A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

The Trail, by Meika Hashimoto



After a tragedy, 13-year-old Toby runs away to hike the Appalachian trail solo. This is a nice solid middle-grade novel with plenty of adventure and a satisfying conclusion. The revelation of exactly what happened to Toby's best friend made me giggle inappropriately because I visualized it with the sound effect "BONK." ( Read more... )

Content notes: Tragic death of friend, attempted suicide (Toby rescues the guy), dog abuse (Toby rescues the dog).


The Glamour, by Christopher Priest



Beautifully written literary novel, probably but not definitely fantasy, about people who can become invisible to the point where they cannot be perceived - ever - by anyone who can't also become invisible. Or maybe that's just a lie, or a shared delusion, or a metaphor; the ending is possibly the least resolved one ever written, very deliberately so. I enjoyed reading it while I was reading it, but the whole thing feels like a magician's trick. It may be relevant that Priest also wrote The Prestige.

Content notes: extremely graphic rape scene that seems to be written as a technical exercise in writing a rape scene where the man having consensual sex with the woman has no idea she's simultaneously being raped by a man he can't perceive. Kudos on the execution, ugh to the content.



Black River Orchard, by Chuck Wendig



Extremely enjoyable horror novel about evil apples. Likable good guys, awful villains, a good premise, excellent apple-related body horror, fun apple lore, and a whole lot of really good descriptions of what it feels like to bite into an apple, plus an unexpected amount of queer/ace rep.

Content notes: horror-typical violence, control-style relationship abuse.

A musician driving to visit his dying grandmother stops at a gas station in the middle of the night, and makes the unwise decision to use its restroom. Next thing he knows, he's trapped inside it by someone who's come up with a lot of inventive ways to fuck with someone inside a locked room, from the outside of the room.

This was a very mixed bag.

A+ for the parts that are "I'm trapped in a gas station bathroom by a psycho:" it feels just like a nightmare, and is riveting.

B+ for Abe being Jewish, and how his bad relationship with his awful grandmother, a genocide survivor, comes into play in the story. I like that it's there but it could have gone deeper.

D for the irrelevant, annoying flashback storyline about Abe crushing on a woman who ends up dating another guy in the band.

D for story logic. Major elements of the story are just nonsensical.

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C- for the ending. ( Read more... )

I very rarely say this, but this was a novella that should have been a novelette. The last chapter and the entire annoying subplot with the woman he failed to ask out should have been cut.

Also, I cannot believe I'm suggesting adding anti-Semitism, but an anti-Semitic psycho would have been really thematically on-point.

This was a lot of fun to read in paperback because of excellent graphic design elements.

Content warnings: Extreme gore, insects/spiders/snakes, insect/spider/snake harm, generational trauma.

A dark fantasy about a group of teenagers who are kidnapped from their homes and forced to participate in wilderness therapy, only to encounter actual monsters in the woods. GREAT premise!

Devin is a lesbian teenager who's been processed through a series of often abusive foster families. After she steals some money from her current foster parents, they have her kidnapped by a wilderness program supposed to straighten her out. She's dragged into the middle of the woods with four other teenagers whose parents have enrolled them because they did drugs, stole money, or were generally rebellious or sad. A pair of guidance counselors lead them on a very long hike through the woods, during which Devin gets in an intense love/hate relationship with one of the other girls. Then their counselors disappear...

For-profit wilderness therapy/survival camp for "troubled teenagers" is a real thing in America, and they really do kidnap teenagers with their parents' permission - and payment. It's abusive and unregulated, and a number of kids have been killed at those camps.

The book begins with an author's note similar to my paragraph above. But once the teenagers are violently kidnapped, their forced hike through the woods proceeds with surprisingly little abuse beyond the fact that they're forced to be there. There's genuine wilderness training and self-esteem-building activities. I don't want to sound like "just" being kidnapped and held against your will isn't abusive by itself, but these programs are typically very abusive in other ways too. I felt like the awfulness of these programs was inexplicably downplayed despite the author apparently writing the book specifically to expose them!

