“You’ll be making a serious mistake if you pursue this, Professor.”

106. Smithy – Amanda Desiree

In Newport, Rhode Island, an experiment is brewing in a former boarding school/former giant rich people house that’s sort of rotting in the 1970s. A chimp named Webster (nicknamed Smithy for his wordsmithiness) is going to learn sign language – way more than that other chimp learning sign language – and he’s going to prove that chimpanzees can acquire language skills far more so than any animal before. And he does for the most part, but some things get in the way.

Honestly, I was waiting for Smithy to rip someone apart most of the time. He did rip off a face eventually. The one thing I’ve consistently seen about chimps being raised as humans is that when they get older, they get aggressive, even towards those they love because they are animals which are very complicated, but the human environment is not for them. And in this story, Smithy is stuck being part of a project with his young people 70s family and a ghost.

This was told in epistolary format, with diary entries, letters with many misspellings (geez, Gail), transcripts of film, and snippets from published books. It did move fast for a book over 500 pages, but I am not sure all the pages were necessary. I found the last jolt, if you will, the last explosive situation (literal, it was the 4th of July) to be not that great and then it just kind of ends. There’s no real information on the ghost (although it is mentioned one person uses microfilm for the newspapers – yes!) and it’s sensible to stop the study for safety, but it’s also pretty boringly done.

This did make me uneasy several times, which was good. I do like experiment in a haunted house story and this time the experimenters didn’t know the house was haunted, a novel way to go about it. There’s a sequel, but apparently it’s way longer and that makes me hesitate if it’s going to be resolved in a similarly sputtered out manner.

 

Danger Crumples and Horace would’ve gotten to the bottom of that whole ghost thing right away. If there’s anything guinea pigs know, it’s research on top of other research.

 

Duncan and Twiglet love accurately described research!