The Feast of the Goat

The Feast of the Goat

By Mario Vargas Llosa

Haunted all her life by feelings of terror and emptiness, forty-nine-year-old Urania Cabral returns to her native Dominican Republic - and finds herself reliving the events of l961, when the capital was still called Trujillo City and one old man terrorized a nation of three million. Rafael Trujillo, the depraved ailing dictator whom Dominicans call the Goat, controls his inner circle with a combination of violence and blackmail. In Trujillo's gaudy palace, treachery and cowardice have become a way of life. But Trujillo's grasp is slipping. There is a conspiracy against him, and a Machiavellian revolution already underway that will have bloody consequences of its own.

You can tell the book is written by an expert. Despite the heavy (and at times excruciating - the rape of a pre-teen seems mild in comparison to some of the horrors described) material you are kept rapt, pressing on to the inevitable conclusion. The book deals in turn with three storylines: Urania, a woman returning to the country after 35 years, who comes to reckon with the past and her family's involvement with the regime (wholly invented by Vargas Llosa), a collection of collaborationists, traitors and conspirators, waiting to assassinate the dictator (real people fictionalized), and the dictator himself, Trujillo, on what will become the last day of his life (also, obviously real but fictionalized). There's multiple flashbacks in each story-line and, especially in Urania's story-line, the text will switch abruptly between present and past conversations with no noticeable delineation. This is used more heavily in the later chapters, when we have a better understanding of all the players and plots, but it's still not an easy book to read.

Since it's not entirely fictional, there's a need to include certain prominent figures, even though it can complicate and confuse the reader. There's seven conspirators waiting for the car, and more who are waiting in the wings. There's multiple government officials and hangers on. All of these people are known to each other and in some cases are brothers, cousins, uncles and nephews. The sections involving Urania's story are relatively contained in comparison: her, her father, aunt, cousins, and a nurse, all of whom are made up, are the only characters in the present. Although I managed to keep most of the large cast straight, I did struggle, particularly in the last few chapters, at the culmination of the assassination, when the scope of the plan widened and the ripple effects began to be seen.

It's also interesting to note that although the beginning of the book takes each of the three story-lines in turn, around chapter 19, when we leave Urania waiting to be delivered to the belly of the beast, several chapters in a row focus more on the immediate and long term period after the assassination, and Vargas Llosa instead slots in the finale to Urania's story as the very last chapter. It's both out of order and interestingly, Urania's last chapter follows the "Balaguer chapter" which ends, somewhat optimistically, with the removal of the Trujillo family from the country and the pardoning of the living conspirators - they literally walk into Balaguer's open, welcoming arms. Balaguer's chapter is also the last chronological moment before Urania comes back to the country 35 years later, which is the start of the book. As tempting as it might have been to leave it at Balaguer, Vargas Llosa instead returns us back to the scene of one of Trujillo's final, personal, petty crimes (albeit wholly fictional one), and reminds us that no matter the events to follow, the effect of the regime cannot and should be be forgotten - and in the character of Urania, physically unable to forget, as others in the book appear to have done. 

I think Vargas Llosa does an incredible job of setting us in the time and place, and in differentiating between the various narrators, which is something that can be hard for authors to do. Here, it's immediately apparent when Urania or Trujillo is narrating, although some of the assassins are not as easily distinguishable from each other. Although we know what happens to Trujillo (he was in fact, assassinated in May 1961) you anticipate the moment as a reader with some relief of anxiety and joy. After so much detail about the degradation and horrors that Trujillo presided over, you want Trujillo to be done, you want the assassins to succeed, and you know (as someone with access to Wikipedia) that they do. I don't know whether Vargas Llosa assumes knowledge of the outcome on the reader's part. Surely, as it become more and more distant past - it's already been 23 years since the book was first published - fewer and fewer readers can be expected to be familiar with what happens next. Certainly I didn't know, and didn't "spoil" myself. This section was the hardest for me to read, perhaps because it was so immediate, perhaps because it seemed so unjust for an action which should have been celebrated (and in fact was, if only they could have lived long enough to see it).  History is written by the victors.

In the end, I am left with only two questions, both of which come from Urania's fictional story-line, and which therefore the author has even more deliberately decided not to address overtly: Who hid the memo (if, in fact it was deliberately hidden) from Trujillo about Urania's departure? One reviewer attributes the memo's disappearance to Balaguer as a nod that no action of Balaguer is ever unconsidered, and states that it is a demonstration of Vargas Llosa's appreciation for him as a politician, by showing Balaguer's compassion in that (completely fictional) moment. That's a compelling argument. I did think that Balaguer, of all the characters, was probably the hardest to write about, given his outsized importance to the country later, and the fact that, at the time the book was written, he was still living and still actively involved in politics, despite his age and health. It is hard to judge the legacy of a living person.

My second question was about the ostracization of Cabral in the first place. Was it just a loyalty test, as Trujillo seems to allude to in one chapter, or was it designed with ulterior motives in mind? I also think it's interesting that Vargas Llosa so clearly lays out the torture and consequences for those in opposition to the regime in the later chapters. It adds more layers to Cabral's decision to pimp his daughter out, in his effort to appease the Generalissimo. There are real, and not imagined, consequences for angering that type of person.  In this case, the choice was fatal not only due to Trujillo's inability to perform and further angering him, but also being ultimately pointless given his assassination weeks later. But would there be a devil on the shoulder to say that, in the absence of that foresight, Cabral's choice was unreasonable? When you live in hell, what salve to conscience can you afford? "In this country, in one way or another, everyone had been, was, or would be part of the regime. 'The worst thing that can happen to a Dominican is to be intelligent or competent,' he had once heard Agustín Cabral say ...and the words had been etched in his mind: 'Because sooner or later Trujillo will call upon him to serve the regime, or his person, and when he calls, one is not permitted to say no.' Egghead was proof of this truth....As Estrella Sadhalá always said, the Goat had taken from people the sacred attribute given to them by God: their free will."

 It is possibly the best book I never want to read again.

 

21: A Book Where A Main Character Is A Policitician

 

Dark Waters

Dark Waters

By Katherine Arden

Until next time. That was chilling promise made to Ollie, Coco and Brian after they outsmarted the smiling man at Mount Hemlock Resort. And as the trio knows, the smiling man always keeps his promises. So when the lights flicker on and off at Brian's family's inn and a boom sounds at the door, there's just one visitor it could be. Only, there's no one there, just a cryptic note left outside signed simply as —S.

The smiling man loves his games and it seems a new one is afoot. But first, the three friends will have to survive a group trip to Lake Champlain where it's said Vermont's very own Loch Ness monster lives. When they’re left shipwrecked on an island haunted by a monster on both land and sea, Brian's survival instincts kick in and it's up to him to help everyone work together and find a way to escape.

One thing is for sure, the smiling man is back and he wants a rematch. And this time Brian is ready to play. 

I zipped right through this one, and my only complaint, really, is that it felt very short, compared the first two.  I read it on a device, and the little ticker said the book ended at 75%, the other 25% being previews of other books.  I didn't want to read the preview of the next book, Empty Smiles since I wanted to get to it all at once.  So I was left wanting more, which isn't a bad thing, but I am glad that I waited so long to read this one, so I don't have too much longer before the next (and final) book is published.  

In fact, I read this one akin to when events were happening in the book, i.e., a Saturday in early May, although I was not at Lake Champlain, sadly.  And it looks like the next one takes place in August, so from this time to then, I will assume poor Ollie is lost in the mirror world.  That's a long ass time!

Because of the cover, I was thinking that this might take place underwater (I mean, if you can do a mirror world, you can do an underwater world I suppose) and I was thinking that was kind of stupid, so I'm glad Arden didn't go for that.  It's also interesting to me how she manages to keep the adults on the other side of these supernatural shenanigans even where they're clearly necessary to keep the plot mostly believable (send four kids out on a boat by themselves? yeah, that would have been a stretch).  It may be a low bar, but I appreciate the effort she put into making it at least semi-realistic in the context of this children's ghost story.  

This one is more of a straight monster story than the previous two.  While, yes, scarecrows are scary, they were more the minions of the Smiling Man.  Here, although I assume the Smiling Man is implicated in the whole set-up, the lake monster is more of a creature-feature, like, uh... Anaconda.  While there's a ghost involved (more than one), he's a nice ghost, who's willing to kill you so as to avoid your slow death by hunger/giant snake.  I like the change of pace, and am (again) impressed at Arden's ability to both incorporate horror tropes, and also switch it up so we don't read the same story four times.  

I would say that this feels less like a complete book, both because it feels shorter than the other two books, but also because it leads into and sets up book four.  We're left on a more significant cliffhanger and frankly, haven't even made it safely back to shore yet when the book ends (and really reckoning with the fact that Phil's uncle was eaten by a lake monster... although as Phil says, it's how he would have wanted to go).  

This is Brian's turn to shine (I assume Phil will narrate the final book in the quartet) and he's okay, but doesn't bring a lot of special abilities to the fore.  It seems like both Coco and Ollie take more of an active approach to the problem while Brian and Phil are mostly along for the ride.  It's not bad, just feels a little bit shallower. 

 

I really wanted to read this one, and so I entered into the spirit of the challenge, by selecting this for a "Sister Lake" exchange instead of a Sister City.  Honestly, I'm pretty excited by the other book too, I'm looking forward to learning more about Lake Toba.

49: Two Books Set in Twin Towns Lakes, aka "Sister Cities Lakes"

Girl A

Girl A

By Abigail Dean

She thought she had escaped her past. But there are some things you can’t outrun.

Lex Gracie doesn't want to think about her family. She doesn't want to think about growing up in her parents' House of Horrors. And she doesn't want to think about her identity as Girl A: the girl who escaped, the eldest sister who freed her older brother and four younger siblings. It's been easy enough to avoid her parents--her father never made it out of the House of Horrors he created, and her mother spent the rest of her life behind bars. But when her mother dies in prison and leaves Lex and her siblings the family home, she can't run from her past any longer. Together with her sister, Evie, Lex intends to turn the home into a force for good. But first she must come to terms with her siblings--and with the childhood they shared.

