Rachel Smith's Blog: Guinea Pigs and Books, page 51

Since Halloween is mostly untenable this year, a story that has the actual day in it.

9. The Babysitters Coven – Kate M. Williams

A little Halloween slice of contemporary YA fun. This was cute. There’s fashion and witchery and pop culture references that actual young humans will probably/definitely have to look up as these are some quite savvy teens. Quite.

The story was easy to follow and the twists and family secrets and “chosen one”-style shtick didn’t go overboard. Williams clearly made the effort not to throw in every idea she’s ever had for a novel with magic and teens in it and it makes a big difference. It’s fluffy but with some sharp edges.

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Merricat and Peregrine prepare for their “on the day” spell workings.

“Where do you come from? The dust. Where do you go to? The grave.”

36. Halloweenland – Al Sarrantino

Apparently, this is the first full novel in the Orangefield Cycle. After I initially read it, I thought it might be the last in a series or in the middle somewhere and I guess if you count the novelette and the short story it’s almost to the middle. It doesn’t read much like a beginning to me, is what I’m taking most of a paragraph to say.

Det. Bill Grant and Samhain seem like they’ve been tangling for quite some time and have the world-weariness to prove it. It also reminded me of Something Wicked This Way Comes, with the Halloweenland carnival being set up and having anticipation and a very strange carnival owner and whatnot. There’s also quite the freakshow. And a trip to Ireland. The scope of the book is relatively wide and that’s part of why it reads like an end more so than a beginning. Usually, the series waits till the end to expand or go to heaven.

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This is also Salem’s first pumpkin photoshoot with real pumpkins. He didn’t realize how nicely the orangey ones complement his shiny beautiful hair.

Music by Willa Ford

70. Dangerous Creatures – Kami Garcia & Margaret Stohl

And, since the Beautiful Creatures series is over, there shall be a new series where we follow the dark side of the family and… it’s okay. Ridley Duchannes seems more interesting than she is in the Beautiful series and she carries that on into her own series. She’s supposed to be “dangerous” and “a bad girl,” but when it comes down to it she’s just another lovelorn teenager with a fondness for sugar and make up and saying things that reveal she is emotionally immature. She’s a siren, boys find her attractive, but which boy who is also “bad” will she choose? There’s an evil cliffhanger.

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There should be no doubt Finny is a dangerous creature. He followed the original Danger, he kept up the reputation.

Death, apparently, is also a highway.

20. The Brotherhood of the Wheel – R.S. Belcher

As I have mentioned on this blog before, Interstate 55 and I are best friends, as much as one interstate and one experienced driver can be. I know the majority of that road by heart and I do miss it sometimes. Driving is something I do quite like to do and it’s fun to be able to navigate the entire way down the country, including all the confusing little twists and turns in big cities, without needing a GPS. I do not need one on I-55. For these reasons, a gritty urban fantasy series about highways and those who protect them is very, very appealing to me.

And the first entry in this one has a lot of great elements – serial killer truckstop diner set piece, an antler wearing scary thing, ghostly hitchhikers, annoying hipsters, a very impressive crone, a fun Louisiana State Police Investigator, a motorcycle riding madman, oh, and much driving. This was just ridiculously fun to read.

There’s a lot of information and quite a lot to take in as far as things like backstory that main character Jimmie Aussapile does not want to explain because honor and integrity are as important to him as family; however, the overall tale is very cinematic and it’s well worth the time taken to read each little chunk of explanation. They’re clearly there for a reason as there is a sequel which may or may not involve fighting with the forces of nature again. Yeah, they went big in the first one.

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Danger Crumples was also very familiar with I-55, investigating the mysterious, and being epic, so this book works for him.

70. King of the Road – R. S. Belcher

So, there’s a nice shout out to the Britt, Iowa, National Hobo Museum in the second book of this series, King of the Road. The Gathering of the Juggalos is also mentioned. As is a transgender were-bear. At the beginning, children who were going to be trafficked are saved. Other children run from nearly immortal clowns. A class war seems to be a-brewing between the Brethren who do all the work and the Builders who seem pretty smug. Heck finally gets a girlfriend and a dog. So once again, a lot of ground is covered.

As someone who very much straddles the line between the smug researcher type who knows perhaps too much at times and the very functional on the ground worker bee, I am really looking forward to seeing where this series is going, regardless of whether or not I am on board with all the musical choices.

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Danger Crumples also hopes they’ll move a little further away from clowns in the next one. Perhaps reanimated roadkill zombies would be more pleasant. When I was driving cross country more, I did refer to a certain time of the year as “Carcass Season,” although it may have been more prescient for me since my hometown has an animal rendering plant. If they all reanimated, the devastation would be terrible. And pungent.

