Rachel Smith's Blog: Guinea Pigs and Books, page 63

All the Coopers can’t be Special Agent Dale Cooper.

68. Final Girls – Riley Sager

Xanax and grape soda. And Wine. And a boyfriend that South Park would’ve described as a ’90s guy – Chris, but in this case it’s Jeff. A baking blog. An expensive apartment in New York bought with the settlement funds from her friends’ deaths. That’s how Quincy makes it through being the final girl of a slasher-style cabin massacre. That and texts to and meetings with Coop, the cop who showed up. Until one of the other two final girls she’s aware of gets murdered…and the other one shows up at her building.

This was a fun thriller. It was also not fun, but them’s the brakes of massacre, anxiety, and PTSD depictions. It had a stellar ending, I was incredibly pleased as someone who has also had to deal with being a survivor of several abusive situations and doesn’t have a paid for expensive apartment and the ability to solely work on their blog instead of having a real job.

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Merricat never had to pay for anything either, but, she had serious grit and still works posthumously as a model.

ZZZZZzzzzzzzzz……….

17. The Boy Who Couldn’t Sleep and Never Had To – DC Pierson

This book reads like it was written by someone who is too cool for school. The initial impression I got from the blurb of it seeming like a magical realism sort of sci fi teenage romp well written enough to be literary fiction is really inaccurate.

The science fiction bits come in toward the end and they don’t make up for the lack of cleverness and ingenuity with tired tropes. There was also a lot of space taken up by the main character wondering if making friends with the weird kid will also make him weird. Um, duh, kid, that’s the whole point of hanging with the weird kid…getting out of the banality. If you don’t want that, keep hanging with the stupid cool kids. An unwilling protagonist who spends too much time debating the risk of letting an actual story happen is a sad, sad thing in fiction. Bottom line for me was feeling like I’ve read this story before with less pretentious prose.

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Belvedere would’ve put this book in the “rejected MFA imitations of more interesting genre fiction” section of his library.

“Where certain fungal infections are common…”

61. Come Closer – Sara Gran

Extremely short at 168 pages, and not a young adult book, this was a bit of a surprise take on possession – from the inside.

The demon has apparently been fond of Amanda since she was a young child but didn’t try to take full possession then. She waited. Then, once Amanda was basically getting her shit together, she pounced.

One of the amusing parts of the book involves the failure of self-help for Amanda. She finds Demon Possession Past and Present, a book that has a checklist and levels of how possessed one may be. As she becomes more and more possessed, she isn’t allowed to read books that might have helped her, she even finds that she’s burned several of them in her fireplace. The doctor recommended by her husband tells her to eat more salt and turns out to be possessed too – somehow salt makes the demon stronger in this story as opposed to being a purifying element and something demons can’t cross. The psychiatrist recommended by the doctor before she knows the doctor is possessed is also concerned as to why she wouldn’t want to be more active in her own life, taking control, doing weird stupid stuff that’s detrimental to her health and relationships but also more active…he’s possessed too.

And for once in a possession story, there’s no fight. No holy water. No “The power of Christ compels you!” Just a girl and the demon that tells her she’ll never leave her.

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Peregrine is the pig that will never leave me. She’s not even a demon; she’s just nice that way.

“The maiden’s waiting for her knight in shining corduroy.” – Creepshow

74. There’s Someone Inside Your House – Stephanie Perkins

This little slice and dice of teenagers has some interesting elements. It’s a pretty accurate depiction of high school in the Midwest, especially if you are different from the normies in any capacity. The inclusivity is a change of pace from most of what I’ve seen in YA that’s supposed to be horror even though this book isn’t really scary or thrilling. There is a lot of blood, so that’s interesting considering that it’s not particularly suspenseful. The best part of the whole thing really is the reasoning behind the killings. It’s also very small-town Midwest but deployed in a totally new way.

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Whoever’s in the house woke up Murderface. They better watch out or she’ll cute them to death.

