Rachel Smith's Blog: Guinea Pigs and Books, page 58

“I don’t see any other handy takeout corpses around here.”

92. The Day Is Dark – Yrsa Sigurdardottir

I have read a couple of books lately that involve Greenland and as I am a fan of stories like The Thing and scared of latent bacterial diseases that are definitely going to come out of the permafrost and kill me off if I finally get to move somewhere I can breathe without my allergies being a major daily concern…well, this book worked for me. It’s bleak and there are several unlikable characters, even if none of them is an alien-infected dog.

It’s another story of Thora, the lawyer who gets to do more than most lawyers I’ve heard of, traveling to Greenland because of a possible failed operation and some missing workers. Is this still monetarily viable for the company? That is, um, not intriguing to me at all, but the rest of it was. There was a lot of cold, messing around with bones (not the best idea here), a dead guy in a freezer, some elements that were supernatural via religious ideas, and a lot of unpleasant conversation. It also touched on how awful it is to be the odd one out in a group of workers, so, much is covered. Oh, and Thora packed like a total moron for the trip while trashed. Nice. Very human.

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In this herd of golden pigs – Horace, Ozma, Finny, and ultimate ruler Peregrine, everyone was an odd one and that’s why they were all so wholly lovable as a group.

“The world’s most pissed-off snow cone!”

75. Snowblind – Christopher Golden

In Coventry, everybody gets twitchy before a snowstorm. Because in that one big snowstorm, a lot of people died and a lot of people saw things that didn’t make sense. Like white walkers, basically. I kept picturing the scenes from the early seasons of Game of Thrones where that White Walker with the beard and no shirt kept showing up alone. I can tell you from much experience with the public, if some dude is wandering around shirtless, some bad or stupid shit’s about to go down. Granted, in Snowblind, it is not established whether or not the ice demons represented wear shirts. They made quick appearances when they dragged Isaac out of that window or just creepily peeped in, so, they could have been wearing shirts.

Anyway, everyone’s lives have changed as a result of that one big snowstorm and now there’s some ghosty weirdnesses happening and “the one that got away” for Isaac’s brother Jake, Miri, feels pulled back to Coventry. Everybody’s got to reconverge for the next big storm. And…it was okay.

I did not get as drawn into Snowblind as I did Ararat (the only other Golden I’ve read that isn’t a Buffy story) even though there were some very similar themes running around in the snow. The threat in Snowblind didn’t seem as threatening for some reason, which, since I’m me is probably because nobody did any research…or those ice demons were wearing shirts.

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Snuffy is on alert for any and all snow monsters – shirtless or wisecracking or not.

They probably needed a montage here.

54. Frostbite – Richelle Mead

Ski trip! When I was in middle school it was not at a vampire academy, of course, however, our ski trip was only for the day and it was supposed to be a reward- as opposed to a way to keep students safe from an amassing bad vampire attack. For me, it was not a reward because I did not understand skiing in several ways. I definitely french fried when I should have pizzad and could not for the life of me get the hang of that rope thing that pulls you up the hill. Thankfully I had other friends who got bored easily and we pretended we had the money to play video games for a good part of the day. The Moroi and dhampirs of the Vampire Academy series don’t even find the video game room. They’re too busy acting older than they are (like lots of high school kids) and scheming of how to fight back against the bad vampires, the Strigoi, who act like Danny Huston in 30 Days of Night, and getting their romantic feelings all torn asunder.

Rose did not irritate me even half as much in this sequel as she did in Vampire Academy. I guess she’s sort of growing up, sort of, or I’m less concerned with teenage ridiculousness. Either way, I did enjoy reading this one and when the foundations have already been set there’s room to move around. Even her being jealous of her tutor Dmitri’s having a lady friend who he could maybe end up guarding or end up with romantically didn’t seem overwrought. And the vampire court stuff that I mostly find pretty dull was not as intrusive, most likely thanks to the actions of some very impulsive novice guardians who almost get themselves killed. They also french fried when they should have pizzad.

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Peregrine and Merricat would find the blankets in the ski lodge and never come out. Skiing antics are not for these ladypigs.

We are using the zed word.