The beginning part, before the counselors vanish, is fine but feels a bit slow. The two boys in particular are not very differentiated, and I kept mixing them up. Surprisingly, the best part of the book is the monsters themselves. What they turn out to be is unexpected and SO COOL, and I wish there was more of it. The book overall is about 70% teenagers interacting, 30% monsters/teenagers vs monsters. That would be fine if I was more into the teenagers, and it wasn't like I wasn't into the teenagers. They're fine. But for me, not more than fine.

Overall I would say this was a perfectly fine book that I didn't love. Except for the part that really focused on the monsters. That, I loved. But that's only about 10% of the whole.

So what are the monsters? ( SPOILERS! )

Elise, Julie, Mae, and Molly are best friends, until Julie vanishes without a trace. Two years later, Julie returns in very bad shape and claiming no memory of where she's been. Once Julie is more recovered, her friends arrange a girls' week at a fancy hotel to catch up and reignite their friendship.

It's immediately clear that Julie came back wrong, and there are strong suggestions that there's something wrong with the hotel too. But Elise, the narrator, and Mae, who arranged the trip, are extremely set on denying that anything is wrong. A lot of the book consists of Molly trying to get Julie to talk and trying to get the other two to admit that something is wrong, and Elise and Mae refusing to listen. This is the central issue of the entire book, which is about denial and trying to insist one's preferred reality into existence, but it's frustrating to read.

The September House does something similar, but it was a lot more tolerable as at least Margaret isn't denying that there's ghosts, she's just denying that the ghosts are a problem. In The Return, when blood drips from the ceiling, Elise insists that it's just tinted water from a rusty pipe. In The September House, when blood drips down the walls, Margaret cheerfully cleans it up and crosses her fingers that no one else will notice the stain.

The slow-burn horror is well-done and the truth about Julie is pleasingly weird and even kind of original. The ending is quite moving, and the friend group dynamics are plausible for a particular type of people who I find annoying - extremely self-obsessed people whose friend groups border on frenemies. (They're canonically in their late 20s, but they act more like they're in their very early 20s.) But ultimately it feels like Rachel Harrison moves in really different social circles than I do, and that's deliberate on my part because those people are maddening. They're basically the women that women's magazines are written for - not the actually good magazines like Teen Vogue, stuff like the modern equivalent of 1980s Cosmopolitan that assumes you have a high-powered job but are also very concerned with Goop, thigh-toning, and office gossip.

When 300 employees of a giant amusement park are trapped there for over a month due to a hurricane, they form tribes and slaughter each other. So basically, Lord of the Flies at Disneyland, in the form of an oral history. I do not generally like Lord of the Flies stories, but I LOVE fake oral histories. Also, many people said the audiobook was outstanding.

The audiobook is indeed outstanding. I thought it had a cast of like 30 very talented actors, and was astonished to discover it was only two. It was extremely compelling, entertaining listening, and I sincerely recommend it on that basis if you like horror/thrillers/oral history, are okay with graphic violence, and need something really engaging to listen to for a couple hours.

The book itself... well...

This is the basic story, told by multiple characters involved from the owner of the park to visitors who were evacuated to disaster relief workers to the people involved:

A giant hurricane hits Florida and other areas, causing so much damage that many areas are not reached by rescue workers for a month or more. Fantasticland, the amusement park, is a low priority because the park management had a disaster plan, which was to stock up the park with food, water, etc, and get 300 park employees to volunteer to stay to maintain the park and prevent looting. As the 300 employees actually did have several months' worth of supplies for all of them, they were a low priority. Honestly, all this seems totally plausible.

Spoilers for how everything goes down. ( Read more... )

So, the book has some pretty big issues, but it's also got some significant good points.

Pro:

As material for audio storytelling, it's terrific.

Bockoven put some actual thought into some aspects of what might really cause this situation to happen, and some of it is pretty plausible. (Some. Not all. But some.) The part I thought was really plausible was that if you trap a bunch of people in an area with no outside authority, and one of them is a charismatic sociopath, then he absolutely could quickly form a rape-and-murder cult with a number of the young men. It's obviously quite easy for a male leader to attract a subset of men and egg them on to rape women, and fairly easy to get a subset of men to commit horrifically violent acts, murder included. We see this happen in RL all the time. This part? TOTALLY believable.

