Rachel Smith's Blog: Guinea Pigs and Books, page 14

“Should a deity listen if you can’t even pronounce its name?”

99. A Night in the Lonesome October – Roger Zelazny

Jack the Ripper’s dog, and familiar, Snuff, tells the story of each night in an October with a Blue Moon, when familiar literary characters take sides and decide if they’re going to let H.P. Lovecraft style Old Ones come back through and take over – there’s even a tentacle. It’s mostly told through the familiars of the various players – openers who want to let the Old Ones back in and closers like Jack the Ripper (oddly pleasant here), who’d like the world to stay as it is. This was a very strange story, a little bit like The Monster Squad and The Monster Club in tone, but with no musical performances and we’re supposed to be on the side of some monsters and one very disguised and Sherlock Holmesy detective. It’s kind of sweet how the cat Graymalk and the dog Snuff interact and the worst character is actually the vicar with his crossbow.

 

Snuffy vs. Thorfy, Pig vs. Pig, they both just really want territory and escarole.

“I’ve been trying to show you over and over…”

The Man in the Moss – Phil Rickman

Bridelow is a village that’s hard to get to and they like it that way. It’s surrounded by a gigantic lake of moss, which has been treacherous to cross for centuries and if you lob your car off the side of the road it can get sucked in. The moss also returns things and that’s where this story gets its name and its major character. See, they find pieces of people who were interred (maybe) in the moss every so often. In Bridelow they bury them in the church yard once someone else also needs to be buried. But it is rare to get most of a person like the Man they find. The Man in the Moss, you see. Almost immediately the whole chunk of peat is sent to university for study and all the usual stuff when you find a well preserved dead person in peat and as soon as he’s gone, Bridelow starts having more issues than it can really reckon with well and it gets some good and terrible visitors. Unfortunately, the bog man does not like wake up and wreak havoc, I guess he actually wasn’t mad about being sacrificed probably for the safety of the area.

Phil Rickman is excellent at putting together an ensemble and discussing the clashes small and large of ancient pagan traditions, like Our Sheila at the church which really bothers the new fundamentalist type vicar. And he uses the supernatural well. The atmosphere and the sort of psychic powers of one Moira Cairns, who turns up in the only other Phil Rickman I’ve finished, are all well woven into the story. Also, the peat. Peat is one serious substance. And I was super excited about this story revolving around a bog body. The one time I’ve been to the British Museum, seeing the Lindow Man was one of my main goals (the other, ironically was seeing the Linares Family paper mache figures I knew they had- when Mexico is technically closer to the US, but I was already in England when I went to the museum, anyway, both goals achieved). It took me forever to find him because he’s sort of in a dark corner and he’s very crunched up. He honestly looked like a backpack skin-wise, but the level of preservation (beard hairs) is amazing.

The books Rickman writes seem to be consistently over 500 pages, but the pages do not seem wasted to me. I’m never reading and telling him to just get on with it, at least not in the two I’ve read and that bodes well for me reading the rest of his catalog. They just don’t take as long to read as you’d think a 594 page book would.

 

Horace just knows there’s a bog body inside this pumpkin village and it’s hiding something. Danger Crumples looks on from afar, knowing way more than Horace expects.

“It’s just, I wish I had more time to seek out the dark forces and join their hellish crusade.”

62. The House of the Magus – Jack Shackleford

Juliet Morley is taking a break from acting since the unfortunate death of her friend. And she has a great place to take that break, a large house that her rich husband bought, which also happens to have a cottage on the property. Her husband has let the cottage to someone mysterious though, someone she hasn’t seen that brought giant furniture and a sense of unease that gets to the dog first and then Juliet.

It turns out the tenant is a Christopher Lee-knock off and his “daughter” and his “wife.” They knew the person who built the house, Simon Ansell aka Magister, a super serious magic dude with a very serious library. Juliet doesn’t like it in the library. Juliet’s husband tells knock off-Christopher Lee that he can use the library if he wants since he knows it contains very important materials to his crap horror novel writing and his more serious witchcraft writing that nobody buys.

