We went to San Francisco. It was really lovely. I saw some of Matt's colleagues who I really like, I saw some of a city I've always wanted to visit, and I got to hug and shop for books and eat pasta with Julie!
Should I have travelled to the U.S.? At one point I had decided I would try not to. Then I went to Charlotte and Atlanta in May because I wanted to see Angus ("you don't boycott your kids" one of my friends said). Matt asked me to come with him to San Francisco, and I had to think about it. I think I have come to the decision that my son lives in the U.S. and my husband has to travel there often for work, unless he wants to quit in protest, which would probably be the most principled stand, and some people would take it. We are not that principled. At this point, for me to claim not going there as some kind of activism would be largely performative.
In any case, it's hard to feel like going to San Francisco is showing any kind of support for this administration. There was evidence of activism everywhere. The bookstores all had zines and stickers and revolutionary literary material. I heard an ICE protest outside our hotel. A man at the SF MoMA asked where we were from and thanked us for coming. I was nervous going through customs, and then felt stupid when there are so many people who have far more call to feel scared. It's all so terrible.
Anyway. I walked and walked and even though all my footwear was broken in (except the orthotics, I guess, I got those in December) my feet were torn to ribbons. Fortunately I had brought sandals (blistered my heels) and sneakers (blistered my instep) and boots, so each day a new site of injury would develop but the next day I would choose footwear that didn't hammer on the exact same site.
And I got to ride a cable car! With Julie! How beautifully surreal. I love it when a last-minute plan that relies on an 8500-mile geographical switch comes together!
The Books of San Francisco:
After a crazy first day of travel (more on that later) Matt went to his trade show and I walked around the area around our hotel. Fortuitously, there was a bookstore called The Best Bookstore just around the corner. I walked in and it was a nice bright space, and the books had fun sticky notes on them. I was a bit at a loss, because lord knows I want to support all the independent bookstores, but what do I do, just grab any random book? Just as I thought this, right at eye level, I saw Elder Race by Adrian Tchaikovsky, which Steph had just recommended, which seemed like a sign, so I bought it.
Matt's colleague Camille took me to Golden Gate Park and a bunch of awesome lookout places one day, and we ended up having lunch right across the street from Green Apple Books, which Julie had mentioned. It had both used and new books, which is always really cool, and I found a used copy of March by Geraldine Brooks. It also had a shelf of books for the Prison Library Project - books that were requested by prisoners and approved - so I bought a copy of N.K. Jemisin's The Fifth Season to donate
Then I went to City Lights bookstore with Julie. I bought Either/Or by Elif Batuman because I had read The Idiot for book club and loved it, and because I always feel a bit like an idiot stumbling around in a new city. I had to buy a Mandylion Press copy of The Hill of Dreams by Arthur Machen because Mandylion "unearths lost literary gems written by women and weirdos in the (very) long nineteenth century". And then Julie told me there was a downstairs and downstairs I found and had to buy this gorgeous edition of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead for obvious reasons. They also had an unutterably beautiful edition of Middlemarch, which I would have snapped up except Julie and I had some walking to do still and it was HEAVY.
AND if all of that wasn't cool enough, I got a book from the Little Free Library at the Painted Ladies with Camille. Camille is a highly successful sales person for Matt's company who is a woman in tech, can hold her baby in one arm while furiously texting one-handed with the other, and also reads. Eve and I are in awe of her.
There, now feel free to skip the horror books if they're not your thing!
Four-Star Horror
I know, I know, a lot of people think I am weirdly attracted to horror books and movies. Some people like romances, I happen to like some occasional dread and doom, who knows why? Bad horror is very bad, but then bad fiction can also be very bad. Good fiction brushes the heights and fathoms the profundity of human experience and emotion, and I think good horror does the same. I've always appreciated art that admits the possibility of strangeness.
Horror Movie by Paul Tremblay: Synopsis from Goodreads: A chilling twist on the “cursed film” genre from the bestselling author of The Pallbearers Club and The Cabin at the End of the World.
In June 1993, a group of young guerilla filmmakers spent four weeks making Horror Movie, a notorious, disturbing, art-house horror flick.The weird part? Only three of the film’s scenes were ever released to the public, but Horror Movie has nevertheless grown a rabid fanbase. Three decades later, Hollywood is pushing for a big budget reboot.
