A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

I finished reading this and immediately rushed to write this review to warn people off this book. It's one of those books where I was VERY ANGRY upon finishing it, and thinking about it more only made me angrier.

I bought it on the strength of this blurb:

And Then There Were None meets The Last Breath in this tense and suspenseful locked-room thriller that takes place inside a hyperbaric chamber.

Six experienced saturation divers are locked inside a hyperbaric chamber. Calm and professional, they know that rapid decompression would be fatal and so they work in shifts, breathing helium, and surviving in hot, close quarters.

Then one of them is found dead in his bunk...

Ellen Brooke, the narrator, is one of the very, very few female saturation divers. Sat divers do repairs and maintenance on underwater structures by being living in an extremely high pressure chamber in between doing their dives, so they only need to do decompression once, when they finish the job. The chamber is above-water. If it's breached before it's decompressed, they will basically explode. This has happened once in real life, in an incident on the Byford Dolphin. It's gruesome.

The rest is as the blurb says: the divers start mysteriously dying within the chamber. The team outside immediately begins decompression, but this takes days. They can't open the chamber, or they'll all turn into raspberry jam (as is stated, in those words, something like 20 times.) So they're all trapped inside, maybe with a killer amonst them, trying to figure out what's happening and why.

I figured that even if the prose and characterization weren't the greatest, the book would be carried by the strength of its premise. The challenge from a writing standpoint is incredible. They can't get out. It's a tiny space. They can see each other at almost all times. They're being observed from the outside 24-7. And yet somehow they're getting killed off one by one. How can the writer pull off this bravura feat?

I will tell you how: by constructing the book like it's a locked-room mystery, and then not solving the mystery. Thought it would be incredibly hard to pull off a mystery under these circumstances? Ha ha! It's easy when you don't have to bother with solving the mystery.

Cut for angry, spoilery details. ( Read more... )

I hate this book. I hate it so much. It was pretty engaging, if somewhat repetitive, until the 98% mark and then it earned my FOREVER HATE.

ETA: Oh wait, I forgot to mention that in retrospect, given the ending, it's also really sexist! ( Read more... )

I bought this book in the library book sale, based on a logline about orphans surviving on an mysterious island. Little did I know what I was in for.

I HATED this book. It's not a realistic or even unrealistic survival story, it's a preachy allegory that doesn't even make sense on its own terms AND has unnecessary plotlines that seem set up only to frustrate the reader by going nowhere AND has a bad message AND appears to advocate letting toddlers use filleting knives.

There are nine children on the island. There are always nine children on the island. Every year, an otherwise empty boat arrives with a toddler. The toddler gets off the boat. The oldest child on the island gets in the boat, and the boat takes off by itself. That child is never seen again. And so the cycle continues.

The kids have no idea why this is happening, but regard it as a normal fact of life and have been told that if a child ever refuses to get on the boat, the sky will fall. Who told them this? Older kids. Who told those kids? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The book opens with the arrival of a new toddler, Ess, who speaks in obnoxious phonetic baby talk, "Whah dis?" and "Ess sooze" (shoes). I HATE baby talk.

Deen, the oldest child, gets in the boat over the tearful protests of the next-oldest child, Jinny.  Now Jinny has lost her best friend and is stuck as the primary caretaker for Ess. Lucky for Ess, the island is a paradise. Food is extremely easy to get, there are bees but they don't sting, there are snakes but they don't bite, the sunrises depict beautiful flowers opening and stuff like that, and if you jump off the cliffs a gentle wind will blow you back. None of the kids ever get sick or hurt, except for very minor scrapes.

So clearly, we're dealing with either Heaven or a constructed environment. At first, all signs point to "constructed environment." There's a library of real books from our world, and Jinny marvels over such strange things as "movies" and "candy."

None of the kids have any idea what's off the island or if the books are describing real things, because they all arrived when they were so young that they couldn't explain anything, and by the time they're old enough to talk coherently, they don't remember anything before their arrival.

( Minor spoiler )

This is why I kept reading - I was curious WTF was going on with the island and why. Virtual reality? A carefully maintained super-playground? A long-term science experiment? A generation ship? This is all a dream while Jinny's in a coma in the real world?