I also liked that he did not do the usual thing of "when there's scarcity, people become vicious." There is no actual scarcity of food and water, and everyone knows that. People could share if they wanted to, and no one would go without. But some people prefer to sit on top of a giant pile of everything, and leave others with nothing.

One of the chapters, involving the only character who's smart enough to go to a hotel on the grounds and hole up there, is an outstanding work of creeping horror. It functions as a short story, but gets a lot of extra impact from being completely different from any other chapter in the book, so where it goes is much more unexpected than it otherwise would be.

It is WAY better with having female characters who do things than its closest comparison, World War Z.

Bockoven does a good job of portraying how different characters and different tribes react differently and come up with different strategies: the maintenance staff hides out in the maintenance tunnels for almost the entire duration and is mostly fine, the special effects artists scare off everyone else with special effects and are mostly fine, etc.

Con:

Very anti-climactic climax. The National Guard shows up and arrests everyone, and no one fights back.

Some of the book is SPECTACULARLY stupid.

Multiple characters say there was no sex AT ALL, just a little light kissing and making out, because there were no condoms (none of the mostly 18-24-year-old employees carried any?) and everyone was worried about pregnancy and STDs. Uh, WHAT? Everyone is merrily slaughtering each other, but they have WAY more sexual self-control than the average non-slaughtery American? If they're lying, why would they confess to murder but insist that they definitely didn't have sex? Meanwhile, the pirates were dragging off women constantly, so... there was tons of rape but no consensual sex? Makes no sense.

(Several reviewers thought Bockoven was trying to say there was no rape, but this doesn't make sense because it was specifically women who the pirates kidnapped. Also, multiple characters are worried about rape, and the only person who specifically denies rape is a pirate who is clearly downplaying everything. What were the pirates doing with the kidnapped women if they weren't raping them? A little light forced kissing and making out?)

In terms of actual events, everyone in the book agrees that, with a few specific exceptions, the pirates were consistently the aggressors and everyone else was mostly just defending themselves. But when they talk about it in the abstract, everyone talks like it was a total free-for-all where everyone just murdered everyone at random. And again, this is everyone in the whole book. Literally no one takes the position that what basically happened was that a bunch of people got trapped with a murder cult and ended up essentially in a war with them, which again based on the actual events, is 90% of what was going on. This is America! People believe that it's legally and morally okay to kill in self-defense! They might feel guilty about it, but at least some people should make the point that it is not illegal/morally wrong/abnormal to defend yourself from someone who's trying to kill you.

If Bockoven wanted to write about a free-for-all murder chaos zone, he should have portrayed a free-for-all murder chaos zone, not a situation where there was basically a war going on between one aggressor tribe and multiple defender tribes.

And then there's the "but the real enemy was the social media we posted on along the way." Something like half of the total characters say that a major or the main cause of what happened was that kids nowadays are internet addicts, and without their phones they became dissociated and savage. At the very end of the book, the guy who is putting together the oral history concludes that insofar as we can understand a basically senseless occurrence, internet addiction was the main culprit.

Apart from that this is stupid on the face of it, the hurricane affected a big chunk of America. Tens or hundreds of thousands of people were without power or internet for months, and no one else went feral like this. If all kids are so addicted to social media that they lose their minds when the internet is cut off, then why didn't they lose their minds in any of the MANY other places where the internet was cut off? If losing internet access makes young people go feral, there should have been rape-and-murder cults everywhere, not just Fantasticland.

Content notes: extremely graphic, visceral violence.

These are companion works about DEEP SEA MURDER MERMAIDS. Scientifically justified and science fictionally depicted DEEP SEA MURDER MERMAIDS. I am there for that, and for once this is a Seanan Maguire/Mira Grant book where I not only liked the premise, but liked what she did with it. By far my favorite of anything I've ever read by her.

"Rolling in the Deep" is a novella set several years before Into the Drowning Deep, concerning an expedition to the Mariana Trench to make a fake documentary "proving" the existence of mermaids, a la the garbage fake docs on the History Channel. They hire some human mermaid performers for the purpose. The novella starts out by informing us that the ship was found later with no one onboard and weird footage that looks like it was attacked by mermaids, which is largely assumed to be fake. But no one on board was ever found.