The man who played “The Thin Kid” is the only surviving cast member. He remembers all too well the secrets buried within the original screenplay, the bizarre events of the filming, and the dangerous crossed lines on set that resulted in tragedy. As memories flood back in, the boundaries between reality and film, past and present start to blur. But he’s going to help remake the film, even if it means navigating a world of cynical producers, egomaniacal directors, and surreal fan conventions—demons of the past be damned.
But at what cost?
-”It’s difficult to put into words. The difference between screen deaths as entertainment and art, perhaps. And sorry, that’s bullshit, too, as come on, Evil Dead 2 is one of my favorite movies. And people die violently in real life, so they must die violently in our art too.
‘So, no, I’m not filming that party scene and I’m not adding any other major scenes, because I want to make this movie. What I love about it, as written and as it will be filmed, is that I honestly don’t know what it means, that it makes me so uncomfortable but almost joyously so, and it communicates emotions I can’t simply describe with words alone.’”
-”EXT. KARSON’s HOUSE – CONTINUOUS
His house was always the last place he ever wanted to be, but there is no place else for him to go, which is one of the many horrors of this film.”
BUT AT WHAT COST? Reminded me a little of Night of the Mannequins by Stephen Graham Jones, although the pace lagged a little in places. Less frightening than odd, disquieting, and melancholy. I like hearing people talk about what it is about horror that draws them and moves them.
There can be so many layers to a story involving a piece of art. There's the matter of interpretation, and how some fans can become positively unhinged at the thought that anyone else dares to disagree with their absolutely-the-only-true-and-rightful-exegesis. The way scarcity can create insatiable demand. All the ways lines can become blurred in art and life, and the question of 'are humans the real monsters' or 'wait, are monsters the real monsters'. I often find this writer a bit of a miss for me, but this was a better fit.
A Sorceress Comes to Call by T. Kingfisher: Synopsis from Goodreads: A dark retelling of the Brothers Grimm's Goose Girl, rife with secrets, murder, and forbidden magic
Cordelia knows her mother is unusual. Their house doesn’t have any doors between rooms, and her mother doesn't allow Cordelia to have a single friend—unless you count Falada, her mother's beautiful white horse. The only time Cordelia feels truly free is on her daily rides with him. But more than simple eccentricity sets her mother apart. Other mothers don’t force their daughters to be silent and motionless for hours, sometimes days, on end. Other mothers aren’t sorcerers.
After a suspicious death in their small town, Cordelia’s mother insists they leave in the middle of the night, riding away on Falada’s sturdy back, leaving behind all Cordelia has ever known. They arrive at the remote country manor of a wealthy older man, the Squire, and his unwed sister, Hester. Cordelia’s mother intends to lure the Squire into marriage, and Cordelia knows this can only be bad news for the bumbling gentleman and his kind, intelligent sister.
Hester sees the way Cordelia shrinks away from her mother, how the young girl sits eerily still at dinner every night. Hester knows that to save her brother from bewitchment and to rescue the terrified Cordelia, she will have to face down a wicked witch of the worst kind.
-”’I…yes, I’d be happy to…’ Cordelia was growing annoyed with herself for stammering so often. I may not be clever or brave or beautiful, but is it too much to ask that I can form a complete sentence?” (Yes! Precisely! At least she's aware of it)
-”A week ago, Cordelia would have wondered if the Squire lacked the money to fix it. With seven days of hard-won wisdom, she had realized that the Squire was so wealthy that he simply did not need to care. No one was going to look at Chatham House and think that the inhabitants were poor, so why bother rehanging perfectly good wallpaper because of a minor imperfection?
It was a strange reflection that, like Hester turning the cuffs on her gowns, you were somehow allowed to be poorer if you were rich than if you were actually poor.”
When I was little, we had a recording of The Goose Girl on... a little record player, I think? I have double-checked that Falada in the original fairy tale was the princess's loyal companion, which is what I remember, along with realizing after many listenings, to my great horror, that the goose girl was stealing away to talk to her horse's HEAD which had been removed from the horse and mounted on a gate.
