oooh, goodreads choice awards semifinalist for BEST HORROR 2019! what will happen?
this book is straight-up bonkers. seeing this was set “at an elite noooh, goodreads choice awards semifinalist for BEST HORROR 2019! what will happen?
this book is straight-up bonkers. seeing this was set “at an elite new england university” with an exclusive clique at its center and seeing it compared to Heathers, i went into it expecting a Megan Abbott-y/The Secret History-y type of deal; full of those dark and toxic currents that define adolescent girlhood, where affection shifts into power struggle at the drop of a hat, but also featuring a bunch of soulless smarty-pants big on ritualistic gatherings and down for some light murder.
[image]
yes and please
this… is not that. which is not to say it’s bad AT ALL, it’s just not what i thought i was getting into. it is ALSO not, although this is frequently true of other books, that it is being misrepresented by overzealous marketing. you see, it is also compared to The Vegetarian, which i have not read, but now that i’ve looked into that book more, if i HAD read it, i probably would have been less taken aback by what this book actually is.
which is, as previously stated, bonkers.
this is The Secret History through the looking glass, carroll’s white rabbit split into four excessively co-dependent MFA students; twitchy and touchy-feely and calling each other “bunny,” operating symbiotically(?) as a “we;” each maintaining a specifically regimented style of expression in appearance and craft, but otherwise inseparable.
samantha, our narrator and entry into this world, is the fifth person in the workshop, on the awkward periphery of these cooing girls who always seem to be monkey-grooming one another and giggling and sparkling all over the place. unlike the bunnies, who are rich and well-assimilated in the jargony twaddle of MFA programs the world over (”I appreciate the uncertainty the piece gestures toward…I just think she could go further into the dream space. It’s so interesting how she performs and reenacts trauma.”), samantha is planted firmly in outsider territory; a scholarship student whose darker themes are called ‘angry,’ ‘mean,’ and ‘distant’ by the bunnies, from whom she seems content to maintain her distance; aloof and sarcastically eviscerating them from afar alongside her art school dropout bestie ava; she of the fishnet gloves and veil, the asymmetrical haircut and tattered underwear-as-outerwear look.
[image]
and then, unexpectedly, samantha is formally, by way of origami swan, invited into the bunnies’ inner circle, where she learns an awful lot about creativity, process, vulnerability, and true power.
so yeah, it’s VERY reminiscent of Heathers, with its interplay of the frivolous and the dark and the comedic, as well as individual and group dynamics,
[image]
but it’s just as much molly ringwald and annie potts in Pretty in Pink; outsider snark as a weapon against the allure of the wealthy pretty people, and the spiritual cost of capitulation (which john hughes never addressed, but i always inferred),
[image]
and a vision board collage of style and theme that’s like Desperately Seeking Susan and Pump Up the Volume and Heathers and 92% of john hughes’ oeuvre. and also, oddly, the spice girls, since the bunnies adopt a particular quirky fashion-based persona that sets them apart within their collective persona.
it’s not bonkers right out of the gate. at first, it seems like it's gonna be a fun-poking campus novel. this book is so funny in its depiction of the MFA world; the fetishizations and the relentless cleverness and posturing and critiques, which i can only imagine is much worse now as millennials tiptoe thru the triggers trying to make art that offends no one and supplying feedback that is nothing but praise, even for the kind of self-consciously manufactured glop people like the bunnies produce. like the one samantha calls “the Duchess,” who writes “inaccessible and cryptic” pieces, she calls proems, “etched on panes of glass using a dagger-shaped diamond she wears around her neck.” or the work of the one samantha has dubbed “Vignette,” who shares “a series of unpunctuated vignettes about a woman named Z who pukes up soup while thinking nihilistic thoughts, then has anal sex in a trailer,” for whom samantha has little patience.
I hate Vignette’s pieces. They are dreary word puzzles I’m always too bored and annoyed to solve. Each paragraph is a half smile, half frown, way up its own asshole. Also, they beg questions like: when on her perilous, pirouetting journey from Interlochen to Barnard was she ever in a trailer?
but, of course, in a workshop of four hydra-like girls and a fawning mentor, an outsider does not have the luxury of honestly speaking her mind.
”What do you think, Samantha?” Fosco asks me.
That it’s a piece of pretentious shit. That is says nothing, gives nothing. That I don’t understand it, that probably no one does and no one ever will. That not being understood is a privilege I can’t afford. That I can’t believe this woman got paid to come here. That I think she should apologize to trees. Spend a whole day on her knees in the forest, looking up at the trembling aspens and oaks and whatever other trees paper is made of with tears in her languid eyes and say, I’m fucking sorry. I’m sorry that I think I’m so goddamned interesting when it is clear that I am not interesting. Here’s what I am: I’m a boring tree murderess.
But I look at Vignette, at Creepy Doll, at Cupcake, the Duchess. All of them staring at me now with shy smiles.
“I think I’d like to see more of the soup too,” I hear myself say.
samantha herself is not immune to that stereotypically, overly fussy brand of MFA writing, even though we don’t get to see much of the work she produces for the workshop. however, as the narrator, everything is filtered through her descriptions, and the prose is precise, overly crafted; the reader is bludgeoned with adjectives, with a particular emphasis on smells pinned into place with poetic words, where the bunnies’ outfits are described in every scene, creating a sensory overload that is frequently original and poetic, but is sometimes just… too much. don’t get me wrong, i loved most of the writing,
She shivers at the view of the grand trees, as if they’re not trees at all but something truly vile, like all the rosy-blond light that seems to forever bathe the campus is about to punch her in the face like a terrible fist of rich.
there’s just a lot of chewy prose here and sometimes it’s a description-bog.
and then… bonkers ensues.
it’s really fun and sharp and shivery, with a macabre fairy-tale overlay that gives it a unique spin on the coming-of-age tale. "coming-of-age" might seem misplaced, considering these are MFA students, but they read much younger than their actual age; not just the self-consciously girly-girl bunnies, but also in the themes samantha brings to the narrative; her awkwardness and loneliness and leftover-adolescent self-consciousness about fitting in; finding her place — for all of her ostensible disgust at the bunnies, their camaraderie is not without appeal for someone defined by loneliness and survival-mode embracing of their own otherness.
it may not have been the book i thought i was going to read, but it was a very pleasant surprise, and even though i am being intentionally vague about where this one’ll take you, i encourage you to find out for yourself, because bonkers is way better than boring.
[image]
************************************
that was... unexpected. i need to process this one a little bit. review TK.
this is such a good middle grade animal book. based on the real-world wolf OR-7 (aka journey), A Wolf Called Wander tells the story of a wolf cub separated from his pack and his struggles to stay alive in a confusing world full of the dangers and difficulties that face a wolf too young to have learned how to survive on his own—to know what to eat, what to avoid eating, where to seek help, and when to be cautious.
it’s a fairly realistic depiction of nature—it doesn’t disney-sugarcoat its animals into being all bestie-pals or anything; some are definitely food and some are definitely competing fiercely for resources, but it’ll pan away before it rips your kids’ hearts out. make no mistake, there are plenty of sad things that happen in this book, but it doesn’t twist the knives. much.
the animals do "talk," because, ya know, exposition, but they can only understand their own kind. wander develops a working relationship with a raven, but they do not communicate through a shared language. in fact, wander cannot even understand a domesticated dog when he encounters one along the way. i liked that detail very much.
it’s a very thoughtfully-written adventure story, with appeal for both adults (i can vouch for this), and children (i am assuming the publishers can vouch for this). also: it has great illustrations:
[image]
[image]
[image]
it even has a lesson about underestimating nature at your own (or your brother’s) peril:
A scuffle of noise at the edge of the waterfall catches my eye. A black nose peeks out, followed by the most wild-haired weasel ever. Its hairs are long and stiff and wave out in all directions. It is even slower than the last one. I could catch that thing. I look at Father. He is not crouching to stalk it. He is looking at me.
“Is it delicious?” I nose-point to the weasel.
“Probably.”
The thing goes to a pine tree and nibbles at the bark. The stiff thick hairs are silver-gray at the tips and black at the base.
“Is it poisonous?”
“No.” He wags—just a little.
I make a little yip in case it hasn’t smelled us watching so nearby. It turns and doesn’t back away. Badgers and wolverines are not big, but Mother has warned us about them.