It's a fun horror novella with a killer premise - and it really is about the premise. I enjoyed it a lot.

Into the Drowning Deep is a novel about an actual scientific expedition to the Mariana Trench to try to figure out what happened to the ship and if mermaids could possibly be real. The characters are just plausible and likable enough to make us care what happens to them, but really it's all about horrifying deep sea creatures, which is what the murder mermaids are. It's a lot of fun, especially if you're freaked out by deep sea creatures, which I totally am. The mermaid descriptions are very fun in terms of how they work out a plausible way for mermaids to be deep sea horrors. I would absolutely love horrifying mermaid art, and may request this for the next fic/art exchange I do.

Though I was mostly in it for the mermaids, I also appreciated the look at human mermaid culture in the novella, and the number of disabled characters in both. Like in real life, some people have disabilities which are relevant to their lives, but aren't all they are.

My biggest quibble with both books is that they both have a big twist, which ends the novella and is heavily involved in the climax of the novel. But it's the same twist, so if you read them both, you will spend one of them waiting for the characters to figure out the thing you already know. Which can be fun, but they're both written like the readers should also be shocked. In both cases this supposedly shocking and horrifying moment is just stated rather than described, so by the time you get to it for the second time, it falls doubly flat. I'm really baffled by this choice.

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That aside, I did enjoy both books quite a bit. This is very light horror - it's creepy and people die and there's violence, but it's juuust to the horror side of science fiction action - Aliens rather than Alien. I suggest reading the novel first (the opposite of what I did) if DEEP SEA MURDER MERMAIDS piques your interest.

Content notes: Mermaids kill people.

Hal and Margaret, who have been married for over twenty years, buy their dream house after their daughter Katherine goes off to college. The house is perfect. Except for the minor detail that it's haunted as fuck eleven months of the year, and every September it really gets bad.

Three years later, Hal has vanished under mysterious circumstances, and Margaret is living in the still-haunted as fuck house, conversing with the ghosts and apparently totally fine with the situation as it, though it gets tiresome cleaning up the blood that pours down the walls every September. Unfortunately, Katherine has heard that her father has disappeared, and is determined to visit to come look for him. And September is right around the corner...

Every haunted house story has to deal with the question of "Why don't they just leave?" (The movie His House had a particularly compelling and brutal answer to that question: the couple are asylum-seekers who were given the house, and will be deported to their deaths if they leave it.) In The September House, the question forms the central mystery to both the story overall and to Margaret's character, as the book is largely a character study. Why doesn't Margaret just leave? Why is she so willing to cope with everything the house throws at her? Sure, anyone who's ever bought a house can identify with the willingness to overlook flaws that maybe shouldn't be overlooked, but this seems a little extreme...

The September House is best read unspoiled. It's a slowly unfolding revelation of character and situation, and also has one plot turn (not a twist, just a thing that happens) that was so unexpected that I burst out laughing at the author's audacity. It's got great dark comedy and character development, and comes to a very satisfying conclusion. Margaret's inner monologue can get repetitive at points, but it's a minor flaw.

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Content notes: Child abuse, ghosts of murdered children, domestic violence, suicide (all of the fromer mostly off-page or in the past), horror-style violence, non-malicious attempt to convince Margaret that she's delusional and put her in a mental hospital, issue of whether any of this is real or Margaret is delusional and/or has dementia.

The little English village of Dunstonholme has been the site of many strange tragedies, starting when a group of religious fanatics called the Children of Paul were involved in a massacre in 1300. It's now 1966, and the weird shit continues.

After a ship vanishes mysteriously, strange things start happening, and happening, and happening. Sheep go mad. Bulls go mad. People go mad. Something weird seems to be going on underground, and the bishop (who is either a mass murdering criminal smuggled into the role or a naive hippie, Blackburn seems to have forgotten to pick one) should probably not arrange a celebratory meeting for whatever lurks beneath the sod...

