A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

GREAT cover. (Look closely.) I'm having a run of "the cover is better than the book lately."


Mina, a just-qualified child psychologist, gets an unusual first patient: a teenage girl who might be a witch.

Mina was in a grief group to cope with the loss of her teenage brother, who had an immune deficiency that doomed him to die young, and died when he was fourteen. In the group, she met Sam, a journalist whose young daughter had died. Both of them hoped there was life after death, and Mina even thought she had a photo of her brother's ghost. So when Sam got assigned to cover a possible haunting-by-witch in the tiny village of Banathel, he gets Mina to come with him to rule out psychological causes.

In what will not be the last of her questionable professional moves, Mina and Sam move in with the family of Alice, the girl who might be a witch or be possessed by the ghost of a witch. Alice is sure that a witch is haunting her via the walls and the creepy fireplace in her bedroom, and that the witch allows her to see ghosts. Alice really does know a whole lot, including about dead people, that she has no way of finding out, and this has attracted a bunch of groupies who lurk outside, trying to get Alice to contact their dead loved ones. This is all complicated by the fact that her financially strained family would definitely benefit from publicity that might bring money, so they have a motive to fake the haunting.

The rest of the Banafel locals, who keep hag-stones to ward off evil, also believe in the haunting but are a lot less happy about it. "Burn the Witch" graffiti appears. In an intensely spooky scene, Sam finds his dead daughter's shoe in a fireplace. And then people who bully Alice start dropping dead...

Up to about the 75% mark, this book was very enjoyable, spooky folk horror. It had some issues but they weren't enough to spoil my enjoyment.

Issues: Mina's poor professional ethics and methods. Mina's irritating refusal to entertain the idea that anything supernatural could be happening even when there's really no other possible explanation, which doesn't match with the entire reason she came which was that she supposedly wanted to believe. Why it never occurs to anyone to move Alice out of the haunted bedroom to see if she improved. Why it never occurs to anyone to check the chimney to see if there's 1) a natural cause for the weird noises emanating from it, 2) a witch.

That sounds like a lot but the actual haunting and creepy superstitious village bits were so good. Halfway through, I ordered it off Ingram for my bookshop, planning to rec it to my folk horror customers.

Immediately upon finishing it, I rushed to Ingram to delete it from my cart.

This was a very frustrating book. Up until the last ten pages or so, it was engrossing, atmospheric folk horror - a subgenre I quite like. Then I got to the ending, which was so bad that it retroactively ruined the entire book for me. It was an absolutely unnecessary "clever" twist that made the whole book make no sense in retrospect. It also completely failed to explain or resolve what was going on with Alice and the witch, which was the main plot of the entire book!

Angry spoilers! ( Read more... )

WHAT ABOUT ALICE AND THE FIREPLACE WITCH???

Five women steal a spaceship and set out to save the Earth. Sounds good, right?

The more detailed version of the premise is that Earth is so environmentally devastated, humanity is in danger of going extinct. But there is hope: a warp drive is invented, a habitable planet with only plant life is discovered, and NASA plans to move humanity to it. But a Trump-like president is elected in America, and women are banned from all or most jobs, including at NASA. Somehow this causes women to lose all rights worldwide. The women who were originally supposed to be part of the five-person crew to start up the colony on the planet are fired, and an all-male crew is readied. But the women steal the spaceship and go to start the colony themselves.

If that makes you think "Wait a second, that doesn't make sense... and that doesn't make sense... and..." it's even less sensible with more detail. Is there any other resistance to women losing the right to work? How did America get to a policy where women are forcibly implanted with IUDs after they have one child because abortion is banned and any subsequent children are met with a stiff fine? Who knows! (The way women lose the right to work is that they're given financial aid if they stop working when their child is born, then not re-hired when their child is older. So basically, the current state of much of the US, minus the financial aid.)

How do five astronauts and one Earth confederate steal a NASA spaceship which is the main vehicle of a currently active mission which is considered to be the only way to save the world? How does NASA plan to save Earth via colonization when there's exactly one warp drive spaceship in the entire world and it only carries five people? How are FIVE PEOPLE supposed to set up a colony that will support a big chunk of the entire population of the Earth? If more ships with more people will arrive later, why not wait and build a bigger ship carrying more people?

