Rachel Smith's Blog: Guinea Pigs and Books, page 45

This book also discusses plagiarism and retirement savings.

34. In a Crooked Little House – A.G. Cascone

Casey McCabe, secret poor, is the most desirable female student at Huntington Prep. She is being stalked and photographed by a number of people, including one maniac who calls himself “Iggy Boy” and won’t quit killing students who displease him and he’s been doing these killings and taking pictures of them for quite a few years. Like in any slasher, some of these students are awful human beings, but…this boarding school is pretty unsafe. Especially for Casey, not that she knows. When several people are contemplating a relationship with who they imagine you to be, there’s not a lot that can go right with that.

Ozma knew what it was like to be endlessly photographed and painted and idolized. As she well should have.

 

Ozma’s 80s horror paperback cover is expressing the exact sentiment that pushed menfolk over the edge in In a Crooked Little House.

“Don’t Tell Anyone What Happened In The Summer House!”

77. Evil on the Bayou – Richie Tankersley Cusick

This member of the Twilight: Where Darkness Begins series is also Richie Tankersley Cusick’s first novel. It’s a little more apparent that this is a first effort if you’ve read her later novel Blood Roots, which is a very similar story, but darker and more fully developed. Sorry, Meg. But it’s okay, many people find being around their families draining, even if it’s not as nefarious as the situation with Meg and her Aunt Belle and her Aunt Belle’s conspiratorially weird doctor in that isolated Louisiana swamp mansion. And some people find people draining no matter what and have no swamp mansion to retire to, or their inherited swamp mansion’s about to be bulldozed like in Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte. Basically, there are a lot of ways to be a mad old bat or to be drained in the swamp, provided there is mansion availability, and this is one of them.

Horace shall remain undrained for any reason as we have no mansion available.

 

Speaking of questionably non-vampiric draining… Horace Martin.

Shadyside in the beginning

23. The New Girl – R.L. Stine

This is where it all started with Fear Street. The blood on sweatshirt cuffs, the wild deaths, the “crazy” students, and the hungry kisses. Cory the elite high school gymnast meets Anna, gets fixated on Anna, then goes to her house on Fear Street and is told she is dead by Brad, who Anna says is her crazy brother. Mmhmm. Cory next meets Lisa – who is clearly not dead or very mysterious – and bad things start to happen. A dead cat in the car with a warning note attached is pretty extreme. The warning note alone would have been unnerving enough, I think. Anyway, there’s a twist besides “this whole Anna thing is really bad news,” and a series is born.

In my herd, the new girl is Hen Wen. She’s been around for a year, she has Salem, she’s pretty well adjusted into the herd, but then again she didn’t have anyone warning her off. Also, she’s a more 70s pig, no 1989 nonsense for her.

 

Hen Wen can judge all teenagers and decades from her 70s chair. She knows things, she has a hanging plant.

News at 11: Psychic research institute actually up to no good.

3. The Strange Power – L.J. Smith

So your drawings come true and everyone thinks you’re a witch. The Zetes Institute will help you feel normal through being a research guinea pig! But not for what you think, as series protagonist Kait and the other four psychic teens with powers find out. The Zetes Institute isn’t about cuddly psychic research, but are any of them? Joyce says it’s fine, their houseminder Marisol says to get out as soon as they can and then is in a coma – and then they find the secret space where they’re really being used to develop psychic weapons. Meanwhile, Kait is beset between Gabriel, the angry loner who won’t really talk to anyone but her and only talks to her in an antagonistic way, and Rob, the dude who seems like he’s a decent person. Once the five of them – the love triangle and Anna and Lewis – get their psychic link going, they have some togetherness to fight against Mr. Zetes and Joyce’s plans to make them evil psychics instead of the wistful teen psychics they are.

Finny was perfection, even if he wasn’t a teen psychic.

 

Getting a group together can be tough, especially when it involves a common goal and guinea pigs like Salem, Finny, and Ozma.

“Are you eating it or is it eating you?”