31. Coldbrook – Tim Lebbon

To use blurbesque language- this was a very compelling zombie tale that kept me up at night. In other words, it’s a mass market paperback, so I ended up reading about 200 pages in one night and about 130 the next so I could finish it on my days off. The characters were interesting enough that I wanted to follow them through their various actions to the end soon and not over a period of many, many days.

I am always keen on secret labs and somehow this one managed to have the secret experiments not be on humans…on this earth. There are multiple earths, alternate universes, etc. in this book and for once it didn’t bother me that much. I know it’s a normal sci fi trope, but sometimes, like on TV in the past few years, it gets overused and seems lazy, to the point where I wait each new time I hear it for someone to mention the world without shrimp. In this story it’s the catalyst and things go to shit pretty quickly (and no shrimp are involved).

Another thing I liked was that everyone who had access to guns wasn’t suddenly good with them. Many things that occurred were not too ridiculous to ring true and the ending was only mildly hopeful. Mildly!

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Horace and Danger Crumples assumed based on the title they’d just need to amass fleece blankets.

Slightly fewer emotions than Stake Land

47. 13 Bullets – David Wellington

The vampires in David Wellington’s vampire tales are gritty. They have the shark teeth, terrible attitudes, and they are not going to talk anyone’s ear off. I respect that. It’s nice reading about vampires that aren’t looking for beautiful teenagers. And making the main vampire hunters a state trooper who is kinda grumpy and a US Marshall who is…also pretty grumpy puts the narrative in a place to be action forward, which is awesome.

I read Wellington’s zombie trilogy before I knew these existed and technically I like that better, but, Laura Caxton is truly fun to follow around and formidable but not infallible against the vampire threat in Pennsylvania. She’s a solid heroine and very believable as she ruins her relationship so she can learn to deal with the vampires everybody said were gone by the 1980s. Liars. Some of them went to Santa Carla and the others were wrong when they thought Pennsylvania would be an okay place to seduce a scientist.

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Murderface always has her skeptical face on when starting a new vampire series. Will it be gruesome? Will it make her want to buy a frock coat? Will it encourage her to sing “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” at karaoke?

48. 99 Coffins

Sometimes when archaeological digs find dead people it’s a good thing. They can sort out how epic women truly were in Viking society or uncover yet more great injustices done to people intended to be forgotten. Or, you can find the Union vampire corps from the Civil War and much can go to shit. Guess it’s important that the dead stay dead in these situations.

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Murderface knows how to fight vampires and keep the dead down, but, she is a queen in Pighalla, so, of course she knows stuff like that.

49. Vampire Zero

Who doesn’t want to visit scenic Centralia, Pennsylvania to find a vampire lair? Well, me, for one, I don’t think I could do anything but pass out and probably die there for several reasons. But it’s dangerous to healthy breathers too. Especially if you go underground. However, it is an excellent setting for any kind of confrontation or horror story because there’s no end to that fire. It will keep going and it will continue to be dangerous regardless of how many monologues about evil or the hunter becoming the hunted or even if someone just read all the side effects of asthma medications that you can’t take while also taking corticosteroids out loud…it will still be burning the earth out from underneath you. Just like fighting the vampires will take the interpersonal relationships out from underneath Laura Caxton. However, loneliness typically does not come with the side effect of a burning sensation. Thankfully.

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Murderface did not know what it was like to be alone. She couldn’t even nap by a stuffed turtle without Pickles wanting to be near her.

51. 23 Hours

Woo! Prison! What a wonderful place to be if you are A. a cop and B. surrounded by halfdeads and stalked by a vampire, like Caxton. On paper, kidnapping and torturing someone seems wrong and even doing it because they killed their family to get vampire attention still isn’t quite right…so, Caxton goes to prison. And Malvern, the oldest and bestest of the vampires, comes too so she can make sure Caxton answers her ultimatum. It’s like the bottle episode of the series and it was really fun.

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It was super hard to capture an individual picture of Murderface with my level of camera when she got the zoomies, so, this is her silently having fun.

3. 32 Fangs

The final confrontation. The whole enchilada would be the wrong idiom for this and yet, there I typed it. Anyway, what’s great about this ending as a reader is that Wellington made efforts to tie up loose ends AND provide way more backstory for the most formidable vampire he’s written. It makes for quite the set up, as does Laura’s past coming up against her current harder than hardened exterior from having to evade capture after that prison break. All in all, a fitting end to these five books of tales and a fitting end to one of the better vampire series for anyone not looking for romance or teen conversations.

