A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

Sixteen years ago, Rachel Price vanished without a trace. Her car was found, empty except for her two-year-old daughter Annabel, who was too young to say what happened. Her husband Charlie was arrested and tried for her murder, but acquitted. He's been living a quiet life raising Annabel (now Bel) ever since. But his father has dementia, so he sold the rights to his story (and by proxy Rachel's) to a ragtag true crime documentary crew.

As you know from the title, partway into filming, Rachel Price returns. This ought to answer all questions and be a happily ever after, right? But her family reunion is awkward to say the least. Her story doesn't quite add up. Was the timing of her return really a coincidence? Her prickly daughter Bel is suspicious and begins investigating...

This book is a ride and a half. It has something like eleven shocking twists, all of which basically make sense and create a coherent whole. At exactly the fifty percent mark, something big happens, and then it's all !!!!! from there on. This would be a very fun book to read with a friend .

Bel is a great narrator - angry, driven, sometimes mean, but very plausibly a teenager who's spent her whole life with the shadow of the mother she's never known hanging over her. There's some nice commentary on true crime.

I read this in a single gulp and look forward to reading more batshit thrillers from Jackson, who also wrote The Good Girl's Guide to Murder.

If you've read it, feel free to put spoilers in the comments. If you haven't read it, don't read the comments till you do.

Content notes: Domestic abuse, gaslighting, violence, dementia. They're treated seriously but the tone is "thriller," not "brutal realism."

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.

Eleven-year-old Rob loves sitting in the cherry tree in his front yard, where he can spit cherry pits at the bedroom window belonging to Mrs. Calloway, the world's worst neighbor, and avoid the madhouse his home has become in the runup to his older sister's wedding. Then he sees a pair of hands shove Mrs. Calloway out the window to her death! But when he tries to tell people, nobody listens or believes him. Except the murderer...

Roberts' first book is basically Rear Window for pre-teens. I read this when I was kid and remember finding it very suspenseful. It still is once it gets going. The beginning/middle is a nicely written and amusing but fairly standard middle-grade comedy/mystery, with some implausibilities in terms of how impossible it is to get anyone to even let Rob finish a sentence when they know he saw Mrs. Calloway fall to her (rather gruesome) death. But once the murderer gets serious about getting rid of Rob, it becomes a cracking thriller that had me staying up late to finish it.

Content notes: One use of the r-word, the murder is unexpectedly disturbing/graphic for a middle-grade thriller, cats are injured/in danger (but they recover and are fine), a whole lot of spiders.

The Kindle version with the awful cover has been censored. The original book had the cat named S.O.B. This version names it Sonny, and cuts the explanation for the cat's name. S.O.B. is a major character, so it wouldn't surprise me if other elements of the book were altered too. Buy a used copy of the original book instead.

Holly Gibney, a 50-something private eye with anxiety and a passion for movies, takes on a missing person case that's bigger than it initially seems.

Previous books explain how Holly became a detective in middle age and detail some past cases. You don't need to read the others to read this one - you can pick up what you need to know in this book - but ideally you should have read Mr. Mercedes, The Outsider, and If It Bleeds.

Holly is set in the summer of 2021, such a specific time period that it makes the book feel like a well-observed period piece, complete with people bumping elbows and telling each other which Covid vaccine they got. When it begins, her business partner is out with Covid and Holly, who's germ-phobic and whose mother just died of Covid, doesn't plan to take on any cases. But then a woman calls, frantic. Her adult daughter Bonnie has been missing for weeks, and the police seem to have given up...

We, the readers, already know more-or-less what happened to her. A prologue showed a pair of unlikely serial killers - an elderly professor couple from the local college - kidnapping a different victim years ago. Periodically we flash back to them taking other victims. While we know who took Bonnie, we don't know whether she's still alive, or exactly why an elderly couple have been kidnapping and murdering an apparently random selection of people.

In the prologue we also got a snippet of what I initially believed to be one of King's excellently sketched cameo characters, an elderly poet who's a professor at the same university. The poet, Olivia, turns out to be a very important character in a major subplot that is connected to the main story, but is primarily about her mentorship of Barbara, a young poet who's a friend of Holly's. (If you've read the other books, Barbara is Jerome's younger sister; Jerome has some excellent scenes in this book too.) King doesn't often write about female writers, so this storyline, which is about 80% unrelated to serial killers, was an unexpected delight. It's a very moving portrayal of the growth of a young writer under an older writer's mentorship, and the passing of the torch.

Holly's story is a straightforward gumshoe narrative, made extra nervewracking by our knowledge that the people she's tracking down are right in front of her nose, and also by the presence of Covid and some family drama involving her mother's death. I love Holly and King clearly does too; she's got very believable struggles with mental health and childhood trauma and generally being a misfit, but she's kind and brave and she never gives up.

I was initially reluctant to read this because of the setting, but it works surprisingly well. The omnipresence of Covid and people talking about Covid and conspiracies and politics functions both as an obstacle for Holly and a reflection of the major theme, which is aging and mortality and changing times, and how we deal with them.

