Rachel Smith's Blog: Guinea Pigs and Books, page 47

It wants a soundtrack by Wojciech Kilar

87. Wicked Saints – Emily A. Duncan

Sometimes this book seemed like a novel-length version of the opening scene from Bram Stoker’s Dracula. There’s a lot of blood dripping, magic, religious wars, a worried lady, death, an evil dude who is trying not to be evil…or is he? It moved very slowly and while I was interested in a dark, grimy journey story like this with morally ambiguous characters, I lost interest at the end when it seemed like the romantic neediness was going to take over instead of any other part of the plot. I know it’s a teen series, but that direction gave me a case of the furrowed brows and I am not sure I’ll ever read the other two.

Like Hen Wen napping on the floor of her Halloween Fun House, reading that ending made me tired instead of having fun.

Lots of things are broken

69. The Devil in Silver – Victor LaValle

Pepper is a casualty of overcrowding. His “choices” after he’s arrested are Rikers and the New Hyde psychiatric unit, he ends up at New Hyde because it’s more convenient…but then he stays much longer than the seventy-two hour hold.

He’s not exactly a Randall MacMurphy and he’s not actually in need of in-patient psychiatric care, either. He becomes part of a team bent on dealing with the patient behind a silver door, a patient the other patients think is the devil. A lack of proper renovation makes that so, as the “devil” can pop into the other rooms through the ceiling and attack the rest of the patients.

I expected something vastly different than what I got in this novel. I really expected to find more horror than I did, as I found it on one of those lists that pop up in October. The trope of the patient who really isn’t supposed to be in the psychiatric unit and ends up solving a mystery is one of the tropes I’ll always be interested in, and this one ended up being kind of sweet.

One thing that stood out for me, because I do think that no one stuck in a facility they can’t leave, whether it’s prison or a psychiatric ward, should not have both fiction and non-fiction book access, is the book group and the book cart – courtesy of Nurse Josephine. Everybody should read, especially if they’re stuck somewhere. It is fundamental, as they say. Pepper finds the letters of Van Gogh and is able to relate very well. Pepper’s summary of the letters made me feel sorry for Theo, mostly, but it’s very hard to support the irascible genius with mental illness and a tendency to be a real asshole.

Horace knew a lot about dealing with irascible fellow herd members. He was very calm and tolerant, a model pig.

“Some carrots are humiliated publicly.”

6. Within These Walls – Ania Ahlborn

Darn cult leaders. They always have to be in charge and manipulating somebody, even when they’re in jail. And dangling the carrot of the first interview with a cult leader who has been in jail since the 1980s in front of a true crime writer, especially one whose career and marriage are falling apart is so manipulative, so insidious, and such a good idea. To get the interview, Lucas has to move cross country and he takes his daughter – who totally doesn’t want to go – and they have to live in the house where it happened and where it’s still kind of happening.

Ahlborn moves back and forth between the lead up to the ritualistic killings in the 1980s living room and the present time of Lucas and his daughter’s dueling angst fests. It’s great. This was creepy and had the dread I’m always complaining about being missing in novels that are supposed to be scary. It moved quickly and the perspectives were all sort of fighting against themselves internally and the progression of things out of their control and it all worked really well for my reading experience. Really well. This was the first book I’ve read by Ahlborn and it was slightly referenced in the second one I read, which was fun since that book wasn’t as good, but I see Ahlborn as an author whose back catalog I definitely plan to work through just based on Within These Walls as it will certainly be worth it.

What baby Finny doesn’t know is Ozma already has a cult and Pere is the queen of the herd, so his efforts to stare either of them down are futile.

Sometimes the only way out is through.

76. What My Body Remembers – Agnete Friis

This is a story where the main character is pretty unlikeable most of the time. At the least, she is naive and ornery about her inability to completely care for her son while consistently suffering incapacitating PTSD-induced panic attacks. Basically when she’s triggered she checks out completely, so it isn’t really surprising that Danish Social Services is involved. It also isn’t surprising that Ella does not see them as “help” or “services,” more like bitter enemies, which, to be fair is a pretty common reaction to being made aware you are not a fit caretaker for your child and that muddling along with you while nothing improves is not what’s best for them.