What begins as a propulsive tale of escape and survival becomes a gripping psychological family story about the shifting alliances and betrayals of sibling relationships--about the secrets our siblings keep, from themselves and each other. Who have each of these siblings become? How do their memories defy or galvanize Lex's own? As Lex pins each sibling down to agree to her family's final act, she discovers how potent the spell of their shared family mythology is, and who among them remains in its thrall and who has truly broken free.

I 'd like to say I knew what the (or "a", I guess, since both are revealed very closely in time) "twist" was from the very beginning, but if I'm being honest, I could only so far as to say that I was mildly irritated that there were supposedly seven rescued people but only six chapters, and that we skipped Boy C and went from Boy B to Boy D.  Normally that would alert someone that yes, Boy C is missing and therefore probably not alive, but I was like, Hey, maybe I can't count, or keep people straight, and I'm just along for the ride, so take me where thou wilt.  So yeah, I was not really surprised that Boy C was summarily dispatched as soon as we knew his name, although it was honestly heartbreaking to know he'd died the moment we knew who he was.  And the other death twist was also not a huge surprise, although I'd been misled by the conversation about wedding guests, and Girl A's comment that Evie and Delilah didn't get along.  

So if it was meant to be a shock, total failure.  But I'm not really sure what the book was going for - was it going for a meditation on what it takes to survive? Or is it a tragedy about how this family ended up in this situation to begin with? I'm going to assume the author borrowed inspiration liberally from the Turpin case, although the story is set in England (part of it takes place in Blackpool). There's other long term child abuse/imprisonment cases but to be honest, most of them come with a side of sexual abuse too, which was not really present as such in Girl A (there is a fadeout of a punishment and the implication that a wooden stake messes up Lex's ability to have children, soooo...probably present? But also unclear). 

I dunno, the book is a fast read, but because of the present and past framing aspect, it feels like we have trouble striking the right tone.  The present stuff is all about getting approval to make the house into a community center, which isn't exactly scintillating stuff. The climax of this storyline is Lex's realization that Evie died, which, since we're viewing it from her perspective and she doesn't know it (because trauma), can't be used as a build-up of tension, so we're sort of waffling about for a good chunk of story there.  

The past storyline is interesting, but we spend a lot of time on the before aspect of things, and don't get into the Binding Days etc., until the very end (although once we were in that part, I very much did not want to be. I had a dreadful foreboding about the baby, and just did not want to get into that).  It felt weird to be reading this as entertainment, like it just reinforced the feeling that anyone reading this is ghoulish.  The Marsh King's Daughter (and Room for that matter) did a better job, I think, of making this type of story enjoyable (for lack of a better word) by avoiding the POV of the primary victim, and focusing on the child who had a very different perspective. And The Marsh King's Daughter went a step further in making the main character kind of unlikeable too, a product of her environment, but still pretty cold to her mother and other people's problems. 

I think I saw that Dean's intention was to focus on the aftermath sort of, the media and attention and not on the crime itself.  If so, then I think we should have had the revelation about Evie much much earlier in the book. It springs from a decision that the psychologist (Dr. K) makes about Lex's recovery and for better or for worse, informs a lot of Lex's decisions and actions, but it comes too late to do much more than wrap everything up. There's a lot that's held back, I assume because of pacing issues (Noah's life, Ethan's participation in the final beating), that if we're making this a story about the ways these families are failed after the initial media onslaught, doesn't do justice to that aspect. G's chapter deals with this the most, but we spend very little time (if any) on Ethan or Delilah's foster situations, and how they decided to separate the kids versus having them do group sessions together. 

  

Overall, it was engrossing and kept me interested, but after I was done I felt gross and unhappy.  I needed something different right away to wash the taste out. Anyway, this may be stretching it, but the wedding is a focal point of the book, and we have a big scene there, so I'm calling it a party book. Kind of ironic, since this is the last book where you'd think, "I bet there's a party scene!" 

38: A Book Featuring a Party.

The Ninth House

The Ninth House

By Leigh Bardugo

Galaxy “Alex” Stern is the most unlikely member of Yale’s freshman class. Raised in the Los Angeles hinterlands by a hippie mom, Alex dropped out of school early and into a world of shady drug-dealer boyfriends, dead-end jobs, and much, much worse. In fact, by age twenty, she is the sole survivor of a horrific, unsolved multiple homicide. Some might say she’s thrown her life away. But at her hospital bed, Alex is offered a second chance: to attend one of the world’s most prestigious universities on a full ride. What’s the catch, and why her?

Still searching for answers, Alex arrives in New Haven tasked by her mysterious benefactors with monitoring the activities of Yale’s secret societies. Their eight windowless “tombs” are the well-known haunts of the rich and powerful, from high-ranking politicos to Wall Street’s biggest players. But their occult activities are more sinister and more extraordinary than any paranoid imagination might conceive. They tamper with forbidden magic. They raise the dead. And, sometimes, they prey on the living.

So, I hate the way this book starts.  We start in "early spring" with our narrator, Alex, banged up and holed up somewhere, and no idea what is going on (the readers, I assume Alex knows what's going on).  Well, okay, I guess we want to build up some tension.  And then we flashback to "winter" and STILL have no idea what's going on, in another chapter without any proper introduction.  So we have to flashback AGAIN, to "fall" and now at least we're getting some introduction as to what on earth is going on, but seriously? That was basically a waste of two whole chapters, and for what? I can't fathom why the author did it, and frankly, it made me seriously pissed off and I decided to switch to another book because of it.  

That being said, if you can get past that, the book does pick up, although takes a while to get moving and it's still a very dark book.  Essentially Galaxy ("Alex") Stern* sees ghosts, and this ability gets her handpicked to succeed Daniel "Darlington" Arlington as resident ghost peace-keeper for Yale's secret societies (and no, I didn't bother keeping the societies straight, and I managed just fine) but shortly after she arrives (aka in the "Winter") Darlington is swallowed up and disappears by some magic hole and she's left to sort of muddle on for herself.  Then she discovers various cover-ups and nasty shenanigans involving murder (as one would expect in a book with a bunch of magic and secret societies).  

I was surprised by the amount of sexual assault in this book!  Haha, not a sentence you read (or write) every day.  I mean, not only the magically coerced rapes, but also just rough lifestyle.  I guess I just wasn't expecting it, not that it was unduly graphic or tastelessly done. LOL "taste" at the idea of drugging and sexual assault.  

The book wraps up the main storyline, but leaves it open-ended for another adventure (like Hench did), and I'm pretty sure Bardugo is already planning more, since Amazon describes this as "Book 1 of Alex Stern". It's hard to judge this one well, since a lot of the Darlington sections felt like a prelude for a sequel in which the gang tries to rescue Darlington from hell (or wherever he went).  They don't add much to Alex's main storyline here, although given that Darlington was disappeared because of an ongoing investigation he was doing into said shenanigans... maybe they should have. 

This was... on the whole, mmmokay.  I don't know that I want to read another one, but I have no regrets on this one.  There was a LOT of New Haven stuff, which maybe would have been more fun/interesting if I'd gone to Yale, or lived in the area.  There's also a fair amount of, well, "building and zoning practices" for lack of a better word.  Part of one of the mysteries is that the secret societies want tombs built on top of nexus points, and no one knows how to make more of them (OR DO THEY?!) and it's a Big Deal if the societies lose the tombs they have.  I mean, I know I've asked for more day to day realism in my fantasies before, but I wasn't really expecting zoning law.  It's definitely not the area of law I would have picked to include first in a fantasy. 

This also had the vibe that Cat Among the Pigeons did, with multiple murderers being revealed at the end.  And SPOILERS, obviously, but Belbalm and Sandow were clearly evil.  I mean, maybe it's just me, but any person of authority in a horror novel is basically a villain, right? I was temporarily misled when Belbalm says her house is a sanctuary, but basically as soon as she invited Alex to a "salon" in, like, Chapter Four, I was like, "Way evil." Unless you're in the 1800s, salons are basically code for "evil rich people".  And maybe even if you are in the 1800s.

Even though the book was a little bit all over the place, what with the flashbacks, and the scatterbrained world building, it still did a good job building up anticipation for the showdown and resolving the various mysteries.  I was reading this on my kindle, so I really noticed the slow versus the fast parts - I would spend what felt like ages reading, and only be a little bit further along, and then it would get really zippy for a bit and then slooooow again. The pacing felt inconsistent, is what I'm trying to say. 

There's definitely some handwaving about how random people/events just happen to unlock huge parts of the mystery here.  I think it's very convenient that one of the mysteries about the magical drugs happened to involve Alex's roommate, who otherwise had no connection to that storyline, but I guess there's some attempt to make it less so, since the bad guy in the roommate story was eventually revealed to just be a convenient fall guy for other villains.  Also how convenient it was that the ghost who just so happens to asks Alex for help looking into his (150 year old) murder turned out to be connected to the other major mystery.  The stars (haha) are really aligning in New Haven, I guess!  

 Ninth House had strong Veronica Mars vibes to it, so maybe that's why I liked it as much as I did, despite its flaws.  [It also had strong The Magicians vibes, which, I hated (but read) the books since I found all of the characters to be unsympathetic whiners and enjoyed the tv show much more]. It had way too many storylines, a lot of unnecessary filler, did a terrible job introducing the characters and world building in the beginning, but for all that, if you want to read a dark magical fantasy about a world wise and weary young lady standing up for The Right Thing against corrupt and powerful people, then here you go!

*Also, how adorable is it that Stern is star in german, so her name is basically "Galaxy Star"? It makes me want to throw something.

Dead Voices

Dead Voices

By Katherine Arden

 

Having survived sinister scarecrows and the malevolent smiling man in Small Spaces, newly minted best friends Ollie, Coco, and Brian are ready to spend a relaxing winter break skiing together with their parents at Mount Hemlock Resort. But when a snowstorm sets in, causing the power to flicker out and the cold to creep closer and closer, the three are forced to settle for hot chocolate and board games by the fire.

