Rachel Smith's Blog: Guinea Pigs and Books, page 35

“I know about cannibalistic flowers, but this tree monster is utterly unbelievable.”

30. Twilight: Demon Tree – Colin Daniel

This has one of the best book covers I’ve ever encountered, painted by Enric Torres. Super creepy green lady face in the tree, super gnarled tree, super scared 1983 teen in a pale pink sweatshirt and white sneakers. She’s not getting anywhere. This tree is an obvious threat.

The town of Wells is also super creepy, like many small towns that someone moves into when they become an orphan before it. Everybody in Wells suddenly becomes super mean during the fall and winter seasons. There is also a fog that does not precede leper pirates (sigh). No one can get out of Wells, no one can successfully own a dog in Wells, and no one can act like they like anyone else at all in Wells as all of these things lead to death and destruction. Unless one plucky teen orphan can figure the whole thing out without going to the library at all and help the town and her more taciturn than taciturn grandparents. The secret ingredient is hate this time.

 

Thorfy’s not a scary ghost or a plucky teen, but he looks great in a green sweater.

 

Thorfy’s working on being super creepy, he’s made it to the trees.
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“Oh, you mean there’s a ghost as well as a skeleton in everyone’s cupboard.”

43. Just Pretend – J.V. Lewton

Foxpath Lake has secrets and some people are willing to let some despicable things happen to little girls to keep them. Clay, the touch-psychic with a very vibrant through her leukemia little sister, and Hillary, a rich girl who actually cares about kids and hosts a segment on her radio show just for them called “Just Pretend,” are taking up the mantle of junior investigators to solve a murder and find the last girl who was kidnapped before she’s murdered. They of course slip into some real trouble with the officer who patrols the lake, a newspaper lady who smells a story, and the retired high school guidance counselor who lives on the lake as well. Oh, and will Hillary’s parents get a divorce once her dad gets back from wherever he is? Will Clay’s mom stop being so delusional about his absent father? Somehow Clay and Hillary never talk about their absent fathers, it seems they’re concentrating on falling in love through the investigation an both of them mention they don’t have much in common…but the absent father thing is kind a of big thing to have in common, kids.

Just Pretend is very much a neighborhood story. There are a lot of characters, but they’re all very settled into this landscape – except the newspaper lady, who is an outside catalyst to break past what these locals think they know and what Clay and Hillary missed. I would say it’s because they never had a research scene, but this case was too contemporary for a research scene, that’s only a downer for me. In lieu of research there was mostly a lot of staring at the lake, sometimes with psychic phenomena, sometimes not.

 

Danger Crumples knows how to be an outside catalyst to break a mystery right open – he uses his gorgeous guinea pig charm. Never fails.

 

They didn’t even try bribing any of the lake denizens. Danger Crumples knows that’s a good way to solve a mystery.
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It’s not quite Invitation to Love

41. The Watcher – Lael Littke

The way that Catherine is obsessed with the soap opera Lost River reminded me a lot of how everyone on Twin Peaks was watching Invitation to Love, but instead of Jade and Emerald, Catherine is watching and obsessed with Cassandra Bly. Catherine is imitating how Cassandra dresses, the new guy thinks she looks like her, she’s making sure the tape the show every day if she can’t get home for it during school (I assume her sick days would include a high level of anticipation), and she seems like a typical obsessive fan. But then the “pranks” start after Cassandra’s storyline becomes about someone trying to kill her and it’s not as fun to be an obsessive fan. Actually, was it ever fun to be an obsessive fan? I think maybe not, with or without the pranks.

 

Horace and Ozma, tragically unable to prank.

 

Ozma as Shelly was definitely watching the soap of Twin Peegs. Threadless

A good man is like totally hard to find

14. Wrong King of Boy – Shannon Blair

Liz wants to expand her horizons. She’s tired of just being herself and post-breakup with football great Bud, she wants a totally different kind of date – like Laurence, the misanthrope from her invitation only creative writing class.

And here would be where Laurence turns out to be a psychopath, or Bud does, or the new guy who seems to like Liz, Cliff, would be, but this isn’t a horror series and I was reading it because there’s a phone on the cover…so no one is a psychopath, but one is a plagiarist. Don’t steal one act plays to impress your new girlfriend. Especially if you’re a writer, Laurence.

