Rachel Smith's Blog: Guinea Pigs and Books, page 79

Gary also reviewed the coffee at a Jiffy Lube… also four stars.

45. Drawn to the Grave – Mary Ann Mitchell

I have a tradition of starting a new horror mass market paperback while waiting for my oil to be changed. There’s something about knowing that I’m going to be sitting there for a while, maybe longer than I expect because I waited till the last possible moment the weekend before a lengthy trip like I always do, that helps me cope with the things I find annoying about mass market paperbacks, like how I always end up creasing their spines, how easy it is to lose my place when I get surprised by someone asking to show me my air filter’s dirtiness level, and the paper texture – some of them are printed on just rough enough paper that I hate it! Anyway, Drawn to the Grave was one of the Jiffy Lube paperbacks. While reading it, I kept getting distracted by the re-run of the Casey Kasem Top 40 on the radio and the smell of car fluids that kept winding its way into the waiting room, hyacinths it was not. The story is both engaging and very strange so I kept having to give sarcastic looks at the vinyl cushioned chairs around me as well. None of the chairs had read it, they couldn’t relate. The book felt weirdly like a Lifetime movie mixed with something they would have shown on Cinemax at ten PM in the 1990s. It’s a clever premise; it just struck me in a very off-putting way and I cannot entirely blame the fumes or the interruptions. It might have something to do with how I refuse to ever go on backpacking trips alone or rely on the kindness of strangers if at all possible. I also promise to never choose my lawyer based off of Yelp reviews, Kyle.

Drawing Mortemer has the opposite effect of all the drawing in Drawn to the Grave, well, sort of, I remember him better but I still get older.

My joints also reacted to the descriptions in this here book. I feel old.

54. The Keeper – Sarah Langan

There is a somewhat obvious comparison to be made when a writer sets a horror novel that encompasses quite a few perspectives in a small town in Maine. That nearly avoided, I really enjoyed Sarah Langan’s debut novel; it’s creepy and weird and bizarre and she created a wholly immersive experience. And, thankfully, I can’t say that she’s used solely stereotypes and cookie cutters to create her female characters, they’re not just there to react either. There are some definitely multi-dimensional, relatively reprehensible ladies doing some things in The Keeper. However, it’s the attention to the environment- how the rain makes the people of the town feel, the smells, that sets Langan apart. Now that I’ve finished three novels of hers, describing the environment in all its mineraly, sulphur-stinking glory seems to be her trademark and it has occasionally made my eyes burn (my allergies have that powerful of an effect on my psyche).

The chocolate-faced Abyssinian about to be eaten by a fake alligator skull is Ozma. She’s from Milwaukee. She and Peregrine almost get along. Lady pigs are awfully complicated and apparently completely unintimidated by fake alligator skulls.

 

On the way up, it was state three of six; on the way down, it’s state four of six.

63. Devil’s Knot – Mara Leveritt

As a long time metal listener who wore a lot of black while pissed off in high school and who always will, I was very concerned about this case when I first heard of it. To me, it was clearly a witch-hunt and nothing else. The clear mishandling, superstitions believed over facts, and ignorance on display added weight to a lot of stereotypes about the south and certainly influenced my own views before I lived there. It’s easy to lump all of the southern states together, and in the case of West Memphis, I’m sure there are still many people who don’t know that it’s in Arkansas and not Tennessee…there’s a whole Mississippi River in between West Memphis and Memphis, and when three teenagers get locked up for a crime that involves a lot of forethought like the murders of those three boys, it’s easy to make sweeping generalizations.

Devil’s Knot is a very thorough examination of the murders, the trial, and the evidence that makes an excellent companion piece to the Paradise Lost documentaries and that holds the region, the people involved – except for maybe Mr. Byers, and the evidence at a pretty objective arm’s length, which I appreciated since I read it after moving back up. I can’t say that I didn’t find any ignorance during the years that I spent driving up and down I-55, which does take you through West Memphis and past the wooded area where the boys were murdered, I can say that I found it in both directions and one side is just a tad more self-righteous about it and that still annoys me. The bureaucratic process doesn’t seem to be all that helpful for most poor people, regardless of where they’re from or currently living, so, really, ignorance and agendas that harm the poor abound across this great land – and that bureaucratic bullshit was egregiously on display in relation to this case. I can say that I was very happy to read this knowing that the West Memphis Three were already free, even though the state refuses to acknowledge how horribly they mishandled the whole case and that does not help any of the families involved.

