Rachel Smith's Blog: Guinea Pigs and Books, page 61

Young’uns. They exist.

21. The Nightmare Man – Tessa Krailing

The protagonist in this extraordinarily short novel is extremely young. SO young. So it doesn’t read like other Point Horror and the title is more like “I need a nightlight because I’m 10 and scared” nightmare than like mind-ripping teenage brutality… because that’s what all the other Point Horror novels are like, mind-ripping teenage brutality. This reads like some kids snuck into a movie they were too young to see, but, not really because it’s just a fine little story about ghosts and taxidermy and a pond set in the UK.

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“I believe I was promised mind-ripping brutality.” – Duncan

Mixtape:

1. Bakom Varje Fura – Finntroll

2. A Stroll through Hive Manor Corridors – The Hives

3. They Only Come out at Night – Dance with the Dead

4. The Light at the End (Effect) – Uniform

5. Cold, Cold Rain – Danzig

6. Bottomless Pit – King Dude

7. New Dawn Fades – Joy Division

8. Still Evolving – Josh Freda

9. Sister Doom Face – Harglow

10. Sons of Thunder – High on Fire

11. Midnattens Widunder – Finntroll

12. That House – Dance with the Dead

13. To Here Knows When – My Bloody Valentine

“It would be easier to stop Karswell’s demon than a woman with her mind made up.”

36. The Crush II – Jo Gibson

Carla, main narrator, would like you to know that she is plain. So plain. She has glasses! How astonishingly plain of her.

Anyway, now that we know that Carla is plain, we should talk about psychopath killer Judy and popular musician Michael. Oh, and this is the second book and I haven’t read the first, but I get the impression they might just follow a bit of a formula. You see, every girl that dates Michael gets killed – by Judy, the Cupid Killer. But! At the beginning of The Crush II, Michael gets out of protective custody at the hospital and doesn’t invite Judy to his welcome home party so she drives off a cliff after leaving a letter explaining that she is the Cupid Killer and Michael isn’t. Very clever, Judy.

This book actually was pretty amusing, you see all the main kids work at a teenager music bar that serves fruit drinks (mmhmm) and it’s a really easy place for Michael to realize he loves plainass Carla, but then go out with Heidi and her showbiz connections instead. And then, when Carla takes off her glasses for a movie part and starts wearing flowy separates because of the same movie part, Michael realizes he loves her again, and then allows himself to be nearly date raped by Vera. When Carla rescues him from that situation, sort of, he realizes he loves her again – only to have his childhood best friend show up and seduce him! Of course, Miss Showbiz and Vera have been killed at this point by Judy’s ghost? A copycat Cupid Killer? Nope. It all becomes clear after childhood best friend turned seductress gets murdered and Michael gives his class ring to Carla! Plain old, unmurderable Carla. Well, she gets stabbed – Judy killed a hitchhiker and stuck her in her car, but she lives so she and Michael can be “engaged to be engaged.” Barf. Put your glasses back on Carla, then Judy won’t recognize you when she inevitably escapes from the mental hospital.

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Ozma is the Michael of my herd, she’s like, so popular with the boys. So popular.

Mixtape:

1. Temptation – New Order

2. Empathy Boxes – All of Them Witches

3. Heart On – Eagles of Death Metal

4. Garbage City – Hanni El Khatib

5. The Cardinal Sin – Dead Can Dance

6. You’re Toast – Electric Six

7. Don’t Ask Me to Love You – The Eighties Matchbox B-Line Disaster

8. We Hit a Wall – Chelsea Wolfe

9. Funtime – Iggy Pop

10. March to the Altar – Terrortron

11. Monday Hunt – Carpenter Brut

12. Dressed to Kill – Dance with the Dead

13. Future Persuasion – Electric Citizen

14. Down with the King – Midnight Force

15. Rats in Paradise – The Birthday Party

16. Whorehoppin – Eagles of Death Metal

 

Holding cells are where the Halloween magic really happens.

35. Amy – Samantha Lee

British book about US Halloween, excuse me, the States’ Hallowe’en, bring on the yokel language and stuff that doesn’t happen! Follow that up with words we don’t use and more hick language, add one ghost, and you have Amy. It’s short. And kinda sad. For every biscuit (cookies are a bad idea to give out for trick or treat, they crumble and nobody said they were little packs of Oreos when they were walking around carrying cookies in their sheet-based outfits) and holdall that don’t work, there’s a “Land sakes!” that made me laugh. Also, like every imaginary small town story, there’s just one big area for the holding cells that need to, um, hold, the biker who comes through town to solve mysteries, the town drunk, and not the perpetrators of evil dressed as vampires – twin teen boys… or the person who really is responsible for the drowned ghost running around in a sheet full of cookie crumbs.