I have to say that with that memory in play, it's hard to imagine a retelling of the story matching that level of horror. Cordelia's mother, and imagining what it would be like to be tied to her, gives it a pretty good run though. I admit that I found Cordelia annoying - so twitchy! so meek! - and I was aware that this was unfair, given her life to that point. Hester, on the other hand - major badass, major delightful use of her status as an invisible spinster to plan to bring down the witch. I'm pretty sure the horse didn't talk in this one, but maybe double check with Engie.
I Was a Teenage Slasher by Stephen Graham Jones: Synopsis from Goodreads: It’s the summer before senior year for best friends Tolly Driver and Amber Dennison. They’re not in the marching band, they’re not in the FFA – they don’t really count. Amber’s the only Native student in town, and Tolly’s only on the radar due to his father’s recent death.
This is all about to change.Bodies are going to be dropping fast in this small West Texas town. For a few unbearably hot days that will resonate through the decades and even get made into a TV movie, Tolly and Amber will be famous. Notorious even. Finally, everyone will know their names.
This is Stephen Graham Jones x-raying the slasher genre, interrogating its motivations over the shoulder and in the voice of the killer itself – from a town he did some growing up in, in a year he was also seventeen.
The kills will be poignant, the jokes will hurt, and the violence will be endearing. Everything’s turned around for Tolly, for Amber – for all of Lamesa, Texas.
-”After, when everyone was shrugging their way back through the headstones to their trucks, this could also be where all this starts?
It’s like, when historians are trying to go back and say what started World War I? There’s the trigger, I guess you could call it – that archduke getting got – but there’s a lot of precipitating little things as well.
This is one of those little things. And it’s why I associate Justin Joss with my dad’s funeral.”
-”West Texas, man. I both do and don’t miss it, I guess.
It’s not an easy place to try and hack a living out, but I think your heart only ever knows a single place, too.
You’re my place, Lamesa.
I’m so sorry.”
No one like Stephen Graham Jones to engage your sympathy for the villain. Sort of a more melancholy Scream in book form - sometimes you become imprisoned as an archetype whether you want to or not. You become the victim of a horrible bullying prank enacted by a few assholes who should be dipped in honey and left out for the ants, and the next thing you know you pull a knife out of its holder to cut a sandwich and it makes an unmistakable *shing* sound, and it's all downhill from there.
This is, in a lot of ways, a bittersweet coming-of-age story, set in the same Texas town the author grew up in. The same important friendships, the same woes and terrors, the same regrets. With a few more murders than usual. Like much of SGJ's work, it is haunting in every sense of the word.
The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires by Grady Hendrix: Synopsis from Goodreads: Fried Green Tomatoes and Steel Magnolias meet Dracula in this Southern-flavored supernatural thriller set in the '90s about a women's book club that must protect its suburban community from a mysterious and handsome stranger who turns out to be a blood-sucking fiend.
Patricia Campbell had always planned for a big life, but after giving up her career as a nurse to marry an ambitious doctor and become a mother, Patricia's life has never felt smaller. The days are long, her kids are ungrateful, her husband is distant, and her to-do list is never really done. The one thing she has to look forward to is her book club, a group of Charleston mothers united only by their love for true-crime and suspenseful fiction. In these meetings, they're more likely to discuss the FBI's recent siege of Waco as much as the ups and downs of marriage and motherhood.But when an artistic and sensitive stranger moves into the neighborhood, the book club's meetings turn into speculation about the newcomer. Patricia is initially attracted to him, but when some local children go missing, she starts to suspect the newcomer is involved. She begins her own investigation, assuming that he's a Jeffrey Dahmer or Ted Bundy. What she uncovers is far more terrifying, and soon she--and her book club--are the only people standing between the monster they've invited into their homes and their unsuspecting community.
-”’These two women were best friends and they chopped each other up with axes,’ Kitty said. ‘Don’t pretend you don’t want to know what happened.’
‘Jude is obscure for a reason,’ Maryellen growled.”
‘You all need to get alarms,’ Maryellen said. ‘Ours connects directly to the police, and the Mt. Pleasant police department has a three-minute response time.’
‘I think you could still get stabbed forty-one times in three minutes,’ Kitty said.
‘I won’t have those ugly stickers all over my windows,’ Grace said.
‘You’d rather get stabbed forty-one times than ruin the curb appeal of your home?’ Maryellen asked.
‘Yes,’ Grace said.”