But that's not the only problem with the book. Chapters from the mission alternate with completely random flashbacks: five years previously, eight years previously, one year previously, four years previously, etc. This makes the past action extremely hard to follow. But it kind of doesn't matter, because the flashbacks are extremely boring and don't provide any actual information other than dull recaps of fundraisers (yes really) and the main character's boring relationship with her ex-husband who is also an astronaut. Also, despite women supposedly being oppressed more than they are now, the only oppression we actually see is the women astronauts being booted out of NASA.

The crew consists of the boring heroine and her boring mentor, and three crew members who have no personality whatsoever. Two are married to each other, and one is Russian. Not even stereotypically Russian. Just, all we know about her is that she's Russian.

Some potential drama occurs partway, but is ruthlessly crushed. Then my least favorite plot twist ensues, followed by a deeply obnoxious conclusion. Spoilers!

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I HATED this book. I hated it so much that, although I've hated other books more, a quote from "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" came immediately to mind:

HATE. LET ME TELL YOU HOW MUCH I'VE COME TO HATE YOU SINCE I BEGAN TO LIVE. THERE ARE 387.44 MILLION MILES OF PRINTED CIRCUITS IN WAFER THIN LAYERS THAT FILL MY COMPLEX. IF THE WORD HATE WAS ENGRAVED ON EACH NANOANGSTROM OF THOSE HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF MILES IT WOULD NOT EQUAL ONE ONE-BILLIONTH OF THE HATE I FEEL AT THIS MICRO-INSTANT FOR YOU. HATE. HATE.

This is one of several classic novels about Jesuits in space.

The book takes place in two timelines. In the present, Father Emilio Sandoz has returned to Earth as the sole survivor of a trip to a newly discovered planet which went disastrously wrong. He is near death from malnutrition and general bad treatment, and has been tortured, gang raped, and horrifically mutilated by kangaroo-like aliens. He was discovered in this condition in an alien brothel, and literally everyone on Earth seems to believe that he just randomly decided that he'd like to be a whore for aliens.

People often do refuse to believe that any given survivor was actually raped and instead claim that the sex was consensual. But if there's ONE situation in which people are likely to believe that a rape happened, it's when the victim is the sole survivor of a massacre and is discovered starving, tortured, mutilated, injured by violent sex, and locked in a brothel.

So that entire storyline, which is an enormous part of the book, was one that I found impossible to believe. Especially since until near the end of the book, literally nobody even considers the possibility that Emilio – who, don't forget, was mutilated so he is literally unable to use his hands – had been raped rather than having consensually had incredibly brutal and violent sex with a bunch of aliens.

The other thing everyone blames him for is that he killed a child. We get no details on that until the end of the book, so I'll just say that once we learn the details, I had a big problem believing that blame too.

This book got an incredible amount of mainstream acclaim. Unsurprisingly, it has a number of the flaws common to science fiction written by writers who don't normally write it, and largely read by people who don't normally read it. It has genre tropes but not the underpinnings that make them make sense.

What it also has a lot of is whump. If it was written for Whumpfest for the prompt "Everybody blames character for being gang raped, mutilated, and nearly killed," I would say, "Excellent job!"

At least 50% of the entire book consists of Emilio being accused of terrible things, being so traumatized that he's unable to defend himself, having nightmares, having migraines, throwing up, not eating, doing agonizing physical therapy with painful prosthetics, etc. I felt like I was reading a Bucky Barnes fic circa 2018.

The second timeline is the story of the expedition to the alien planet Rakhat. It's discovered when a low-level tech working on SETI, Jimmy Quinn, hears aliens singing on radio waves. Jimmy, who is friends with Emilio and his group of friends, gets together with them one night. They decide it would be cool to visit the planet, and come up with the idea of making an asteroid into a spaceship. They present this to the Vatican, which is the only entity who cares enough to send a spaceship. It hires the entire friend group who came up with the idea to be the crew, plus a couple redshirts.

I cannot think of a less-qualified crew for a first contact mission. It consists of Emilio (linguist and priest), Sofia (another linguist), an elderly doctor, her husband the elderly engineer (all sorts of engineer, he does everything from mechanical engineering to nanoparticles), another priest, and Jimmy, the low ranking dude at SETI. None of them are qualified to go on an expedition to another planet! None of them are capable of designing a spaceship on the back of an envelope!

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Religion is a huge part of the book but it's weirdly unmoored from the science fiction part. There's tons of discussion of Emilio's celibacy (the most boring aspect of being a priest IMO) but despite the Catholic Church funding the expedition and putting multiple priests on it, there's no discussion about the theological implications of aliens. Nobody even asks the aliens whether they have a religion!