The kids have very limited knowledge about the world, as they all arrived as toddlers and were taught by preteen kids who were also taught by preteen kids. So a lot of the names for things are ones they made up, because they don't know what the real names are. (This is why their names are all spelled oddly.) Sometimes I liked this, like "jellyblobs" for sea anemones. Other times I did not like it, like "wishing" for peeing/pooping, and the toilet being a "wish cabin" BARF FOREVER into the wish basin.

This also fails to have a point. In books like Piranesi or The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents, we see how specific people construct knowledge in different ways depending on who they are and what they have to draw from. In Orphan Island, it's all just cute or twee and not drawn from anything specific beyond not knowing how to spell.

But all is not well in cutesy paradise. Jinny is resentful over being stuck with Ess, worried that Ess will get hurt, and doesn't want to get in a boat and sail off to somewhere totally unknown and possibly to her death. None of the other children think those are reasonable concerns for Jinny to have, and everything in the narrative supports the other kids.

When Jinny tries to teach Ess the things the older kids are supposed to teach their toddler charges, Ess doesn't seem to learn them very well, Jinny gets impatient, and the other kids lecture Jinny on how it's very important that Ess learn and Jinny needs to teach her better. (Note that Jinny is the oldest kid, and she's like eleven. In fact, she comes across as the youngest short of Ess, because everyone else is smarter and more competent and calmer than her.)

I hesitate to say that I have a literal trigger for anything in literature, but if I do, it's when a character is criticized or punished or mocked for being unable to do something when they've never been taught how to do it and there's no reason why they should know how to do it, and the narrative seems to think this is fine. (I don't mind if the narrative clearly thinks this is unfair.) How is Jinny supposed to teach Ess how to read? She clearly has no idea. The other kids, disgusted with her inability to do so, take over and successfully teach Ess to read, but we don't know how they do it because it happens off page.

Similarly, Jinny fails at teaching Ess how to swim, largely because she's worried that toddler Ess could drown. The other kids tell her that's impossible, and one of them tosses Ess in the ocean. This successfully teaches her how to swim!

Jinny is worried that if she tries to teach Ess to scale and gut a fish with a sharp filleting knife, she might cut herself. Remember, Ess is a LITERAL TODDLER who talks like "Dinny, pease stay?" The other kids tell Jinny she's being overprotective and to let Ess use the knife. Of course, Ess is fine.

The lessons are so bad here that I started to feel like I was being gaslit by a book. Okay, sure, in this specific situation the kids are clearly being protected by something and it does seem impossible for them to get hurt, not to mention that toddlers are somehow magically capable of the physical coordination to SCALE AND GUT A FISH, so Jinny actually is being overprotective, buuuuut...

If this was black comedy, I would probably like it. But it's not, and Jinny is presented as being clearly in the wrong. That's not to say that I like Jinny. I actually couldn't stand her. I just hated the other kids even more. Needless to say, none of the characters came across as actual kids.

Oh and also Jinny is explicitly being condescended to and lied to by the other kids - at one point they explain to her that her lost bestie Deen, who she'd thought was an advocate of letting her do things her own way, had secretly told them that the key to smooth relations with Jinny was to let her THINK she was getting her own way, but actually to manipulate her so she only thought that was true UGH UGH UGH.

ANYWAY. So what's up with these boats? Let's leave aside the possible science fiction explanations and look at it as allegory. The children arrive when they're very young and know and remember nothing. They're cared for by others. When they're older but just before they hit puberty, they get in them again and sail away. The allegory seems like the arrival is birth, and the departure is leaving the golden, protected, beautiful land of childhood behind and entering into the uncharted and scary waters of adolescence.

But that is not a good allegory for adolescence. (Even apart from very few people thinking of their childhoods as perfection even if they were happy!) The children have no idea where they're going or whether they'll ever see any of their friends again or even if they'll survive. Adolescence is kind of an unknown, but not to that extent. You're still allowed to see your younger friends! The departure feels much more like an allegory for death.

So is Jinny's desire to not get on the boat an allegory for a child afraid of becoming a teenager? Or is it an allegory for a person refusing to face death? This is a children's book, mind, so if it's the latter that's a little disturbing.

Orphan Island feels like a preachy, message-y book. But what's the message? Well...

( Are you fucking SERIOUS )

In conclusion, fuck the baby talk, fuck the misspelled names, and fuck wishes that come out of your ass.

