Rachel Smith's Blog: Guinea Pigs and Books, page 23

“An intellectual carrot – the mind boggles.”

7. The Plants – Kenneth McKenney

The sunflowers like guinea pigs. Thankfully, they don’t want the guinea pig as a sacrifice, they just like them. They want human sacrifice. A willing human sacrifice. But first, they will warn the guinea pig’s owner repeatedly that the way humans are going is not okay and the plants will not take it. I sort of just gave away the ending, but, this book is from 1976.

See, England is having its warmest summer in years, not unlike in recent years. People who didn’t have allergies now have allergies – also like in recent years and those who already had them are having worse allergies…check for me over here in the US too. Plants are overgrowing their spaces and rustling. Very ominous rustling. And a TV show host’s family lives in the village at the center of it all, the village of Brandling. A giant squash has grown there, there are older men saying the “creatures of the field” are warning us, Mabel’s roses just bit her because they’re trying to run a plan here, and Debby, with a guinea pig she hasn’t named (sheesh), is listening to all the plants. Phillip, TV host, has seen a scientist who is tracking plant communication in London, who is promptly murdered by said plants because he could get in the way, and he believes the plants are rising because humans are being shitty stewards of the planet, although he said it less forcefully. I believe there was some chatter that humans are “making mistakes.”

I like books like this because they’re a little bit more like my life. Because my allergies are so severe, and grass and trees get some of my worst reactions, plants are a threat and they are also ubiquitous. Everything that triggers me to have trouble breathing is everywhere, though. It’s very hard to live comfortably for me. So it’s nice to see that almost represented, even though nobody dies of allergies in this book, they could’ve been, but they weren’t mentioned. However, having allergies and an honored guinea pig, even nameless, is extremely rare in a book, so to me this book is special even if I would have liked more carnage and less pub conversations. Especially since, unlike the people of Brandling, I can’t get my suffering to stop by hugging the angry peach tree and showing a guinea pig to some sentient sunflowers. I have guinea pigs and I like peaches, but, that is not my quest and the current effects of climate change do not seem to be slowing down so breathing is just going to get harder.

 

Salem knows the pumpkin monster is really just interested in how sweet he is. Plants like guinea pigs, I guess, even though guinea pigs eat essentially nothing but plants.

 

I didn’t even mention my favorite part of the story, which comes in the funeral chapter.

100. Grim – Sara B. Elfgren

Kasper is born into a Swedish death metal legacy that he isn’t sure he knows how to handle or even just what to do with himself in general. He’s in art school and about to finish, but he’s not doing the kind of work he thinks is worthwhile. His dad was in one of the most infamous Swedish death metal bands, the short-lived but high impact Dark Cruelty, at his age and Kasper is named after the infamous lead singer Grim’s real name. Grim, of course, is a metal legend in no small part because he died under mysterious circumstances before even turning 20 or before their EP could really get out, that being the first Swedish death metal EP.

Kasper gets a job because of his stepbrother at an amusement park and ends up, because of the notoriety of his dad’s band, in the house of horrors style attraction, which gives him a friend group of the other workers aka Demons and he starts having weird dreams and weird experiences like trying to trust new friends and he knows it’s all connected to his namesake and the weird circumstances of his death. He’s gone through serious depression before, and so he doesn’t really know what or who he can trust, including himself. And when he decides he needs to try to figure this all out with the help of Iris and his dad’s bandmates while they plan a 30 year reunion, things get creepy and scary and also smell gross. And that’s without the little snot, now old snot, Malte the shitty one out of the band who came in late and was a bad dude who was okay at guitar and Ossian, the other band-child, the first one, who is now singing for the reunion and is both a dick and has the reputation of being an enigma. Ossian is on a similar quest as Kasper, but he chose down.

There are occult themes, similarities to the antics of Norway’s 1990s black metallers that were quite noticeable even though this is Sweden and death metal, the realities of being in bands and having some infamy and becoming an actual adult after, and the time line goes back and forth between when Grim was alive and Kasper’s perspective. And Kasper is also worried about working at the haunted house attraction and remaining a functioning human being and artist while having all the weight of the past poking at him. I found this to be one of the best books I read this year. I’m very pleased I found it and I am always skeptical when something seems like it includes too many things I care a lot about.

