Book Review

 I wound up checking out Paul Tremblay's Horror Movie since it was on a lit of suggested books based on stuff I've been reviewing. Saw that he write a book I heard good things about but already knew the ending to, and figured I'd give this one a try.

Let me see if I can explain this book. Our narrator is never named, so I, like probably everyone else, thinks of him as The Thin Kid, the name of his character in the movie that forms the central point of the book. We spend the book bouncing back and forth through time, with a reboot/remake of a movie that never really got released, titled Horror Movie. Seems at some point, Valentina, the director, edited and released 3 scenes from the movie on YouTube and dumped a PDF of the script in a few horror forums, and it got interest in the movie going. In the past, TTK narrates the filming of the movie, and we get excerpts of the shooting script. The script is art house horror, with everyone playing roles named after the actor, one murder scene involving a 5 minute shot of an empty doorway, lots of notes from Cleo (the screenwriter) about what is actually supposed to be implied from each shot, and how she thinks the audience will react. Shortened down, 3 kids lead a 4th to an abandoned school, make him wear a mask, and torture him. He eventually becomes a masked killer who turns on his creators, eventually vanishing into the shadows under the survivor's bed. 

Problem being there were problems on the shoot, including TTK actually getting his pinky chopped off in real life, and ya know, an accidental chainsaw death during filming the final scene. 

 Or was there?

A few passages suggest TTK is a very unreliable narrator. (Add to the conceit here, he's supposedly dictating the narrative as an audiobook.) He discusses having his finger chopped off during filming, but then discusses someone else chopping it off much later in the timeline. Music listed in the script wasn't written when the script was released, suggesting the person who leaked it had done some revisions. Stuff like that. Frankly, about the only narration that feels honest in here by the time we get to the end is his description of signing autographs at a Horror Convention. (One gets the distinct sense the author was relaying his own experiences through the narrator here, minus the whole getting confronted about the missing finger thing.) And the ending... Well, I guess it fits in with the original movie script about finding the meaning for yourself, as much as figuring out how much of the final chapter you're willing to take as honest has meaning. 

I enjoyed this one, even if it did leave me with more questions than answers, but I think that was the point of this narrative. Worth checking out if you're inclined.

Once again, I got behind

 Evidently Valdemar (book 3 of Mercedes Lackey's The Founding of Valdemar trilogy) came out in 2023, and I missed it. Well, that has been remedied, and I can now say I have finished the story of how Baron Kordas of of the Duchy of Valdemar became King Kordas of Valdemar, First of his name. 

The book picks up roughly ten years after the last book, with the remnants of the escape living in what they're calling Haven. While many people who came on the journey either stayed at the lake or moved elsewhere, the remnants are fairly well organized and establishing a kingdom. The Hawkbrothers are less present, but still able to be in contact. An Adept of not quite known hostility is north of the kingdom, running their own city, and absorbing some of the groups unhappy with Valdemar. 

We get a lot of watching the children grow into their roles, and Kordas does eventually deign to let them crown him King, against his better wishes. This leads into a very strange magical firework show against the shields, which in turn leads to Valdemar's legendary prayer that births the Companions. Amusingly, the first companions share some information that later on in the timeline Valdemar Heralds don't get until much later. 

Speaking of, the Adept turns out to be a missing Hawkbrother Prodigy who vanished after learning her first Fire spell. (AKA tying it in with Mage Winds, where we find out this was the legendary Ma'ar's trick to eternal life.) 

It's a really fun and quick read, although it is very much a Lackey Valdemar novel. You know what you'e in for when you pick it up.

Reform School Girls

 Grady Hendrix is one of the authors I enjoy reading as soon as I find out a new book is available, which is amusing, since a few of his listed beta readers are authors I don't understand the appeal of particularly. 

His last book was really nerve touchy though, and I found this one hitting a few nerves I didn't know I had, which indeed heightened my enjoyment,other than wanting to slap a few characters. 