Leveritt has also combined forces with Jason Baldwin to write a sequel to Devil’s Knot called Dark Spell, I’m looking forward to reading that one.

Mr. Cheese and I stopped for gas in West Memphis on the way back to Mississippi once and some people saw us feeding Pammy (she would not eat her roadtrip lettuce in her carrier, she had to be taken out and convinced that it was fine to eat) and thought she was a monkey. She did have a butt skirt, but no prehensile tail, not a monkey.

The word of the day is “disappointed.” Scream accordingly.

44. I Know I Am, But What Are You? – Samantha Bee

Samantha Bee has always been one of the correspondents I enjoyed most on The Daily Show so I was happy when I saw that she had written an autobiography. It seemed like a good way to find out more about her own sense of humor for longer than a Daily Show segment. I cannot say that I really enjoyed the experience of reading this though, there were parts of it that were pretty messed up and I can’t really sympathize with her short crime spree. I definitely cringed inside more than I snickered at anything that happened and it left me feeling uncomfortable as a human. Definitely not what I expected, but I guess I should have inferred that the reading experience might be cringeworthy based on the fact that the title isn’t capitalized on the cover of the hardback edition. What are you trying to tell me with that?

Twiglet, nearly napping in protest of the proper nouns that remain lowercase in the title.

Oh, Daisy, I’m so sorry. How did it happen? …He walked.

43. Witch’s Sister – Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

The first in the series. Mrs. Tuggle is freaking terrifying. She’s manipulative, she has a funny name but she is not a nice, amusing, pleasant elderly lady…she’s like the elderly neighbor from Spaced if she really had been cooking Colin (I mean, Lancelot) ala Fatal Attraction instead of whatever she was doing with a stuffed rabbit on the stove – I’ve never used the stove-boiling option for cleaning the pigs’ stuffed animals, I stick with the washer and dryer, was she sterilizing? Dogs are involved, I barely understand them because they’re not misunderstood fuzzy things that don’t make me sneeze originally from South America. Anyhoo, Phyllis Reynolds Naylor has a serious gift for creating disturbing images and situations and making some shit tense for child readers. So very tense. Someday I suspect I will locate Witch Water, The Witch Herself, and The Witch Returns and finish reading the series and end up just as scared as I did when I read The Witch’s Eye as a kid.

Belvedere’s best “standing on a pumpkin” photo. Thankfully, Mrs. Tuggle and her creeptastic attempts at manipulation will never reach his adorable little head. He was only ever loyal to me anyway, that witch would never have gotten to him.

“This is where the fish lives.”

60. Michelle Remembers – Michelle Smith & Lawrence Pazder, M.D.

A bit of a fudge in my “Year of Ladies” to include a book co-written by a dude, however, I think it’s warranted because this book is not only basically Michelle’s fault, but it’s also full of her own words with lots of ellipses between thoughts.

Michelle Remembers is The Chronicle that could be righteously blamed for a lot of the Satanic Panic. I’ve been aware of it for a long time as a Satanic Panic enthusiast and finally found a copy in the horror section of Half Price Books – on 50% off day! A sign if ever there was one. Strangely, it was not locked up in the special pricy books cabinet where it had less potential to harm anyone or inspire them to make up repressed memories. And, shockingly, I was less than impressed. The X-Files episode with Mrs. Paddock was way better. The Touch of Satan, the MST3K episode from which I quoted my title, was also way better, as long as it’s that exact episode. The Touch of Satan on its own is probably about the same level of inspiring as Michelle Remembers, that quoted title is a real line of dialogue. Someone wrote that on purpose and put it into a film. I’ve had to look it up several times to make sure they didn’t mean to say “This is where the fish live,” as in multiple fish, but that’s not what it is, it’s “This is where the fish lives,” as in only one fish. Geez-us, I have so much trouble with that. The only hope I have is that it wasn’t written that way, even though it was spoken that way.