Grim is also one of very few books that can have an ending which involves a lot of the action being off page and I did not care because of how well the rest of the book sets it up. It’s funny, too, because it is marked as YA, but it’s on that weird borderline where there are several teenagers in it, in two different time periods no less, but they’re older than 17 and way less dramatic than they tend to be in a lot of YA. This may be because the ladies in here weren’t coming into some ancient birthright or even the manic depressive/pixie dream girl type, they were very grounded with ambitions and jobs and I super appreciated it as a woman who loves metal. That’s right, band tees and the right band tees, not just stereotype groupie attire, band tee women exist too as actual listeners.

Also, this is actually from Sweden and I’m so glad we’re getting more and more translations into English. So glad. It’s not just mysteries and lit fiction! Now we too can have YA novels with metal and posers alike from the home of metal’s evolution/descent, depending on who you are listening to, into darkness.

 

So, Snuffy and Thorfy may not really be “working” at this fun house, per se, but Thorfy is watching out for the scent of unfinished occult rituals and Snuffy is taking down the very structure they’re stuck with. They’re prepared.

 

“It’s sort of a shock to see your head detached that way.”

76. Fire & Ash – Jonathan Maberry

Fire & Ash is the end of the Rot & Ruin series, but it also draws together Maberry’s other zombie series, so, if you’re looking to catch up with some significant characters, they’re here. And it’s pretty normal for a zombie series to find a Sanctuary that’s totally not a sanctuary in the true sense of the word. There’s not really a way to be totally protected once the apocalypse comes, so you make your choices. While Benny, Nix, Chong in his halfsies state, and Lilah are trying to navigate Sanctuary and understand all the information that’s now available to them that hasn’t been before, like the origins of the zombie plague and what a future might look like alongside normal diseases that could have been cured in the beforetime becoming deadly all over again, the Night Church is also still pursuing their zealot murder mission and closing in. There’s a lot of action in Fire & Ash, as well there should be, and yet Maberry still takes the time to examine who these teens have become over the course of their adventures and who they want to be to each other and overall. It’s a definitely well executed conclusion to one of the best zombie series, YA or not.

 

Ozymandias watches Danger Crumples end this series of photographs.

Or is it?

Just in time for the end of Banned Books Week –

118. What you are looking for is in the library – Michiko Aoyama

This is a hopeful little book. It also extols the many virtues of honeydome cookies, which I hope actually exist due to the clear level of joy they seem to be bringing people who randomly wander into this community center library. Libraries can be anywhere and even a small collection can clearly change lives. Lives with direction who want a different one, lives without direction, lives with thwarted purposes. Apparently, it is also much easier to give people a little push towards finding their happiness or at least a new way of looking at their life with an unexpected book recommendation and also a felted gift. It was nice that it was also repeatedly mentioned that being an actual librarian requires significant training…because it does. The nice thing is unless you want to be a school librarian, which requires additional certification/licensing, you can keep your title and use that training anywhere it is useful, stepping in and out of working within a library at any time.

Anyway, this is a series of interconnected stories taking place at a community center in a Tokyo neighborhood. A variety of people end up finding the little library and interacting with a librarian who in turn intimidates and calms patrons from her desk with her super fast typing and pointed looks. She was an interesting mix of what I like about reference, i.e. why would anyone need to look happy all the time when I’m here to answer questions effectively? Pretending to be happy should not be required for anything… and the effect of knowing how to help, i.e. once the patrons realized that her recommended books were most certainly not mistakes, they were more appreciative of her skills.

Reader’s advisory and reference are complicated and it’s fun to know what people need before they know what they’re even asking, but apparently they do not require a super big collection like I prefer working with in this book. Doing it right does involve not banning books and pulling them out of library collections for ignorant reasons or firing librarians and turning school libraries into detention, oh excuse me, they said “discipline,” centers though. No honeydome cookies for those banning books and especially the ones using AI to choose the books based on keywords.  AI doesn’t get context or critical thinking and neither do they, apparently.

Libraries and librarians are under attack all over the US and so I’ve referenced some exploitation themes because sometimes you need a “roaring rampage of revenge” like borderline all the Grindhouse movie trailers say. Peregrine is the right pig for vengeance since I thought if I sent her into the libraries I’ve worked in for me, no one would notice the difference. So now she’s my ladypig of Pigsploitation parody posters. She’ll help libraries and librarians with those ridiculous book banning requests and put the sneaky fascist bastards asking for them in their place… and obviously she also doesn’t like it when people botch research scenes either.

