Rachel Smith's Blog: Guinea Pigs and Books, page 3

By jove, this is quite the collection.

9. Fettered and Other Tales of Terror – Greye La Spina

One of the gem authors in the overall kind of a bummer collection Queens of the Abyss was Greye La Spina. And so I sought out more of her work and found this collection, mostly so I could read “Wolf of the Steppes,” but that one was not as good as “Fettered.” I mean, “Wolf of the Steppes” is no slouch and a pretty damn cool werewolf tale told in epistolary format from 1919, before the “rules” of The Wolfman or the five pointed star comment from Jack in American Werewolf in London about it. And her wolfman has a really serious coat.

Fettered though is a short novel with a great title and a lot of the word “jove” and perhaps an interracial relationship that was a little patronizing even if the “brown girl” was the heroine. Or they couldn’t get over her very efficient tan, some old timey things are confusing and honestly, referring to her as “brown Bessie” did make me think of a cow. Even with the unfortunate nicknames, Bessie is discerning and a good heroine. Fettered is a vampire tale that takes place during spring or summer and the guy who won’t stop saying “jove” is a painter who is essentially on vacation in virgin forest with his twin sister Bessie, although how virgin can it be if there are cabins? Anyway, it’s from 1926 and the roles for women are meaty and also bitey.

Greye La Spina is definitely deserving of being unoverlooked and maybe some lovely library collection with Weird Tales is hiding some more of her stories, apparently she wrote a lot of them and for anyone with more time and library access than me, the University of Iowa special collections appears to have quite a few issues to peruse. They probably have a decent book scanner too.

 

Finny and Ozma’s version of trying to keep me fettered is slightly easier to break out of than the version in this tale.

 

“You have nothing to lose but your mind.”

120. Banquet for the Damned – Adam L.G. Nevill

Nevill’s first published novel is like having a BBC Ghost Story for Christmas with metalheads and a US hippie-style anthropologist as your heroes. So fun. Before I read it, I was aware there would be some heavy M.R. James (the heavyweight of BBC Ghost Story for Christmas tales) influence and it was all over the place. The academics, the weird thing in the corner, the dreading going to sleep, the sandy beach situation, the dusty research materials, that one guy in the archives who is all in on the research but thinks it’s just that and does not leave the library, and the sort of ancient threat not quite controllable by our modern times. I really enjoyed it for all those reasons, especially because I am a metalhead and a librarian.

I one-thousand percent related to the guy in the archives explaining the gruesome cult’s reemerging in different locations and also his explaining which texts were super difficult to get through. That’s a researcher who knows that his job is to help other people get access, but it can be very interesting when you’re not choosing what the topic is too. Unexpected fun comes with unexpected reading about people wearing skin for frenzied rituals. Sometimes. It’s not like anybody’s after him, which is lucky. A researcher with the arcane knowledge saved!

For Dante and his bandmate Tom, their efforts to create a concept album based on the book Banquet of the Damned by working with its eccentric, to say the least, writer lead them to being unlikely residents of St. Andrews and into basements…and danger. And Dante really steps up. He has real questions about reading eighteenth century texts in languages he doesn’t know for work, gets massively sick, has the weirdest of nightmares, and all the same is ready to do what he can when he needs to try and stop something really old, brutal, and gnarly from happening (which seems not metal, but, it feels right in the book all he same).

 

Thorfy knows his role in these sorts of things, so he’ll have a rest before he needs to be metal and do research at the same time.

Fay’s got a Uher and she’s not afraid to use it.

69. Curfew – Phil Rickman

This border between England and Wales seems haunted. And also, I had no idea you could just move the standing stones around for fun. I have definitely gotten the impression from other horror stories and sort of sci fi stories that you should not touch or move the standing stones. But, this area has a ley line between a burial mound hill called the Tump and the home of one super nasty former associate of John Dee (who it seems John Dee even realized was too bad) they call Black Michael. And Black Michael seemed to think he should be immortal in some form, some form that keeps everyone in the town, Crybbe, from owning dogs and discouraging all dog ownership.