 

 

Paging Gladys Kravitz

35. The House Next Door – Anne Rivers Siddons

They say new houses can’t be haunted. But they can.

There is a lot going on in this book, especially when reading it under more contemporary circumstances. There is much insidiousness to be found and not just in the house that’s “haunted.” The narrator of the story, Colquitt, seems to be soooo bored in that “I have everything I need, where’s my Bloody Mary” sort of way and she’s way too keen on the young male architect of the haunted house, which is exactly the type of gossip Colquitt herself would be spreading around the cul-de-sac if anybody wanted to talk to her regularly. This neighborhood is just on the edge of the woods and just on the edge of learning other types of people are allowed to exist and they’re not everybody’s judge and jury in the suburbs. Even though Colquitt and Walter promise to burn the haunted house down if anyone tries to move in… they’re the only ones who can fix it. If you like your suburban horror more along the lines of The ‘Burbs, you’ll have to wait for the 80s, as the 70s as represented here are not your style, but are still very scary if you’ve run out of proper garnishes.

Apparently Anne Rivers Siddons only wrote this one horror novel, and didn’t even realize how many horrors she was including, and I’ve really only skimmed the surface.

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Ozma’s house makes it easy to tell if she’s spying on your house, which she totally is.

Also, slow motion cigarette smoke will be filmed until it dissipates.

30. A Dozen Black Roses – Nancy A. Collins

One warning about this, when I was doing some research to refresh myself on the book, I found that there is a revised version of A Dozen Black Roses out that apparently does not contain the crossover elements of World of Darkness. I did not deal with World of Darkness so I don’t know what’s now missing – and I read the first edition of this so I read the crossover elements without knowing; but I do have a problem with these revised editions because I like to know beforehand if I’m reading something that’s been altered so I can find the original edition if I want. Like when I read Daughters of Eve. I do not care for the insertion of cell phones and modern technology, so I made sure I was reading an unaltered edition. Next, I may yell at a cloud about these revised editions.

Anyway, reading Sonja Blue novels out of order and at random is sort of like catching The Crow on TV halfway through. Nostalgic. It’s a wet, gritty world and the soundtrack is good and scratchy. The reflection of the dingy lights of a bar off somebody’s pleather jacket is a welcome sight and there better be blood everywhere at some point, especially covering synthetic fabrics that will never recover. Also, there will be some relatively orphaned young person and an anti-hero who will be vengeful, but still interested in helping at least two people because they’re not a completely emotionless monster. So, if you’re looking for that “isn’t this wet oil puddle in the gutter beautiful” sort of charm, with vampires, inquire within.

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Thorfy has no clue what I’m talking about, even though he was found on the streets. He is that orphan. He probably does know what I’m talking about and just won’t admit it to me. Adorable little jerk.

The fake shipping company job really made it scary.

89. Lakewood – Megan Giddings

Not to sound like a school book report, but Lakewood has many themes. To totally not sound like a book report, I won’t discuss many of said themes that give this book many layers. That said, being a guinea pig owner who is grateful for the sacrifices that their species has made throughout time without any capability of giving consent, I’ve always found stories where people volunteer to be guinea pigs and it goes horribly wrong interesting. However, there’s an awful lot of history where people have been subjected to experimentation without their knowledge and/or consent and it has also gone horribly wrong. I’ve also written about that in a darkly funny way, although there are many actually true stories about it that are so not darkly funny.

Lakewood is the story of a young woman trying to get the money her family needs by subjecting herself to a medical study as a fully consenting adult, technically. She notices elements like the clinical detachment and gallows humor needed to carry out experiments (which is necessary in many fields but can seem inhumane), the hideous feeling of knowing you’ve done something to your body you can’t take back and rationalizing it anyway, and how “they” can become really, really real when you’ve stuck yourself in a secret lab in a fake town that has real people in it who may not know it’s a fake town, and you’re not supposed to talk about it.

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Although real-life Peregrine was never subjected to anything experimental…

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she would’ve been out of there once she saw the navy blue suit and the flag pin in that initial meeting.

Cat Monster Welcome Wagon

56. The Hour of the Oxrun Dead – Charles L. Grant

This is the first full length book by Grant I’ve read and when I was looking up his novels after very much enjoying his short stories that I’ve encountered, I had no idea it was part of a series about the town of Oxrun, Connecticut. I also had no idea it would mirror some of the worst parts of my library career.