The lesson here was that you can insulate yourself no matter what you think you’re expanding and it’s best to just be yourself and like what you like. Try new things as a high school student, you don’t have to pretend you like things you don’t, and for serial, don’t steal one act plays and try to pass them off as your own.

I’ve gotten lots of shit in my day for liking high and low culture equally, but I will not budge on the idea that they’re not mutually exclusive, just like how Liz’s new jock boyfriend also likes writing poetry. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d had a satisfying conversation with a guy!

 

Thaddeus would never steal a one act play and would side-eye any stupid plagiarists.

 

You know who is never the wrong kind of boy? Thaddeus. Look at him making calls.
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Wood fairy, witch, or murder victim?

65. Funfax Horror: The Wood – Elaine Sishton

Matthew gets lost in the woods while his family is on a camping holiday and he’s very lost…until a young boy about his age helps him out. That same young boy cannot leave the woods, or at least, he can’t yet. Not until someone finds his body and confronts those smugglers who seem to have zero qualms about leaving a trail of dead children in a wooded area very close to where people camp.

 

Finny was never trapped in the woods, he was occasionally trapped on the couch, but not by smugglers either way.

 

One Finntroll goes home to the forest, sort of.
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“It’s lovely to see you under such alarming circumstances.”

17. Lights Out – Bernard O’Keane

Moira lives in a closed military base for secret science workers and their families in the desert and her father is working on the most dangerous of all projects – Achilles, who looks like a dog but is not one. Her main concern is that she’s about to leave the Citadel to take four children on a camping trip outside the Citadel to a nearby lake…with her major crush, the son of the main head general there. And he seems to like her! And he does – enough to distract Achilles from her and the kids when he inevitably escapes and goes on a killing spree and is of course, easily able to escape the Citadel. Also, Achilles likes Moira too, so he follows her scent.

We even find out why Achilles follows her scent – because he wants to know if this one is more devious or easier to kill than the other “soft ones.” Yes, we get Achilles the biological killing machine’s interior voice. This is the weirdest child camping excursion I’ve ever read about.

 

Horace was an excellent sentinel, Danger Crumples clearly trusted him as look out.

 

Ozy was also on the lookout for things to investigate like beasts escaping secret labs/military bases; Danger was concentrating on his stealth skills first, which are clearly on point.

 

Biking away from angry mutant military experiments only works in the 80s.
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I went to nocturnal camp, we didn’t art there.

59. Who Are You? – Joan Lowery Nixon

The police have come to tell Kristi Evans there’s a folder of material about her at the home of a Mr. Merson, who has just been the victim of an attempted homicide. Kristi and her parents have no idea who Merson is – a stalker? An eccentric stalker? And who is vigilante style trying to avenge the stalking? And the even bigger question – why can’t Kristi’s parents just let her go to freaking art camp? She’s really good and in high school, and her accountant parents just shit all over her dreams because art “isn’t a real job.” It’s true, for many people art can’t be their primary job, but these two are really dream crushers. It’s not like Kristi’s renting a garret in Paris to starve in, it’s summer art camp.

It turns out Mr. Merson is good at art and so was his son, who went to college under an assumed name before committing suicide. And, no, he’s not the one trying to kill Mr. Merson. However, in Kristi’s quest to find out, she will place herself in many situations that will just lead to her being more interesting to Mr. Merson’s actual attempted-killer. And not because he wants one of her cartoon sketches. And in the end, we never find out if her parents will just let her go to art camp. Parents. Sheesh.

 

Merricat never asked to go to art camp, but she did become art and she does have a request/command for literally everyone else that may seem somewhat parental.

 

Merricat and I feel that this is what everyone should be doing, especially my neighbors.
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Cinnamon Girl Friend Zone

49. Scream: The Admirer – Debra Franklin

I do have to agree with the killer in this case, Morgan does lack some smarts on occasion. Perhaps they were lost in a tragic hairspray accident on her cinnamon hair. Morgan is super concerned about how attractive and popular she is, and yet, her male best friend Elliot is a nerd in sweatpants. They’ve been friends since childhood.

