Rachel Smith's Blog: Guinea Pigs and Books, page 26

“They’re eating the guests, sir.”

21. Horror High: Mr. Popularity – Nicholas Adams

Brad has a panther. Do you have a panther? Brad also has voices in his head calling for blood and telling him to kill a nice older lady’s escaped Yorkie. And Cassie, who thinks Brad is awesome and doesn’t even realize he was murdering that Yorkie with his car instead of realizing he said he’d pick her up “if he saw her” at the bus stop next to the dog-murder, is willing to back him up. Brad also bribes the cop who shows up at the scene. Great cops in this town, totally willing to be bribed by a rich high school kid. No wonder Brad’s ex-girlfriend Alice is still missing.

But she’s not missing in Brad’s head because he knows she’s buried in his backyard and he named his panther after her because that’s a fine tribute. Brad has money and voices he will listen to in his head, he’s going to be a very successful young man. And no one can get in the way of that, not Cassie, not Cassie’s friend Jake who is the anti-Brad, not the police who don’t want to infringe on the rich people privacy and actually bother to look for Alice, and not the panther. The panther is totally on Brad’s side, which actually makes no sense as she shouldn’t like living in a damn basement and listening to a high school kid. She’s a panther.

 

Currently, Wisting, as a new pig, is not popular with the herd. I don’t think it’s because he doesn’t have a panther as it seems to me amongst guinea pigs that would be even worse than with high school kids.

 

If Wisting had any wild cat as part of his household, it would be a prehistoric American lion, one of my non-guinea pig paintings that is oddly relevant here.
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Dobkin has a research purpose.

45. The Locker – Richie Tankersley Cusick

Marlee and Dobkin and their aunt Celia move every so often, as Celia is a free spirit sculptor who apparently can set up her ceramics shop in seconds and must be secretly super rich and Marlee and Dobkin lost their parents in a car accident…that Marlee predicted with a terrible feeling she had.

Now they’re in MO at Edison High and Marlee gets assigned the locker of the last young woman to move to Edison, who disappeared. This also causes Marlee bad feelings. Marlee is perhaps the only one listening to the missing, dead, last outsider to move in and while she would like to be normal, she isn’t and neither is her six year old brother who speaks like he’s a wise elder of 160.

He is weirdly coherent and understanding for a six year old. I am not sure why he is not creeping anyone out, but I did like him as a character. I just had to ignore that he’s supposed to be six and new to the town and watching his sister freak out. He even does research about the missing girl at the school library. A six year old… asks for help… with finding newspaper articles about a missing girl. Suspicious.

Anyway, if you pretend that’s not super abnormal, Marlee’s trying to get along with the farm boy xenophobic weirdo Jimmy Frank and the cute boy in black next door Tyler and also Noreen, who seems nice, but is resigned to small town bullshit as well. It is harder to get along with people when the dead are invading your mind though. Way harder.

 

Thaddeus did not have time to look into town hauntings while tending to his busy schedule of chasing Pammy, napping, and asking that Swiss chard always be part of the veggie assortment for the week.

 

Sometimes you need to explore and solve murder mysteries in a small team as demonstrated by Peegs in Shirts.  Threadless

“I never dreamed that it would turn out to be the bees. They’ve always been our friend.”

5. Final Exam – A. Bates

Kelly has an angry ex-boyfriend who is sort of trying to date her sister to get back at her, she has a complete terror of finals, and she has someone or someones playing “pranks” on her like stealing her hat, putting liquid cheese product in her locker, egging her beautiful restored T-bird, and sabotaging her Chem book right before the open book Chemistry final so she flunked it because she didn’t even try to look and see if she could answer anything once she realized her book was no longer in the correct book cover. She did do well enough on her English test to make her teacher suspect she cheated…and got an A on her phys ed final, which I do not remember from school. It’s possible I blacked that out as I am not Kelly and would not have gotten an A. Basically, it’s a bad finals week for Kelly. Very bad. She didn’t realize when she picked up a book off the floor of a closet she would get the attention of a psychopath who also ransacked and tried to burn down her bedroom with a trash can fire in addition to the food-based pranks. Really, you could say the end of Kelly’s senior year in high school was a dumpster fire.

 

Danger Crumples thinks it was bees getting their revenge on Kelly because bees don’t like it when you steal books.