Black Michael’s influence, or maybe all the earth magic ley line sort of stuff also has some weird effects on various townspeople for confused and for bad. One of the story principals is Fay, a freelance radio reporter who keeps building a negative reputation and makes it even worse when she adopts the dog of a dowser who has just been mysteriously auto-accidented into the wall surrounding the Tump. She isn’t from Crybbe, she’s just there because her father married a woman there who died and he now has dementiaish sickness (and a Kate Bush t-shirt), but while she’s there, she’s going to have a bad time and learn a lot about earth mysteries.

Phil Rickman’s books are really ensemble pieces and they’re really fun to read. They’re definitely on the folk horror side (even if he thinks he’s not a horror author, sorry, it’s like Motorhead and metal) and it’s a little bit like reading a more contained version of Stephen King’s good ensemble stories, which is really pleasant. I’ve also liked the resolutions to his stories in all four I’ve read and those resolutions come after at least 500 pages each time. Now, if he’d throw in a library scene with some microforms that are accurately described I’d be over the moon about it.

 

Salem and Hen Went have been involved in folk horror and they noted that this evil ghost dude in the tump does not discourage guinea pig ownership.

“You’ll be making a serious mistake if you pursue this, Professor.”

106. Smithy – Amanda Desiree

In Newport, Rhode Island, an experiment is brewing in a former boarding school/former giant rich people house that’s sort of rotting in the 1970s. A chimp named Webster (nicknamed Smithy for his wordsmithiness) is going to learn sign language – way more than that other chimp learning sign language – and he’s going to prove that chimpanzees can acquire language skills far more so than any animal before. And he does for the most part, but some things get in the way.

Honestly, I was waiting for Smithy to rip someone apart most of the time. He did rip off a face eventually. The one thing I’ve consistently seen about chimps being raised as humans is that when they get older, they get aggressive, even towards those they love because they are animals which are very complicated, but the human environment is not for them. And in this story, Smithy is stuck being part of a project with his young people 70s family and a ghost.

This was told in epistolary format, with diary entries, letters with many misspellings (geez, Gail), transcripts of film, and snippets from published books. It did move fast for a book over 500 pages, but I am not sure all the pages were necessary. I found the last jolt, if you will, the last explosive situation (literal, it was the 4th of July) to be not that great and then it just kind of ends. There’s no real information on the ghost (although it is mentioned one person uses microfilm for the newspapers – yes!) and it’s sensible to stop the study for safety, but it’s also pretty boringly done.

This did make me uneasy several times, which was good. I do like experiment in a haunted house story and this time the experimenters didn’t know the house was haunted, a novel way to go about it. There’s a sequel, but apparently it’s way longer and that makes me hesitate if it’s going to be resolved in a similarly sputtered out manner.

 

Danger Crumples and Horace would’ve gotten to the bottom of that whole ghost thing right away. If there’s anything guinea pigs know, it’s research on top of other research.

 

Duncan and Twiglet love accurately described research!

And no one will be called “toots” ever again.

133. The Devil’s Playground – Craig Russell

A cursed film mystery set in the Golden Age of Hollywood aka when they made silent films and no one’s horrible abrasive voice got in the way of their stardom. We follow Mary Rourke, a fixer for Carbine International, as she does cover ups and ends up investigating one of the cover ups which turns out to be a cover up of a cover up, but, there’s another twist to it. Rourke’s story happens in 1927 and parallels a Dr. Conway looking for the one remaining print that may or may not exist of The Devil’s Playground, supposedly the most horrific of horror films, in 1967.

This is a mystery with lots of twists and turns and it’s intriguing the whole way through. I had to remind myself “the war” in this one would have been World War I, because it is such well trodden territory to have Hollywood in post-World War II USA, and that unto itself made things a little more interesting. Basically I was reading about Hollywood when my grandma was 4 and the Great Depression was about to hit and nobody knows that’s going to happen. It’s not entirely relevant, but it is the time between the two major timelines. I kept thinking, this isn’t going to stay for a couple reasons, not just people having good looks and terrible voices…or being cursed. I really enjoyed the characters of Rourke and her police buddy Kendrick in particular.

