Rachel Smith's Blog: Guinea Pigs and Books, page 39

Public Service Painting

Sometimes we need more public service announcements for very specific situations and I have created one that applies to both Valentine’s Day and one true horror I have been forced to experience more than once, acoustic guitar noodling. Just say no to acoustic guitar noodling. Especially if you are in a couple and intend to remain so. Here’s Salem and Hen Wen in Salem’s second parody book series spreading this very necessary societal message:

Salem and Hen Wen say no to acoustic guitar noodling. Yes they do.

 

Hen Wen gives Salem little nudges whenever she can.

 

Remember this Valentine’s Day, acoustic guitar noodling can happen to anyone, especially if someone is trying to impress you with their limited musical skills.

They showed us how to deal with it in Animal House, but smashing the guitar to pieces could be dangerous, so watch out for the signs. Stay away from any stairways with dudes in turtlenecks in them or back of the house balconies. If you see one, cover your ears and run. A shitty cover of “Wonderwall” could be coming. Or worse, just some jamming. Aimless jamming. With mumbling and no discernible end. Beware.

“I think you’re forgetting whose weekend this is.”

96. In a Dark, Dark Wood – Ruth Ware

All right, Nora, I think you could have stopped all the murder from happening in this book with a text ten years ago, but this read so quickly I didn’t really care that the real reason for the killings was technically stupid.

A hen do in the middle of nowhere for a wedding you’re not invited to doesn’t sound like a good idea to anyone, not even Nora, but she goes anyway. I got the impression that Clare is not really someone who has actual friends. She just has people who tolerate her; including Nora’s former boyfriend James who she tragically lost in a texting accident that no one ever questioned when they were sixteen, despite all evidence of sixteen year olds being unable to stop texting when they smell drama.

Anyhoo, I do like cold middle of nowhere settings and I have found that female friendships are represented in a way that both makes sense and doesn’t in stories like this. Whomever is a true friend and not into pretending she’s fine with all the proceedings just to placate Clare (or insert whatever controlling bride stereotype) will die far too soon and then we’re stuck with the leftovers who think “not making a scene” and “this is for Clare” are good ways to get through the whole weekend. They’re not. It’s still going down bloody and stupid- but quickly.

 

Ozymandias never had trouble being friends with Danger Crumples, the most dramatic of all guinea pigs.

Somebody really needed attention for their wet specimen collection in the basement.

126. The Restoration – J.H. Moncrieff

Never underestimate the ladies or evil ghosts, they always have something unexpected to pull out in the end, or the middle, or the beginning, really. Terri, a woman who ruined a séance by telling the ghost it’s dead, is restoring Glenvale along with her daughter during a summer. Her employer is a remarkably spry 100 and the previous housekeeper, who was fired before Terri was hired to restore, can’t seem to leave – she must solve the mystery of the 100 year old’s brother’s young death, even though he had diabetes before he could really be treated efficiently for it or read about it via Stacey in the Babysitters Club. In her quest, she will have a bad time. Terri will also have a bad time. Terri’s daughter Dallas will also have a bad time. Even so, this is a solid, short haunted house tale with some gross family secrets.

 

An actual sweet brother guinea pig, Belvedere. He’d let the house be restored without going nutballs during a séance about him.

 

Stupid necessary organs

3. The Unit – Ninni Holmqvist

Writing is a solitary pursuit. Art is also a solitary pursuit. Lots of artists and writers have at the least the urge to cut themselves off from other people for periods of time so they can work. If they realize their work is the main thing they truly want to devote themselves and their lives to, then they don’t go with the program of what society tells everyone they should do (i.e. both want to and have a family with more than one human in it or consider all that creativity just a hobby) and are often treated differently for knowing who they are and what they wanted, so why not dehumanize them as well? Just sacks of organs, those unmarrieds; as obviously this does not just apply to creatives who like to isolate and get some damn work done- it applies to anyone who doesn’t want a family in the sense that society sees one (multiple humans). The Unit takes that dehumanization and makes it more on the surface of society instead of just implied when people say “you’re not working hard enough” (to fall into this trap of society) when someone can’t fully support themselves on one income in the US.

