Rachel Smith's Blog: Guinea Pigs and Books, page 38

Night of the Living Horse Figurine

102. Detective Inspector Huss – Helene Tursten

There is apparently much motorcycle gang action in Sweden. That is one thing I learned reading the Detective Inspector Irene Huss books out of order. The first one, this one, has the right title and not unlike a couple of others, gets into motorcycle gang situations. Not to make light of being captured and nearly murdered by a motorcycle gang, but being peed on by them once Irene and the super young officer were found on their stakeout to me was really the end all. Pee. So disrespectful. Somehow, even the Living Dead, who it’s implied at least injured a baby inside a grocery store in their rampant undead actions in Psychomania and did provoke several car crashes with death, never peed on Robert Hardy’s detective. Or bothered to capture him. So I guess Huss’ Sweden is rougher than the Living Dead’s England. Take that, Tom, and your arrogance of wearing a white turtleneck tucked into leather pants with your very pretty hair.

Moving on, the motorcycle gang isn’t even the most important criminal action in the book! They’re a bit incidental. Until later books. This is our introduction to all the fun characters, like Hannu, still kind of my favorite Finn detective at this time even though he’s working in Sweden and written by a Swedish writer in this. It’s kind of like how Finntroll’s lyrics are mainly in Swedish even though they are obviously Finnish…an acceptable discrepancy of sorts. Anyway, there’s a murder in here somewhere and a screeching rich woman, who is Finnish also but the total opposite of Hannu in being a jerk and shrieky and having completely unreasonable expectations about what police do to solve murders in the house where the murder occurred. As in, they show up, sometimes more than once. And they want to talk to you, as the closest person to the victim, also more than once. Shocker, that one.

I’ve enjoyed each book I’ve read from this series, maybe not quite as much as I enjoyed watching Psychomania, but there’s no perfect soundtrack to books like there is to Pyschomania. By that I mean everything else but “Riding Free,” it should be fairly obvious I would not like “Riding Free,” and I do not like it. Oh, and the motorcycle gang in Detective Inspector Huss gets its comeuppance when they make the mistake of going to McDonald’s. Yes, McDonald’s. Bad choice for those perps.

 

Why yes, Finntroll, your name was invoked. Don’t join a motorcycle gang or a rich people murder plot.

“You’ll have plenty of Slurm at the end of the tour, where you will party with Slurms McKenzie.”

43. Thinner Than Thou – Kit Reed

The Afterfat. Seriously. Thinner Than Thou mixes a lot of what is constantly brewing in American culture in relation to religion, to ideals of beauty, and the process of ruining the self-esteem of young women in particular via, say, Instagram, but not admitting that’s one of the things Instagram does. US culture is still pretty focused on “thin is in” even if there have been some improvements in a few places. Even if it’s okay to not be okay, it’s still better if you’re perfect looking while not being okay in the USA. And control, the kind that comes with religious cults and diseases like anorexia, is also very much at play in Thinner Than Thou. It is a satire though, this is Kit Reed, and there are several characters to follow into the hellaciously awful world of the Dedicated Sisters and the Reverend Earl and his totally bullshit promises about making people perfect and his other, larger, slipperier secrets. It doesn’t have a satisfying ending, but, neither does an unattainable beauty standard/religious cult in real life.

 

Guinea pigs’ hierarchies are not based on beauty or religion, which is one of many reasons why they are such appealing companion creatures. Danger Crumples was perfect though, unattainably perfect. He knew it, too.

Soap and sanitation are the nice things we can have.

44. The Wolf and the Watchman – Niklas Natt Och Dag

This book smells. That is, there are so many pungent, repulsive smells described that they are the first thing that comes to mind when I think about it and how I would definitely not have lived for very long with my frequent retching and asthma attacks triggered by strong smells in Stockholm in 1793. Holy shit. Pretty literally.

To help with those feelings of internal breathing struggling the smells inspired on their own, it also made me cough a lot with the descriptions of lawyer Cecil Winge’s fun with breathing. He has consumption and it is going terribly. No little cough of blood in a handkerchief for Cecil. However, despite the pitiful condition he’s in, Cecil wants to solve the murder of the mutilated torso dude they found in the sewage of the Larder before he no longer works with the police (or anyone else). Torso dude has nice hair, not much else.

The “main” two characters of Cecil and Mikel, the watchman who pulled torso dude out of the Larder and drinks too much in a reasonable response to the horrors of his life, are really only featured at the beginning and end. There are a couple of middle sections where we find out even more miserable things about how the torso dude came to be in the condition of eyeless, tongueless, limbless he was found and the story of Anna Stina, who totally gets stuck in a miserable life of destitution once her mother dies, so we do have a female perspective on all the misery too. What a relief.

I’m sure it doesn’t sound like I liked this book since I do react strongly to even the description of smells that would take me out, but I strangely did. Filth aside, well, we never really put the filth aside in this story, it was very readable and also miserable in a fun way at times. I appreciated that it was occasionally funny and weirdly tender as well. It’s very well written and it is possible to appreciate the descriptive scene setting even if it’s gross. Squalor is important too.