“All good scientists are from Missouri: in other words, they should continually be saying, ‘Show me’.”

73. Unbury Carol – Josh Malerman

“Hell’s heaven” was uttered so, so, so many times that it distracted me from the plot. Everyone says it. The husband, the sheriff, the assassin, the outlaw, Rinaldo, the helper girl, the funeral director, some guy…I’m not entirely exaggerating. As we know, if something distracts me so much that I lead with it, I may not be entirely complimentary to the story.

One thing I will say, I believe Malerman spent a lot of time organizing the world he wanted to portray and yes, the Western can be a repetitive genre. Hell’s heaven.

There were definitely a lot of concepts that deserved a less distracting phrase interruption than “Hell’s heaven” or, the other one, “Shudders.” We have a greedy husband with a wife who has a condition where she looks dead but can still hear everything going on around her – and she’s rich. We have that wife’s lost love who totally screwed up – James Moxie, who went on to become a very famous outlaw and holed up on the other end of the “Trail” from where Miss Not Dead Carol lives.

We have an important journey, a very austere inventor mother who really comes through in an unexpected way, and an assassin with an interesting method of walking and he’s so evil he doesn’t even need a hat. And then there’s Rot, the fantastical character who continues to lead the good characters astray to hopeless places and the bad characters to what they need. I’m still not sure how I felt about that character and whether or not he was really necessary. At the end I definitely felt like he was just butting in randomly to delay the plot and it would’ve been tighter if he hadn’t. He definitely got in the way of the main scene that really needed to be there for the title character. Show, don’t tell, Malerman. Hell’s heaven.

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Ozma’s distinctive face makes her a guinea pig of certain distinction on any and all trails. She’s a sweet little legend in her own right.

Reindeer Hell

2. The Ritual – Adam Nevill

Wet. Cold. Brutal. The Ritual is a lovely book. I truly enjoyed reading it, but I do gravitate toward journey stories and when that journey ends up involving an ancient cemetery, metal, hooves, and a single person who keeps having to defend their life choices to their bitchy friends who are, in the end, kinda envious of their freedom and fortitude, I know I’m going to love it. And it was scary too.

Nevill’s description of that upper floor of the first creepy-ass cabin they ran into did my head in- it’s always better to describe the unnatural in increments – plus he said the sculpture’s tail was mouse-eaten and that is truly terrifying when coupled with the knowledge that the lost middle-aged men went into that cabin with wet jeans…and also came out with wet jeans and nightmares.

If being chilled to the bone and unable to get warm doesn’t scare you, then this won’t really work for you and you’ll probably get annoyed by the amount of environmental description but for me that worked very well. I also really, really liked the little old lady who doesn’t say anything. She’s pretty much my favorite character, even if she is technically against our protagonist.

If you’ve seen the movie, then what I just described might sound odd – because they pretty much took out all my favorite parts. The cabin sculpture’s not the same, the little old lady is missing, and so are most of the hooves and the metal and the cemetery (or maybe they found that but I don’t recall the super cool church that went with it). The movie is as pretty and full of trees as I expected, but, as per usual, the book is better.

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This is Finny. He has been turning to calcium from the inside while keeping the most feisty attitude long enough that I am pretty sure he is a mythological beast creature. Brutal.

Cremulator

30. From Here to Eternity – Caitlin Doughty

This one time, in the Houston airport (IAH), I realized that I did not have enough to read to get through all of the layovers and plane rides I was taking that day. I also realize that people with Kindles and Kindle apps do not have this problem. Paper is my jam, as the not-kids say, though, and I usually use plane rides as an excuse to try reading REALLY tiny print mass market paperbacks that I have trouble with otherwise. I found From Here to Eternity and was really surprised that I wasn’t going to have to give up and read The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck. Death book! Yay! Oh, and this time, I scared one of the flight staff people with my reading choice – she asked and I minimized what it was about with “Death” (there is a skull on the cover, a super cool Art Deco-looking skull) – this book isn’t scary, but, apparently being interested in death is uncomfortable for others on planes; just like being interested in reading about VD. Whatever.

