

Camille has a sleigh in which she will slay during any onslaught of snow.

“Well, it sounded like the scream came from down here… Right, let’s look upstairs.”

44. Episode Thirteen – Craig Di Louie

Fade to Black is a pretty good name for a ghost hunting show, I will say. And I do love a good “paranormal experiments in the 1970s have long reaching effects” sort of story. So I am essentially the audience for Episode Thirteen. I sometimes don’t like when stories are epistolary as I have had some recent experience with that not reading as quickly as I would like and I really dislike text messages represented in books because it reminds me of the downfall of comprehensible spelling and grammar that I see on a regular basis. Capitalizing words does not mean you have some sort of anger, it means you know how to write formally and maybe, just maybe, don’t know how to write as informally as someone born after the internet was in homes across this great land.

Anyway, I sound like one of the characters, the cop, who is older than me if he was a cop in the 1980s. But, he was also the only part of the ghost hunting group who understood the references the ghosts of the 1972 paranormal research group were making, songs and phrases and a reference to the long running Tootsie Pop commercial with the impatient owl. Kevin, as the cop is named, certainly has a lot of downsides represented, but he was useful because a bridge between generations always is.

The main couple of the ghost hunting group are Matt, who totally believes, and Claire, a red head who totally doesn’t and is super into physics. She wants out and this show might be crumbling and she doesn’t want to tell her husband, so they have drama.

The other two people experiencing the ghosties are an actress who has been placed with the group but is apparently a very good addition, and she’s the only truly rational person once things go to shit in the house and everybody gets super scared. She runs away. Smart. She knows how much she is pretending to be interested in communicating with ghosts. Of course, she also comes back, but, that initial running was the smartest character move in the story. There’s also the camera man who calls himself a “Techno Viking” based on his tattoos and tech savvy. Okey-dokey then. He, like many who stay behind cameras, considers himself an observer and detached from what’s in front of him, but that doesn’t prevent him from being totally frightened when an apparition looks directly at him.

And that apparition is described in a super creepy way. I didn’t find most of the book scary, per se, but I did not like the description of that apparition and after reading this in two sittings, one of which was when I encountered all of the action, I found it unsettling. Just a general sense of unease and really being uncomfortable with the idea of an apparition making direct eye contact, especially while smiling. That’s creepy shit.

I did enjoy reading the files of the group doing experiments, although they were minimally included. To me, having the files and home videos were a big part of what makes the investigation special and so I guess I wanted to spend more time with what Claire’s character was doing. Although we do find out in the end that one of the authors of the files didn’t actually “make it to the end” and so I don’t get why she was authoring anything if she wasn’t actually all done with the program that no one knew they were entering when they came to the house, this of course does not make sense until you get to one of the twists in the story.

Overall this was very worth reading and went very quickly and is not so much terrifying as it is unsettling, like when you know a frequency exists that makes you feel like someone is watching you.

 

Thankfully my own ghost hunting couple, Thaddeus and Pammy, have never had to worry about super creepy smiling apparitions making direct eye contact.

This takes quite a turn or two.

75. Earthlings – Sayaka Murata

Natsuki is another female protagonist who is apart from the world she inhabits, but, it’s sort of forced on her by her family (in particular her mother’s constant put downs) instead of something she uses to be extremely useful to society like in Convenience Store Woman. Natsuki has ideas of wanting to be “brainwashed” so she can be a useful cog in the “Factory,” which essentially means giving up who she really is (according to her, she’s an alien) and just getting along. But that comes later, first, you see how Natsuki and her cousin Yuu, both treated like they’re not welcome in their own families, grow to prefer the idea of being aliens rather than people. It’s not hard to understand how someone as emotionally neglected as these two, especially Natsuki, who is also preyed upon by the teacher her friends think is “Cool,” would prefer not to be an earthling and only see agency in being an alien who maybe murdered that same cool teacher.

There’s also a time jump so we see Natsuki as an adult who really hasn’t progressed emotionally from childhood and her continuing efforts to be who she thinks society wants her to be on the outside. When she finds out Yuu is living alone at their grandparents’ former house on the mountain where they used to actually enjoy life and talk to each other about being aliens and where the spaceship to take them back could be, she finds a way to bring her equally alienated from society husband there and it gets very weird and dark and transcendence through cannibalism makes them all pregnant. Yep.

 

Pickles is pretty sure Belvedere’s not an alien and is her brother, but, she’s also suspicious.

“He’s breaking the night winds, he’s breaking the chains”

122. When It Grows Dark – Jorn Lier Horst

Before Wisting was an investigator, he was a nights patrol officer who never slept and not because he had new twins. Honestly, considering that right now in crime auto theft is a near constant across the country, Wisting watching a parking lot where shift workers’ cars keep getting stolen and used in subsequent crimes in 1983 was kind of funny as he could just as easily have been doing the same thing 40 years later. Ugh.