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Pickles would’ve been all right if they gave out cilantro on Halloween, but no one does that either.

Mixtape:

1. Lone – Chelsea Wolfe

2. All Hallows’ Eve – The Heartwood Institute

3. Pursuit – All of Them Witches

4. Hear the Sirens Scream – Electric Wizard

5. We’ve Seen the Blood – The Mangled Dead

6. Bride of the Devil – Electric Six

7. Revenged – Repeated Viewing

8. A Face in the Fog – Joel Grind

9. Blue Harvest – All of Them Witches

10. Get Out – Wojciech Golczewski

11. Walkin’ on the Sidewalks – Queens of the Stone Age

12. Hexagram – Graham Reznick

13. Diablerie – Windhand

14. All Hallows’ (Epilogue) – Ogre & Dallas Campbell

15. Two Spirit – Chelsea Wolfe

Miranda and the Owl

50. The Ghost Next Door – Wylly Folk St. John

This book is from 1972 and it is very much for persons on the young end of young’un but printed in the form of a YA book when YA wasn’t entirely a thing and juveniles might be keen to read something melancholy with a smidge of the supernatural.

The children in the book were nice enough to follow around trying to find an owl that Miranda, lord of the neighborhood – well, not really, her aunt just hasn’t been able to get past or through her grief about Miranda’s death, and her aunt made with “love in its eyes.” There’s a seance, which is immediately pegged as being to mislead the poor aunt, there are notes Miranda left behind, there’s Miranda’s half-sister who seems to be communicating with Miranda somehow, and it turns into a nice little semi-cozy mystery instead of Miranda sucking everyone into hell because of her untimely death. That could wait till the 1980s.

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Merricat, haver of an untimely death via liver cancer at age 2, says we’ll be dragging everyone to hell at noon.

Mixtape:

1. Anonymous Letter – Ogre and Dallas Campbell

2. The Deadenin’ – Legendary Shack Shakers

3. Lost in Time – Midnight Force

4. Grey Garden – Windhand

5. The Otherworld – All of Them Witches

6. Night Child – Electric Wizard

7. Near Dark – Dance with the Dead

8. Ghosts House – Witchcraft

9. The Guest at the Window – Pentagram Home Video

10. Goodbye Gemini – Blood Ceremony

11. Ghost Boy – Widowspeak

12. Circumradiant Dawn – Dead Can Dance

13. Blood Promise – Swans

14. Things Present, Things Past – Blood Ceremony

Bavmorda of the sea

43. The Surfer – Linda Cargill

There are very committed swimmers in this book. Even the one who turns out to be an ancient witch – she curses families and she surfs very well. At night. When no one is around except for the main character, Jessie, who hangs out on a creaking pier she’s not supposed to and gets way more than she bargained for as a result.

There’s some toxic, toxic relationships in this book too. Swimmers in toxic families and friendships. Although, if your toxic friend makes it clear she can control the weather, it does make her much, much harder to ditch. They try though, there is much driving around. So much driving around. They drive almost as much as they swim or talk about swimming or the ocean.

It’s also a book where things seem like they’re going to follow a somewhat solid storyline and then they just fall apart all over the place instead like a badly glued popsicle stick sculpture. Sure it seemed sound, but then it very much wasn’t.

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Peregrine’s looking for the sense-making plot line that has been cast into the sea.

Mixtape:

1. Diamond in the Witch House – Mastodon

2. Attack of the Ghost Riders – The Raveonettes

3. Say a Spell – The Birthday Party

4. Witch’s Hammer – King Dude

5. Possession – Samhain

6. Fiskarens Fiende – Finntroll

7. Teenage Thunder – Sigue Sigue Sputnik

8. I Sat by the Ocean – Queens of the Stone Age

9. Forget That You’re Young – The Raveonettes

10. Silver Chain – Rowland S. Howard

11. Stand Inside Your Love – Smashing Pumpkins

12. Back to the Old House – The Smiths

13. Dream in Red – Murder By Death

14. Big Sky – Reverend Horton Heat

Bart Simpson is correct.

