1) i liked it a LOT 2) i needed to honor SPOOKTOBER, and i wasn't seeing anything else in my stacks that qualified and 3) bestbear melki sent me a stack of kiesbye's books recently, and i am so very grateful to her for that kindness.
SO, unsolicited explanation concluded—let's get spookin'!
this is a story about a prestigious family-owned ballet school in the run-up to their big holiday season production of The Nutcracker;NOW AVAILABLE!!!
this is a story about a prestigious family-owned ballet school in the run-up to their big holiday season production of The Nutcracker; the atmosphere crackling with the energy of anxious parents and tiny dancers; hope, excitement, and disappointment mingling in the air.
but this is megan abbott, so it's gonna dig deep under that banal sugarplum premise to unearth the gothic drama lurking just beneath the festive girl-glitter, removing the pretty pink toe shoes to expose the mangled dancer's feet within—blackened toenails sprinkling off, reminding you, as she always does, how beautiful things could be all broken inside.
ballet is the logical next-step in abbott's progression of novels spotlighting the gritty underbelly of ostensibly pretty, "girly" pursuits (cheerleading in Dare Me, gymnastics in You Will Know Me); the brute physicality and athleticism required to compete at the highest levels of these largely female-dominated spheres, and the psychological fortitude; the drive and ambition, the sheer willpower and sacrifice it takes to succeed.
ballet illustrates all of this perfectly in its juxtaposition of fragility and power—physically demanding, dancers achieving strength and flexibility by breaking and reshaping their bodies, the sheer amount of pain that goes into creating the illusion of lightness, effortlessness, in a performance.
We have a different relationship to pain, their mother used to say. It's our friend, our lover.
When you wake up and the pain is gone, do you know what that means?
What, they'd ask every time.
You're no longer a dancer.
megan abbott is the absolute queen when it comes to panning all the dark bits out of the sugar and spice of the adolescent female experience; ambition, rage, desire, obsession, the space where childhood loyalty gives way to self-interest, and most especially, the power of young bodies—the exhilarated flush of training, of winning, the freedom and power in the strength of their limbs, the invigorating discovery of their sexual currency, her characters a-quiver with invincibility and the possibilities of life before them.
although the bodies in this one are grown, the characters have lived so narrowly that they are emotional adolescents in many ways, and as ballet teachers, they are surrounded wall-to-wall by young bodies, the book claustrophobic with 'em: stretching, posing, arching, aching, yearning. it's sweat and effort and pushing beyond limits, and it is her most frankly erotic work thus far. even when it's not explicitly about sex, it's using the language of sex to create this kinda sensual fog that permeates everything:
Long summer nights, the click of the beetles, the soft grind of the cicadas, all those crickets rubbing their legs together, the low moan of the mosquitoes at the screen.
yeah, megan abbott just made bugs sexy, and the eroticism jamboree doesn’t stop at the wanton moaning of insects, flip to any page and there’ll be a passage like that; something oblique or overt making it very warm in here, indeed. let’s try it!
The Fire Eater, the Sword Swallower. They were both women, dark and fair and fearless, their heads pitched back, their mouths wide open, everything laid bare.
They could take these things inside them and emerge unscathed. Dangerous things, deadly things. They could take these things inside and remain untouched, immaculate. The same forever. Forever the same.
you can play this game yourselves at home, very soon.
plotstuff: sisters dara and marie durant were raised in a ballet-bubble, indifferently homeschooled by their dancer-mother while their father worked long stretches away from home, his occasional presence in their realm almost an intrusion:
Every evening when he wasn't traveling, he'd come home from work and navigate stacks of pointe shoes, towers of them in the corners, tights hanging on doorknobs. Music, forever, from the old stereo console, from the turntable upstairs. The sound, forever, of the barre squeaking, Dara's or Marie's eager hands on it, their mother's voice intoning, Lift through the leg! Turn that foot out! Their house was all ballet, all the time.
their childhood was sheltered and friendless, with nothing but dance and each other, but they were happy in their female cave, wearing leotards all day and dancing until their feet went numb, learning lessons about life and love and dance from their glamorous-feline mother.
the female-energy-dominated sphere changed when the girls were teenagers and their mother's star pupil charlie moved in with them. their bubble expanded to absorb him; a boy, but still a lithe-bodied member of their tribe, training all day together, the foursome piling into their mother's bed at night to watch performances; inseparable, the boundaries between them blurred, and soon dara and charlie begin sleeping together.
abbot's depiction of the highly-charged atmosphere within their "Hansel and Gretel house" with its "rotting gingerbread trim" is *chef's kiss* perfection. even before charlie's arrival, their lives were characterized by a careless, nearly claustrophobic intimacy—growing up on top of each other, always half-undressed, sweating their leotards sheer, their days spent focused on their bodies—legs, hips, posture, and the pleasurable pain of delicate things tearing—a hothouse of sensuality where the girls discovered the secret pleasures of their bodies separated only by the partition between their bunk bed, casual and even somewhat competitive about masturbation and their orgasms, dara having sex with charlie while marie lay awake above them; the whole house a warm pink erotically-charged dynamic bonding them together. the three became inseparable, and after the girls' parents are killed in a car accident, charlie and dara get married and the three of them continue to live together in their childhood home, running their mother's studio. marie, the younger, softer sister instructing the beginners, while dara whips the older ones into hardcore dancers, and charlie, his body broken after a years of injuries and surgeries, manages the business side of things and everything continues as it always has.
It was the three of them. Always the three of them. Until it wasn't. And that was when everything went wrong. Starting with the fire. Or before.
the fire (which, i know i've been going on and on with too many words and blah, but most of this is backstory and the fire takes place on page 29, so we're not even close to spoilertown) destroys a portion of the already-rickety studio, but the bigger consequence is that it brings derek into their lives; the swaggering contractor and unlikely suitor who nevertheless becomes marie's lover. dara can't understand why delicate marie is drawn to this man; so loud and blunt and emphatically masculine as he invades their space; the wolfish, brute sexuality of him leaving marks on marie's skin. his arrival is the catalyst that challenges their whole small stunted world.
it's slow-burning sinister; a gothic suburban drama—grey gardens with a splash of vc andrews—featuring insular and codependent characters drifting between a crumbling house and a crumbling studio, bloody toe shoes strewn about; a story of submission and power, obsession and mental fragility, everything obscured by smoke and family secrets...it's so very deliciously megan abbott and soon it can will be yours.