“Does that thing hunt us?”
“Nothing hunts a grown wolf but men.”
“He is so small. Why is he not afraid?”
“The porcupine fears no one and fights no one.”
“But I could get him in one pounce. He is so slow.���
“Anyone who tangles with a porcupine bows to him forever after.”
No way am I bowing to that thing. I watch it slowly and clumsily climbing the pine tree. There is nothing sleek or strong or shrewd about it. I will get Sharp to tangle with it. Then I will know, and Sharp will have to do the bowing.
wander will learn many lessons over the course of his journey, but that one is a good solid foundation to build upon.
i snatched this arc up because Raphael Bob-Waksberg is the creator of bojack horseman. i like my entertainment to be on the sadder side of the emotioni snatched this arc up because Raphael Bob-Waksberg is the creator of bojack horseman. i like my entertainment to be on the sadder side of the emotional spectrum, and bojack is the saddest show on television. do not come at me waving your this is us/million little things banners, because you’re not winning this one - between the writing, the vocal talents, and whatever the tragic analogue to comedic timing is, bojack's got the trophy for 'saddest' sewn up. and i know it takes several villages to create a teevee show, and sometimes their creators’ll create a thing and then wander off to go create another thing, leaving the showrunners in charge of all that follows, but i was confident that this guy's sensibilities would make for some short stories that would kick me in my feelingparts.
and i was not disappointed.
no, wait, actually, at first, i WAS disappointed. here’s the thing - my looking-back sense of this book as a whole is very positive. however, the second half of the collection was stronger than the first, and it took me a while to start digging it.
i am telling you this because i always feel compelled to review short story collections piece by piece because my life is full of poor time-management decisions, so, if you are reading this (because YOUR life is full of poor time-management decisions), you may read my mini-reviews of the early stories and too-hastily conclude, “oh, so this is a collection of meh stories,” but you would be as wrong in thinking this as you would be in thinking that this is us compares to a bojack in terms of its searing heartblistering devastation -- i.e. very wrong.
so to begin:
the first two are pretty much throwaway pieces. not that they aren't enjoyable, but they are very brief ( < 2 pages) nonstories
Salted Circus Cashews, Swear to God ★★★★☆
this isn't really a story so much as it is a thematic introduction; the risk v. reward of romantic relationships factor heavily in this collection, in which vulnerability is a recurring factor.
[image]
love is one of those trust falls that will most certainly make a fool out of you, but what if, comes the whisper, the slick devil persuasion, what if it’s different this time?
the symbolism is kind of fucking genius - using the olde snake in a can gag to invoke those tremulous ‘once bitten, twice shy’ beginning stages of any relationship; all the promises - This time there is no snake waiting, but there’s also an insidious underlayer of salesmanship to the pitch - a “you know you want to” invitation to open that can that invokes a different snake - the one whose persuasive talents led to that very first couple’s very first discord and therefore responsible for every breakup ever.
all in under 2 pages.
so - will you or won’t you? do you dare?
[image]
SIDENOTE - i also really like the playfulness with fonts that occurs in this story and several others throughout the collection. it’s weird and wonky and fun.
[image]
short stories ★★★★☆
a series of ten... what to call these? too long to be epigrams, not didactic enough to be aphorisms, too interconnected to be flash fiction, too bleak to be greeting cards.
let's call them bojack outtakes, because this:
7. "I don't even think about you," he couldn't wait to tell her, just as soon as she called him back.
calls to mind the sulking huff of a very drunk horse, and
6. "I never thought I could be this happy," she imagined one day saying to someone.
gives me the same sobbing-heart feelings as most of princess caroline’s storylines.
[image]
okay, and now the "real" stories begin. i very much liked those first two pieces, but they were too short to really stick in my reader-craw. i spent much more time writing those words and looking for those pictures just now than i did reading the stories in the first place, once again proving that all my time management decisions are bad ones. no more pictures!
A Most Blessed and Auspicious Occasion ★★★☆☆
unfortunately, this one didn't wow me. it’s a fine story, but as the first long piece in the book, i needed a bigger hook to land me. it's a solid three star; it's well-constructed and the lampooning of wedding culture is probably really enjoyable for readers who have gone through the experience themselves or have been to more than two weddings in the past 15 years. it just didn't inspire any strong feelings in me one way or another, even though i do appreciate all the splattery goat-slaughter parts. is it weird that i relate to that more than i relate to a wedding ceremony? should i bother unpacking that or would that be another one of those wastes of time? self-scrutiny = always a waste! moving on!
Missed Connections--m4w ★★★☆☆
i promise you, my feelings for this book WILL skew positive. just not yet. this one seemed like another little throwaway piece and in fact it originally appeared on craigslist in the missed connections section. coming across it there, i think i would have been more delighted. its placement here, at the start of what is already a fairly shaky collection, is less so. it's a cute modern prufrockian urban love story about a love that coulda been, but again - it’s very brief (a full FOUR pages this time) and i haven't been landed yet. but i’m going to be landed - you’ll see.
The Serial Monogamist's Guide to Important New York City Landmarks ★★★☆☆
okay, it’s not this one, but again, this is a good story - it’s sweet and nostalgic and perfectly fine and relatable - especially for someone who has lived and loved all over NYFC and understands perfectly how many places are past-haunted and inspire flashback montages of happy and crappy romances. it just didn’t give me anything i hadn’t encountered elsewhere in my reading life. decent story, no fireworks.
We Men of Science ★★★☆☆
this is the one i liked the least. i know - so far this review is a drag, but right now we are only on page 45 and there are more than 200 pages to go and soon you’ll forget all about these iffy ones just like i did. this one has fun doodles, including CATS! but it’s also a sci-fi-lite story with alternate realities and, i guess, multiple ways to screw up your relationships. perfectly acceptable as a story, just not my thing. you will probably like it more than i did because we are different people. however, this one does have one of the most bojack-y* ruminations:
Perhaps a better me would have done the right thing and left, or a worse me wouldn’t have worried about it, just indulged in the transgression, but I am only as good as I am, and I could only do what the person as good as I am could do.
A statue isn't built from the ground up—it's chiseled out of a block of marble—and I often wonder if we aren't likewise shaped by the qualities we lack, outlined by the empty space where the marble used to be. I'll be sitting on a train. I'll be lying awake in bed. I'll be watching a movie; I'll be laughing. And then, all of a sudden, I'll be struck by the paralyzing truth: It's not what we do that makes us who we are. It's what we don't do that defines us.
Lies We Told Each Other (a partial list) ★★★★☆
a bitterbleak comedy, in outline form, bullet-pointing a couple’s relationship arc—all the empty reassurances, promises, self-delusions, and gaslighting that goes into maintaining a healthy modern relationship. another brief one, but it’s astute and funny, plus it gets points for successfully suggesting the entire body of a relationship using only these skeletal snippets.
These Are Facts ★★★★☆
i don’t know what the hell i think about this one. this is the problem with reviewing each and every story when NOBODY ASKED YOU TO. on the one hand, i’m interested enough in the characters and the situation to want to read more - like, i think i could read a whole novel with these characters, or maybe a salinger-style story cycle. on the other hand, isn’t that supposed to be one of the hallmarks of a “good” short story - that it leaves you wanting more? WWRCD (in which RC is raymond carver, duh) i don’t know - i still feel like a short story dummy in many ways, as far as what they are “supposed” to “do” and what i, as a reader, am meant to “get” out of them. i liked a lot of moments in this story, i folded over a few pages because of an especially lovely turn of phrase or insight, but i’m not sure what, if anything, it left me with. for a story that ends with the words Yeah. I know, i really really don’t.
Lunch with the Person Who Dumped You ★★★★☆
another little bitty comedic interlude of a story. it’s that thing when you’re meeting someone for dinner but you’re hungry NOW and you shove whatever’s handy into your face to tide you over and it’s not that you don’t enjoy the eating of it but you’re really ready for dinner to happen.
RUFUS ★★★★★
this is dinner happening. this is the story that started turning it around for me. fun fact: i don't usually love dog-voiced stories, but this one made me smile and got me all soft in the heart. in a book filled with love stories, this one--about the waxing and waning of a human romance seen through the fuzzy filter of doggy-understanding -- this is the one that got me a little choked up.
