forever we try

Roxane Weary's father, a cop and a hard-drinking piece of work, was killed on the job; Roxane, a PI and a hard-drinking piece of work herself, has mostly coped through sleeping with her dad's former partner. When her brother sends a new client her way--Danielle Stockton, whose brother, Bradford, is on death row for the murders of his high school girlfriend and her parents--Roxane uncovers links to an old missing persons case of her dad's, plus nasty undercurrents of police corruption in the quiet suburb of Belmont. 

This is a well-plotted mystery--the murderer's true identity is foreshadowed subtly enough that I only realized it was foreshadowing in retrospect--with a snappy, charismatic first-person narrative voice. I mentioned yesterday that Roxane has a bit of Cass Neary/Jessica Jones flair to her; here's an example: 

Bradford is black and his girlfriend and her family were white, and Belmont is exactly the kind of small, nosy suburb where prejudice and suspicion, especially against outsiders, get free rein.

Roxane is bisexual; it's not a huge part of the plot, but it is part of her as a person, and it helps her strike up a connection with a teenage girl who becomes crucial to the case. She's self-destructive and self-aware about being self-destructive without tipping into self-pity, and by the end of the book she's taken steps towards cleaning up her act. Her character arc is less sprawling and messy than Cass Neary's, but again, there's a little bit of that shared-DNA sweet spot to it. 

This book is also unusually balanced in its treatment of the police--there are multiple characters in law enforcement, and some are great and some are terrible and some are just trying to do their job in a system that's obviously rigged to favor insiders with wealth and connections. 

Two extremely different movies, both of which I've been wanting to watch for a while: 

The People Under the Stairs: My very first memory of this movie is a friend who'd seen it already recapping it for my sisters and I when we were all around seven or eight; her description scared the pants off me and I still have no idea how or why she managed to watch it. 

Now that I've finally seen it, The People Under the Stairs didn't scare the pants off me, but I did find it both effectively creepy and effectively goofy, and Fool is exactly the kind of brave and resourceful kid horror protagonist that I would have wanted to be back when my friend first told me about the movie. For most of the run time he's obviously terrified, but his spirit is never broken, and there's a cool element of puzzle-solving to his story, too--watching him figure out and learn to outsmart the Robeson's traps is genuinely fun. 

The Stairpeople--and Alice and Roach, by extension--hit a good balance between scary and pitiable. Alice comes the closest to being entirely pitiable, with no bite, but she has her moments of creepiness and/or bravery, and her last confrontation with Mommy is especially awesome. Fool's character arc is (very, very obviously, and not in a bad way) modeled after the Fool figure in tarot, but Alice's has the structure of a fairy tale (even with her name, I kept thinking more of Rapunzel or Sleeping Beauty than Alice in Wonderland, but I also haven't read Alice in Wonderland in years, so I could be missing the obvious!). And the ending is pure bonkers wish fulfillment, which is exactly what these characters deserve. 

Jodorowsky's Dune: It's wacky and sometimes clunky and the sequels go from really really good to really really unbearably nuts, but Dune is one of my favorite sci-fi novels (with the caveat that I haven't read much sci-fi) and when I heard about Alejandro Jodorowsky's unproduced, psychedelic, Pink-Floyd-scored movie adaptation, I knew I had to watch the documentary covering it. 

So I did. But by the time I did I already knew enough about the project that I was looking for something deeper than an overview; I'd have loved getting into the nitty-gritty of casting different characters and more exact details about the plot (since it's pretty much completely different from the book's). There are some great bits about casting the Baron Harkonnen (Orson Welles!), Paul (Brontis Jodorowsky, the director's son, who trained in martial arts for something like six hours a day, every day, for years!), and the Padishah Emperor (Salvador Dali!), and the snippets of plot we do get are AMAZINGLY bonkers, even compared with, you know, the book Dune, which never goes light on bonkers. Still, it was mostly info I'd picked up before, so I guess I just wish I hadn't waited so long to actually watch it. 

Jodorowsky comes across as mostly passionate and lovely and endearing...and then drops a couple metaphors that don't exactly reassure me about certain accusations swirling around him. So there's that. The documentary is mostly uncritical about the lengths he went to make the movie (see: having you kid train six hours a day every day) and his vision for it (more than 10 hours long)--it implies that it's all soulless Hollywood executives' fault that we never saw this Dune. But whether it means to or not, I think it does paint a portrait of the guy as carried away by passion pretty much beyond the point of reason, and how that affected both himself and the people around him. 

I didn't intend to write Stranger Things s4 fanfic, since after s3 I'd pretty much resigned myself to the fact that even though the show was still good, nothing would top the fannish heights s2 catapulted me to. And then s4 actually came around, and I was...maybe not catapulted, but the heart wants what it wants and I guess I'll just never be over Steve. 

Title is from "Jump" by Van Halen, because why not commemorate my return to the fandom with one of the goofiest/best 80s songs ever. 

go ahead and jump (1,054 words)

Another Random Old Children's Book picked up at a secondhand bookstore--I'd never finished anything by Vivien Alcock before but remembered coming across a couple of her books in the children's section of my old library back in the day. They all had interesting, weirdly haunting titles, like Singer to the Sea God. 