 

One eye based pointed looks are one of Pere’s specialties, so she really fits into revenge film parody paintings and library settings… even if I depict her with two eyes.

 

I know it’s hard to see the teeny titles. One skeleton has a pamphlet entitled “Inaccurate Research Scenes” (I wonder which one?) and the other has “Library to Detention Hall.” There’s a reason these titles are not books and also it’s all a bit easier to see on my art sites. And of course, I also labeled the microfilm to once again show it’s not the same as fiche.
Redbubble
Threadless

 

It is entirely possible to choose books that won’t be great for your patrons and if you ban all the good and useful books and choose only “approved” titles with no librarians helping who understand libraries are meant to be access to information for all, this is the kind of stuff you end up with – three books in this one: Mein Kampf, Corporal Punishment, and Bad Choices. Just hammering the point home like Pere in the painting. Again, this may be easier to see in detail on my art sites, I upload bigger versions so they print nicely on stuff and things.
Redbubble
Threadless

“Well, it would appear that you just move back three spaces and lose a turn.”

88. The Mark of the Rope – Miriam Lynch

So now even the very mention of Salem while being in a suburb of it is enough to make things scary and invoke witchcraft, I guess. I guess the whole place is just permeated with ancient vengeance evil vibes and it’s seeping into the suburbs because when Andrea drops off her “friend” and neighbor Charlene at her ex-husband’s mom’s house with her daughter so they can beg for money in Shadduck, she gets those vibes and sees a dog and then it’s all happening. But what is happening is not something anybody wants to tell Andrea, innocent bystander with a now ruined vacation because she is the only person with any common sense.

Charlene is dramatic, like gets dressed up to meet the mailman in heels and full face paint level wanting attention. She has made some bad money decisions and also refuses to do anything for herself like sort it out or even pay attention to her daughter, who she is only concerned about when it might get her more attention and who she named Catha. Yes, Catha, although there is one typo of “Cathy” in my copy which I totally understand.

Catha gets sick as soon as they get to the house near Salem, so very near, and when the doctor is called, he also happens to be the object of one woman’s unrequited affections and then Charlene sees him and no one was going to take care of Catha while those two are so busy trying to get the doctor to talk to them. Andrea also finds the doctor attractive, but someone had to be sensible and not let that get in the way of a sick child. Andrea was only supposed to drop Charlene and Catha off. She never gets away.

A dog comes and reminds everyone in the house of a family curse they don’t want to talk about and it’s now Catha’s best friend, but seems otherworldly, and there’s clearly no way out of this curse or the dramatic attention whoring of Charlene. You know Andrea will end up with the doctor and only eligible dude since this is a Satanic Gothic romance, but, it’s all because she can’t get to her vacation…where she could have met any number of menfolk…but she had to just be stuck in Shadduck forever.

 

Being near Salem in my house, or this cardboard haunted house, was desirable, he was a very sweet guinea pig and as far as I know had no family curses.

Baxter is a novel of inhuman evil, but not all the evil is inhuman, Carl.

16. Baxter – Jessica Hamilton

Animal perspective always seems like a frontier authors don’t attempt lightly and I’ve found that in the 1970s, like in The Pack, the dogs whose perspectives are represented are not pleased with people. Baxter, a white Bull Terrier, did not know that his breed of dog would later become party animal Spuds McKenzie and the Target mascot, which makes the white Bull Terrier a lot less intimidating from my position in the future after 1977 when this was published. But, I will concede the thoughts of many of the people in the book that they are a bit offputting in their head shape (Baxter’s is described as “hatchet”). I believe it’s the tiny eyes.

Baxter is super not pleased with people, he finds them interesting to smell and possible to manipulate and he doesn’t really want much more than smells and his independence and to not have to deal with anyone’s foibles. His lack of scruples are of course because he is a dog and he does some very rude things like killing his mistress because he thinks he would end up living across the street with the couple who smell more interesting.

Baxter is not man’s best friend in the slightest, he is pretty much the nastiest thing on the street until one more murder finally gets him to his match in Carl, the extremely gross teenager with a Hitler’s bunker obsession who will definitely grow up to be a serial killer. Carl is just as gross as Baxter inside his twisted little mind and in the end we find out who is worse, a murderous dog or a sociopathic teenage boy. You already know who will prevail, but it’s still disappointing.

 

When all of you is tiny, the tiny eyes are not so suspicious, Thorfy. That’s a fact.

