forever we try

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. 

This is the fourth Cass Neary book and (so far) the last in the series, which I binged over a month or so. Withdrawal pangs are coming on, so if anyone has recs for other character-driven mysteries with not-exactly-likable but compelling narrators, please feel free to send them my way! Sara Gran's Claire DeWitt series seems to give off that kind of vibe--maybe I'll go there next.

After the events of Hard Light, Cass is lying low in London with no plans beyond avoiding the police and tracking down Quinn, a convict and ex-boyfriend. She wanders into an occult bookshop and crosses paths with Gryffin Haselton, who first showed up in Generation Loss. Gryffin, a rare books dealer, is about to close the deal of a lifetime by selling a manuscript a friend of his--now dead--picked up in Baghdad.

This manuscript is the only existing copy of a legendary occult text, The Book of Lamps and Banners. Since Gryffin has bad judgement and a thing for Cass, he asks her to tag along, and the two end up having sex on the floor of another rare books dealer's pantry. When they remerge, the other dealer is shot through the eye, and the manuscript has disappeared. 

Like all the other Cass books, this one is addictively readable and incredibly creepy in an understated, maybe it's cosmic horror, maybe it's paranoia and a whole bunch of drugs kind of way. In Hard Light, Cass encounters a movie that's possibly evil (it makes people sick, not with its imagery but with some kind of wrongness seeping out of it). The Book of Lamps and Banners has a possibly evil manuscript and a definitely evil app/code inspired by that manuscript.

The app can unlock people's worst memories and also drive them into a Viking-berserker-type frenzy; Cass is "lucky" enough to only get the unlocking your worst memory treatment. By the end of the book, she is finally ready to at least try to move past her trauma, but even if the app helped her decision along it's still dangerous at best and malevolent at worst.

The series is really good about taking mundane horrors (like apps knowing more than they should) and pushing them that one step further. I'm on the yes cosmic horror bandwagon for most of the creepy stuff Cass runs into (and most of the creepy stuff she believes about herself), but either way you go, she's not an especially reliable or sympathetic narrator. As in the other books, she makes a bunch of illegal and/or immoral choices that pull her even deeper into the mystery, but as always she's clear-eyed and very passionate about a very select number of things. I love being in her head--I just wouldn't love being with her.

As a bonus, this book is also set partly on the Finnish island of Kälkö, which, per all the settings in the Cass Neary books, is a touristy area rendered eerie and dreary--maybe because it actually is, maybe because we're seeing it through Cass's eyes. There are a couple neat callbacks to the Norse mythology elements in Available Dark: Cass as a Valkyrie, carrying the dead with her, Cass as Odin (there's a bunch of increasingly eerie eye imagery woven through the whole series).

Oh, and there's also a grossout that grossed me out like no grossout has ever before. Predictably, it barely slows Cass down at all. 
 

Reading

The Turn of the Screw by Henry James, a reread I meant to do over the Halloween season and never got around to. The first time I read this I was in high school, maybe even middle school, so even though before diving back in I remembered the basic plot and the creepiness, I didn't remember most of the actual encounters with the ghosts--which are eclipsed in creepiness only by some of the conversations the narrator, a governess, has with the two kids in her charge, Miles and Flora. There's such a shivery, I-know-you-know-I-know vein of horror running under most of their interactions, especially her conversations with Miles. It's fantastic. 

The Girls at the Kingfisher Club by Genevieve Valentine--another reread! This doesn't quite nab the #1 spot as my favorite 12 Dancing Princesses retelling of all time (that would be Entwined by Heather Dixon: it has a lot less bite than Kingfisher Club, but it's sweeter, with a big ol' dash of Gothic horror). It comes in a very close second, though.  I love the setting (1920s New York! Flapper princesses! Dance halls and speakeasies!), the prickliness of all the sisters, and the fact that it's ultimately much more their story than the story of their romances--though there are romances, and those romances are handled in some unusual, interesting ways. 

Read

I finished Trick Mirror. 

The Mark of Cain by Lindsey Barraclough, the sequel to Long Lankin. It suffers a bit from not having the same sense of mystery, but it does have the same sense of oppressive atmosphere, and the ending wraps things up with a little more resolution for the characters, which is nice. 

Watched

Он – дракон | I Am Dragon, aka the big dumb Russian dragon movie I loved with all my heart. The story--a princess is kidnapped on her wedding day by a dragon who oh-so-conveniently can transform into a hot and sweet, if angsty dude; at first she's solely focused on getting back to her equally hot but much less sweet fiance, until of course dragon dude wins her over with his angst and sweetness--is more or less Beauty and the Beast, but with dragons, so there's never any doubt that Miroslava (the princess) will end up with Arman (the hot dragon dude). Instead, you can sit back and enjoy scenes like Princess Teaches Hot Dragon Dude How to Spruce up His Man Cave (I love that most of Miroslava's advice for living as a human boils down to "Get better at interior decorating; also wipe your feet,") and Hot Dragon Dude Teaches Princess How to Fly a Kite.

The scenery and costumes are both gorgeous, and the worldbuilding is a little thin, but satisfying; there are lots of cool details like a wedding ritual where the bride gets decked out in a gorgeous costume, lies down in a little gondola, and floats across the water to her groom. The whole thing reminds me of some of the Russian movies and soap operas I used to watch with my sisters and my mom, in that even when things get cheesy there's this genuine feeling and sweetness to them, which makes the cheesiness not just bearable but enjoyable. 

Fall semester's here and I'm going to DIE. Maybe. Every day I feel a little better; still overwhelmed, but more used to being overwhelmed, I guess. One of the best things about college is that all the practicum/field work requirements force me to get comfortable with always being a little bit uncomfortable. 

No surprise, but writing's been going slowly, and non-assigned reading is going even more slowly. I did finally crack the cover of Pacific Rim: Tales from Year Zero and finished it in one sitting. The artwork was nice, and the story was decent, but I was hoping for something with a little more depth, and considering how could Pacific Rim was about this, I was kind of disappointing when I got to the standard fanservice-y woman-almost-completely-naked panel. Not outraged or anything, but...come on, book. You can do better than this. That being said, both Tendo and Stacker's backstories were great; I wish they'd been given a little more space and detail. 

The other book I finished (I started a few weeks before the semester began) was a collection of West Virginian ghost stories. Very good and genuinely creepy in parts, especially in the "Weird Creatures" section (There's one story especially, apparently about the narrator's grandmother, that made me shudder: basically, she was riding home one night and was chased most of the way back by a "pure white" something with "razor-sharp teeth" that "screamed like a woman in terrible agony". Uggggh.) Got to admit that, all and all, I liked this book--it's called The Telltale Lilac Bush--a lot better than Tales from Year Zero.