Witchcraft for Wayward Girls is set in 1970, with unwed mothers from the south arriving in Saint Augustine, Florida, to deliver their babies for waiting adoptive parents. (I know one of the comments I read prior to reading this was wondering how a male author was going to tackle this subject matter. While I can't comment from experience here, he seems to do well with it.) Neva, our major focus character, arrive at the home and is promptly assigned the name Fern. (The mistress of the home, Miss Wellwood, assigns plant names to all the new arrivals, discouraging the girls from knowing anything about their lives outside their shame.) We have a nurse on sight, a doctor who does wellness exams through the pregnancy, a housekeeper/cook and her sister, and a social worker as staff. every two week, Miss Parcae comes with the Bookmobile. The girls don't leave the home until it's time to go "Downtown", and are discouraged from the woods, due to the murderous hippie encampment  back there.

About a third of the way through, Miss Parcae slips Fern How to be a Groovy Witch, with instructions to keep it hidden from the adults. The first thing the coven of four Wayward girls does is cast a spell allowing Zinnia (the only black girl at the home; the cook is black, but she is a bit out of child bearing years. Zinnia is also almost force to stay in the home's attic until hippie Rose switches rooms with her) to transfer her morning sickness to the doctor. (This is actually pretty funny, and doc kind of deserves it; he keeps insisting the sickness is mental and a sign of her compromised morals.) Then it gets more serious, as we find out Holly, the youngest, is bearing her pastor's baby, and the pastor is planning on adopting the baby with his wife so he can continue molesting Holly and her daughter. 

Zinnia is unhappy with the pact the coven signed, and keeps looking for ways to help Holly without magic. Rose ends up taking another path after she has her child; I won't spoil the surprises here, but her treatment is horrifying, and her revenge is just as horrifying. On the other hand, her revenge gives us a much better understanding of Miss Wellwood, and shows us Hagar, the black cook, is a rootworker who can counteract some of the more damaging coven magic. Eventually everything resolves, and no one really gets a happy ending, but things sort of work out for the best-ish. (An epilogue brings us several years into the future and shows us some of what happened after everyone left the home.)

The horror in here isn't just the The Craft style slip into power beyond their ability to understand or control, or the designs of the older coven; there's plenty of accurate non supernatural horror to go around here as well. The molestation, the girls trying to hide when they're going into labor to ry to keep their babies, mothers getting threatened to get locked up so they can have the baby taken away due to insanity, the episiotomy and stitches the doctor tells the mother her future husband will appreciate, the treatment of unwed pregnant girls by outsiders, the fact that all the mothers to be be chain smoke, the way the fathers of the babies and the fathers of the mothers treat them...I mean, the amount of people I wanted to smack in here was horrendous. I realize it's a fairly accurate representation of the homes and the attitudes of the time, but wow, it's ugly. Also got me thinking about my grandmother's support of the home here in Columbus, and realizing it wasn't just a southern thing. Also the lack of any kind of sex ed for the characters hurts.

A very good book, and frankly way more serious than what Hendrix usually produces.

The nightmare begins

 So, one of the purchases I made with birthday money was the omnibus Fear Street: The Beginning featuring the first four novels in R. L. Stine's Fear Street series. (To be fair, I know I owned all of these as a teen, but they've vanished over the years.)

We open with The New Girl, in which gymnast Cody falls in love with Anna, the eponymous New Girl who lives n Fear Street in Shadyside. Anna is a bit... old fashioned, and Cody's best friend/neighbor Lisa doesn't like her. Anna's brother Brad keeps insisting Anna is dead, and pushes Lisa down a flight of stairs at the Sadie Hawkins dance. In the end, we find out Anna is actually Anna's sister, who killed Anna because Anna got all the attention. Lisa and Cody wind up dating.

Next is The Surprise Party, wherein Meg finds out an old friend is coming back to town a year after her boyfriend died in the Fear Street Woods. Meg decides to throw a surprise part for Ellen. Meg keeps getting death threats because of the party. Party happens, we find out Meg's boyfriend thought he killed Ellen's boyfriend, but it was actually somebody else. We also get a whole bunch of nearly Satanic Panic shit about D&D. 

Continuing on, The Overnight involves the Shadyside Outdoors Club taking an overnight without adult supervision on Fear Island. In this one, Della runs into psycho, thinks she kills him, finds out when everyone goes back to get rid of evidence that the guy was still alive, as was his partner. 

We finish with Missing, we get twin narration from Cara and Mark, who live on Fear Street with frequently moving parents. Said parents fail to come home one night, or for several days thereafter. Come to find out the police officer they've been talking to is a crooked cop, Mark's girlfriend's father runs a White Supremacist Cult, and Mom and Dad are FBI. 