ManMonster scratches my back and he makes a noise like, "Rufus rufus rufus." And I know that noise "Rufus" can mean many things. Sometimes "Rufus" means "I am happy to see you" and sometimes it means "I am upset," and this time I discern that it means both things at once.
he is Goodog.
Rules for Taboo ★★★★☆
another tiny (3-page) story, but coming as it did after a GREAT story, i was more pleasantly disposed towards it. on the one hand, this story is an instruction-booklet for how to play the board game taboo. on the other hand, it's an instruction-booklet for why couples shouldn't play games, in mixed company, that encourage the sharing of personal history because what begins as an innocent night of fun can quickly turn into an airing of grievances and too much insight into a relationship's stress fractures.
also: title-sighting!
Up-and-Comers ★★★★★
this one is the one. my favorite. it has so much energy and is so much fun. it’s one of the longest ones in the collection (it might even be the longest - it’s either this or the penultimate story, but i REFUSE to do any math/research into the matter because i am LEARNING how to be more judicious about my time expenditures - have you even NOTICED the lack of pictures?)
if you know me, you might think it is strange that my favorite story in this collection is about the exploits of a rock band who are also superheroes. i know me and i think it is strange, but it is more about the very small and ordinary human things that are happening underneath all the flash and glamor of being in a rock band and being superheroes and it is deeply moving and sweet in its most quietly uneventful moments and it got me all over. this isn’t true spoiler, but it is a maybe-spoiler to someone because it is the end of the story. it doesn’t, you know, reveal the name of the murderer or anything. also, spoiler alert, there isn’t a murderer.
I remember one time I asked Iris if she was afraid to die. This was when we were trapped in the Man-Pig Pit of Dimension K and it really looked like we might not make it home. Iris said, afraid or not, it didn't really matter. That the thing about death is that it's terrifying and overwhelming and it can happen at any moment. And when we're confronted with death we can either be cowardly or we can be brave, but either way we're going to die, so...
And I thought, Whoa, that's dark.
But here I was, sitting in my childhood bedroom with a guitar. The Up-and-comers were over and done with and it was just Lizzy and me and it was the afternoon and it was summer in Tulsa and Lizzy was lying on my bed, looking as calm and beautiful as I had ever seen her, and she was asking me to play her something I had written.
And I thought about how, actually, if you wanted to, you could say the same thing about life. That life is terrifying and overwhelming and it can happen at any moment. And when you're confronted with life you can either be cowardly or you can be brave, but either way you're going to live.
another l’il shorty: 2 pages, second-person, a short sad circle about the self-defeating patterns of behavior in a depressive cycle - recognizing the ways in which it causes relationships to end but unable to avoid it happening again and again - but maybe it will be different this time.
snakes rattling in a can.
You Want to Know What Plays Are Like? ★★★★★
i did not think i was going to like this one. it seemed gimmicky - ANOTHER second person pov, right on the heels of the ministory preceding it, plus a theater-focus, but then it really expanded into something… else and became a funny-sad little powerbomb of a story, one of the strongest in the collection.
I TOLD YOU IT WAS GOING TO GET BETTER! are you still here? probably not, but that’s fine, now i can just talk about you behind your back.
the poem ★★★☆☆
i don’t have any feelings about this one, but i will say that he manages his rhyme scheme and scansion much better than lang leav ever has.
The Average of All Possible Things ★★★★★
yes, this one YEEEEESSSSSSSS!! sooo, this one maybe hit a little too close to home. not necessarily the details, but the feels. like lucinda, i am regular, and average, and boring, and fine. and my life and opportunities and expectations?
Everything was beige, and stucco, and fine.
and all the other stuff?
The truth was Lucinda never even wanted to work there in the first place; she just kind of fell into the position, the same way she seemed to always just kind of fall into everything. A person as unexceptional as Lucinda doesn't live a life as much as a life just floods in around her, filling up whatever empty space a life should be occupying.
that’s me in a nutshell these days. i’m not proud of this wallow, but things in my life are still trending sour. (since you’re not here anymore, i feel okay about being a little confessional and self-pitying) this story described so many of my moods, i just had to love it.
More of the You That You Already Are ★★★★☆
FRANKLIN PIERCE IS MENTIONED IN THIS STORY. that is all.
We will be close on Friday 18 July ★★★★☆
aaaaand the book closes with a one-page downer of a story. which is the perfect way to end a book. this book, any book.
so you see - (not that you are still here to see) - now that i have finished reviewing this, i’ve already forgotten reviewing, let alone reading the earlier, less-satisfying stories, and i’m left with an overall glow of appreciation for this book.
and maybe you have saved a life or birthed a baby or prevented a crime and made a more lasting contribution to the world in the time it took me to self-indulgently prattle on about all of my thoughts and feels about some short stories, but iiiii did all this while wearing a onesie with a monkey on it, so i win the cozy trophy.
* bojack the show. this feel more like a diane moment. HOLY SHIT I JUST REALIZED WHAT A NERD I AM!!!
if you’re going to read ONE african mythology-infused fantasy novel with magical portals, bloody dismemberments, shapeshifting, immortNOW AVAILABLE!!
if you’re going to read ONE african mythology-infused fantasy novel with magical portals, bloody dismemberments, shapeshifting, immortal beings, and a murder mystery that throws you in the middle of its world with zero regard for your comfort… probably read Black Leopard, Red Wolf.
that’s glib, but the comparison is worth mentioning. i love marlon james, and i’m willing to work for his ‘catch me if you can’ brand of storytelling, but reading that book fulfilled my quota of maddeningly confusing fantasy novels for the year. blrw requires the reader’s close attention and critical engagement throughout, otherwise, it can be easy to get bogged down and lost. this book is the same kind of disorienting, but it never came together for me, even though i kept going back and rereading chunks of it, trying to find where i’d lost the thread.
i suspect a lot of my confusion would have been avoided by reading Redemption in Indigo first. ten years is a long time to wait before writing a follow-up, and this lists as a standalone novel, but several of the characters were introduced in RII, and this book takes for granted that you are either already familiar with or can effortlessly wrap your head around its fantasy bits, and i am simply not that reader.
i don’t think the word ‘standalone’ should ever be applied to a book set in a fantasy realm. because while the story itself may be a standalone, the specifics of the world are crucial for comprehension and enjoyment.
‘cuz it would be fine if this book was about jimmy the baker and the first book was all about his bakery and all the fine loaves he baked therein. and if the readerly WE were only reading the second book featuring jimmy the baker and he made mention of the previous loaves in his life, we would be able to interpolate our own bread-related memories or experiences into the story and we would probably be a-ok. but this? this is about undying/immortal creatures and angels and a goddess and mindpaths and essences and amulets and I DON’T KNOW HOW THIS WORKS.
but then, neither do the characters:
The Trickster closed his eyes, pondering. “I can’t explain it. I barely understand the theory of how amulets work. I know a lot depends on human choice. I also know that there are some events—both those in the past and those yet to come by human reckoning—that are already completed, and others that are waiting for a choice to be made. Change or thwart those choices, and you change the world—past and future.”
“There is no way I am going to understand that, is there?” She wagged her head in tired defeat.
same.
i enjoyed the parts i did understand—which was more of the book than this review is implying—and she does good word-work:
The murmur and chatter had the disconcerting normality of a cocktail party hum, and the vague background surged and shifted with the turgid ennui of a crowd of people assembled to elegantly waste time
(o, that assonance)
but, yeah, i struggled with the conceptual foundation. and i hear you scolding me - 'karen, you have owned Redemption in Indigo for years. it’s your own damn fault you didn’t read it.'
we all agree i am a dummy.
you are probably better at fantasy than i am and this book will not trip you up the way it tripped me up. OR, to avoid being me, all bewildered and mewling, there are three weeks before this book comes out and Redemption in Indigo is < 200 pages. you can do it.
******************************
IS this a standalone? because it doesn't FEEL like a standalone! i am about 60 pages in and i am LOST!