And then there are the accidents. The “wife” of the new cottage dwellers dies, some girl Juliet saw on the highway and almost picked up gets murdered (she has some guilt there), and then her husband and their housekeeper get into a car crash on their way to the train station. So, Juliet is alone, with her grief and her dog that disappears off page for quite some time, and the people in the cottage…who show up to the house with suggestions of the magic and non-magic kind and worm their way in. Juliet’s sort of a prisoner of herself and also them.

So, eventually, they get to the part where they seduce Juliet into witchcraft, as they always do in these novels. You see, she has this force inside her that she hasn’t been able to understand and she was always just too much for her husband, but in the context of ritual magic and the necessary sacrifices, Juliet’s special and also required.

 

Extremely special and required and very relaxed due to the lack of ritual sacrifices – Snuffy.

 

Fine, lure a reader in with the whole specter of being murdered for not checking nets…

12. Hold Back the Tide – Melinda Salisbury

Alva lives in a small village that revolves around a loch and a mill that sucks a bit too much water from said loch. Her father is the caretaker of the lake and she’s convinced that he murdered her mother. This is the second book set in the Scottish Highlands I’ve read this year where a father and daughter live together and there’s a major suspicion that the father is a murderer. That’s an interesting and unexpected trend. This version seems to be set around the 17th or 18th century, though it isn’t made clear, based on all the candles being mentioned and me looking up what an earasaid actually is. I was getting hooded sweater, it’s more like a blanket scarf that’s very convertible. Alva is very attached to her earasaids.

Alva, though, has a job as a transcriptionist that sounds cool (this being part of what makes it complicated to figure out the time setting) and a plan to escape. Her friend, fellow village black sheep Ren, gets her some of what she needs to start over far away and also totally sees through her plan. She won’t admit her plan because she thinks that any word of it getting back to her father will get her killed. So Ren is like, take me with you, at the town bonfire and Alva’s like, I’m not leaving. And then a supernatural creature shows up literally at her cottage door. It’s very pale and is or isn’t what’s been messing up nets and animals in the area.

That creature throws a major wrench into Alva’s plans and is the key to understanding her father’s job, what happened to her mom, and her future. It’s a good story with a sad ending.

 

Right now Thorfy’s more of a “hold down this blanket” kind of pig. Sleepy. Not up to capturing old timey monsters from caves.

“This story was filmed on location inside a woman’s soul.”

28. Past Mortems – Carla Valentine

Why, yes, I am reading more books about death professionals, this one starts in Liverpool and makes her way to London and ends up in a museum, working with different versions of the dead as an anatomical pathology technologist and then a curator, all of which sounds so very silent. And smelly, but, the silence of the museum environment is mentioned and as a librarian, it sounds lovely. I would not mind working in a museum of specimens at all, especially for someone who values silence.

Although it’s not necessarily off to the best start with the assumption that in the US all we have are coroners, who don’t have to have medical degrees – which is quite wrong as many places in the US don’t have a coroner and do have a medical examiner or an office full of them (not elected, very much in possession of medical degrees), overall there was a lot to enjoy here. I easily figured out she was consulting on The Autopsy of Jane Doe, which is a movie that scares me but I also truly enjoy, and for some reason the name is never mentioned, but she even said Emile Hirsch is not nice (which is the gossip I’ve seen elsewhere as well) and that Brian Cox is in it and besides the corpse, they’re the main characters so why beat around it?

Anyway, she was also part of the team that worked on the terror attack on 7/7/2005, which happened while I was in northern England getting my MA, so I had a personal frame of reference for the time period. She also covered something else I really relate to easily, loving your work without loving the people around you and how much of an effect that has on whether you can continue in the same job or field at all. She didn’t cover how sometimes there can be external pressure to be someone other than who you are, but she makes it clear that there are some other serious struggles she went through and, not unlike in the last mortuary memoir I read, she dealt with PTSD from the totality of circumstances, to use a phrase I see a lot in my current job.

Anyone dealing with similar job and life progressions that wind their way through PTSD (or not if you’re lucky) has to hope they can find a place where their preferred brand of silence is as she did. I mean, I’d like to work for her museum for sure, but I’m not UK based, just really into organizing information successfully and medical specimens and silence. And guinea pigs, who I stay committed to until their deaths, and afterwards.

