Rachel Smith's Blog: Guinea Pigs and Books, page 20

Endless putrescence

24. Anatomy: A Love Story – Dana Schwartz

Hazel Sinnett is a lady who wants to be a doctor and she’s trying in 1817 Edinburgh, so of course she gets kicked out of Dr. Beecham’s lecture. When she gets kicked out, she runs into someone useful if you want to learn on the sly about anatomy, Jack, a resurrectionist.

After Hazel makes a deal to learn from Dr. Beecham if she can pass the medical examination without attending any of his lectures, she and Jack start working together and Hazel gets a taste of the Frankenstein life with the same goal of life, but not from death, or is it? That sentence didn’t really make sense and I’m not rewriting it, but there is some searching for immortality in this story and some serious need for bodies so Hazel can keep studying that gets her a bit obsessive. She needs to see all the anomalies for science!

Jack, on the procuring bodies side, notices more things going on around the city than Hazel, like his friends disappearing. Skulky characters on the fringes. And the Roman Fever is back with a vengeance in the lower classes first, but it will spread like they do. Jack helps Hazel get bodies that she can help who are already living too. Lots of lessons learned and classes transcended and who could help but fall in love amidst the stench of sickness and death and learning?

 

Peregrine and Ozymandias didn’t learn anything, but still had a sweet relationship anyway. Sometimes you meet in the street after getting kicked out of med school, sometimes you meet on a couch cushion, both are valid.

 

19. Immortality: A Love Story – Dana Schwartz

Hazel’s in jail! Not right away, but after she helps a woman who won’t say what her name is with the bloody results of trying to get rid of her own pregnancy, she’s accused of being a doctor who got rid of a pregnancy in the wrong era, essentially. But she doesn’t know that until a hearing and then, all of a sudden, Hazel is whisked away to help Princess Charlotte down in London at the request of the Prince Regent who is ruling in the stead of his dad, King George III, who we all know in the USA particularly and who was at the point the story takes place pretty darn raving.

Hazel also runs into a secret society once she’s in London, the very one who produced Dr. Beecham and his immortal weirdness. Dr. Beecham also is supposedly dead and left Hazel an inheritance, which is weird. The secret society wants Hazel to replace Dr. Beecham as their sewing bits and pieces back on doctor like Death Becomes Her with no mannequin paint, but all of the attitude.

Hazel is able to figure out the madness of King George, the unspecified ailment of Princess Charlotte, runs into Jack at the most unexpected place ever, and also has her family accusing her of ruining her reputation.  And Jack tries to put her off, but, that doesn’t work and he knew it wasn’t going to. Those two can’t stop making out in open graves. They’re going to have to become cemetery caretakers in the US once they get there.

 

Pere and Ozy looking into their own future not taking care of anything like a doctor or a cemetery caretaker would. Bliss.

 

“Superstition also breeds in the forest.”

101. The Watchers – A.M. Shine

Ireland has some seriously angry fairy myths and seriously angry forest underground fairies, if several of the horror movies set there I’ve watched and this book are to be believed. The Watchers, which involves a forest where cars break down, motorbikes break down, heavy machinery breaks down, and if you make it to the right place, you can live through the night when that happens. It’s more likely you’ll be shredded by beastly fairies though. Way more likely. This would be why there are only four people and a golden conure in the “coop” as they call it.

Once you get beyond the day to day survival talk which is essentially the only stuff older woman Madeline talks about while she’s ordering people around, and the diet of berries mostly it seems, you realize how trapped you are. And under a scary bright light of all things. The watchers, who don’t get a real name, tend not to attack the coop as long as they can see the trapped people in the light at night. They don’t want them to sleep, so, not only has your transportation broken down – you now work nights without consenting to! And since I do work nights, my main issue with this was that no one addressed the consequences of not sleeping at night while also being awake during the day, Mina acted like she never slept and never needed to, liar. Thankfully, the action ramped up enough for me to stop being super concerned about it because the group did find a way to get a good night’s sleep before their escape attempt. That was necessary.