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When the vampire hunting is over, the napping begins. Murderface’s work here is done.

 

“Good evening, I’m Hugh Downs. And I’m Barbara Walters- and This Is 20/20.”

16. The Walls Around Us – Nova Ren Suma

The Year of the Pig is not over yet, but for my pigs it has been the year of Pig Death. Granted, one was terminal illness and two were really old age-related if you want to get down to it, but still. Three. I really should be reading and writing about A Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Newton Peck, as an aspirational thing or an impossible new year’s resolution, but, that would just be a title thing and a thing I want in year form. Instead, I have chosen a magical realism tale about a wrongfully imprisoned teen, her rightfully imprisoned cellmate, and the conscience-less ballerina who made their meeting happen…right before everyone in the child prison died and got all ghosty. Spoiler. Everyone dies. That’s a life spoiler.

The Walls Around Us is also a reminder of how talent makes people jealous. Even other talented people who are just insecure and need to realize that another talented person existing, especially one who does not have the advantages of money and support, is not going to hurt them. Advantages hurt people all the time, the ones who don’t have them, anyway.

Being born into or forced into a bad situation hurts too, which is why Amber the murderer in the story gained my sympathy to a large extent. Plus I totally get why she wants to dominate the book cart in juvie. Ori, who gets thrown into juvie for a crime she did not commit, well, she wasn’t born into good circumstances either and she is a massively talented ballerina. So she apparently has to pay, so that Violet the haver of all advantages and also technically a talented ballerina doesn’t have anyone to outshine her or make it clear she’s a criminal around.

The language in this book is beautiful and poetic in a way that did not bother me for once. I believe it’s because of how grounded it seemed. It didn’t seem like Nova Ren Suma was trying to avoid character development or the realities of these characters so she could wax lyrical about guilt or make life in prison an escapist fantasy (suck it, Suckerpunch), but it’s still a very unsettling story, both in plot and reading experience.

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Also unsettling – how perfectly Ozma posed with paintings of herself, even at five years old. She was too cute. Too cute.

“Tell me will it be sweet New Year’s Eve or do I fear a New Year’s Evil…”

96. New Year’s Evil – Michael August

It seems this is an overly easy play on words to make. Everybody’s done it from Eazy-E to the 1980 slasher film with the best opening song not to have a wide release full soundtrack to back it up to this 1994 entry in the Z*Fave Scream series which doesn’t even really have much anticipation in relation to the holiday. It easily could have happened on any other holiday when teenagers usually have parties. Or, like an equinox, or any exciting day for astrology. I mean, there’s no anticipation about who is going to secure the beer, if there will be murders in different time zones, or whether or not there will be a kiss from a super-crush at midnight. They also did not paint the town.

It starts with goody two-shoes Tess Ryan trying to buy candles for a ritual the new girl says will keep the local ne’er do well off of her and her friends’ backs. The new girl is from New Orleans and is apparently very, very old for someone attending high school.

Tess wants mostly normal 90s teen things – to date the boy her father looks at like he’s the one beating kids up (He wears ripped jeans. And black! Oh horror of suburban horrors.), to hang out with her friends the bubbly one and that other nerd boy, and to research witchcraft at the local library when it seems like something’s up. It’s tubular.

I’ll be honest, their solution to witchcraft-based attacks is a little weak, but, the witch did manage to take most of the good books out of the library before they got anything useful. Sinister shit.

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When it came to Horace and Ozma, she really didn’t have to worry about whether she’d get her NYE kiss either.

Delightful

70. All Creatures Great and Small, 21. All Things Bright and Beautiful, 37. All Things Wise and Wonderful – James Herriot

James Herriot’s series of memoirs about being a new veterinarian in Yorkshire are some of the most pleasant volumes I’ve ever read. It took me a while to realize there were only ever mild through lines and that it didn’t matter to me. Some stories stick out more than others, for instance one about a hematoma in a pig’s ear that could be in this one but also could be in another of the series, but there’s always a strong sense of Herriot’s commitment to animals and his prickly journey getting to know the people, livestock, and pets of the Yorkshire Dales.

