Rachel Smith's Blog: Guinea Pigs and Books, page 34

Chinatown with cyborgs

41. The Eternal Enemy – Christopher Pike

The VCR that records the future! Which is never really explained. It’s never explained how exactly the VCR records the future, which I feel is an unfortunate oversight, but also apropos since I’m not sure even a robot from the future could explain what tracking is, what it does, or why we must adjust it. And also, I think the little blinking light on the VCR would be a better meaning of The Eternal Enemy, but, whatever, Christopher Pike frequently expands his stories into mystical and time traveling areas so he wouldn’t be inclined as a writer to keep it tight to that light.

 

Another frustrating thing about VCRs would be not having fingers to use them with, as experienced by Peregrine and Ozymandias.

 

Peregrine’s face says she now understands one of the main frustrations of VCR dominance, but Ozymandias is bringing her carrots so she’ll be okay.
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This rumor would be handled very, very differently now.

26. Sweet Valley High: Secrets – Kate William

I read more of the Super Chillers and Sweet Valley Kids series when I was younger, so I was not familiar with Jessica Wakefield’s enduring lust for Bruce Patman until I read this because there is a telephone on the cover. Nothing will stop Jessica. Nothing! She will try her best to ruin lives so she can be the queen of the dance with Bruce Patman…even though it seems like he dates college girls, which mostly says a lot about those college girls.

Jessica accuses a teacher of dating/making out with a student in a rather blase manner, not realizing how ruinously evil that is. All the students seem to think this is totally funny too, it’s super weird. And she takes Elizabeth’s best friend Enid’s sordid drug addict/car accident hitting a child while high past and uses it to break Elizabeth and Enid apart and also break Enid away from her controlling piece of shit boyfriend Ronnie, who she’s clearly scared of, so she did do one good thing with her creepy meddling. I guess I forgot in the somewhere near 30 years since I was reading about the Wakefield twins that Jessica was wildly ruthless. I did remember that Lila is stuck up. That was unforgettable.

 

No really, please tell me more about this Bruce Patman fellow, how has he wrangled college women into coming back to high school? Finny asks the important questions. It’s the moustache, Finny, he looks older.

 

You know who’s really good at keeping secrets and starting rumors to get someone where they want them? Pagan apple farmers.
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“I’m a stranger to my own soul.”

45. Let Me Tell You How I Died – Sinclair Smith

Delia finds a diary, Delia reads the diary, Delia begins acting like the original writer of the diary and it’s not clear if she’s going mad, if she’s actually the diary writer reincarnated, or whether she’s going to be murdered before she figures it all out. There’s some misdirection that’s more effective than I expected in here, although the ending is on the abrupt side.

 

If Murderface had kept a diary, it would have been about who she glared at, who she cursed, who she used her mind control powers on that day, the usual sorts of things.

 

Speaking of reincarnation and taking over a body, there’s also Murderface in Black Sunday, although she does really make it her own.
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Roller skating parties came back, but the party line has been sent to the dustbin of history.

18. Party Line – A. Bates

Mark, born before the internet was in homes in any capacity, is using the local party line to talk to human girls. He can hear their voices, so it’s a little more likely that he can determine whether he’s achieving human connection or not, which he was totally unable to do in person. Confidence building! Or is it? He gains confidence, but is it because he’s become a murderer? I mean, he does end up dating two girls at once… and girls also disappear. He does have car repair skills as well, so clearly, he’s a good suspect in his own story. Mark never should have called the party line; he clearly couldn’t handle the power that comes with no one seeing your facial expressions while you’re talking to them. It’s like he’s predicting the future.

 

Yes, Danger, a nap in which you sort of hide is vastly better than the future.

 

Sometimes the party line goes very wrong. Sometimes the party line is really imitating something else…
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“You think you’re telling the truth, but in fact… you’re telling only your version of the truth. It happens to me all the time.”

38. Are You in the House Alone? – Richard Peck

Talk about your bleak story of rape…this is one. Gail lives in one of those suburbs where New Yorkers move to raise families if they want to have space and quiet. And this town has its rich family with a psychopath rapist boy child, which to be fair is not as unusual if you watch/read/listen to true crime programming, and this one is named Phil and drives an MG.

