Rachel Smith's Blog: Guinea Pigs and Books, page 36

“And after the gathering they might, for instance, sneak into a barn and bewitch a cow.”

55. Witch Hunt – Wendy Corsi Staub

It happens all the time – find a hidden cabinet, travel through time, get accused of witchcraft based on your outfit… I mean, who hasn’t had a summer like that after their parents inherited a centuries old house? I mean, Abbey totally has, she goes from being a little too concerned about the fact that she had to move from New York City to Seacliffe, MA for the summer, to having a crush on her neighbor’s older brother, to fending off a “prowler” who came from 1692. All because of some plants that remain unnamed in the story. It’s no phone booth, but both remain equally plausible because they involve time travel.

Overall, this was a cute story, not particularly horrifying, but in a world where judicial opinions are still being written with references to someone who supported the witch hunts in 1640s England- like his opinion matters anymore for anything relating to women, it was timely to see a girl from 1963 reacting to the overreacting of the 1690s Massachusetts witchcraft-bullshitters with things like, “obviously she’s seeing things.” It’s not easy to be held to the standards of the past as a modern woman, but at least in a book with time travel that makes sense. Thankfully Abbey gets away because Zacariah from 1692 has some damn sense – why didn’t he write any judicial pamphlets someone could quote centuries later?

 

When it comes to pigtchery and having an unending legacy, even the most difficult of ladypigs work together.

 

Even if they have to do it posthumously.

 

Good luck catching these three, even with time travel powers.
Threadless
Redbubble

 

“Paintings – lifeless images rendered in colorful goop.”

I have chosen the quote from Treehouse of Horror IV as the title for this post because it is all too relevant to my own artwork, which I will once again be putting up alongside YA “reviews” for works from the 1980s and 1990s and sometimes earlier in reprint editions so no one knows it’s from the 1960s until they see all the content about hippies and go back and look at the copyright date in the cataloging in publication data (I bet that’s not just me).

 

Peregrine and Merricat always check the CIP. They want to know what’s what when they read.

 

Anyway, part of the reason for this continued shift away from mix making for YA Megamix Summer is that I haven’t been listening to very many things for the past couple of years and what I have been listening to is not really conducive to making mixes. My main two stalwarts of the past few years have been Havukruunu and Acid Witch, Finnish black metal and Michigan Halloween metal, neither are for everyone, both have Bandcamp pages. So if you want music I recommend, that would be it. I’ve also been watch/listening to the Two Minutes to Late Night covers of Danzig “Snakes of Christ” and David Bowie “Station to Station” on YouTube a lot. A lot. They are well worth the time and cheer me up at work when I need it, which is sometimes a lot. Depends on the crimes of humanity I’m looking at that night.

This is what Snuffy’s doing when I get to work at home. And also…right now!

Anyway, there may be older paintings, but none of them will have been featured alongside YA reviews before. All of them are on my page of “Art Works, Pig Based and Maybe Recent” as well if you’d like to see a grouping of multiple paintings by me with fewer words. And, each will be available on my Threadless, my Redbubble, or both and each post will have a link to that image’s exact page(s) as well as a link to the many images at the bottom of every page like there always are. Accessible for clicking while reading and listening to Halloween metal. Have a good summer.

If there’s no true spontaneous combustion, then I may have to revise my retirement plan.

58. Son of Destruction – Kit Reed

Dan was raised without knowing who his real father was. So when his mother dies, he decides to try to sort out her past under the guise of writing a story about the elderly ladies who spontaneously combusted in his mom’s home town – Fort Jude, Florida.

There are a lot of plants as well as depressingly familiar clichés about rapey-entitled-rich teenage boys. And in this book, the mother dies and does not have to go back through that part of her past, say, in court. But her son at least finds out he wasn’t fathered by a rich entitled rapist dipshit. Instead, he was fathered by someone who is capable of setting people on fire with his mind and is maybe sorta responsible for those dead elderly ladies.

 

I know someone who can set people on fire with her mind. Her name is Pickles. She liked cilantro and cutting my hair with her teeth and setting people on fire with her mind.

 

“The sad life of a touring wizard.”

111. Gnelfs – Sidney Williams

With a terrified 80s child watching TV on the cover and a title like Gnelfs, I was expecting a combination of Gremlins and the feelings I get when I see too many lawn gnomes together smiling the same stony smile… shudder. What I got was a rich dude-sorcerer who was mad at his ex-girlfriend and used an actual functioning sorcerer who sounded like he was wearing cowboy boots with metal tips in that “cannot ride a horse” way and biblically based monsters attacking a very worried (probably for life) child named Heaven. Then yet another sort of sorcerer who like “does jobs and is grizzled” shows up to help Heaven and her mom because he is the only person who knows what’s going on and that Heaven is not delusional about being attacked and it’s not a poltergeist either. Casualties included a local author and helpful friends and no lessons were learned along the way. Sorcery as vengeance doesn’t really work against exes, I’m sorry, you’ll have to try “living your best life.”

 

Pere and Finny know how terrifying it would really be to combine Gremlins with those gnomes in a world with no cell phones.

 

Arac-not-phobia

81. Don’t Move – James S. Murray & Darren Wearmouth

So, this seemed like it wasn’t going to be boring. I saw some reviews that said it was like a horror movie in book form, all action packed and fun. I would agree that it was action packed; I wouldn’t say that I cared or was carried away with that action. I didn’t care about anyone on the church trip, including the main character and I didn’t see the giant spiders as a real menace. Perhaps I am jaded by years and years of horror movie viewing, but I can definitely get sucked in by some not-great writing if the characters are there and these were cut outs of cut outs for me. I felt no suspense because I didn’t care and for some reason even less than 190 pages seemed like too much.

 

Why would Thorfy want to move?