And once that action kicked in and they had finally watched an informational video, I mainly kept getting worried that the parrot would die a horrible death. I wasn’t sure how it was being fed because that kept getting not addressed at all and then I was worried about a revenge killing because it was a better judge of character than any of the people in the story. However, I can say that this was a quick reading story with absolutely no dead golden conures in it and a very creepy ending.

 

Murderface and Mortemer together in a flash of bright light when they were little, lucky for them this was an instant, not months of bright light while under the watch of monsters.

 

Is this cursus cursed?

15. The Crossing Places – Elly Griffiths

The first in the Ruth Galloway series, we meet Ruth, haver of cats and issues with how fat she is. She is also a great archaeologist and has excellent instincts. And now that a skeletal child has been found in the saltmarsh near where she lives, she’s also consulting for the police. There is a child missing from the village, you see, and it’s been about 10 years since she went missing. But the child they found was more of a ceremonial sacrifice type – not that you can’t do that with modern murders – and is from the Iron Age. So, the police are asking, where is the current missing child and then another one goes missing!

The saltmarsh is also the site of a dig Ruth was on years ago with her mentor and her ex-boyfriend who she doesn’t love and maybe didn’t love. They found a henge and her ex-boyfriend almost drowned when the tide came in, so they got together more seriously. However, right now Ruth is on her own and has her friends at the university she works for, her cats Sparky and Flint (such an anthropologist set of names), and her new bestie, DCI Nelson, who keeps taking her on interviews. She’s also got a mystery of letters to solve from DCI Nelson and it’s pretty flowery lunatic stuff.

If you like ancient henges and Druid-based ire and thinking about how dangerous the tides are, this will be a very enjoyable book. If you like morose policemen and mysteries involving kidnapping it will also be enjoyable. Ruth is an interesting protagonist and I really admire that she wants to be left alone, it’s just that if she is, we can’t have a 15 book thus far series, now can we?

 

Ozy understands not wanting to leave the house or the blankets. But Danger Crumples always pulled him into solving mysteries anyway.

 

“What horrors will be performed with this axe? This hose? This dagger? This gun? This sword? All the implements necessary to make this the ultimate in adult horror films.”

46. The Long Weekend – Gilly MacMillan

Dark Fell Barn sounds just totally innocuous as a place to have a creepy and terrible girls’ weekend, doesn’t it? I mean, I know “fell” here means essentially a big hill, but there is totally a twisted ankle coming and a lack of cell service that leads to some basic wine-drunk chaos on a rainy night in Northern England. And that’s just the girls’ night part with the threatening note tagging along in the champagne and the unexpected gun. To be fair, the characters are not that distinct from each other and it’s when they get back home that the real twists and turns begin. Followed by yet more twists and also turns, but then more twist. I found the characters to be not that intriguing, obviously, I haven’t even mentioned any names. The Long Weekend was a quick enough read, but I did start to really hate the number of crosswise twists and dramatic turns for these people I barely knew or cared to understand and rolled my eyes quite a few times by the end.

 

They wandered in the dark and pelting rain around a place called “Dark Fell Barn” before all the kidnapping and murder plot parts? Horace thinks perhaps this could have just been called Bad Decisions in the North instead.

 

We totally know words too.

69. The Professor and the Madman – Simon Winchester

This is the story of the Oxford English Dictionary…the dictionary’s dictionary, the big one which has so many giant volumes. I’ve interacted with these mainly in the reference shelves of libraries because it’s so humungous and it doesn’t surprise me that it wasn’t finished before some of the major players involved died. However, this story teaches us that the United States played an interesting role in the creation of the OED, which I don’t think is super publicized.