 

If anyone heard Merricat and Peregrine’s voices on film, they would have been very beloved across the wide world.

 

 

“We’re doing it, we’re doing it! Stop being so testy.”

45. Birthday Party Demon – Wendy Dalrymple

Teenage best friends having the kind of sweet sixteen that didn’t involve throwing a fit and a new car, just pizza (apparently frozen, how disappointing), cake, ice cream, and rented videos – Pumpkinhead and Clueless, just to juxtapose the kind of messages this book sends. Tina, Lacey, and Eve are all going in different directions in high school, and Tina thinks she’s being left behind, but they’re all in for her sixteenth birthday. It was nice to see a group coming back together like this instead of that false bravado teen girls can get when they join new groups at school and don’t want to get any loser on them.

And I guess they had a nice, wholesome experience with an Ouija board when they were kids. It just showed them where missing stuff was and didn’t bring them an entity to ruin their lives or haunt their house. Weird. But Tina and her lack of self-confidence and unrequited crush situation have a black blob following. That black blob was just looking for an opportunity to possess someone and it gets the chance when they use the board and also do light as a feather, stiff as a board. Uh oh.

This was very cute and didn’t take long to read. I also definitely liked that the Delia*s catalogue was turned into Daria*s. Daria is still one of my most beloved figures. And I never liked that caps and lowercase in the same word style, so I won’t be hurting anyone’s eyes.

 

Snuffy knows there’s no reason to have disappointing food on your birthday. Real corn, certainly never frozen corn for her.

 

Garoul in Old French

36. The Undying Monster: A Tale of the Fifth Dimension – Jessie Douglas Kerruish

This was such a nerdy occult investigation book and I loved that. It’s from 1922 and involves a cursed family with a hidden room used for black magic, Norse mythology, opening up a barrow (Thunderbarrow, awesome name), not being out in very specific weather/tree combinations, ancient grudges, and beastly behavior like ripping people and dogs to shreds and stuffing a chair with important documents. Also, they used the word “jove” quite a bit. And the ladies were respected. For who they were, their skills, and not relegated to not being involved because of such bullshit delicateness as appears in many other novels in the gothic tradition. The men do not figure this one out and they’re all like, “I trust Miss Bartendale to do her investigation work,” and even when the one dude, Swanhild’s fiancée, doesn’t he still keeps his promise to her to not tell Oliver about his affliction, even though they’re like best friends. I loved that aspect of this.

Luna Bartendale could have had a series and this could have been the end of the series where she unexpectedly falls in love with her last case, the only part of the story I didn’t really care for. She was professional up until she didn’t have to be, but, I would have liked to read more stories of her investigations that didn’t involve any falling for the subject. That aside, cheers overall to the first female occult detective to appear in a novel length work, “supersensitive,” “sensitive,” or whatever she wants to call herself, her hunches and detecting were diligent and fun to read and so very nerdy.

 

Pickles and Belvedere were a brother and sister who did not need a certain environment to become a little more beastly. No pines or occult investigations needed for this family.

“Most people’s lives, what are they but trails of debris – each day more debris, more debris… long, long trails of debris, with nothing to clean it all up but death.”

117. The September House – Carissa Orlando

A complex lady living in a complex house. But it’s her house and as she consistently tells herself, anything is survivable. Which isn’t true, but it’s exactly the kind of repeated message someone in an abusive relationship tells themselves over and over again to not leave and get into what someone in survival mode thinks will be worse than the abuse. And Margaret’s in an unusual variant of an abusive relationship with her house and her husband and another thing she says to herself a lot, that she’s following the rules, isn’t working anymore to keep her safe-ish. No “Safe as Houses” here with the blood streaming down the walls and the moaning and the burnt to a crisp woman climbing around and the bitey little boy ghost and the massive evil in the basement which must be kept at bay with Bible pages on the back of the door and visits from an elderly priest.