Natalie is a new assistant librarian in Oxrun, new in the sense that she’s been there over a year but she’s not “local” as they say. That is very familiar territory for me… She came to Oxrun because she married a policeman from there and then he was killed by what I gathered to be some sort of invisible cat monster with an MO beyond just slashy claws – sticking an ear in the mouth of whomever was killed. Like a cat version of Blue Velvet’s ear in the grass = there’s something dark going on in this here small town.

Anyway, So Natalie finds that there’s some sort of conspiracy going on, she finds it along with the other non-local around, Marc the apparently attractive newspaperman. And! The fun and familiar part of the conspiracy involved being shit on at her work! That’s right – find something out, ask a question, get treated like you aren’t good at your job. What do you really think you do here? It’s hard to answer that correctly when the man wants to take you down for pointing out a flaw they don’t like that’s actually hindering their stated goals.

I like to meet stated goals that legitimately serve people, especially once I figure out who the patrons really are. Like the ones that want that Iceberg Slim biography or the ones who needed that lost book (not lost anymore thanks to me) about the Villisca axe murders or the ones who want books about trains, World War II, and guns and then more trains… Neither of these groups would be served by the library in Oxrun and unfortunately for them, I’m not serving them anymore either. Like Natalie, I got tired of being put down for doing a good job and finding issues people didn’t want to fix. Unlike Natalie, they thankfully were not able to send a cat monster after me, silver lining.

I do still have many questions about what the hell actually happened at the Halloween party and how it really ended or if it did – Grant is supposed to be the master of “Quiet Horror” and even as a librarian, I hadn’t encountered that before really. Perhaps the cat monster will come explain it to me where I work to serve the public in an entirely different way now, it’s a lot harder to get into though and there’s an armory.

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Murderface and Pickles always appreciated me, even when I asked them to do work like posing for pumpkin photoshoots.

Friday the 13th Part VIII: Vampires Take Manhattan

18. The Fall – Guillermo Del Toro & Chuck Hogan

The second book of a trilogy is where we flashback and explain origins and also ramp up the action, preferably with a downer ending. Everything’s as bad as it could be, how will they overcome this? How? How?

So in The Fall, the vampires pretty much take over New York with their virusness, which makes total sense as it’s easy to spread uncurable disease in an area with a shitload of people. Unfortunately, with the pandemic there’s real-time evidence of this- but they also broke it and flattened that curve, so, vampires beware. Also, as per the first book, the descriptions of how the vampires feed and live in the subway and basically exist are very gross and slimy. So very slimy.

And the flashbacks belong to Sertrakian, which is much better. Less Eph whining, except that of course he has his own non-Sertrakian based ideas of how to like totally fix this thing…which doesn’t involve Corey Stoll’s wig from the show, but it would be better if they’d known that was going to be a thing. Anyway, backstory is increased, possible solutions are explored, and shit gets dark.

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Special book to kill the vampires, you say? Salem’s sitting on a special book right now.

“I think it’s time I start paying back this country for some of the good things it’s given me.”

52. Lock Every Door – Riley Sager

There is a lot of 2008 economic crash after effect in this story. The main character is in a position that started to be a frequent happening once people got laid off or found out there were no jobs available, as in, a shitty one where they have to basically take whatever they can and if it was one of several types of jobs I’ve had, you’re also supposed to never make any noise about how the pay is unlivable and no human being can do three people’s work, because if you make noise, you’re just ungrateful. So when there’s a job that is really just living in an apartment, you’re going to take it. It is, as they say, too good to be true for someone like Jules, so, just like what’s about to happen with the U.S. economy now – any and all red flags will be ignored until it’s too late, you have to rationalize that you have a job now and lots of people don’t and other people will tell you you’re just whining if you’d like to be able to live off of what you make and not completely destabilize yourself repeatedly and “just move,” as people who don’t know how expensive and risky moving can be say… On a personal note, I would never tell anyone to move somewhere new because they can’t find a job because A. I’ve moved for jobs and it is a giant setback most of the time because very few places to work are upfront about wages vs. cost of living where the job is and B. That’s how horror movies start (see A or Arachnophobia).

Jules just has to follow a few simple rules for her apartment sitting job, like never spending a night away and leaving people alone (and they didn’t even have a pandemic to use as a reason to isolate) because they could be rich and famous people as this is an important New York building. She also can never use bright light or eat after midnight. Kidding. There are echoes of some other familiar horror stories in here though. One has a baby and a New York building. The other one that came to mind for me is the sad and maudlin but very well written riff on The Clonus Horror by Kazuo Ishiguro.

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Ozymandias, seen here luxuriating in his warm colors blanket, knows it’s best to follow his nose when it comes to housing. That’s why when he first sniffed my hand, he immediately popcorned.