Back on Earth, Emilio agonizes over how a benevolent God allowed the terrible events he experienced. This is a very understandable reaction, but there is an entire field of study devoted to that exact question. It's called theodicy and it ought to be something a priest would be aware of. Even if Emilio is too traumatized to think of it, the other priests ought to be bringing in actual theology when they talk to him about it, because THEY'RE ALL PRIESTS.

Also, nothing about Emilio's crisis of faith had to be science fictional. He'd be having the exact same crisis if he got caught up in a war on Earth where his friends were killed and he experienced the exact same trauma only done by humans.

Cell phones send out a signal that makes everyone who hears it turn into ravening zombies!

Stephen King often starts out with "ordinary thing X is scary" and then takes that premise in interesting directions. So it didn't put me off that the premise of Cell is "cell phones are scary," because he's done great things with "a car is scary," "a Saint Bernard is scary," "a devoted fan is scary," etc.

The problem with Cell isn't that cell phones aren't scary, or that the book is basically "old man yells at cell phones." It's that though there are individual good scenes and good characters, the premise goes in nonsensical directions, the characters are subpar, and the book as a whole doesn't work.

The opening scene, in which the one guy in a park without a cell phone watches helplessly while everyone who answers or makes a phone call goes berserk, is a grabber. But it also ends up illustrating why King normally doesn't do big action scenes as openers. Everyone's running around attacking each other or trying to escape, and we know nothing about any of them, so it's exciting but in a hollow way. In most King books there'd be more buildup - sometimes a LOT more buildup - so you care about the characters and are biting your nails in anticipation of the phone zombies, rather than the phone zombies attacking on page one.

The no-phone guy is Clay, a comic book artist/writer who's in New York to pitch his comic, while his estranged wife and beloved son are home in Maine. Normally I either love King's protagonists or find them awful but compelling. Very unusually for King, I didn't care about Clay.

There's a lack of specific details on what his wife and son are like as people, so Clay's quest to find them lacks emotion. He also just doesn't have much personality. Clay hooks up with a gay guy, Tom, and a teenage girl, Alice, to avoid phone zombies and find his family. I did like Tom and Alice, but the entire book is from Clay's POV. This book particularly would have benefited from multiple POVs as everything outside of Clay seemed more interesting than Clay.

But mostly I want to rant a bit about how the phone zombie plot is aggressively nonsensical.

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Really bottom-tier King. I rank it with Thinner and The Tommyknockers in my absolute least favorites. (I have not read Dreamcatcher.) If you like King in general, which are your least favorites of his?

Check out the covers. The first is the original, showing a flip-top phone. (Also an overturned cup and a scary shadow, both of which detract from rather than add to the central image. The artist definitely caught the "throw in things randomly" vibe of the book.) The second one shows a modern phone. If you read this book picturing a modern cell phone, you will be very confused as they are only ever used for phone calls, not accessing the internet.

What was he going to say to the department store Santa Claus about the emissary whom he had sent to Gramercy Park and who was now residing in the deep freeze?

I picked up a bunch of old pulp mysteries and thrillers at Bouchercon, and this was one of them. It was not good, but it was extremely diverting by way of being completely nuts - something I did not expect from the title, cover, or blurb, which made it seem much more normal.

Here is the blurb: When lovely, wealthy young Jennifer Clay flew from California to New York, she plunged into a world of danger she had never dreamed existed. Her former college roommate, Mary Bostwick, had mysteriously disappeared, leaving behind a multi-million dollar legacy. Jennifer vowed to find her friend. At Jennifer's side was a handsome lawyer she could not bring herself to trust. Blocking her path was a web of sinister deception. And shadowing her every step, moving ever closer, was a murderer who had killed twice and was poised to strike again...

This blurb is correct but misleading. Most of the book is from the POV of Foley's series detective, Mr. Potter, a wealthy young man with a big house and a live-in housekeeper.

He comes home from a vacation and finds that an unknown person is living on the top floor of his house but keeps not getting around to investigating this. He eventually asks his housekeeper, who says it's her sick mother. He almost immediately begins to doubt this, as the unknown hider in the house is also stealing his Scotch and cigarettes, but doesn't do anything about it.

Mr. Potter is hired to find a missing heiress, Mary Bostwick. If she's not found within three days, the entire fortune goes to a different set of heirs. Jennifer shows up about a third of the way in.