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me getting my hands on this ARC is the best thing about 2021 so far. review to come...
fulfilling my 2022 goal to read one book each month that was not published in my country that i wanted badly enough to have a copy shipped to me from fulfilling my 2022 goal to read one book each month that was not published in my country that i wanted badly enough to have a copy shipped to me from abroad and then...never read.
Almost anything is tolerable, provided it's not for ever.
hey, that's how i felt about reading this book!
okay, that was just a cheap laff but real talk—this book went way over my head. i read it in february and now it's may and i have zero memory of it, but honestly—if you'd asked me what it was about back in february, i would probably still have been unable to answer you.
and it's such a shame because i adored Follow Me to Ground enough to import this one into my country and when it arrived, i gasped at how beautiful the cover was—can you see the glittery sprinkles?
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i can't seem to capture it, but seriously, it's like this:
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and it's gorgeous.
and everything i loved about that one is in this book, too—the lovely poetic prose and dark ambiguous tone, but with Follow Me to Ground, while i didn't understand everything that was going on, i understood enough. with this one, i had to stop a couple of times to read the flap synopsis just to remember what this was supposed to be about.
it's a cult and twins and one is diurnal and one is nocturnal because cultrules, and their mom abandoned them, leaving them behind with koan, the cult's leader, and there's a situation like a plague turning biological entities red and that's bad and shameful and people with the red need to be killed and i think someone gets killed who shouldn't have been and there's twincest and some of the plot occurs before the red and some after and the early stages are marked by people obsessively succumbing to pleasurable impulses, which are not necessarily sexual in nature but become so in the giving oneself over to them—a man begins to purr because he likes the way it feels and this is...bad?
I know what I know The mouth is an orifice that should not weep red. Old men should not purr.
it didn't really come together for me, plotwise, but the prose is so sharp and striking and beautiful:
Feeling of being a bowl of broth someone wants to eat before licking clean the spoon they ate you with. Thinking If I'm to be eaten best make sure I'm scalding hot, best make sure their tongues are blistering.
but it wasn't ultimately enough—i need a story. Follow Me to Ground was a weird-ass story, but i could follow it, this one i just could not and it makes me feel bad about myself.
i can handle a slowburning book where you don't know what's going on...until you do, but here i never got that moment of clarity that lit up the surroundings. this seems like obfuscation for obfuscation's sake and that doesn't work for me—for a long time i felt like i was just turning pages instead of reading and nothing really got absorbed because nothing was solid enough to hold on to, it was just one slippery scene after another.
trying to review this book is breaking my brain so i'm going to abandon ship and let her drive.
Slow sun today, taking its time in rising and setting and so my knees feel torn with the drawn-out devotion. Down to where the grass turns crisp with the sea and then further to where the wolves sometimes do their savaging, the soil there reddy with little cubs' bleeding. The wolves will die out if they're not careful, killing off their young. But then all they're doing is all any of us can do, which is the thing that makes sense at the time.
*****************
This is how we grew up: living inside a mistake until someone told you otherwise, and then living inside the shadow the mistake had made.
*****************
People overcomplicate Nature because they think her driven by something crude and fallible, something akin to human logic, and so they detect false errors and instances of cruelty.
The simplest answer, the route most direct: that's what we must look to.
What we know: when an interior, biological shift occurs within a species it is in response to an alteration in that species' environment.
What else we know: this new environment is proving more hostile to some of us than others.
oooh, goodreads choice awards finalist for best horror 2020! what will happen?
THIS HAPPENED:
CONGRATULATIONS, WINNER! goodreads choice awards best HORRoooh, goodreads choice awards finalist for best horror 2020! what will happen?
THIS HAPPENED:
CONGRATULATIONS, WINNER! goodreads choice awards best HORROR 2020!
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SPOOKTOBER COMIN' AT YOU LIKE
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this is not so much a reinvention of the gothic novel as it is a game of pin the crazytown tail on the classic gothic storyline.
and it is beautifully done.
if you’re a fan of gothic novels, whether they be the The Castle of Otranto or the Rebecca kind, you’ll dig the first 2/3 of this one. it’s all there: big crumbly isolated house, stormy storms, imperiled women, too much silverware, you know the drill.
if this is your first toe-dip into the genre, know that gothic novels are in no hurry to get where they’re going and the characters always take longer than the reader to get a handle on their situation. gothic horror is a slow simmer all about building atmosphere; the descriptions of rooms, wallpaper, clothing, trees. it’s about slowly uncoiling dread. it’s about nothing much happening until it does. it’s about an author walking the ambiguity line between the supernatural and plain old madness for as long as possible before canting the reader one way or the other.
and when this one cants, it cants HARD, shifting into some cronenberg-channelling-lovecraft fireworks that are super-icky and wonderful and it plays far rougher then your typical gothic does.
i enjoyed The Summer that Melted Everything a bunch, but Betty; a standalone with spillover into TSTME, has so much more weight. i remember bits and pieces from The Summer that Melted Everything—i remember the language being striking, i remember the framework and a few details in particular, but this one is going to stay in my brain for a lot longer, and there are specific scenes i know are with me for life; not as fond memories of a book i enjoyed, but as straight-up reader scars.
for me, that’s a good thing, but some people’ll be too gentle for this book, and they will read it and low-star it because it made them too sad or uncomfortable but when you consider it's a family saga inspired by the life of mcdaniel’s own mother, it becomes like that joke about the man and the boy walking through the woods, where the boy says “hey mister, it’s getting dark and i’m scared.” and the man says “how do you think i feel, i have to walk back alone.”