My favorite review from Goodreads: "We listened to this on audiobook, and upon completion my children wanted to stop the vehicle and put the discs under the car and run them over. [...]

We ranted for at least a half an hour. We woke up the next morning and one of my son's first words were, "I'm still angry about the book."

A collection of interviews with plane crash survivors (both crew and passengers), plus some excerpts from cockpit recorders. The interviews are excerpts from the ones the NTSB does as part of its investigations. There's no way I wasn't going to like this book... right?

Surprise, surprise. It's almost willfully disappointing.

How, you are probably wondering, could this go wrong? What possible choices could an editor make to create a boring oral history of plane crashes?

The main issue is a near-total lack of context. Each chapter is a set of extracts from interviews of survivors of a particular crash. There's an opening paragraph that says more-or-less what happened in the crash, but they're along the lines of "Flight 182 departing from Houston to Miami crashed while taking off. Three of the 102 passengers were killed." There's not enough details given in advance to understand what exactly happened during the crash, and there's no explanatory material other than that. He doesn't say what caused the crash - ever!

The excerpts are broken up into more-or-less chronological order, so you might get a bit of a flight attendant and a bit of a passenger saying what happened before the crash, then they come back later to give accounts of what happened during. There may be as many as ten or twelve different people appearing in a single chapter, with each of them getting 1 - 5 segments of an interview. But MacPherson doesn't name the passengers (sometimes, apparently at random, he doesn't name the crew either), but rather gives them random anonymous headings like "male, seat 23" or "female, age 45" or just "male passenger" so it's impossible to keep track of who is who. He's not even consistent within the same chapter/crash at identifying them by seat number, age, gender, or all of the above!

Seat number IDs are not helpful as there's no diagrams.

There are excerpts of cockpit transcripts, but with no context and editing applied apparently at random, they're almost impossible to follow. I strongly suspect that MacPherson didn't understand enough about the subject to know what was and wasn't relevant, so just threw in a couple pages with no idea how they related to the incident at hand.

It's difficult and at times impossible to tell what's actually going on in any given crash as there's no context, no care is given to selecting excerpts for clarity, and most of the passengers had no idea what was going on at the time.

There's no follow-up whatsoever. In multiple chapters, unnamed people say things like "And then I realized that I couldn't see my husband" and you never learn whether the husband survived or not.

I have read a lot of plane crash books and while this is not the worst, it takes the prize for biggest waste of potential.

Comment with your favorite!

In a climate change apocalypse near future, an expedition sets out for the Arctic in search of polar bears, which are believed to be extinct but might not be. They find the frozen body of a polar bear cub on the ice, way south of where bears have ever been sighted, and bring it aboard the ship. Weird, creepy events immediately ensue. Is the cub actually alive? Is the ship haunted? Are there weird creatures outside trying to get in?

This sounds good, right? Nothing like Arctic spookiness! I was so excited to see what Catriona Ward would do with that!

It's nothing like her usual style and I suspect that she had very little to do with it. In fact, this audiodrama has the remarkable distinction of making me ragequit TWICE. I ragequit at the first big twist, then decided I wanted to find out what was going to happen and also I was listening while cleaning my kitchen and was nowhere near done with that, then ragequit for good at the second big twist.

The performances are okay at first, but get more and more melodramatic as they go along. The sound effects are very loud and intrusive. This led to a number of unintentionally hilarious scenes that were basically this:

Actor: "He-hello? Helloooo? Is anyone--AGH NO!!!"

Sound effects: GRRRRR! CRUNCH! SNRRRRR! SKREEEEEE!!!

Actor: "AGH! ACK! AHHHH!"

Sound effects: BRRRRRR! CRUNCH! SQUISH! ZZZZZT!

Actor: "AIEEEEE! AUGGGGGHHHH! ARRRRRRGH!"

And so forth.

The frustrating part was that it started out as a very promising Arctic horror-thriller. Then we hit Plot Twist of RAGEQUIT number one.

There are six people on the ship. They have brought aboard a frozen polar bear cub they found, which several of them have dreamed came to life. The captain is becoming convinced his dead husband is on the ship. And the computer, which monitors their vital signs, is detecting SEVEN heartbeats!

What is the most annoying and anticlimactic possible explanation for that?