This makes it sound super dark, but The September House, like any relationship, is not all dark and foreboding or no one would stay in them because they would have known it would get terrible. Just like any abusive relationship, there are still okay parts or decent parts to go with the fear and awfulness. For one thing, her husband disappeared after trying to get her to leave the house with him. She does not necessarily consider this a decent part, nor would anyone else, but she doesn’t report him missing or even want to tell their daughter. And he was controlling and shitty and getting worse before they entered the haunted house and an alcoholic and starting to not even let her get by with his seemingly established rules, so, staying with the house is easier because it was still following the program it established and Margaret accepted because it’s her house and these are its quirks. Every September, it got active, but certain things would help it be more manageable. Except for sleep, which was always difficult and I totally related to that as both an abusive relationship survivor and a person who has had trouble with sleep for a large chunk of their life.

Margaret has some ghosts who are more functional than others, for instance one cooks and makes tea and when it’s September, she rearranges things to the point of putting knives in the bathroom sink and aspirin in the attic. And she has a nice neighbor who knows about the ghosts to talk to on the porch.

That whole husband disappearing thing is going to catch up with her though, since even though their daughter has not visited them for several years and it gets easier to understand why once she arrives and they begin “looking” for Hal, she’s coming so someone will be bothered to report her father missing. The problem is, Katherine the daughter is coming in September and so everything is now required to come to a head.

I really enjoyed this. The horror elements aren’t exactly just a metaphor and her husband isn’t just a monster either. The things Margaret tells herself and the things she does made a lot of sense to me, her survival mode was familiar. I don’t mind ghosts not being particularly scary and I love dark humor, so I felt like this was very much made for someone like me. It’s a little bit House, funny and sparky, except Margaret was okay living with the ghosts and they weren’t going to steal her child who made it to adulthood and never lived in the house anyway. A little smidge of it is also not that great like House II: The Second Story, including one research scene which at first says microfiche reader and then clarifies on the next page she was reading newspaper articles on microfilm (But why say she’s using a microfiche reader? It wouldn’t work unless it reads both…) so that’s was very nearly on my hill of giant irritation. I also didn’t find the super bad ghost in the basement scary, as I am a little desensitized as a result of a life long interest in horror. However, I did find the mother-daughter relationship in here a little more scary because Katherine has a very realistic, very abrasive personality that reminded me of someone.

 

Camille and Dagmar’s house is sometimes the stage for squabbling, but there’s no scary basement or recurring nightmare fodder.

 

Duncan and Twiglet using the correct library materials for their aims. There’s a close call in this book though.

Not even a fiver to make a canary and a grown man disappear.

77. I Will Make You Disappear – Carol Beach York

A nice vacation home for the summer. Like Burnt Offerings. Pretty much, but in a much shorter span of pages and with no supposed elderly lady. This elderly lady was supposed to be a witch with an emphasis on the was as she is also supposed to be dead. And she is, but her influence on young girls is not at all dead. And it’s working on them through her special room and the book that Clara decides to buy for $2.98. The witch’s story is also still working on the “not afraid to put his hands on kids” drunkard odd jobs guy who works on the house, he’s looking for her “treasure,” though the girls find it. And they make a canary disappear. Mean.

 

Twiglet is thinking about turning around from her plan to ruin their summer with a cheap spell book. Pammy is totally unaware Twiglet ever had that plan.

 

At the summer cabin, which maybe has an influential witch ghost in it. Pammy, Thaddeus, and Twiglet will investigate and find out. 
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“The web of destiny carries your blood and soul back to the genesis of my lifeform.”