Ollie, Coco, and Brian are determined to make the best of being snowed in, but odd things keep happening. Coco is convinced she has seen a ghost, and Ollie is having nightmares about frostbitten girls pleading for help. Then Mr. Voland, a mysterious ghost hunter, arrives in the midst of the storm to investigate the hauntings at Hemlock Lodge. Ollie, Coco, and Brian want to trust him, but Ollie's watch, which once saved them from the smiling man, has a new cautionary message: BEWARE.

With Mr. Voland's help, Ollie, Coco, and Brian reach out to the dead voices at Mount Hemlock. Maybe the ghosts need their help--or maybe not all ghosts can or should be trusted.

 

I picked this one up last fall as a fun aside, and I will be darned if it isn't just as good, if not better than, the first in the series, Small Spaces.  Whatever else Ms. Arden is, she's  a fantastic writer of children's horror.  Not only did it manage to create a brand new story with a new wintery location and spookiness factor (ghosts this time, instead of animated scarecrows), it made me really eager to read the next in the series.  It never felt stale or rehashed, not even (Spoiler Alert!) when we discovered that the bad man was the same smiling man who orchestrated the first go-round.  

 It also really worked that the kids remembered what happened in the first book and really tried to learn from it.  They didn't make stupid choices like splitting up or falling for them ghost tricks.  It's a lesson for us all - no matter how much you know, you can still sometimes be surprised by a supernatural demon and a bunch of old ghosts.  And honestly, even though I knew FOR SURE Mr. Voland was bad news, the lead up didn't aggravate me, but made me question whether I was reading the room right (I was), so it wasn't annoying that the kids weren't more cautious.  

It did throw me a little bit when we started switching narrators between Coco and Ollie, mostly because (AS ALWAYS) I forgot which one was which since I read the first in the series, and I was like, "I remember the main character being... different".  But  we get that wrapped up, and hopefully Brian comes into his own in the next one. 

The ending was also much clearer and less vague than Small Spaces - the whole thing felt really tight, what with the initial scene setting, the trip through the mirror, and the final battle.  Not as much confusion about who was who or how Ollie "won" or anything like that. I told my husband without any shame at all that I was really enjoying this children's horror book, and while I'm sure he thought I was being ridiculous, this is becoming one of my favorite series.  I stalked the author's blog and I'm pretty sure the next one is set in the summer with a LAKE, and it's like, the use of all these classic horror tropes to create this is so thrilling.  I honestly wouldn't have thought it could be done without becoming trite, or cliche, or expected, but it definitely is working so far.

 

Ten Second Reviews

Men to Avoid in Art and in Life

By Nicole Tersigni

This was like the froth on a cup of coffee: fun to contemplate, but when it came to drinking the stuff, basically intangible.  I like the idea, but maybe it's better enjoyed on a scrolling read, rather than in book form.  There's some attempt to match topic and art, but not always successful.  Like I said, briefly enjoyed, and briefly remembered.  

Hex Life: Wicked New Tales of Witchery

Edited by Christopher Golden and Rachel Autumn Deering

Well, first of all, it's very hard to compete with the gold standard of witch stories, which is, obviously, Nine Witch Tales, by, ahem, "Abby Kedabra", published in 1968. But there's always room for second place! 

Okay, I know this is dumb, but I liked the length of the stories.  And I know, I know, that sounds like I'm damning with faint praise, but honestly, if I'm reading short stories, one of things that bugs me is when I get like, five twenty-page stories, and then like, one seventy-page story. That is no longer a story, sir, that is a novella.  Also, as much as I like shakin' things up (to wit: very little) I much prefer orderliness.  Anyway, to the actual review!

Some good ones, some not so good ones. Of the ones that stuck with me, I have to call out Sarah Langan's The Night Nurse, which is definitely NOT something I should have been reading as a pregnant person and Tananarive Due's Last Stop on Route Nine was chilling and spooky, and took me down a Dozier School for Boys hole, which is where I thought the story was going (it wasn't but it was still satisfyingly spooky).  Angela's Slatter's Widows' Walk, Hillary Monahan's Bless Your Heart, Ania Ahlborn's The Debt, Chesya Burke's Haint Me Too (which felt inspired by Beloved, at least in the beginning style), and Theodora Goss', How to Become a Witch-Queen,were all above average, enjoyable witchery stories.  

I felt a bit let down by Helen Marshall's The Nekrolog, and Kristin Dearborn's The Dancer, both of which were really great, but wrapped up without a satisfying resolution. Both felt like they were excerpts from a much larger universe, but even thought the world was interesting and well-done, I wanted something more complete in my stories.

I also feel like calling out Rachel Caine's Home: A Morganville Vampires Story, and Amber Benson (yes, of Buffy fame)'s This Skin, which were my least favorites, by far. Home was part of a larger universe thing, and I don't know if the people were more sympathetic if you read the books, but in the story, this witch comes to town, looking for a drop of blood from the vampires who murdered her and her husband in order to resurrect her husband and her murderers basically are huge assholes to her, basically being all "she's a terrible person, blah blah blah" even though they're the ones who killed her and frankly should be expecting revenge. And then she doesn't even do anything that bad to them, she just leaves once she gets the blood.  This Skin was a let down, again with a protagonist who didn't draw you in, one of those ones who thinks they're soooooooo much smarter than everyone else, and when things don't work out, it's hard to tell if it's because we're meant to believe that the narrator did get away with murder because they're just that smart, or because the narrator is an idiot and has just puffed themselves up into buying their own hype. 

Ten Second Reviews

Semiosis

By Sue Burke

Colonists from Earth wanted the perfect home, but they’ll have to survive on the one they found. They don’t realize another life form watches...and waits...

Only mutual communication can forge an alliance with the planet's sentient species and prove that humans are more than tools.

Ooo, I liked this one a lot, especially in the beginning, which is when it was really out there.  Towards the end I felt like it became more conventional sci-fi-y with a struggle against another colony, but the beginning, where you just don't know what it going to happen next??? Fabulous!  It felt really fresh too, like a whole new idea (although I'm sure that something somewhere had the same germ (haha, no pun intended) of an idea) and even when we do get to the point where they're in constant communication together and they're pretty clear that there isn't going to be another betrayal, it's a well written story.   I'm waffling on reading the second, mostly because the reviews are iffy and frankly, this doesn't need a sequel.  But on the other hand, it was a fun, fascinating world to spend time in, and even just reading about their day-to-day survival was entertaining in Burke's hands. 

The Witches Are Coming

By Lindy West

From the moment powerful men started falling to the #MeToo movement, the lamentations began: this is feminism gone too far, this is injustice, this is a witch hunt. In The Witches Are Coming, firebrand author of the New York Times bestselling memoir and now critically acclaimed Hulu TV series Shrill, Lindy West, turns that refrain on its head. You think this is a witch hunt? Fine. You've got one.

Hmm, what to say on this one? It's undeniably funny, well-written, and passionate.  But so GODDAMN DEPRESSING. Not unrelentingly depressing, or I would have stopped reading.  But notice that West had to end the book on a couple of chapters whose throughline is basically "Don't give up! The world is not a complete dumpster fire yet! There are still some nice things (trees) even though we are rapidly killing them and everyone else and heading towards total annihilation of all that we currently enjoy - oh wait, this is depressing again."  I don't know if the intent was to energize and electrify, but all it did was depress and demoralize.  It was a funny depression though.  Okay, I'm gonna be real here: I am hungover and mentally checked out on this review.  What is my review? That I liked the writing but the message was sad and I would read something else by her, and it had nice short chapters.  Honestly what I should have done was pull quotes because they're all hilarious nuggets, but obviously, I ain't doing that.  I really liked the Adam Sandler chapter, because IT IS VERY TRUE.  WHY IS HE ALWAYS SO MAGICALLY GIFTED?? HE IS AVERAGE, MAKE HIM AVERAGE.

Ten Second Reviews

The Devil in Music

By Kate Ross

Alas, we've come to the end of our series, and I am actually very disappointed that there won't be any more - this was a pleasant delight of a set.  As before, coincidences and lucky chances abound without alluding to them, and it's a very chunky book, but you just don't seem to mind any of that.  I may at some point get the whole set to sit down and enjoy.  I really couldn't say that these are the best books in the world, but I just really had a good time with them, and in the end, isn't that what matters?  Anyway, Julian Kestrel solves another (couple) murders, this time whilst on Lake Como, which did nothing to make me satisfied with my own little plot of land.  Truly the rich are to be envied.