Oxford screams England and not much else; I mean “Oxford English” certainly doesn’t imply that an American veteran who had some mental health concerns, as we’d say now, and totally killed a guy had a major influence on it from his asylum cell, which to be fair had a ton of cool antique books in it because rich people, no matter what they do, tend to end up better off even in an asylum in England. I also think he probably had syphilis, just based on his lust for the ladies being kind of endless before he was in the asylum, where it was just mental lust. See, these things are all things that seem disqualifying for an “Oxford man,” don’t they? Or someone who would end up being a most trusted source of dictionary quotes for the most important dictionary of all time? But they’re not because he also loved words and old books and had a knack for finding endless accounts that could be the first uses of words in them. He also painted.

And said that the Irish were coming for him because in his military time, he was a doctor and had to brand deserters from the Civil War in the US, some of them Irish and this apparently had quite an effect on him and gave him the idea that the Irish were coming for him…for the rest of his life. He had a lot of paranoid delusions and frankly, talents. Why there is no movie I have seen about him I do not know, maybe it’s the penis cutting off thing, maybe not. There are a lot of reasons to read about this bizarre American man, perhaps a peak example of American exceptionalism, Dr. W. C. Minor, and they’re thankfully cataloged in this book. There’s other stuff in there too, including that there’s another American who contributed a very large amount to the dictionary, which was another weird surprise.

 

I wouldn’t be surprised if Belvedere also contributed to the OED, really, he was so very clever.

 

“I’m asking if you want her properly taken care of.”

136. Village of Satan – Margaret Bingley

Every book I’ve read so far by Margaret Bingley is about evil children, this one is also about evil children. I know she has some books that aren’t about evil children, but, do I want to read them? Yes, I do, I have two Point Crime YA ones that I don’t think are about evil children, but, still, I enjoy this niche she’s carved out with a seriously deep groove.

Luke is very talented at things like astral projection and easing someone else into the idea of giving up their soul. Nice. He likes to hang out in the local graveyard and really wants Jasmine, the little girl whose mother just moved to the village so they can take care of her grandma, to stay and become one of the village cult. Luke doesn’t want Jasmine’s mom Kathryn to date his dad or to investigate their out buildings or learn anything about the cult, so, you can see how the evil comes in. I mean, it was already there, but, it gets out more.

 

If there’s a village cult, I could be in charge – Finny knows his place in a Margaret Bingley story.

This lady was not going to relent at imitating the spiritually plagued.

67. The Haunting of Alma Fielding – Kate Summerscale

In 1930s London, Alma Fielding gets a poltergeist to spice up her life, as it were. She has past traumas and illnesses, she has a boring husband, she does not have the level of attention she might want, so, she becomes part of the spiritualist and paranormal boom of the 1930s. She even manages to convince Nandor Fodor, who is nothing if not relentless in his pursuit of paranormal evidence… If he was a different Nandor perhaps she could have left her husband and become his 38th wife instead of hiding birds and mice and jewelry in her clothes and orifices to pretend to be haunted, one might even say pillaged (or not), by the dead. She was really good at it, but, this true story mostly made up of case file summaries was quite a tedious read at times. It didn’t really have the spirit, per se, of other séance fakery documentary sorts of things I have seen and read where I guess they must have added some zazz to make the investigation of the paranormal more interesting. Or maybe it’s just because they were fiction. No one asked anyone if they heard “that,” and it seemed like maybe some of the writing wasn’t super dynamic to begin with. I mean, original What We Do in the Shadows had the interminable Stu and that was a paranormal documentary. Alma is, unfortunately, no Stu. I guess that’s what happens when the persons involved are real.

 

No one needs the distraction of the exciting paranormal when they have Thorfinnur. He’s super relentless and going to make a very special ghost some day.

“Helling it like it is…”

120. Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead – Barbara Comyns

This book is very short and very strange. There’s a flood and rather awful family who are all either keeping to tradition by being a terrible human being (the matriarch) or trying to get away from said traditional Grandmother Willoweed. No one is super keen to help her, yet, even after the flood, she’s there ordering people around. After the flood, there are several descriptions of dead animals left behind… you know, the thing you never want to think about happening with floods if you like animals. And then there’s a spreading madness that continuously causes more illness followed by several suicides; the butcher’s suicide has a particularly odd description that was rather on the limits of dark humour. It seems the flood poisoned the whole village in a way that’s reminiscent of ergot poisoning.

