Rachel Smith's Blog: Guinea Pigs and Books, page 41

“I don’t care who your god is, you need permits.”

100. The Reddening – Adam L.G. Nevill

Prehistory and ponies. Sort of. I remember the animals on the Willows’ farm made it obvious to me that this story was going to a fetid place. It didn’t sound like the farm was being well taken care of by the folk musician and family who owned it. Really, the family and friends all sounded like they weren’t taking care of themselves very well either. Devoting oneself to the “old ways” and ancient rites and keeping secrets about the beasties of the past being kept alive by those ancient rites in the network of caves on the Devon coast is a solid way to wear oneself to sinew and bones apparently. Oh, and murdering travelers in the area with rocks, that’s a lot of work too.

However, that all comes in more so towards the end. We start with Helene and Kat, both trying to find some sort of answer or story that comes from the same network of caves. Kat went with her boyfriend Steve because the Brickburgh cave has been the site of an archaeological discovery that indicates cannibalism and there’s no way that’s just going to be ignored by the readers of Devon Life and Style, or anyone else, I mean, it’s cannibalism. Helene’s brother was making recordings in the same area of caves and what he recorded sounds otherworldly since it might not be easily recognized as being more of a very-old-worldly set of noises. It’s unsettling, suffice to say. And then he committed suicide in the area and that just doesn’t make any sense to Helene. And it shouldn’t. Then we follow Kat and Helene on the path of folk horror and fetidness.

 

“They did what with how many guinea pigs prehistorically?” Finny just learned something about sacrifice from Ozma.

Break that wheel

91. The Five Turns of the Wheel – Stephanie Ellis

Celebrating Mother Nature is sometimes not very fun. Tommy, Betty, and Fiddler make it not fun for the villages in this area on purpose because that’s the way it has to be for Hwoel, who is powerful and has no sense of humor or joy, apparently that goes when one becomes an ancient being, and the Mother, who seems voiceless for the most part, which isn’t very nice. The old rites have to be done, the super petty and personal process of choosing sacrifices is done, and everyone just has to live with it because they’re not allowed to leave. Folk horror often involves traditions of harvest and how it’s going to go and being thankful for the harvest and who we thank and it’s not ever a celebration of the scientific modifications of plants that made corn grow more abundant nibblets or the like because that’s just not very folksy. We didn’t have to bleed anyone out over a field to get more nibblets. Anyway, in this story the main thing that comes through is the weariness of fear from the villagers. “I’m the one who does this,” “This is where Tommy stays,” “My daughter’s been assigned to marry the giant, hairy mummer dude named Betty,” etc. It’s unpleasant and unending and very palpable, but still makes for a story that hums along like Fiddler’s song and makes it stop.

Snuffy is nibbling the abundance.

 

The nightmare house was already built, so why bother with the dream house?

100. The Nesting – C.J. Cooke

The Nesting involves something that has cropped up in multiple thrillers with supernatural elements I’ve read centered in Norway and Sweden, i.e. Don’t mess with the forest. Don’t. One of the reasons I’d like to go to that area is to see super old growth trees and I definitely wouldn’t mess with them, so, point taken on my end. However, the architect trying to build in The Nesting is arrogant and grief stricken where the reader comes in. He shouldn’t have rerouted that river. The irony of his arrogance is that he was trying to build an environmentally friendly home both before he rerouted that river and killed a bunch of forest life with pollution as a result and after, when he’s decided to keep going for his wife, who has drowned in the fjord, because it’s their dream house.

But the architect is not who the reader follows. That would be Lexi, who stumbles into the circumstances of being the architect’s nanny by stealing someone’s CV and pretending to be up for a nanny position after overhearing a conversation on a train. Lexi’s living at a home for women with housing instability at this point and trying to get her life back together, so instead she takes someone else’s (but doesn’t murder them to do so, nice of her). Once Lexi gets to Norway with the family (which is English in origin, like Lexi) to the forest where they’re living in an older space while building this “environmentally friendly” home, she starts hearing things and seeing hoof prints inside and seeing the same scary, but also sad, lady the child is seeing, although I should say “lady” because it just looks like a lady.

The point of the story is read your mythology, remember your mythology, and don’t mess with the forest.

Is Danger really there or is Ozy seeing mythologically cute beasts on the other side of the pumpkin? Both, really.