So, while there are volumes in this series I really enjoyed, the ones collected here reminded me of how I learned as a teen that a great cover might be the only redeeming quality of the volume within. I do remember thinking Stein was trying to edge out Christopher Pike in the YA Horror glut of the late 80s early 90s. While this is partially true, I have more than a few volumes from much earlier with an author name that's belied by and R L Stine copyright. Also, while Pike had no issues adding the supernatural into his writing, Stine mostly avoided doing so. (I think later volumes added hints of things, but his YA never really went all out. his Tween books, notably the whole Goosebumps series, on the other hand....)

 These may have started it, but they're really not up to what would come later.

No atheists in the trenches

 So, KL Charles's Slippery Creatures wound up being a surprisingly good period erotic novel. (Yeah, I know.) 

We open in Jolly Olde England not long after Armistice Day, as one Will Darling, former British soldier who fought in the trenches for most of the war is back in London having pawned most of his medals to keep going. However, an estranged uncle he managed to find did leave him a used book store, which is currently tied up in probate. Which, other than the fact the store is kind of like the better used stores, where things aren't exactly well organized, is a step up. 

We get an early hook when two different sets of men enter the store at two different times demanding information promised to them. Problem being, the information is something Will has no clue about. (Of the two groups, one is the War Office, whom Will wants nothing to do with. The other is a group of Tories going under the group alias Zodiac. Whom Will also unceremoniously kicks out of the shop.) During one of these visits, the Honorable Kim Secretan comes a shopping, and he and Will hit it off.

Sort of. While they do eventually manage to get into some fairly smutty scenes, every time Will starts trusting Kim, he finds out another way Kim betrayed him. (Now at the outset, it's a bit like the movie version of Clue, where we find out The Honorable Secretan supported the Bolsheviks prior to the Great War. Then it gets into the fact that Kim is engaged to a woman, that he's tipped off the War Office, that he... well, lets just say while he isn't exactly a Bond Girl double agent, he does some rather dastardly things. 

 While the central mysteries are engaging, I was more sucked in by the conversations on homosexuality is 20's London. Reminded me quite a bit of a conversation in God and Monsters where James Whale makes a comment about how there are no atheists in a foxhole, but plenty of lovers. Given that Weimar Berlin in the years after this novel became a Homosexual Hangout, I kept pondering if the main characters might find time to slip off to see a certain Sally Bowles in later volumes. 

While I'm sure there are historical inaccuracies, it was a fun read with characters who while not morally pure certainly made understandable gray characters.  

The long road

 So, finally finished Deadbeat Druid, the final book of David R. Slayton's Adam Binder Trilogy.

Now, when we left off, Vincente got pulled into the Underworld along with Adam's Great Grandfather, leaving Adam to seek out Death herself. In this volume, we get to spiral through hell, as Vic and Jodi (and new acquaintance Mel make their way from the Ebon Sea to what they hope is Adam, while Adam is spiraling down to hopefully find and recover Vic and Jodi and Mel as well as Grandpa. While the actual plot here doesn't matter as much, since it really boils down to everyone meeting in the middle followed by some twists that get resolved by the end, but I will say this vision of the migration of souls after death is actually kind of interesting. See, in an underworld not polluted by the living (of which we have 7, as Bobby and Vran are with Adam), souls journey down the spirals to the sea, losing their emotions, hurts, longings, etc to demons on the way down. (It's kind of a whole biome/ecosystem.) Problem being with Mel having arrived roughly a century before, many of the demons have gained some form of sentience, which means they're no longer fulfilling their function. Which leads to things like Sanctuary, where one of the "living demons" is saving souls not ready to move on from moving on, or a living hotel demon using Bobby Sr to draw in Adam and Bobby Jr. 

Really, the entire cosmology here is what ended up sucking me in, as did the appearance of Death's opposite number, and exactly what he represents.

It's a good read, although the stakes aren't exactly world altering, but they're extremely personal.

I'd be more than interested in reading more in this setting.

And you thought your family had skeletons

 So, finished David R. Slayton's Trailer Park Trickster this morning, which was a worthy follow up to the first book. 