( Read more... )

If this had been a physical book I'd have thrown it across the room. As it was, I ragequit with half an hour left to go and my kitchen only half-tidied.

The Nox

A bunch of John Christopher's books are getting reprinted as ebooks. He's a very uneven writer but his better books are well worth reading if you're okay with male-centricity - The Tripods, obviously, but also the Sword of the Spirits trilogy. His worse books, like Sweeney's Island/Cloud on Silver and Wrinkle in the Skin are some of the most jaw-droppingly misogynistic books I've ever read and that's saying something. (Also racist, but sadly not the most racist books I've ever read.) And some are just plain weird, which is always a plus in my book.

Sadly, Kindle has not yet reprinted the Nazi leprechauns.



Empty World, one of his many apocalypse books, features contagious rapid aging. At first children and younger teenagers are spared, and I thought it would be an "adults die, kids are left to make a new world" book. Then the children start dying too. By the two-thirds mark, there are only five survivors that we know of, and one is insane and one, believing he's all alone, commits suicide the day before the others would have found him. This book is dark.

The last third is very odd. Neil, the protagonist, finds two girls living together. They seem to be doing fine, but he doesn't agree and demands that they leave London and go to the country with him. Things go very, very bad between the three of them, leading to an ending that is weird and abrupt but oddly powerful. (This is a minority opinion. Amazon reviews were mostly "WTF? The book just stopped!)

( Read more... )



Wrinkle in the Skin is another apocalypse book, genre: giant earthquake. I DNF'd/skimmed it as it takes my second-place prize for Most Ridiculously Unrealistically Grimdark Apocalypse Reaction. First place is the book (IIRC Ashfall) in which a giant volcano erupts and people resort to cannibalism the next day. If you can't hunt for canned goods or just fast for one day before roasting babies in the town square, you just really want to roast a baby.

In this one, a giant earthquake kills most of the inhabitants of Guernsey. Literally ONE DAY LATER, when no one has any idea how widespread the earthquake actually was, some random dude has rounded up the women and begun raping them with the intent of quickly impregnating them so he can found a dynasty with himself in charge. The narrator is mildly put off by this, but not enough to do anything about it; he evaluates all women by attractiveness and agrees with the rape dynasty dude that the first one he found and raped is a "slut." The rape dynasty dude discusses forming a rape roster and keeping an eight-year-old girl for later sexual use when she's slightly older; the narrator is mildly put off but doesn't object.

At that point I started skimming. The narrator, accompanied by a young boy who is not considered a rape target because John Christopher cannot conceive of men being sexually victimized, goes on a trek across a former ocean bed in search of his daughter, a student a London. This part is pretty cool though, hilariously, they cannot conceive of eating raw fish so just leave perfectly good fish because they lost their lighter. These dudes are not exactly dynasty-building material is what I'm saying.

They find that England has also been devastated. The narrator meets up with a woman who delivers a "It's a man's man's world now" monologue in which she explains that she needs male protection because she has been raped in like eight separate incidents by different rapists, and was also raped by the men who "protected" her. After rape # 4 or so, I think I would try striking out on my own and avoiding men as much as possible, as there is plenty of canned food around.

At that point I gave up. It's too late now but I would really like to tell John Christopher that 1) you cannot extrapolate the behavior of soldiers in a war zone toward civilians on the enemy side to the behavior of random civilians to each other immediately after a natural disaster, 2) the day after a natural disaster is waaaaaaay too soon to found a rape dynasty, 3) raw fish is delicious and even if it wasn't, when you're starving you eat what's available so so much for your grim realism that allows for rape dynasties but not raw fish, 4) once things have devolved into a rapefest free for all, boys are getting raped too and eventually you, yes you, will land on the rape roster.

From my giant birthday box o' books from scioscribe; thank you very much! (No, this is not the butt blade book.)

Carr was a Golden Age mystery writer particularly known for locked-room mysteries. I’d never read anything by him before, though I’d always vaguely intended to. And now that I have, I understand who the Golden Age critics were talking about when they parodied absurdly complex, artificial, and implausible mysteries peopled by characters who appear to have been written by an alien who read a book about human behavior.

