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“Jeph Benedick’s Grandmother”

The author placed a lot of emphasis on Bierce as a savage satirist but the grotesqueries of the second collection were far more steeped in the sardonic than these humorous stories. This anecdote is about the narrator’s friend, Mr. Benedick, who has the driest delivery of humor ever to be found among the members of the human race.

“Samuel Baxter, M.D.”

We know generally that Bierce loathed doctors as quacks. This is a story of the most egregious example of a doctor as a compulsive liar, baited into offering deer gall as a cure for rheumatism after rebuffing a man for positing that venison might be a cure for the very same disease. The dude has no self-awareness; he offers this deer cure to the same guy who originally suggested it to him.

“The New Bedder”

uhhhh

Starts out describing a fantastical period of flooding where dead bodies were drifting everywhere and impossible to remove without involving a coroner and people traveled to each others’ houses via boat. Someone is led to believe that one of these bodies is the new lodger… but it turns out that the new lodger is a newborn????? Okay, Bierce. You got me.

somewhere in here is a similar thread to Asimov’s Foundation series with Heathcliff as the mule. He is a mutant and gets his way while he is alive but the moment after he dies and he cannot affect his influence the natural tendencies of Emily’s characters lead them toward the good that merely been suppressed, not burned out.

TIL that wink and wince have the same root, which makes sense. I gave Nelly some amends but she is still such a facilitator of Heathcliff’s schemes, with him literally villain monologuing to her when his victims can’t hear him, that I want to SCREAM.

death is imminent! the period of the book where Heathcliff is trying to set the two cousins up with each other is incredibly painful. I could also do without the strong hints at Lockwood being attracted to Catherine. Like, this whole family history is in service to his fascination with her. But I can see Nelly asking the questions as her way of trying to leverage him to “rescue” Cath from Wuthering Heights.

belay that death… I harangue Nelly in how complicit she is in this soap opera but her ultimate reality does not put her in a position of power over any of these gentrified folk. she tries to do what she thinks is best. The reasons underpinning her helplessness are the same that bred the contempt of Heathcliff for everyone else.

well it’s shaping up to be a real blood tornado. Heathcliff was completely dismissive of Isabella but the moment that he knows that his son is nearby he demands him and it’s a pretty good bet that Linton will be dead, probably within the next 25 pages. Or, well, it’s just as likely that his dad will die first. All I know is that the best way to handle Heathcliff is to go back in time and to never have met him.

O GAWD I just figured out that Emily is setting up an echo of the Heathcliff - Catherine - Linton triad in their family’s descendants, and since I don’t recall hearing anything about Isabella’s son when Lockwood was bumbling around, I am guessing that he has died in the interim 😬😬😬

wait Nelly is a servant who grew up with Hindley, Catherine and Heathcliff??? In my head she was a fair bit older but this aside pegs her as the same age as Hindley the drunk!!

the insane soap opera of this story is magnificent. There isn’t a single person that Heathcliff has tousled with beyond maybe Nelly that doesn’t want to go scorched earth on everyone they hate, and there is a lot of hate to go around. I am curious as to what the thrust of this story will be once we are caught up to the present day. I mean, SURELY Lockwood isn’t going to romance the daughter…?

so much drama because Nelly is an enabler. like, why should anyone trust his word on anything??? He is so transparently and overtly malevolent and Nelly is all “WELL I GUESS I’ll take your note to the misses” like there is no way this plays out well. I suspect Heathcliff leaves her out in the cold to die when she tries to come to Wuthering Heights after birthing her daughter.

A very bizarre monologue from Catherine that takes the story to stranger fever dreams. We also get a sense of what responsibility Nelly has in this whole affair as she seeks to “advise” Catherine by telling her what she thinks that she needs to hear, not the entirety of the truth. Catherine is pulled between a love for two men: the Mr. Hyde of Heathcliff and the Dr. Jekyll of Edgar.

“You are aware that I am in no way blameable in this matter.”

omfg cath

zero points for anticipating Isabella falling in love with Heathcliff. Catherine is a character who lives in a bubble where the only consequences of her actions are the ones that she wants to have happen. Her first plot before Heathcliff ran away was to marry Edward so that she could use his family’s estate to uplift her heart’s heart. She is constantly in awe of how famously Ed and Heath do NOT get along.

holy shit at Hindley the drunk, child-abuser extraordinaire, who is forcing his knife into his housekeeper’s mouth o.O

Catherine is an interesting character, awful at her own home but demure as a fine lady with the Lintons, caught between her soul-mate foster brother Heathcliff and the benign Edward. LOL at Nelly’s savagery in raking Cath in her advice AFTER she’s already accepted the marriage proposal

I kind of know what is going to happen, but I don’t really. We are now hearing the tale of Heathcliff’s upbringing from his former housekeeper. This disastrous affair at the Linton’s explains how Catherine fell in with them at the first place, an adventure that I assume Heathcliff will come to regret.

