Rachel Smith's Blog: Guinea Pigs and Books, page 50

“Well, do you think there really was a head in her suitcase?”

90. Ashes to Dust – Yrsa Sigurdardottir

Birds of prey, volcanoes, archaeological digs, old murders, one night of young people dancing and drinking alcohol that led to so much it shouldn’t have in the 1970s… Ashes to Dust is quite the story and quite the case for lawyer Thora and her unfortunate secretary that she keeps judging, Bella. I like Thora, but at the same time, I do not think harping on Bella is a good choice. Even if Bella is clearly not secretary material (and some of us just aren’t, I don’t like the phone either and I sure can’t make coffee), she does come through here – a bit of can’t be asked turns into some solid research.

Although there were parts of this where I was a little concerned that Thora didn’t realize a clue was being found, it was still a good story and involving mystery. I do always appreciate learning some Icelandic history from Sigurdardottir, and really a mystery is an excellent way to work with historical fact and keep it intriguing. The Midwest is volcano-less and fancy free and as a relative non-breather who pales whenever they smell fire outside, the possibility of the sky filling with ash is very scary. Even scarier than finding a head in a box. Maybe not. Maybe…not.

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The crack mystery solving team of Danger Crumples and Ozymandias would miss nothing. No clues would not be sniffed out.

“Why don’t we psychoanalyze the monster? Maybe its mother was scared by an oak tree.”

77. Wonderland – Zoje Stage

You move into the country and your family gets torn apart by a tree. Well, not exactly, as that would be way more of a monster book and what I think From Hell It Came is like but I keep missing parts of it on TCM – also that’s a tropical climate. Wonderland is set in the crushing misery time of having to deal with snow in order to leave, to get out of your own front door, once you finally get your car shoveled it’s everywhere else you go, just snow snow snow. Snow.

This family doesn’t seem entirely prepared for moving into the country, maybe they thought they would just eat a lot of peaches instead of getting totally trapped by the evil tree. Or is it an evil tree? With TB (tuberculosis, not Taco Bell, in this case)? Anyway, I think we know what happens to families trapped by snow and evil foliage (or topiary, perhaps in the form of a maze), especially when one of them intends to get creative work done. But there are some variations here and a lot of parenting in crisis situations, which is not my thing, I’m more with the random woodland critters that keep showing up and the evil tree…no offense, fictional family.

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Pickles is in hiding, she also thought she was going to be eating a lot of peaches.

“Very sunny night.”

18. The Night Eternal – Guillermo Del Toro & Chuck Hogan

SO, here we are with Eph and Zack and the eternal struggle of “the Master kidnapped my son,” so my least favorite characters, besides Kelly, are the main source of potential vampire-take over endings. Fine.

I was not entirely pleased with the jumps made in order to meld the viral, more grounded, but also slimy aspects of vampirism in this trilogy with spiritual things, which of course show up in vampire stories a lot because, you know, evil and whatnot is typically spiritually based. So the explosions have angels in them. Or something, really the ending seemed a little rushed and that’s definitely in part due to those jumps. It’s fine.

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This little trilogy of Ozymandias, Danger Crumples, and Pammy were just a tad more organized than the CDC’s response to vampirism in these books.

It’s got that crisp, cold, black, middle of nowhere Iowa night in a farmyard feeling, so, points for that.

11. Universal Harvester – John Darnielle

VHS rental – YAY!

I can tell that Darnielle knows an Iowan, and I was, of course, wondering… because setting this in Nevada is an odd choice for a non-Iowan based on the specific pronunciation of “Nevada” for that exact location and a lot of other things. At times it did seem like he just looked at a map a few times and listed things so said Iowan may not have had enough strong influence on the choices. Or he didn’t listen.

One thing: I know zero farm-adjacent people that say “combine harvester.” I get that it’s possible he didn’t know what it did at some point and probably didn’t grow up on a farm…and also probably hasn’t worked for a farm implement company while also coming from a family that’s been in farming for over 100 years, like me, but “combine harvester” is not a thing. It’s certainly not fetch. Also, it’s like someone involved knew better because the title is not Universal Combine Harvester, it’s just Universal Harvester.  More typically, if you say “Harvester,” it’s because your family bought one made by IH (International Harvester, now merged with Case, that’s not where I worked. I worked in the city where combines were made and still never heard anyone call one a “combine harvester”); it’s just not a correct colloquialism. It bothered me enough to go on this long about farm machinery, which of course is not my typical rant- that would be the one about microfilm vs. microfiche, I’m working on some paintings about it, so it will never die!