My True Love Gave to Me: Twelve Holiday Stories

Edited by Stephanie Perkins

This was more of a hit or miss for me (which most anthologies are, despite my glowing review of How Long Til Black Future Month? and the, uh, next anthology, below).  It's definitely a YA & love/romance-y one, particularly at the start, which I guess I... wasn't expecting?  Now that I think about it, I think I just picked this one up in the library and didn't really look at reviews or anything, so... surprise! Here's my one sentence reviews:

• Midnights, by Rainbow Rowell: boring, nineteen year olds like each other after several years of being friends.  
• The Lady and the Fox, by Kelly Link: girl falls in love with weird guy she only sees at Christmas if it's snowing.  He's from like, three hundred years ago, so who knows how that culture shock is going to go but let's pretend they have a future together.
• Angels in the Snow, by Matt de la Pena: hispanic guy falls for white girl while he's housesitting at some rich person's place - not bad, but after the previous two, needed something stronger than this.
• Polaris is Where You'll Find Me, by Jenny Han: Um, what the heck did I just read? Young human girl raised up by Santa falls for an elf, but also has a thing where she tells lies about meeting a Scandinavian boy and also really wants to leave the North Pole. This feels like it ends on a cliffhanger, but it's crazy enough that I was starting to get into it.
• It's a Yuletide Miracle, Charlie Brown: Ah, here we run into our series second theme: depressed people.  It kinda came up with Angels in the Snow, and in this one, a young christmas tree salesman is picked up by, and rearranges the furniture for, a young lady whose father left her and her mother because they were his bigamist family.  Fun at the outset but a little too saccharine to finish.
• Your Temporary Santa, by David Levithan: another one about a depressed family, although I wasn't quite clear on what fatherly disaster had befallen this one - another abandonment I guess.  This was fine, less romance because the couple was already together, so it was just someone doing something nice, which is more of what I was looking for in this set.
• Krampuslauf, by Holly Black: trailer park girl invites a demon back to a party, and he turns a cheating boyfriend into a donkey.  Good times! Two thumbs up.
• What the Hell Have You Done, Sophie Roth? by Gayle Forman: lonely city girl gets picked up by black guy on her small town midwest college campus.  I think I gave this one more of a pass because the stories before were a bit better/different.  If this had been placed third or fourth in the book, whoa.
• Beer Buckets and Baby Jesus, by Myra McEntire: Juvenile delinquent and good girl fall for each other during mixed up Christmas Pageant process.  At least this was a little bit funnier than the other boy-meets-girl stories, but also more of the same.
• Welcome to Christmas, CA, by Kiersten White: young teen hates everyone in her small town, until she meets the new diner cook who knows what food everyone needs. I definitely thought that the cook was going to turn out to be like, an elf, or an angel, or some other supernatural being, but he was just another juvenile delinquent, but this one was my favorite by far, especially when she learns that her mother and de facto step-father have actually been scrimping and saving for her and her college fund (so obvious, but it's CHRISTMAS).  Sniff.
•  Star of Bethlehem, by Ally Carter: Young singing sensation switches places with Icelandic girl and flies to Oklahoma where she feels okay about singing Christmas Carols again. This one felt way too long, and I can't help but HATE the very end, where the local judge is telling people that apparently it would be pretty easy to undo the guardianship her manager has over her.  In favor of these people she met a week ago, I guess.  Mmmmhmmm, yeah. 
• The Girl Who Woke the Dreamer, by Laini Taylor: The Strange the Dreamer series has been on my list forever (I think I was waiting to see if more books in the series were coming out???) and this gave me the push to get it. I didn't want to read too closely in case there were spoilers for the book series, but the beginning is really interesting and well written, and it inspired me to check more books by her out, so what else do you want?

Nine Witch Tales

By Abby Kedabra

Man, I LOVED this book when I was growing up, some twenty-five years ago, so I bought an old copy online, and it does NOT disappoint, this book is wild. I really mostly remembered the first story, where the twelve horned witches come in to do some sewing and then send this woman on errands like, "fill up a bucket using this sieve".  But all of them are fun, and short enough you don't get tired of them: haha, the one about Kowashi's mother, who developed an appetite for eating fish, bones and all, and he whacks her on the head and realizes she's a witch demon cat, and then! Casually, at the very end it goes: "Not long after this, Kowashi discovered that the wicked cat had killed his real mother and buried her in the garden." And then it just ends. FIN.  MAJESTIC.  I LOVE IT. And the curious woman who uses the magical ointment and is dragged all over and then wakes up in a barn and gets fired because her employer thinks she's drunk, lol. There's comeuppances and escapes, and each story is a delightfully spooky and scary-but-not-too-scary tale.

 

Ten Second Reviews

Poorly Drawn Lines

By Reza Farazmand

This is a collection of short panel comics by Farazmand, who got his start online (and is still there, I assume).  These are mostly 4-6 panels apiece, with some longer ones mixed in.  They've got that off-the-wall humor which I enjoy, talking animals and inanimate objects, birds judging how well you sing, aliens who just want friendship bracelets, thirty-seven year-old babies with beards, weirdly tall frogs, robots who suck.  It's got a bit of that Far Side influence, but it feels a bit more Dada-esque (yeah, I know shit).  One thing I didn't like was the formatting - if you have a four-panel page, but a six panel comic, for the love of god, just make it smaller and put it on one page!  It makes it weirdly hard to figure out if the small panel is a continuation of the previous page or a new comic.  Same for the eight (or more) panel comics.  When stuff is online first, you don't have the same space restrictions you'd get if they were published in the newspaper.  So they're all different lengths.  But you gotta solve that problem when you publish - and I don't think they've quite cracked the code yet.  But overall, a fun diversion, and a good gift for someone with that absurd sense of humor.

Through The Woods

By Emily Carroll

 

This is sort of the antithesis to Poorly Drawn Lines: short stories instead of panels, arty illustrations instead of block characters, horror instead of comedy, confusing instead of straightforward.  I got this because I wanted some spooky stuff to read, and they were definitely - atmospheric - but I felt like a lot of them were kind of ended the same way: you have a set up with a spooky premise (I killed my brother but he's standing right there drinking, a lady is hearing a chilling song in the floorboards, my friend has a cloud thing that has arteries over her head, my mother warned me about the piano-teeth monster, etc), and then the character takes further action (goes down a hole to follow a monster [in several stories, actually, they should probably stop doing that], cracks open the walls and finds body parts, discovers someone is missing, etc) there's maybe like a little more explanation or clues about what's going on, but mostly not, and then we end with, like an ominous close up (of the monster, of the piano teeth, of the beating heart cloud, etc) but honestly, some of it (most of it) is so confusing, I can't figure out enough of what's going on to be scared.    For example, in the piano teeth one, Emily follows Rebecca down a hole and see her face come off into red worms, and then she leaves and hits her head and comes to back at the house, where she talks Rebecca out of using her body as a sack for Rebecca's red worm babies.  But then at the end, we find out Emily has piano teeth too.  So..... is she already a red worm monster? Did Rebecca change her mind and use her body anyway? It's so weirdly obtuse.  And the one where the brother is killed and then comes back, the narrator follows him down a hole he's been digging, and then sees... someone sleeping on the ground? The wolf the brother killed earlier? The brother is the wolf? Totally unclear. Anyway, beautifully illustrated, but a bit obtuse for me.   

Ten Second Reviews

Anya's Ghost, by Vera Brosgol

Anya could use a friend, but she wasn't expecting to find one at the bottom of the old well she fell into.  Emily has been there for 90 years - she's ready to get back out into the world, and her gratitude towards Anya knows no bounds.  Until Anya begins to realize that Emily may have been in the well for a reason - and Emily doesn't want to go back.  This one, like Be Prepared, takes inspiration from the author's life (although I assume all of the ghost stuff is made up).  Anya is a scholarship teenager at an expensive prep school, trying to navigate relationships, and Emily seems like the answer to a prayer, helping Anya with tests, tracking down the cute boy's class schedule - at first.  But when Anya doesn't like Emily's methods and tries to distance herself from her, Emily threatens even more destruction  - this time on Anya's family.  I don't know if it's the inclusion of ghosts, but this one felt slimmer than Be Prepared, more like a short story than a novel.  It also seemed like it ended really abruptly.  It seemed like the last scene (when Anya and her class are outdoors) was supposed to be connected somehow to Emily, but I couldn't figure out why (are they just out beautifying things? Did Anya tell people where to find Emily's bones? What is it?) and it seems like everything just wraps up really tidily.  While still entertaining, definitely not my pick for Brosgol's finest.

Trading in Danger, by Elizabeth Moon

Kylara Vatta, daughter of one of the great trade and shipping families, has been sent home from the military academy in disgrace.  Her father arranges a new job for her - taking an old ship off for scrap - which should give her some time and space from her embarrassment, and set her up in the family business.  But it's not long before Ky starts to take matters into her own hands, and accidentally winds up in the middle of a planetary war, where she'll have to use all her military training to survive mercenaries, mutinies, and pirates.

One of the Publisher's Weekly reviews for a book in this series says that Moon is great at action and space battles, but it's "too bad she so frequently drowns them in mundane details that provide realism at the expense of entertainment." I could not have said it better.  I like slow sci-fi books that talk about commerce and boring things (how else could I have made it through the Ancillary  series?) but already in Trading in Danger, it feels like we spent a hundred and fifty pages ramping up to action, and then forty pages on the aftermath - planning funerals, reading mail, arranging a new name record for the ship (I am not making any of that up).  I didn't mind it at the beginning, but it definitely feels like the end is unbearably slow paced, like when people (mostly my family, although I'm sure other people felt the same way) complained that The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King movie had like, ten endings that went on for an hour.  It's a weird pacing problem.  The other problem that Publisher's Weekly had, which I definitely agree with, was that things are set up, and then there's no payoff: like this polo match which is alluded to multiple times like it has meaning, and then is just skipped, or the whole ship model kit that Ky receives from one of her old military instructors which has a secret code in it that she just ignores, but then also happens to have the one part she needs later to re-assemble the ship's beacon. That pissed me off.  Come on!  You can't just be like, here's a mysterious package which has a mysterious part, which turns out to be the one part you need, but we're never going to even talk to the sender or mention him again, or even have consequences of using what is clearly a military beacon on this junk ship.

I'm just not quite convinced enough to keep going.  Based on the reviews, although the rest of the series has more action, they're all plagued with similar issues. 

How Long 'Til Black Future Month?

How Long 'Til Black Future Month?

By N.K. Jemisin

N.K. Jemisin is one of the most powerful and acclaimed speculative fiction authors of our time. In the first collection of her short fiction, which includes several never-before-seen stories, Jemisin equally challenges and delights with narratives of destruction, rebirth, and redemption.

Spirits haunt the flooded streets of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In a parallel universe, a utopian society watches our world, trying to learn from our mistakes. A black mother in the Jim Crow South must save her daughter from a fey offering impossible promises. And in the Hugo award-nominated short story "The City Born Great," a young street kid fights to give birth to an old metropolis's soul.