27. Nightmare Matinee – G.G. Garth

Go see a movie, get the holographic marbles, turn into a monster – it’s an age old story. However, the monsters are not the Universal Monsters or even Monster Club monsters, they’re a little different, which made this more interesting. Also, the idea that the movie changes every time they see it was quite different and sounds like editing hell, but I guess editing hell is what you want in a film that will literally change those who watch it via spell. Nightmare Matinee has a lot of quirkiness and yet also manages to bring up alcohol abuse, step parents, and what it would feel like to be eaten from the inside out by worms and wearing a hat with a veil to high school to cover it (only in the 80s).

Snuffy is a very 80s pig, she’s making her way into the horrors of rampant consumerism via The Stuff, but also the b-movie levels of fun.

 

The Snuffy Container, available to take over your will to live cutely or your home, whichever. All cute. No filler.

 

 

Tracking

44. Silent Witness – Carol Ellis

Lucy’s neighbor Allen dies and his parents give her a box of his stuff to distribute to his friends, and what she keeps of Allen’s stuff is a videotape. Allen is an amateur filmmaker and the videotape is of Lucy sleeping, and Lucy murdered, and Allen playing the saxophone over Lucy’s murder – oh wait, that’s Lost Highway, which came several years later and was a lot darker than most YA teen fare…or is it? Anyway, bad things start happening to Lucy once someone figures out Lucy has the videotape and she gets hang up phone calls (the true hallmark of teen terror before caller ID) and sees lights on in Allen’s house when there shouldn’t be and her friend Jenny is attacked when she borrows Lucy’s poncho because people are indistinguishable in ponchos and have very little peripheral vision. The killer is actually the FBI coming for Allen because he didn’t heed the warning at the beginning of all commercial VHS and was creating unauthorized reproductions. He died before he could get the maximum penalty of up to five years in prison and/or a $250,000 fine. Yep.

Merricat wouldn’t steal a car, either. Pere might. Pere might even exhibit a VHS in public. The horror.

 

It’s either the FBI or Interpol judging Merri & Pere’s VHS habits. Or the man in black from Lost Highway, hopefully not him.

Plague Year II: Paintings Take Manhattan

This is the eighth year I’ve been putting out slight reviews of 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s YA of the variety published in teen trade paperbacks, those little gems with neon and raised lettering where a lot of their structurally sound plots should be. I collect them, I love them, I parody their covers with my guinea pigs… and for many of the eight years I have managed to make mixtapes to support them. Last year was a lot to deal with and somehow, this year is also feeling like a lot to deal with and so I’m taking a second plague year because I’m still having some trouble getting back to all my usual activities. I didn’t really quarantine so much as get to work at home more often while still working full time this whole pandemic, so, I’m, like, very tired. Vaccinated and very tired will not be the title of my memoir, but it’s true nonetheless.

But! I have managed to get almost nearly back on track with one of my usual activities and it’s painting. The past month I reviewed more books involving artists and that will probably keep happening since I still am one. I did get some paintings done last year, and this is my favorite:

Usually I parody more so, but this time I just took over the title and it is still rather transformative and funny. Guinea pig Fulci domination with Horace. I will never paint Horace as Bob, though. Horace’s voice was sweet and not the most annoying dub every committed.

This second plague year I’m pairing paintings with the YA books. Some will be amazingly relevant pairings, some will not, I do not have tons to choose from because I still only have these two human hands and work full time. Many of these paintings could also openly be called delightful, a word I don’t often use. Like scrumptious. I think paintings of Snuffy I’ve done tend to be scrumptious.

Anyway, I always have links at the very bottom of the page to my two stores – one on Threadless, one on Redbubble. Those very words are also links to my two stores’ overall pages, where it is in fact possible to click each image and subsequently buy things and stuff with my art on them if you choose to. I am not sure when in the future I’ll be doing any shows in person, so those two stores are the way to see what I have on offer to guinea pigify your wardrobe, living areas, fridge, demented ramblings (I am quite fond of the journals, myself), or even your shower. Be more of a weirdo and support guinea pig art made by one.