This book kind of wrecked me. I had read two previous books by the author, and enjoyed them. I had in my head that he was a kind of horror/comedy writer, but I think I've only read the books that veered more towards horror. So I'm not sure why I was expecting this to be funnier. I don't even really LIKE horror comedy that much, for the most part. No worries, though.
I felt kind of naive, and maybe unaware of my privilege, at how indignant and surprised I was at the husband/wife dynamic in most of these couples. It seemed like something more appropriate for a book that takes place in the fifties or seventies. I don't know if it's because it's set in the Southern United States or because I've just been that clueless. Actually, a lot of the reading I've been doing lately does point to the latter being true.
So I guess in my head it would go something like: Southern ladies are in a book club, drink wine and gossip more than they discuss the book (no judgement, truly), somehow it becomes apparent that there is a vampire in town, and they posse up and stake the bastard while he thrashes humorously like Paul Reubens in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
That was NOT how it went. The book club is a microcosm of the social hierarchy and constraints of the neighbourhood. The vampire is more like a sexy, well-spoken, charismatic men's rights activist or similar, someone your husband would get drawn in by and then refuse to see his true agenda. And then you'd have to decide if you are willing to risk your kids being taken away and being left penniless and ostracized.
Holy shit, you guys. Is this book about capitalism?
It was much darker than I was expecting, and much deeper.
The Library of the Dead (Edinburgh Nights #1) by T.L. Huchu: Synopsis from Goodreads:
Ropa dropped out of school to become a ghostalker. Now she speaks to Edinburgh's dead, carrying messages to the living. A girl's gotta earn a living, and it seems harmless enough. Until, that is, the dead whisper that someone's bewitching children--leaving them husks, empty of joy and life. It's on Ropa's patch, so she feels honor-bound to investigate. But what she learns will change her world.
She'll dice with death (not part of her life plan...), discovering an occult library and a taste for hidden magic. She'll also experience dark times. For Edinburgh hides a wealth of secrets, and Ropa's gonna hunt them all down.
-”The veiled implication that my little sister might end up just like me if I don’t do something grates on me. Blunt truths don’t cut cleanly, I guess.”
-”Something smells off in the barns. Even in this city of olfactory tragedy, this scent’s more pungent and desperate than anything I’ve encountered before.”
Very well written, with a visceral sense of place ("olfactory tragedy" - *chef's kiss*) and a well-organized and fascinating magic system. The dialogue/dialect is pitched perfectly, the sense of desperation and determination is palpable, and Ropa is a fantastic character. Looking forward to reading the next one.
The Madness by Dawn Kurtagich: Synopsis from Goodreads: With one unexpected email from her estranged best friend, Lucy, Mina Murray’s carefully curated life is turned upside down. Leaving behind her psychiatric practice in London, along with her routine and the calm it brings, she returns to the windswept shores of Wales. Faced with everything she’s left behind, she soon discovers that Lucy’s symptoms mirror those of her mysterious patient with amnesia hundreds of miles away.
With nothing but an untreatable sickness connecting the two women, and with Lucy’s life on the line, Mina finds herself asking questions and being drawn ever-deeper into a web of secrets, missing girls, and the powerful, nameless force at its center—one that has been haunting her for years.As terrible, ancient truths begin to reveal themselves, Mina prepares to confront her own darkest secrets, and with them, an evil beyond comprehension. Together with a group of smart, savvy women, Mina seizes one last, desperate chance to stop the cycle that began so long ago. But there are dangers to inviting the attentions of what might not be a man, but a monster…
-”I forgot what night tastes like, the salty, moon-licked rot of London after dark.” (fucking gorgeous sentence)
The last book I read by this author was a bit of a miss, but this modern, feminist, Welsh take on Dracula lured me in, and worked much better for me. Recentering the victimized women and Mina's processing of her past trauma was so satisfying, and the narrative was also just energetic and engaging. The Welsh folklore blended seamlessly as well. I am newly up for anything by this author.
Guests by Kealan Patrick Burke: Synopsis from Goodreads: A tour bus full of elderly visitors in search of a new life—even if it isn’t their own.
A fancy hotel in the off-season, a snowy night, an unexpected bus full of guests, and a grieving bartender on his last shift - obviously these are the ingredients for a killer horror novella. Cemetery Dance Publishing occasionally put out small collections of work by their favourite authors. I've discovered some of the most imaginative and awe-inspiring work by checking these out. Occasionally it is so well done that I wish I hadn't read it - I called Kaaron Warren a major sicko on Twitter once, which she took as a high compliment.