 

“Do Not Entry”

65. Tule Witch – Jane Toombs

This was an odd one, a mix of medical drama, murder mystery, running from a witchcraft past, and a story of fog. It was actually pretty fun. Bebe is working the last nights of night shift at a hospital that is closing down. They have a new one, they just haven’t moved the ER yet. Bebe’s grandma was a witch and she has some clairvoyant powers herself that tell her some dude is outside that needs help despite the thickness of the fog and the lack of noise.

All of a sudden, sexy Dr. Jed shows up with his brash approach to Bebe’s skills and helps her with a very crumpled man who was totally dying outside in the fog. Dr. Jed is suspicious. He should be. But he won’t be doing the autopsy, that’s the other doctor who wants to/once did take Bebe out, Harold. Harold and Jed have a bit of a rivalry for Bebe’s affections because I guess she’s the only attractive nurse with a past in the ER at night. She’s behind on her charting because of their attentions. And, in my opinion as someone who has worked nights, she is behind on her charting because she doesn’t make sleep a priority. She’s basically up for days on end considering she also has to go see her child with medical issues who gives her visions during the day and she never mentions sleeping. She mentions being tired, but that is traditional nights worker language. She should be talking more about sleep.

The mystery of the dead guy, a mysterious illness that comes up, and Bebe’s husband through a witch ceremony who is also the father of her child and a terrible human all come together in a way that reminded me of watching a Robin Cook mashup of his own books Year of the Intern and Coma but with a way cooler protagonist in Bebe. She’s great. She’s running away on the cover and running away to some extent in life, but she also faces up to most of the mysteries and the end kind of leaves it open for a sequel…I don’t believe there is one though.

 

Danger Crumples and Merricat never had any trouble finding time to sleep, that being a benefit of not having to outrun your witchy past or work a nightshift.

Claudia and Sibyl deserve each other.

131. And DIE Remembering – Mary Lin Roby

The women in this book do not come off well. Three of them are essentially fighting over a professor who married one of his students who has become a shell of himself. That student he married, Anna, and Graham the hollowed out professor have two children, Hamish, who he loves and who hates his mother, and Grace, who no one seems to like. Graham, haver of affairs with students, also has an admirer in Sibyl, who has been pining for him as he withers away into drinking that his wife is telling everyone about. But, I’ve forgotten our narrator, Claudia. Miss Manipulation, she is. A journalist who took Graham’s class and so has met him before and a friend of Anna’s, Claudia is asked to visit Anna and Graham in Oxford to initially bear witness to the demise of a shitty marriage as Anna tries to lose Graham a promotion that she does want him to have…or does she?

We’ll never find out because Anna gets murdered after making a scene with Graham’s rival for the promotion, Brian, at a party for Graham to get the promotion. If I’m being honest, it all seems a bit stupid and that’s before Claudia is suddenly in love with Graham and protecting him from being accused of murdering Anna by stealing his mail and secluding him in her cottage in Devon. Oh, and this is apparently because after being asked to play witness to their shitty marriage, Claudia takes off driving after Graham and finds him about to succumb to carbon monoxide poisoning because someone, presumably his wife, put a hose in the exhaust and then through the trunk into the backseat. Graham, apparent trophy husband, didn’t know to check his backseat for weirdness.

So I guess since Claudia found and saved Graham, her response was to manipulate him and steal him away from Sibyl and not just run screaming for the train once she realized what kind of couple they were and how they were just looking for a witness to their shitty behavior towards each other. I think this might have been a better story if Claudia murdered Anna and Graham and then just went back to being a journalist instead of letting Sibyl do all the work so they could cat fight on the last couple of pages over a hollowed out shell of a man who now has a tan…from sunning in Devon.

 

Pickles isn’t afraid to just shove her way in, but Murderface thinks she could do it with more class.

“Hang loose, stay cool, and don’t forget your psychic humor.”

91. The Witches of Brimstone Hill – Helen Arvonen

In the beginning there are sausages and dill pickles stuffed in a 9 year old’s pocket and a scene similar to when Julian Sands gets to LA in that storm in Warlock, but all outside at Brimstone Hill.

