Rachel Smith's Blog: Guinea Pigs and Books, page 31

Ed’s dead.

15. The White Road – Sarah Lotz

I can safely say that I will never willingly be stuck in a cave or on a mountain, as in, I would not go on a trip that involved caving or mountaineering. It is not in my make up and I have a hard enough time breathing as it is. Simon, however, is in search of dead people because his American friend and partner in a website of dark listicles and articles of dark tourism pushed him into it…and he’s the thin one, so, he gets to do the cave. However, as they say, it’s all fun and games until the cave fills with water.

And it’s clear that in all pursuits of this nature involving rocks, to be short, it seems like death is constantly imminent, or sitting right there on the trail, or what you’re thinking about a lot of the time. It is both strange and totally understandable that the dead of Everest do not really get brought down off the mountain. It’s super weird that they can end up being used as landmarks, but also very definitive -it’s by that famous climber Juliet Michaels, as opposed to by that other snow covered rock formation. Juliet Michaels being the other narrator of The White Road (and she’s not really a landmark, she’s out of the way, also, that’s a spoiler).

Juliet and Simon both seem to be carrying their dead along with them in their pursuit of Everest and although apparently a “third man” as it were is common, Juliet and Simon’s thirds do not feel like encouraging presences, they feel evil, and Simon’s just will not leave.

The White Road was a pretty fast and relentless read and I liked the mixture of perspectives, Simon was very obviously not a hero and aware of that, which was weirdly refreshing.

 

The closest to caving or mountaineering Snuffy will get involves blankets. Blanket cave, blanket mountain, much achievement for guinea pig kind.

“Well, Frank, this looks like one of those long, hard ones.”

82. Greed – Elfriede Jelinek

I vastly prefer to be candid and I will tell you this book is very hard to read. Some of the pages are just one big block paragraph, the chapters aren’t remotely a uniform length, sentences take forever to end, it’s got barely any dialogue, all in all it’s a pretty rough read. It’s also hard to tell what exactly is going on and sometimes who is telling you the story. That said, I felt it was worth it to try and get to the end.

I found some similarities/weird oppositions in the women of the story to another book I enjoyed that I’ve seen reviewed as hard to understand or follow, Little Sisters of the Apocalypse by Kit Reed (Kit Reed is far and away more accessible and easier to read than Jelinek though). In Greed we’re in what seems to be rural or just small town Austria and these women do not seem to have many options for men folk to talk to or be around, for sure, and they are sometimes being seen through the lens of the main character, a policeman who is dating almost all of them and also acquiring their property. This policeman just seems like your average selfish dude who is a big fish in a small pond and more than willing to take advantage of that, which maybe makes this story seem uninteresting as well as impenetrable. It can be, that’s definitely not wrong, it’s also weirdly cynical and has strange insights. It’s also got a murder in it. Sometimes it’s like reading the murderer’s excuses and vague explanations of how the environment of this county made him do it, even though he says it’s an accident. He just couldn’t control his greed. I just gave it away, guess I’m not that greedy.

 

If Finny publishes a borderline impenetrable tome at some point about his main concern, which was not greed, but hay, I will definitely read it. I bet it would be about the eternal struggle of arranging hay on the floor, only for it to be cleared out and replaced frequently so he always had fresh hay, but then had to pull it all over and arrange it again.

 

Also, Gruss vom Fimpus.

A wet ghost could definitely be scary. I’ve seen The Fog.

72. Dark Matter – Michelle Paver

Jack, Gus, and Algie go out to Gruhuken to do some meteorological expeditioning in the Arctic right before the onset of World War II. The Norse boat captain that’s dropping them off tries to warn them off Gruhuken and won’t exactly explain why and when they do get there, no one really wants to help them unload and all the sailors stay each night on the boat instead of on land with the expeditioners. This should cause some dread, but it really didn’t for me. It’s a perfunctory Arctic ghost story, but without much at stake because once Gus gets appendicitis and Algie goes with him back to have surgery in not the arctic wilderness and Jack is alone, the only entities Jack’s clinging to are his crush on Gus and the one dog who likes him, Isaak. No offense, Jack, but one lonely man going mad in the wilderness who totally has enough food and gets saved right away once he accidentally burns the cabin down trying to get away from the wet ghost of a rightfully ragey and apparently unsightly man is not very scary. Unfortunately.