This book, while definitely a fun read, was a bit too similar to For Fear of Little Men to be a good one to read right after it, especially as the latter has more interesting/likable characters and a higher batshit quotient. I am not sure whether to add or subtract points for the reveal of the horror, which unlike many such reveals is not anticlimatic but worse than what I was imagining, but is also extremely gross and a particular brand of gross which I particularly dislike. I mean, effective, but YUCK.

However, the second chapter of Children of the Night is a deranged treat for horror fans and the high point of the book, so I recommend going to Amazon and reading it in the "read a sample." It's like a lost scene from a British version of Needful Things.

Spoilers! ( Read more... )

The first time I told Mommy and Daddo about Other Mommy they laughed. It was good-night time and I told Mommy good night and then I said it again and Mommy said,

Why do you say that twice, Bela?

And I said,

I was saying good night to Other Mommy.

Daddo laughed and shut the light and they left my room, but I saw Mommy look back once through the crack in the door. Her eyes looked right at mine. Then she and Daddo went to their own bedroom.

Then Other Mommy made the grunting sound she makes when she stands up on the other side of my bed, in the space between my bed and the wall, when she's been crouched down there on the carpet waiting for them to leave.

A horror novel narrated by a very young girl, about the Other Mommy who lives in her closet and keeps asking, "Can I come into your heart?"

(I assume Other Mommy is a nod to Coraline's Other Mother, which was uhhh kind of unfortunate timing.)

The sample above is how the whole book is written. That sort of thing can sometimes drive me nuts, but it was extremely effective in this. I read the book in a single sitting, and then had to stay up very late reading something less creepy and twitching every time my cats moved.

The first quarter or so of this book is one of the most effective pieces of horror I've ever read. There's no violence or gore, and it's utterly chilling, tapping into childhood fears of things in the closet and under the bed and glimpsed in the corner of your eye. A big part of the fear is that Other Mommy doesn't come into clear focus - Bela knows what she looks like, so only mentions attributes when they're relevant - and every tiny bit of detail that she drops is utterly horrific. It approaches the original story "The Monkey's Paw" in terms of the evocation of sheer dread by what you don't see.

If the first quarter or so had a satisfying ending and then stopped, it would be a basically perfect horror novella. Unfortunately, it continues. Much of the rest of the book consists of the exact same event happening in slightly different contexts FOUR TIMES. But the larger problem with where the story goes after the first part is that it takes the Other Mommy, who is terrifying because what she is and what she wants is so unknown and maybe unknowable, and brings her more into the light, where she promptly becomes less scary. The conclusion is depressing, doesn't quite follow from previous setup, and is sufficiently confusing that it prompted multiple posts to r/horrorlit asking "What happened at the end?"

So, do I recommend this book? Well... the first bit is SO good. If you're interested in horror or writing horror, yes, it's good enough to read for pure enjoyment and as a masterclass in how to evoke more by revealing less.

The rest of the book, eh. It's good in parts. Bela's mother is a borderline misogynist stereotype of the bad cheating wife, though at least there's other normal women to balance her out, and her bad marriage with a saintly doormat is maddening to read. Bela's own narration is pretty convincing as that of a four or five-year-old, so I was surprised to re-read the blurb and see that she's supposed to be eight. What. No. (Her parents treat her like she's four but monologue at her like she's their therapist, but then again, they're AWFUL parents.)

Spoilers! ( Read more... )

Content notes: extreme spookiness, child in danger. There's some violence but it's extremely underplayed, non-graphic, and/or off-page.

A new collection of shorter works: 7 short stories and 5 novellas. The shorts range from meh to good. All five novellas are terrific; if you like King's work at that length, get this collection. For me, it would have been worth it for "Rattlesnakes" alone.

Like Different Seasons, which contained "The Body" and "Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption," the genres of the novellas are varied. "Rattlesnakes" and "The Dreamers" are horror, "The Answer Man" is fantasy, and "Two Talented Bastids" and "Danny Coughlin's Bad Dream" are cross-genre and/or hard to categorize. Despite the title, this anthology isn't actually all that dark as far as King goes, and several stories are outright uplifting.

There's a strong theme of aging and mortality running through the volume as a whole. King is in his seventies and he's clearly thinking about that. One of the novellas, "The Answer Man," has a pretty extraordinary backstory relevant to that, which I'll get into when I discuss it.