34. When Darkness Calls – Janet E. Gill

As Bart Simpson once said, “All the best bands are affiliated with Satan.” And like most things, the Simpsons writers are correct about this. But, Janet wants her reader to assume that being affiliated with Satan is equivalent to being affiliated with Nazis by casually incorporating the swastika into random situations where they only needed to be present if these teen Satanists were also white supremacists…and considering their group was multiethnic, they were not white supremacists. The not-Nazi religions and groups that used that symbol and slightly different versions of it prior to its co-opting for racist bullshit were not and are not Satanic (it’s just really hard to picture any type of Buddhists caring about Satan, amongst other reasons this made no sense), so it’s being used as a lazy shortcut to these black wearing teens being evil and frankly, saying they’re Satanists who wear Baphomet pendants to school is enough to lazily do that.

This book was essentially Don’t Make Me Go Back, Mommy, teen edition, but even that ridiculous, debunked, horrorshow of a children’s book warning about teachers and daycare and rabbits (it’s the rabbits that should’ve tipped everyone off, clearly, but maybe also the capes) didn’t equivocate Satanists and white supremacists like shorthand for being seriously evil. Like really, really, really evil, you guys. They smoke pot and encourage this poor new girl who wants to get in her new school’s student government to cheat on her boyfriend, but with Peter Drake and his magical disappearing car, not just Satan. They also force her to go to a heavy metal concert! She wears white and pink to a heavy metal concert! What a rebel, she’s just a Satanist of the individualist type and doesn’t even know it. And then gets fake chicken blood all over her outfit – which, yeah, that’s not cool. I hate it when there’s sticky shit at any concert, because the floor is already sticky, we don’t need more mess and definitely don’t need to endure music we don’t like to fit in and “give us [the awfully pushy Satanists who apparently never saw the Indiana Jones films that make it clear the goals of the WWII Nazis were not to eat chips, smoke pot, worship Satan, listen to shit music, and rule a high school] a chance.” The horror of what one does to be allowed to fundraise and go on the class trip to DC.

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Finny, the antichrist of my home, says those teens were always going to peak in high school anyway.

Mixtape:

1. A Witch Stole Sam – Mark Korven

2. Sinners – The Cramps

3. N.I.B. – Black Sabbath

4. I Hear Satan – Dax Riggs

5. Am I Demon – Danzig

6. Louis Cyphre – Burning Tapes

7. I’m the Devil – Electric Six

8. Demons from Hell – Ice Dragon

9. Amaranth – Windhand

10. Kill You – Dethklok

11. Hel Vete – Finntroll

12. Fire Fire (Live) – Motorhead

13. Black Mass – Electric Wizard

14. The Hooves of My Lord – Ice Dragon

You have died of exposure.

42. Driver’s Dead – Peter Lerangis

Move into a new house and there’s a dead kid in the closet. Geez. At least he’s not literally in the closet, but, learning to drive and navigate a new town is bad enough without all that moaning about his untimely death and whatnot…although maybe if Kirsten wasn’t accepting help from the creepers responsible for said untimely death he might not have as much reason to haunt her closet and fliers and help her find his floppy disk-based diary so she can learn more secrets that will scare her into helping him out with his unfinished business.

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Sorry, little Crumples, no one could teach you how to drive in any of the three towns you lived in because you were always too short with no forward vision.

Mixtape:

1. World In My Eyes – Depeche Mode

2. Always Crashing in the Same Car – David Bowie

3. The First Vietnamese War – The Black Angels

4. Phantom of the Motorway – The Mangled Dead

5. Hate Breeders – The Misfits

6. No Class(Live) – Motorhead

7. Bowels of the Beast – The Raveonettes

8. Into the Void – Black Sabbath

9. Mess of Wires – METZ

10. The Wretched – Nine Inch Nails

11. Carrion Flowers – Chelsea Wolfe

12. Way Abandon – Repeated Viewing

13. Surrender – The Duke Spirit

14. Walk Between the Lines – Witchcraft

15. Red Eyes and Tears – Black Rebel Motorcycle Club

“Shattering! Shivering! Shocking!”

37. Fan Mail – Nicole Davidson

Acting! Rivalry! Obsession! This was a fun read, if you ignore the descriptions of Randi and a few other things. Chris, the not at all stuck up actress and her plump, plain, supportive best friend Randi (see), get to hang out sometimes – but Chris has always been focused on her career and Randi’s always been able to accept and understand that. Now if only she could get a boyfriend. It’ll be hard now that she’s the lead in a horror film shooting in her hometown. She’s the lead, and her rival with a stage mother from hell isn’t.

And there is this one guy who has a bunch of pictures of her in his locker – pictures he took, pictures he cut out of the newspaper, but he’s not obsessive or anything, he has to wrestling championships to think about. If only those creepily obsessive photographs could lead to something… Well, they will, a misunderstanding of epic proportions and more creepy behavior. I’m in this tree outside your window, Chris, it’s totally normal and I’ll help you find the person trying to scare you with answering machine messages, blood on your mirror, and not drilling holes in that coffin you have to stay in for long enough to hyperventilate.