 

Finny’s familiar with my level of commitment.

 

Teens and their fertility knives, tapestries, and preserved horse bits, geez.

111. Stallion – Gordon McGill

Tom McEvoy moves his family to rural England to get out of show business and get beyond his drinking. However, rural England is no place to raise a teenager like Janey, a true horse girl who totally gets into the old ways once a creepy neighbor gives her some encouragement. She’s got a gelding knife in her drawer and a preserved horse penis in a jar in the corner. It’s Bucephalus, you see, he’s the biggest except for the weird smelling horse next door Banshee, who is super huge and also quite otherworldly. Banshee sort of seems like a ghost horse and keeps luring Janey at night to come ride around even though he smells like “putrefaction.” Plus Janey’s hiding porn and wearing a lot of makeup. Like a lot.

Janey’s mother Susan is worried about how well Janey seems to be taking to the ritualistic past of the area as she grows up and also about her sweet young son Graham, who seems poised to end up kicked in the head or suffer some terrible accidents just trying to save his nice horsey, Baz, who takes an awful lot in this book as well. Susan also descends into madness a bit trying to figure out what the hell is going on in this horror novel entirely about horses where even the ponies end up intimidating Susan en masse. Also, I learned a lot about inhumane stunt practices in the movies, as Tom wanted to move to England to begin with to stop being a horse stunt coordinator whose guilt drove him to the drink and start giving riding lessons to the children with much less drinking. He definitely chose a farm that was important to ancient horses and horse worshippers, but he wasn’t the one chosen to represent their interests.

 

Merricat was neither a horse girl nor a wearer of makeup. That orange ruff on her moustache is natural and she knows instinctively what that stone in the yard is for, but stays away. Guinea pigs know ancient sacrifice with too much familiarity.

“You witnessed her combat with her subconscious?”

94. The After-Death of Caroline Rand – Catherine Cavendish

I have been hunting down stories with bands in haunted places ever since I read Wylding Hall and got spooked like a guinea pig running from sudden noise. Anyway, I thought that’s what this would be, but it’s more haunted abbey owned by one musician who is stuck in an occult monk’s time warp that serves this other cult thing, which is cool too, but there was a significant amount of time in nostalgia time warp land that I got tired of. I don’t keep the same level of reverence for a lot 1960s music held here, I like a lot of it, I have a Jim Morrison poster which I will not get rid of, but, I’m far too idiosyncratic to be okay with hippie shit. Also, John Denver is a real touchstone here that didn’t work for me. He’s a good dude, I’ve seen the Tipper Gore hearings John Denver, but, I can respect him and not enjoy listening to him too, we can all do multiple things with our musical taste. I’m only trailing on about this because it’s a big part of Alli coming to understand what’s going on.

She had to do research through staring at paintings that change occasionally (quite cool) and time travel because they’re stuck in the haunted abbey and it doesn’t have microfilm, not that there’s a lot about arcane cults on microfilm, actually, there might be. I know where you can access the newsletters of the Rajneeshpuram on microfilm. I’ve seen them, so I’ll just correct myself there because there’s definitely more like that. Moving on, I would have liked more about the cult because it came up late in the game and there wasn’t time to realize people might be in the cult and stare at them with knowing while they stare back at you silently with menace and calm. You know what I mean if you’ve seen movies with cults next door or would like to.

 

Yes, Danger, John Denver was just a time travel perk and not part of the cult.

 

Are you sure there’s no other way?

9. Nine Liars – Maureen Johnson

So, Stevie goes to London, for a mystery from 1995 outside the city in a manor house, Merryweather. It has a ha-ha. I have spent a significant amount of time in London, it is my favorite city I have ever been to, and the wandering around scenes are my favorite as it’s all familiar. I do wish they’d gone to Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, though, it’s in a tiny alley and the first time I went I asked the person who brought me if they were taking me there to kill me because it just looked like we were heading down a claustrophobic dark alley at night. Very murdery, Stevie would appreciate that. Plus it’s on Fleet St., which has dramatic associations with murder and this was a story about a group of actors/sketch comedians.