[‘course, in this case, it would be a girl—there are so many ways a girl can hurt. and if A girl comes of age against the knife isn’t just begging to be tattooed across all the clavicles of lilith fair, i don’t know what is.]
in any event—i don’t know what is hand-on-bible truth here, or what has been inflated for dramatic effect, but even if everything in this book was conjured up out of the clear blue sky, day after day this world reminds us it is full of horrorshows and people who have survived things others are too lily-livered to even read about. and that, to me, seems insensitive.
this book is sad. it is SAD. it is beautiful and broken and filled with tenderness and love and cruelty and neglect and it is SEARING. i cannot emphasize enough that, like life, it is a mixture of sad and lovely. although, also like life, for every sad you see coming, there’ll be two that’ll catch you off guard.
i will admit, it took me a minute to get into it. the language isn’t as engorged as it was in The Summer that Melted Everything, but there was something a little fiddly and twee to the beginning that didn’t grab me right away but once it did, i was thunderstruck, rapt, unable to look away &etc. i belonged to it.
mcdaniel has excellent control of the narrative, handling foreshadowing and discovery like a boss, and making you care about (almost) every member of this family, even at their least sympathetic.
a loud recommend for this book. it did things to me.
”God hates us.”
“The Carpenters?” I asked.
“Women.” She dabbed the lipstick against my lips, using her pinkie to smooth it into the corners. “He made us from the rib of man. That has been our curse ever since. Because of it, men have the shovel and we have the land. It’s right between our legs. There, they can bury all their sins. Bury ‘em so deep, no one knows about ‘em except for them and us.”
With a delicate step back she looked at me, her eyes cutting where they landed.
“My, my, Betty girl.” she smiled. “Red is not your color, darlin’.”
*oh and p.s—whatever landon's “pudding pie” is; this wondrous magic of “multicolored gelatin cubes suspended in pink gelatin,” i want the recipe.*
the recent and bewildering trend of tumblr-poets getting book deals and selling thousands of copies of these books is redefining poetry inEDUCATORS, TAKE NOTE
the recent and bewildering trend of tumblr-poets getting book deals and selling thousands of copies of these books is redefining poetry in the minds of impressionable kiddies as 'any thought that pops into your head as long as you hit enter a bunch of times.'
and even though these poems here are full of blowjobs, and whale-on-human sex, and blowjobs, and hand jobs, and blowjobs, and drinking, and bird-murder, and blowjobs, they are still better examples of 'poetry' than anything lang leav will ever write, and by that rationale, more appropriate to be included in a grade-school poetry lesson than the emogasms of any of those cyberpoet hacks....more
"Porn, man! Monster porn. That shit is blowing up right now. It's gonna be fucking HUGE!!"
arthur graham seems to be constantly writing stuff, a[image]
"Porn, man! Monster porn. That shit is blowing up right now. It's gonna be fucking HUGE!!"
arthur graham seems to be constantly writing stuff, and he's constantly shaking me down to read and review this stuff. which i do, since i don't have the money to give to charitable organizations and it's my only way of contributing to the well-being of the less-fortunate; inspiring others to shell out for his books so arthur can finally afford that fancy helmet and be the envy of all his fellow short bus riders.
but now he's just getting pushy about it. this time, he didn't even ask me to read this book, it just appeared in my mailbox on my birthday. stalker alert aside, i was really excited about it, since i thought the cover was a depiction of a drunken red panda with giant testicles, which seemed like a very thoughtful birthday present to have written just for me.
turns out, it's not a red panda at all, nor was i the only person who got a copy, so now i'm back to calling it an imposition.
but it's honestly the best and funniest thing he's written.
don't get me wrong, it's disgusting. reprehensible, even. it's full of icky sex, copious bodily fluids, bloodshed, drugs, the smearing of robert redford's good name, some rough sexual treatment of uma thurman, unusual architectural adhesives, the worst orgy ever, and worst of all - marital infidelity.
but - it did give me something else to hopelessly long for. no, not decomposing zombie orgies or coked-up starlets, but a TANUKI!
my initial thinking that the cover-image was of a red panda was down to my complete ignorance of the tanuki's existence. otherwise, the title would probably have clued me in.
and here, mr tanuki is legendary, indeed. mostly because of his enormous testicles, Like two fleshy boulders, they're barely supported by the narrow couch cushions, a thin film of tacky ball sweat being the only thing keeping them from tumbling to the floor. also, his enormous sexual drive, which insatiable drive is shared by his tanuki wife, and they both get up to many extramarital shenanigans, frequently with human celebrities.
it's a riches-to-rags-to-riches story from which our plucky, ballsy tanuki and his sassy tanuki wife ultimately emerge heroic, if a bit sticky.
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technically, this book is comprised of three short stories:
- Tanuki vs. the Aokigahara Swingers Club - Tinseltown Tanuki - Shinkansen of Love
but they're connected by characters and situations, so i'm treating it as a novel. novella? it's 92 pages, call it what you like.
as long as you call it.
arthur needs that helmet before he concusses himself.
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learn a little, love a lot!
thank you, arthur!
*************************************** look what reading this book did to my cat!!
this is a gem of an apocalypse story. i'd read this author's book The Panopticon a few years back, and loved it, but this one is sHAPPY PRIDE MONTH!!!
this is a gem of an apocalypse story. i'd read this author's book The Panopticon a few years back, and loved it, but this one is so very different in style and tone, it shows just how much authorial range ms fagan has. The Panopticon was gritty and harsh, but not without some really lovely bits. this one is slower, more deliberate and insightful, and the lovely languid writing is back and it is tremendously effective in this setting, where the world is slooooowwwwly ending as a new ice age rolls in.
oddly enough, the ice age isn't really the main focus of the book. it's more of a backdrop for the characters acting out their lives, and a way of marking time as it gets colder and colder with each subsequent chapter, all the way down to -70 C. the snow and cold and icebergs supply logistical obstacles, but also inspires some gorgeous imagery:
She picks up speed. Faster. Faster. She pedals harder. Air stings hew few inches of bare skin, so it is colder than ice floes on the North Sea - or even right at the bottom of the ocean where the skeletons hold hands or do the jitterbug or bang their fists on a whole roof of ice forming overhead.
if you're hoping for a realistic portrayal of how the world might end, this ain't it. this isn't a book in which people freak out and hoard food and take up religion and panic about their impending dooms. the problems are small, they are our problems: family, death, identity, love...
it all takes place in an isolated scottish caravan park, in a valley surrounded by hills, where dylan - a gigantic and heavily-tattooed, but gentle and thoughtful man, has just arrived to look into selling a caravan left to him in his mother's will, which he had no idea she'd owned. prior to this, he'd lived his whole life in london, in a crumbling movie house with his beloved mother and grandmother, which they operated together until the two women died and the property was repossessed. grieving and adrift, dylan arrives in the community, stunned by his multiple losses, and his introduction to his new home is the sight of a woman named constance sleepwalking in her front yard, polishing the moon.