In the world of The Unit, the childless and unmarried are sent to “units,” a “reserve bank unit for biological material,” which are essentially their own little retirement communities where they can have their organs harvested for those who made themselves “indispensable” to society by getting married and having children. The “dispensables” in The Unit are men and women over 60 and 50, respectively, although I’m sure there are some countries that would throw women over 30 in there right away. They might have been contributing to society somehow, like by making things the “indispensables” want to look at, but it doesn’t count because they don’t want or never had a family of humans. Dorrit is one of these women and she finds love in her particular unit, which throws everything into flux for her and she finds the horror of the situation instead of some kind of bullshit dignified peace.

 

I don’t think anyone truly knows how to measure who or what is really contributing to society. I mean, check out Peregrine looking at a painting of herself as the Snoreceress. She is and was and ever shall be needed and utterly indispensable.

 

“Many have no known purpose at all.”

99. The Factory – Hiroko Oyamada

We can’t all have meaningful, recognizably significant jobs. Someone has to shred that paper and proofread those seemingly useless documents and never get anywhere with either task and never have the opportunity to advance or advocate for their own ambition and to eventually lose all ability to want something more after basically moving in to the factory with an incredibly hard to define purpose. I say this, but The Factory is very short and easy to read and could maybe have also been called Malaise, like that one part in Clerks. It really felt like what work feels like when you have a dead end job you didn’t realize would be a dead end job. It also feels exactly how I’ve felt any time someone said “circle back around” or talked about silos outside the context of farming like that ever made sense, oh wait, that actually annoys me significantly. There are little pops of life still in the perspectives presented here too, the ones who notice things and aren’t quite so numb yet. The Factory is a surreal reminder that being worn down into compliance and apathy is what many workers have to look forward to. Hang in there.

 

Thaddeus never had a job. Can you tell?

Choose Your Own Adventure: Bog

51. Hekla’s Children – James Brogden

In some stories, the moral ends up being “no field trips.” Picnic at Hanging Rock and Hekla’s Children would be two of those stories. If you take the children on a field trip, they will disappear, be it into a giant rock formation or a bog. However, in Hekla’s Children we find out what happened after the children disappeared and left their English teacher behind to be released for lack of evidence. It’s kind of a lot and very much answers the question of how well these children would really do if stuck in the Bronze Age without any relevant skills. It’s fun enough, and I like a good bog body and picky forensic anthropology scenes, but towards the end everything seemed all over the place, which was a bit of a drag even if it was quick read.

 

Finny having no relevant skills never stopped his exploring either.

 

“Polite demons that would open a door for a lady carrying too many parcels- BUT DEMONS NONETHELESS!”

46. Red as Blood or Tales from the Sisters Grimmer – Tanith Lee

It took me a very long time to get through this book. I decided to start reading it as one of my “appointment” books, so I was only reading it while waiting for something. But even only reading it in short bursts did not save me from being a little tired of the sumptuous and luxuriating description. It’s too much for me, and I know I like Tanith Lee’s stories when they just pop up in collections with others’ work, so I’ll have to stick to that.

Snuffy sumptuously luxuriating. She has no problem with it.

“Paid Piper” – Since I’m very scared of rats, their tails, how they like people, and how generally smart they are, I was more than aware it’s not the best idea to worship them. However, I would not tell people that by hypnotizing them with my flute.

“Red as Blood” – Sharp teeth, man, Snow White with sharp teeth. And….Satan. I miss Hecubus.

“Thorns” – This one had slightly less description of sumptuous furnishings for a while at least.

“When the Clock Strikes” – Cinderella…and…Satan. Sorry. I’ll try to stop doing that when Satan stops being a part of the stories. I just really love Hecubus from Kids in the Hall.

Peregrine heard me say “Hecubus,” she and Merricat both appreciated Kids in the Hall like good polite little demons.

“The Golden Rope” – So…guess who shows up in this one? Guess. It’s Jaspre. The annoyingly good looking child stolen by a witch to be sacrificed once she looks all sexy plump and virginal to – Satan!

“The Princess and her Future” – This one as a bit more interesting to me because I wasn’t familiar with it already and it didn’t exactly involve Satan. Some other kind of demon imprisoned in water, who wasn’t Satan, so, a nice change of pace. The princess was a little bit of an idiot, but what completely sheltered rich kid isn’t?

“Wolfland” – Case in point about those sheltered rich kids. Getting lycanthropy through eating flowers is a new one for me. And the girl’s grandmother really reminded me of Dracula in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The girl’s grandmother easily could’ve been sporting the same hairstyle that Gary Oldman had when Jonathan Harker showed up. Plus the young girl was pretty ridiculous in her reactions to everything. Although maybe my expectations of young girls staying calm are a result of me more often freezing and waiting to react to bizarre situations than screaming hysterically or getting fresh with the servants. This was my favorite story in the collection.