Anyway, back to Michelle, so… Michelle shows up needing to get something off her chest and ends up in hours and hours and hours-long sessions with Dr. Pazder, going back to “that place” and recounting endless weirdness and ritual abuse and she decides to start kicking it religious-style so she feels warm and safe again despite all the ridiculous abuse and then she and her psychiatrist get married (that’s not in the book, though). I can see how this would be taken seriously when it was published. Dr. Pazder has an M.D., the editor includes a nice note, there’s some corroborative evidence of hospitalizations presented in the narrative. That said, my problem is that Satan actually shows up and so does Mary and so does Jesus. Once Satan showed up at one of the shitty Canadian Satanic rituals specifically so that he could wrap his tail around Michelle’s neck I was beyond out. Suspension of disbelief ruined! I don’t care how many rashes Michelle got – and man, I get hives and rashes for no particular reason all the time, so, perhaps she was allergic to Dr. Pazder’s floor and also demonstrating her inner guilt for making it all up? My other super-glib explanation is that Michelle wanted to be an inspirational novelist, because when I write my novels, I occasionally feel like I blacked out and went to a different place because I’m writing down what I see in my head. It’s like a movie, but I’ve never considered writing about poop-covered crosses as my security blanket like Michelle, those just don’t reside in my head. Although I’ve never imagined a lake occupied by a single fish either, so maybe my imagination just isn’t working hard enough because I haven’t been touched (enough?) by Satan. Ichy.

“Isn’t there an ethical issue raised when one marries their psychiatrist?” Merricat wonders as she swallows your soul.

I suggest: Thorin: Glamour Shots as an alternate title for The Hobbit: The Battle of Five Armies

30. Deathless – Catherynne M. Valente

This was my kind of romance. The torturous, horrible kind where you inevitably end up at the siege of Leningrad eating wallpaper paste because you’re starving to death – emotionally. In the case of this novel-length fairy tale, the wallpaper paste eating was literal and I did feel strangely about how the situation was resolved. Very strangely. Anyway, Valente is a major creator of pretty sentences, which typically I do not like. However, in this case I didn’t notice them as much. Maybe it was the fairy tale cadence, maybe I was just really excited about the tiny proletariat organizing, maybe it was because I pictured Koschei the Deathless as Luke Evans (thankfully with different hair than he received as Bard, damnit, Peter Jackson, let someone have decent hair without CGI besides Thorin), and maybe it was because it was so damn dark…and I am really used to being put through the ringer in any and all relationships (which is not good and I’m working on it, and, don’t ever tell me not to speak, I don’t follow orders like that so I would not have done well in so many places in this story). I do not understand why anyone would like Ivan though. I mean, really, Ivan? He was like a paper cut out of a person, like those standees of Robert Pattinson that Twilight fans have been known to take with them to film screenings, likeable because he doesn’t say anything. I guess I should be searching for the right standee…for me. But I really don’t want to.

Murderface turns away from the pretty sentences. She was a “no bullshit” kind of pig; unfortunately, not a “deathless” kind of pig.

Did you know that “Fun Size” is smaller now? It is way closer to bite size. Not fun.

59. Undead Much? – Stacey Jay

Undead Much? was a cute piece of teen rom-zom-com fluff when I read it and I bet it hasn’t changed. It’s the sequel to You Are So Undead to Me, another cute piece of teen rom-zom-com fluff revolving around Megan Berry, zombie settler – and I don’t mean pioneer-style settling. The most interesting aspect of it for me was that there is actually a dead guy involved in the romantic triangle. Well, mostly dead.

 

Pickles Pickles Pickles! She looks so incredibly cute on the pumpkin that Murderface is trying to leave the photo.

“Fuckin’ beauty queens blowing chunks everywhere. I-I’ve never seen anything like it before, and I live in L.A.”

53. Beauty Queens – Libba Bray

It’s taken me forever to write about this book because, and I’m sure this comes as a surprise to longtime listeners, first time callers, that I have much more trouble articulating my thoughts on books I like than on books I do not enjoy. Unless the book in question helps me process something specific. I would be hard pressed to find something that Beauty Queens helped me process, perhaps if I had been younger when I read it, because there are several characters I can see would be useful to younger ladies who hadn’t had the chance to read about anyone like themselves yet.