This is what Ozma looks like sitting on a blanket that is of her giant face in namesake mode.

“Generally you don’t see that kind of behavior in a major appliance.”

24. The Painted Darkness – Brian James Freeman

I was not so much enchanted with this as I was a little perplexed. It’s sort of a cozy horror story and I really wanted it to be darker than it was, even though it would be plenty dark enough for some people with the beast in the basement and the melting flesh and stepping on broken glass and the apparently very bloody paintings and an impending (probably) divorce.

Anyway though, dude paints in his attic studio (lucky, I bet the light’s awesome) and gets completely carried away much of the time. His family does not think that is a good thing and it is pretty unprofessional, time management is a skill and a virtue. Anyway, his wife leaves the house and takes their child very pointedly and dude needs to make sure to bleed the boiler or it will explode the house. He knows this, and yet, he forgets because he’s in the zone painting this princess fighting a monster. This is where I was wanting it to be darker. It’s like everything else he paints is the wall from Hellraiser asking for help in blood and this is a fighting princess and a monster, which just rang not quite scary dark to me.

The boiler in serious need of maintenance at all times and his childhood have intermingling memories of when his father was murdered by one of those same boilers and now he’s in a pickle because he got lost in the princess painting. He’s also going through traumatic memories and the basement is way creepier than usual…and bloody…and if you want to take this as a tale with a teensy moral, it’s “learn to manage your time and set an alarm so you can respect others’ time, not lose your family by being stuck in your own head, and not blow up your house.” There’s more to the actual story than my teensy moral, but I ended up kind of staying on the surface, probably because of the princess painting. And because I understand losing time to creative pursuits and having extremely unpleasant memories to say the least, but, I would’ve made it a point to set an alarm for the boiler. An exploded studio is not useful.

Danger Crumples was all the princess I ever needed since all my ladypigs were (and are) queens.

“Hold my hand. It’s like touching the dead, isn’t it?”

100. Doctor Death – Lene Kaaberbol

A historical mystery featuring the headstrong wiliness of a pathologist’s daughter in France, 1894, Doctor Death was a fun read for me. Madeleine Karno has a familiar disposition to me and her zest for figuring out what killed Cecile Montaine after her family won’t allow a full autopsy, whether she or her father performs it, is fun to read. It is in several ways the 1894 version of contact tracing, and even involves the potential for zoonotic transmission, which admittedly sounds not fun – but it is. There’s nuns and a wolf and some serious weirdness there, over 200 years post-Grandier and everything.

Well, her name’s Murderface, so clearly she could step into this universe.

“I’d like to see you come up with one big lie to explain all your other lies.”

27. Strange Angels – Kathe Koja

I read this as a wallow. Grant’s got artist’s block and isn’t finding any inspiration for photography in unemployment or living off his girlfriend Johanna the art therapist…until he sees the crayon drawings of Robin, a schizophrenic who Grant decides is his way out of muddling along in slackerdom and not finding his way out of anything on his own. It’s one thing to make friends with another artist who has illnesses to deal with, it’s one thing to support someone’s art, it’s another to pretend you have the wherewithal to take someone who has always needed full time care – you, who has no training in therapy or care, Grant – out of that care and just encourage them to completely decompensate so you can see what they’ll do artistically. Grant thinks he knows what will be best for Robin and once his art therapist girlfriend Johanna leaves him, there’s no voice of reason to tell him how selfish and ill-informed he is. Robin is really tortured by being taken away from the services he needs and Grant seems to almost understand what he’s done was not the right thing by the time Robin just wants to “be with the angels,” but it’s not going to work out and Grant should’ve listened to his art therapist girlfriend.

Ozma and Peregrine’s most destructive art tendencies involved trying to gnaw on the canvas corners as opposed to being pushed over a mental cliff by some selfish jerk named Grant who wants them to draw.