And then all of a sudden there are just way too many characters and I had no idea the nine year old was now in her 20s for a little too long. It was very confusing because everyone was talking all at once. The radio personality she works with, some friend in the neighborhood who I guess is involved with finding college students housing, the main character Jamie’s little sister who is 16 and is very developed and plump (the amount of breast-related thinking instead of thinking about unwanted attention for young girls makes me think this is a male author writing under a female pseudonym), and her little sister’s friend with neglectful parents which Jamie is trying not to be because their parents are dead and she is concerned and not neglectful, Jamie’s boyfriend who is like really involved in the town and the college and does all the things except have sex with Jamie, which her radio personality friend is really concerned about, and that radio personality also has a husband who is very boring to her and who lets her be with other men whenever she wants because he can’t keep up with her, so she’s always eyeing anything male, oh, and the male cat – who is large and orange and doesn’t like anyone and doesn’t purr. Doesn’t that seem like a lot to come into without any separation? Yes it does.

Once all the people in the world are pushed upon you simultaneously, they’re holding a benefit and it’s witchy themed and also needs Jamie to be a fortune teller because she’s eerily good at seeing things for people. Jamie doesn’t want to and gets pushed into it anyway. And during the benefit, we learn of more people, Kelly who apparently looks like the rough and tumble cat and Jamie is totally not into him, but she is into him and why… And Jewel, who is missing, and who Jamie makes an offhand comment about – but that’s exactly where she turns up! Jamie is totally psychic. And these two dudes Raj and Paul move into her psychic basement, which is an apartment her now deceased parents fixed up for her and her now deceased husband, they all died in a train/broken down car accident situation and Jamie foresaw something terrible, but not exactly that, but she feels guilty, which is not surprising. Psychic guilty. Caretaker for her teen sister guilty. Sort of cheating on her boyfriend who she isn’t sure she likes guilty with someone who is a bit much and pushy and keeps telling her she’ll “like it” guilty.

So, when the girl turns up murdered ritually and Jamie’s little sister and her little bad friend start going to a “club” that they won’t explain and sneak out for, Jamie gets suspicious. There’s some clear evidence that Jamie is the target of something as well, maybe because she’s psychic and the murderer thinks she saw him during a seance she didn’t even really want to be at. This is a slice of witch panic and fascination and very 70s and there’s constantly a little too much going on but it’s kind of a fun read anyway if you can get along with the very 70s nature of it and too many characters, which also might make you want to tell Jamie to lock her damn door sometimes. Her house is like Grand Central Station and this needed tightening.

 

The witches of my couch, Snuffy and Hen Wen, did not end up bonding. I tried to get them to bond, but had to give them each their own ear of corn before they came to fisticuffs via their sharp little teeth. I guess I should have given them sausage and dill pickles they couldn’t eat to summon the devil to bond them, because it’s unlikely they were ever going to bond without an unholy pact and they don’t like each other to this day.

Life before tabloid TV

118. A Feast of Eggshells – Florence Stevenson

At first I couldn’t figure out why the connection was made between a child that seems possessed and Rosemary’s Baby when The Exorcist exists, but, then I checked the publication date…1970. The Exorcist’s film did not exist yet, so, potential devilish children had to be relegated to being compared to a film where the child didn’t do anything at all. And The Exorcist book didn’t come out until 1971. To be fair, neither is actually an apt comparison to A Feast of Eggshells, but I feel like marketing didn’t know what else to do and I blame them for me reading this because it was that evil child situation that made me interested. Hmmph.

The title has to do with a method for getting rid of a changeling – feed it eggshells and it will go away and leave your actual child back in its place. I guess changelings are keen to run away from the kind of bad parenting that involves serving sharp edged inedible things, good for them. But that’s also a misdirection because Pamela Gabrielle, child who talks like a gangster’s moll, is not possessed and not a changeling, her only supernatural aspect is that she’s reincarnated. And she’s not the kind of reincarnated where she says random creepy things that make her parents wonder, she’s very specific about who she is – Stella Crowne, who is a murder victim and whose daughter lives not far away. Three year olds can’t have children, thankfully, but they can attract national interest and a lawn full of hippie followers and a slew of people who want proof of reincarnation or to profit off telling people their past lives by stealing a Volkswagen because they want to see their kid.

Pamela Gabrielle isn’t scary and doesn’t have any menace, she just wants to see her kid. And her psychiatrist. What she says is funny sometimes, but I had a hard time picturing her saying it. This book is like if one of those 1920s photos of children smoking came to life, specifically the one of that little boy with the chicken where it seems the chicken would also like to be smoking. The chicken is us in this case.

 

I did a painting of Peregrine smoking, well, part of a painting. It sort of looked like she does here. Not really.