 

Most of the time I don’t let the guinea pig poop feature in the photos, but Horace is demonstrating the ubiquitous nature of poop in late 18th century Stockholm’s streets and lake areas and he’s very sweetly sleeping on his froggy to take the edge off.

 

Once it becomes a cold case, all progress must be narrated by Bill Kurtis.

17. The Shining Girls – Lauren Beukes

A serial killer who targets girls who “shine,” which would easily make sense in just one time period, but make it sci fi. A little. It’s more like one major sci fi element in a crime fiction story, which, I have to say is way more palatable for a reader like me. I am more easily grounded in the crime than I am in the time travel and The Shining Girls makes that even easier through the grounded heads of Kirby, the girl who got away, and Dan, the reporter who covered Kirby being attacked, as they try to figure out the nuttiest of cold cases. The serial killer, Harper Curtis, on the other hand, ew. He’s super creepy with his whole “I’ll see you later in your life when I’ll be murdering you” bit. Way to be rude. Way to cloud some girl’s life because the sentient house you found lets you travel through time and you use it for evil. Geez. There are so many options for time travel and dude chose the vilest.

 

As you can see, Murderface and Duncan both had beautiful shiny hair. Shining girls are pretty easy to find amongst my ladypigs, though.

 

“You have to stop lying awake wondering about Tony, wondering where he is, who he could be with, what he’s thinking, if he’s thinking of you, and whether he’ll ever return one day.”

103. The Witch Hunter – Max Seeck

A combination of horror and crime to a literal extent at some points, The Witch Hunter was pretty good. Because I really like both horror novels and crime novels, I was hoping it would be better but the main character – she’s so intriguing, she’s secretly rich, she knows she’s very beautiful, she goes rogue and doesn’t think about back up, she’s got multiple traumatic events in her past (some that haunt her literally) and one she doesn’t even really remember is relevant to the story – Det. Jessica Niemi, was not very endearing to me. For me, it is hard to understand why it was sooo important to hide that she has a huge inheritance and a huge apartment to go with it. I’m not sure why the other police would consider that so important, working there should indicate they’re not that keen on burglary. And frankly, rich people tend to get more respect than poor people in the, like, world even if it’s fake respect; I’m not sure how she missed that, maybe because she’s trying too hard to both cover up and focus almost entirely on her past. If she was honest about herself maybe some of her more terrible internal thoughts would have been able to get the attention they deserved.

Anyway, though, the central mystery involves a horror author and people acting out scenes from his books and an underground cult and oh wait, there’s Jessica’s past again, and there’s lots of witchery references and it’s fun enough to follow along when the crimes are actually being investigated. I wish it had been more about the horror-style crimes. Beyond Jessica’s involvement in the crimes with her past, she’s also got an intermittent interlude about her time in Italy that to me was gratuitous and one of those things that forces women through more trauma unnecessarily to build character like endless trauma is all that builds women’s character. I guess it’s not possible to set up one of those troubled detectives, if they’re a lady, without that endless personal trauma. She would be seconds from getting fired if it wasn’t for her higher up also helping cover up her past, which she is constantly thinking about while also somehow being a fabulous beautiful detective in Helsinki. In part, I am interested to read the sequel to see if the story is more focused on horror-based crime as that would be welcome with the short chapters and good pacing this writer’s already doing.

 

Is Ozymandias hiding from his past under this hay? Or is he just enjoying investigative foraging for the best bits?

Sneaking out to disappear

6. Rules for Vanishing – Kate Alice Marshall

The local legend is that Lucy Gallows (great name) vanished in the woods and if you go in the woods during the time of year that the road appears, you will probably vanish too. So of course, after Sara’s sister Becca joined the ranks of the lost one year earlier, a group of kids including Sara will go in after her. Apparently, this Lucy person has a “game” or “the game” and this year a mysterious text has invited everyone in school to play. Thankfully, not everyone in the entire school is a joiner, so we are able to narrow down characters although there are many characters. Fodder, even.

This is presented like a case with interviews and exhibits, so, you know someone got to investigating and the comparisons to the Blair Witch Project are kind of obvious (woods, being missing, video evidence) and also not really very apt. I definitely thought the Blair Witch Project was very scary when I saw it in the theater. Rules for Vanishing is not as scary. Some parts read more like a novelization of a video game and while it can be disorienting and scary to an extent, it’s not terrifying or bone chilling (at least, not to me) in part because it’s not as real as messing up because Mike threw the map in the creek because he was mad you’re all lost. Rules for Vanishing has some light brutality, is fun and fantastical, and there’s some good characterization for the group of teens trying to find their way through and out.

 

Some guinea pigs are neither joiners, nor outdoors pigs; like Snuffy, seen here napping in the hanging wicker bed instead of lost.

