![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Millie Two Bears, the heroine of this novelette, is a middle-aged Blackfeet woman living alone in a trailer after her husband went to jail for accidentally hitting two children with his car and killing them. She will soon have to give up her home as it's owned by his children and he won't be out of jail for another 20 years. In the interim, largely so she can have something else to think about, she gets obsessed with an invasion of prairie dogs and starts trying to get rid of them.
Meanwhile, she gets a taker for the camper that she advertised for rental months ago and then forgot about. Her renter, an Indian woman named Frog, is nice but peculiar. Extremely peculiar. The prairie dogs are also peculiar.
A lot of the fun of this story is the way Jones plays on genre tropes. I kept thinking I knew what genre the story was in, but hilariously, every time I did, the heroine would get the same idea. There are a number of iterations of this before we find out for sure.
It's a very fun story and includes one of the single most batshit images I've come across outside of other Stephen Graham Jones books.
Each individual prairie dog, according to Frog's sketch, was the end of a tentacle.
I literally burst out laughing when I hit that sentence. THE PRAIRIE DOGS ARE FLESH SOCK PUPPETS ON TENTACLES. A LOVECRAFTIAN TENTACLE MONSTER FILLS THE CAVERNS BELOW THE LAND AND STICKS UP TENTACLES WITH PRAIRIE DOG FINGER PUPPET DISGUISES ON THEM TO SUSS OUT THE AREA.
Millie discovers that she can bargain with the tentacle prairie dog monster, which can create clones from a drop of blood, complete with memories up to the point when the blood was shed, and it resurrects both the horse than broke its leg in a "prairie dog" hole and the children her husband accidentally killed with his car. This is a surreal and beautiful scene which ties all the plot and thematic threads together.
I thought that would be the ending: with the children alive, presumably her husband would be released from jail. Instead, she clones her husband. The end!
But what about the original husband who's still in jail??? If he's released when the children show up, doesn't that get awkward?
That aside, this had all the inventiveness and genre play that one expects from Stephen Graham Jones, and who can resist prairie dogs undulating at the end of tentacles?
Content note: There's a lot of talk about animal harm (the plot involves trying to exterminate prairie dogs after a horse is injured stepping in a prairie dog hole), but it's questionable how much harm actually takes place.
Meanwhile, she gets a taker for the camper that she advertised for rental months ago and then forgot about. Her renter, an Indian woman named Frog, is nice but peculiar. Extremely peculiar. The prairie dogs are also peculiar.
A lot of the fun of this story is the way Jones plays on genre tropes. I kept thinking I knew what genre the story was in, but hilariously, every time I did, the heroine would get the same idea. There are a number of iterations of this before we find out for sure.
It's a very fun story and includes one of the single most batshit images I've come across outside of other Stephen Graham Jones books.
Each individual prairie dog, according to Frog's sketch, was the end of a tentacle.
I literally burst out laughing when I hit that sentence. THE PRAIRIE DOGS ARE FLESH SOCK PUPPETS ON TENTACLES. A LOVECRAFTIAN TENTACLE MONSTER FILLS THE CAVERNS BELOW THE LAND AND STICKS UP TENTACLES WITH PRAIRIE DOG FINGER PUPPET DISGUISES ON THEM TO SUSS OUT THE AREA.
Millie discovers that she can bargain with the tentacle prairie dog monster, which can create clones from a drop of blood, complete with memories up to the point when the blood was shed, and it resurrects both the horse than broke its leg in a "prairie dog" hole and the children her husband accidentally killed with his car. This is a surreal and beautiful scene which ties all the plot and thematic threads together.
I thought that would be the ending: with the children alive, presumably her husband would be released from jail. Instead, she clones her husband. The end!
But what about the original husband who's still in jail??? If he's released when the children show up, doesn't that get awkward?
That aside, this had all the inventiveness and genre play that one expects from Stephen Graham Jones, and who can resist prairie dogs undulating at the end of tentacles?
Content note: There's a lot of talk about animal harm (the plot involves trying to exterminate prairie dogs after a horse is injured stepping in a prairie dog hole), but it's questionable how much harm actually takes place.
From:
no subject
Instead, she clones her husband. The end!
Absolute genius.
From:
no subject
Genius!
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
Especially if the prairie dogs are just bits of tentacle (a proposition in respect of which I am suitably speechless), so harming these particular specimens at least would presumably not be very different from filing one's nails.
From:
no subject
There's also a horse that dies, but it's resurrected.