So, this time we have TWO focus characters, and it's a bit better balanced as to who we're following at any given point in time, although frankly, it's basically two very different stories that overlap a lot. The major one, focused on Adam, involves what happens when he goes back to Guthrie, Oklahoma, to deal with the death of his Aunt Sue, the woman who taught him to use what magic he has. The other involves his boyfriend Vincinte, who catches a ride to the funeral with the Queen of Swords, AKA Argent, of the Winter Elves. Except...well...

See, Bobby is dealing with the fact that Aunt Sue left all of her possessions to her sister Noreen and Noreen's daughter Jodi. Neither of whom like Adam. And who happen to be there when Sue's trailer blows up when he arrives. Which sets off Adam's part of the story, as he finds out Jodi has a bit of the Sight, and has been hustling money trying to pick up Sue's old customers. Unfortunately, she's also been invoking The Druid, the bad Warlock who's been making bog iron charms and who up until recentkly, Adam thought might be his father.

Vincinte (AKA Vic), on the other hand, winds up getting mixed up in Elvish affairs as someone attacks the car on the way to Oklahoma from Denver.  This leads to the Sea Elves (suite of Cups), who want control of the fallen Tower of the East, and also want to flood the human world to get rid of all humans. The Sea Elves try to kill Silver, the Knight of Swords and Ada's ex boyfriend. Which Vic, being a Reaper, is then charged with being a witness at a meeting of the Races. He's also pissed when he figures out Adam lied to him about what happened to Adam's father, and more irritated when he finds out the bond he shares with Adam is considered a marriage by the Immortal races.

The stories overlap a few times, as everyone gets together to share notes. We do eventually find out the name of the Evil Druid, and Robert's new job title gets used twice between the story arcs. And there's one passage towards the end that really really kind of hurt to read, as Vic gets a visit from his father's ghost and has a heart to heart that had me wondering how much of it was the author trying to reconcile with his own father, all the while making me wish it was MY dad and I having this long distance conversation. 

I look forward to book 3 and how we're going to resolve everything that happens here.

A surefire cure for insomnia

 So, on one of my recent bookstore trips, I ran across Stephen Graham Jones's I Was A Teenage Slasher and wound up checking it out of the library. Which made me really happy I didn't pay to own a copy, since frankly, it was was about exciting as watching paint dry. 

The story is narrated by one Tolly Driver, who is narrating his tale of his 17th summer in Lamesa, Texas. We find that Tolly's dad had died within a year of the start of this tale, his mother owned a hardware store, and he was essentially just short of being a juvenile delinquent. He and his best friend Amber decide to crash a popular teen's party one night, and Tolly gets really drunk and throw up on a band member. The band members at the party tie Tolly to a chair and force a Coke down his throat. Problem being, the Coke has peanuts in it. which Tolly is allergic to, which sends Tolly into anaphylaxis. 

Tolly's fomer babysitter and current crush, Stace, finds Amber and gets the Epipen, which gets Tolly breathing again, just in time to witness a zombie crash the pool party. Seems said zombie was a former peer of the students at the party, who had been egged into trying to bronco ride an oil jack, which wound up decapitating him. Now, with a bit of some kind for a hand, said zombie is back for revenge. 

Mind you, this gets introduced on page 90 or so, and has next to no effect on the plot beyond zombie getting blood on Tolly's forehead and being found the next day ripped apart by another grasshopper, with the bodies of his main tormentor and his final girl also trapped in the rigging. 

In this setting, it seems that Slashers are born out of some kind of infection that makes them seek revenge. 

So, Tolly finds at night he goes color blind, can move really fast as long as no one is watching, and his Mom's belts can be a mask, along with some other things common to movie slashers. 

This leads to a few hundred pages of avoiding the cops, killing six people who tied him to a chair, and did I mention lots and lots of whining?

Because seriously. With his just above poverty life and the whining, the entire narrative is like reading Holden Caufield of Catcher in the Rye narrating traveling to California with the Joads in The Grapes of Wrath, only with a left field zombie attack that shoehorns Friday the 13th: Jason Goes to Hell into the narrative. I mean, it's not only bad, but boring. I realize it's up for Best Horror Novel of 2024 on Goodreads, but I fail to see why, unless the other finalists were even worse somehow. Either that or everyone else got something from it I didn't. I mean, I could say the flaws come from lacking the visual and audio cues that make a slasher movie work, but adjacent thematic books I could name take similar tacks and still work better than this mess. (Zombie Ohio by Scott Kenemore in particular. It's narrated by a zombie who manages to retain some of his brain function.) 