Gothic core, lol. The opening of this is like half of the tales in Classic Ghost Stories where the narrator pays a social visit to a place that is obviously kicking out bad vibes. He is an entitled prick, great for bringing out the worst in Heathcliff’s surly crew, including the 17 year old girl who pretends to be a witch, hexing the old servant (!).

Soooo I know of this book through cultural osmosis (I recall a Monty Python bit where Heathcliff and… Catherine? were signaling to each other in semaphore) and because my sister had to read it for what I believe was their 8th grade novel (we had A Tale of Two Cities. After exhausting Austen I am excited to get into the works of the Brontë sisters!

“Triangle At Rhodes”

We open with Poirot slathering sunscreen on one of a pair of single women as they are all in Italy on their own vacations. There’s a lot of gossip and an apparent, blooming love triangle. A triangle whose angles add up to 180 degrees of murder.

“Dead Man’s Mirror”

This is a fun accusing parlor-type story that also has a cameo from Mr. Satterthwaite from Three Act Tragedy. Poirot has to figure out who staged a suicide to cover for a murder and I don’t mind telling you that I had NO inkling toward the guilty party. It’s a wonder how many Poirot stories tend to end in soap opera-style reveals.

“The Incredible Theft”

I KNEW that I read this story! Or, rather, the short story that Christie expanded it from—“The Submarine Plans”, which I read in The Grey Cells of M. Poirot. This is a fun story and memorable for Poirot’s banter as well as a goofy moment where a young French maid hits on Poirot, still winking after he rebuffs her. Dang, I wanna read more of these expanded stories!

“Murder in the Mews”

I like this book’s format! The novella-length cases are more satisfying than the short stories in The Grey Cells. This case has a pretty good major twist and I appreciate that this one focuses on Japp as the sidekick as you get a better sense of the purposefully-bumbling-inspector solving cases within his means but always eager for Poirot’s cryptic input.

I wasn’t sure how Miller was gonna handle the story after Patroclus’s death but an earth-bound shade is, well, about as straightforward as anything. I wonder, like, is there an opportunity for a narrative somewhere where the shades of Patroclus and Hector have a dialogue while Achilles is mourning? I can’t imagine that it hasn’t been done before, maybe as a poem?

oh lord Patroclus really busted out the “If you love me—“

like I know he has good intentions in trying to save the Greeks as well as Achilles’s legacy and it’s not him trying to be emotionally manipulative. it is more how the toxicity of this relationship is revealing itself.

Here we go!! I was way wrong about what motivated Achilles a hundred or so pages ago, thinking that the death of Iphigenia could be a catalyst for how Miller might complicate the plot, but what happens it is fitting in with his utter lack of compassion. The story starts to make more sense when you have Achilles the man fated for greatness but doomed to die young.

the portrayal of the years leading up to the Iliad is pretty good. I was wondering why Patroclus hadn’t ended up in the surgeon’s tent sooner. There is some sort of love triangle blooming here with Briseis but I have no idea how Miller is going to get to the tantrum. is Patroclus going to fall in love with her? He has demonstrated a capacity for compassion for women, something Achilles had not before Iphigenia.

oh lol Patroclus is the one who asks for it. I guess the way Miller has been writing Achilles’s character, distanced in his heroism, it would not be up to him to offer his compassion… but, ten years from now, when Agamemnon tries to take her, we will see how he reacts. Miller already foreshadowed this with the early dialogue about the lyre.

okay I think I can see where this is going (I mean I a lot of this is enshrined within mythology, just not the exact motives all the time). Achilles is going to take a war bride during the Troy raids as his own way to perform restitution for Iphigenia.

😬😬😬 ihpigenia, heartbreakingly rendered in Elektra. Will she be spared death in this retelling? I have no freakin’ clue.

Odysseus is a lovable dickbag, clashing with Diomedes. I don’t recall Diomedes as a major character. Him wounding Aphrodite was important but it didn’t leave as big of an impression as it should have, I guess.