constance is a fierce woman, protective of her eleven-year-old daughter stella (who until recently was her son cael), living her life on her own terms despite the gossip of her neighbors. part of the gossip results from her twenty-year-long romantic relationships with two men, on and off, frequently overlapping. one of them, alistair, is stella's father, who lives up the hill, but refuses to acknowledge stella as she is - occasionally dropping off presents clearly intended for the son he still stubbornly sees her as.
stella is a firecracker of a character - very much like the girls in The Panopticon - spirited, fond of cussing, vivacious and tough, but also vulnerable in her new identity, hurt and resentful by the reactions of those who knew her only as cael, including the nuns at her school, and her best friend lewis, whose friendship has just gotten considerably more complicated. but she's not broken-down by others; she maintains her sass and spirit:
They took her into a meeting in school and she had to say in advance that she wasn't a lesbian, or they wouldn't have let her even try to use the girls' changing room. They asked her if she was still a Christian. She explained that her family is not religious. They asked her what she knew of damnation. She asked them what they knew of autonomy. They asked her how she knew that word. She asked if they had met her mother. They said they would pray for her. She said it was not necessary. They asked if she might feel different in a few months, or if perhaps she should simply change for gym in the janitor's cupboard. She said she'd felt like this her whole life and no amount of praying was going to change it and she could use the janitor's cupboard to change, but she was a person, not a broom.
she adores her unconventional mother and their life together, This sums up my entire childhood: clever shit and apocalypse-survival skills, and she immediately befriends her new neighbor dylan, casting him in the role of pal and casual father figure.
the book is told from the perspectives of dylan and stella both, and we are not privy to the innerworkings of constance's mind. we only see her as they see her, which is an absolutely genius move on fagan's part. there is something so powerfully enigmatic and 'other' about constance - she is so attuned to her surroundings, and it's infinitely more mysterious to not know what she's thinking or feeling or planning. she remains a cipher, smart and strong and odd and independent, and it's so much more effective to never visit her interiors, just that she accepts stella while still mourning cael, and she teaches stella about life and duality in her own remarkable way: There is a half-female, half-male cardinal bird that is pure white down one side and bright red down the other! Google it.
it's just … beautiful. i don't know what else to say. it's lovely and magical and surprising, and both the characters and the language are phenomenal:
If the doctor asks her what she is most - she will tell him she is a wolf child.
Her mother is winter.
Their neighbor is the child of Nephilim.
Her biological male donor is a future bone teapot.
which sounds kooky, but is completely appropriate in context and is probably my favorite passage in the book.
i will say that the opening; the italicized prologue, is completely baffling at first, but plow through it and be rewarded because it will all make sense later, i promise.
it's a perfect mishmash of coming-of-age/coming-into-gender-identity story, with tentative romance elements, family secrets, the strength of community in facing the inevitable, with vivid descriptions and a perfectly understated ending.
you know, one of those books.
*********************************************** i don't even know if i'm qualified to review this one. what she has done here in under 300 pages is more accomplished than i can even unravel.
it's damn good.
i'll try to make this review have better words soon.
Snakes are easy. It’s people that I don’t know how to charm.
this tor short is equal parts beautiful and disturbing.
it also comes with a warning: PleaSnakes are easy. It’s people that I don’t know how to charm.
this tor short is equal parts beautiful and disturbing.
it also comes with a warning: Please be warned that this story deals with difficult content and themes, including child abuse, incest, and rape.
and also snakes. up close and personal and slithering, so if you've got phobias, or any triggers around the themes mentioned above, there are many other free tor shorts for you to read.
me, i have no triggers and no phobias (not any real ones anyway, although i quite sensibly mistrust twins and birds and dolphins), so this story was nothing but smooth dark chocolate for my heart. it's a very…unexpected tale, and as the story made its sinuous sexxy turns into its reveals - some predicted, some complete surprises - i was completely entranced by her writing, her characters, and her perfect blending of gritty realism and fantasy elements. because "fabulous" here is not used in its camp mode, but in its literary sense, as it relates to 'fabulism.' and this is some pitch-perfect fabulism here.
and i kind of don't want to say too much about this one, which might seem like someone who's just trying to get out of writing a long-overdue review for a short story they read months and months ago, but i assure you - this is done more out of respect for you, potential reader, than out of laziness of me, procrastinating reviewer.
it's that i just reread the story now to properly review it, and if anything, i liked it more the second time around. it even got an extra star and now i can't stop thinking about it.
it's just so achingly beautiful:
“Tallulah, what am I? Am I a monster?”
She sat up and leant against me, her chin on my shoulder.
“Yes, you’re my monster.”
it's family and love and strength and sacrifice and helplessness and revenge and snakes and power and suffering and coming through all sorts of pain with a sense of humor
These people with their interminable words. I came from a place where a slap sufficed.
again - it goes to dark and triggery places, but i don't think it's gratuitous at all. sometimes you need to be made to feel uncomfortable, and an author who manages access into a reader's emotional space - it's something to celebrate, not shy away from. which is maybe me speaking too much as a reader who rarely experiences strong emotions from reading, and regular non-robot people do not enjoy this discomfort which they probably feel more acutely than i do, but all i know is that after reading this a second time through, i think it's a perfect short story.
and i have just discovered she has another free tor short: rag and bone which i will read tomorrow. which is really going to mess you up since i won't be posting this review until way in the future, a future in which i will have already read (but likely not reviewed) that story and you will think you are magical time travelers but you are not.
anyway, read this story. i thought it was phenomenal.
this is good, solid, splattery horror that also playfully takes a meta-step back from itself to poke fun at the conventions of the horror genre and atthis is good, solid, splattery horror that also playfully takes a meta-step back from itself to poke fun at the conventions of the horror genre and at its own content. it's a collection of linked stories, but there's an overarching narrative holding them together, so they aren't really standalones.
it takes place in the british town of kramusville, on a - yes - on a dark and stormy night. fitz and paul are on their way to an important conference when their car breaks down. they cross a spooky and decrepit old bridge complete with unsettling noises and possible apparitions (doing the classic, "was that? nahh, couldn't be" brush-off that is required of all participants in horror stories) and find themselves in a ghost town that nonetheless is where they are meant to catch their train. cellphone reception being spotty and no train available until morning, they are forced to wait out the storm and pass the time at the finger inn, where they can drink some beers and relax.