Psycho Phil’s girlfriend is Gail’s best friend, so when Phil starts writing Gail creepy notes, calling her wherever she is (even without a cell phone), and then goes and rapes her after knocking her out with a fire poker at her babysitting job – Allison does not believe Gail. Neither do the police and I’m glad to say I do have evidence that sexual assault investigations have come a very long way. Gail’s parents are upset, her boyfriend wants to know who did it, and he and her drama teacher do believe her when she says it was Phil, but even the lawyer explains that since this is the town-funding rich family, Phil won’t have consequences and Gail has to think about what she wants to go through (that I do not believe has changed much, how the law is applied – investigations, yes, law, not so much). Then Phil strikes again and it’s very vague as to what happens or if both his next victim and Phil disappear; Gail ends the story in the language of rumors, which is probably accurate. Yikes.

 

Ozma demonstrates one way of finding short term comfort, eating your favorite things.

 

Ozma does also have the ability to transform a different kind of trauma, the kind from Deep Red.
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Have you tried lettuce to soothe your murderous impulses? Lettuce.

18. Deathline – Barbara Steiner

Erica aka Riki is working at the Rapline, a counseling line for teens, when a guy with a sultry voice calls in…and says he thinks he killed some girl. Erica and her Rapline co-workers call the police, but without anyone missing and no bodies found and zero locations to look, well there isn’t much to do but wait for him to call back and give more details or a girl to be found. Of course, one is eventually found and then he keeps calling back – and calling Erica’s house, which to me should have been way bigger of a clue, as in who has her number and knows that’s her number. I as a 1993 child was not personally listed in the phone book, I don’t know what children were, it seems very unsafe.

It escalates while Erica tries to do normal teenage things like hang out with her friends and fend off her super insecure and needy ex-boyfriend who just dropped out of college, get escorted around like she’s dating an undercover police officer who is a sucky conversationalist apparently, and go to the Halloween party in the cemetery with the guy who her one friend calls “The Vampire Lestat” – um, awesome – who is a great conversationalist even if his friends leave a lot of trash in the cemetery – not cool. The killer dude even calls payphones while Erica is running by, which was super weird.

Anyway, of course they eventually find out who it is and it’s someone close enough to her to know her home phone number; but that doesn’t matter as much as how well done the details were in Deathline. One of these areas of precision detail was Erica mentioning that the kids use black humor to deal with the completely bizarre and terrifying circumstances they’re in. There’s a killer of high school girls on the loose and she cites jokes about Jeffrey Dahmer and Chernobyl as examples of what helps. It might seem odd, but she’s well on her way to a job as a counselor or 911 dispatch. Also the title, I do like the title. Deathline is way better than Bells aka Death by Phone. Exponentially better.

 

Although I find my guinea pigs to be very comforting, I am not sure I would trust them to run a counseling line. They would probably suggest lettuce as the answer to all problems.

 

Horace would also suggest lettuce as the solution to any and all problems.

 

They’re the ones who like it when they get apples trick or treating. But they’d all prefer lettuce.
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That’s telekinesis, Ian.

23. Twilight: Storm Child – Susan Netter

Cindy has been volunteering with learning disabled and working with “difficult” children as a teen on her quest to becoming a special education teacher. So, she is eager to take a job working as a babysitter for just one difficult child for the summer at a remote-ish house in upstate New York’s storm center.

Although apparently the child’s father would also like Ian to learn to talk to other children, so Cindy and Ian will be spending most days at the local country club where they have group activities and Cindy might spend most of her time at the pool.

Ian eventually warms to Cindy after trying to almost injure her with his telekinetic powers (also, fun scene, there is a library in the country club where Cindy goes for her research scene that has books on psychic phenomena). But because Ian likes her now, he will use his powers on her enemies, real and perceived, like that arrogant snob Alyssa Fairborne who thinks she should be able to get Cindy kicked out of the club for not being the right kind of person and also for being interesting to the guy Alyssa wants as her boyfriend. Ian totally ruins her tennis tournament. Take that.

But of course Cindy realizes it’s wrong and perhaps childish to let Ian hurt people in her honor…and then everyone becomes friends after Ian starts a giant fire and burns many teens, but doesn’t kill them.

 

As you can see, she’s very excited about her 80s YA horror parody series. Very excited.

 

Hen Wen would certainly use her telekinetic powers to make things less fun for teens.
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The Cath effect

4. Just Dial a Number – Edith Maxwell

It all started as a challenge to good girl Cath’s acting skills and ended with an odyssey though the Be-in into a San Francisco bar in a basement called The Coffin. Oh, what Cath’s one line hath wrought.