What he could not do 40 years later, investigate the disappearance of a money transfer via trunk and murder from 1925…nor would that be connected to the stolen cars and subsequent theft of a safe from a bank.

I have to say this one didn’t grab me as much as Wisting novels usually do and I like reading about night shift. The main thing that I appreciated was Wisting getting the understanding that if he became an investigator he would lose both the extra night shift money and would still basically lose all the sleep. That’s exceptionally true.

 

Wisting is learning the ropes of working night shift and he’s having trouble staying awake, but then again he doesn’t have to.

 

I’ve always liked prairie dogs.

79. Frost Bite – Angela Sylvaine

It’s 1997 in Demise, North Dakota and a meteor just crashed into a field next to the trailer park where Realene and her mother with early onset dementia live. And that crashed space rock brought something with it. Something that makes the prairie dogs act a lot like the squirrels in my own Squirrelpocalypse Trilogy, i.e. now they eat people to the extent that small rodents can. And small rodents can be very clever.

Realene and her best friend Nate are trying to keep things together and get to the bottom of what’s going on and there’s quite a bit against them, including a megachurch kind of cult. I don’t want to say a lot because overall this is just a really great read – it’s fun, it’s got some emotional arcs that work, it’s got some pop science, and some gore too. And no cell phones.

 

Dagmar is very small, very clever, and good at hiding. Clearly.

“A monster he cannot control has taken over his very soul”

36. Gothic – Philip Fracassi

This was fun and also a valuable parable about putting too much of yourself into your work. An evil desk with a bloody past history of sacrifices, warlock fights, and ruining lives is Tyson the formerly popular and successful horror writer’s birthday gift. He has a novel due in a month and it’s really obvious that his agent doesn’t think he’s got it anymore, which super sucks because his agent is right and Tyson feels it all the way down to his bones. His intrepid and very rich partner Sarah finds him this amazing antique desk which is carved with all kinds of creepy folkloric images and weird symbols and has a full piece of stone as the top and is hoping it will be a good source of inspiration. And it will, in a way, but Tyson is being told his stories now by the ancient spirits and this creepy old dude with white eyes who only he can see.

The family who had the desk stolen from them in a warlock fight’s last descendent is also looking for the desk and hired a private investigator in the New York City area who actually finds it and is easily able to get it back because Tyson realizes that his own ideas are better than letting a desk whisper to him. Who am I kidding? He’s a horror writer. He loves that desk, creepy attached spirit and bloodsucking splinters and all.

 

Ozymandias loved this blanket, even though it didn’t have a bloody and horrific history, it was just soft and suited his colors.

 

Unlawful Use of the Town Canoe

126. My Heart is a Chainsaw – Stephen Graham Jones

Proofrock seems like the kind of place you’d obviously want to leave, but if you’re Jade, your opportunities are really limited. And if you’re Jade, you’re already basically stuck in your own head and are getting into trouble and being noticed more in relation to taste your taste in films being almost overbearing upon the world than anything else. I am fond of slasher movies as well, however, Jade is overboard. Literally at a couple points of the novel, but I digress. The story almost ends too early because Jade is reenacting the end of Friday the 13th.

Despite the fact that I, too, have seen A Bay of Blood and many of the chapter title slasher movies, it was still hard to find solid ground in Jade’s delivery for me. Her stream of consciousness is hard to parse and in between being in her head you’re getting her treatises on slashers that she wrote for extra credit for her favorite teacher and gave to Letha, who she’s decided has to be a final girl in real life and so she’s going to need Jade’s knowledge.

Jade’s is a very interesting head to be in when there’s a lot of action happening as well. It was a lot easier for me to get my reader’s footing if you will forgive how little sense that makes once a lot was happening and the actual slasher parts of the slasher Jade was expecting to happen were going on. There were tons of very cinematic situations in the giant pile of death Jade and Letha ended up in and the town’s 4th of July celebration made for an exciting setting to reveal an awful lot about what had been confusing me and really also Jade too. And I know there’s a sequel and a third, but it seems like there aren’t going to be a lot of people with the institutional knowledge to run the town left so I’m keen to see how that goes, as confusing as Jade’s head can be some times.

 

Ozma was the final girl standing in her herd that included Finny, although he was more protective of her than anybody in Jade’s life. Both of these pigs have seen a lot of slasher movies too, though, and they had those slashing teeth.

“Where in the hell are you getting all this stuff from?”

61. Rainbow Black – Maggie Thrash

The Satanic Panic is always a draw for me and this was an extremely well done version of what it really was in terms of all those bullshit daycare allegations. Although Michelle Remembers was not mentioned here, it is in fact that book that gave rise to most of the accusations and the whole “repressed memories of Satanic Ritual Abuse” thing, even though it was just the result of one woman wanting to date her Catholic therapist and take up all of his time, which she did with invented Satanic persecution, which is gross and totally worked. Hysteria at its finest.