I'll take the shorts first as I have less to say about them.

"The Fifth Step" is a horror short about a guy who gets buttonholed by a stranger doing the "Make Amends" AA step. It's fine but predictable.

"Willie the Weirdo" is another horror short, about a creepy kid and his creepy dying grandfather. The story isn't original but it's done well; very atmospheric. I enjoyed it.

"Finn." An Irish kid with bad luck has an unlucky encounter with gangsters. What the hell was this story even. Why Ireland? Why did it have the ending it had? A clunker.

"On Slide Inn Road" is a crime story inspired by Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man is Hard to Find." Good climax, otherwise... fine.

"Red Screen" is a horror short about a cop who arrests a guy who claims he killed his wife because of an invasion of the bodysnatchers situation; the cop starts wondering about his own wife. This story was ruined by its ending, which should have left the situation ambiguous.

"The Turbulence Expert" is Twilight Zone style fantasy about a man with a very unusual job that involves being a passenger on airplanes. It has some dark elements but overall it made me smile.

"Laurie" is a story about a grieving widower who gets a dog. It's really sweet and heartwarming, but because it's Stephen King there's also an alligator attack. (The dog is fine.)

On to the novellas!

"Two Talented Bastids" is a really interesting story in the context of King's career and preoccupations. It's about two friends who were ordinary guys, one (Laird) who wanted to write and one (Butch) who painted a bit, who suddenly achieved meteoric success as a writer and a painter in middle age. The story is told from the point of view of Laird's son Mark, now a middle-aged man, who finally learns how that came about. The story involves some well-worn tropes but with new spins on them, and goes to some pretty dark places with zero violence or even malice.

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"Danny Coughlin's Bad Dream" is about a janitor who dreams of a woman's buried body, goes to look and finds it, calls the police, and learns the truth of the saying "No good deed goes unpunished" when an unhinged cop decides Danny killed her and Danny must pay. This is an extremely anxiety-inducing story which starts with a literal nightmare and turns into a living nightmare of persecution and injustice and bad things happening to people who don't deserve it. I could have done with slightly less of Jobert's counting mania, but it's a very effective, tense story.

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"Rattlesnakes" is my favorite story in the book, and it has some strong competition. It's a sequel to Cujo, of all unexpected things. Vic, now an old man, goes to stay in friend's cabin in Florida, and meets an old woman who is also still mourning her twin sons who died many years ago. Creepiness ensues. This story is a banger - genuinely scary, with unexpected twists, solid character work, tons of tension, very moving, and also a really good sequel. Donna does not appear on-page, but we hear a lot about her and we learn what happened to her and Vic in the aftermath of Cujo. It was deeply satisfying for me to find out that, not really unexpectedly, Stephen King loves Donna and thinks she's a hero.

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"The Dreamers" is a terrifying novella about a Vietnam vet who gets a job assisting a mad scientist researching dreams. It reminded me of Revival, with the blend of low-tech weird science and cosmic horror, but they blended better in this. Also I'm much more scared of dreams and the way they're treated here than I am of (Revival spoiler; rot13) tvnag nagf. When I was a child and read Voyage of the Dawn Treader, I initially didn't understand why everyone wasn't immediately terrified of the island where dreams come true: I'd never heard the phrase used to mean "wishes coming true," and my mind instantly went to the worst nightmare I'd ever had. But "The Dreamers" isn't about nightmares, exactly. It's about something worse.

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"The Answer Man" is about Phil, an ordinary man who gets three chances to get answers from the Answer Man over the course of his lifetime. The scenes with the Answer Man are really fun and Twilight Zone-esque ("Tempus is fugitting.") The answers aren't exactly helpful, but they're not monkey's paws either. It's not clear whether Phil's life would have been the same if he'd never had those encounters, but they do change his perspective in some ways. Some of his life is tragic, some is wonderful, some is just a life. It's a beautiful, mature, haunting story.

Stephen King wrote the first part of the story, when Phil is a young man, when he was thirty. He then set it aside and forgot about it for FORTY YEARS, until someone else found it and suggested that he finish it. So he wrote the final section, where Phil is old, when he was old himself. It feels very personal.