It has served and does serve one peculiar purpose for me that anyone who has had to pitch their work to an editor will be familiar with – it’s one of my comparables. My currently out books fit squarely between Beauty Queens and Jonathan Maberry’s Rot and Ruin series. A group of somewhat skilled, definitely smart ladies stuck in an isolated location (in this case an island) and forced to survive mainly on wits, things learned from pop culture, and sarcastic dialogue while impending doom approaches…that’s one of my wheelhouses and one of my favorite things to read. Especially the doom and sarcasm – I know, it’s so shocking to read that I’m into doom and sarcasm, after all this time I’ve spent posing as Pollyanna.

Maybe if you were one of the over 1261 people who I noticed (yeah, googling your first self-published book title a few years in wasn’t a good idea… and of course all the seeds are verified and 100% quality – I’m the only one who uploaded a copy and I worked really hard on that file, it has been double checked to hell and back) already illegally downloaded my book, you’d know me better – and I thought I took a screenshot of the person who reviewed it on a message board as being “impossible to put down because it’s so disgusting and irresistible” or the one who asked if the author was “messing with us” – not specifically – but I just have the one who said I changed their life. Or, you’d just be contributing to my inability to pay for things, like those 1261 people who took money directly from my pocket. I cannot wrap my head around why my book would be of interest to people who illegally download books – it’s barely advertised (just on here!) because I’m still trying to figure out a traditional deal or a letterpress so I can print it myself (buying the online version instead of stealing it would help with that, or, you know, a lack of salary stagnation would too, but really, stealing it from me helps nothing and makes me feel anxious and like I’ll have to die soon John Kennedy Toole-style). If I ever get a letterpress sorted I want to make nine haunted copies – haunted by my personal failure and possibly also ghostly guinea pigs (bonus!).

Anyway, back to Beauty Queens, it’s amazing. It’s probably been stolen way more than 1261 times too. But it made it into print first, and for that, among many other things, I salute Libba Bray, one of my favorite authors. Beauty Queens is a glorious mix of wit, pop culture, and explosions. Who knew there was room for another dark and amusing story about pageant girls trying to survive in a post-Drop Dead Gorgeous world?

I thought about entering Danger Crumples in a pageant once. Based on his last vet experience, in which not only the staff, but also the other patients and their owners were very taken with him, he would beat any and all human contestants.

And here is the screenshot I did manage. “It is worth to read.” Glad you enjoyed it.

My tired eyes wake up at dawn

28. Night Film – Marisha Pessl

I had some level of trepidation coming in to reading this book. I noticed a bit of hype about it and there was some award winning and hype about her first novel, Special Topics in Calamity Physics (which I haven’t read) and to be frank, hype and the lack of horror indicated in her first novel’s title made me wary. Whenever non-horror people write horror, there are usually narrative problems that super annoy me because I am a total horror person. I’m not a total horror snob, but I get a bristly feeling when it seems like someone’s dabbling and they keep giving you cliché after cliché that they would know were clichés if they knew the horror genre better. Also, I’ve had a lot of bad and somewhat angry feelings after Ryan Murphy decided that he invented the horror comedy genre that effect my interest in possible dabblers. What an asshole, he definitely had his head up his ass when he said that. Calling it “comedy horror” just trips the tongue and does not make it a new genre. And I’ve liked more than one season of American Horror Story because it was so batshit, but, that has a lot to do with the fact that he’s not the only one writing the episodes and the fact that it’s batshit camp. Maybe if he had done some research, I wouldn’t have to blame him for wasting New Orleans as a location or being incapable of sustaining a reasonable seasonal story arc that sorts out and uses all the random moments instead of just throwing them at the audience and never using anything, or anyone (Angela Bassett could have had so much more to do. SO much more to do.) properly. It is more than possible to coalesce batshit elements into beautiful garbage. Like Doomsday. Or Gremlins II, which is really just beautiful, and it could have been more beautiful if somebody was a tad nicer to Gizmo.

I ended up liking this book quite a bit. It was definitely not as horror themed as I thought it would be, in fact, I ended up getting more of a Lars Von Trier meets the seventies vibe from the descriptions of the movies, the whole thing was much more suspense thriller, which is totally fine. There was a smattering of horror elements and they weren’t overplayed to me, it was actually a bit like reading Harvest Home by Thomas Tryon; if you know the tropes you’ll end up amused but not necessarily surprised at the outcome. There was even a genuinely scary moment in there for me, so good show.

My darling little Merricat had a couple of things in common with one of the main characters that made reading this at the time I did very hard. She was such a beautiful tiny demon with perfect ears and such bright eyes.