Anyway, the Satanic Panic is a draw for me because it makes no sense and as a metalhead, it makes even less sense. Rainbow Black, though, does make sense. The trajectory of the story is pretty realistic and sometimes that’s unfortunate and in several cases, mostly towards the beginning for me, it makes for some seriously black acid humor that made me laugh out loud. It’s not the kind of book where you’d blurb that though.

We see things through the eyes of Lacey Bond, the younger daughter of a New Hampshire couple who are unconventional in many ways and run a daycare center on their farm. They have goats. And a shed. Obviously, they’re Satanists. But at first in in reality, they’re just a weird family and Lacey is an awkward child whose sister, Eclair, is a forceful juggernaut of 80s lady power. She’s the kind of person I would not like in real life, but love in books. When she returns from Miami, she tells Lacey she looks like “Lumberjack Skipper” and always has a good insult for everyone who sucks. She also hits a lot of people with her purse in a weirdly endearing way.

After the accusations, which no one wants to tell Lacey about like she wouldn’t notice her parents were completely missing or the media at the end of the driveway, Eclair and Lacey and their lawyer come up against the true villain of the piece, Mrs. Grange. She was an awful woman from all angles and she’s not even there that much, but every time she reared her head I was like, No! Not that woman again. That’s a good antagonist. A lot of the minor characters are also very well and quickly drawn and provide some little gems. There’s one lawyer whose first priority is his dog who needs, and then gets, hip replacement surgery. The lawyer is very focused on the dog’s schedule, which I can relate to bone deep as I’ve been taking care of Thorfy with his heart failure alongside other guinea pig medical crises (not to undercut them, they’re all viscerally significant) for more than two years. Thorfy’s borrowed time is sacred and so is that imaginary dog’s surgery and recovery to the imaginary lawyer.

I really liked this book, but it was also extremely depressing. There’s no happy ending, which is realistic for what the situations were, but I really wanted something that was more than crumbs even if it didn’t make sense. Especially when I read this, which has not been a good time for me. I don’t know if you should read books that are emotionally grueling but also funny when you aren’t doing well, but I definitely wanted to read this and it was my turn on the hold list and I couldn’t renew it for an emotional break once it turned. I will definitely buy a copy at some point, hopefully signed, as it’s definitely one of the more significant books I’ve read in a long time.

 

I never would have guessed which of these three (Hen Wen, Thorfy, & Snuffy) would end up going to Pighalla first. Or second.

Human fat candles keep showing up everywhere

66. December – Phil Rickman

In December 1980, a band made up of people with varying psychic abilities and a session drummer started recording an album in a medieval abbey on the Welsh border and it went horribly wrong. What they brought out of the abbey at Ystrad Du was something evil that was already there that waits every seven years to make it’s mark and take what it’s due, essentially, and apparently it’s been doing so since 1175.

We start with the most terrible firey death night of album making and then comes the aftermath when a little stoat of a record executive finding out the record company people didn’t actually burn the tapes like the band thought they did. The band’s been having issues as a result of what happened ever since, except for the session drummer, he’s super famous in the United States now, lucky him. But once those tapes are baked back into playing shape…even the place that bakes the tapes feels the effects.

This is a long book, 587 pages, but all of it is interesting. It’s not as spooky as Wylding Hall, the other creepy recording band story I’ve read and I did except to be more unnerved. However, it’s a solid good read and apparently Phil Rickman uses the same bandmate characters in multiple other novels and this definitely didn’t turn me away from reading those brick sized tomes either.

 

Ozymandias doesn’t like it when music executives lie to him.

 

 

“Put your mind on the wander and your ass on the roof.”

98. Will-O-The-Wisp – Thomas Burnett Swann

The Gubbings live in Dartmoor and after poor pious Nicholas breaks his leg running away from his first sexual encounter at Cambridge, he returns to an adjacent location to hang out with his family and his vicar, Robert Herrick. Herrick is apparently very interesting, he’s definitely presented as one of the cool ones when it comes to vicars, he likes the lusty things and also poems, but to me the coolest thing about him is that he has a pig named Caligula who sleeps in a trundle bed and apparently isn’t very nice. Oh, really? I wish there had been a lot more about Caligula, pig version.

Anyway, Nicholas and Herrick get lured into Dartmoor by Stella, a widow with wings, and her daughter Aster who is way too into boys for a 9 year old. They have a bear in their care and that’s super cool too. Good pets in this book, generally, even if some do not have good ends.

This story was very odd, very folk horror but not scary, just odd. It’s a bit of a character study of Robert Herrick as the author presents at the end and if I was intrigued by the Gubbings and their presentation as super Puritan I would have been more keen on it. But, I think my lack of religious interest affected how much I could get invested in these characters and so I was really more keen on finding out more about their pets rather than if anyone was getting married or getting out of the weirdo trial in Dartmoor and subsequent weirdo trial back home. The pets stole the show, as they often do.

 

Danger Crumples, eater of carrots, stealer of shows, also not that worried about the weirdo trial, even in the limbo time before New Years.