The poet Olivia is 99 years old, while Barbara is 19. They both know they have very little time to learn and teach and enjoy each other's company, and they make the most of it, knowing all the while that the more they get from the relationship, the more it will hurt when it ends. Holly is facing personal fears of inadequacy and social anxiety plus the fear of death from Covid every time she interacts with anyone, and soon the fear of death by serial killer is thrown into the mix; she takes precautions but doggedly keeps pursuing her case.

The other big theme is mothers and daughters. Holly is dealing with her relationship to her dead mother, who is still fucking with her from beyond the grave. (Since this is King, I should explain that I don't mean as a ghost, I mean psychological baggage plus some unpleasant revelations via her will.) Bonnie Dahl and her mother had a big fight right before Bonnie was kidnapped, Holly spends a lot of time unraveling their relationship in retrospect while trying to figure out if Bonnie might have actually run away, and her mother's anguish both kicks off the plot and remains a force throughout the book. Barbara has a good relationship with her actual mother, but her mentorship with Olivia has aspects of mother-daughter/grandmother-daughter. Even one of the earlier victims has a subplot involving a surrogate mother-daughter relationship she had with a neighbor as her birth family was a disaster.

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This is a very polarizing book, but I loved it. The characters are great, it's often very moving, and it's got a banger of a climax and a perfect final line.

This is a fascinating cross-genre book. I read it knowing very little about it, not even the premise. This was a very fun way to read it, if I can call a book this tense and stressful fun, as it has a number of startling turns.

If you'd potentially like to have that experience, I will say that Good Neighbors has aspects of domestic suspense, literary fiction, science fiction, epistolatory fiction, and horror. It involves rot and feuding under the surface of the suburban lifestyle, and is set in a very near future in which climate change is even worse than it is now but lifestyles continue in a pretty similar manner. I would classify it primarily as mainstream literature, but that mostly has to do with an indefinable feel.

The book that comes to mind as being in the same genre is Rumaan Alam's Leave This World Behind. However, Langan's likable characters were much, much more likable than his, and her style was much more enjoyable to read than his. (His book is very good, but not enjoyable per se.)

The other thing you probably want to know before diving in is that Good Neighbors involves both actual child abuse and false allegations of child abuse.

Spoilers for the premise and the first few chapters lurk beneath the cut. ( Read more... )

Good Neighbors is not a cheerful book and has a lot of tragedy, but it also has a surprisingly hopeful angle, which is the teenager and child characters. Some terrible things happen to some of them, and some of them do some bad things, but overall, the kids are all right. In fact, a number of them are extremely heroic. It doesn't really fix things, but given the general moral awfulness of many of the adult characters, their children leave you feeling hopeful. These are the people who will be inheriting the earth. It's a very damaged earth, but despite enormous pressure, they're already making better choices.

Content notes: dead dog, dead animals, child abuse, child death, violence, scapegoating.

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

Camille, a furious grieving mother whose teenage daughter was raped and left to die by a golden boy college student, gets in touch with a group of mothers whose children were killed by people who suffered no consequences, and have a method for bringing down those consequences themselves.

The public group, Niobe, gives way to a darkweb group where the leader, 0001, sends Camille on gradually escalating tasks. Camille initially tells herself that it's a role-playing game that makes them all feel better, with no real world consequences; if she ever really believed that, which is doubtful, she quickly learns that it's a very elaborate version of Strangers on a Train: "You do my murder, and I'll do yours."

This book is an interesting balance of the classic and the extremely current; it's the opposite of the kind of "middle-aged writer discovers TikTok" that internet-heavy books can easily become, and instead is very sharp about internet forums, relationships with people whose real names you don't know, going viral, how support groups can be both life-saving and an unhealthy kind of marinating in other people's pain, and, offline as well as on, moral dilemmas, grief, injustice, and rage.

Despite the heavy subject matter, it's a very fast, compelling read. The plot is clever, if implausible, up until the last couple twists which tip into ridiculous.

This sort of revenge story usually ends up finger-wagging about how revenge is bad really, which is annoying because everyone who reads it wants to enjoy the wish-fulfillment of killing rapists, racists, and murderers who the law refuses to touch.

The main failure mode of "revenge/vigilantism is bad really" is the shocking reveal that the people in charge of the revenge are pure evil - they say they're just trying to save the environment/take out rapists, but really they're doing it all for personal profit, don't care if an entire preschool is collateral damage, and so forth. I always feel like this is a cheap and easy way out that allows the writer to avoid tackling deeper moral dilemmas, and is annoying for the reader who gets told their enjoyment of reading revenge is bad actually.

The Collective has a good long stretch of avoiding that in favor of a more thoughtful examination of the actual pitfalls of this type of revenge scheme, like the difficulty of knowing exactly how justified you really are, the necessity of trusting people who may not be trustworthy, and the impossibility of building a vigilante network without having to kill innocents to protect the network as a whole.