The Stonewalkers is also interesting and weirdly haunting, and very, very creepy. The plot kicks off when Poppy, a girl with a difficult relationship with her mom and a habit of lying, witnesses the stone statue she's kinda-sorta befriended, Belladonna, get struck by lightening and then painfully come to life. At first, Poppy's excited that one of her unbelievable stories is actually true, but Belladonna is...off. Aside from obviously being a statue who shouldn't be traipsing around in the first place, she's both uncomfortable in Poppy's world and jealous of it, and before long she's making her own plans. Plans that don't bode well for Poppy. 

Recently I've been stuck in a cycle of rewatching Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror, a LONG documentary that's very expansive with its definition of folk horror (The Wicker Man? Obviously. Picnic at Hanging Rock? Why not? Candyman? Sure, you could make that argument!). The Stonewalkers slides right into that sure-why-not slot of folk horror with its rural setting (a moor somewhere in northern England, I think), outsider protagonist (Poppy's the new kid at school), and creepy statues reanimated by some form of ancient magic Poppy doesn't understand (she made Belladonna friendship bracelet out of some old chain she found in an ancient jar in her mom's employer's basement). It also has a great and believably tough mother-daughter relationship--Poppy and her mother aren't especially likable or easy to get along with, but the fact that they recognize that about themselves doesn't necessarily make them nicer to each other. 

This was a good one--I'd love to read more Alcock in the future. 

Emily Canfield always got whatever she wanted. When she wanted the moon, her father bought her a reflecting globe and installed it in the family's garden. When she wanted her parents, her father insisted that he and his wife cut their trip to New York short and come home to be with Emily. When Emily wanted to marry her childhood best friend, she wrote up a contract and forced the poor kid to sign it in blood. And when that best friend had had enough of her, Emily drenched herself in water, opened up her bedroom window, and sat until the freezing water and winter weather gave her pneumonia, and she died. 

Years later, Emily's orphaned niece, Jane, and Jane's aunt, Louisa, come to spend the summer at the Canfield's house. Emily's mother Lydia is the only original Canfield still alive; her husband died soon after Emily and her son, Jane's father, was killed in a freak buggy accident. But another presence in the house fixes on Jane, and on moonless nights the old globe in the garden starts to glow...

A short, fun Gothic that seems to have always been marketed for kids, which is interesting since the narrator (Louisa) is eighteen, the book's true main character (Lydia) is "elderly" and "awe-inspiring" (So...fifties? Sixties?), and if I had to sum Jane-Emily up in one sentence it would be "Some kids just suck."

To be fair, "Some kids just suck" is a common theme in children's literature, but I've racked my brain and I cannot remember a single kid character quite as poisonous as Emily. She never appears, either in the flesh or flashbacks; Louisa picks up her story in bits and pieces from Lydia and Emily's childhood friend, Adam Frost, and from Jane's increasingly creepy "Emily-incidents." But Emily's presence is all over the house, from the dark, stuffy attic where her dolls are packed away (including one whose wax face she melted off) to the garden, where her reflecting ball becomes a nexus of all the creepiness. 

Emily also had an especially sinister relationship with her father, who "adored' her more than his own wife. Jane-Emily's final confrontation comes down to Lydia finally standing up to her daughter, something she was never able to do during Emily's life. 

I remember dipping in and out of a couple other Patricia Clapp books as a kid, including Witch's Children, which is historical fiction but, if I'm remembering right, shares some of the same Gothic spookiness as Jane-Emily. Based on how much I enjoyed this one--it didn't scare me the way it probably would have if I'd read it back then, but I ate up the whole thing in just one day--maybe it's time for a reread. 

A couple weeks ago my roommates got to make a trip to The Book Thing, a warehouse full of donated books in Baltimore where once a month you can come in and pick out as many books us you want for free.  (Technically, there's a limit of 150,000 books per person per day, but GEEZ.) There's also a one-hour time limit; my roommates still managed to grab a whole bunch of books. Some of those were for me, including two in one of my favorite categories, Random Old Children's Books.

Here they are: 

A Chill in the Lane by Mabel Esther Allan
An atmospheric, not especially spooky ghost story set in Cornwall. On vacation with her family, Lyd begins experiencing visions of a cottage in the woods that isn't actually there, and starts to suspect it might tie back to her Cornish heritage--Lyd is adopted, and her parents, especially her father, would rather not talk about her biological family. That huge red flag aside, Lyd's parents are actually much more supportive than secretive adoptive families in ghost stories usually are. It's sweet but doesn't make for tense reading. But this is more of a family story with some light Gothic/ghost story elements. 

(This book also has a list of "Other Good Books for Girls" on the back. One of them, Tina and David, gets this kicker of a blurb: "[...] beautiful and exquisitely tasteful. Mrs. Tate has proved that a good book for the young can be written without sex, crime, or drugs.")