 

Danger Crumples and Horace couldn’t warn each other off the pillow, so, now they’re stuck just like Arctic explorers in a haunted cabin. Or are they?

Erce, Erce, Erce it is.

120. The Vessel – Adam L.G. Nevill

This is quite a lot shorter than most of Nevill’s novels and it has mostly female characters, which is unusual as well, but awesome. One of them happens to be an elderly dementia patient who is quite difficult, including random acts of violence, and also does spooky things more and more as the novel and Flo the patient’s friendship with her carer Jess’s daughter progresses. Flo is like the regal version of the creepy little lady from The Ritual (my favorite character, she’s not in the movie though). She rules. Somewhat literally.

At first Flo seems like the main foil for Jess, a caretaker who seriously needs money to get her life back together now that she’s a single mom with a daughter who is being bullied and an abusive ex who is pulling the bullshit “I’ve changed and I just want to see my kid” act. I mean, I know Tony is supposed to be believably decent at first, but anyone who has been in an abusive relationship sees right through that instantly. I sure did. So Jess’s life seems quite not-fun. Constantly on the go, needing a job where her patient punched her in the face and the other caretaker is mean and the cause of her having to swing night shifts all of a sudden so she has to bring her daughter, and a kid who doesn’t understand that her dad is a violent shit who won’t follow the lawful orders to stay away from them.

Anyway, the reason why this is so short is a contained set of spaces, minimal character situation, and it started as a screenplay so the characters’ thoughts are not explored so much. It’s mostly what’s going on. And what’s going on is another lovely folk horror situation with ritual scythe, creel, missing human bits and pieces, and an ancient wheel in the Eadric community. The process of revealing weirdness via cleaning was unexpected for me, but I enjoyed it nonetheless.

 

A little old lady with a weird house who rules? Peregrine understands that life.

 

“What is all this about the dead coming back to life again and… having to be killed a second time? I mean, what the hell’s going on here?”

87. Dead Water – C.A. Fletcher

This is kind of a wet zombie folk tale with some Viking bits. If you recall the part of Fulci’s Zombie where the zombie fights the shark (and how could you not…) it’s not like that. It has a little dose of the Stephen King ensemble and it’s on an island with its own traditions and everyone knows everyone and it’s very rainy so sometimes the ferry doesn’t come. It turns out everyone who was on the last ferry was very lucky and totally got out of the whole drowned-curse phenomenon and also missed the internet and phones being exploded “on accident” by Jamie, a very bad telecommunications worker. Very bad driver, as well.

Sig, the “living her life around grief” over her husband character, but who is also very resourceful and has a great dog, is one of the main perspectives. She has an interesting back story of being from a Christian Scientist Swedish family who let her sister die because of the whole “no doctors” ridiculousness, but she blames herself for that and an accident that killed her husband, who was from the island and who she had moved to the island to be with. She’s got the lead and a leg injury that hurts all the time.

The second lead is Matt, who is mostly deaf, and signing to him came in at a crucial moment for him to understand there was a curse situation happening. Matt and Sig get along because Matt was best friends with her husband, they also do not get along because of this. Matt is from the island as well, so he knows things are weirder than normal there and also knows that Sig’s going to have to get over her whole constantly rational bit to make it through this crisis even if she has a Land Rover Defender and the great dog.

Speaking of dogs, it is a tourist’s “interaction” with a Cocker Spaniel that sets things in motion and animal perspectives were occasionally represented here, which reminds me of the groundhog from Stephen King’s Under the Dome. Dead Water has about half the pages and fewer direct murders from what I recall of Under the Dome. It was an enjoyable read and really started to move along in the last 250 pages.

If Thorfy’s not going to rescue Snuffy from the pumpkin monster, she’ll find a way herself. Getting off a pumpkin island plagued by a harvest beast pumpkin monster is a job for rational ladypigs.

The something rotten floated up to Sweden.