Ozma’s ready to get fresh with whomever.

“Black as Ink” – Someone is in the business of taking waifs off the street, teaching them some tricks, and turning them into swans. I think it’s Satan, but they weren’t explicit this time.

“Beauty” – Lee went futuristic in this one and that was a pretty intriguing choice. She got to add future technology to her overly involved descriptions and cat people. Sort of. No Satan though, in this one I was disappointed by that. A young woman has to reckon with her alien overlords and how she doesn’t fit in with her annoyingly skilled family members and she doesn’t interact with Satan? What the hell?

Murderface and Pickles ask, No really, how was Satan not involved in the last two stories and swans and cat people are?

Cosmic okey-dokey

88. A Hawk in the Woods – Carrie Laben

A little of Lovecraft in a modern Instagram and Twitter wielding head is interesting, and I did finish it, but I didn’t find the story of two sisters and their otherworldly birthright to be all that engaging. I wish I did because it’s a fun idea, but the perspective of Abihail was not one I could follow without getting tired of her pretty quickly. She needs attention to gain power to push people into doing things and so she uses her job as a network anchor and uses her social media and she’s definitely a user from many perspectives. Her sister, Martha, can fold time and since Abihail needs her now that she has a quick-growing cancer, she breaks her out of prison. It was interesting enough if you can stand Abihail really not wanting anyone to be happy but herself and very little explanation.

Otherworldly birthright, you say? Pickles knows things.

They still haven’t definitively found Crozier, either.

115. The Snow Collectors – Tina May Hall

I’ve been interested in the Franklin Expedition for a long time. There’s something about being that stuck and found in bits and pieces (they even confirmed one body as Erebus’ engineer in 2021) that is very terrifying, hence The Terror for instance, and to me it wasn’t really a secret that Lady Jane Franklin was involved with expeditions and went on one to find out what happened to her husband Sir John Franklin. It’s not like she could wait until they found Erebus in 2014 or the Terror in 2016, even though Sir John Franklin died before everyone was attacked by the folkloric monster bear… Anyway, that seems to be the “secret” that the weird family with all the birds is trying to hide in their swampy basement of deep freezers and secret rooms in The Snow Collectors and it takes a long time and bad research practices to get there. And I believe we all know what I mean by bad research practices, see my little Twiglet and Duncan below. This book is one of the main reasons I did those two paintings as I was taken out of the story and it never got better from there for me. I think the narrator was also supposed to be considered unreliable and that was clear from the putting away her own library materials after misidentifying them. NO.

Henna’s haunted by the loss of her family, including her twin which would be very harsh to say the least, she’s living by herself in a small town that’s remote, she finds a frozen woman with a letter fragment (related to Lady Jane), and I guess she’s not keen on the local police dude who keeps talking to her (maybe because it’s clear she’s not super sharp in terms of her own safety). The mystery of the frozen woman was both a catalyst and a reason for Henna to just wander around even more often- it didn’t really push the narrative that much even though it seems like it would. It’s possible I missed something, but the lack of research material accuracy super bothered me, so, it wouldn’t be surprising if I didn’t in all that unreliable weird captive energy that came on halfway through the story and went to the basement wearing an antique dress.

 

Lady Hen Wen and Capt. Salem Crozier just went on couch expeditions – no Northwest Passage, but also no cannibalism, no TB, and no shoddily done fictional investigations later on.

 

Fiche cannot be wound, that’s film. And no library lets patrons put actual or magical realism fiche away themselves; no one’s ever going to find it again and I know this wasn’t clever enough to make that connection on purpose.

“Here’s a five inch nail for dessert.”

66. The Bone Weaver’s Orchard – Sarah Read

When you get sent away to school with only your pet insects, you need something to do in between bouts of your peers forcing you to clean their shoes or bullying you because you have interests other than sports and being a jackass while stuck in a school with such clear evidence that it is full of secrets. Charley scrabbles around investigating the North Yorkshire boarding school’s less than fresh areas. He finds out who it is making all those scratching scrapey noises at night and also realizes he would have been much better off not knowing. There are a lot of crumbling building bits and also crumbling people bits and this is gothic with a healthy serving of bad medicine style gore thrown in. Creepy.

Thorfy will get up at any time; he’s always up for some investigating.