I’m beginning to find movie sets a very suspect location for teenagers. Some of them just can’t be professional and assume threats are just a PR stunt.

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Salem has his best friend the T-Rex to protect him, so, he’d be cool on film. Hire him, the 90s.

Mixtape:

1. Young Pros – Bass Drum of Death

2. Out of Line – The Bravery

3. I Am the Sun – Swans

4. You Don’t Know Me – The Butthole Surfers

5. LA Venice Bitch 80s – Carpenter Brut

6. Venom – Dance with the Dead

7. Posed to Death – The Faint

8. Grey Areas – Electric Six

9. Super Goo – The Cramps

10. Leave Me Alone – The Butthole Surfers

11. Evil La Girls – The Raveonettes

12. Rival – Black Rebel Motorcycle Club

13. Turbo Killer – Carpenter Brut

14. High School Roaches – Bass Drum of Death

15. Scrape – Chelsea Wolfe

16. Night Walks – Black Mountain

17. Close Your Eyes – Edward Bear

18. Forever the End – Burning Tapes

There should be a conversation heart that says, “No.”

11. Be Mine – Jane McFann

You didn’t notice me in class and I like you, therefore I will scare you and people you care about so that you will be vulnerable to me and my obsession. Rude. Why do any men feel entitled to women’s attention at all? It’s not theirs, not even on holidays when you might be able to make them think their boyfriend is creeping into their house to leave anonymous hearts on things.

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Horace’s method of hitting on ladypigs makes it impossible not to notice him, he’d just pretend to fall on them from the back of the couch. It was…a little obvious.

Mixtape:

1. In Your House – The Cure

2. You’re Mine – The Black Angels

3. Bedroom Hymns – Florence & The Machine

4. The Sky Is Falling – Queens of the Stone Age

5. I See Through You – Uncle Acid & the Deadbeats

6. Eva – Burning Tapes

7. Cut Me Loose – UNKLE

8. My Least Favorite Life – Lera Lynn

9. Save a Prayer – Eagles of Death Metal

10. Heartbeats Acoustic – Dick Valentine

11. Demented Mantra – Ogre & Dallas Campbell

12. Invader – Dance with the Dark

13. Are You Satisfied? – Reignwolf

14. For Blood – Bass Drum of Death

15. Vicious & Disgusting – Burning Tapes

An overreaction to tacky necklaces.

48. Twisted Summer – Willo Davis Roberts

Mistake one – going to Crystal Lake, I mean, haven’t these people heard about the camp?

Okay, so, location names that now mean something much different than they used to aside – Wait! This was originally published in 1998. She should have known better. Credit rescinded. – this story has more parallels with the concepts raised by Friday the 13th. The girl that got killed last summer had a bad reputation… but apparently everyone thinks she was murdered by some townie’s older brother, who is cool, but a poor townie, so of course he’s a great scapegoat. His name is Jason. I’m kidding. It’s Brody and he went immediately to jail even though he totally didn’t do it. I mean, his name is Brody, he very well could’ve done it, but if he did, main character Cici’s summer won’t be ruined and she won’t get Brody’s younger brother as a boyfriend either. Bummer.

Just so everything’s clear, this book is actually pretty well structured, unlike my review. It’s also got characters that are better developed than the ones in the first novel I read by Willo Davis Roberts, The Tarot Spell, which demonstrated just a giant dearth of female empowerment and so I was very glad this was better. The children deserved better.

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“Nobody thought about that association? Really? The ‘Final Friday’ had already come out,” Belvedere knows Jason is a household name for murder-reasons.

 

Mixtape:

1. The Guest at the Window – Pentagram Home Video

2. Chattox – All of Them Witches

3. Little Thing Gone Wild – Black Rebel Motorcycle Club

4. Bad People in a Bad Place Doing Bad Things – Repeated Viewing

5. Haydee – Burning Tapes

6. Rain Grey, Dark Sky – Brass Hearse

7. The Weeping Willows – Espectrostatic

8. Flower Phantoms – Blood Ceremony

9. The Dove & the Serpent – Devil Electric

10. Crux – Electric Citizen

11. Architecture for the Night – Harglow

12. Eye of the Storm – Dance with the Dead

13. Rabbit Run – Ogre and Dallas Campbell

14. A Dream about the Lake – Espectrostatic

15. Last Rays of Daylight – Ogre and Dallas Campbell

16. Damned if She Do – The Kills