Mr. Potter finds an unknown corpse in his living room. Since he's in a hurry to find Mary Bostwick and thinks being investigated will delay him, he sticks the corpse in the freezer. A clue leads to a department store Santa, and thus to the immortal line, "I have to see Santa Claus about a dead man."

Santa is missing Mary's uncle, Bostwick, who sent the dead guy to Mr. Potter with a message. Mr. Potter immediately shows Bostwick the freezer corpse:

Mr. Potter explained why he had hidden the body and Bostwick accepted his explanation without question.

I would have questions.

Mr. Potter FINALLY goes to check out the hider in his house and finds him (an unknown bearded dude) sleeping. He goes downstairs to demand an explanation from his housekeeper but was sidetracked by the ringing of the phone. He then has a conversation in which he's about to ask, then gets distracted by a thought and wanders off.

Meanwhile, we learn that a male ballet dancer deliberately dropped his ballerina partner and broke her neck because she was getting more attention than him so he "got rid of his rival."

...that's not how that works.

For literally no reason whatsoever, Jennifer decides that a missing college student is probably a prisoner behind the Iron Curtain and maybe his girlfriend, the also-missing heiress Mary Bostwick, was kidnapped by Communists.

This is UTTERLY out of the blue.

Meanwhile, Mr. Potter again chats with his increasingly weirdly behaving housekeeper without mentioning the hider in the house who is definitely not anyone's mom.

Jennifer gets kidnapped and rescued, one of the rival heir's maids is murdered, and Mr. Potter randomly causes a riot in a department store by spanking a stranger's misbehaving kid.

SPOILERS include the immortal line "What makes you think you have leprosy?"

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I can't say I didn't get my money's worth but, similarly to the magnet murder book, it's a wildly coincidental and overly convoluted plot that only works because characters don't behave like actual humans. And also, make correct deductions with literally no basis.

Oh and it's not leprosy. It's an allergy to his new shaving cream.

Here is the author's Wikipedia biography; like the book, it takes a sudden turn: Elinore Denniston was an American writer of more than 40 mystery novels under the pseudonym Rae Foley. She wrote other mysteries as Helen K. Maxwell and Dennis Allan. Elinore Denniston was born on September 20, 1900, in North Dakota. She worked as an assistant to the playwright Theresa Helburn. She also worked as an assistant to Eleanor Roosevelt.

So a little while back I read this absolutely batshit contemporary mashup of Jane Eyre and Rebecca called Verity, by ginormous bestseller Colleen Hoover. Do not click on this or any links unless you're OK with spoilers for it.

Then cahn read Verity.

Then snacky also read Verity.

And then! snacky made an amazing discovery! COLLEEN HOOVER WROTE A NEW EPILOGUE FOR VERITY. It's posted on Reddit, in two parts, and the three of you who have read Verity or the many of you who just read the spoilers need to read it immediately and discuss in comments to this post.

Absolutely no need for rot13 or other forms of spoiler protection in the comments! Don't read the comments unless you want to be spoiled for the new epilogue!

New epilogue, Part I

New epilogue, Part II

Hoover is a huge bestseller and has an immense TikTok following, so I decided to check out her most popular novel, Verity. (It's also her darkest and she warns that people who like her other books might not like this one.) Oh boy was that a good decision. At least, it was a good decision for you. This book is NUTS.

Verity is absolutely batshit literally from page one.

It opens with one of the most accidentally hilarious scenes I have ever read. Lowen, a midlist writer who moved to New York City ten years ago, sees a man fall in traffic and get his head "crushed like a grape." His head "pops like a champagne cork!" She's splattered with blood!

...and all the New Yorkers totally ignore this, because New Yorkers are so hardened that seeing a man's skull get unexpectedly crushed and blood splatter everywhere isn't worth a backward glance.

Her own reaction to this is to muse on New Yorkers vs other people.

A hot dude, Jeremy, helps her exchange her blood-splattered shirt for his so she can get to her job interview, mentioning that he wasn't bothered by the guy's head exploding in front of him because he's seen worse things.

I assumed he meant he was a combat veteran because war is literally the only way anyone ever gets used to heads exploding. Instead, he says his eight-year-old daughter drowned in a lake.

