Rachel Smith's Blog: Guinea Pigs and Books, page 48

“Fine stuff, but it’ll rot.”

136. It Will Just Be Us – Jo Kaplan

Is it really surprising that a house built on the edge of the Great Dismal Swamp is going to have problems of great variety? Nope. The good thing is, the haunting of this house is not dismal at all. It’s creepy and sticky and also damp. Uncomfortable. Kaplan does a great job with the environment of the inside and outside of the house and in haunted house stories, there should be a lot of tension in the feelings they inspire. Like any little noise will push your brain to panic because it was already on edge from being in that space. And that’s outside of that room that’s always locked. The house is stuck both in and out of time, with ghosts of residents past and present who pop up like holograms – or like the “Ghostfacers” episode of Supernatural- harmlessly replaying events over and over like TV. Also, they do not seem to own a TV.

Sam, the main character who can be a little unreliable, has a good handle on who everyone is that keeps showing up…until her sister Elizabeth comes home while pregnant for reasons she doesn’t seem to want to express. Sam starts seeing other ghosts that she doesn’t recognize, one she’s seen before, but one is a hallmark of super creepy stories – a cruel, faceless child. The one she’s seen before involves someone with their mouth sewn shut, so, not like good happy memories kind of ghosts. Once Elizabeth’s super angry, controlling husband who can find fault with anything and nothing shows up, everything gets much worse, as abusive relationships do tend to have far reaching consequences for those in and around them, even ghosts. My favorite little tick though was that they put Donovan the controlling in the room haunted by a relative who is still tuberculosis coughing from beyond the grave – and he can hear it.

Twiglet was not scared of faceless child ghosts; she also did not own a TV or meander in swamps, but I don’t think she missed out.

“Oh yes, I don’t think it would be too amusing for the youngsters if I conjured up a demon from hell for them.”

34. Jekel Loves Hyde – Beth Fantaskey

Teens and their drama, seriously. So much drama. So much. So…much… That said, this was pretty decent. I wanted to make fun of the characters for being so SERIOUS all the time, but I did very much enjoy reading the whole book. The Jekyll and Hyde story was well tied in, there was a twist or two that were fun little bright spots amongst all the romantic angst, and really, I think the relationship rang pretty true to the 0-100 in three seconds level of anguish that teens tend to express whether they know they do or not.

Ozma, while very calm at times, can turn on the drama on a dime, especially in cases of romantic angst.

 

Horarce…

66. Horror House – Mary Hooper

Jenna and Jake are mean kids. If there are no other kids and one younger girl who isn’t even staying in town forever shows up – can’t you be nice to her for three seconds instead of constantly being jerks? Do you, Jake, complainer that no one knows anything about football (soccer, this is England) except one priest, have no concept of being lonely? These twins are total fickle bitches.

Anyway, that poor little girl who is staying with her grandparents in their newly purchased Horare House is aware that there are ghosts there and that those rude, awful twins at the shop are ghost hunters because they told her and acted like it’s above her to both have ghosts and interact with them – even though she’s the one temporarily living with said ghosts. And because this book is only 115 pages long, the jerk twins go to a sleepover at Horare House after finding very minimal factoids about the house and do experience some ghostage, without “skellingtons” as Claire calls them. See, it used to be an academy, and it had a punishment book and a headmaster who looks mean in his portrait.

With so little room to expand the plot and mere children involved (take that, Jenna and Jake), they can’t do much research or die or whatever, so they just open the door to the secret tower room where little Billy was punished with a cold bath which later caused him to die of pneumonia. Apparently they have no sage. Or common sense. And, to be fair, Billy isn’t given much characterization as he is called “Billy Kingsley” twice, but two pages later when they find his grave, he’s now “Billy Brown.” If only they had a ghost speaker thing so he could EVP at Claire and tell her not to hang out with them because they may be the only available kids, but they’re mean to her. Find a ghost friend if the other kids are mean to you. Sure, they might ask you to make questionable acts of revenge, but they also might help you more with your self-esteem and teach you about history.

Horace and Danger Crumples were always willing to welcome another piggie into their quest for ghosts. It’s always better to have more pigs to answer “Did you hear that?”

“At 12:10AM, the hand became alive.”

26. Deadline – Mira Grant

And now the Newsflesh series regulars will find a secret CDC lab on a road trip led by Shaun, who has gone a bit mad with grief. I do like journey stories, and there is an interesting spin on journeying in Deadline with all the blood testing required to go places. I do hope that isn’t foreshadowing.