Anyway, this book and a random comment elsewhere made me realize how much I was enjoying these short stories, and the last time I felt like this, which was when reading Connie Willis.  Short stories are tough, man!  I just put a book in the giveaway pile because I read like, four of the ten stories are didn't really get into any of them.  Obviously not all of the ones in a collection are going to be knock-outs for me, but here's some of the ones I liked best:

•  Red Dirt Witch, which combines the fae and Civil Rights Era Alabama,

• L'Alchemista, whose main character is a down-on-her-luck chef in Italy, who is given some magical ingredients,

• Cloud Dragon Skies, about the consequences of interference with nature again after we already fucked it up and then agreed to live with it,

• The Storyteller's Replacement, which uses the framed story to tell a story about a king who eats a dragon heart in order to get a massive hard-on, but karma revisits him in the form of his daughters (somewhat similar to a story by Kate Elliot, whose book of short stories I wasn't into nearly as much)

• The Brides of Heaven, about the interrogation of a woman who, in her desperation to re-seed a male population which has died off, has allowed something...wrong...into their homes

• Walking Awake, which is about a woman who works  at a body replacement facility slowly realizing that she's doing something awful and fighting back,

• Sinners, Saints, Dragon, and Haints, in the City Beneath Still Waters, which is about post-Katrina New Orleans, except with dragons (and sinners and saints and haints and the battle for the City's soul).

Not that the others aren't good - at a minimum, they all do that good sci-fi thing where they tell a story about our world using another world, i.e., The Ones Who Stay and Fight (which is a direct response to The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas, by Ursala K. LeGuin, which I had to look up because I'd never read it) is a reminder that we've simply accepted how fucked up things are, but even in a world that demands cruel things, we don't have to let ourselves be cruel, or simply walk away and wash our hands of those necessary evils.

Or the Narcomancer, which I enjoyed, and which was more straight-on fantasy, but which felt also like the shorter version of a bigger world (which she says in the introduction it was).  Henosis, which is about legacy, combined with a touch of Shirley Jackson. Or The Effluent Engine, which is a steampunk New Orleans spy-action story, set around the time of the Haiti Revolution. I'm telling you, if you like sci-fi or fantasy at all, you gotta read this. Or The Evaluators, about a predator that takes on the shape of those it hunts (which, I'll be honest, only made a little bit of sense to me, but it felt cool).  There's definitely something for everyone. Also a lot of like, pregnancy horror, so I would say not to read it if you're expecting.  Pregnancy is enough horror all on it's own. 


So this was a bit of a last minute add-on because The Woman in the Window got pushed to 2020, and in the spirit of the competition, I decided I would definitely read a book being made into a movie that was actually released in 2019, but when all was said and done, I didn't really want to read The Goldfinch, since I'd already tried A Secret History and hated it, so I decided I would make Where'd You Go, Bernadette? my selection for 01, and move How Long 'Til Black Future Month? into 16.  Long story short, I am very glad I got prodded into Black Future Month, and very sad I read The Woman in the Window which turned about to be for nothing, nothing!


16: A Book With A Question In The Title

The Mere Wife

The Mere Wife

By Maria Dahvana Headley

From the perspective of those who live in Herot Hall, the suburb is a paradise. Picket fences divide buildings—high and gabled—and the community is entirely self-sustaining. Each house has its own fireplace, each fireplace is fitted with a container of lighter fluid, and outside—in lawns and on playgrounds—wildflowers seed themselves in neat rows. But for those who live surreptitiously along Herot Hall’s periphery, the subdivision is a fortress guarded by an intense network of gates, surveillance cameras, and motion-activated lights.

For Willa, the wife of Roger Herot (heir of Herot Hall), life moves at a charmingly slow pace. She flits between mommy groups, playdates, cocktail hour, and dinner parties, always with her son, Dylan, in tow. Meanwhile, in a cave in the mountains just beyond the limits of Herot Hall lives Gren, short for Grendel, as well as his mother, Dana, a former soldier who gave birth as if by chance. Dana didn’t want Gren, didn’t plan Gren, and doesn’t know how she got Gren, but when she returned from war, there he was. When Gren, unaware of the borders erected to keep him at bay, ventures into Herot Hall and runs off with Dylan, Dana’s and Willa’s worlds collide.

I was a little sad when I realized my final post would be on November 7, rather than October 31, but we'll make do somehow.  This was a good final choice in my challenge, I think - I had deliberately set aside The Count of Monte Cristo for my trip, and just hadn't been able to get to this one before I left, but it turned out to be both well written, attention-getting, and "light" (in the sense that the chapters feel short, and even though it's like, three hundred pages, seems like it zips along pretty quickly).

This is a re-telling of Beowulf, which I first (and last) read when the much-lauded Seamus Heaney version came out (I was fifteen, can you tell I was a nerd?), and I did enjoy it quite a bit, although I don't remember much of it now.  I am pretty sure there's some departures from the Beowulf version though, especially in regards to the "kidnapping" of Willa's son Dill, and his later return to Herot Hall and intervention in the fight between Dana and Ben Woolf.

What Headley's accomplished though, is the feel of a modern day monster/fairy tale.  The allusions to Gren's fur and claws (which may, or may not be, as we discover when Gren grows up and Dana begins to realize her experiences shortly after she was released as a prisoner may not be reliable) and the contrast of Willa's stepford wife life with the creeping intrusions made on suburbia by creatures living in a hole in the mountain, gives you the sense of falling into an inevitable dark dream.

It does suffer a little bit from what happens when you use the dream style to narrate your books, which is a case of what happened-ism: like, is diving into the lake a metaphor, or did they actually pilot the whole train into a body of water that drowned everyone? Questions for a closer read than I really care to do!

Anyway, it's been real, PopSugar.  Let's do it again sometime.

12 - A Book Inspired By Mythology, Legend Or Folklore

Vicious

Vicious

By V.E. Schwab

Victor and Eli started out as college roommates―brilliant, arrogant, lonely boys who recognized the same sharpness and ambition in each other. In their senior year, a shared research interest in adrenaline, near-death experiences, and seemingly supernatural events reveals an intriguing possibility: that under the right conditions, someone could develop extraordinary abilities. But when their thesis moves from the academic to the experimental, things go horribly wrong.

Ten years later, Victor breaks out of prison, determined to catch up to his old friend (now foe), aided by a young girl whose reserved nature obscures a stunning ability. Meanwhile, Eli is on a mission to eradicate every other super-powered person that he can find―aside from his sidekick, an enigmatic woman with an unbreakable will. Armed with terrible power on both sides, driven by the memory of betrayal and loss, the archnemeses have set a course for revenge―but who will be left alive at the end?

About a third of the way into the book, I told my fiance that I wasn't sure how much I liked it, as it was "unpleasant".  That's the problem with anti-hero books sometimes - there's nobody in the book that you want to spend time with, or see succeed, so any storyline is going to fall a little flat in the face of your "don't-even-care" -ism.  What happened in Vicious, to make me enjoy it, is that in then later parts of the book, Victor becomes less monstrous and more sympathetic (possibly because we just spend less time inside his head in the second half) and you start rooting for his side to win, if only because Sydney and Mitch are basically innocents in all this (the least bloody hands of the characters, shall we say) and because everyone can agree that a killer who is a religious hypocrite is, like, just the worst.

I don't know that the structure of the book - flipping back and forth from the present to various points in time of the different characters' stories - was necessary, or added anything to the book.  I think the struggle is that you want to create some tension between the "pre-EO" transformation, and the current revenge rampage events, but the problem is that, while necessary to show the relationship between Victor and Eli, the "pre-EO" events are not all that exciting.  It's a lot of Victor being weirdly obsessed with Eli, and, as I mentioned before, it's a fairly unpleasant viewpoint to inhabit.

It's only as we focus more on the final showdown between Eli and Victor that things ramp up, and the book becomes more engrossing.  I will say that although I did enjoy the ultimate resolution and how things worked out, I found it kind of silly that, on the eve of their great battle, both Victor and Eli decide to fill the hours by...tracking down a completely new EO with an unknown skill and looking to recruit or kill him, respectively.  Like, how you do decide that shortly before you face your nemesis is a good time to go hunt and kill some other rando?  Like, "Oh, I've got a few hours to kill.  Let me decompress and prepare by going to a bar and killing someone else." Or conversely, "I have a few hours to kill.  Let me track this rando down and hope that he'll miraculously (a) be useful to me and (b) want something desperately that only I can provide, so as to convince him to join me."

The whole thing felt very deus ex machina, and kind of unnecessary, like, why introduce this new guy at the eleventh hour? But ignoring that (and the original deus ex that involved the two sisters somehow hooking up on opposite sides with Victor and Eli to begin with) it's still fun to watch all the pieces come together - and the small hoodwinking of you as you discover in the final pages what Victor's plan really was, all along.

I was originally thinking I would read the sequel but the reviews have dissuaded me - this stands perfectly well on its own, and no sense in gilding the lily. 


18: A Book About Someone With A Superpower

The Hunger

The Hunger

By Alma Katsu

Evil is invisible, and it is everywhere.

That is the only way to explain the series of misfortunes that have plagued the wagon train known as the Donner Party. Depleted rations, bitter quarrels, and the mysterious death of a little boy have driven the isolated travelers to the brink of madness. Though they dream of what awaits them in the West, long-buried secrets begin to emerge, and dissent among them escalates to the point of murder and chaos. They cannot seem to escape tragedy...or the feelings that someone--or something--is stalking them. Whether it's a curse from the beautiful Tamsen Donner (who some think might be a witch), their ill-advised choice of route through uncharted terrain, or just plain bad luck, the ninety men, women, and children of the Donner Party are heading into one of one of the deadliest and most disastrous Western adventures in American history.

As members of the group begin to disappear, the survivors start to wonder if there really is something disturbing, and hungry, waiting for them in the mountains...and whether the evil that has unfolded around them may have in fact been growing within them all along.

What was incredibly startling to me was how little of The Hunger was made up.  There was so much bad shit going on with that wagon train from Day 1, a supernatural explanation was practically required. Mysterious deaths, fraudulent trail blazers, literal SIGNS telling you to go back?  Honestly, this book is spooky in all the right ways; I had nightmares after reading it.

