Rachel Smith's Blog: Guinea Pigs and Books, page 56

Into the arboretum

39. Path of Needles – Alison Littlewood

Anyone for bird watching? Or gin? Perhaps an aimless walk through the woods next to a crime scene? Murdering ladies and staging them as reinterpretations of fairy tales, some with obscurities?

The thing that struck me though was the policewoman consistently messing up her own career. Every single time a new piece of information would show up, details that only the police and the killer knew- which are usually useful when looking for a MURDERER with a very specific sort of MO, she would run directly to the fairy tales expert she found and tell her. You’d think if you suddenly got promoted, maybe, just maybe, you’d follow some rules of investigation for like a few minutes, or at least ask your fellow investigatory persons their opinions and not just run off repeatedly till you get kicked back to normal patrol. Both fairy tales and police work tend to have rules. Rules apparently made to be broken repeatedly like your squad car isn’t being tracked.

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I haven’t read Hen Wen my favorite Grimm’s tale, “The Mouse, the Bird, and the Sausage,” where everyone learns about appreciating the skill sets of others through gruesome deaths. We all have our talents.

“The chilling sound of cardboard on cardboard.”

9. The Cellar – Natasha Preston

So, in theory this book has an interesting plot. I did not know it was possible to making being kidnapped, stored in a basement, and forced to watch romantic comedies alongside three other kidnapping victims boring, but, this book was quite boring so it is possible. He names them after flowers! He shops for pastel cardigans and freakishly boring shoes! Summer wants to see her boyfriend and her mom! The dude who kidnapped them has childhood issues related to his mother and the concept of whoredom! Surprises, all the time. There’s no grit here. On paper, all of the parts of being kidnapped and raped by a psycho are terrible, but without heart or grit or any realistic personalities involved, it’s just not engaging…not even during the pivotal moments where some flowers don’t work out and he murders them in front of everyone. Somehow, that is also boring.

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Peregrine and Merricat put themselves in the Pigloo, it’s a much more interesting form of captivity than what was in this book because they tried to get out, cutely, gave up, and then I lifted the Pigloo off of them and they managed not to forget who they were or anything.

“We’re in for a hell of a lot of trouble this morning.”

12. Savage Season – Joe R. Lansdale

The first Hap and Leonard! And of course the plot of the first season when they made the show that was evilly cancelled (I love that show). So, if you are Hap, then you have a hard time letting go of Trudy, your ex who moved on while you were in Leavenworth (“all her ex-husbands go there”) and also killed your rescued bird, the one you rescued as a couple. It is not a questionable decision to move on from your dude when he goes to prison for draft-dodging, it is questionable to murder birds, so, Trudy is not cool. But she might know where some money is and just needs a little help to get it out of the Sabine River, a river Hap knows quite well. Leonard also does not like Trudy and knows she is utterly full of shit, but will not let Hap get into trouble on his own. Leonard is the best kind of friend – beyond being helpfully loyal he has lots of fighting skills, is funny, and also happens to be the reason I occasionally get strong cravings for Nilla Wafers and Dr. Pepper (especially now that I am asthmatic-isolating and working at home due to the assault on breathing that is COVID-19). Are these times when I wish I had lots of fighting (or normal breathing) skills? Perhaps.

Anyway, anyone worth their salt (Leonard) knows that this scheme to get the drowned money out of the Sabine River with Trudy and her two-bit former radical dipshit gang is going to go further south than East Texas. But it’s fun ride while it does, as usual. This would be a set of police reports I would’ve loved to read.

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With Danger Crumples, all seasons are savage and no scheme goes swimmingly.

It’s only the haunted VHS that doesn’t get eaten by the VCR. They’re in league.

29. Ring – Koji Suzuki

In the interest of full disclosure, despite my long term horror movie fan status, the US version of this movie scared me. I do not like the idea of some wet dead child violating my TV. So essentially when reading this I was overjoyed to find out that doesn’t happen.

It was still scary and the beginning was tense and creepy and totally made me think that truly terrifying crawling out of the TV deal was still going to be a thing, but, no. It was much better plotted (no surprise, really, since it’s the original, but I had to work backwards because I didn’t know it was a book till 2009) and I have to say I enjoyed the extra medical and research-based angles instead of being given too much opportunity to worry about the survival of the kid and his creepy little proclamations like in the US movie. Sometimes, I worry about how often children are used as pawns and shortcuts to emotions in movies…and in real life. However, I did really like the reveal of what the “child” really was in this book.

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Salem is still a bit of a skittish pig, so he would not be up for The Ring or Ringu without several protective blankets and maybe smashing the TV so no wet dead kids could climb out of it.

Land of enchantment and tentacle enhancement.

71. American Elsewhere – Robert Jackson Bennett

One hundred pages in, I really thought I was going to like this book a lot. There’s a very David Lynch-but-clear style to the beginning. Mona leaves one weird town for another, more 1950s looking town in the middle of nowhere New Mexico aka Wink. She’s kind of a grumpy character and has some unfinished business with her mother…way more than she thought.

Wink is weird for a reason, an otherworldly reason, but it also has a roadhouse and some seriously trippy woods, so I kept getting reminded of Twin Peaks. And to an extent, it would be nice if there was more Twin Peaks than H.P. Lovecraft because maybe things would’ve stayed on the strange and narrow.

I mean, I love a good abandoned lab and a place where the boundaries between worlds are thin, but there was just way too much here. Way too many words and pages and to an extent, characters with tentacles. And I have to say, in the end, Mother was not that formidable of an adversary. She’s definitely not more scary than Mom from Mom’s Friendly Robot Company.