I do like to try reading stories that I find described as disturbing elsewhere and I was reading this one because the other one by Barbara Comyns I found described as disturbing, The Vet’s Daughter, was not in my library system and this was. It reminds me a little bit of Rituals by David Pinner, although it precedes it by about 13 years in terms of being published, but the similarities such as the weirdo village elements and the lack of a grounding character that’s relatable while there’s all this grotesque stuff going on that makes no sense are major elements of both Rituals and Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead. And it’s also a little like the Gormenghast Trilogy with that mostly repellent, but slightly sympathetic (only Hattie or just a couple of the kids, really) Willoweed family. Two of the Gormenghast novels precede this, but only the family and their significant amount of senseless weirdness are similar. So, if you like the grotesque and senseless weirdness this is the short novel for you.

 

Wisting’s not sure if he wanted to join the senseless weirdness of this household, but he did anyway. It’s not as grotesque or senseless as this novel, so he was in luck.

 

 

Middle-aged convict Nancy Drew? I’m in.

79. Games for Dead Girls – Jen Williams

This turned out better than I expected. I was pleasantly surprised by this tale of a seaside town separated through several time periods and with some disparate characters that come together rather well and in a very weird way in the end, but, like I said, better than I expected. Hithechurch and nearby Folkeshome have a history of pirate smuggling, beachside running, a funfair, and disappearing girls. Oh, and a story of a young girl in a smuggling family running from said pirates and hiding herself in a scarecrow. But, the disappearing girls and one particular murder in 1988 are Charlie’s focus when she returns as an adult with her niece, neither of whom are all they seem.

Charlie has her reasons and some pressure as a book that will truly ruin her reputation is about to come out and she’s getting some mysterious messages about it. She needs to resolve her side of the story and what she experienced overall back in 1988. However, there is also the ticking clock of another girl who has disappeared and it seems a bit like Charlie suspects the murderer from 1988 of potentially kidnapping the girl as well. Charlie stirs up trouble by talking to old locals, one of whom chased her away from the slot machines back in the 80s, and she also finds a nice bookshop and some sad tales and unresolved disappearances that may provide a pattern for what happened with the most recent one and a bit of a bigger mystery of what’s going on in those caves.

 

Danger Drew certainly would have figured it all out and then gone out for butter lettuce.

“Most everyone sweats under one circumstance… or another.”

34. Eileen – Otessa Moshfegh

Pure weirdo squalor seems to make Eileen, not exactly happy, but bitterly pleased, I guess. Eileen is the kind of woman who likes talking about her bowels rather endlessly and is very wrapped up in the minutiae of her job as a secretary in a teen boys’ prison. She shoplifts, she takes care of her father who was a police officer but has devolved with alcohol abuse, she stalks Randy the guard, and she obsesses over her fantasies about getting out while also basically resenting herself having to even breathe, in addition to everything around her.

Daria had a future and talent while seeming awkward and out of place, Eileen is not really capable of talent or having a future without drudgery, unfortunately. Not in her time period of the early 1960s and certainly not without a lot of psychological help. She really seems rather hopeless for the most part, which is an interesting and uncomfortable character study unto itself. She’s probably the target audience of the short film about body care and grooming so you’ll be worthy of humanity they showed on Mystery Science Theater 3000 and she definitely ignored it while knowing herself too well from the inside out already.

Until the dreary, frigid winter when Eileen is 24, she keeps on as is. But then, Rebecca St. John comes. Eileen decides to pin all her hopes and dreams on Rebecca St. John and not notice that she’s being pulled into crime. To be fair, Eileen seems like she needed a kick and Rebecca gave her the worst kind while also giving her somebody to idolize, too overwhelming.

 

I lived with Ozma for most of her life and let me tell you, she could have enchanted Eileen, Rebecca St. John, and the entire boys’ prison right back out of crime with her little chocolate kissed nose.