...okay, yes, that is more traumatic than seeing a stranger's head explode. BUT THAT DOESN'T MEAN YOU'RE USED TO HEADS EXPLODING! I HAVE SEEN A BUNCH OF CORPSES BUT I WOULD STILL BE FREAKED OUT IF SOMEONE'S HEAD WAS UNEXPECTEDLY CRUSHED IN FRONT OF ME!

Lowen rushes to her job interview, which coincidentally is with Jeremy. He is the husband of bestselling author Verity, who was disabled in a car crash and is unable to finish her book series. Lowen is hired to finish it for her. For literally no reason it's a big secret that Verity was injured so this is announced as her randomly collaborating with Lowen.

At this point I started liveblogging over email:

- We have just learned that Jeremy has TWO dead daughters, not one. They were twins who died six months apart.

Also, the heroine's mother just died slowly of colon cancer.

- Lowen is now staying at the house of the Jeremy and his mysteriously disabled wife Verity. She has been placed in the master bedroom, which has human toothmarks on the headboard, she presumes from extremely hot sex.

- Verity is in a coma. I'm calling it now: she murdered the kids and framed her husband, and she's faking the coma.

Lowen discovers that Verity has written a memoir, which she proceeds to read veeeery sloooooowly, at a pace of one chapter per day maximum. The revelations about Verity all come from the memoir.

Spoiler cut. ( Read more... )

The exploding head has nothing to do with anything, except for a thematic thing about some people having lots of random bad stuff happen to them.

I can tell why Verity is a bestseller despite being batshit, melodramatic, and kind of nonsensical: it is pretty compelling reading. I finished it in a day.

You can read this without being spoiled for more than the first few episodes by not clicking on the cut tags. Cut tags are spoilery through S4 E7.

Dr. Bright is a therapist who treats atypicals (people with powers). They are not known to the general public, but a secret sinister organization, the AM, studies them.

At the start, she has four clients we follow. Caleb is a sweet teenage empath who's struggling to not get overwhelmed by other people's emotions and who has a sweet romance with another boy at his school, Adam, who is not atypical. Sam is a young woman who time-travels when she gets anxious. Chloe is a college-age woman who is an extremely strong receptive telepath.

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We learn early on that Dr. Bright has a secret agenda and wants to use her clients' powers for her own purposes. This is actually not my beef with the show or its portrayal of therapy. Obviously, it's unethical but the show knows it is and this is discussed a lot. Her clients learn what she's doing and why fairly early, and because she does have sympathetic motives they stick with her.

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Chloe, the telepath, I think is incapable of tuning out other people's thoughts. (This isn't 100% clear but it seems like it.) If she attends a therapy session, she can/will read Dr. Bright's mind. That means that she knows everything Dr. Bright knows, including everything Dr. Bright's other clients tell her. She routinely blurts out stuff other clients told Dr. Bright to different clients of Dr. Bright. Effectively, no one can have any secrets or privacy around Chloe, not just because she knows things, but because she will tell everything she knows to everyone.

(Dr. Bright's clients all end up meeting each other, which sets up its own set of ethical issues which I'll get to shortly.)

If I was Dr. Bright dealing with this genuinely fascinating problem in a therapy ethics, there are multiple possible ways to deal with this. The best way would be to only see Chloe over the phone. Another might be, since my clients all know each other anyway and know this is happening, to ask them, privately and individually and after discussing it, whether they consent to Chloe knowing everything they tell me. If even one person says no, then all of Chloe's sessions happen over the phone, permanently.

If I was the writer of this podcast, I would make clear is whether Chloe is literally incapable of shutting up about other people's secrets, whether she can but it's difficult for her for whatever reason, or whether she just doesn't want to or get why this upsets people.

Why this is happening makes a huge difference! Especially since Dr. Bright is literally there to help people control their powers. If Chloe is incapable of shutting up and her other clients don't consent to having her blurt out everything they tell Dr. Bright, then all her sessions need to happen by phone so she can't read Dr. Bright's mind. If it's difficult for her not to blurt, then Dr. Bright should be helping her with this. If she just doesn't think it's a problem and so refuses to stop, she should be booted as a client.

In the show, the why is not made clear but it seems like it's difficult for her not to blurt and she doesn't want to stop. (At one point she complains how haaaaard and saaaaad it is for her to be expected to keep other people's secrets.) Whatever the reason, everyone keeps telling Chloe not to blurt out their secrets to third parties and Dr. Bright keeps complaining that the whole situation is unethical, but no one ever boots Chloe out of their life or asks Dr. Bright to only see her by phone or do anything about it. Chloe is portrayed as a sweet cinnamon roll too good for this world, but in real life, she would be murdered so fast.