Oh the desolation.

84. Teeth in the Mist – Dawn Kurtagich

Despite this also being written in an essentially pieces of blog and letters format, I enjoyed Teeth in the Mist a lot more than the last Kurtagich book I read, The Dead House. There were a lot more full scenes to go along with the letters and blog posts, which may have made a lot of the difference. Also, I do like the Faust story, and this had a lot of that in it. Or maybe it’s just the super creepy ram that I like since I just painted a series of four of the pigs I currently have behaving like the movie versions of scary British children, and Salem is poking a ram skull – because when there’s folk horror elements, one must be a ram skull because they have cool curly horns. Anyway, there’s Faust, there’s the devil’s daughter, the devil’s language, and a feisty couple of ladies ready to break the wheel, per se, at two different points in time.

The setting is great as well – rocky, barren, misty, truly isolated and foreboding. And while this is YA and that means some overdramatics and magic and romance between two characters who otherwise can’t stand to be in the same room, of course, it has a lot of creepy elements that work well – like the ram and being stuck with a bunch of people who think you’re a witch (and you are) in a place where there’s not really anyone who could effectively help. I also liked the twist on the Faust story, it made Faust seem like even more of an eternal jerk.

Salem is not poking anything here, but he’s also not wearing a sweater like in the painting and I don’t have a ram skull. Yet.

“It seems there are just some things you can’t do seriously with liberated women.”

21. Ghost Wall – Sarah Moss

Silvie’s dad has a serious interest in British history and forces their family to take part in an Iron Age reenactment along with a handful of students and the professor overseeing the whole thing in a remote area. They have a hut. Silvie’s dad is also a pretty hardcore misogynist and doesn’t seem to think the lady students should be doing anything but what he’s forcing his wife and daughter to do, i.e. cook, clean, the usual tasks that take up so much time no one has any to make period appropriate art objects, unlike reality. His shadow and ideas about how brutal everything should be hang over the whole thing, especially via the narration of Silvie’s thoughts. Her comparisons of what the students do and how they’re kind of obtuse and what’s she’s living through outside the reenactment are compelling and sad. They also might be familiar to anyone who has tried to get someone to listen to accurate information only to hear it being re-summarized incorrectly to someone else in front of them later. There’s also a sinister undertone, Silvie’s dad’s the obvious sinister force right there and he seems to find a common thread with the professor that only pushes towards trying to amplify the brutal parts of history. They could have been making period appropriate art objects instead, it’s not like art making isn’t brutal sometimes.

Peregrine, seen here on a pumpkin wall, was the longest leader of my very hierarchical pig herds. She liked it matriarchal.

A very scary topic.

50. Seeds of Evil – Margaret Bingley

I didn’t realize when I started reading this novel of a woman stuck with Village of the Damned kids with their basically colorless hair and weird eyes that there would be a guinea pig murder in it. I know they’re more popular as a recognized animal in the UK than in the US, most likely thanks to Elizabeth I supposedly having one, but, I did not know until I read that there was an “unwell” one in the London Zoo’s Children’s Corner that Tristan, in his only appearance, was going to murder it in a scene I selectively read over once I knew where it was going. I’m glad Tristan later died of meningitis. Serves the evil child right for using an unwell guinea pig as a demonstration tool to show Orlando his beloved blood so he can have his “tingles.” Clearly, they were undeserved tingles as Orlando and his twin, the even more evil Olivia, both died of meningitis too. But, some of the evil children live. Ophelia, and Cindy, in an unfair for the future of the world turn of events.

Thaddeus says no one cares about your tingles, evil children. Guinea pigs will always be much cuter and probably outnumber evil children too.

“Puree a few of the locals”

62. The Missing – Sarah Langan

Field trip! To bring back a plague to make everyone in town super creepy, apparently. I read The Missing several years ago, but like many books where some rather uncontrollable contagion shows up and people turn on each other it’s awfully familiar sounding in 2021 as a bad omen sort of story. If you want to watch the deterioration of society, there is the current reality shitshow, or there’s fiction. The Missing is connected to Langan’s previous novel The Keeper and expands the destruction to a community level, like viruses like to do.