The premise is delightful: a mysterious wealthy dude, Clarke, buys a haunted house and invites seven people, each chosen to represent some facet of human psychology when faced with the inexplicable, for a weekend visit. The first third of the book, in which the haunted house does creepy things, is atmospheric and compelling. And then the mystery aspect begins…

To start with, the whole idea of people reacting to the inexplicable in individual ways, doesn’t get followed through at all. The characters are puppets who move around doing things and saying things that make no sense on any level except that they make the plot happen. This goes far beyond common Golden Age character issues, like being stereotypical or sketched-in or subordinate to the plot.

And then there’s the mystery and its solution, which is convoluted, implausible, and bizarre.

( Fucking magnets, how do they work? )

Carr’s atmosphere in the early part is great, and his writing style there is very appealing. But I’m just as happy this style of mystery has fallen out of fashion.

Man Who Could Not Shudder

A gift from nenya_kanadka via my request for weird books. I believe she got it for a quarter at a nun shop. Thanks! I think.

As you can tell from the cover, the disclaimer stating that This book is a Fantasy Sci-Fi, and the author’s alphabet soup credentials, this book was self-published; in this case, in print before ebook self-pub became a thing. You’ve seen books like this. They have dolphins and hot pink double helixes on the cover.



And now, I have read – well, skimmed - one so you don’t have to!

It begins, as they often do, with an explanation of how it all was dictated to the author in a series of dreams by Angelica, a being from the Pleiades, how lots of famous (not really) people agree that this is the truth, and how scientific discoveries/history/the pyramids prove it!!!!

This introduction is notable for the author explaining that he ate six mini-bananas while writing down the first dream; he will return to this later. Rather endearingly, each chapter is punctuated with his reactions to the dreams with comments like “Wow! This is so exciting! I can’t wait to find out more!”

The story (such as it is) begins with David, a prodigy who is telekinetic, telepathic, graduates from Harvard with three PhDs at the age of 16, and invents a universal translator and antigravity, and solves the energy crisis by age 18. This does not play into the plot (such as it is) as much as one might imagine.

The story is interrupted by a pair of full-page black and white diagrams of the Pleiades which prove that this is all totally real.

Special Agent Stafford said to Dr. Reinhardt, a psychiatrist, “I’m with NSA. Mr David Chartrand is a National Security risk. It will be necessary to sedate him heavily and strap him down before you do your doctor thing.

However, the psychiatrist is unable to do his doctor thing because Angelica teleports David to the top of the huge sports dome in Vancouver, Canada with five beautiful female Spiritual Beings from the Star system they call Pleiades!

(Why is it always the Pleiades in these books and manifestos?)

A long stretch of exposition ensues. The Pleiades built Stonehenge and the pyramids, David has the Quantum Love Gene which can turn bad guys into good guys, the Illuminati are after him, etc. Most of the book consists of reiterating and elaborating on this sort of thing.

At the end of this chapter, the author notes, I’m out of bananas this morning. Oh well, at least I have coffee.

We are introduced to Energy King Lucifer from the Planet Diable. There is a big and incoherent battle, which David and the other good guys win. The world has been saved! Everything is perfect! But the book is not quite over:



Angelica turned around to spring this incredible surprise on David. She had a twinkle in her eyes as she said to David, “You see, now that everything is said and done regarding the meeting, David, I have a surprise for you.”

David replied, “Good! I like surprises!”

With this, Angelica uttered the word, “Energize!”

The room began to glow with a bright white light. They heard the song of We are Spirit Light Beings.

We are Spirit Light Beings.
Having a wonderful human experience.

We are Spirit Light Beings.
Here for a moment in time and space.

We are Spirit Light Beings.
Learning to love again.

We are Spirit Light Beings.
Walking each other home.
We are Spirit Light Beings.


In case you were thinking, “But what about the dolphins? The cover promised dolphins!” a pool with two dolphins in it materializes in David’s living room.

As the Rev. Raymond J Pilon, BGS, ret. CSL writes,

THE END

The Dogs (Coronet Books)

I bought The Dogs after randomly opening the other three. I opened Bamboo Hell and it had 2 different racial slurs in 2 pages. I opened Venetian Vendetta and it had "Lucia, you slut." I opened Orca and it had an orca miscarrying.

...I forgot to racism/sexism/orca miscarriage spot check The Dogs. For all I know it contains all three.

This is for bookelfe/skygiants. Of course. (Yes, I'm out of order.)