From Here to Eternity introduced me to a couple of new deathy things I hadn’t heard of before and was really inspiring in a lot of ways. I find that reading about others’ rituals and ideas about ritualizing death and dealing with bodies makes me feel less intimidated by the whole idea. I’m not really an avoidant person anyway, but, it’s a very nice read and made me want to turn the altar for my guinea pigs into a version of the Buddhist death disco type memorial Doughty visited.

One extremely important portion (to me, anyway) of the book discussed a research project about completely composting bodies. I think that research will become very, very useful in the future and really it’s useful now. There’s a lack of space in so many places and composting is even more environmentally sound than cremation. During Doughty’s time there, they were very close to complete obliteration of the person. So, murderers, pay no attention.

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Pickles would’ve picked The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck and realized she didn’t need to read it. She had that down.

In the end, we are the walking dead.

58. Never Let Me Go – Kazuo Ishiguro

It’s good to know that no matter how removed from normal society you are, teenagers will still get jealous and petty. Even if those teenagers were solely created to feed the rest of the world’s need for fresh organs. Not surprisingly, Ishiguro tells the story of some clones with a lot more maudlin panache than my summary. It’s a very English read. There are pretty sentences, some stiff upper lipping, some pining, a slowly unwinding mystery, and a main character who never really gets what she needs – just like a lot of the vulnerable.

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As a guinea pig, Ozymandias knows a little bit about the possibility of being used for medical stuff.

“There’s been a murder almost everywhere in this house.”

75. Anna Dressed in Blood – Kendare Blake

It took me a bit to realize the head I was in was male. I’m so used to YA books with supernatural elements being told from female perspectives that it was a bit of a shock to figure out this was a young guy’s head. Also, he didn’t constantly think about boobs and changing his clothes, so how was I supposed to know? Anyway, the head belongs to Cas (Theseus Cassio) and his father was killed by a ghost. Now he and his mom follow other ghosts and kill them, along with their cat, Tybalt. Somebody likes Shakespeare. The titular ghost is up in Thunder Bay, Canada, and she is a doozy. She’s sixteen and she’s killed a lot of people. A lot. Pretty much anyone who comes in her house.

I didn’t expect this to be as good as it was. It was very teen and yet involved pop culture references that would probably work better for people in their 30s, so that worked for me; but it was just better than it seemed like it should be. The characters seemed natural, the gory parts were gory, and one of the characters attempted to stop library vandalism – good. The one thing that was pretty off-putting was the design choice of printing the book in dried-blood-brown ink. It makes sense, but it hurt my eyes a little to read it all the same. And it really wasn’t necessary for such a compelling narrative to have that kind of gimmick.

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Salem’s ready for some in your face ghost hunting too.

Mr. Rogers is nowhere in sight.

51. The Neighborhood – S.K. Epperson

There’s a bird hoarding nutbar whose brain will turn on him and a lot of other people, a lying doctor whose brother has SMALLPOX, of all the diseases to somehow get, and he’s trying to pass it off as HIV to a nurse he hired out of his hospital, the vocally disabled ex-cop who gardens and totally works out and also makes eyes for the eyeless as a single father, the ex-burglar who is pretty much just a dick – even when he’s shackled in a basement -, and the mentally underdeveloped adult who keeps getting into trouble he really doesn’t deserve. Epperson’s ensemble have generally distinct personalities, different motivations, and her story comes together in an entirely unpleasant for the characters but highly readable way.

I’ve now read three of her books and frankly, I like her stories. I also like how she works in awful things and diseases! By the way, the nurse and the ex-cop get together and since she was with the dude with Smallpox when he died and he was totally breathing in the room…everyone in the neighborhood who isn’t dead will now die of Smallpox. It’s a very stealthy way to have a happy ending that will turn out TERRIBLE. Yay!

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All’s well that ends well; Merricat and Danger Crumples know how loaded endings can really be.