The Hunger may not be completely surprising (I mean, I did have to tell my thirty-three year old boyfriend what happened to the Donner Party, but I think that's because he emo'd his way through grade school and didn't pay attention in class) but it incorporates real events and horror very seamlessly.  There's a lot of characters involved (there were around 80 members of the Party) but Katsu wisely focuses on just a few narrators.  Some of the ominous forebodings do turn out to be red herrings - Stanton's early dalliance with Tamsen Donner and subsequent significant looks winds up having no bearing on any of the action later.  Nor, in fact, does anything have to do with Tamsen's supposed witchcraft.

Did I guess who the evildoer was?  Um, not really, even though it was perfectly clear from the prologue.  Again, the facts aligned so easily, I'm not even sure how you explain his actions and survival in a non-supernatural way.  That being said, Katsu's job had to have been incredibly hard, to interweave the truth and fiction as well as she did. Although I imagine it helped to have a truth stranger-than-fiction. 

I very much enjoyed it, although for whatever reason I didn't find the last half as quietly engrossing and unsettling as the first half - perhaps because I anticipated death, perhaps because the monster you see is not always as frightening as the one you imagine. There's also relatively little gore, it seems like a lot of it takes place off-page.  All-in-all a very engrossing and semi-unusual horror story, given the setting and characters.  Five (severed and eaten) thumbs up!


38: A Novel Based On A True Story

Comic Bonanza

Here's a round-up of a couple of kid-friendly(ish) comic books I've been reading:

Courtney Crumrin, Vol. 1: Courtney Crumrin & The Night Things

By Ted Naifeh

Courtney's parents have dragged her out to a high-to-do suburb to live with her creepy Great Uncle Aloysius in his spooky old house. She's not only the new kid in school, but she also discovers strange things lurking under her bed.

This one is why I'm calling these "kid-friendly (ish)" emphasis on the "ish".  Courtney is a somewhat darker take on the beginning witchcraft dabbler tale, both figuratively and literally.  I mean, everything is kid-appropriate, but at one point a changeling takes away a baby that Courtney is watching, and although she tries to get it back (being captured and sold herself) her uncle basically tells her in the end, "Forget about trying to get the baby back, these things happen, his parents won't even notice." And they don't!  That was a more chilling story than I expected it to be.  Anyway, these are set up as four short stories, all in black and white.  I would have loved to have them in color, but I suppose it sets the mood.  Courtney herself is an entertaining little curmudgeon.  The last story finds her losing energy, only to realize she's been replaced by a doppelganger who is living her life (and doing much better at it apparently).  In the final confrontation, you think that Courtney will let the doppelganger just take over since everyone seems to prefer it to her, but she comes out swinging hard with a "fuck everyone else, I'm a difficult and unpleasant person, and that's exactly how I want to be!" that completely saps the doppelganger.  Good on you, Courtney.  I would never want to meet you in real life, but bless your confidence. 

Goldie Vance Vol. 1

By Hope Larson and Brittney Williams

Sixteen-year-old Marigold “Goldie” Vance lives at a Florida resort with her dad, who manages the place. Her mom, who divorced her dad years ago, works as a live mermaid at a club downtown. Goldie has an insatiable curiosity, which explains her dream to one day become the hotel’s in-house detective. When Charles, the current detective, encounters a case he can’t crack, he agrees to mentor Goldie in exchange for her help solving the mystery.

This one is a lot of fun to read, colorful, bouncy, basically Nancy Drew in 60s Florida, if Nancy weren't so lily white.   Whereas Courtney was a loner and preferred it that way, Goldie has a colorful cast of supporting characters, including friends, enemies, potential ladyfriends, adults who seem to exist mainly for spoiling fun, and also: aliens!  Yes, I was really getting into the story when it took an abrupt right turn into Martian colony weirdness.  This was set up so the mini-stories merged into a longer connected story, so we'll have to see if all of the mysteries end like that.  It was a little off-putting, but I (a) enjoyed the rest of it enough to keep reading and (b) can kind of see where they're going with the 60s cold war and space-focus (one of Goldie's friends wants to be an astronaut) so I will allow it for now.

The Lost Path

By Amélie Fléchais

Three young boys set off from Camp Happiness, map in hand, determined to be the first to find the treasure before anyone else. But the shortcut they take leads to something far more spectacular and sinister! All manner of magical beasties live in these woods, and the kids find themselves caught between warring Forest Spirits. Will the three boys find their way out of trouble? Get your map and ready, set, go!

This was something I picked up and bought during my sojourn on Free Comic Book Day solely because of how beautiful it was, and that definitely panned out.  It is gorgeous, done in multiple color and drawing styles.  I would have liked something 100% in color, just because the coloring that was there was so beautiful, but, I acknowledge that (like Courtney) the black and white was an appropriate style choice for those sections - when the three boys are simply wandering in the woods.   I agree with a lot of other reviewers that felt the story-line was lacking in comparison to the illustration.  The story is good, but it felt oddly incomplete and only half explained.  We wind up in the middle of fighting forest spirits, but it was hard to tell who was on what side and why.  A crown/hat becomes a Chekov's Gun that never goes off, and when I got done, I went to look if this was intended to be a stand-alone story or not.  So far it is, which is a let-down.  Overall, a beautiful, but otherwise somewhat empty, little book. 

Small Spaces

Small Spaces

By Katherine Arden

After suffering a tragic loss, eleven-year-old Ollie only finds solace in books. So when she happens upon a crazed woman at the river threatening to throw a book into the water, Ollie doesn't think--she just acts, stealing the book and running away. As she begins to read the slender volume, Ollie discovers a chilling story about a girl named Beth, the two brothers who both loved her, and a peculiar deal made with "the smiling man," a sinister specter who grants your most tightly held wish, but only for the ultimate price.

Ollie is captivated by the tale until her school trip the next day to Smoke Hollow, a local farm with a haunting history all its own. There she stumbles upon the graves of the very people she's been reading about. Could it be the story about the smiling man is true? Ollie doesn't have too long to think about the answer to that. On the way home, the school bus breaks down, sending their teacher back to the farm for help. But the strange bus driver has some advice for the kids left behind in his care: "Best get moving. At nightfall they'll come for the rest of you." Nightfall is, indeed, fast descending when Ollie's previously broken digital wristwatch, a keepsake reminder of better times, begins a startling countdown and delivers a terrifying message: RUN.

Only Ollie and two of her classmates heed the bus driver's warning. As the trio head out into the woods--bordered by a field of scarecrows that seem to be watching them--the bus driver has just one final piece of advice for Ollie and her friends: "Avoid large places. Keep to small."

I do think that children's stories (and children, really) have a better grasp on visceral horror.  Yes, it's terrifying to be chased by a masked killer, but you know what will scar you for life? A man with hot dogs for fingers, with the ends split out.  Just ask me and my brother, courtesy of Nothing But Trouble.  It's like what the Counting Crows asked: We were perfect when we started/I've been wondering where we've gone" - the answer is Nothing But Trouble, my friend.  Even thinking of it today makes me want to vomit.  Now that's horror.  Or, conversely, a scarecrow skinning an old farmer. Shoutout to Harold!  Adult horror is about real things, twisted, or targeting you.  Children's horror is about that stomach-churning feeling you have before the figure turns and you realize that the person's hand you've been holding isn't your mother after all.

That's the good thing about it.  However, it can be hard to sustain for long periods.  I do think that the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark series is the apex of children's horror, as they manage to get in, get the job done, and get out in like, ten pages or less.  Books are much harder to keep tense for that length of time, although I do think there are some recent good ones: Boneshaker, which is definitely more children's than YA, and bears some similarities to the classic Something Wicked This Way Comes, as it plays on the fear of the carnival (and come on, who isn't scared of carnivals?  I once got extremely ripped off by a carny, and frankly was lucky not to face worse).  In the older category, I think The Diviners created a bogeyman that felt like he hadn't been created by Bray at all but stolen from our collective imagination.  I don't think the sequels were as successful in that, though.

Anyway, three paragraphs in, maybe I'll finally start talking about Small Spaces.  It's good!  It is a horror story, or a ghost story, but not a horror ghost story, because it's also about grieving and accepting that sometimes, it's just better not to raise the dead.  (With all due respect to Stephen King and Buffy, at least Ollie has the sense to figure that out before the dead get raised).

I really like Arden's work in the Winternight Trilogy, which I've reviewed here earlier, and Small Spaces is also well written and spooky.  The biggest hurdle is keeping the tension up throughout the entire book.  It's about two hundred pages, and the first half is a lot of set up - Ollie's mother's death, Ollie's frustration with the school system and her fellow classmates, her taking the book and getting wrapped up in it, and then increasingly concerned during the school trip to the farm.  I don't know if the pacing is entirely successful, although I don't think a longer book is the answer. It was very nicely atmospheric (can't go wrong with fog and scarecrows, as Harold knows) and would be a fun read on an autumn night.  The messages on her watch also allow Arden to keep her characters moving forward without forcing too much guesswork or unrealistic knowledge on them - the obviousness of the deus ex machina somehow makes it more palatable.

I also don't know that it quite coalesced at the end - she poured some water on the scarecrows, and that turned them to dust, but then it also started raining?  It's a little glossed over, while I need everything spelled out.  It also wasn't clear to me why this one particular family kept running afoul of the Man even though at the end it seemed like he would do a deal with anyone, and if anyone would be reluctant to make bargains, you'd think it would be the descendants of the ones who had already faced him and lost.

 On the whole though, it's a clever, well-written addition to the pantheon of children's horror.  It's also (as you'll see in other reviews) a lovely coming to terms with grief and letting someone go, and finding joy in life again. Ollie's mother's death haunts Ollie, but as everyone could stand to learn as a child: just because it's a spook, doesn't make it bad.  Embrace your inner demon!

36: A Ghost Story

I'll Be Gone In The Dark

I'll Be Gone In The Dark

By Michelle McNamara

For more than ten years, a mysterious and violent predator committed fifty sexual assaults in Northern California before moving south, where he perpetrated ten sadistic murders. Then he disappeared, eluding capture by multiple police forces and some of the best detectives in the area.