I used to care when men called me difficult. I really did. Then I stopped. This way is better.
this is a breeeeezy zip of a book. it’s written in a gossipy, fragmented way, using snippets of “behind the music”-style interviews to chronicle the rise and fall; the relationships, adventures, and misadventures of a fictional 70s rock band called daisy jones & the six, which is apparently modeled after fleetwood mac.
reid’s frothy trip down imaginary rock and roll lane is shaped as a book-in-the-making, allowing former band members, rock critics, producers, friends and lovers the opportunity to supply or respond to other participants’ admissions concerning all the seamy behind-the-scenes dirt that is part and parcel of fame’s mythos - the resentments, the sex and drinking and drugs, the creative differences, the posturing; the whole roiling emotional toll of the rock and roll lifestyle.
there’s a special emphasis on the burdens and perceptions and scrutiny that comes with being a woman in the industry, and in a band numbering seven people, the juggling of egos and managing status and contribution and consensus becomes a real issue along with the compromises one makes for commercial viability, being an artist vs. being a star, personal/artistic sacrifices made for the good of the band — and things get, as the kids say, complicated.
although reid has to construct these personas using only what is essentially a series of monologues, she does it well and consistently, and there’s some fun to be had in observing who among the characters are forthright, who politely declines to answer, or whose memories differ or contradict the memories of others. this makes for a little subtext of a story about how memories change over time, how situations are interpreted based on a participant’s perspective or the filter of hindsight, or how misunderstandings, when allowed to go unchallenged, often snowball into bigger problems than they ought to have.
in a related theme, it’s interesting to see how this phenomenon transcends the interpersonal level and is carried out into the legend of the band - how lyrics are interpreted, misinterpreted, how rumors grow around them, how situations are inflated for a juicier tale, and how the press operates as kingmakers - creating or perpetuating the aura of stardom on the slimmest of pretexts.
it’s a fun, light summertime book sprinkled with great lines. the best one?
Karen was the kind of person who had more talent in her finger than most people have in their whole body…
and don’t you forget it.
********************************
reading for marieclaire.com’s all-lady-authors book club
oooh, goodreads choice awards semifinalist for BEST MYSTERY/THRILLER 2019! what will happen?
this is one of those rare perfect books. the fact that it’oooh, goodreads choice awards semifinalist for BEST MYSTERY/THRILLER 2019! what will happen?
this is one of those rare perfect books. the fact that it’s a debut only makes it more impressive, and no matter what this author writes next, i will be on it immediately.
i was fortunate enough to stumble upon a free arc of this, thinking-to-self, ‘this looks like it could be good,’ and then when i saw all the high praise it was receiving in its early reviews, i decided to bump it up the old arc-stack and see what all the fuss was about.
lemme tell you, the fuss is earned.
it takes place on russia’s kamchatka peninsula, and at its center is the disappearance of two little girls; sisters eight and eleven, who get into a stranger’s car and… vanish.
each chapter that follows carries the story forward a month - from the girls’ abduction in august to the following july, and each is told from a different character’s perspective. the disappearance worms its way into every chapter, but is usually only used to season the stories - how the situation affected different people who live in the area, most of whom had no direct connection with the girls themselves, and each chapter is gripping and fully-realized enough to stand alone as a short story.
it’s such an original way to tell a missing-kids narrative; using that same structure i love in Winesburg, Ohio - a smalltown short story cycle that both is and isn’t a novel, but this one has more specific touchpoints, and as time passes, the impact of the tragedy shifts the way any sensational news story shifts with the passing of time and proximity, slipping into cautionary tale or local legend, dredging up memories of earlier disappearances, giving way to ’where were you when…’ recollections, becoming a different kind of collective reference point.
most multiple POV books will pick a handful of characters and alternate between them, and it was a great moment of realization for me, about three chapters in, when i clocked to the, “oh, so we’re just not going to go back to that character’s POV at all, wow.” at first, i was a little disappointed, because i had become invested in particular voices, but with each chapter, i found myself making a whole new investment, and once i started approaching this more as a short story cycle, i appreciated it even more, because that’s just so freaking hard to pull off, and she does it remarkably well. characters do pop up again, but seen through someone else’s eyes, and these transitions and the recurring motifs are handled beautifully.
i admit to being a very ignorant person when it comes to culture and geography, and this book introduced me to a region i knew absolutely nothing about; phillips’ descriptions of the landscape, ethnic makeup, history, and social fabric of kamchatka was illuminating and engrossing and - without a drop of hyperbole on my part - masterful.
i loved this book so very much. her writing is flawless, the build is rich and textured, the ending is satisfying. my only (oh-so-minor) complaint is i wish she hadn’t dropped that mic in the final paragraph, because we knew without it being pointed out and i think it would have been more elegant to not call attention to it so explicitly.
but i mean, really - that’s not even a couple’s spat in the love i have for this book.
i've already read and reviewed the first two stories in this collection (The Prospectors and The Bad Graft) during 2017's december advNOW AVAILABLE!!!
i've already read and reviewed the first two stories in this collection (The Prospectors and The Bad Graft) during 2017's december advent calendar, so i'm ahead of the game!
and you, too, can be ahead of the game, as four of the eight stories in this collection previously appeared in the new yorker. here are your links: orange world, bog girl, the prospectors, and the bad graft.
i'm not sure if the other stories can be found elsewhere, but don't go looking for them online - they are right here in this book! and even though karen russell is giving her milk away for free, you should still buy this cow - it's got a FOX on the cover! <--- sentences like that make me wonder if my brain's got one of those slow leaks in it. incidentally, the eponymous story here is about a new mother giving her milk away for free... to the devil. so, if you just read all her stories for free, you will be as big a freeloader as the devil, and is that what you want? i didn't think so. but i will give you a sip, you minor demon:
Even as a girl, Rae was a terrible negotiator. She gave anybody anything they asked of her. She owed the world; the world owned her. She never felt that she could simply take up space; no, one had to earn one’s keep here on planet Earth. As a kid, Rae’s body soundlessly absorbed the painful things that happened to it, and not even an echo of certain events escaped her lips. Sometimes she thought the problem (the gift, she’d once believed) was anatomical; she didn’t seem to have a gag reflex, so none of the secret stuff—the gushy black awful stuff—ever came out. Now it lives inside her, liquefying. Inadmissible, indigestible event. Is that what the devil is drinking?
that passage is slightly different in the new yorker version, so there - now you GOTTA read both.
i'm not going to do a play-by-play of the collection as i usually, masochistically, do, but i'll high-and-low it: The Prospectors is one of my favorite short stories ever, and The Tornado Auction was my least-favorite in the collection, but this book - like double stuf oreos, has a big delicious middle. AND A FOX ON THE COVER!
this is the first book i have read by gillian french, so i don’t know how this one stacks up to her other ones, but i knew she was a prNOW AVAILABLE!!
this is the first book i have read by gillian french, so i don’t know how this one stacks up to her other ones, but i knew she was a pretty popular YA author, i saw a free ARC, i loved the cover, and i grabbed it with my sticky froggy hands.
[image]
this is YA written for the younger side of the YA curve. and there ain’t nothing wrong with that, but most of the YA i’ve read seems to be aiming for that juicy YA/adult crossover demographic, so the difference is something i noticed when i was reading it. on the one hand - that makes it an easy breezy read, but on the other hand, i was missing the depth and richness folks like patrick ness and laini taylor and melina marchetta bring to the YA table.
everything about this is fine: the characters are appealing, the atmosphere is developed into a fine weave of horror and realism: halloween slendermannish spookiness in one strand and quirky new girl/friendship/enigmatic-boy crush in the other. even the descriptions work:
I swear I’ve been here before. Not Birchwood Terraces, exactly, but other developments like it, named after the trees cut down to build the place: Oakfield, Elm Park, Spruce Way. We’ve moved three times in four years, and twice when I was in elementary school, following Dad’s construction work, but somehow, we always end up right here.
i know this girl, i know this place. and i appreciate that the characters are children of lower-middle class/working-poor families, which novelists so frequently turn into stereotypes, but here read like real people, real circumstances, discrete personalities and home lives.
all of that is fine - i was really enjoying seeing where it was going, enjoying the journey towards the ‘is it or isn’t it?’ of the supernatural/human reveal.
and then it got there.
and, wow.
this book is like waiting for marriage to lose your virginity - you spend so much time anticipating what’s going to come and then it’s over and you wonder if it was all really worth waiting for. i’m not sure if this analogy holds water, but unlike marriage, i’ve committed to it, so here we are.
again, i have the ARC, so page numbers may differ come pub day, but after 280 pages, we come to the big reveal, the big showdown, and it lasts NINE PAGES. nine. pages. and that’s me rounding up the half-pages - it’s actually only seven. which is a truly unsatisfying roll in the hay, by my standards.
so, was it worth it? for me, not really. it’s an out-of-left-field answer to a question built up into a lot more than it turned out to be. and it doesn’t even make sense - if the why is the why, then the hazel thing makes no sense at all. none.
so, yeah - for me, this one didn’t work. i liked enough of it to give french another shot, considering the high marks her other books have gotten ‘round here, but this one did not stick its landing, which pretty much tainted whatever steps in our courtship i’d enjoyed before we commenced our regrettable wedding night.