I’m sticking with books here. A lot of manga and anime operates on different narrative rules, so the bizarreness makes wacky internal sense. I do have to mention, though, the complete works of Kaori Yuki if you have any interest in things like random flying Heavenly whales, apocalypse by army of flying zombie angel embryos, and people getting turned into masses of writhing tentacles and kept in the bathtub.

Even so, it was very, very difficult to narrow this down to five. There are bizarre premises (“I will break every bone in my body because then they’ll grow back stronger and I WILL BE INVINCIBLE”), the sheer weight of ridiculousness in a single book (the bone-breaking book also featured the near-death of the hero’s milk-allergic brother when the hero’s cheating girlfriend ate pizza, then kissed the brother), the sudden intrusion of absurdity into a previously non-bizarre book (two-thirds sensitive exploration of sketchy power dynamics, one third EVIL BALL OF MASKED S&M SMALL PRESS POETS), and unwanted intrusions by the author’s peculiar id (of course the most desirable whores have hooves.) Not to mention Terry Goodkind's infamous evil chicken. How to choose?

I have so many contenders that I was forced to name winners in categories.

Most Stupid Protagonist

Runner-Up: Oscar, the hero of Myke Cole’s Control Point. When faced with the difficult decision of who he should get help from— a) his best friend, b) a friendly acquaintance, or c) the sociopathic supervillain who is currently locked up after going on a mass slaughter rampage but who promises to help him out if he’ll only release her from the magical wards laid on her to stop her from slaughtering everyone in sight— guess who he picks?

Winner: Summer in Mary Brown’s Master of Many Treasures, for failing to get rid of a traveling companion whom she easily could get rid of, after he repeatedly and deliberately endangers her and all the rest of her companions, including trying to kill a friend of hers in a random fit of temper. Also for ignoring all advice by people who clearly have her best interest in mind, and taking all advice by people holding up HI I AM EVIL signs, and for failing to learn from very consistent consequences, like falling into quicksand full of rotting corpses because she couldn’t bear to take her best friend’s advice that the left-hand path led to the Swamp of Rotting Corpses. Also for believing that a good excuse for stalking her dragon ex-boyfriend is explaining that she actually fell in love with him when she thought he was a flying pig.

This doesn’t have anything to do with her intelligence, but I just want to mention that during the course of the book, she lays an egg.


Once Is Tragedy, One Million Times Is Hilarity

Crazy-Beautiful, by Lauren Baratz-Logsted

Gee, if I'd known spilling my orange juice was this effective, I'd have spilled it in Dad's direction every day when I was younger. Then maybe he'd have made time to do things with me like, I don't know, play catch in the yard. Not that I'm complaining or playing the neglected child card. I'll never do that. I know what I've done. I know who's responsible for everything in my life, past, present, and future. Still, a little catch would have been fun, when I still had hands.

…

And what of me and my hands? Or, I should say, lack of hands.

…

I finish loading the dryer, hookload by hookload, use my hook to set the dial at seventy minutes, use my hook to depress the button.

Most Ridiculous Plot Twists

Runners-Up:

All books by Sheri Tepper. Future ones too. Every Sheri Tepper book in which infanticide is presented as the solution to the problems of the world. Also the one where the heroine turns out to be a de-aged squid-person. She might lay an egg too, I forget.

The indie gangster movie, name forgotten, in which the screenwriter’s poorly thought-through desire to add on one more surprise reveal meant that the entire action of the movie consisted of a drug lord hiring people to steal his own drugs.

The Isobelle Carmody books with the love quadrangle between two humans and two transformed dogs.

Dan Simmons’ The Rise of Endymion. The climactic revelation of the entire series is that quantum strings are made out of love.

Frank Herbert’s God-Emperor of Dune. It makes sense in context, but I still find it hilarious that the climax consists of the main character becoming a million worms.

Lord of Legends, by Susan Krinard. I still have no idea why the heroine’s housekeeper turned into a talking fox.

And finally… drum roll… the winner!

Spider Robinson’s Starseed. The heroine is paralyzed via drugs, has multiple bad guys holding guns on her, and isabout to be killed. As her last request, she asks for a moment to meditate. When they grant it, she achieves enlightenment. This enables her to become telepathic, overcome the effects of the paralyzing drug, and slaughter the bad guys with kung fu.