Cath is trying to be cool after she does things like get jealous of the attention Allyson Troy is giving her very cool boyfriend she’s trying to keep at all costs, so when he dials a number randomly, she says her line from the play: “Someone tried to kill me,” as convincingly as possible. However, the call went to one of her fellow student’s parents and they thought it was their daughter and went tearing off into a car accident and died. Much guilt. So much guilt.

First Cath tries to assuage her guilt that she can’t tell anyone about by sending Mary Ann who now has no parents some clothes of hers, which I honestly thought was an odd choice, but her friend Deedee recognizes the clothes. So does Mary Ann, she already thought Cath was a with it chick and that she had it all, being on the pom pom squad and having a cute boyfriend who she’s nominated for couple of the year with. That same boyfriend is really only concerned with the cover up of the call and winning couple of the year. A treasure he is not, which Cath slowly realizes while falling for her best friend’s boyfriend Paul.

I read the copy with the 1988 cover art, but once the hippies are described with their Be-in and seeming like they took over San Francisco, it is quite obvious this narrative came from a different time. 1971 is the original copyright date, which makes a lot more sense. Serious hippie judgments aside, this is a consistent story of rich kid guilt, group cover up, and the realization that at the end of high school you won’t always be near these people. Also, Allyson and her pool cabanas totally get some shit.

 

Salem is glad he’s never had to concern himself with prank phone calls or pom pom squad. Not having hands has its advantages.

 

Salem doesn’t have a pool, but he does have 70s plants and no guilt.
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Never Rest, Toddy

44. On That Dark Night – Carol Beach York

A very short story that’s about how being reincarnated does not necessarily make you feel very good with quite a few mentions of “Three Blind Mice” and no research scene, despite the girls walking directly past the public library on their way to the cemetery…

Julie and Allison usually hang out after Allison takes summer school Spanish, but one day, Julie is morosely playing “Three Blind Mice” and with some prompting, launches into how she went to Greenbridge with her mom and knows she used to live there and something about Toddy and how no one can scold Toddy, even though Toddy did something rude and/or terrible in the past to little girl-Julie.

Julie and Allison go to Greenbridge and wander around and end up in the cemetery and…never look at any of the names on the graves to see if Julie’s past life kid is in there. I do not understand this urge to find things out without looking at anything like those graves they visited twice or the local newspapers for decades ago, a child death accident would totally have made the paper. But these are curious teens who just want to wander around and sort of get into things, but not totally commit. They’re just, like, feeling things, for reasons. Then the story ends with Allison realizing she is also reincarnated, also with very little information.

 

Horace, as a rational pig, would have been to that library and looked at all the tombstones before just making assumptions about his reincarnation.

 

Speaking of Horace as a rational piggie, here he is doing science as Horace-Ravi. It’s a very rational sweater vest he has on there.
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“Take a look at my face, I am the future”

124. Friends for Life – Ellen Emerson White

Kids who no one knew used drugs are dying at Baldwin like that one kid on the flagpole in Class of 1984. And also like in Class of 1984, there’s a guy named Tim responsible (well, in Class of 1984 only the actor’s name is Tim… but still there’s a parallel). I guess I just spoiled the whole book, but mostly, it’s about friendship and loss and Tim being a rich lying jerk whose friends don’t really seem to like him very much, also like the gang in Class of 1984 (except they seemed more organized, after all they were also running a prostitution ring and doing home invasions, it’s quite the movie).

When three best friends Susan, Patrick, and Colleen are about to be able to go to high school all together – Colleen dies of bad LSD…after telling Susan she’s sure the last overdose death was a murder. So, Susan goes undercover, shrugs off Patrick and because she used to go to school in New York City, she can pretend she also was heavy into drugs and get in with the drug dealing rich kid Tim and his friends. She does a great job pretending to be on drugs while having anxiety attacks and grieving over her memories of her best friendship with Colleen. Then she gets in over her head after Tim’s friend Beverly realizes that Susan did know the last person their group murdered with drugs (mostly that was just Tim and Randy,but once Beverly knew after Randy told her, she was in on it according to Tim). And so of course they decide while high that they must now murder Susan. Kids these days.

 

Peregrine understood having best friends very, very well. Her first was Merricat.

 

Pere also understands best friend related sadness.
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