And when her abusive shithead boyfriend Duane and her break up and she starts getting nice gifts of things she really likes, does she for one moment know who it is? No! She suspects Duane’s friends, who seem to hardly know her enough to buy her Shangrilamour perfume, a Guns n’Roses tape, and a lavender teddy…ew. Then she starts getting bad gifts like calf brains and a doll head filled with worms and angry calls threatening to kill her, it seems to me this admirer is unhappy Morgan’s not getting it, but she just thinks it’s her ex-boyfriend and uses some very rude tactics to call it out via her Bart Simpson phone.

The Admirer is a familiar story of the vitriol that is showered upon some unsuspecting girl when she doesn’t want to date a male friend who was only there to cling to the shreds or crumbs of possibly dating her. As creepy as it ever was, but maybe the internet has stopped someone from sending these messages via a dead cat – why does this happen? Oh wait, Elliot said cats aren’t loyal so he did have an explanation, but the dead cat thing is in at least one R.L. Stine too. Yikes.

Actual best friends Pere and Finny shared dill instead of cruel pranks.

 

Salem, not Finny’s best friend, posed alone instead of being attacked, best for everyone.

 

Sometimes it’s best to know you’re not friends from the get go, like Salem and Finny. Threadless

“My view is, we’re not on a map.”

53. Human Prey – L.D. Pierce

Maria’s got some troubles with the men in her life. Her boyfriend Todd seems a little volatile and is definitely jealous of her friendship with her lifelong friend Lance, whose one true love is the woods, and her father’s anthropology pursuits seem to have brutally embarrassed and scared her at some point in the past. She doesn’t like to see him engaged in any work with his area of shapeshifters and cultures with human to animal transformations, for foreshadowing purposes. They also live right next to the woods and Maria sees and freaks out about a large animal that really seems to be looking directly at her.

Maria freaks out a lot and is consistently weak at the knees like she’s about to fall over, so not really your proactive heroine type. It seems that everyone who is involved in this situation noticed that because she’s really not being told much and instead Todd and Lance are both kind of hanging it over her head that they talked to her father when she didn’t want them to talk to her father. I mean, geez, usually teen boys aren’t bragging about that because of all those stereotypes about being killed for dating their daughter.

By the time the mystery is nearly solved, i.e. it’s not a werewolf and it’s not tied to the moon, we’re one small dog down (Racket, RIP) and Maria’s made the roundest of melon balls possible for her cookout. The things teens are worried about in this story are unexpected at times.

 

Thorfy and Snuffy technically are good friends and prey animals, but sometimes Snuffy must assert her dominance and she’s more of a predator. If you’re a blanket or a cherry tomato, she’s a predator.

 

Northern England first…and only.
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Were your kids doing research in disguise in 1995?

118. A Killer in the House – J. H. Carroll

I’m not used to young people needing to dress up in costumes from the 1970s to sneak into the library so they can do research without being noticed by the librarians. Even in 1995, I believe that would be considered odd behavior. However, I can also say that even if it seems like the librarians didn’t notice you, they did notice and they definitely took note that the girl dressed up like a corduroy hippie didn’t take the newspaper back off the copier and put it back in its box, Sue!
Anyway, Sue’s issues with stealth aside, I have to say even I was a little concerned about her level of obsession with what she thought she found when she spilled her tea all over the desk of the people she was babysitting for and found a big check taped underneath. She seemed a little obsessed in a weird way about the computer company the husband worked for having an intellectual property leak, which is not usually what I think teens were thinking about in 1995.

I certainly wasn’t. I was definitely more concerned about guinea pigs than technology companies and I didn’t even know my favorite car of all time was new that year and had been released on my birthday the previous year, even if I had, still guinea pigs. And what music that sounded good to me was on Beavis and Butthead and tracking down all those weirdos like Nick Cave and PJ Harvey on the Batman Forever soundtrack at the local Blockbuster Music to hear their other stuff. The important stuff. Guinea pigs.

Granted, Sue is older than I was during this book, but she got in over her head pretty quickly making calls to the possible blackmail recipient and tripping over her own feet to make it obvious she was investigating to the actual murderer she ended up investigating. At least everyone else who questioned why she was so obsessed with this was there to help her when she got kidnapped and nearly murdered herself. Technically, a guinea pig would not be able to help with that. Technically.

 

Pickles…would not help with a kidnapping, either doing it or getting out of it. Neither would Murderface, whose little nose can be seen on the right.

 

Speaking of 1970s disguises…Pickles in her very own Giallo phone call.
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