but there will be no rest in kramusville, only unspeakable horror and unease. muahahahaaaaaaaaa
at least there's beer.
the pub is deserted except for the creepiest bartender ever, and a man sitting in the shadows known as "the bastard drunk." and for the price of a drink, the bastard drunk will share the stories of kramusville; all the urban legends and haunting deaths that have plagued the town for years.
which deal our two friends accept gladly, as waiting-room entertainment.
and the stories roll offa the bastard drunk, each more horrific than the last. but fitz and paul are a tough crowd, and fitz isn't buying what the bastard's selling:
Fitz took a sip of his drink, held it in his mouth for a moment, then swallowed with a frown. “Are the lights going to fail in every tale you tell us?” The Bastard eyed him curiously. “The fuck is that supposed to mean?” “The lights on the train flickered, the lights in the corridor flickered; we’re not stupid, Bastard. We’re very aware of the suspense you’re trying to create, but there must be a different cliché device up your sleeve.”
which is a nice little giggle. fitz continues to challenge the bastard's storytelling abilities:
“Are you callin’ me a liar?”
“I’m just questioning your abilities as a storyteller, that’s all. You’re trying to sell us these tales as fact, and yet you’re expecting us to believe the impossible. Now, I’m willing to suspend disbelief when it comes to dialogue; there’s no way of you knowing what conversations took place behind closed doors. I’m even ready to accept character backstories; maybe you know for sure about Polly’s childhood trauma, maybe you don’t, but adding depth to your protagonist is never a bad thing…But you’re too explicit, too definite…the not knowing for sure, the supernatural becoming an almost rational explanation for the unknown; that’s where the fear lies, Bastard."
i appreciate this device, the taking the reader out of the story to address the very nature of storytelling and asking the kinds of questions a rational person asks when confronted with horror stories. because for the most part, the bastard's tales are very traditional slumber party stories: the woman traveling alone late at night, the revenge from beyond the grave, the brainwashed children - it's all very conventional. and fitz continues to shoot them down and voice his disbelief and point to the weaknesses in the bastard's storytelling abilities, who in turn continues to defend them and it becomes an almost lighthearted respite alternating with all the gore.
but it's not lighthearted for long. as the stories and the arguments continue, the two worlds collide and the horror elements bleed into the the finger inn narrative as the bastard drunk reveals that he knows o so many details of fitz and paul's lives and that their story will one day be just like any other in his mind; a chilling tale used to terrify and delight some other hapless visitor to kramusville.
it's a fun experiment in horror writing. i enjoyed the referential winks and the overall structure - nothing beats the story-within-a-story setup in my opinion. the individual stories are also good, although as fitz points out, there are a lot of clichés in them. what he can't point out is that the "travelers who meet a spooky character on a spooky night and find themselves imperiled" is itself a cliché, but the reader doesn't need that spelled out for them.
A hero would have charged through the front door, but she did not know any heroes. She knew dead men, and the men who'd killed them, and the boy.
this A hero would have charged through the front door, but she did not know any heroes. She knew dead men, and the men who'd killed them, and the boy.
this is one of those books that separates the hip from the unhip. i liked it, but i didn't LOVE it. and i feel the judgments!
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doubtless true.
early on, i felt this book would be friends with Dark Property or A Choir of Ill Children. both of those books take a traditional subgenre - post-apoc and southern gothic, respectively, and then throw a bunch of weird all over it. this one uses the western as its base coat and there's all sorts of surreal splattering it, but i never had the feeling it was used as thoughtfully as the evenson or piccarilli. i'm generally fine with weird for weird's sake, but i had the feeling there was meant to be more than that here - some commentary or some larger theme i was missing. i kept feeling that i was so close to having that "AHA!" moment, but either i missed the point or the author was circling something without ever connecting the dots.
i'm just confused, i guess. this book is being held up as "the" indie book of the summer - as this bold revisionist western. but this isn't particularly "new" or "edgy," this subverting the expectations of the western genre by making it either really ultraviolent or really weird. it's not the first to borrow elements from noir and it's by no means the first nihilistic western. "weird west" already exists as a pulpy subgenre, and people like robert coover, ishmael reed, rudolph wurlitzer and even richard brautigan have written more literary versions of the weird west, so it's not like this is the first of its kind. and the heightened violence is definitely not new to the genre. there has always been an emphasis on violence in the western - it's one of its defining characteristics, but the classic stuff; the louie l'amour stuff, was always a little more tasteful in deploying it. and then along came cormac mccarthy, paving the way for the modern reader with a taste for more graphic violence, which led to things like The Winter Family, joe r. lansdale, and my favorite bloody/weird mashup, Smonk. SMONK! and i myself am one of those modern readers with a taste for more graphic violence - i read a lot of grit lit and there's frequently crossover into the western with grit lit, so i am fairly desensitized to violence, even when it is beautifully-written violence, so there's nothing here that is shockingly new to me.
the writing here is fantastic in places. he's great at the terse aphorism; a staple of the western:
*"It's a graveyard," said Bird.
"You'll find that's always the case," said Sugar, "if you pay attention."
*"Lots of things are going to come at you," said Mary. "It is only the world saying hello."
*"Left to their own devices, people will live out every possible variation of a human life."
and, like most westerns, life is cheap. but here, even the characters meant to be redemptive are at risk (view spoiler)[what even happened to that baby? worst rescue mission ever. (hide spoiler)] so you never really feel "safe" for anyone.
but i feel like winnette has less control over the surreal elements of the novel. the confusion starts early, and it never really lets up.
brooke and sugar are brothers and killers for hire. they arrive at a town where they are owed money for bloody services rendered to find it unrecognizable - burned to the ground, its citizens murdered, and under the new leadership of a tiny man with plenty of hired muscle. there is a tongueless old man, verbal sparring, unprovoked violence and then the page-nine reveal that sugar has a vagina.
so then you gotta go back and say "wait, what?"