So, the mystery itself comes up while Stevie and co. are on the London Eye. One of David’s school friends has an aunt who said something while on pain killers which sparks the rest of the mystery and there are also flashbacks with lots of Blur. So much Blur. I understand, though. There was so much good Blur. And their CD even maybe participates in an adjacent murder. Once again I did not entirely follow Stevie’s path with her, there was a jump I didn’t expect, but it was a sensible one in the end, so not as “wait, what” as in The Box in the Woods.

Anyway, I did also enjoy the undertones of everyone in the group applying to colleges and trying to decide where they are going after school is over. Stevie is terrified and a bit propelled by the wind and I cannot relate to that at all. However, Stevie should take comfort in knowing that even if you did plan out what you wanted to do, what your goals were, and made a solid effort to achieve them, they can still escape you completely so it’s not really that bad to not know where you’re going, except for like, housing and where your funding is coming from, those are best not left to the wind. Plus at the end she’s in big trouble in multiple ways, which just makes me anxious as a reader. Very.

 

Salem knows being anxious very well. He’s a brave, but also very cautious, guinea pig.

“Damnit, rain, I didn’t know you were going to bring your friends mud and rocks.”

44. Benighted – J.B. Priestley

This is the tale that became The Old Dark House, the James Whale movie, and a lot of the dialogue from the movie came straight out of it. I’ve used some of that very dialogue as titles for posts without knowing it came from this tale of horrendous rain and not having four wheel drive in 1920s Wales. The Wavertons and their friend Roger Penderel do manage to get their car down the bumpy lane of the old dark house and beg for shelter with the totally weird family within. They have no beds and clearly don’t understand how to talk to other humans, but at least Horace admits that.

Once things are getting clammy between poor Margaret Waverton and the sister who thinks she’s the only godly person in existence, Rebecca, another couple shows up seeking shelter from the storm, which has pretty clearly now washed out the road around the mountain and broken their car. Gladys and the businessman dating her for fun arrive and there’s yet more inhospitable conversation with the family. Then they start playing the 1920s version of Truth or Dare without dares being an option and realize they’re out of booze. Not ideal.

The lights also go out and the family shows their true colors and ability to hide and ditch their guests to dangers coming from the inside and nobody gets any sleep. They are like totally benighted, inside and out.

 

Pammy and Thaddeus haven’t been stranded in Wales or overtaken by darkness in general, but I’d like to think they’d cope well.

A Maud for the ages

116. Wakenhyrst – Michelle Paver

This is the Gothic for me. Overly religious mean dude going mad because of his own sins and one very saucy devil in the corner of a painting, very important rescue pet dynamic which also scares the overly religious father, a very serious fen which also scares him for good reason – right on super intimidating and uncaring natural features, and just the one endlessly eczema suffering daughter, Maud, in the way. I’m making it sound like it moved a bit faster than it did, but I really loved this story.

Maud’s the star witness to her own father descending into madness, but of course no one wants to listen to her and her father ruins everything she loves, mostly literally, on the way. She has her special objects, she moves toward nature worship, and she types and researches, all while her hands are all exploded and itchy. I know the feeling. Every summer and every time I paint all day are generally constant obstacles to not having any itchy fluid-filled bumps just under or right on the skin of my hands and the first time my eczema got infected and I found out I had it at all, it made my hands basically a crust and the right one was worse so I covered it with a Kleenex like a cape. Maud uses lace gloves, that just sounds more itchy to me.

Anyway, that eczema is a major reason why I liked Maud. I liked her even more for her commitment to Chatterpie the magpie she rescued from the well. And, of course, her doing research, trying to solve the puzzle of what exactly was going wrong with her father when no one would listen to her about it. The other thing I liked about Maud, which you find out from the framing device right in the beginning, she’s on her own and likes it that way. She has her house and her nature to enjoy and have complicated feelings about the past in and she’s not seeking anything that women are typically assigned to seek. Finally.

 

Hen Wen has had the opposite experience; she’s very used to other guinea pigs listening to her. I mean, she’s got her own chair to look down from, who would question the authority of such a ladypig?