 

Danger Crumples In a Car with a Skeleton… coming for you book thieves. Threadless Redbubble

 

Killer job

21. Nightmare Hall: Book of Horrors – Diane Hoh

I once had to deal with a very manipulative writer in residence, but thankfully I wasn’t her personal assistant and she wasn’t known for all of her previous personal assistants disappearing or dying in “accidents” like Victoria McCoy at Salem. And I would say it might not be the best idea to have someone from an author’s fan club as their personal assistant if she’s so worried about snooping… But that’s the case with Reed, who has basically jumped on the very, very recently opened position to assist McCoy and is the organizer of her fan club on campus.

Reed has a very protective almost-boyfriend, they hadn’t entirely decided they were definitely exclusive, but in this case she’s lucky she has him since McCoy is prone to volatile personality shifts and for some reason situations similar to those of her horror novel keep popping up for Reed to be injured or killed in. And those are nothing for the rest of the fan club to be jealous of, nor is the attention of McCoy’s nice looking long haired son, not really.

 

Snuffy threatens Thorfy with the basement if he doesn’t do a better job of running her fan club. She’s a harsh mistress.

 

Speaking of novel inspiration, here’s Thorfinnur Has Tapes which is partly inspired by The Norliss Tapes and partly inspired by novel covers and partly inspired by the Rare and Obscure Metal Archives bringing me some awesome tunes which I would like to put onto tapes if I could get my hands on them.
Thorfinnur Has Tapes

“I can already feel the fungus growing in my lungs!”

126. Class Trip – Bebe Faas Rice

Personally, going to an island to stay overnight with several makeup concerned popular girls, their boyfriends, and the one dude I kind of have a crush on as a nerd would be not a good idea. Oh, and my one friend with allergies who wouldn’t let a trip like this get away from her. However, if I was very concerned with my vengeance, I guess it would be a good idea since I blame those very popular girls, their boyfriends, and that one dude for my actual super crush to end all crushes’ death. I guess I just spoiled this book. It was a little wonky though on a few levels, including the explanation, but the thing that rang the most true was the two popular girls constantly suspecting the nerdy girl of being the murderer. They were correct in their ideas that she didn’t really want to be in their crowd. She wanted to exterminate their crowd and she had access to pharmaceuticals to do it.

And…she’s right, when dead, Tina didn’t have to worry about allergies anymore, but, is cyanide the best way to achieve that? There are immunotherapy drops now and I recommend them even though I have made it close to the end of what they can do for me and it’s not exactly immunity (Thanks, climate change). They’ve made a huge difference in the meantime for several years and I didn’t have to die in a sneezing fit that whole time and maybe won’t in the future either. I so like being represented as someone who suffers to breathe in books, though. There are lots of us who the outdoors and/or indoors could easily kill because our immune systems say so.

 

Group trips usually result in something terrible happening, Ozma is warning you from the closest she can get to a group trip with Horace and Peregrine on the couch.

 

Ozma warned you, sometimes group trips don’t go well for anyone…except her.
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Sometimes you have to hit the archives and just dig through.

48. The Hunting Dogs – Jorn Lier Horst

You totally screwed up the evidence in this murder, Wisting. The lead investigator has to be responsible and since Wisting is a decent dude, of course he understands that. However, also because he’s a decent dude, he’s going to get to the truth even if he has to use a football, which I just now realized with my American brain was a soccer ball and my mental picture of him breaking into the police station was in fact wrong. It makes so much more sense if that ball can roll and does not just have to be thrown perfectly. Sheesh.

Anyway, a convicted murderer wants to clear his name after he gets out of prison…even though he totally did it…because he knows, and has a very solid argument that he’s right, that the police tampered with the evidence. He even knows who and that it’s not Wisting, which was decent of him to say. But, Wisting gets suspended and is not allowed to be an officer while being investigated, which is why he has to break into the police station to get files and ask police personnel to do stuff they’re not supposed to like get old paper visitor logs to help him figure it out. He also enlists his journalist daughter Line, who is way cooler in this book than I usually find her, and a retired forensic tech who I really liked even though he’s not in there much. Nerd.

He’s doing all of this alongside a new murder which has some weird connections to the older case dude was convicted of murder for and also alongside a new kidnapping which parallels the older murder. I totally understand why The Hunting Dogs won mystery novel awards based on how all of these are connected and established and also I love the importance of a Walkman. Cassettes and old school investigation and forensics for the win. Really though.

 

My own Wisting does not think he’s contaminated any evidence of anything. He’s on the up and up.

“Morbidly curious, huh, I won’t cater to that.”

24. Freezer Burn – Joe R. Lansdale

I’ve read a lot of very strange things, and this is certainly one of them. This is one of the more significantly weirder weird things I’ve read, even coming from Lansdale, and maybe it’s not as weird as some parts of the Drive-In books, now that I think about it, but it’s still a very odd tale. A very odd, sticky tale.