Having grown up around farm animals in spurts, I was saved from having much direct contact with the complications of calving or much beyond seeing cattle and pigs up close, so I don’t have any direct stories of large animal veterinary activities I saw up close, but, if I wasn’t allergic to everything outside and inside and also scared by certain animals with hairless tails, I would probably have gone that route in my career. Investigating problems, figuring solutions to weird things out, and being useful are all aspects of both veterinary medicine and librarianship and these stories are chock full of all of those things with a large dose of gruff English farmers. And drinking. And also a lot of off road-style driving. Some World War II and getting married and Helen sounds cool. But I will never forget that pig ear hematoma.

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The reactions to there being no guinea pigs in this series run from escape (Merricat, Horace) to begrudging solemnity (Peregrine, Danger Crumples).

You want it darker. We kill the flame.

26. Black Skies – Arnaldur Indridason

So the first entry in the Inspector Erlendur series I read was not focused on Inspector Erlendur…oops. Sigurdur Oli, the somewhat of a jackass partner to Erlendur is the one investigating here and he was actually pretty easy to follow for me, since he likes US things like baseball and US TV and rock and roll, so if you’re from the US and get arrested in Iceland, try to find this fictional character so you’ll feel more comfortable. And, weirdly, he gets into quite the to-do by going to his college reunion – which also is a popular plot line in the US even though for us it’s usually high school reunions because more traumatic things happened there for most US people. Things that make you want to claim you invented Post-Its.

However, this is Iceland so instead of Romy and Michelle’s bubbly awesomeness, the familiarity of the reunion plot concept is broken by extortion, an outdoors excursion that ended in murder, a swinger’s group gone very wrong, and, the kicker, this other story line involving a homeless man who was abused as a child making a leather mask so he can murder his tormentor using a very old school method of slaughtering calves. This shit is bleak. I’m very sure Romy and Michelle could also have helped with their on the spot ingenuity – perhaps a newly choreographed dance with Allen Cumming to Leonard Cohen’s last single “You Want It Darker” would have helped via massive distraction, but that’s not how it works in Reykjavik.

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This is the book Thorfinnur’s name came from. It means thunderous Finn, and since he succeeded Finny mostly because he looks like Finny and he has turned out to be very, very loud and demanding like Finny, it’s appropriate.

“Perhaps man’s highest cultural achievement is the horse head bookend.”

71. Cold Earth – Sarah Moss

What if the archaeological dig is haunted? By personal failure? Could you dig it? Or, as is more accurate in terms of this book, can you make it? As in survive on classic novels, crackers, and sad noodles? While still pretending that your excavation matters? Can you listen to the jackass who didn’t check to see if the satellite phone they brought even works tell you not to “disturb the site” while you are developing scary symptoms of being deathly cold and it has a shelter?

I’m asking many questions, but many questions are raised by this book – especially at the end. It is a bit of a confusing ending and I can’t tell if I felt like it was rushed or if it was just too optimistic when throughout the book they keep mentioning a virus that’s spreading in not-remote Greenland areas. It seemed like when the internet went down whole hog that virus might be way more than just something to stoke their isolated paranoia.

Also, to establish my baseline for how reading this felt, Nina was soooo annoying, and she’s both the voice allowed the most space and the main one hearing and seeing ghosts. AND she’s not even an archaeologist or an anthro student, so, somehow, she wins the annoying olympics without bringing much expertise. I mean, she has expertise, but a lot of it is about food – which is not helpful on a remote dig when the “food” is dwindling. But I’m definitely not on Ruth’s super-bitch side either, or Iowan Jim’s (nope, he’s not a similar Iowan to me, he had like no fight in him), or optimistically painting terrified Catriona’s, or agreeable Ben’s, definitely not Mr. Lack of Preparation/Don’t Touch That Turf Mr. Yianni’s. I am on the side of the sheep who kept randomly bothering them. Those sheep were on to something about the intersection of curiosity and knowing your limits. I need to know if that virus was zoonotic in case the sheep didn’t make it.

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Ozma and Peregrine demonstrate their work methods in this dramatic recreation of an archaeological dig on the couch. When you find “bones,” put your little teefs on them.