I’m also disappointed that, not unlike most indie guitar-based albums, it seemed like it was going to be better than it was. I thought the story was going to be way more sinister – the splicing lady could’ve been the horror equivalent of Tyler Durden splicing porn into children’s films in Fight Club, but, she wasn’t. I mean, she had a shed! It could’ve been way more sinister, at least more ominous.

I also hoped the author intrusions were really going to go somewhere besides Darnielle just not making choices and interjecting into the story a couple of times to irritate me out of the plot. I could see the story quite well in my head and then – here’s some dude, telling me it could’ve gone a different way – and I wanted him to shut up. You have to make sure you’re solid with what you choose to say because you won’t be around to explain it when people read it, even if you’re famous.

Perhaps I sound a bit bitter…and I am a bit bitter, writing about my home state and thinking about the farm where my pig family cemetery is and how I can’t visit them, or my actual family, or my home state, for any holidays this year due to a disease that could have been better handled in the US to say the least.

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Peregrine and I are also never there to explain that the devilishly clever paintings on these very purchasable throw pillows are A. devilishly clever and B. both parody John Carpenter movies. Apparently, several people thought Merricat is just a cute DJ and not transforming The Fog. To be fair, they’re not wrong about her being a cute DJ.

Nelsan Ellis as Lafayette was the best thing to come out of this series. RIP

46. After Dead – Charlaine Harris

An alphabetical listing of what happened to the other characters from the Sookie Stackhouse books…it’s smaller than the other books. Literally. At least the hard back is.

Long after I gave up being satisfied with the end to this series, this was published. It doesn’t feel as much like a tying up of loose ends as it does a throwaway collage of little snippets that could’ve been published on a wiki and therefore given away for free. It’s a good thing Lafayette was killed off in the first book; the version of him from True Blood would’ve had something very quippy and devastating to say about what this book is lacking.

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Belvedere’s end. A paragraph is about all the space I would need to describe his contemptuous relationship with Danger Crumples, whose end is not visible in this picture.

“The chickens were released from their cages but remain on the property.”

124. The Last – Hanna Jameson

There’s a murdered girl in a water tank, but in all honesty she’s not really important. She mainly confused me because she’s like a reference to Dark Water and the actual younger woman found in the Cecil Hotel’s rooftop water tank, Elisa Lam. It should be noted that the hotel in The Last is a remote one in Switzerland. There’s a body buried outside, he, also, is not really important. There’s a reference to a serial killer having stayed there which is tied into the real story of Rodney Alcala, that guy who won The Dating Game on TV and thankfully didn’t end up going on the date because the lady was creeped out by him; and rightly so, he was an actual serial killer. Not only are these ties to real stories relatively meaningless, the blurb for the book also mentioned And Then There Were None and The Shining, neither of which are truly good comparisons for this book. It isn’t a murder mystery of people being offed one by one, not really, especially as most of the deaths are suicides; and it’s set in an isolated hotel like The Shining, but there’s no real madness and no well defined family-murdering and the bartender seems like a nice guy.

This is more like a spinoff of The Walking Dead with no zombies, just a world post-nuclear bombings that really turned elsewhere into a nightmare, but not this isolated hotel. Oh, and they never actually run out of supplies. There’s a group of left behind guests and they have to sort out working together. The philandering academic is keen to document things as they are now and reminiscing about how he screwed up in the US, slowly. Also, he has a tooth problem – nightmarish in the post-apocalypse when the dentists at the hotel have died. The philandering academic is also part of finding the girl in the water tank and tries to sort out how she died with the amount of energy that can be expended with interviews done by someone who does research and not live investigation, not finding some DVDs, and pawing through some rooms. He does find a suspicious post-it. Oh, and he tries meth at one point.

It is readable, but there are some major issues at the end in addition to the things I found confusing or like odd additions I’ve mentioned. In a way, the ending is like they finally found a story that would be cooler to read than this one, so, if a series was being set up this book would make more sense structurally. But I don’t get that impression.