104. The Torso – Helene Tursten

I’ve liked all of this series that I’ve read so far, but this one struck me in a not so positive way at first. I did not like seeing Detective Inspector Irene Huss saying the gay sex shop was “sick” or the later reveal that one of the murderers liked extreme metal being seen as a possible gateway to him being a murderer. I mean, if you live in Sweden, lots and lots of metal bands are from your country and the two next to it and several are seen as extreme because of their sound even if they might just be screeching about trees and being cold- on the inside, and if you’re not a gay dude, why do you even care what’s in the gay sex shop when you could just not say anything about a lifestyle you’d never be able to practice? I was definitely annoyed by those aspects. It made it seem like her investigation was going to be influenced by her irrelevant opinions. Not cool.

However, just as metal fans are in lots of studies about how well adjusted they are despite the intensity and anger of the music they prefer (or because of it) as opposed to being pushed to violence, the investigation turned a different way. And what’s available in Tom Tanaka’s shop paled in comparison to what was really going on, although it was clear why the torso that washed up and started it all was that of a very, very ridiculously good looking man. It was also clear that Irene’s original super judgy opinions ended up making this case way more of a nightmare to try to put aside while she was home or trying to sleep, which is realistic. As was how much she was pushing to finish it off and stop anyone else from ending up dismembered. Once you accept that your opinions don’t matter as much as finding that severed head in a photography studio, you can move on with the facts and solve the case.

Ozymandias doesn’t want to have to tell you that your opinion about others’ lifestyles is irrelevant, but he will.

“Witchfynder finder”

89. Witch Born – Nicholas Bowling

This was a fun read, even if I do have some minor issues with it. It is YA, but I would have liked a more “on the page” resolution towards the end of the story, it was like it skipped over some bits to me and I would have felt more like the story ended and wasn’t just taking Alyce over to the US to be hanged if some of the later scenes had been a bit more fleshed out. You see, Alyce was raised by a witch and there is some sort of “maybe England should be ruled by witches or is it already” sort of shenanigans, amongst the lice and lack of food and budding romance between the underfed Alyce and the underfed actor Solomon. Solomon reallys knows his way around London and helps Alyce once she escapes from Bedlam…and his mother was a witch as well, so they understand each other.

Also, as someone who has done very minor amounts of research into the main witchfinder of the 1640s, his name is Matthew Hopkins, not John Hopkins, as in this book, so his outfit may be making a cameo, but that one true total dickcheese of witchfinding from 1644-47 isn’t. I say this because there are some historical cameos that are important to the story, including not-Matthew – Elizabeth I, Mary Stuart, John Dee, and Walter Raleigh all have a role in the plot to make it a bit more expansive and Alyce more important…oh, and actually my favorite appearance of anything historical that also happens to be current, the Tower of London ravens.

Although Salem has been a witchfinder in one painting, he is the kind of witchfinder that wishes to find and kees the witches, as evidenced by how he and Hen Wen are getting on while she’s in the coffin loaf pan here.

Guinea Pig Book Club

I am writing this on 11/11/2022 and if all goes well, these images will be live on my Threadless and Redbubble on that date as well. However, this post goes up 11/13/2022 to give them some time to infiltrate the crowded market for guinea pig parody book covers. So crowded.

I mean, this shelf of what I’m working on is certainly crowded and contains a preview of Belvedere’s cover.

 

Dweezil is my second guinea pig. He was amazingly smart and a very skilled stair climber, so he definitely knew what was up there.

 

Duncan is a perfect pig for Folk Horror, just look at her holding a four horned ram skull in the old hills in her own 1970s gothic story. There’s also a visual lyrics joke involving her name and the Dethklok song in which it is sounds like they’re saying it and apparently they’re not. Layers.

The “greatest beast” doesn’t like “pain sticks.”

101. Deadly Harvest – Morgan Fields

The main thing I don’t understand about this book is why it has this title. There is no harvesting in the story and not even any farming. It’s a pretty different entry into the 80s horror pantheon, involving an otherworldly beast that has been preying on people since the Pleistocene. Some of the older, well, genetically, or maybe evolutionarily would be the better ly-word here, did manage to keep the beast to its pit so it wouldn’t pick them off in bloody carnage before they could starve to death while all their food sources died, and those very people are talking to the sheriff’s daughter in her dreams.