Langan always includes environmental details that take the scariness beyond “oh no someone’s getting infected” and that makes the world building better; at the same time, it’s not quite as tight as The Keeper and doesn’t really have an explanation besides basically “ancient evil.” And really, we can have contemporary evil or ancient evil without explanations, but I’ll take a good research scene that gives some solid answers over family drama in these stories any day. Although to be fair, “not as tight as The Keeper” does not mean it’s not good reading.

“There’s a Corpus Christi, Maine?” – Salem. “Apparently.” – Hen Wen.

I could easily see Tom from Psychomania settling down into a house like this.

14. Slade House – David Mitchell

Five chapters, five decades, twins, and a very fun read. There is a house that shows up once every nine years and lets someone in through an iron door in an alley. It’s magic and, of course, once you want out, you can’t leave, like a proper English manor house version of the Hotel California. After the first chapter when the story jumped a decade and wasn’t going to follow the previous set of characters I was worried it would be confusing or annoying or both. I have had trouble with normally literary authors writing something that is supposed to be scary and is just irritating instead. However, I was pleasantly surprised by Slade House and it’s quite a short novel, despite the chapters increasing in length as they go. It was a short, spooky, satisfying read.

Will Thorfy be invited into the haunted house? Maybe he’ll notice the door is open, maybe he won’t.

It’s very clear that somebody watched Scooby Doo rather extensively.

42. The Supernatural Enhancements – Edgar Cantero

Even though the house itself and the secret society and some of the attitudes about various things are pretty turn of the century, this haunted house tale was never creeping slowly through the icy mists. It was pretty much twirling the whole time. It’s a haunted house story/mystery with lots of clues in weird places/pillar of wackiness told through snippets that didn’t drive me crazy. I’ve read some epistolary novels lately that have, but this one was readable. And it helped a lot that one of the main narrators doesn’t speak – which makes the written word her only clear method of communication, plus Niamh is great, as is her dog, Help.

It’s a bit like the 2001 version of Thirteen Ghosts (which one specific part reminded me of) – if you can go along with the ride, it’s an amusement and it’s not that big of a problem that it’s not scary or is full of reference humor. If you get stuck about what’s supposed to be in an epistolary novel or what a haunted house story is supposed to be like, or start asking why the Black Zodiac has such specific ghosts involved and how would anyone even begin to know where to look for them or who they were to use them for sorcery, which is a totally valid approach, you’ll probably have a bad time reading. The Supernatural Enhancements uses some familiar elements and a lot of layers to create a story of weird people solving other weird people’s mysteries and turns a traditional gothic on its ear.

Ozma refuses to have a bad time in a haunted house. Especially if it’s one haunted by her.

The same gravitas as those two cops from Halloween 5

56. My First Murder – Leena Lehtolainen

I haven’t been to Finland and have only had the opportunity to appreciate that which is Finnish from afar, like Finntroll (that’s Finny’s full name for good reason), Moomin, and the lovely film Heavy Trip in particular, plus of course I’ve seen the art of Tom. And I think Finland is probably a country that would staff Helsinki’s police force with enough detectives that they don’t need to assign a homicide case to a 23 year old law student who for some reason is a substitute officer as her summer job.

I guess Maria Kallio made it through their police academy, left because she was bored with low level cases and the amount of paperwork to be a law student (this does not seem like less paperwork), and then came back as a sub for the summer and is now a homicide detective, so she won’t be bored I guess. And the person who died is someone she knows and now she’s talking to her old friends to solve the case, which clearly involves no bias or blind spots. This is also the start of a many book series, but for me it’s a hard start because of the very concerning premise.

I know it’s fiction so anything can happen, but it has to ring true. It would be more plausible that this happened somewhere remote or super rural where there just isn’t anyone around and policing could somehow be a summer job, but that’s not Helsinki. I’m not surprised she had sexist colleagues that she had to prove wrong by solving the case; I am also not surprised that anyone would have issues with her being 23 and assigned a really significant role in the police force without even really being part of that force full time, regardless of gender. It was also not surprising to see her consistently getting herself into dangerous situations like someone who has no experience. Training matters and experience is earned over time. While it’s always good to have more female detectives to read about in Nordic and Scandi crime novels, I like it when it makes sense that they’re even working an important case a bit better.

Technically this wasn’t Thorfy’s first ineffective attempt at interacting with Snuffy, but it makes just as much sense as a random 23 year old solving a murder in a world capital.