There is less zombie killing action than in Feed, but in that one they had to establish how around the zombies are, even though in Deadline they’re traveling and there’s more unknown to deal with. And as with any second book in a trilogy, there is some attempt to explain the origin story of Kellis Amberlee and some conspiracy unearthing and, what isn’t always characteristic of every trilogy writer, a bunch of repeated information. I wonder if that was important information? Heh.

Duncan’s sniffing out the conspiracy hidden in this quilt.

I can see the dust motes swirling in the air.

1. The Twisted Ones – T. Kingfisher

I have recently moved house and I can safely say that one thing people tell me a lot is that I “have a lot of stuff.” It’s not so much “stuff,” as it is vinyl toys, books, movies on various media, records, and art supplies. These all contribute to my life goal of being that unseen person in the creepy house where children dare each other to run up on the porch. But, by the actual definition of a hoarder, the ones with the levels and not being able to open doors or get rid of garbage or broken things, I am not a hoarder. I’m an inside person with inside pursuits. I say this because I can relate to the problems that come with clearing out the house of a hoarder because I have the many things, but not all of the problems. In The Twisted Ones, Mouse is clearing out the house of an actual hoarder, her grandmother, after she has passed away and her dad asked her to.

In a creepy book you must have atmosphere and The Twisted Ones managed to make a muggy, humid place full of the stench of old mouse (Ew.) and stuffy detritus eerie and cold, but, then again, at night everything changes. I work at night, that’s truly how it is. People and not people do things at night they wouldn’t do in the light of day and when you’re alone, even if you are on the weird end yourself, stuff can creep you out in an unfamiliar place at night more so than it ever would otherwise. Especially if you read the wrong thing. And Mouse finds that trigger of many horror stories for reading material, the journal written by someone you can’t ask what the hell they were on about full of craziness. Mouse never should have agreed to do this job alone.

Peregrine also had a lot of toys, but clearly they all sparked joy as here she is using her anthropomorphic asparagus as a pillow.

Birthdays are tough.

57. Blood Innocents – Thomas Cook

This is a book I read during a day I did not realize would be the start of something good. For some public service jobs, you have to take tests. I had applied for and been accepted to these tests for two different public service positions and my tests were on the same day with a chunk of time in between. I brought this book for the wait and because I was sitting in a weird alcove in a basement trying not to get any bit of the peach Danish I had just purchased at the lovely bakery next to the testing place on it, I have a strong sense memory of Blood Innocents. I finished it very quickly. It was not what I expected.

When you see an axe buried in a birthday cake on a book cover, you maybe don’t expect deer murder. I mean, it wasn’t the deer’s birthday. And there were two deer, and later two roommates, and I guess I just thought it would be more like a slasher movie, but it was not. It was a murder mystery. A deer murder mystery. Det. Reardon, the main perspective, is very much in the “no longer has a sense of humor” stage of his career, but he is still determined to solve these two sets of murders. He pounds the pavement and questions whether they have the right suspect. He sounds like he has a moustache even if I don’t remember one being described. I bet his eyes are tired. But, despite these very normal detective qualities, this book is not covering a typical case. The first major murder being of two fallow deer at the Central Park Zoo was so different, and it was so brutal; however, it did not prevent me from doing well on my typing test later and I didn’t get any Danish on the book. Success! Anyway, Blood Innocents is different and brutal, like lots of movies about gritty-era New York City, but also not over the top like lots of movies about gritty-era New York City. I couldn’t help but think the sun was never shining during the course of the story and everything probably smelled like stale cigarettes and even that didn’t drag the pacing down.

Salem shows off his dogged methods of sniffing out deer murderers.

“You can’t expect me to spend the night like a half-drowned rat on a mountainside.”

45. The Tenth Girl – Sara Faring

Let us be whisked away to a mountainside in Patagonia with Mavi, who took a job in the middle of absolutely nowhere at the Vaccaro School. The school has a small gaggle of Argentinean elite ladies of school age who are totally judging Mavi’s outfit and it’s run by an aristocratic mother and son who appear to basically hate each other. The son ashes his cigarette in Mavi’s hair…need I say more to convince you they will fall in love? I really didn’t like her interest in him. No sir, I did not like it.