i don't consider that part a spoiler because - page NINE, but this is a bit more potentially spoilery. (view spoiler)[i'm not sure what's going on with sugar, frankly. he isn't consciously trans so much as confused, despite being the more articulate and insightful of the brothers. he doesn't know how old they are, he can't remember their past, and having been raised as a boy by a cruel and rapey father, he just doesn't know anything else. which would be fine if the characters were children. but once adolescence and adulthood is reached, there's no reason for this confusion. they know whores, they have had "their genitals rubbed," so they know what women are, anatomically. and if sugar really has been pregnant many times, "the woods… crying out with all you've left them," he knows about childbirth and babies so he (and brooke) must know sugar is a woman. historically, the western has pretty much on the lowest rung of gender/sexual progressivism ('cept for that brokeback mountain and all the non-trans cross-dressing by women in westerns as protection from the raping), but this doesn't read like a character who is living as a man because he feels like a man in his heart as much as someone who is simply unaware that men don't typically have vaginas. or that they shouldn't use them to have sex with their family members. (hide spoiler)]
so we are forced to second-guess a lot of what's happening. and that makes the occasional sloppy writing even more frustrating, because we don't know if it is intentional or oversight. what are we to make of a character whose arm had been lopped off, just above where would have been an elbow who on the next page pushed from his wrists to set his weight upon his legs? or this sentence - He looked ill and miserable, like an old dog she and John had once put down together. It was only a puppy. is that careless or is it meant to give us pause, in a book where gender is uncertain and families and relationships are slippery - adopted children, pretend marriages, and where the supernatural will sit on a rock and have a conversation with a fella?
it's a muddy kind of storytelling - it's unclear what is real, what is imagined, what is supernatural. it occurs in a dreamspace but there's a difference between deliberate vagueness for the sake of a surreal tone, and leaving loose ends because you don't know how to wrap up the story or finish what you've started. too many times i had the feeling that i was reading the latter. too many times i thought something was being implied that wasn't. for a long time, i thought brooke had some kind of magical healing powers - there are two scenes in which he boldly and unnecessarily displays a willingness to be stabbed as though he knows it won't matter and: He looked as if he should be covered in scars, but all of the wounds he bore were fresh. so i thought there was something going on there, some ability he had, but nothing ever came of that. and i think that's down to the tone setting up expectations; the reader is forced to fill in the gaps with their own explanations because there are too many details included that don't solidify into anything meaningful.
Living was all winding around and doubling back.
that is a pretty good encapsulation of the shape of the novel - there are recurrences and mirroring, which give the reader pause, but again - to no thematic purpose.
my problems with the book were mostly in the details. the tone of the book was great, and the message that stood out most clearly to me in all the chaos was the way that the violence of this world leeches in and taints even the most innocent, and that this is what we call survival.
that most innocent character is bird - he's a tabula rasa that arrives into the narrative naked and amnesiac without even fingerprints and he becomes shaped by his experiences and his victimization - hardened by the violent necessities of this world from a sweet kid who can't even manage to kill a bird (in a really reader-squirmy scene) into a force for vengeance that will continue and contribute to this cycle of inevitable violence.
one of the novel's central images stands in well for my overall feelings towards the book - a charred spiral staircase, all that remains in the middle of a burned-down town - it's a beautiful and twisted thing in the center of chaos and destruction, but it ultimately goes nowhere.
i was prepared for it, since so many of the reviews on here have been thumbs-down; people expeunlike The Secret History, this book has some problems.
i was prepared for it, since so many of the reviews on here have been thumbs-down; people expecting a donna tartt or a gillian flynn and getting something altogether different. and i can't say i hated it - it's a very fast read, and it was a fine summer diversion, but it takes some frustrating shortcuts down build-the-suspense road.
nica baker is sixteen when she is murdered on the grounds of chandler academy, a prep school in hartford, connecticut. shortly thereafter, another student kills himself, leaving an incriminating suicide note and the case is officially closed. nica's older sister grace; the shy and cautious opposite to her wild and popular whirlwind, was about to go off to college, but nica's death has rocked her out of orbit and into grief allayed by the narcotizing arms of prescription medication. while her parents fight, drink, and separate, grace makes a lousy decision to attend nica's ex's fourth of july party dressed as nica, and wakes up the next day hungover, newly deflowered, and pregnant with no memory of the sexual act, but with a memory of seeing nica's ghost.
she makes herself a deal - she will either find nica's real killer before her first trimester elapses, and abort the baby, or if she fails, she will raise the baby as a sort of apology/tribute to nica's memory.
so, off she goes, in all her 17-year-old investigative fervor, and she discovers all of nica's secrets along with some of her own.
the other blurb on this is Megan Abbott meets Twin Peaks.
i'm not sure where the twin peaks comes into play here. except in the "pretty popular high school girl with sexual secrets gets murdered." which is not a concept owned by david lynch. although i did like where grace points out the cliche of it all, especially her deflating of the "homecoming queen" mythos.
for the most part, it's a fun and twisty thriller. some of it is predictable, some less so. it's one of those "everyone's got secrets, so everyone's a suspect" stories, and i think anolik did a good job strewing suspicion all over the place. the problem is an overreliance upon surfacing memories. grace spent the period following nica's death abusing prescription medication, so she has very few clear memories of that hazy time and she has filled in the blanks with assumptions that are mostly inaccurate. and every time she uncovers a clue or a secret, she suddenly remembers an incident that supports or enhances this "new" knowledge. you can get away with that technique once in a book. use it more than that and it starts feeling contrived. (see blair's review for a better version of what i have just said - of how Grace seems to experience memories like other people experience seizures.)
so it's things like that, and the fact that this doesn't read at all like the voice of a seventeen-year-old (i had to keep reminding myself of the ages of most of the characters - it definitely read more college than high school), and the implausibilities in clue-gathering (how would grace have ascertained the romantic significance of nica's tattoo on first sight?), and some stereotypes in the ethnic blue-collar characters, that made me less of a fan of the book.
however, there are some things that i thought were great, particularly the relationship between nica and her mother, a sally mann-ish photographer who has obsessively chronicled nica's adolescence in all its tender fumblings and provocative adult posturings. and even though i'd guessed this particular reveal, the scene in the studio was fabulous. huge. generally, all the scenes centered around the family were great - the pressures, the grief, the awkwardness between grace and her father as even basic communication became impossible - it was all incredibly realistic and sad.