A Conventional Boy (The Laundry Files #13, New Management #4) by Charles Stross: Synopsis from Goodreads: In 1984, Derek Reilly was just another spotty teenage dungeon master growing up in middle England. But then a secret government agency tasked with suppressing magical intrusions received a tip-off – and one midnight raid later, his life was turned upside down by the Satanic D&D Panic.
Decades later Derek, now middle-aged and institutionalized, is a long-term inmate at Camp Sunshine, a center for deprogramming captured Elder God cultists. He’s considered safe enough to edit the camp newsletter, and he even has postal privileges – which he uses to run a play-by-mail game. After 25 years, Derek finally has reason to escape: a nearby D&D convention. While Derek’s D&D games were full of fictional elder gods and world-ending threats, a LARP game at the con is a dread ritual designed to summon a great evil into our world, and it’s up to Derek and his players to stop them.The fate of the world may depend on the contents of Derek’s magic dice bag.
-”Here is what it is like to awaken one morning, and discover that in your sleep, instead of being transformed into a monstrous verminous bug, you have been mistakenly detained in a camp for dangerous cultists.
It sucks.”
-”Derek did his best to pay her breasts exactly as much attention as they deserved, which was to say no more than any other magic weapon of +1 bamboozlement.”
I sort of knew I was coming in to a series in the middle - I don't think it really mattered. This was kind of wholesome and fun, except for the plentiful death and dismemberment. Derek is a great character, easy to root for - the Fool, the Invincible Incompetent. I enjoyed the incredulous chaos left in his wake, and his innocent shlumpiness. Nothing was really unpredictable, but the journey was very enjoyable.
Beauty in the Blood by Charlotte Carter: Synopsis from Goodreads: A riveting, eerie novel about two families caught up in a centuries-old curse.
Sarah Toomey is afraid she's losing her mind. Ever since her mother’s death, she's found herself acting upon strange urges, losing track of time, and coming to in odd places. There’s a dark force that seems to be haunting her, and leaving death in its wake. Yvonne Howard has reinvented herself. After years of unhappiness as a guard in a women’s prison she’s finally pursuing her passion for cooking. But when an ex-inmate reaches out and asks her to investigate the inmate’s brother’s death, then ends up killed herself, Yvonne is pulled into the same dangerous world Sarah is inhabiting—a world of chaos, death, and a curse that dates back to the Civil War.
I'll be Waiting by Kelley Armstrong: Synopsis from Goodreads: From New York Times Bestselling author Kelley Armstrong comes a spellbinding new tale of supernatural horror involving a haunted-house, seances, lost loved ones, and a sinister spirit out for blood...
Nicola Laughton never expected to see adulthood, being diagnosed with Cystic Fibrosis as a child. Then medical advances let her live into her thirties and she met Anton, who taught her to dream of a future… together. Months after they married, Anton died in a horrible car, but lived long enough to utter five words to her, “I’ll be waiting for you.”That final private moment became public when someone from the crash scene took it to the press—the terminally ill woman holding her dying husband as he promised to wait for her on the other side. Worse, that person claimed it wasn’t Anton who said the words but his ghost, hovering over his body.
Since their story went public, Nicola has been hounded by spiritualists promising closure. In the hopes of stopping her downward spiral, friends and family find a reputable medium—a professor of parapsychology. For the séance, they rent the Lake Erie beach house that Anton’s family once owned.
The medium barely has time to begin his work before things start happening. Locked doors mysteriously open. Clouds of insects engulf the house. Nicola hears footsteps and voices and the creak of an old dumbwaiter…in an empty shaft. Throughout it all she’s haunted by nightmares of her past. Because, unbeknownst to the others, this isn’t her first time contacting the dead. And Nicola isn’t her real name.
Three and a half. This was much better than the other Kelley Armstrong horror I read this year. It struck a good balance in the protagonist's voice between a healthy, snarky skepticism and a tentative belief. Good characters and relationships.
The Queen by Nick Cutter: Synopsis from Goodreads: One sunny morning in June, Margaret Carpenter wakes up to find a new iPhone on her doorstep. She switches it on and is greeted by a text from her best friend, Charity Atwater. The problem is, Charity’s been missing for over a month. Most people in town – even the police – think she’s dead.