“One, two, three, four… four… Shit.”

6. Ten – Gretchen McNeil

So you want to hang out on an island with some other teens and be part of the cool kids and get killed off in an orderly fashion? Well, okay then. Go for it.

In the tradition of And Then There Were None, and because it’s fun, setting up these teens to be killed off one by one is what happens and they scramble around a lot trying to figure out how to get off the island during this major storm that just popped up and of course since this is a thoroughly modern novel there has to be an explanation of having no reception for their phones, and if you like this sort of novel this is a quite fine example. It’s not bogged down in trying to reinvent the wheel or the story tropes as they may be, it’s just an easy read doing what this kind of orderly kill off novel is supposed to do.

 

Horace and Pere demonstrate what they’re supposed to do as guinea pig friends – relax, but not while touching, just close enough to nip each other if needed for warning or annoyance.

Have a Good Summer II: Hello Mardie Lou

2. Sweet Revenge – Jean Simon

Those artists, man, the quiet ones especially…we can go either way. It’s best to leave us to our work, especially Tucker, who apparently had a Nice Guy TM hiding under the surface (80s book spoilers). I do have to say, the descriptions of Tucker’s paintings sounded either pretty hideous or incredibly boring, so, really, they should have known something was up.

But this story isn’t really about Tucker at all. It’s about revenge, stabby rhinestoned revenge. And also Mardie the bookkeeper (she has pastel slacks) and her niece Jess trying to have a good summer, as they say, and finding a small town possession instead. I do like how Jean Simon set this up – the bookkeeper buys her own house (Yay!), next door to a quiet artist (this seems good if you like quiet and some of us really, really do), and then her niece Jess comes to visit like she does every summer…and brings this box full of possession down from the attic (don’t put any of that shit on!). And even though it could have been quite clear who murdered the lady ghost, who is now super pissed (like Mary Lou but age 25, essentially), she did manage to set up two possible suspects pretty well.

The murderous ghost, looking for her murderer without for some reason realizing he still lives conveniently next door, keeps stealing Mardie the bookkeeper’s body at night with bad makeup (just like in Lizzie, the movie version of The Bird’s Nest) and doing very bad things that make a total mess of Mardie’s day time life with real consequences that are really ruining her ability to keep books and Jess, while still trying to have a good summer with her new young person friends at the beach, notices and gets reasonably scared.

And why yes, there is a microfilm research scene. These 80s teens were going to spend time at the beach and the amusement park and the newspaper basement doing research and they were going to like some of it.

Snuffy looks like any working girl, and yet…

 

A seal of approval has been won by this research scene. Grape job, scratch and sniff.

“Anthropologists are permitted to believe in myth. It’s part of their charm.”

8. The Twilight Pariah – Jeffrey Ford

Excavating outhouses is a fun way to find out a lot about the past. It’s also a good way to find bodies other people were trying to hide – like the horned child they find in this familiar story of digging something up gone wrong. Sometimes those summer projects you think will help you discover something cool for your archaeology major will actually get you up close and personal with the town demons. Whoops, Maggie, Russell, and Henry. Whoops. It was Maggie’s idea and she was pushy.

There was a lot about this story that was familiar to me or that I’ve seen in person, like anthropology field school including outhouse excavation (not that I went, that’s outside and dusty and therefore not for me), having a house that is dilapidated enough to seem haunted in the woods outside of town (Is there a Midwest county that doesn’t have at least one of these?), and of course the tale of friends doing something illegal while drunk together that ends up in dismemberment and feeling like you’re constantly being watched that any horror fan has encountered once or twice. It’s a fun enough read and quite short.

 

Pickles and Belvedere will follow Murderface anywhere. She is their mother, but I wouldn’t put it past her to ask them to dig up a demon baby.

Goat Man!

53. The Bottoms – Joe R. Lansdale

Lansdale is very good at weaving a humid tale. The Bottoms is as sticky as a Mississippi summer and just as foreboding. The descriptions are brutal, the mystery is inventive, and it’s one of those books that is hard on the kind but it’s worth getting through the parts of language and Great Depression era-reality we’d rather not consider anymore because they’re painful. To me, this is a novel that makes it completely clear that Joe R. Lansdale is one of the United States’ best writers. I mean, there’s a Goat Man in it and I didn’t even get a flash of Torgo, that’s saying something.

 

Finny is one of the United States’ best guinea pigs. He also happens to be brutal and inventive.

“It’s exciting. Do nice people come here?”

1. A History of Wild Places – Shea Earnshaw

It feels like cults in fiction have made a major comeback in recent years and sometimes, even probably with research, their tactics for keeping their people in thrall don’t really make sense. In A History of Wild Places when it came to the big reveal, that’s how I felt. I feel like if the tactics of Pastoral were combined with some nice mellowing drugs they get addicted to, it would make sense that they think they can’t leave the border of their community in the woods…because they would start to feel sick. The sickness in the woods they’re trying to burn away with sage would be literal instead of just a suggestion. But that requires more thinking than drunk Levi, cult leader with major insecurity, was willing to put in.

It was a decent enough read beyond that, I like the premise that an author of very dark children’s books went missing and so did the person who went to look for her, that’s a little bit more Blair Witch, but it wasn’t a very dark story to me overall. I may be a little desensitized to cult activity…or I am just really familiar with how the bystander effect works, either way, the whole group think and the punishing didn’t chill my bones at all. It also mainly is happening to characters we aren’t involved with even if they have clear motivations for breaking the rules. The darlings here were definitely safe, even when they were a little unsafe, so that does not make for much drama.

Speaking of cults, Ozma’s had some influence for a while now. Here she is with the first Midsozmar painting.

 

And here she is after she took charge and made herself available on various products via the links at the bottom of the page.