***********************************
[image]
sorry, booknerds - i didn't love this. 3 stars, rounded up
The last thing the world needs is one more woman with principles. What we need is women with money. Women with money have flexibility, and nothing is The last thing the world needs is one more woman with principles. What we need is women with money. Women with money have flexibility, and nothing is more dangerous than a woman who can bend any way she wants.
this gets three stars because i didn’t like it as much as Luckiest Girl Alive, and i gave that one four stars, so ta-daa - computation. i always feel like i have to explain that three stars is not a negative rating. in fact, this book has quite a lot going for it - it’s a fast, twisty read, it’s very au courant with its intersectional feminism angle, and it makes some smart, and probably unpopular, points about oorah sisterhood and the state of modern feminism.
but it’s also a reality show murrrrderrr plot, featuring the cast of Goal Diggers - Season 4, a show where successful young female entrepreneurs middle-finger the expectations of the patriarchy, support each other in their endeavors and inspire their female viewers with their accomplishments achieved in the show’s empowering, pro-woman environment.
that’s the pitch. but what’s a reality show without conflict?
for all its lofty ideals, Goal Diggers is still a show that encourages and rewards self-promotion, which means staying in the spotlight, which means giving the camera something to film, which means drama. so the cast and their nearest-and-dearest; these sisters, besties, rivals, mothers/surrogate mothers, daughters, lovers are being handled, massaged, groomed, their behavior amplified for ratings, and they are incentivized to lean in to confrontations to keep their place on the show, strategically forming and reforming their alliances, always on guard, watching their backs, scheming, paranoid that others are scheming, fostering an environment of lies and betrayals escalating into increasingly desperate ploys and coverups building to murrrrrderrrrrrr.
the only reality shows i watch are the one where people make dresses and the one where people make food. and there’s plenty of posturing and competitiveness, but there’s also an actual game at the center. conflict for conflict’s sake has never much appealed to me, on teevee or in life, but this book is kind of fascinating, giving some insight into the behind-the-scenes of these “unscripted”, controlled reality programs, and all that goes into a show’s construction; the filming chronology, the politics behind who sits where, the shifting of alliances, the management of public v. private selves, and the power of who knows what about whom.
there’s also a nice nesting effect here, in how the book presents reality and Reality, and how the lines between the two get smudged. for example, in Reality:
On a show with four to five players, any more than one gay woman and it becomes a lesbian show, any more than one woman of color and it becomes an ethnic show, and then advertisers start to worry about alienating the audience.
and in reality:
Black women in a white milieu are notorious infighters. It’s a risk to align yourselves. One of you is a gentle breeze of difference. Two is a twister, everyone hiding in their basement.
even outside of the structures of the show, there are rules and codes for women, which only intensify as the circles narrow from gender into race, income, sexual orientation, age, weight, an endless vigilance directed towards navigating the expectations of others, an impulse that follows the cast whether on-camera or off, the inherent competition between women causing a beautiful, successful thirty-five year old woman to feel a sense of relieved delight in cataloging the physical imperfections of a twelve-year-old girl. there are so many poisonous moments where i personally felt a pang - jen and her rescue dogs, stephanie’s publicist's horrible advice, layla’s observed eyeslide/loss of innocence, much wincing in this one.
it's full to the bursting point with toxic rivalry and miscommunications and ways in which tragedy could have been avoided, and none of it feels like the "fun" kind of catfighting that reality TV seems to cultivate - so much of this is directed inward, women self-assessing, feeling like they're not measuring up in some way, ironically by having those feelings in the first place - a modern woman is not supposed to have doubts, have body issues, judge other women, etc...
the tone is reflective, but also often sharp and angry, particularly towards lip service sisterhood; the commodified, instagram feminism of easy slogans but no real follow-through because there's just not enough opportunity to go around; competition for those opportunities again collapsing the walls between reality and Reality.
”We can make this right, can’t we?” Brett pleads. “Come on. You know I always support you. Real queens fix each other’s crowns.”
My disdain takes my breath away. Real queens fix each other’s crowns? This is the equivocating claptrap that passes as feminism these days. Just another Instagram idiom that assigns responsibility to the less effective party. How about, Real kings promote women? Or, I don’t know, Real kings pay black women the same as they pay white women? Real kings pay all women the same as they pay men? That we task women with helping other women in a society that places us in systemic competition with one another is why feminism has failed. Do not recruit me to link arms with my sisters until more than 2 percent of positions at the top are occupied by women, until her success does not almost certainly guarantee my failure. Do not tell me I’m not a real queen when another woman catches a fish and I am too starved to cheer.
it's a fast-paced, juicy thriller, but there's also plenty of message. like i said, this book has a lot going for it, but there are some weaknesses - the characters are somewhat flat, they don’t always feel like people so much as mouthpieces or outgrowths of a situation, and some of their choices seem to be more tied to serving the narrative than reflecting human behavior. but it does get its hooks in you - i started reading this on saturday night and i just...kept reading straight through the night without a wink of sleep until i finished, when everyone else was just waking up for their sunday brunchies and i regret nothing.
this is a fine, meaty debut. it’s grit lit literary enough to drop words like “extispicy,” but gritty enough to include an anecdote* tNOW AVAILABLE!!!
this is a fine, meaty debut. it’s grit lit literary enough to drop words like “extispicy,” but gritty enough to include an anecdote* that made me, long leatherskinned against book violence, wince.
it takes place deep in the virginia part of the appalachians, where a man named rice moore has been working for six months, appreciating the seclusion of his new home:
No other human being lived within miles. Rice presided alone over seven thousand acres of private nature preserve: he was the caretaker, the science tech. He drove the John Deere tractor. He’d exaggerated his construction experience on the job application, probably one reason they’d hired a guy with his record. That and the fact he was a qualified biological science technician who looked like he could take care of himself. He’d agreed to do the work on the cabin so the owners wouldn’t hire a bunch of carpenters to drive up in the morning and ruin his solitude.
the isolation of the location was one of the perks, after all - not only does rice have a record, but he’s also using an assumed name, hiding out from the members of the mexican drug cartel who want him dead after previous entanglements have left a heap of dead and wounded on both sides.
cautiously optimistic that they’ve lost his trail, rice immerses himself in his work, giving himself over to the wildness that surrounds him; not in a starry-eyed tree-hugging way, but in a way that studies the movements of the creatures around him, that prowls the forest at night, occasionally sleeping under the stars. and in the way that gets really pissed off by finding the bodies of bears poached on the protected land, baited and stripped of galls, paws, skin, left to rot.
time for the caretaker to take care...of business.
[image]
oh, you know you love me.
it's man and nature and crime and protection, as rice begins his own unauthorized investigation into who is responsible for the poaching, making friends and enemies along the way, ultimately risking exposure to the people he most needs to avoid.
there are some pretty intense, well-placed scenes.
in between those more confrontational scenes, there are quietly meditative ones, building an atmosphere in which there's a great deal of blurring between natural and civilized spaces; rice ventures into nature, but nature ventures right back, encroaching upon what little of the preserve has been allotted to its humans. all the nooks and crannies of rice’s new home are explored by bees, snakes, mice, squirrels, chipmunks, opossums, insects, toads, birds, spiders and even a bear.
The bear’s intrusion wasn’t a surprise, exactly. This was nothing more than a new level of permeability in the boundary between wild and domestic, something he had come to accept while living up here.
this phenomenon of nature, or wildness, taking back the domestic spaces claimed by humans as civilized is a recurring theme throughout the novel, and it becomes a metaphor for what is to come - rice’s past catching up with him, bringing violence, infecting his new life.