The description of the main character running through the swamp is one of the most itchy, stinging, and wet things I’ve ever read. It so perfectly evokes all the reasons why nature and I do not hang out. Especially not in humid places. Mosquitoes love me; I do not love them back – and I never will! And that description is before he comes across the traveling freak show and joins with his newly swollen visage, but after he keeps his dead mother and her Social Security checks and after he gets into a hellstorm of a firework stand robbery, so it just gets stranger from there. A lot of deceptive people running around in that freak show… Then there’s that dude in the ice block.

 

Pickles and Murderface squint incredulously in the direction of East Texas.

Once again, I am interrupting our regularly scheduled programming in the name of guinea pig paintings…

This time the coming attractions are very 1980s and 1990s forward and all will be available within the next couple of months on my Threadless and Redbubble sites barring some kind of annoying catastrophe.

Thorfy thinks you may not be surprised how often annoying catastrophes happen.

Coming Soon for all your candid guinea pig heavy metal nerd snapshot needs! Thorfy is repping one of my favorite records, Parasite’s 1984 self-titled that, based on the cover and best song, probably should have been titled “Nightwinds.” That’s what Thorfy’s shirt says, don’t let the human calamity of painting tiny lettering and wings surrounding the letters fool you. It’s totally “Night Winds.” In the world of the painting, he made that shirt himself. Metal. Possibly puffy paint.

Guinea Pig Snapshot – Snuffy & Thorfy, Heavy Metal Nerd

 

Here they both are, living their dream of posing in front of paintings. Snuffy would like everyone to know that she is pointing out that Thorfy is a heavy metal nerd and she is not. Snuffy hates all sounds for the most part. She is not metal, but she is brutal.

 

As you can see, Snuffy’s book cover, Just Right for Snuffy, demonstrates how not metal she can be while she eats her lettuce in front of it.

 

Just Right for Snuffy

 

She lays like that a lot. Even next to pencil drawings of soon to be paintings.

And, in a the vein of being very 80s, one might say the realm of the truly outrageous, there is Miss Ozma:

So much wig for just one pig. Showtime.

Moving forward in time to the 1990s, when I got my first guinea pig, this is my first guinea pig, Ace, in her book cover and painting debut:

Ace climbed the stairs extraordinarily fast, therefore, it was only right to paint her at the top and about to snip her little teeth through a headphone cord, the other thing Ace was very, very fond of doing. If it was her Walkman, she might not have done it, but it was mine.

 

Here she is on top of her book cover painting in the best photo of her, taken by my Aunt. Ace is totally an At the Top kind of guinea pig.

 

And now that we’ve reached the pinnacle of variety in guinea pig paintings that is possible at this time, I will now return you to our regularly scheduled programming… in like two days.

Not enough ominous rustling.

63. The Ruins – Scott Smith

Even with villainous plants in Mexico that are clearly hungry, for some reason, this just didn’t really feel like it was moving along when I read it. It just seemed very dry, like the throats of everyone trapped on the evil plants’ hill. It made sense, but without the research scene, I think horror is less effective. There’s something about revealing actual information that makes the horror of some supernatural (in this case very super – it imitates phones and voices and smells) horror more scary, I guess. Information is power and brings the possibility of triumphing over the supernatural and these tourists had none. They were just waiting, and rotting and sunburned and somehow avoiding their iced tea, which for me should be way more scary, especially outside! But, I mostly just felt sorry for them, especially Mathias, because there wasn’t much support for him and he had to deal with a bunch of selfish and self-righteous Americans and one Greek with a broken back on a death hill.

 

Danger Crumples totally knows how to defeat plants, so this is also not horror to him.

 

“Send them out in the streets to tell their friends how wonderful it is to be scared to death.”

82. Fightmares – Eva V. Gibson

Working at a haunt attraction in Orlando sounds sweaty and smelly and like the air conditioning can never really do enough and in Frightmares, that’s pretty much the case. Except the smell might be dead people and not just unwashed costumes and mold.

This was an efficient little tale of Dave, popular in high school, consumed by anxiety afterward apparently, and his shoulder Daves (like the angel and the devil, except for chill and anxiety-based instead) while they worked in a haunt attraction with many scenes and a cemetery’s worth of turnover.

But two of the missing or rage-quitting stand out. And Dave finds one of them while working a different scene from his normal Captive Countess one and away we go on a mission to find out how one young man finds just the right girlfriend to sort out the mystery of Bethany and Chet while taking care of his sister’s dog, Trent Roznor, and very consistently freaking out in make up.

 

Finny has no shoulder Daves, but he would be good in a haunt attraction. Very intimidating.