Any time someone brings up Chloe blurting out everything other clients told Dr. Bright to third parties, Chloe or someone else points out that Dr. Bright was also unethical. ONE PERSON BEING UNETHICAL DOES NOT MEAN IT'S OKAY FOR SOMEONE ELSE TO BE UNETHICAL. ALSO, CHLOE, SHUT THE FUCK UP BEFORE SOMEONE SHOVES YOU OFF A CLIFF.

This brings me to my biggest single problem with the show: almost everyone in it is from the Crab Nebula. (On FFA, "from the Crab Nebula" is shorthand for "person operating off of an incredibly strange set of assumptions about life/human beings/everything.") The particular quadrant of the Crab Nebula is, I think, young people on Tumblr.

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Almost everyone's values and ethics and reactions are skewed from how humans normally are, and they're all skewed in the same weird directions.

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People keep defending the evil lab with "but they do some good work," which is true, but WHO THE FUCK CARES WHEN THEY'RE ALSO IMPRISONING AND TORTURING PEOPLE WHO SOMETIMES DIE AS A RESULT? The evil lab people say they don't kill anyone on purpose and their experiments aren't meant to kill anyone, which appears to be true, but WHO CARES! They literally grab atypicals off the street, lock them up, and do experiments on them and sometimes they die! Not killing them on purpose doesn't make that better!

As of season four, everyone knows they still have atypicals locked up and experimented on, but no one is doing anything to break them loose and they're still half-heartedly defending the AM as "they do some bad things and some good things, it's complicated." NO IT ISN"T!

And that's not all! There is SO MUCH Crab Nebula reasoning!

A telepath constantly blurting out your secrets to third parties? Worth resignedly bitching about but not worth doing anything about.

A time-traveler using her ability to spy on the evil organization kidnapping, experimenting on, and sometimes killing atypicals? BAD. INVASION OF PRIVACY.

A therapist telling one of their clients something another client told them in therapy? Unethical enough to literally say "So much for ethics!" in a "Oh well, can't be helped" manner.

A violent sociopath is seriously injured when attempting to kidnap your friend? TERRIBLE. THE WORST.

Guiltily not caring if that sociopath dies? TERRIBLE. THE WORST. (No one ever wishes him dead without feeling guilty about wishing harm on another human being. I wish people harm all the time because they're harming other people, and I feel no guilt about it, and those aren't even people who threatened to murder someone I loved!)

Using the word "rape" or "sexual assault?" Apparently so horrifying that it can't be done, even when people are explicitly talking about it, such as exchanges like this:

Character A: "Did he... do anything to you? You know, when he kidnapped you and you spent all that time together, I mean I don't know his sexual orientation but, well...?"

Kidnapped Character: "No! Absolutely not! Nothing of the kind happened."

YOU CAN SAY SEXUAL ASSAULT, THESE ARE ADULT CHARACTERS ON AN ADULT SHOW DEALING WITH TRAUMA.

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There's this weird prudishness and naivete going on, which is especially weird given that the show deals very openly and explicitly about topics like trauma, mental illness, and sexual orientation. This juxtaposition feels very Tumblr teenager to me.

AND ALSO, when you have a situation where your clients end up all knowing each other and hanging out together, one's telepathic and two are empathic, and they don't have any real therapy options other than you, stop wringing your hands about the unethical lack of privacy and DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT.

It's actually a very interesting problem in therapeutic ethics. The most relevant ethical frameworks I can think of come from group therapy and situations in which dual relationships and clients knowing each other is unavoidable, such as being a therapist in a hospital or in a very small town where you're the only one.

The solution that comes to my mind is to get everyone's input, first individually and then (if they all want) in a group setting. You could decide that within the group, you don't have secrets, but you cannot reveal anything from within the group to anyone outside of the group.

And this is just touching the surface! There's so much more, like why the fuck Dr. Bright wouldn't tell a client that the organization she's involved with KIDNAPS AND EXPERIMENTS ON PEOPLE LIKE HER when there is literally no reason not to tell her other than that-- HER STATED REASON FOR NOT DISCLOSING THIS - is that the organization doesn't always do this and is sometimes helpful WHEN IT DOESN'T DECIDE TO KIDNAP AND EXPERIMENT ON YOU WHAT THE ACTUAL CRAB NEBULA FUCK.

