Jesse > Recent Status Updates

This is a pretty well-paced mystery. We find out some great secrets with the people Sam knows and we are also now hitting on the fact that Ardelia is, uh, a ghost or something. The Library Police isn’t exactly a secret society, then, and from Dave’s reaction, she is the tip of a horrid iceberg in the town’s history. The question looms: just what happened, then?

Starting with “The Library Police”. A big part of the basis of this story is how something like a joke about “The Library Police” might scare children away from using the library altogether…because that’s exactly what King’s son Owen said when the library was suggested. The librarian’s retort within the story, however, is that children are fascinated with the morbid. Which, true!

“Secret Window, Secret Garden”

I don’t mean much by asking about King’s headspace. the man established a career in taking niceties of a normal life and then skewing them into something that evokes horror, as he does here, centered around his wife’s own garden. Mort’s story is a dark tale about the power of imagination fueled by a guilty conscience.

😬😬😬

The blurring lines between Mort and Shooter have an obvious parallel in the more involved supernatural history of Stark in The Dark Half, it’s just that Stark as the consumed Twin who gives birth to the MC’s dark side has more of a concrete, in-universe dark fantasy explanation than what’s currently going on with John Shooter.

It isn’t exactly a twist but King is one of those authors that likes to hint very strongly or outright tell you very broadly about something so that the suspense comes from the WHEN, not the WHAT. Mort’s fearful romp through his own house is one of those great thriller moments, and the climax where he smashes his own reflection ought to tell you a good portion of what is going on here.

So, King lets on a bit of the core idea of “Secret Window” in his intro notes, talking about how it’s sort of a restructuring of The Dark Half. Right now we have a sinister figure, Shooter, antagonizing the MC (and murdering his cat 😔) as well as a messy divorce in the background. Hey, the first MC of The Langoliers was divorced, too! I wonder what was going on in King’s head at the time?

“The Langoliers”

The twist of the survivors winding up in the FUTURE and then seeing the Present catch up is a wonderful, sci-fi quantum moment. This was a fun horror-mystery-thriller with quite a few moving parts and a great economy of characters. The drunk guy seems like a total throwaway gag but he’s integral to the success of their escape as only a conked-out drunkard can be.

The Langoliers only show up for a very small portion of the story, but they’re an incredible Lovecraftian device, a force of nature whose purpose is inexplicable. What is “the past”? Where do they come from? What happens when they’ve done their job?

Sacrifice is an important motif in this story. Albert, Dinah…and one more horrible decision to be made.

At this point the story has transferred to a thriller and there are a lot of different elements ticking down. They have to refuel the plane; someone has been potentially mortally wounded, another probably dead; there is a deranged maniac trying to kill them as they try to get the casualty onto the plane; they are specifically told that they CAN’T kill the maniac; and Something is coming from beyond the sea.

Albert has a lot of great character moments in this book. He’s a Jewish teenager, groomed to be a professional violinist, who fantasizes—like King—in the realm of the gunslinger. He is there to listen to and ruminate on Jenkins’s musings and he would have taken a bullet for Bethany if this wasn’t the land without time. He does violin covers of Led Zeppelin, which—remembering Curved Air—would be badass.

There is still way too little known for any of the characters to truly speculate on what the unreality of their situation is. I feel bad for Dinah, but King also has a really good portrait of Toomy, making him a sympathetic monster, the product of a stunting environment who was looking forward to his career suicide… and this flight “event” is screwing everything up!!! GAWD!!!!

I actually saw a good portion of the made-for-TV Langoliers miniseries so I’m pretty well versed with how most of this story is going to play out. I also know a few of the differences, too. Right now, we have a very good creepypasta scenario: a small number of people wake up on what had been a crowded plane, with most of the passengers now missing, leaving only inorganic items behind on their seats.

This section is primarily about Sula and her vast loneliness, her inability to relate, her objectivism that only validates her own curiosity and pleasure, and how this ethos earns her the enmity of all of Medallion, nearly first of all her old best friend. It’s a heart-rending character study, also including Sula’s actually falling in love, only to be spurned once she finds her own possessiveness.

this book is so beautifully brutal, from the death of Chicken Little to the burning of Eva’s other child to the conflict between her and Hannah over whether or not Eva ever loved her children (the immolation of Plum in her mind, and we get a horrifying explanation of why), and I glazed over where Sula the badass scares off the Irish boys (if this is what I’ll do to myself, imagine what I’ll do to you)

there is so much to love in these first fifty pages, so many haunting character portraits. Shadrack, another WWI vet, who offloads all existential ennui into “national suicide day” and finds an anchoring solace in the blackness found in his reflection. Hannah, who is maybe the most purely sexually liberated female character I’ve ever read. The matriarch herself, Eva, and her own charity in taking in children.

There is this beautiful portrait of the multi-layered and tragic black community of the Ohio town of Medallion and you think you have the gist of the sadness that Morrison is writing about and then you cold hit the matriarch of a family torching her heroin-addicted veteran son after rocking him to sleep and it’s just brutal

I had a feeling that Bessie might have been the beast—it’a a bit too far out for a throwaway scene—but let myself get swept up in the rest of the action. Also, was Atlas the father of the Hesperides? Awwww dip, Zoe’s gonna die

Like, she’s gone, but she’s not DEAD. I’m more worried that Zoe is going to die. The cop-out is, what, Thalia having her heart stop by a lightning strike by Zeus???

It took me a bit to realize that the general was Atlas, I mean I got that they somehow had Annabeth take his place, but I didn’t once at the time ask what had happened to him. coNnEcTiNg ThE dOtS

That said, this quest is supposed to be a real blood tornado. Who gets “lost” and what does that mean? Also, someone’s supposed to DIE. I doubt that Grover bites it, which leaves it to the girls.

Of course, Percy isn’t officially in on this quest. Not that this will stop him from getting involved.

Okay! So, we haven’t heard a lot of Thalia, but she won’t have time to shine with Annabeth hanging around, so f course she has to Disappear. I was wondering about Artemis, I mean she has been a more quintessentially chaste Goddess than Athena, so Jackson exploring the hunters as well as Apollo right off the bat makes for some really fun world-building.

…what? Well, Katniss not being able to make good on her assassination attempt is… realistic, but the cascading deaths of both major and minor characters is brutal, particularly the girl who prompted Katniss to volunteer in the first place. It’s gonna be a weird final 40 pages.

not Boggs noooooooooo

I’m bummed that Johanna couldn’t make it, but the irony of both sides trying to capitalize off of Katniss’s assumed death is darkly amusing. I am like 90% sure that there’s gonna be a betrayal here, and it won’t be Peeta who does it, lol. The economy of YA demands it.

Katniss and Johanna bonding over pushing each other to get through training for the Capitol is a great character moment. Peeta is behaving like a dick in the aftermath of an ugly breakup, which is painful when it’s only halfway how he feels, like all the doubt from whether or not Katniss cared about him festering into bitterness, especially because Katniss has a Big Problem in hedging her bets between boys.

In a plot development that surprises no one, Peeta is rescued—but he has been conditioned to hate and murder Katniss!!! It sucks but it’s both sensical in story and also a mechanism to keep the love triangle going. I’ve grown to cherish Finnick’s character, especially as the history of his governmental sexual slavery has been revealed, giving a different air to his hyper sexualized persona.

From action to interpersonal drama and life during wartime. The implication that Peeta is being conditioned by brainwashing is another bit of future tech that has not quite been hinted at before. It’s way less ridiculous than the muttations, though, with mind control being a staple of dystopian fiction. Katniss’s drama is softened by the fact that she is too discombobulated to field any romantic passion.