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.