Recent Reading: Snake-Eater by T Kingfisher

All right, so I didn’t actually read a short horror novel this past Halloween, though, I mean, I thought about it and looked at some and downloaded a couple. I was, however, busy, so it didn’t happen.

Then, somehow, T Kingfisher’s Snake-Eater came to my attention – I don’t recall how, exactly, because nobody mentioned it specifically. Maybe Amazon put it in front of me. I’m not sure. But I was still thinking, short horror novel, not too horrific, all right, fine, let’s take a look.

With only a few dollars to her name and her beloved dog Copper by her side, Selena flees her past in the city to claim her late aunt’s house in the desert town of Quartz Creek. … in Quartz Creek, there’s a strange beauty to everything, from the landscape to new friends, and more blue sky than Selena’s ever seen. But something lurks below the surface …

And I read the first few paragraphs and those paragraphs worked for me, so I wound up reading the whole novel, though not in a single day. Here are the opening paragraphs:

***

Selena picked her new home for no better reason than the dog laid down on the porch.

The dog was a middle-aged black Lab, though her Labrador-ness had been diluted by a fence-jumping father of questionable ancestry. Whatever he had been, his genes had helped temper the breed’s boundless energy. She still worshipped chasing tennis balls as the highest form of canine endeavor but wanted a long nap afterward, and ideally a long nap beforehand as well.

Selena named her Copper, which Walter said was a stupid name because there was nothing copper-colored about her. Selena felt guilty when he pointed that out, but Copper had already learned her name by that point, so she put a collar on the dog with bright copper tags. Walter rolled his eyes, but Selena was pleased with herself for having set things right again.

The dog, it must be said, never seemed to mind either way.

Selena had ridden out on the train, two and a half days to get there, and she’d been afraid the whole time that somebody’d tell her she couldn’t have a dog on board. She didn’t know what she’d do. Fortunately, Copper had excellent travel manners and mostly lay under her seat and let out the long sighs of an old dog at peace with the world. The rocking of the train seemed to agree with her. She squatted obediently at every stop and was extremely pleased to share the sandwiches that Selena passed down to her.

At the second-to-last stop, the conductor bent down and scratched Copper behind the ears, and Selena was so relieved she nearly cried.

When they reached the final stop, Copper stood up and stretched. Her muzzle had begun to go white, but her eyes were clear. She glanced around the train platform and then up at Selena, as if expecting orders.

QUARTZ CREEK was painted on the platform wall, in faded blue. The train platform was cinder block and adobe. It could have been ten years old or two hundred.

***

What do you think? Does the grammatical mistake in the first sentence bother you? From a new-to-me author, that would probably be the kiss of death. Why did T Kingfisher do that? Is it conceivable she didn’t realize that it should be “lay,” not “laid”? That doesn’t seem all that likely. Is it even vaguely possible that her copyeditor did not point to that? The book came out through 47 North, which (I looked this up) is Amazon’s very own SFF imprint. They handle this imprint as a traditional publisher, says Google, with editors and all the trimming. So … surely someone pointed to this error and T Kingfisher deliberately stetted it. Not sure why. Nothing else in this novel struck me as folksy in tone, which would fit that usage.

So … moving on with this minor mystery unsolved.

I’m now leaving behind this unimportant quibble to address the actual novel:

I liked it a lot, and it’s just barely horror, so if you don’t like horror, I honestly think this book would be perfectly fine. There is one very brief moment that would have freaked me out completely if it had happened to me, and one slightly longer scene that would have been scary but in which no one was harmed, and that’s basically it. No characters are badly hurt in this story except Merv the peacock, and I’m sorry for him, but he’s a very minor character and, I mean, I’m not that crazy about peacocks, as a rule. On the Horror Novel spectrum, from one to ten, where Very Light Humorouos Horror is one and Intense Creepiness is ten, I’d rate this book about a one an a half, maaaaybe as high as a two. Please weigh in if you’ve read it.

The desert scenery is fantastic. It’s just fantastic. It comes to life right there on the page: the white caliche soils, the hard blue sky, the saguaro and cholla, the scorpions, and the terrifying roadrunner, which is brilliantly described, and I will now forever think of roadrunners as rather small and quite vicious velociraptors. I expect T Kingfisher used the name snake-eater nearly all the time to avoid too many Meep Meep Whoosh blue ostrich outwits Wile E Coyote associations. As it happens, I know what real roadrunners look like, so I had no trouble visualizing the vicious little dinosaur-style bird.

Photo by JC Cervantes on Unsplash

The characters are fun. The dog was excellent, though I did have a very minor problem with her*. Basically, she was excellent. I’ve seen authors add a good dog to a novel, apparently not figure out what to do with the dog, and the dog therefore really could have and should have been removed from the story. Not this time. Copper was an important character all the way through.

I liked all the secondary characters, who were mostly drawn rather briskly, and was deeply entertained by how DJ Raven turned up toward the end.

This is a simple story, so other than Copper, only two secondary characters are developed at all — Grandma Billy and Father Aguirre — and both are excellent. Selena herself is fine, and wow, does she demonstrate the concept of Out of the Frying Pan Into the Fire. One can understand exactly how she wound up with Walter, horrifying as that relationship was. Actually, what’s the word for that – for someone persuading you that you’re the crazy one? Gaslighting? Great example of that. We don’t see anything of that relationship in action, thank heaven, because ugh. I appreciate T Kingfisher starting the story where she did. Walter does appear very briefly at the end, and this something that’s worth noting structurally. He had to appear at the end, so that Selena could reject him and see the community reject him. This provided a kind of closure that nothing else could have provided, so his brief appearance was highly predictable.

Speaking of predictability, just about everything in this novel is predictable. I don’t mean details. I didn’t quite see that coming about Father Aguirre, for example, though it was clearly set up, so I should have. I didn’t expect Yellow Dog, though I certainly did expect the encounter he presaged. There are wonderful details everywhere. It’s those details and the description that lift this book to a higher level than it’s extremely predictable plot, where practically everything is clearly foreshadowed and/or set up far in advance. (“Oh, good morning, Mr. Chekov; just set that gun anywhere,” was a recurring thought.)

Honestly, many things are a revelation to Selena while most likely being quiiiiiite obvious to the reader, including, in broad terms, just about everything important. And you know what? That’s fine. It’s especially fine in a novel positioned adjacent to horror. The predictability reduces the tension to about the level I prefer. Who wants to actually worry about the dog? Raise your hand. Anyone? Right, no one, that’s what I thought. If this novel had been less predictable – like, for example, The Twisted Ones, about a six on the Creepiness scale – I might have enjoyed it, but in a different way and probably not as much.

***

* Here’s the quibble about the dog:

T Kingfisher comes across as knowing a lot about dogs and writes excellent dogs, so why does she have Copper, a bitch, mark stuff by peeing on it? Because all female dogs mark when in season, but not at all the way a male dog marks — they never pee on vertical objects, and they don’t in general lift their legs at all. A very small proportion of female dogs do list their legs, but even they don’t mark the same objects males do, or for the same reasons, or in the same way, plus Copper doesn’t have the temperament of that kind of female (very dominant).

Is it possible that T Kingfisher / Ursula Vernon has never had a bitch as a pet and – this seems inconceivable – has never realized that bitches don’t mark shrubs and other vertical items, even when they mark at all? Or – this seems even less likely – did she once have a bitch who did urine-mark like a male, something I have literally never seen or even heard of? So that’s a puzzle that probable few other readers will wonder about, but I do wonder about it.

Please Feel Free to Share:

The post Recent Reading: Snake-Eater by T Kingfisher appeared first on Rachel Neumeier.