Margaret and Charity have been lifelong friends. They share everything, know the most intimate details about each other . . . except for the destructive secret hidden from them both. A secret that will trigger a chain of events ending in tragedy, bloodshed, and death. And now Charity wants Margaret to know her story – the real story.In a narrative that takes place over one feverish day, Margaret follows a series of increasingly disquieting breadcrumbs as she forges deeper into the mystery of her best friend – a person she never truly knew at all. . . .
3.5 rounded up. I didn't love that the prologue and early scenes basically gave most of the story away and then the rest was just illustration. I would have preferred a more gradual reveal, but that's more a personal preference. The story itself was pretty solid, and the body horror was well done and relevant to the plot. It was fun to have a Canadian setting.
Old Soul by Susan Barker: Synopsis from Goodreads: In Osaka, two strangers, Jake and Mariko, miss a flight, and over dinner, discover they’ve both brutally lost loved ones whose paths crossed with the same beguiling woman no one has seen since.
Following traces this mysterious person left behind, Jake travels from country to country gathering chilling testimonies from others who encountered her across the decades—a trail of shattered souls that eventually leads him to Theo, a dying sculptor in rural New Mexico, who knows the woman better than anyone—and might just hold the key to who, or what, she is.Part horror, part western, part thriller, Old Soul is a fearlessly bold and genre-defying tale about predation, morality and free will, and one man’s quest to bring a centuries-long chain of human devastation to an end.
A Haunting on the Hill by Elizabeth Hand: Synopsis from Goodreads: From three-time Shirley Jackson, World Fantasy, and Nebula Award-winning author Elizabeth Hand comes the first-ever authorized novel to return to the world of Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House: a suspenseful, contemporary, and terrifying story of longing and isolation all its own.
Holly Sherwin has been a struggling playwright for years, but now, after receiving a grant to develop her play, The Witch of Edmonton, she may finally be close to her big break. All she needs is time and space to bring her vision to life. When she stumbles across Hill House on a weekend getaway upstate, she is immediately taken in by the ornate, if crumbling, gothic mansion, nearly hidden outside a remote village. It’s enormous, old, and ever-so eerie—the perfect place to develop and rehearse her play.Despite her own hesitations, Holly’s girlfriend, Nisa, agrees to join Holly in renting the house out for a month, and soon a troupe of actors, each with ghosts of their own, arrive. Yet as they settle in, the house’s peculiarities are made known: strange creatures stalk the grounds, disturbing sounds echo throughout the halls, and time itself seems to shift. All too soon, Holly and her friends find themselves at odds not just with one another, but with the house itself. It seems something has been waiting in Hill House all these years, and it no longer intends to walk alone.
Universal Harvester by John Darnielle: Synopsis from Goodreads: Life in a small town takes a dark turn when mysterious footage begins appearing on VHS cassettes at the local Video Hut
Jeremy works at the counter of Video Hut in Nevada, Iowa. It’s a small town—the first “a” in the name is pronounced ay—smack in the center of the state. This is the late 1990s, pre-DVD, and the Hollywood Video in Ames poses an existential threat to Video Hut. But there are regular customers, a predictable rush in the late afternoon. It’s good enough for Jeremy: It’s a job; it’s quiet and regular; he gets to watch movies; he likes the owner, Sarah Jane; it gets him out of the house, where he and his dad try to avoid missing Mom, who died six years ago in a car wreck.But when Stephanie Parsons, a local schoolteacher, comes in to return her copy of Targets, starring Boris Karloff—an old movie, one Jeremy himself had ordered for the store—she has an odd complaint: “There’s something on it,” she says, but doesn’t elaborate. Two days later, Lindsey Redinius brings back She’s All That, a new release, and complains that there’s something wrong with it: “There’s another movie on this tape.”
So Jeremy takes a look. And indeed, in the middle of the movie the screen blinks dark for a moment and She’s All That is replaced by a black-and-white scene, shot in a barn, with only the faint sounds of someone breathing. Four minutes later, She’s All That is back. But there is something profoundly disturbing about that scene; Jeremy’s compelled to watch it three or four times. The scenes recorded onto Targets are similar, undoubtedly created by the same hand. Creepy. And the barn looks a lot like a barn just outside of town.