I bought this book by the author of My Side of the Mountain because it promised another nature-centric survival adventure, which is something I love, and I finally got around to reading it because it's set in the Okefenokee Swamp, which is a setting I'll be loosely adapting for an upcoming book.

Exactly half of the book is indeed a nature-centric survival adventure set in the Okefenokee Swamp. The other half takes a sudden swerve into a completely batshit other plot, in which multiple batshit plotlines proliferate. This is especially unexpected as the first half of the book had pretty much no plot at all.

Jack, a 14-year-old boy, has been taught an incredible amount of survival and swamp knowledge by Uncle Hamp, who he stays with when his parents are abroad. Hamp leaves him alone for weeks on end and nobody has any problem with this. Like a whole lot of things in this story, this would make at least slightly more sense if the entire story was set about 100 years earlier than it actually is. In fact, the book was published in 2002 and is apparently set around then, or at least in a time when people have cell phones.

Jack paddles off into the swamp to explore. His canoe is attacked by an alligator and he's shipwrecked. He proceeds to deploy a wealth of survival skills that would put Robinson Crusoe to shame. This, which occupies the first half of the book, has plenty of nice nature writing but is just a tad dull as Jack has no notable personality and never seems seriously worried about anything.

AND THEN. I spoil the entire book below the cut but honestly, you probably want to read the spoilers because the best part of the book is the nature descriptions, and the spoiler parts are hilarious.

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What.

Tree Castle Island

I hated this book so much that I looked up Sager's other pen name to make sure I didn't accidentally read anything else by him.

The premise is that three women are the sole survivors of massacres, the media calls them "Final Girls," and then someone starts killing them...

The Final Girls were all the sole survivors of unrelated massacres. Considering how many massacres happen in the US, I'm not sure that would be enough to make them still famous ten years later (or that there wouldn't be a lot more Final Girls) but that wouldn't bother me if the book was generally satisfying. Be that as it may, the Final Girls are a media creation, not friends. Linda embraced the label and wrote a book about empowerment, Sam dropped off the grid, and Quincy, who hates being called a Final Girl, had one phone call with Linda and never met Sam.

Ten years ago, Quincy survived the massacre of a bunch of her friends on a camping trip in college, including her best friend. The story of the massacre (95% of it is lead-up) is intercut with her present-day life. Both timelines are boring and annoying. All we know about the massacre in the present day is that she ran screaming through the woods, was found by a cop who shot the pursuing slasher dead, and two other cops found it very very suspicious that Quincy was the lone survivor when everyone else was killed, she claims to have no memory of the massacre itself, and her wounds, though serious, were not life-threatening.

Right off the bat, this makes no sense. It's common for a massacre to involve many people killed and some or one not hurt at all; that shouldn't make them a suspect. Traumatic amnesia is also common. Quincy is a young white woman so there's an additional reason not to suspect her. Finally, if Quincy was the real slasher, then shouldn't the cops be trying to figure out who the dude who got shot was and why he was chasing Quincy with a knife?

Meanwhile, Quincy now has a baking blog and a fiance, compulsively shoplifts, and takes Xanax washed down with grape juice as is repeated a bazillion times. She's still in touch with Coop, the hot cop who rescued her. When Linda commits suicide, Quincy gets caught up in a media frenzy, and Sam shows up on Quincy's doorstep insisting that Linda was murdered.

Quincy makes absolutely no sense as a character because we're supposed to be in doubt as to whether she is the real murderer, so sometimes she acts like a violent psycho and sometimes she seems like a regular traumatized person, and she makes random, contradictory choices. Two-thirds of the book is her having repetitive conversations with the same three people while baking and/or popping Xanax, and then there's a flurry of utterly nonsensical twists.

There's tons of talk about what it means to be a Final Girl and whether Final Girls should stick together, but none of it is insightful or comes to more than "being a Final Girl means that you survived"/"actually us Final Girls have nothing in common."

I thought the book would be some kind of revisionist take on the Final Girl trope, and it's instead every misogynist stereotype from every bad slasher flick, only revised so it disappears up its own ass in a flurry of frantic handwaving and incoherence.

Also, THERE IS EXACTLY ONE SLASHING SCENE. It's like one percent of the novel's total verbiage. The heroine washing down Xanax with grape juice is probably four percent. I felt so cheated.

( Spoilers make zero sense and are also extremely skeevy. )

Final Girls: A Novel