It also, more interestingly, digs into some real-life moral problems. If it's okay for the mother of a victim to do wrong in the effort to avenge her child, is it okay for the mother of a killer to do wrong in the effort to protect her child? Is it worth pursuing legal methods of stopping harmful people in a corrupt system that still sometimes does the right thing? How do you wrap your head around a person who does both genuine good deeds and genuine bad ones?

And then it drops all that in favor of piling on a stack of goofy, unnecessary, last-minute SHOCK TWISTS!

( Ending spoilers )

The Collective is an Anthony Award nominee for best novel. Despite its flaws, its ambition puts it head and shoulders above the other one I've read so far, Tracy Clark's enjoyable but average PI novel Runner.

After her husband's suicide (or was it???), single mom Vanessa Castro gets a new job as deputy chief of police in a small town completely dominated by an amusement park, Wonderland. The night before her first day at work, 1) she has a random one-night stand with a guy who turns out to be in Wonderland management, which causes complications when 2) a mutilated corpse appears beneath the Ferris wheel, 3) a Wonderland employee vanishes after posting a photo of himself free-climbing the Ferris wheel. Happy first day on the job!

I found this book via a "female horror authors of color" book list, but it's actually a basic detective suspense novel, not horror. I think I'd have been more into it if the horror aspects had been played up. Or maybe not.

The best part of the book is the incongruously cheery Wonderland employee memos. Otherwise, it's trashy and batshit, but not quite batshit enough to be really memorable. Also, waaaaay too much random abusive/predatory/ill-advised sex for my taste. I could have done without the only gay characters being child abusers or the messed-up adult victims of child abusers.

( Spoilers, sort of. The ending was not very clear. )

"Perdita Smith" is discovered at the bottom of a well with assorted fractures and total amnesia. After what in retrospect was the world's most perfunctory search turns up no clues to her identity, she is taken in by friendly nuns.

When driving with a nun, Perdita sees someone riding and remarks that she rides well, and so realizes that she knows something about horses. In the hope of getting a clue about her identity and also because she needs a job, she obtains a position at a local stable with a bad reputation (all the good ones were highly suspicious of her lack of credentials).

There she meets the manipulative owner, the owner's sullen teenage son, the owner's sweet young daughter who's terrified of riding, the sexy asshole who's the son of the dead previous owner, the golden-boy rider who's some relation I forget, the drunk stablehand, and a kitten who sneaks in at night to cuddle with Perdita and sneaks out before she can get a good look at her. The kitten was my favorite character and I was very aggravated that Holland forgot it existed at some point and we never get a good look at it.

If you have read any books by Holland involving a romance, you know that whichever hot dude initially appears to be the biggest asshole is going to be the love interest. (He may actually be an asshole, but he won't have actually murdered his wife.) Sexy asshole it is! Perdita whipsaws so much on whether she thinks he's evil or not that at one point she says "Though I hated him with every fiber of my being..." and I had to flip back to confirm that Holland had indeed lost track and the previous scene had Perdita deciding that he was clearly a good guy who was being blackmailed.

The amnesia and riding parts of the story are lots of fun, especially the subplot involving the girl who's scared of riding. (The kid does, in fact, have zero interest in riding as a sport, but Perdita gets her onboard by getting her to bond with her horse as a friend.) The suspense bits were distinctly pasted on yay.

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Based on the poster featuring a sexy dame and an ominous house, I thought this Edward G. Robinson film from 1949 would be a noir with Gothic elements, or possibly the other way around. It did have parts that were Gothic and parts that were noir. It had a lot more parts of a lot more genres too. In fact, it was about nine different genres tossed in pieces into a bucket, then shaken vigorously.

It started out with a nicely ominous score by Miklos Rocza and Gothic-like photography. It then instantly dove into a pastoral family drama with Edward G. Robinson as Pete, a grumpy salt of the earth farmer with one leg, his pleasant salt of the earth sister (who I thought was his wife for about half the movie), their 18-year-old niece/adopted daughter Meg, and the high school boy she's dating who is inexplicably named Nath (rhymes with lath), having an extremely awkward dinner.

The genre abruptly switches back to Gothic, as Nath declares that he'll take a shortcut through the woods and Robinson tells him that no one who goes through the woods ever returns!!!

Nath says, "A tree's a tree."

In my favorite bit of the entire movie, Robinson says, "You won't save yourself from the screams in the night! DO YOU KNOW WHAT IT MEANS FOR A SCREAM TO FOLLOW YOU?!"

Naturally, Nath takes this as a challenge and marches into the woods. There are indeed screams.... or are they just the wind? He gets lost over and over... but it's night. There's a house somewhere in the woods, which he can't seem to find and which Robinson implied was cursed. Are Meg's supposedly dead parents imprisoned in it, or actually dead and haunting it??? This part, a nicely directed and scored "supernatural or not" Gothic was my favorite genre of the movie, and I kind of wish it had stuck with it.

Spoilers! ( Read more... )

I can't say this was actually good but it was entertaining. All that stuff happened in an hour and forty minutes!

The Red House