The lodge had been assimilated into the meadow over the past hundred years, and despite his efforts to keep the place up, an irresistible osmosis was always at work, the life outside inevitably forcing its way in.
change is gradual, but inevitable.
the descriptions of the natural world are beautifully written, and although it is not a pretty book, it falls on the “nicer” side of the grit lit divide, in the vein of Fourth of July Creek or Above the Waterfall. there’s ample violence, but it’s neither gratuitous nor gleefully descriptive, and there’s an effort made towards the redemptive; opportunities for rice to retain his conscience and his humanity even in the midst of all this roaring ungovernable nature.
a very strong debut with an equally magnificent cover.
also, these endpapers:
[image]
* the part where they proved “they could do whatever they wanted,” that “nobody could imagine what else they might do.”
oooh, goodreads choice awards semifinalist for best mystery & thriller 2018! what will happen?
People are not mirrors - they don’t see you how you see oooh, goodreads choice awards semifinalist for best mystery & thriller 2018! what will happen?
People are not mirrors - they don’t see you how you see yourself.
a careful, careful tiptoe review for a book whose hook is how twisty its twists, how shocking its conclusion.
[image]
the publisher-letter slipped into this ARC says:
It has an ending that completely messes with your head in the very best sense - and if you can see it coming, you’re smarter than everyone I know!
which is the best way to sell a book to me.
i’m positive that i’m not smarter than anyone anyone knows, but i read a lot, and pursuing that english degree in my youth both diminished my chances of amassing great material wealth and also ruined me for many of these “twists for days” books. you’re trained to close-read, you’re gonna close-read. and unlike a lot of readers, i’d rather be surprised than validated. i get angry if i figure things out too soon - you had one job, writer! fool me!
but this book did not make me angry. i figured out jo’s deal pretty early on, but nearly everything else was a delightful surprise.
[image]
as far as plotting goes, it’s pretty tight. it cheats a little, but you were warned by the title and the opening bit that there would be some misdirection coming your way:
My name is Amber Reynolds. There are three things you should know about me:
1. I’m in a coma. 2. My husband doesn’t love me anymore. 3. Sometimes I lie.
the story alternates between three different points in amber’s life: now/then/before. or more precisely, in coma/leading up to coma/childhood journal, and it’s full of messy relationships, tangled secrets, plots, lies, and much shade.
it’s a fun ride full of toxic people with plenty to chew on. and the promises of
[image] you’re a twist! and you’re a twist! and you’re a twist! are no lie.
at the end of it all i have a couple of blurry areas - some timeline turbulence, some questions about edward and some miscellaneous loose ends, but for the most part it was fun smooth sailing. i read it in one day (or one night, since my night job has made me a daysleeper), in a mad dash to get ALL THE ANSWERS!, and if ever there was a one-sitting book, it's this one. call in sick and be cozy. you have four months to work on your fake cough.
***********************************************
FOUR AND A HALF STARS!
this is one hell of a debut. and it requires a careful careful tiptoe review.
oooh, goodreads choice awards semifinalist for best memoir/autobiography 2018! what will happen?
At the time, I gaze up at the sky, the birds, the fastoooh, goodreads choice awards semifinalist for best memoir/autobiography 2018! what will happen?
At the time, I gaze up at the sky, the birds, the fast-moving clouds, and I am thinking about the dense forest behind us, about how I do not want to be dragged in there, not at all. I do not want to see the trees closing over my head, feel the scratch and pluck of bushes against my skin, my clothes, the cold damp of the ground in there. My thoughts are very simple. They pulse through my head: let me go, let me go, not the forest, not the ground, please.
conceptually, this is wholly original and a bit chilling - a memoir told through all of the author’s near-death experiences, with a total of seventeen chapters.
that’s too many, right? i became outraged at capital-d death on her behalf, for cat-and-mousing her around so much - go pick on someone your own size, etc etc.
but it’s not quite as dire as it appears - the final chapter is about her daughter, whose severe food allergies reminded me of another memoir - Don't Kill the Birthday Girl: Tales from an Allergic Life, so it’s really only SIXTEEN personal near-death experiences, which is much more reasonable; slightly more lives than a cat, considerably more than most humans.
and some of the situations in those sixteen chapters are nearer to death than others - going for an AIDS test after your partner has been unfaithful is a far cry from having a machete held to your neck. although, machete-to-neck should be weighted to count for at least two, especially if it is not the first time a killer has threatened your life via that slender stalk. and just some friendly advice - after three near-drownings, you need to take the hint and stop going into the water. it does not want you inside of it and is saying “no,” the only way it can.
it’s a very novelistic approach to writing memoir, both the novel-ty (HA!) of the approach, and the style of the writing, which is vivid and descriptive, expands and contracts in focus, wraps anecdotes around other anecdotes, and switches from first to third to even second-person from chapter to chapter.
although the premise seems designed for thrills, it’s a much more reflective than sensational approach. she’s very pragmatic about her experiences:
There is nothing unique or special in a near-death experience. They are not rare; everyone, I would venture, has had them, at one time or another, perhaps without even realising it. The brush of a van too close to your bicycle, the tired medic who realises that a dosage ought to be checked in final time, the driver who has drunk too much and is reluctantly persuaded to relinquish the car keys, the train missed after sleeping through an alarm, the aeroplane not caught, the virus never inhaled, the assailant never encountered, the path not taken. We are, all of us, wandering about in a state of oblivion, borrowing our time, seizing our days, escaping our fates, slipping through loopholes, unaware of when the axe may fall.
the chapters are titled after the part(s) of the body made vulnerable by or responsible for each close call, with a nice olde timey anatomical rendering of said parts.
[image]
i’ve chosen a pull-quote from each chapter to entice you with her writing chops or the shivery allure of the situation. there’s a lot packed into these stories, and i definitely recommend this one as an intriguing alternative approach to memoir.
NECK (1990)
I am careful to use strides that are confident, purposeful, but not frightened. I am not frightened: I say this to myself, over the oceanic roar of my pulse. Perhaps, I think, I am free, perhaps I have misread the situation. Perhaps it’s perfectly normal to lie in wait for young girls on remote paths and then let them go.
I am eighteen. Just. I know almost nothing.
(this story was really frightening, but it reminded me of an even more horrifying close call story, which you need to watch here: http://www.trutv.com/shows/the-chris-...)
LUNGS (1988)
At sixteen, you can be so restless, so frustrated, so disgusted by everything that surrounds you that you are willing to leap off what is probably a fifteen-metre drop, in the dark, into a turning tide.
SPINE, LEGS, PELVIS, ABDOMEN, HEAD (1977)
I remember that I kept going. I kept moving my feet, kept powering on through the mountain air, as if nothing could touch me, nothing bad might happen, if I could just keep going, keep running, keep moving.
WHOLE BODY (1993)
The air is filled with screaming, with curses, with prayer. A man with blood coursing out of both nostrils starts to yell in a language I don’t understand, gesticulating wildly. Drops of blood scatter from his face to mark the seats, the ceiling.
NECK (2002)
We had more money in our pockets and bags than we’d ever carried before, at any time in our travels. The man takes it all from us, pulling it out from the various places in which we’d stashed it. We hand it to him, in exchange for my neck, its arteries, its tendons, its muscles, its trachea, its oesophagus, for it all to remain in its current unbreached state.
ABDOMEN (2003)
The floor was awash with blood and people were running. It is never a good sign, I’ve found, when medics run.
BABY AND BLOODSTREAM (2005)
You will watch your body backtrack, go in reverse, unpicking its work: the sickness recedes, your breasts shrink back, your abdomen flattens, your appetite disappears.
LUNGS (2000)
I straighten my swimwear, watch the water drawing the blood off my skin and whirling it away, as if it has need of it, as if it has some purpose in mind for it.
CIRCULATORY SYSTEM (1991)
Because why not? Why not let a man you’ve never met, a man you have no reason to trust, throw a fistful of knives at you?
HEAD (1975)
”There was that other time,” she says, “when you didn’t stay in the car. Do you remember?”
CRANIUM (1998)
She is aware of having dodged something, of having pulled her leg out of the trap, once again, at the last moment.
INTESTINES (1994)
What came out of me was streaked with blood, mucoid, meaty in texture.