Jeremy doesn’t want to be curious. In truth, it freaks him out, deeply. This has gone far enough, maybe too far already. But Stephanie is pushing, and once Sarah Jane takes a look and becomes obsessed, there’s no more ignoring the disturbing scenes on the videos. And all of a sudden, what had once been the placid, regular old Iowa fields and farmhouses now feels haunted and threatening, imbued with loss and instability and profound foreboding. For Jeremy, and all those around him, life will never be the same . . .
-”’Well, all right,’ said Steve, and then: ‘I think your mom would be proud, too.’
It always sat a little funny with Jeremy: Dad speaking on Mom’s behalf in her absence. These past few years of sitting around waiting for something to solidify: wouldn’t Mom have also understood that? You wait for signs, but there aren’t any signs; you wait a while longer, just in case.”
-”In open spaces people begin to think about the world of possibilities, about things that might happen that they couldn’t have foreseen: possibly our daughter will grow up to be president, possibly swords will be beaten into plowshares, possibly we will all climb into spaceships and go live on the moon. The substance of things hoped for, an endless open field. But there’s another region in that realm, and it’s actually the biggest spot on the map: that place in which none of this will happen at all, and everything instead will remain exactly as it is – quiet, unremarkable, well ordered and well lit, just exactly enough of everything for the people within its boundaries. A little drab from the outside, maybe: slow, or plain. But who, outside, will ever see it, or learn the subtleties of its textures, the specific tensions of its warp and weft? You have to get inside to see anything worth seeing, you have to listen long enough to hear the music. Or possibly that’s a thing you just tell yourself when it becomes clear you won’t be leaving. Sometimes that seems more likely. It’s hard to say for sure.”
Do NOT pick up anything of this author's if you're looking for straightforward, in-your-face horror. I would likely have found everything by him very frustrating when I was younger (like I said, should read Hill House again). The first review on Goodreads says "there is a version of this story where it actually gets told. But this isn't it." And it's not wrong! There is a version of this book (and of Wolf in White Van, the first Darnielle I read) that causes me to fling my iPad across the room in disgust. There are layers of strangeness and sadness here - the mother who leaves, the mother who dies, the families left behind, the notion of the cursed film, the melancholy of small towns, the grief inherent in seeing your children grow away from you - and in between all of those layers I could feel a lurking horror that never quite came into view. I generally hate books that have a thing that never quite comes into view! But here I did not. It's a mystery.
Something in the Walls by Daisy Pearce: Synopsis from Goodreads: Newly minted child psychologist Mina has little experience. In a field where the first people called are experts, she’s been unable to get her feet wet. Instead she aimlessly spends her days stuck in the stifling heat wave sweeping across Britain and anxiously contemplates her upcoming marriage to careful, precise researcher Oscar. The only reprieve from her small, close world is attending the local bereavement group to mourn her brother’s death from years ago.
But instead of improving, Alice’s behavior becomes inexplicable and intense. The town of Banathel has a deep history of superstition and witchcraft. They believe there is evil in the world. They believe there are ways of…dealing with it. And they don’t expect outsiders to understand.
-”There is a glass half-visible in the foreground of one photo, slightly blurred. It’s a cloudy pink liquid with chunks of pineapple floating on the surface. What had he put in them, these ****inis? Rohypnol? Ether? Laudanum? That seemed like ****’s style. Something old-fashioned and melancholy, like a sober Victorian ghost.
A nice, tense combination of folk horror with the horror that is being a misunderstood teenage girl and the angry horror of chronic poverty, which can lead to communities pulling together but just as often leads to othering and scapegoating.
Lucky Day by Chuck Tingle:Synopsis from Goodreads: Lucky Day is the newest novel of terror from Chuck Tingle, USA Today bestselling author of Bury Your Gays, where one woman must go up against the most horrifying concept of all: nothing.
Vera is a survivor of a global catastrophe known as the Low Probability Event, but she definitely isn't thriving. Once a passionate professor of statistics, she no longer finds meaning in anything at all.But when problematic government agent Layne knocks on her door, she's the only one who can help him uncover the connection between deadly spates of absurdity and an improbably lucky casino. What's happening in Vegas isn't staying there, and the world is at risk of another disaster.
When it comes to Chuck Tingle, the only thing more terrifying than a serious horror novel is an absurd one...