Anyway, it’s not a great situation, but since Mavi needed to escape Buenos Aires after her mother was taken and was living by the skin of her teeth she didn’t have much choice to try to get elsewhere. And she can probably teach something, but this school has bigger problems. Hidden rooms, mysterious diseases, a tenth girl, ghostly happenings. It’s really fun to read one of these running away to an isolated place and running into crazy ghostiness that isn’t taking place in some dreary part of Europe and with real stakes, disappeared stakes, political execution kind of stakes to be running from. What Mavi’s running from make her really, really stuck and she doesn’t seem to have all that great of connections to get herself a ticket out of the country all together.

She doesn’t have money and she’s curious, so she -of course- becomes a target for the bullying of those upper class characters who need to remind themselves how much better they are for some reason. They’re not. They’re also on their way to ruin, even if they don’t know it yet.

The punishing weather and environmental details made the story’s atmosphere tense and between the treacherous outdoors and the disease making the indoors treacherous, it felt like a very nice haunted place story until all that was whisked away for some modern weirdness at the end. I can’t say I liked the ending twist; it just sort of made the parts I was keen on less interesting to me and more manipulated, which was kind of the point, but not one where I actually understood why that was the way the author decided to go.

Merricat would have had those isolated academy ghosts in order in a jiff, if they stayed ghosts.

Maybe M. Night Shyamalan’s book club. Maybe.

23. I’m Thinking of Ending Things – Iain Reid

I will start by saying that I do not understand why there is a book club edition of this book. I have quite a bit of experience with book club books from my time in multiple libraries, which is why this strikes me. This book falls into the “Did you get it? Did you find the twist? Did you? Did you?” section of annoying things and so might be like the time the public library’s book club chose Inifinite Jest so people could pretend to have read it, but, still, no.

In case you can’t tell, I mostly found this book trying too hard to be clever but not succeeding. Art basement! It’s basically like reading a really shit horror movie that somebody tells you is cool because their relative was a PA on it. But, like, they keep looking at things and not comprehending why they look like them. Yep. I already read Sybil, a copy with certain pages missing, even. I’m good.

Danger Crumples lets Ozymandias know what he thought about being told the twist early, like he wouldn’t figure it out.

We met at camp.

127. The Ice Beneath Her – Camilla Grebe

In The Ice Beneath Her, one has to cobble together their relationships from whoever’s around, be it the controlling douchebag who keeps telling Hanne that she’s basically going to fall apart in seconds because of her early onset dementia or the CEO of the company you work retail for or the detective who won’t take any responsibility for himself and his life choices and would rather bolt at the slightest sign of obligation related to home life. So many choices for the women of this story. So many! It’s no wonder that everything goes horribly wrong, but of course, it will when one of the main narrators is actually a psychopath.

This novel is structured in a way that twists and turns around what the current status of the narrators really is. Dead? Alive? Memory completely gone? Subservient to the whims of a controlling man? It reads quickly, which is helpful because it is quite driven. I was happy to see the portrayal of relationships, albeit shitty ones, at different ages as well. The series protagonist, Hanne, is a psychologist with early onset dementia who is working with the police to solve a murder that shares a lot of elements with an older murder – and trying to cover up her early onset dementia with the police while also dealing with her super controlling husband Ole who just wants her to be afraid she’s falling apart and no one will care for her besides him. Ugh. Then there’s young Emma, who seems like her childhood of being berated by her mother and seduced by one of her teachers has set her up nicely to be manipulated into thinking she’s got no important needs by her new CEO boyfriend (it’s a secret) and she’s on a path of confusion and destruction, basically. Both of these women are out to change their circumstances, but only one of them will get to go to Greenland as a result.

Hen Wen weighs ditching Salem on this pillow for Greenland.

“There are a lot of rules.”

36. Love Is a Mixtape – Rob Sheffield

I knew of Rob Sheffield mainly from VH1 talking head commentaries (Remember when they did video countdowns? I do. I bet Rob Sheffield does too.) and he seemed like he had a decent ability to critique and talk about a lot of pop music but also had that “I listen to indie music” sensibility about him. That’s basically true based on his memoir. It covers a relationship based on a mutual love of music and the grief of the loss of his wife and coping with music with a lot of sensitivity and care. I cannot say that I do not see the parallels between his relationship and couples I know and have known, and it’s a heady reminder  that person could disappear at any time, a factor made way more real by the COVID-19 pandemic. I enjoyed Love Is a Mixtape, although I also judged some of the mixtapes that are included, as any mixtape maker would.

When Taddy was getting older Pammy took good care of him during his naps and he took good care of her too, they were a sweet little couple who did not like music.