Somebody had to take care of the murdering while the Master is away.

47. Brother Lowdown – S.K. Epperson

If you get unnerved by reading animal abuse, don’t read this. One of the characters was manipulated into an awful situation as a young teen because of the threat of said animal abuse and the last time I read something by S.K. Epperson there was this goat who really didn’t deserve what didn’t really even happen to him anyway in it and so I’m leading with that warning.

Brother Lowdown involves nothing supernatural and in some respects is a bit of a love story where two damaged people might end up together if one of them can ever wash the blood off the dress she didn’t even want to wear. In a different author’s story, there wouldn’t have been a serial killer that vaguely reminded me of Torgo, there would just be a woman with a farm and a strong love of animals, a police detective that loves movies and doesn’t go for your average socially conditioned woman, and a dog that runs away from the detective to force a meet cute between them. But in this one there’s a shotgun in that meet cute and then the aforementioned serial killer.

 

Meet cutes involving produce go surprisingly well as Salem and Hen Wen dramatically reenact. Produce, not shotguns.

 

“Look around/ Leaves are brown/ And the sky…”

130. Winter Water – Susanne Jansson

There is a hazy quality to winter water. It says on the front of the book that this is a thriller, however, it is the quietest kind of thriller. There are some relatively suspenseful moments, but they are not of the edge of your seat, must keep reading sort. It also has just a hint of the supernatural. So it’s a bit of an odd book overall but it had enough going for it that I didn’t mind a bit of quiet thriller. I did mind the drowning cat quite a bit though. What the hell, Martin.

Winter Water is mostly a story of the people, couples, mostly, who live on Orust. Martin and Alexandra, in particular, who lose a child theoretically to the sea after nights of Adam sleepwalking and Martin hearing him say he’s coming soon to no one that Martin can see out the window. And apparently, that sort of thing has happened before, always on the same date.

It is also the story of Maya and Backe, but in that story Backe takes a backseat as it were. Maya is a photographer and she takes her independence seriously. She also takes her investigating seriously when she decides to help Martin figure out more about the previous disappearances from the house he lives in and tries to help figure out if Adam was really taken by the sea or kidnapped. Maya has come to Orust in a housing swap kind of situation, she left her cat at her actual house in the woods with someone to take care of it. So, thankfully, it’s not all bad for the cats in this book.

 

Ozma wants to know if the calling voices from the sea are better at taking care of beloved pets than Martin.

This honestly could have used some spicing up.

80. Star Eater – Kerstin Hall

I am not sure exactly how cannibal nuns can be so boring. I generally like the idea of someone breaking out of a stringent system like the sisters here, but it is starting to become more and more uninteresting to me when you’ve got to be “special” to do it. It’s not so much breaking the order if you were born into the order to change it, connected to the one they worship, the Star Eater replacement for any other deity who might have nuns.

Elfreda’s not part of the active resistance initially or the not-internal one anyway, she has to eat pieces of her undead but catatonic mom to keep up her “lace” magic, she knows their society is running out of food and is trying to help with that agriculturally (which to me got short shrift, her actual interests might have helped her be more than a special vessel and also, have they thought about soylent green…). She seems like she wants to not be a part of the order, but wants to keep the power and the knowledge of how things work that being part of the order affords her, so being a spy works in that direction.

The building of the world is interesting to some extent, but all of it, the characters, the world, felt very surface to me. There are quite a few characters, but during the story it was hard to remember who the sisters were, although there was a lot about their hierarchy. It seemed like no one was allowed to truly have depth because the author had to spend a lot of time on something, but I can’t entirely tell you what that something is.

 

Unlike in this book, the rumors of guinea pigs eating each other aren’t true. Guinea pigs are herbivores through and through and Mortemer finds these rumors tiring.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Victorian style

7. The Hidden People – Alison Littlewood

I am not much of a fairy person, even the creepy ones, as I am just not super into them. I am not entirely convinced that what people leave out for them is not being eaten by mice who do not help with protection or cleaning (Beatrix Potter’s Two Bad Mice sure didn’t help, but The Tailor of Gloucester did, so confusing. Her guinea pigs just garden and look fashionable so they’re still best). I guess mice also don’t steal people or replace them, so, that’s one in their column. Anyway, The Hidden People does involve fairies and a very superstitious town that is convinced people are taken away by fairies and replaced and frankly, it was pretty creepy and good. I’ve had trouble getting into Littlewood’s books before, but this one I had no trouble with and it was well worth my reading while. It takes place in the Victorian era, prime time for old ways versus the coming industrialization sorts of conflicts, and I think that’s part of why it works so well to have the modern man Albie and his seriousness come investigate the death of his cousin, who is rumored to have been replaced by the fairies, hence the confusion over whether burning her to death was the right thing for her husband to do. At first it’s just Albie figuring things out, then his wife shows up and it gets so much worse for them in the cottage. So much worse.

 

The partially-hidden Pammy.