and then there's the scene in which grace becomes pregnant, which seems to be the one that kills the book for many readers. and i completely understand - (view spoiler)[it's a really ballsy choice to make your heroine fall for her maybe-rapist. but this is one of those situations which is at once emotionally-charged and hot buttony, but also very very gray. and i think anolik handled it really well, honestly. grace has been an unreliable narrator throughout the entire book, and on the night in question, she was incredibly wasted, but still ambulatory and maybe didn't seem as messed up as she was. and damon's account of the evening does indicate that grace was responding willingly. considering the two of them were both completely in the throes of grief and the shock of "seeing" nica (who was usually intoxicated herself) was probably confusing to damon, i think we can safely say that his intent was never rape, however confused and amnesia-ridden grace was. i think it was written honestly rather than gratuitously, and i think she did a good job of addressing the manylayered complications. (hide spoiler)]
but overall, it's a fine debut. it has some bumps, but it has strengths to balance them. i always enjoy boarding school murder mysteries, and this one was far from the worst i have read. i liked it, bumps and all.
this book is very david mitchell-y in structure and theme, but it is somewhat less intellectually demanding than mitchell, and as the ever-astute blaithis book is very david mitchell-y in structure and theme, but it is somewhat less intellectually demanding than mitchell, and as the ever-astute blair points out, there isn't much of a difference between the voices of the discrete narratives. but that doesn't mean it's not an astonishingly good book on its own merits.
it's a sad, frequently brutal story of the various incarnations of two souls spanning the course of hundreds of years, with detail-rich backdrops of ancient to modern china. the stories satellite around wang - a taxi driver in beijing in 2008 with a wife named yida, a daughter named echo, and some heavy emotional baggage in his rearview (chortle). and as he will soon learn, that emotional baggage is not just restricted to this life; he has had five previous lives in which he has engaged with another entity in various ways, many of them centered around erotic entanglements, and most of them ending in betrayal and gruesome death.
although he has no memory of these lives, he begins to receive mysterious letters from the person with whom he shared these experiences, detailing the nature of their relationships through time and vowing that their paths will cross again.
the five letters chronicling their lives are standalone chapters in the novel, and had they been five stories in a larger collection, i would have thought "what excellent stories these are!," but i am so glad that barker chose to go the extra step and use them as bones to wrap a whole other story around - it is a wonderfully ambitious risk and i think it paid off. the only quibble i have is that i wish the story had been more evenly distributed. there's a lot of wang (heh) in between the past-life stories, and while his own current-life is beautifully, tragically written, i would have loved more islands of past-lives breaking up his storyline.
but that's just a minor complaint in what was a singularly enjoyable, discomfiting, immersive reading experience. if she writes a book of short stories, i will read it gladly. if she writes another novel, i will read it gladly. if she writes a poem on a bathroom wall, i will read it gladly. (edit - so i just learned she has TWO OTHER BOOKS! which i will read gladly)
i don't want to say much more, but i urge you to get your hands on this, as long as you have the stomach for some of the graphic bits and pieces.
Flying down West Main Street in a wheelchair would be awesome on a regular day. Flying down West Main Street in a wheelchair while drunk, firing a pisFlying down West Main Street in a wheelchair would be awesome on a regular day. Flying down West Main Street in a wheelchair while drunk, firing a pistol, and screaming at the top of your lungs during the zombie apocalypse? Now that is priceless.
and now this book about the zombie apocalypse, cussin', and a lot of beer.
sometimes i just want to float all seven of my proust reviews and say "LOOK! sometimes i read long and important books!!"
and sometimes i read books that arthur graham sends me.
life is balance.
this book explores a terrifying premise. not the zombie apocalypse - that's all been-there, done-that. no, this book dares to posit a much more horrifying "what if?": what if the only survivors of the zombie apocalypse were assholes?
sexist, drunk, homophobic douchebag dudes who claim metalhead affiliation but act more like overgrown frat boy brahs in pursuit of nothing more than beer, pot, and perky ass titties.
and a little d&d nerd will lead them.
if you are the kind of person who enjoys a good bizarro-type romp in which obnoxious dudes do obscene things while spouting offensive mantras - climb aboard!! because there is a lot of funny-ass shit in here. and some deeply disturbing imagery, including a zombie birth, fecal alley, and well, this:
Following the sound to the room next door, he's shocked enough to catch the guys with a zombie in there, let alone one strapped to table with a funnel in its mouth. Steady squats over it, his ass hanging out of his jeans.
"What the fuck are you guys doing?"
Giggling even louder now, Rock half turns his head, never taking his eyes off the zombie's face.
"Dude, we call it the boom tube…"
"We're farting in his mouth," Steady clarifies, chuckling as he builds up pressure. "He fucking hates it!"
Suddenly he lets one rip, hard enough to pop an eye out of zombie's head.
"ARRRRgrrrrrr…"
Rock and Steady both fall over, holding their stomachs and laughing hysterically. Kip closes the door and heads up to the roof, sitting down at the table with his journal.
which i will say is the first time i have ever encountered this in a zombie book, so kudos for that!
it's definitely a big slobbery fun romp of a book. these are the antiheroes of all antiheroes, and you'll never applaud them, but for all their poor social skills and lack of perspective, they do sort of save the world. and as the synopsis promises:
Not everyone who saves the world is a rocket scientist, a super hero, or a handsome actor turned politician. Sometimes people who save the world... they're fucking idiots.
amen, brother!
fortunately, they do have one redeeming quality. when they meet up with an african american fellow hiding out in a beer cooler that they desperately want to get into:
"Hey!" Steady shouts back, pretty drunk by this point. "You let us in right NOW, you, you…" He struggles for the words, but somehow they fail.
"Oh, you what" Russ fires back. "Why don't you just come on out and say it!"
"No!" Steady yells, punching the door. "I ain't saying it!"
"Come on and say it, you fucking pussy! Call me a nigga! Go ahead!"
"Not saying it!"
"Say it, bitch!"
"We're not racists! We're drunks!" Rock hollers back.