BLOODSTREAM (1997)
Infidelity is as old as humanity: there is nothing about it you can think or say that hasn’t been thought or said before. You go back and back over the days, the conversations, the walks you took, wondering why on earth you hadn’t seen it, how you could have missed it, how you could not have known. The pain of it is interior, humiliating, infinitely wearying.
CAUSE UNKNOWN (2003)
Right now, my son is nine weeks old and I’m finding my way, blundering forward with this new job, this new life. Right now, I’m in France, for reasons that are no longer clear to me, trying to breastfeed in a hot car by the side of the road. Right now, Will has disappeared over the dunes to look at the sea and two men are rustling their way out of the maize field on the other side of the road.
LUNGS (2010)
He can’t swim, is what is going round and round in my head. He can’t swim and I’ve brought him out here because of what someone told me. He can’t swim and I’ve brought him out into deep sea on the advice of an idiot.
CEREBELLUM (1980)
I gather, from all the listening in, that I am to have what is called a CAT-scan. The name of it is a comfort to me, conveying as it does fur, paws, whiskers, a long and curled tail. It will, from what I can glean, take photographs of my brain and these will tell the doctors how to make me better. I like the sound of this CAT-scan: the photographs, some manner of feline involvement, the making-better.
DAUGHTER (the present day)
We never leave the house without her medication, her emergency kit. We know how to inject her, how to administer cardio-pulmonary resuscitation, how to recognize the signs of low blood pressure, respiratory distress, urticaria, the onset of cardiac failure.
I know I must nod calmly when people tell me they understand exactly how I feel because they have a gluten allergy, which makes them really bloated whenever they eat bread. I know to be patient and genial when I have to explain that, no, it’s not OK to bring that hummus into our house. No, it’s not a good idea to give her a little bit to get her used to it. No, please don’t open that near her. Yes, your lunch could kill my child.
and although, thankfully, this following quoted portion does not end in a near-death experience for the author (although i can certainly envision it going that way), i just wanted to include it because what it describes is what i imagine heaven to be; what i hope will be waiting for me after my axe falls.
My mother instructed us not to touch the kittens, not yet, and we nodded gravely. As soon as she had gone back to the kitchen, however, I told my younger sister to keep watch at the garage door. Obviously, I reasoned to her, there was no way I wasn’t going to touch these kittens. No way at all. The keen joy of plunging in your hands and lifting up all four kittens in a mewing, writhing mass and burying your face in their aliveness, their softness, their miniature faces, their never-walked on paws: how could I forgo this?
oooh, goodreads choice awards semifinalist for best mystery! what will happen?
some years back, i was at BEA with greg, and we were on line for somethioooh, goodreads choice awards semifinalist for best mystery! what will happen?
some years back, i was at BEA with greg, and we were on line for something or other, and he’d wandered off to a nearby booth while i held our place. there was a gaggle of librarians behind me in line, and the boy-librarian was holding court, impressing all the girl-librarians* with his game of thrones knowledge by giving a highly detailed and booming synopsis of everything that happens in A Storm of Swords, which i had not yet read, but i knew from greg was the book with all the stuff and things. once i realized what was happening, i made the emphatic but unobtrusive clicking noise that means “come here now, please,” developed during many years of working in the bookstore trenches together, and the moment he returned to my side, i bounced outta earshot without a word of explanation.
[image]
in a perfectly executed choreography of facial expressions and ASL (which only one of us has studied, rendering it a gesture more decorative than useful), we established when it was safe for me to come back. which, for the record, was much longer than it should have taken - that nerd was on fire with detail.
i’ve since read the book and seen the show and i’m safe as safe can be from that particular spoiler-landmine, but the world is as full of twist endings as it is incautious booknerds, and with Behind Her Eyes, pretty much the only thing i knew about it was that it was ALL ABOUT THE TWIST, and OMG, and i approached all reviews of it gingerly, not wanting to tempt fate or the spoiler monster.
[image]
i succeeded, but i wasn’t, of course, able to escape the knowledge that there was a twist, which comes with its own set of reader-distractions - finding myself subconsciously squinting for clues and developing theories while reading, which i 100% did not want to do, but every time i had to put the book down for any reason, my mind would slink into investigative/analytical mode and try to work out the twist without my consent. fortunately, investigative karen is a moron, and it’s a fast enough read that i was able to push most of life off to the side and gulp this down pretty quickly, and i figured out some things, but not that half-twist jab that comes after the main twist, which was a fun “hey now!” that tied up some lingering questions, but also created new ones.
here's the thing - in this case, the twist IS the book’s selling point. it’s a fun glossy pageturner; the book-equivalent of clickbait that sucks you right in (LGM) with its promise of YOU’LL NEVER GUESS, and YOU WON’T SEE IT COMING, and it’s an entertaining read, although peppered with implausible character behavior inspiring many “who would DO that?” eyerolls, but the momentum is all driving towards this promise of JUST YOU WAIT that, granted, delivers what it promises and is an unusual deviation from other books in this genre. however, it's not a tightly-fitting lid, and there's a lot left unresolved, sloppily explained, or significance overemphasized. paint color is just paint color, after all.
it's fun fluff, but i'll take fun over tedious any day.
oooh, goodreads choice awards semifinalist for best debut AND best mystery & thriller 2018! what will happen?
so, add my name onto the long list of supoooh, goodreads choice awards semifinalist for best debut AND best mystery & thriller 2018! what will happen?
so, add my name onto the long list of superheroes who are conflicted about their powers, moaning about how alienating it is to have superhuman abilities, how it is truly more curse than boon.
[image]
because i have emerged from two weeks of debilitating illness physically enfeebled, but with a new power, like john smith in The Dead Zone - i can now call all of the twists. not one or two, but all. of. the. twists.
and this does not please me, or make me feel superior or smug. in fact, it’s kind of like a little magic went out of the world.
that’s not to say i didn’t enjoy this book - it’s a chewy psychological thriller with a good instinct for pacing and a juicy, if familiar, premise. basically, it’s Rear Window where agoraphobia is standing in for “broken leg,” and with another layer of unreliable narrator smooshed in by pretty much grabbing that drunk voyeur lady from The Girl on the Train to be the main POV narrator - a wine enthusiast on many prescription pills who cannot leave the house and whose main tether to the world is through the internet (which we all know to be the purest reflection of humanity), and spying on her wealthy neighbors through the zoom lens of her camera, when one night she witnesses a woman being murrrrdered; a woman she’s met and tentatively befriended, a woman she is told, after reporting the crime, simply does not exist.
already, it’s got great bones, and i understand why this is being hyped up as THE book of 2018. for a debut, it’s very impressive - the claustrophobia of trauma-based imprisonment is palpable, and the narrator’s love of classic films adds to the fraught atmosphere where references and scraps of dialogue blur the real/fantasy line from the constant background presence of something hitchcockian flickering on her laptop. and even the reveal/withhold ratio is well-maintained, for those of you whose high fevers and persistent hacking coughs have not left you with advanced sensory perception.
it’s a microwave popcorn book - fast and satisfying and buttery-slick, with SO! MANY! POPS! OF! SURPRISE! and even if you call every one of them, it’s still a satisfying treat.
now i am off to brood some more about my magical burdens.
reviewing short story collections is hard. i do not like doing it. so i am going to rock the same style as i did in my review for The Doll Collection: a teaser line or two pulled from the text along with an image i feel is representative of each story's particulars. this may seem lazy, but it actually takes WAY more time to pull together, given my stubborn and time-eating conviction that if i keep scouring the internet, i will find an even BETTER picture, along with the fact that i basically had to read the book a second time to select my quotes. and since i might actually write some mini-reviews throughout if the mood strikes me, the whole thing was a fool’s errand. i have tricked myself, but at least youuuuu get the treat of creepy GIFs.
[image]
Introduction - Lisa Morton
this is a brief, but important little intro, for those impulsive people who see a free book called Haunted Nights with ellen datlow’s name on it at work and just snatch it up without further investigation. the intro lets those goobers know that this isn’t a broad-spectrum horror anthology, it is a halloween anthology, so the stories are rooted specifically in the rituals and lore of that holiday, which is important to note because
1) these references include some old-timey traditions that are outmoded and potentially unfamiliar to modern goobers.