15. Final Friends Book 1: The Party – Christopher Pike

Mesa High closes and some of the students are sent over to Tabb High, a former rival. Jessica Hart, owner of one Swiss made sweater, is one of them and she just got back and is excited to see her best friend and total loud mouth Sara Cantrell as well as younger little sister type Alice McCoy, a painter who also has a very questionable boyfriend Clark, and Clark used to date Alice’s sister, Polly, whose main qualities seem to be innate jealousy, donating blood, and eating a lot. She wants to help people, but mostly treats her friends’ potential boyfriends like prizes to be won by her even if they’re drunkenly trying to chop down a tree.

I have to say, it took for-ev-er to get to the actual party and I understand we needed to know the supporting players and potential suspects, but, personally, I think the only real potential suspect is Clark, and that he will turn out to have alien intelligence at his service or to be an alien and will rip off his skin partially exposing lizard pieces like in V. This is just my guess for the trilogy because A. Clark does not show up much in the first one, but Alice says he’s “dangerous” and also “weird” and she ends up dead. and B. Alice’s paintings completely change after she meets Clark, who is supposedly also an artist. Oh, and C. Christopher Pike’s books tend to go a bit kooktastic and this trilogy has started out pretty normal. Unless it turns out the killer is Polly and she’s just trying to be Alice or be as popular as Alice seems to be with Polly’s peer group even though she’s like barely ever out, but that would just be so damn mundane for Pike.

 

My paintings have changed after the introduction of Dagmar and Camille to my herd, but not necessarily for the weirder. Maybe because this is their idea of a party.

 

16. Final Friends Book 2: The Dance – Christopher Pike

Mostly, this gave me confirmation that Jessica and Michael are romantic turkeys, to use a phrase I finally think I understand from Ghost House. I mean, seriously, get the words out. It’s just like stalling through the entire book. Jessica wants to talk to Michael, Michael wants to talk to Jessica, they then choose not to actually say anything they want to say. It’s annoying. I don’t get what Jessica sees in blank slate Bill, but as I said, she may be a romantic turkey.

At least Nick and Maria are finally on the mend once he demonstrates how talented he is at sports. Yep. A lot of cliche work being done with these two and they don’t deserve it.

And Polly is still really stuck being in the shitty part of the story no matter what she’s doing. She’s an odd bird, but she deserves better and mostly her parts confirmed that Clark, the weird former boyfriend, is in fact very weird and manipulative and creepy. Also, I totally forgot Alice was 14 when she died and should very much not have been involved in that party or with Clark like at all. No one, despite all her protective friends, was really protecting her at all.

Anyway, the main development in this middle book is that Maria no longer wants to be friends with like anybody in this group and honestly, how she got there is unfortunate, but she’s not wrong.

 

Wisting and Dagmar are sweeties. Luckily their relationship is not as fraught or cursed as any of the relationships in this series.

 

17. Final Friends Book 3: The Graduation – Christopher Pike

I cannot express how disappointed I am that Clark is not a lizard person. Seriously. It did not go wacky and I totally thought it would, but instead it was all plastic explosives and detailed explanations of evidence on a boat. Oh, and an extensive amount of Sara and Jessica embarrassing themselves while trying to be responsible about planning to lose their virginities on a party boat. Fine. I mean, I will say that it had a lot more momentum than the first one in the series and thankfully got to the boat before the last chapters, but no lizards, and the strangest things that happened in the whole series were Michael’s dreams and him naming a comet after his future girlfriend. Oh, and I guess imaginary Clark, and maybe also real Clark’s fly infested hovel of a living situation. I wouldn’t paint somewhere full of flies, especially not with oils, they could get stuck in it. And it sounded like Clark was doing the kinds of paintings that end up on sci fi fantasy book covers and progressive rock album covers, you don’t want dead flies stuck in that stuff. He definitely shouldn’t have been dating a 14 year old though, that was the real Clark scandal.

 

Camille is available to model for progressive rock album cover paintings, but only the kind with a lot of vegetation that she can model with. Or someone can just name a comet after her. She’s fine with that too.

 

Camille and Dagmar will always be friends who don’t have wacky or murderous parties. They pick wild strawberries together and wear little sweaters and generate zero noise complaints or boat explosions.
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