"Yeah," Kip thinks to add, himself feeling pretty buzzed. "I love Wayne Brady!"
which of course i only excerpted here so i could use this picture, one of my favorite things from the much-missed chappelle show:
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so, read it if you think this is your thing. or read proust. just read something
SHARK WEEK IS FOR SHARKIN!!! it is also for meeting the author of MOTHERFUCKING SHARKS and getting shark tattoos together:
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take thSHARK WEEK IS FOR SHARKIN!!! it is also for meeting the author of MOTHERFUCKING SHARKS and getting shark tattoos together:
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take that, sharkfans...
i recently watched the incredible syfy original movie ghost shark in which a ghost shark attacks its victims in a pool,
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in a bathtub
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in a bucket at a sexxy car wash
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a toilet
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a slip and slide
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basically, anywhere there is any amount of water
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so, i already knew that there's literally NOWHERE safe from shark attacks, even somewhere "days from the water," which is the territory covered in motherfucking sharks.
basically, this book brings to light the underreported occurrence of rain-sharks. rain sharks will come to your town and they will FUCK YOU UP! they will rise out of the puddles and they will eat up all of your friends and your limbs and there will be nothing but lamentations and hilarious bloodspray and over-the-top violence.
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like that, only with lots more horror.
it's wonderful. or, rather - it's wonderful if you are a sickfuck with a taste for the bizarro. there's murder and incest and a kind of sharkrape, tips on saying "rain" in many languages, cannibalism, a terrible knock-knock joke, and also - MOTHERFUCKING SHARKS!!!
and this book gets a little meta, in the most darkly funny way. i'm going to type a lot of words- bear with me:
On the ground, near a puddle, its face the smell of chocolate, a toddler toddles.
See this, friend: eyes green, cheeks alight with joy. Blonde hair only ever so slightly feathered by breeze. A giggle. A tummy laugh. You ever touched a toddler's tummy? It feels like suede-wrapped heaven. It smells like milk and hugs and handshakes from God. You see this little boy? This little white boy? If it hurts you more to see a black boy die, then make him black in your mind, I don't care what it looks like so long as you're uncomfortable. Instead, reader, do this. Picture for me, if you will, the child you love the most. Hold it in your head. Dress it with the form you'd least like to see killed. In this way, we have always been a team. I tell you a thing, but you spin it real in your head. So, I won't tell you everything. Hell, make it a girl. Make it your own. Give me a child. Put it in your mind. Put it by a puddle. Put joy in its heart. I'm going to fuck it up. I'm going to unleash a magical shark on it. I'm going to turn that precious thing into a bucket of death shaped the way that hurts you most. Put that fucking child by that fucking puddle and let me kill the fuck out of it. I will strip its skin from its body, toss chunks of it at you like strips of bacon. Your baby. Make the fucking baby. I want to kill the fucking baby you've made in your mind. Is it there? Is it the baby?
Now, up comes the shark.
Now listen, I'm serious here, I'm willing to sacrifice my spot in Heaven to make you feel bad while reading this. I'll quit drinking forever tomorrow, and I won't jerk off to amateur porn anymore - you know the kind that's been stolen and where the women look embarrassed and the men look eager and the light is yellow and you can nearly smell the sin - but it won't matter anymore, because after I kill this toddler out of your imagination, God will think me reprehensible. I want this to occur inside of you. We're a team, okay? We're gonna kill this little kid together.
Kill this kid with me. Put it in your mind and let's kill it. Just you and me. Just you and me and our imaginations. Just two people. Taking a kid and killing it in our hearts. It's not real. It's just. Let's take this kid. This cute little kid. It's by the puddle. And in that puddle is something dark. The child is innocent. The shark is heinous. Teeth. Teeth. Teeth. Look at a baby's hand. It's so soft. Look at a shark's mouth. All those teeth, so sharp. Take that soft little hand, with those soft little fingers. Piggies. Piggies. Sing: this little piggy went to market, this little piggy stayed home. God, I'm gonna fucking put those cute little fingers in that fucking shark's mouth. God, it will be fucked up. I'm gonna drag them over the teeth. Oh, shit, they will not stand a chance. Hahaha. Look at that baby's face. It's fucking crying. There's blood everywhere. It's trying to suck its thumb. Hey, dumbass, thumb's gone. I fed it to a fucking shark. Hahahahhahahahahahahahahahaahaa. Oh. It bites the kid again. Oh, man. These motherfucking sharks are crazy.
this book cracked me up.
get a harpoon, watch your back, listen to that lone drifter, and pray for cloudless days.
this is a very slim crime novel based on an unsolved murder case that took place in bavaria in 1922. schenkel sets this book in the 50s which allows hthis is a very slim crime novel based on an unsolved murder case that took place in bavaria in 1922. schenkel sets this book in the 50s which allows her to use the aftermath of WWII to further darken the mood, but other than that, the basic facts are the same: one night, in a rural locale, six people were killed: a farmer, his wife, their grown daughter, her two children, and a maid on her first night in their employ. all were killed with a pickaxe, and their bodies were found scattered about the barn and farmhouse when neighbors concerned that they had not seen them in church or in school eventually went to check on them.
the story is structured as a series of interviews conducted by a former resident of the village who returns to try to solve the crime. these testimonials are offset by om-narr pov chapters of events leading up the the murders and fragments of hymns or prayers, which become more chilling used in this context.
we are told by our investigating narrator that
The people I met there were very willing to tell me about the crime. To talk to a stranger who was nonetheless familiar with the place. Someone who wouldn't stay, would listen, and then go away again.
for all that, some of the residents are not at all willing to get into the specifics, some do not have much useful information, and some are just there to gossip. and there is a lot to gossip about the danner family. old danner, the patriarch, was not a likable man. rumors of wife-beating and incest swirl around him, and his avarice is well-known. his loveless marriage to an older woman got him his farm and his daughter, and his habit of harassing his household help and of hiring drifters for farm labor and bragging to them about the money he has hidden around his farm is well-known. no one mourns his death, but the children are another matter. the crime shocks the community and speculation and rumors run wild, all to the ears of our unnamed narrator.
the documentary style lends to book to In Cold Blood comparisons, but this is a much starker treatment with no conclusions for the police, the villagers or the narrator, and only the reader is allowed to know the truth of what happened, in the final chapter.
it's a fast read, and the structure is smart and unusual enough to prolong interest, but it ultimately didn't "wow" me enough to leave a lasting impression, and at the resolution i was just like, "oh, okay, that's what happened? good to know." but it wasn't a major earth-shaker or anything. definitely worth the read, but it's not going to haunt you forever or anything.
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