Nightbirds on Nantucket by Joan Aiken
A reread and an old favorite. This is the third book in Aiken's Wolves of Willoughby Chase series. The first book is a pretty standard pastiche of 19th century children's lit with a little bit of alternative history thrown in--at least that's how I remember it; it's also my least favorite book in the series--and every book after gets weirder and weirder. 

Nightbirds isn't quite peak Aiken weirdness, but it's getting there. Dido Twite, the closest this series has to a central heroine, wakes up after a months-long coma on a whaling ship headed, eventually, for Nantucket. Captain Casket only cares about chasing an elusive pink whale, but he promises Dido passage home if she can keep his daughter, Dutiful Penitence, company. This apparently includes staying with Dutiful Penitence and the girl's aunt, Tribulation, on Nantucket for a couple of months. 

Dutiful Penitence ("Pen"), doesn't have good memories of her aunt, and once the girls arrive in Nantucket they figure out that Tribulation is still a piece of work, staying in bed the whole day and running them ragged with chores. Dido also discovers a black dress and pair of bottle-green boots hidden in the attic, and begins to suspect that Aunt Tribulation isn't who she says she is. 

Part of the fun of this book is that, even though she's stuck in an objectively terrifying situation--holed up on an isolated farm with an imposter--Dido refuses to let Aunt Tribulation scare her. Here's a typical interaction between them: 

My reading tracker has a space for recording each book's genre. For this one I went with "Aiken."

It's been almost exactly two years, which for me can be pretty much summed up with 1.) Pandemic; 2.) I graduated; 3.) I got a job! It was terrible!; 3.) I quit and got another job! It's less terrible!; and 4.) I drifted out of DW and fandom in general for what--to me--feels like a very long time. I've missed it. 

I still don't feel like I have the bandwidth to write fic or get as involved in fandoms as I used to be, but I'm hoping to at least get back to tracking my reading, hopefully in a way that's a bit more organized and substantial. But for the sake of getting the ball rolling again, here are a few quick and dirty highlights from the past month or so:

Billy Summers by Stephen King
I don't think this is one of King's best books, but it is one of his very, very good books. Billy Summers is a one last job story and a hitman with a heart of gold story, but primarily it's a story about the power of stories and storytelling, the goodness of ordinary people, and the intensely loyal relationships that spring out of chance meetings and a powerful, unmet need for love and connection. So, very standard Stephen King (including some wonky stuff at the end--he tries to turn the book's central relationship romantic for, as far as I can tell, no good reason whatsoever), but it mostly works well, and I adored it. 

The Beekeeper's Apprentice by Laurie R. King
Reread. A Sherlock Holmes continuation/retelling/self-insert fanfic with some MAJOR flaws, also incredibly immersive and very moving. It's in the 'Watson is an idiot' school of retellings, though if I'm remembering correctly that gets better in later books. Or maybe Watson quits showing up in later books. Anyway, this is an old favorite, even if certain parts of it are painful to reread. I'll probably continue with the rest of the series. 

The Cass Neary series 1-3 by Elizabeth Hand
My current obsession. Most of the characters whom I tend to think of as antiheroes are actually just heroes with an iffy past or an attitude problem. At least compared to Cass Neary. Cass is a genuine antihero. 

She's a photographer who published one book of photos, Dead Girls, in her early twenties before being raped and never really getting over that trauma; at the start of the series she hasn't shot a photo in years and is prone to terrible relationships and random acts of spite, like swiping a stranger's car keys (not because she needs a car--she just hides the keys in a dead, dried-out sea urchin). Cass get tangled up in murder mysteries because she's pathologically self-destructive and can't stay away from people who are damaged in the same ways that she is.

But she's also a sharp observer with an almost encyclopedic knowledge of photography and music and film, self-awareness, a sense of humor ("Looks like Sauron's fallen on hard times."), and a good eye. Cass is passionate about photography and photographers, about art and the people who create art. It's almost her only redeeming quality and definitely the one that keeps her head a bearable place to be in. 

Of the first three books (Generation Loss, Available Dark, Hard Light), Available Dark might be my favorite; it's set in an especially dreary Iceland, features black metal and a couple of folk-horror-tinged ritual murders, and ends with another ritual that's both extremely disturbing and weirdly, transcendently beautiful. But the whole series is addictive. I'm a little more than halfway through the fourth and so far last, The Book of Lamps and Banners, and bracing for withdrawal.  

(In my head, the True-Detective-style credits sequence for the prestige TV adaptation these books deserve is set to "White Foxes" by Susanne Sundfør.)

I can feel an obsession spiral coming on. Also, Annie's rapidly morphing into my favorite character. 

The semester so far has been wall-to-wall stress, but it is my last semester, so I'm not sure why I didn't brace for that. In happier news, I finished the first season of The Witcher, fell in love with pretty much everybody, and finally cracked and wrote a fic after figuring I'd have no time to write fic for the foreseeable future. 

and i am wanting: “Yen,” he says, exasperated and puzzled in equal measure (even drunk, she usually isn’t so maudlin), “I don’t give a dog’s arse whether you had a walleye or hangnails.”