Three decades later, Michelle McNamara, a true crime journalist who created the popular website TrueCrimeDiary.com, was determined to find the violent psychopath she called "the Golden State Killer." Michelle pored over police reports, interviewed victims, and embedded herself in the online communities that were as obsessed with the case as she was.

I’ll Be Gone in the Dark—the masterpiece McNamara was writing at the time of her sudden death—offers an atmospheric snapshot of a moment in American history and a chilling account of a criminal mastermind and the wreckage he left behind. It is also a portrait of a woman’s obsession and her unflagging pursuit of the truth. Utterly original and compelling, it has been hailed as a modern true crime classic—one which fulfilled Michelle's dream: helping unmask the Golden State Killer.

In looking for a posthumous book, it would be hard to find one with an odder story than this one: published in January 2018, two years after Michelle McNamara dies, having spent years on a decades-old cold case, in April 2018 a suspect is arrested and charged for a string of more than 50 rapes and 12 murders stretching over fifteen towns.

I'll Be Gone starts promisingly and thoughfully, as McNamara talks about needing empathy in order to write about true crime without being lurid or morbid or unfairly brutal to its survivors, victims, and their families.  I think that her empathy is strength of the book, and it shines most clearly in the early chapters, which walk us through several of the crimes.  The downside sadly, is the unfinished premise: the lack of finality or cohesiveness saps vitality in the later chapters.  Obviously McNamara knew an open-ended true crime mystery was a hard sell: the last chapter, completed by several others who assisted and worked with her, mentions her planned strategy for resolution.  But without her to actually write it, it comes off only half-formed.

The other issue I had with it is something else which may or may not be the author's fault: the seemingly random and non-chronological order of events and chapters.  It moves from rapes to murders and back without any real rhyme or reason, making the patterns that McNamara talks about harder to pin down or follow.  For example, a discussion about "escalation" (i.e., the idea of moving from solo women to couples and from rapes to murders indicates a committed step into riskier and more brutal crimes) loses potency since we as readers can't follow the escalating steps that the criminal took, switchbacking as we do.  I'm not sure if there was a reason for why the chapters are ordered the way that they are, but a more orderly chronological path would go a long ways towards clarity. And I hate to sound uncaring, but because the crimes did escalate the way they did, there would be constant and maintained tension through the entire book, not just the first half.

This book also comes in the midst of a broader examination of how we, the public, consume these stories: for entertainment, titillation, thrills, satisfaction, or what-have-you.  The recent Ted Bundy films (one a documentary, the other a fictionalized retelling from a bystander's point of view), the Serial podcast and its various offshoots and copycats, all of this implicates us.  What steps are we taking to ensure that these terrible crimes are treated appropriately in their re-tellings?  What is appropriate? Who has the right to these stories? And the popular ethical question right now: what do we owe each other?  I've been reading various true-crime books for years, and while I'm not taking on cold files as a personal hobby, it can become easy to lose sight of the individuals in a blur of faces while the focus falls onto the criminal. 

McNamara wrestled with this idea as well, acknowledging the morbid and macabre side to what was basically a hobby (an obsessive one, clearly) for her.  Even as she acknowledges it though, she's picking up case files from contacts she met in chatrooms, going through old yearbooks and buying strangers' jewelry on ebay, the modern equivalent to peeking in windows and reading other people's mail. At what point is this too much? Does intent matter? Nowadays, the idea of being a thoughtful consumer is gaining more traction. What obligations do we have to avoid exploitative works?

As for the capper to the story, the arrest and identification of a DNA match - it's odd, after reading I'll Be Gone, it seems too easy somehow. After all the evidence, all the manpower, in the end it just took an internet database, and all these (amateur and professional) sleuths changed nothing - time, and scientific advances, accomplished that which hours and years of dedication could not.


13: A Book Published Posthumously

Red Moon

Red Moon, by Benjamin Percy

When government agents kick down Claire Forrester's front door and murder her parents, Claire realizes just how different she is. 

Patrick Gamble was nothing special until the day he got on a plane and hours later stepped off of it, the only passenger left alive, a hero.

Chase Williams has sworn to protect the people of the United States from the menace in their midst, but he is becoming the very thing he has promised to destroy.

So far, the threat has been controlled by laws and violence and drugs.  But the night of the red moon is coming, when an unrecognizable world will emerge and the battle for humanity will begin.  

Okay, since the jacket isn't real helpful, here is a brief synopsis of Red Moon: a prion (which you may remember from Michael Crichton's sequel to Jurassic Park, Lost World (or from real life, if you're into that instead of sci-fi)) infection spreads throughout the world's population, going back to the 700s or so, so that in the alternative present-day, the presentation of the disease, lycan, has led to an uneasy semi-stalemate between the two populations.  Percy has substituted key events in world history with lycan equivalents, from the settlement of a lycan-only home territory in the 1940s and 50s, to a lycan (rather than Weather Underground) Days of Rage in 1969.  Now, two young people, one the daughter of revolutionaries, the other the son of a man working towards a vaccine, and the sole survivor of a lycan terror attack on a plane (alterna- 9/11) find themselves trying to survive and navigate the impending clash of cultures. 

It's an interesting idea - looking at the birth and growth of our own world's turn towards suicide killers, revolutionaries rather than armies, and decades-long guerilla warfare through the lens of werewolves - but the book doesn't quite coalesce.  For one thing, it's all a little too pat.  Percy's substitutions - lycan Haymarket for Haymarket, lycan Tounela for Israel/Palestine and so on - act more as a sci-fi gimmick than a plausible history of his world.  Our own history happened for various complicated reasons - you can't just substitute werewolves for one half of every battle and think that's sufficient. I mean, the Weather Underground had ties to communism, civil rights, the Vietnam War, and other revolutions across the world, and in Red Moon, it's basically just...lycanthropy.  Which begs the question (never really answered) - has everything else happened as we know it have happened?  Was there a Vietnam War?  A Korean War?  What about McCarthyism?  How about the Cuban Missile Crisis?  Are we to assume that some form of those momentous US events happened, but always with lycans on the other side?  Perhaps Percy expects us to draw from our own knowledge of history the belief that this all followed and happened naturally, but given the changes he's presented, I want to know how the WUO (here called the Revolution) started in Red Moon. As Marmaduke says in one what may be one of the worst movies ever made, "How did we come to this, Phil?"

Speaking of plausibility, I may not have traveled the Pacific Northwest extensively, but I'm pretty sure it's not the sort of place where people are constantly running into each other by happenstance.  I mean, in the last fifty pages of the book, Patrick finds his father's old vaccine co-worker, then runs into Claire after like, a two year absence, right when he's about to be airlifted out with the vaccine, and then they (and the band of angry Hispanic people that - you know what, don't even ask) get attacked by the President and government agent who killed Claire's parents just happens to be along for that ride as well and tracks Claire down in a final showdown. Really?  All  those people just happened to be in the same place at one time?  I mean, that's not even counting the way that Patrick and Claire met in the first place, or the way that Patrick literally stumbled across his MIA father while walking back to his military base.  If all I had to go on was Red Moon, I would pretty much think that the West Coast (not to mention the Russian/Finish border area) was about ten square miles, and had a population of 2,000, the way people keep running into each other.  And you may think that asking for plausibility in an alternate werewolf universe is stupid, but why go to the trouble of creating this setting, and making it so "gritty" and then being like, "And now I'm going to make all my main, secondary, and tertiary characters meet up!"  And the way that, like Rasputin before them, many of his characters are absolutely immune to bullets, stabbings, and vicious animal attacks.  It's like playing a game on cheat mode.  Not that characters don't die.  They do.  But like, some of these people, *coughPUCKcough* should really be succumbing to the throat-stabbing, multiple gunshot wound injuries they're sustaining here. 

And to top it off, after all this semi-commentary on the rise of the radical within, the book ends with a pure sci-fi/thriller moment.  I guess it is not entirely out of tone, but after all the build up, you kinda expect that the denouement will be more than just some impossible-to-kill villain sprinkling poison in your corn flakes.  At the very least, let the vaccine out and get the inevitable clash of those who are poisoned with those who seek treatment.  Maybe Percy thought that would echo too much the course of the X-Men movies, which has may of the same themes (but, oddly enough, in a more appropriate fashion - at least it doesn't pretend above its station) and has the same "if we can't beat 'em, make 'em just like us" plan.  But instead, after the great battle over the vaccine, we're left watching Patrick take the last dose, and knowing that it's all going to be irrelevant shortly anyway, since we'll all be lycan in a few months.  Or, I dunno, dead, I guess?  It was hard to figure that out, since they poisoned the original lycans before grinding up their bones to make the bread, and that stuff probably really travels through the food chain.  Like mercury poisoning.  It also begs the question - why did they bomb the shit out of the Tri-Cities if they were just going to infect everyone anyway?  Wouldn't a mass-scale infection like that be easier to spread if your infrastructure hadn't just had a bomb dropped on it?  Don't we want roads and shit to be working, and the military force safely focused on another country?

Percy's writing in Red Moon isn't bad - a little too simile filled, too descriptive-heavy, for my taste, but it does the job of getting the mood across very well.  Everything is ominous - it's not just blonde hair, it's seaweed spread across the beach at low tide, all the animals are all meaty or sinewy, voices are mucousy, glass splinters, adrenaline stabs, and mountains rise like fangs.  I think that if you want to enjoy Red Moon, it needs to be read for what it is - an alternative werewolf  history/thriller - rather than what it could be - sharp-edged commentary on our own political morass.  It's fairly gruesome, but mostly earned.  I'm just wishing that it made a bit more sense. 