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Twiglet and Pammy are looking for the thrilling white knuckle madness promised and I hate to disappoint them.

I just learned that they put “cromulent” in the dictionary. It was more fun when it was just a Simpsons reference.

49. The Ascent – Ronald Malfi

A perfectly cromulent action novel. There’s a lot of snow and ice and a blocked sculptor with guilt and an enemy he didn’t know he had. Mountain climbing is not my thing, and to be fair, neither is sculpting as I did a good job in my first sculpture class but a terrible job in my second one that I only took because I did a good job in the first one. Regardless, and even though there was only man’s inhumanity to man in this story despite some vague supernatural mentioning, this read very quickly and, as stated above, was perfectly cromulent. Or if you want a real word, it was fine.

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Snuffy and Hen Wen could not go on any real expeditions. Snuffy hates sharing resources. If Hen Wen gets closer, she’s getting snapped at.

“They need a smug bastard in the next village.”

3. Brazen – Kelley Armstrong

A Nick the werewolf story. This novella has the best cover out of the Subterranean Press Kelley Armstrong novellas in my opinion – one wolf, many skulls, and yet not too crowded or in any way tacky.

So, Nick is meeting with a half-demon to apparently stop being the total playboy extraordinaire that he usually is and do some damn work tracking down the biggest villain of the werewolf parts of the Otherworld series. It’s a departure that is welcome in several ways. For one, Nick doesn’t get as much opportunity to be cocky and use his apparently existing charm to get out of things. Two, the villain is an actual important villain and not just some schmuck newly made up for this story. Three, Vanessa the half-demon is a very worthwhile character to follow and has some tension with Nick. This was basically just a fresh little addition from a perspective that was more welcome to me than I expected.

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Ozma’s relationship with the sweet gherkin toy was fraught with tension. Sometimes it was in the twigloo, sometimes the sweet gherkin was banished to the corner.

Crazy Eggplant

72. Now You’re One of Us – Asa Nonami

There are definitely some disturbing elements in this book- gaslighting, murder by exploding house, incest – but what’s most disturbing is the cover image of a bar of soap with a curled up hair on it. EW. EW EW EW.

So, anyway, Noriko marries into the Shito family through a matchmaker. She’s pleased with her decision and hanging the laundry like a dutiful daughter in law when some guy who looks a bit unhinged approaches her on the lawn and tries to tell her something… and gets interrupted by her mother-in-law. That unhinged man is not so random.

It would have been maybe really good for Noriko if she could have gotten out at that point – but no matter what she did – talking to her outside best friend, worrying about why that unhinged man’s house suddenly exploded and killed his whole family, accusing her new husband’s sister of banging his developmentally disabled brother, saying the whole family is growing drugs and probably killing people – they keep asking her why she wants to suffer with this suspicion alone, why is she all sweaty and sad, shouldn’t she rest? It was like hell for anyone who tries to fight for themselves.

I have to say, sometimes no matter how hard you try to get out of creepy abusive situations that don’t involve peyote or longstanding family blood traditions, you still might not, so, this is the kind of disturbing that does happen.

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Belvedere and Mortemer, son and father, respectively, would never have been able to share the same girlfriend. They could barely share the same quilt without a rumblestrut or nose off once Bel turned one and a half, the age male guinea pigs turn into prime buttheads.

“To stuff yourselves on other people’s nightmares.”

50. A Song of Stone – Iain Banks This is the second book by Banks I’ve read. I really liked The Wasp Factory and I do remember it being a little bit in the same vein of first person surreal narration. A Song of Stone is told from the perspective of a now-former aristocrat who seems to have his head stuck up his own ass in a world where civilization is falling apart after a war. Or any war. It’s vaguely modern, there are trucks and Jeeps and more modernized weapons.

It starts with him and his sister and some of their stuff leaving their castle in a carriage and not getting very far before they run into a band of organized “soldiers” and their lieutenant who forces them back to their castle so she and her soldiers can occupy it, play house, seduce the sister, drink all the wine, ruin the family artifacts, and inevitably implode. A lot of it sounded very sticky and there were zero likeable characters. Let’s hope it’s not a research text for the next few years.

 

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This is Thorfinnur’s “I’m only likeable when I feel like it” face.