Have a Good Summer II: Hello Mardie Lou

2. Sweet Revenge – Jean Simon

Those artists, man, the quiet ones especially…we can go either way. It’s best to leave us to our work, especially Tucker, who apparently had a Nice Guy TM hiding under the surface (80s book spoilers). I do have to say, the descriptions of Tucker’s paintings sounded either pretty hideous or incredibly boring, so, really, they should have known something was up.

But this story isn’t really about Tucker at all. It’s about revenge, stabby rhinestoned revenge. And also Mardie the bookkeeper (she has pastel slacks) and her niece Jess trying to have a good summer, as they say, and finding a small town possession instead. I do like how Jean Simon set this up – the bookkeeper buys her own house (Yay!), next door to a quiet artist (this seems good if you like quiet and some of us really, really do), and then her niece Jess comes to visit like she does every summer…and brings this box full of possession down from the attic (don’t put any of that shit on!). And even though it could have been quite clear who murdered the lady ghost, who is now super pissed (like Mary Lou but age 25, essentially), she did manage to set up two possible suspects pretty well.

The murderous ghost, looking for her murderer without for some reason realizing he still lives conveniently next door, keeps stealing Mardie the bookkeeper’s body at night with bad makeup (just like in Lizzie, the movie version of The Bird’s Nest) and doing very bad things that make a total mess of Mardie’s day time life with real consequences that are really ruining her ability to keep books and Jess, while still trying to have a good summer with her new young person friends at the beach, notices and gets reasonably scared.

And why yes, there is a microfilm research scene. These 80s teens were going to spend time at the beach and the amusement park and the newspaper basement doing research and they were going to like some of it.

Snuffy looks like any working girl, and yet…

 

A seal of approval has been won by this research scene. Grape job, scratch and sniff.