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The face of an otherworldly and very weird guinea pig- Finny.

“A million candles burning for the love that never came”

60. The Silent Women – Sara Blaedel

Online dating leads to brutal assaults that women are blaming themselves for, in part because they put no parameters on what they were agreeing to and they were the kind of women who were targeted because they were more likely to blame themselves for being left bleeding and battered in plastic cuffs, alone.

The main victim even has the issue of her mother having basically suppressed her having any kind of life on her own and so when she does try and rebel and it leads to her being brutally assaulted, it really limits her hope. It was nice to watch the Danish police push this victim into therapy and to not to blame herself, and to encourage her to assert some independence even when it came as a result of an act that requires support to recover from. It was also very familiar to me based on my current work to see that dry resignation that comes from knowing that there are many sides to sharing one’s story in the media, especially when her mother could talk to them too…and her rapist could be closer than she knew.

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Just imagine Twiglet and Pammy in rain coats in the dark so they seem more cover appropriate.

They got in their own way.

93. We Went to the Woods – Caite Dolan-Leach

I thought this was going to be a thriller, so now when I see the phrase “slow burning” and it’s not a movie, I’m now going to be more concerned. For me, this never caught fire. There were just smoldering embers that never went one way or another because the people stoking those embers were too self-righteous and it was all snuffed out before they even kindled a flame. Insecurities don’t burn or really give me much of a thrill and I got tired of listening to them play out like they were supposed to be intriguing. Ooh, look, jealousy. Never seen that in a carefully crafted friend group before.

The narrator, Mack, a woman who has done something horrible in public, is now running from social media critique and finds some rich people who want to go off the grid like it’s some cute Thoreau throwback but better because they’re doing it and they’re so awake to the suffering of the earth and have enough money to pretend the barter system is clever and amusing. The main thing going for Mack is that she’s not as insufferable as the two main persons behind the “Homestead,” Beau and Louisa, but she’s bad enough.

Mack’s desperate to really be included and belong with these rich weirdos who want to artisanally make food and pretend to be polyamorous and do some eco-terrorism, and yet she was the most relatable when she wanted to go home for Christmas. Sure, once she got there she was unable to stop herself from judging her working class family and their iceberg lettuce salad even though she knows that’s what will be there, but, at least she realized she wanted that and also cared about that poor dog. Everyone else was too busy being smug and unrealistic enough to think their “principles” were real and not just a passing phase they’d ditch when it got old – or nature took its revenge on their ideas about going out to terrorize in snowstorms.

Honestly, I wanted to know what happened to the goat. For all the randomly included information about how they were homesteading, nobody mentioned winter fortification for that goat they got. The goat needed a winter bed, did anyone set that shit up? Deal with parasites? Granted, parasites are technically organic, but, seriously, when your bullshit collective is collapsing under the weight of its own pretensions, the goat still needs to be taken care of. The goat didn’t ask for this and is also probably better at terrorizing because goats aren’t bound by human laws.

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Snuffy also does not eat iceberg lettuce, but she doesn’t care if you do. She has her blankies and her own treats and is also not bound by human laws.

 

Mater Tenebrarum

65. Sweetheart – Chelsea Cain

She’s out! She’s got a copycat! She’s hip, she’s cool, she’s 45…maybe not the last bit. She is running around in Portland. In Sweetheart, the pace picks up even more than in Heartsick in no small part because Gretchen the Beauty Killer escapes and has more than enough ability to recapture the allure she had that led to the torturous trauma she laid on Det. Archie Sheridan back in the day. Even while he and Susan Ward, punky but flawed reporter, are investigating a new killer – who left bodies in Gretchen’s old body dumping site (geez). It’s a little less gruesome than Heartsick, but it read faster for me, and just made me keen to continue reading this series. I do like a fast, rainy read.

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Merricat was always a snappy little sweetheart. She didn’t murder anyone that I know of though.

I did wonder what would’ve happened if any of them had been wearing Doc Martens. Those are like indestructible.

31. The Bachman Books: The Long Walk – Richard Bachman

This is definitely one of my favorite Stephen King works. It’s the best of the Bachman books and displays that weird line that he’s so good at skirting between the terrifying and the everyday.

The Long Walk’s title is literal and much more than it seems. In an alternate version of Maine, teenage boys walk and walk and walk. They all have their reasons for participating, they all have different levels of endurance, and as they keep going through blisters and their shoes falling apart and madness the reader learns more about the world they’re currently living in and it made me more and more anxious as I read. It’s a story of endurance and a totally modern horror.

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Horace is ready.

They definitely ate well in this one.

54. Hotel Paradise – Martha Grimes

In Hotel Paradise, the narrator has family around, but is basically seen as underfoot if she isn’t doing her job at the resort, serving her mother’s food to the guests. She becomes obsessed with the death of another 12 year old in the area 40 years earlier and spends the story unraveling what really happened, while also providing a carefully drawn picture of the area she’s in and the people who inhabit it with their weird proclivities and willingness to live in a dying resort town. There were several mentions of tomato aspic. Aspic to me is one of the more confusing things anyone has ever tried to eat, perhaps that’s not a true mystery, but I digress.

The ending isn’t very neat and tidy, and that may have a lot to do with this being the first book in a series. I didn’t know if was part of a series when I read it, so, it just seemed familiar to me as someone else who had to create and solve their own mysteries because no one else was around.

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After Merricat passed, Peregrine got choosier about her friend-pigs, and maybe indulged her investigative streak a little more dangerously than one would expect.