However, I found Ella had redeeming qualities. She didn’t become completely unsympathetic, her inability to see resources for what they are and fight to hang onto her son even while not being able to really support him or give him at all what he needs made sense. Her trauma affects her believably, especially her body short circuiting her when triggered. Seeing your parent die as a child is a huge trauma, and an unconscious reaction rings true. Ella makes everything harder on herself, reacts badly, doesn’t trust anyone but uses people when she can, and yet, has not resorted to setting up clever murders or seducing her gym teacher because of her past. She’s struggling realistically and when escaping with her son so he can’t be taken away again, makes the choice that will cause her to struggle much harder with her PTSD (and figure out what was really going on around her mother being killed) because her childhood home is a free place to stay. Free is important.

Salem’s prey instincts were in overdrive when I adopted him. He needed confident, experienced handling and serious commitment to trust me- and also to find his best friend the dinosaur seen here.

“What’s your damage?”

86. Bunny – Mona Awad

If all the Heathers wanted to write and it wasn’t just Veronica, they would go to the university in Bunny. I have read many campus novels, but they didn’t all involve the Frankenstein style creation of dumb manservants via rabbits or have descriptions of creative writing workshops that felt as accurate as these felt, and I say that as someone with a Master’s in creative writing. And as someone who is usually not one of the “cool kids,” even in the circles I have traveled in where it seemed possible, there is something sinisterly weird about trying to conform to a group in a major that is about demonstrating creativity. That sort of trying shouldn’t be the focus as doing your own thing is kind of a point of writing and art in general. I, of course, was not a fan of the Bunnies but I did like where Awad took them. They were actually ridiculous instead of just conventionally stuck up, they ended up sad. Even with all that sucking up to the professor and everything. As did the main character, and she pretty much deserved to be sad in the end as well.

Pammy is glad they weren’t experimenting with guinea pigs, as that wouldn’t have fit some of the metaphors anyway.

Watch for a lady continuously stirring a spoon in her tea

2. White is for Witching – Helen Oyeyemi

I was hoping for something else when I read this I think. I saw it on October lists and those lists mentioned Shirley Jackson and folklore and I can see the comparisons and the folklore, but, this needed some more grounding before slithering out of convoluted for me. It’s got a lot of dreamy atmosphere sliding around, and for me that was not quite creeping into my head in a way that produced a likeable reading experience. And not just because of the bizarre

sentence

structures used through the book, so it looks like House of Leaves sometimes for no apparent reason. I’m not sure randomly

breaking a sentence

is the best way to demonstrate a fractured mind.

I’m

just

not

sure…

Anyway, the house is haunted, Miranda is also haunted by anorexia and pica (there is a particularly haunting description of how she eats spatulas that stuck with me) and the influence of said haunted house on her. It’s very hard to tell if she’s fighting against the influence or just giving in and relapsing after she spends any time away at a clinic or, Oxford, where she does manage to get a girlfriend, Ore, and then basically suck the life out of Ore before inviting her to the haunted house. And Ore goes, even though she’s basically aware at this point that Miranda is very comparable with a creature that sucks the blood out of the living…the delusions of love, I guess. Considering that it seems the house has the personality of Miranda’s racist French grandmother and the town also has all those randomly mentioned murdered immigrants, well, it’s not a good time.

Snuffy, like all guinea pigs, has a propensity for gnawing. It’s not pica, but, she has been nibbling this plastic tree trunk she spends time in and I will never let her near the spatulas.

“It’s partly about money, partly about being stabbed in the back.”

73. The Dark Heart – Joakim Palmkvist

What stuck out most to me about this book were the skills of the Swedish cadaver dogs. Did they find Mr. Lundblad? Yes and no. They found where streams of water had carried molecules of his body. Such sniffing skills. I was thinking about them when watching the Danish series The Investigation on HBO recently again, since that depicts Swedish cadaver dogs once again (and they used the dogs who really did the searching in the show) smelling such small amounts of person-smell through water, in that case a much larger amount of water and coming from much smaller parts of a person. It’s amazing that technology can improve so much, but cadaver dogs are still really the best at this sort of thing.