2) some of the stories have the feel of folklore, and are awfully predictable, which would be more disappointing (to me) in an anthology of modern horror, but feels appropriate (to me) in the context of halloween, with my sepia-tinted childhood memories of rhode island halloweens where washington irving stories were read aloud on haunted hayrides and cider was consumed and we may as well have been wearing bonnets for how colonial new england we were.
[image]
3) the specificity of the theme allows for the inclusion of a couple of stories that are not necessarily horror-horror, although very bad things do happen in them.
okay, enough of that; let's get to it.
[image]
THE STORIES
With Graveyard Weeds and Wolfsbane Seeds - Seanan McGuire ★★★★☆
[image]
"It's Halloween," she said again. "Do you want a trick, or do you want a treat?"
i liked this story fine, but if i'm being perfectly candid, it got a free star just for being written by an author i adore. it's good, but it doesn't have the ka-POW of her best work. it feels like a second draft, where the characters are almost there, just needing a final polish to shine. but considering she's produced - what, eight books this year? she's earned a free star.
Dirtmouth - Stephen Graham Jones ★★★★☆
[image]
I would sit with her until she was bones, if need be.
this one is messy in the best way possible. it left me with a bunch of questions, but they are of the "engaged reader" rather than the "you wrote it wrong!!" variety. not that i would ever make that accusation. except to herman melville. and thomas hardy for the ending of tess.
A Small Taste of the Old Country - Jonathan Maberry ★★★★☆
[image]
"We love our dead. Their having died does not make them less a part of our family. We can see the holes carved in the world in the shapes of each one of them."
you can see the ending of this one coming a mile away, but the characters can't, so reading it brings the same kind of gleeful anticipation as watching (insert monster-villain of your choice) approach the poorly-considered hiding place of dumb teenagers. but in this story, the characters on the "dumb teenagers" side of the equation 100% deserve their fate.
Wick's End - Joanna Parypinski ★★★☆☆
[image]
”Tell me a good one, old man,” she said. She swilled her drink and finally turned to face me. Her irises were as black as her pupils. “A ghost story. That’s the real currency around here on Halloween.”
this is one of the super-predictable ones. it's not bad or boring, but it definitely feels like reading something "traditional," something that would have been perfectly suited to those haunted hayrides of my youth, intoned spookily along with all the hawthorne and ghosties and assorted urban legends.
The Seventeen-Year Itch - Garth Nix ★★★☆☆
[image]
She came closer, careful to keep to the end of the bed, out of reach of that scratching, scrabbling hand. Orando had worked with the dangerously insane for many years and would not risk getting too close. But she had never had such a fascinating patient, and she couldn’t help but lean forward…
this one is creepy, and presents images striking enough that as soon as someone tasked with sourcing content for the next big horror anthology series reads it, BOOM! onscreen it shall go.
A Flicker of Light on Devil's Night - Kate Jonez ★★★☆☆
[image]
I don’t even know what to say to a kid who poops in a jar.
i guess this is horror, but it is from the school of "the real world is horrible enough."
Witch Hazel - Jeffrey Ford ★★★☆☆
[image]
By the time the two murderers were tied up and being led away, there were six dead and twenty wounded. That’s a lot of people to dispatch in a relatively short time with only sharp kitchen utensils.
twins. do i need to say more? i should reread this one, but my first pass (and second half-pass for quote-extraction) response is mixed. it seems to get in its own way at the end. there's a perfectly satisfying story here, in the tradition of Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead, but then he goes and spackles it in with some last ditch extra stuff the story doesn't need and he doesn't explore, and it just throws off the whole balance with unnecessary equivocation.
Nos Galan Gaeaf - Kelley Armstrong ★★★☆☆
[image]
The old ways always worked for them, so they would continue with them long after others had forgotten their roots.
this one was fine, but i don't have anything to add beyond that. and since i wasn't SUPPOSED to be reviewing these stories and yet am reviewing each and every one of them as though i've been possessed by the nerdiest demon ever, i'm just going to move on.
We're Never Inviting Amber Again - S.P. Miskowski ★★★☆☆
[image]
”Come on,” I said to our party guests. “This will be fun. We’ll use the salt-and-pepper shakers for “yes” or “no” and then we’ll only ask questions the ghosties don’t have to spell out. Look at me! I’m a psychic!”
this is the douchiest character in the whole collection. and the biggest horror of all in this story is that (view spoiler)[he does not die at the end, nor even come close. nor does he even change as a result of what he witnesses. the last sentence finds him as douchey as ever. where's the comeuppance, miskowski?? (hide spoiler)]
Sisters - Brian Evenson ★★★★☆ ★★★★★
[image]
”What do you suppose it remembers?” asked Millie, her voice papery and whisper-thin beside me, a kind of light flutter against my eardrum. “Does it know how I’ve made use of it?”
“It must know something,” I said. “Otherwise it wouldn’t be screaming.”
i'm gonna go ahead and change this one to five stars, because it is one of the weirdest fucking things i have ever read, and the last sentence made me do an actual, physical double-take before busting out in what can only be described as a bray of appreciative laughter.
[image]
it's pretty awesome.
All Through the Night - Elise Forier Edie ★★★★☆
[image]
”See how hunger makes the world like a veil,” she had said. “How another Place hides behind it.”
foof. this one's a heartbreaker. it's not horror at all, but it is beautifully told and controlled and boy, does it linger. some humans may cry.
A Kingdom of Sugar Skulls and Marigolds - Eric J. Guignard ★★★★☆
[image]
Clack-clack-clack.
fun and cartoony and fun and trippy and ... FUN. the characters don't have fun the whole way through, and there are moments where a reader's anger will be stirred and revenge demanded, but let the dead handle that part.
The Turn - Paul Kane ★★★★☆
[image]
It’s always the same. They can’t help themselves.
When they hear it, when they hear me, they turn. That’s the key. It’s what leads to their downfall. You can’t blame them, of course. It’s natural; it’s instinct. Something which, for generations, has kept them safe. A need to look, to see who might be behind them. Who or what might be following. It has kept people alive, in fact, which is ironic when you think about it. Because the same action now, tonight, is what will ensure their death.
this is a perfect little halloween morsel. it's creepy enough to make the back of your neck itch and i guarantee it will pop into your head the next time you're out walking at night, and it ends SO well with a little surprise kick. very good stuff.
Jack - Pat Cadigan ★★★★☆
[image]
I once overheard a woman who’d just been to a funeral say something to the effect that the dead person’s troubles were over. I didn’t even have to look at her to know she lived only in the natural world.
another one that feels like classic folklore, but modernized with a humorous urban fantasy vibe. if you were to excavate it, there'd be some aesop, some murder ballad, some br'er rabbit, and it's fine without being particularly memorable.
Lost in the Dark - John Langan ★★★★☆
[image]
”At dusk on Halloween, we entered the mine. I was certain we’d run into kids partying there. In fact, I was counting on it. I wanted it as an illustration of an annual event, a local ritual. But there was no one there. As far as setbacks go, it wasn’t bad. After filming the mine’s exterior, we walked into it.”
Edie waits a beat, then says, “And…?”
“And we came out again,” Sarah says. “Eventually.”
i was dreading this story, because it is loooong, and because historically, i have avoided langan the way i avoid all horror writers who fall into the lovecraftian tradition, as that style does nothing for me. but this was not full of nameless eldritch dread nor hideous ichor and madness. or rather, it's got some of those elements, but they are not run through a lovecraft filter, and if brian evenson hadn't suckerpunched me with his story, this would probably have been my favorite in the collection.
The First Lunar Halloween - John R. Little ★★★★☆
[image]
”This is totally safe, so you just need to enjoy your first Halloween!”
halloweeeeeeeen on the moooooon! i really enjoyed this little sci-fi/horror tale. it's short and cagey, and a good endpoint to the collection - a future in which halloween has become a long-dormant tradition; a cultural relic from the time before humans fled the invading aliens and moved to the moon. one which is revived as an interactive history lesson for schoolchildren, its customs taught, and learned, with unexpectedly devastating results.
THE END
wow, so that happened. i reviewed every damn story without even meaning to. this is how i lose hours of my life. i hope at least one person read all the way down to here, otherwise i'm going to have to scold myself for yet another bad life decision.
Loading...