EEEEEEEEBOLA! Double Header

Outbreak, by Robin Cook

A gripping medical drama that focuses on outbreaks of Ebola Hemorrhagic Fever, a deadly virus. Dr. Melissa Blumenthal, a Centers for Disease Control investigator, is thrust into the center of each seemingly unrelated outbreak. She slowly unravels the mystery of the virus and the conspiracy of doctors behind the growing crisis. (From School Library Journal)

The Hot Zone, By Richard Preston

The virus kills nine out of ten of its victims so quickly and gruesomely that even biohazard experts are terrified.  It is airborne, it is extremely contagious, and it is about to burn through the suburbs of a major American city.  Is there any way to stop it?

In the winter of 1989, at an Army research facility outside Washington, D.C., this doomsday scenario seemed like a real possibility.  A SWAT team of soldiers and scientists wearing biohazard space suits had been organized to stop the outbreak of an exotic "hot" virus.  The grim operation went on in secret for eighteen days, under dangerous conditions for which there was no precedent. 

OOooo, one of these books is not like the other!  In the sense that Outbreak is fiction, and also, not very good, whereas The Hot Zone is non-fiction, and nightmarish.  I checked out Outbreak because I was in the mood for a mystery thriller, and I guess in that sense Outbreak lived up to the hope.  But the premise collapses in on itself about two-thirds of the way in, and the terrible, horrible, no-good ending is just....awful.  But I was intrigued by the opening chapter of Outbreak, which deals with the original Zaire Ebola outbreak, so I decided to get The Hot Zone, which goes into the history of the virus in more detail, and I was not disappointed in that.  But let me back up.


Outbreak is about a woman in the CDC who gets sent on missions to contain what turn out to be Ebola outbreaks in cities around the U.S.  We meet her CDC pals, the two guys she's hooking up with, her boss, and the first victim of the outbreak.  Then all hell breaks loose.  That part is fine.  It's a mystery!  Why is Ebola infecting the index cases?  So many questions!  Then.  THEN.  It begins to go off the rails.  First, her boss sexually harasses her.  Big-time.  This guy, (Dubchek) tells her his wife is dead, then asks if she's dating anyone, and she says no, and he's all, let's get back to work, then:

That sounded good to Marissa.  She stood up and went over to the coffee table to pick up her papers.  As she straightened up, she realized that Dubchek had come up behind her.  Before she could react, he put his hands on her shoulders and turned her around.  The action so surprised her that she stood frozen.  For a brief moment their lips met.  Then she pulled away, her papers dropping to the floor.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I wasn't planning that at all, but ever since you arrived at CDC I've been tempted to do that.  God knows I don't believe in dating anyone I work with, but it's the first time since my wife died that I've really been interested in a woman.  You don't look like her at all - Jane was tall and blond - but you have that same enthusiasm for your work.  She was a musician, and when she played well, she had that exact same expression I've seen you get."

Marissa was silent.  She knew she was being mean, that Dubchek certainly had not been harassing her, but she felt embarrassed and awkward, and was unwilling to say something to ease over the incident.

"Marissa," he said gently, "I'm telling you that I'd like to take you out when we get back to Atlanta, but if you're involved with Ralph or just don't want to . . ." his voice trailed off.

Marissa bent down and picked up her notes. "If we're going back to the hospital, we'd better get going now," she said curtly.

He stiffly followed her to the elevator.  Later, sitting silently in her rent-a-car, Marissa berated herself.  [Dubchek] was the most attractive man she'd met since Roger.  Why had she behaved so unreasonably?

Like, what just happened here?  That was definitely harassment.  That feeling of embarrassment and awkwardness?  Is because your boss hit on you and you are now in the awful position of having to say no to someone with control over your job. The only unreasonable thing you did was not immediately get on the horn and get this sleaze written up.

THEN.  Her boss is an absolute DICK.  Since she "behaved so unreasonably," he ignores her when she's working and trying to talk over the details of the outbreaks with him, so that she can't do her job properly (which is to assess and control the situation and work out how it started), he refuses to allow her access to the lab which might answer some of her questions on the basis that she's "not qualified" (i.e., hasn't touched his dick), hangs up on her in the middle of work calls, and is a general all-around asshole.  Meanwhile, Marissa doesn't report him to HR, instead, she spends the book alternately kicking herself because that Dubchek, he's so dreamy!  Why didn't she take him up on his super offer!  And then believing that he's the one who's setting the Ebola loose, then, once she founds out (spoiler!) that he's not, she does this:

"So when will you be coming back to the CDC?" asked Dubchek.  "We've already gotten you clearance for the maximum containment lab." This time there was no doubt about his grin. "No one relished the thought of your stumbling around in there at night anymore."

Marissa blushed in spite of herself. "I haven't decided yet.  I'm actually considering going back into pediatrics."

"Back to Boston?" Dubchek's face fell.

"It will be a loss to the field," said Dr. Fakkry.  "You've become an international epidemiological hero."

"I'll give it more thought," promised Marissa.  "But even if I do go back to pediatrics, I'm planning on staying in Atlanta." She nuzzled her new puppy.  There was a pause, then she added, "But I've one request."

"If we can be of any help..." said Dr. Fakkry.

Marissa shook her head.  "Only [Dubchek] can help on this one.  Whether I go back to pediatrics or not I was hoping he'd ask me to dinner again."

Dubchek was taken off guard.  Then, laughing at Fakkry's bemused expression, he leaned over and hugged Marissa to his side.

WHOA.  I was - somewhat - prepared for this, having read reviews of Outbreak but COME ON.  WHAT THE FUCK, ROBIN COOK?  This guy deserved to be reported to his superiors for what he did, and you decide to hit on him in front of another work colleague?  Can't say you don't belong together, I guess.  PLUS, this was after she used one of her hook-ups for his connections to the lab (repeatedly) and then when he put his foot down on that (because she kept causing problems) she was like, I think you're the one who is killing all these people. Later, when they break up, and Dubchek decides to get her fired in revenge, you can't say she wasn't warned. 

God, the whole plot just didn't make sense.  The doctors were being murdered because they were HMO hospitals?  Seriously?  There's such a problem with pre-pay medical services?  Plus, if everyone else was on the corporate Board of Doom, how come (spoiler!) Ralph, her other hook-up, wasn't?  I mean, he was clearly in on it.  Was his name not in the records for any good reason, or just because it would have made the book even less suspenseful?  And how come she kept announcing where she was going even though she knew people were following her? And she would announce it to the bad guys, KNOWING they were the bad guys (as opposed to when she'd tell the guys she thought were good, but were actually bad) and then be all surprised when hired assassins show up at her next destination.

AND!  When she got hit with the Ebola gun, then couldn't get to the "antibodies" in time, so she was just like, "Well, guess I'm going to...not check in to a hospital for treatment or sequester myself, but instead travel as widely as possible so that if I am infected,  I can kill the maximum number of people."  What an asshole.

Although, to be fair, that is apparently what REAL PEOPLE do in outbreaks, too.  Let's segue into The Hot Zone! Question time!  Did you know that Ebola is approximately sixteen times more deadly than yellow fever? Did you know that it has no cure, no inoculation, no antibodies, and no treatment? Did you know that your insides liquify and you can vomit so much black miasma that the skin on your tongue starts to come off? Did you know that I had terrible terrible dreams after reading The Hot Zone?  Are you surprised by that?

The Hot Zone is a fascinating book about a real outbreak of a (thankfully, non-deadly to humans) strain of Ebola near Washington, D.C.  It's kind of an oddly structured book, since the first couple of sections are about viral hemorrhagic fevers in general, their entry into the modern world, and basically setting the stage for why we're all so severely fucked if Ebola goes airborne (which, it.. kinda already is, to some degree).

The strain that lies at the heart of The Hot Zone was, like the prior known strains of Ebola and Marburg, initially found in primates.  Once discovered in the monkey house, it's interesting to see how everyone reacted: INAPPROPRIATELY.  Hand to god, these two lab technicians sniffed a petri dish full of ebola, and then when they found out what it was they were like, "Uh, I'm not going to say anything.  If I feel sick, maybe I'll check myself in to the hospital then."  SERIOUSLY.  Reading The Hot Zone made me terribly afraid of our quarantine measures.  People who should have known better: doctors, nurses, people who work with these contagious, deadly viruses, all of them, completely disregarded others' safety in the interest of not disrupting their own plans.  Not a single person 'fessed up to possible infection even after: blood got into "space suits" (used to protect against contamination), sniffing ebola, operating on ebola victims.  The one person who was kind of thoughtful about the human race was a man who, after possibly getting infected in a Sudan outbreak, decided to stay behind and keep working on saving lives.  After he never developed symptoms, he went back home again.  But no else did.  They all decided to take the risk that this unknown strain of Ebola could infect and decimate the population.

Which, thankfully, it did not.  But it does concern me that there's this apparent tendency to just - go on like nothing's happened.  I guess some of the reasoning is that if you anticipate it, Ebola isn't as contagious in the early stages, so you can always check yourself in later.  But what a risk to take, not just for you, but for people around you.  I was discussing this with my mother, who mentioned that she read a book that said something similar happened with Typhoid Mary - she wasn't originally restrained, but simply asked not to be a cook anymore.  She left her job, but came back because she didn't like being a laundress, apparently still not quite connecting the dots that led to her killing and harming a number of people.  Asymptomatic carriers are real things, and the disregard of safety by people who would be expected to know better was one of the scarier parts of the book.

Not to be diminished, of course, by the descriptions of the disease on physical flesh.  I found this to be morbidly fascinating.  I simply had never heard of the effects and the danger of Ebola, I guess I thought it was more like, malaria, or yellow fever, or japanese encephalitis, any one of those strange diseases that you plan around when taking trips (although maybe I should have shelled out for that vaccine after all!). The practitioners and people who do work to ensure that the infected are cared for and risk their lives are to be commended.  Certainly there are brave people in The Hot Zone, who walked into a steaming zoo of Ebola to contain and prevent contagion.  It's an interesting, fascinating book, one which I have taken to bringing up in all my conversations this last week.  "Oh, you live near Washington, D.C.?  Did you know they had an Ebola outbreak?" "You know what Ebola does to you?  No?  Let me tell you!"

Good reading, and good dreaming.