While some people obviously enjoyed this, I can't list myself among them.

I find your lack of real conflict disturbing

 So, after seeing his book floating around and getting good reviews for a while now, I got TJ Klune's The House By the Cerulean Sea out of the library and took it for a test drive.

The plot centers around Linus, a caseworker at the Department in Charge of Magical Youth. He's been there for several year, investigating orphanages that house magical youth. His supervisor is a nasty boss, and acts oddly when Linus gets summoned before Extremely Upper Management and given a highly classified assignment to go evaluate an island orphanage off the coast. (We're never given much in the way of locations here, but given this reads a bit like Terry Gilliam, I pictured the orphanage as being off the coast of Scotland.)

He's given very little knowledge of what the residents are like, and the town nearest the island tends to looks with suspicion on the children and Mr. Parnassus, who runs the place. We find out fairly quickly the major concern is one Lucy (short for Lucifer), who is the Antichrist. There's also a Sprite, a gnome, a blob, a wyvern, and a werepomeranian. That the two adults on the island also turn out to be magical adults should not be a surprise to anyone. 

Most of the book is focused on Linus learning and helping the children while being castigated by Extremely Upper Management about losing his objectivity. And falling in love with Mr. Parnassus, but that never really becomes a major plot point until well after the climax. 

I mean, the overall theme about accepting people as the are without judgement I can get behind, and frankly, most readers of fiction spend so much time in other people's heads that I think the message is a case of the preacher giving his sermon to the choir. I mean, it's charming, but it really has no major emotional or physical conflict, beyond "Most of the townspeople hate us!", which in turn kind of falls on the whole "There are good people working to change that" trope.

While I might end up reading more of Mx. Klune's work at some point, I feel like this one is missing something to give it heft and oomph.

Hard scrabble magick

 So, a recent trip to the Book Loft piqued my curiosity about David R. Slayton's Adam Binder series, but they didn't have the first book in the series. Thankfully, the library did, so I'm now able to review White Trash Warlock having finished it.

So, our main character here is one Adam Binder, currently of Guthrie, Oklahoma, and the trailer court he lives in with Aunt Sue. As we meet Adam, he's busy trying to claim a hexed pool cue enchanted with bog iron and a saurian bone. (That there are fantasy creatures running around is the first big reveal.) Sam ends up talking to Tanner (who's Dad bought him the cue at a pawn shop in Denver) and winds up making out with him. (Adam being gay is the second big reveal.) Mind you, they guy who Tanner beat at pool prior to the make out session turns out to be what Adam thought was an extinct Saurian, which leads to Adam bargaining with the lizards to spare Tanner. 

This takes up about 3 chapters, then the meat of the story gets going, as Adam's successful brother, Doctor Robert Binder of Denver, texts Adam out of the blue because Robert's wife is evidently possessed. Robert doesn't particularly believe in or perceive the preternatural, but after finding his wife pushing a baby carriage around with a demon baby inside, he's forced to call his brother. 

Adam is justifiably upset about hearing from his older brother, since older brother had him institutionalized in high school. However, Adam does wind up driving to Denver on the advice of Aunt Sue.

When he gets there, we find out about an entity floating over Denver that eats Magick, and has begun causing problems for both the humans and the other less involved in this layer of reality species. Adam also manages to bind himself with a cop he just met, and find out his ex BF the elf is still around. 

Honestly, this was an engaging read that I really enjoyed. I loved the idea that reality is a sandwich, with humanity being the bologna in the middle, and elves, leprechauns, gnomes, etc existing in the mayo and lettuce. I enjoyed the idea that the Watchtowers changed anchors and presentation depending on where you were. (In Oklahoma, they're various plains landmarks; in Colorado,m they change based on the mountains.) About the only thing that bothered me was the alternating focus characters. While Adam is the main character, Robert/Bobby becomes the focus a few times. For me at least, that the narrative exchange was at random intervals bothered me.That's a minor gripe. 

It really fit the bill of what I was looking for in reading material at the moment.