You see both these people and the 1989 group of girls who went swimming and trekked back through the woods saw a cabin (a weirdly modern one for the Pleistocene) rippling, but present, and it seems to be the doorway to a pit. A pit which contains evil and also a super huge carnivorous beast which is depicted like an angry Rottweiler on the cover. I am not sure if I was supposed to intuit that the beast (and they do keep calling it that, and so shall I) is doing the harvesting? I have too much farming information in my head for that to work.

Anyway, the three girls are part of small town Hobart, TX, and now they’re also part of the theoretical team to re-contain the ancient evil of the beast, mainly, as it’s super after Jodie. The team also includes Jodie’s dad, the sheriff who is having a hard time with custody exchanges, Cariann’s dad, the town drunk who has actual redeeming qualities in between his fits of anger, and Audra Jean’s dad, the historian who totally gets infected with the evil guiding the beast and goes off the deep end. He is not very helpful to the team. Jodie’s getting all the dream information from the Pleistocene team of two and it’s a very different but followable story even with the beast’s perspective.

Apparently the story has its genesis in an actual archeological finding in Texas and an actual carnivorous beast, the megistotherium. The finding is helpfully explained in an afterword and as someone who really enjoys some anthropology in her horror novels, this was a good one. I didn’t mind the lack of research scene, which is something I do not normally say.

The sheriff in this, Rad, also has a charge plate, just like Nancy Drew and Danger Crumples.

Why yes, this narrator is very unreliable…as a library employee.

114. The Comfort of Monsters – Willa C. Richards

Sometimes I get mad at blurbs and descriptions that mention all the parts of a book that would appeal to me and then it turns out those parts are actually very minimal and the story is barely structured.

The main character of The Comfort of Monsters being a library employee is so minimal that mostly she’s a thief and a bad employee. Law books, Pegasus? With no law degree? Those are hard to read and I know you had access to a photocopier as an employee, you could have just made relevant copies or read…oh, but you have to actually go to work to have breaks to read on. Ugh. And I honestly can’t picture even a library in 1991 having “erasing notes” as an actual paid student job at a library. It’s more like, shelving would be the job, with occasional erasing notes because nobody has time to notice the notes unless someone left their dang post-its in the book/someone who wants to use the book points them out. Do you know how long it would take to fully page through each book that comes back? I don’t think you do because no one does because no one has time for that. Anyway, the point of this library work rant is that when even a small part of a book doesn’t ring true, it casts a pall over the rest of it. And she barely showed up to her job anyway. Barely showed up and then in the 2019 timeline was fired, I think, it seemed like she was fired. She is an unreliable narrator who does quite a bit of wine drinking and hoarding and thieving law books (so pointless, seriously, just use them in the building).

The real point of this book is to show how nastily crime affects not just the direct victim, or it could be, but I just couldn’t totally tell in the end. The narrator is stuck after her sister disappears; she parallels it with Jeffrey Dahmer’s victims’ families a smidge, except that parallel doesn’t really work because Dahmer’s victims were found. Her brother and her mother’s reactions and journeys from constant trying to find to anger to “just find her so I can be buried next to my child” make sense to that end.

The main character’s obsessions with the case file and her sister’s probably being murdered by that older man Frank she was dating who sucks makes sense, but too much of the the story is how she and her sister are in competition about who is cooler and who has a better dysfunctional relationship with their boyfriend. A competition between a poet with a job at the same chocolate factory Dahmer worked at and a firefighter in training, who both have some interest in violence.

Then her sister is gone and she wants to find her and hoards the case file, but never really takes the time to learn to investigate in all the years between 1991 and 2019. And then nothing is really resolved ever and it muddles a lot. The story muddles a lot in 1991 and it muddles a lot in 2019. Muddles like someone who wants to say something, but doesn’t know what that is. Muddles like an endless hangover. Muddles like literary novels like to muddle in being unsatisfying reads where genre novels don’t see that as an objective.

You know who does not muddle? My pigs Peregrine, Horace, and Ozma; they learned to investigate without even learning to read.