The Dark Heart covers the murder and efforts to solve it, but in not the usual way. Swedish landowner Lundblad’s murderer is who you expect it to be if you’re familiar with the usual motivations for murder – money -, but it really ends up solved because of the relentless efforts of one woman, Therese Tang. Tang is a woman who has had many occupations and investigates missing persons, taking it to the forest in search parties and talking to families who are actually worried about their missing people – unlike Mr. Lundblad’s daughter and her boyfriend from the rival farm (which isn’t doing very well). It’s a different cut of true crime and that’s not just because it involves forestry.

Morty may not have been good for finding cadavers, or truffles, but he could hear the fridge open and whistle for produce from several rooms away.

There were three mimes in Tourist Trap.

59. The Apartment – S.L. Grey

A South African couple needs a big break after their home is invaded and they think they find it via an apartment swapping site. They’re going to Paris! Then they get there.

But before they get there, issues are already hanging around staring at them…there was an age difference, Mark apparently accidentally murdered his previous daughter and doesn’t seem to care about the current one, Stephanie decided to not have her own finances which is looking more and more like a shit decision, and, well, Carla really doesn’t seem like an actual good friend to the couple.

Then when they get to Paris there’s an issue with their credit card that can’t be fixed, the apartment they got into was as disgusting as a bucket of hair in a closet, and there’s no wifi…but there is some sort of entity.

I honestly found this relatively boring and I’m not sure if it was the couple dynamics that felt like a red flag factory or just the lack of dread. Sure, lots of it was kinda gross, but I did expect more from a Blumhouse Production, although maybe I shouldn’t have. Movies ain’t books.

Danger Crumples realizes he left his bucket of hair in an apartment in Paris.

They spared some expense.

91. Cold Storage – David Koepp

Pre-2020, the idea of a highly contagious, deadly organism escaping a not-so-well staffed sub-basement was not inconceivable, but nowhere near as conceivable as it is now, even though that’s not how COVID-19 started. If anything, this is another reminder to staff and pay properly when trying to maintain public safety. So, if you can put the everyday horror aside for a different kind of quickly spreading deadliness, this book is an easy read and pretty fun. The characters are from different walks of life, which is great, there’s some humor, which is very welcome in dire situations for me always, and there’s some tension. It does not surprise me that the screenwriter of Jurassic Park could create tension on a page and also remember to include humor. Especially dark humor, since he also wrote Death Becomes Her. And there is definitely horror here in the particular form of a rat king, aka the scariest parts of rats intertwining, becoming stuck, and ruining the Nutcracker and my imagination and an attempt to save the world from ruin. Eek.

Ozymandias, tailless, understands why the rat king is my nightmare fuel even when there are worse things going on in the book.

She’s definitely not the Keymaster.

129. Sun Storm – Asa Larsson

Alert: This was also published as The Savage Altar, which is a little bit cooler title and how I ended up checking out two copies of the same book from the library.

Second alert, this is a mystery from the perspective of a tax attorney in Sweden. Not a detective, not a criminal defense lawyer, not a social worker, a tax attorney. Rebecka Martinsson is a tax attorney. It’s like if Louis was the main character in Ghostbusters, but not possessed. It’s actually not as lame as that sounds. It’s just a very interesting narrator choice. She isn’t the only narrator, there is the perspective of the police as well, and the killer a little bit, and Martinsson uses her tax attorney powers to look into aspects of a clearly corrupt religious group, which really is the only way to undermine those groups or organized crime, so, it rang true as such.

I also quite liked Martinsson as a character, she’s responsible and easily annoyed by things that in theory she’d be above being annoyed by, but everyone regresses when they go home. Her home just happens to be a small town with a religious group that’s in charge of a lot of business and land, is totally creepy and predatory (Surprise!), and has their own little deity who gets murdered and was sort of supposed to be Martinsson’s boyfriend at one point when they were young. The deity guy’s sister was her best friend who was and has remained very, very needy and of course refuses all but the will of her god, so, that’s fun to deal with.

It did have quite the ending. Action fest via tax attorney, also unexpected.

Murderface thought about sharing her visions with the world and becoming a deity, but then she got sleepy and found this pillow cave.