Books read for March and April 2019.
… eep! Late.
Binders full of women.
How to find women who write horror.
Note that this isn’t a list of “women in horror”; it’s a list of things you, reader, can do to find for yourself more female horror writers, which is an approach I like a lot more, and which is applicable to far more things than just its immediate subject matter.
The Dragon of Rosemont High, finale.
“Everything is different now.”
The Lyddans do show up, Zoe tells him later. With the cops and even an ambulance. The last Zoe saw, they’d been taking Jake away on a stretcher.
From Aunt Addi, Eli learns the sheriff had found Jake’s grandmother. Dead in her trailer, hidden in the bedroom loft. By the timeline, she’d probably been Jake’s first victim. Eli tries not to think of a fading blue eye, watching him from beneath the water as its owner slowly drowned.
No one (else) dies from the incident at the rec centre, although Lance and a few others get treated for burns. They’d tried to subdue Jake after Eli had saved Arthur, and Jake had unleashed balefire on them to escape. The whole thing gets written up as just another attempted mass shooting—just another day in America, nothing to see here—this one averted by the bravery and quick thinking of a room full of teens.
“It was cool, what you did with the lacrosse stick.” Two days later. Eli’s at Zoe’s. They’re both sitting in the big couch-sized swing in her front yard, carefully supervised by Mr. Chung from the bay window in the den. Giving them space, but . . . watching. All the adults are on edge right now. Eli supposes he can’t blame them. He thinks his ribs are still bruised form Aunt Addi’s crushing hugs.
“Was it?” Zoe says. She isn’t in cosplay today, just nebula-patterned leggings and a big chunky black sweater. Eli thinks she looks really nice. Zoe always looks really nice, but today it’s . . . even more. “It felt kinda . . . shitty,” Zoe continues. “Like . . . like, I dunno. Un-feminist? Sending a Man”—she pronounces the capital letter, voice pitching low portentously—“to fight when I should’ve been able to do it myself.”
Wyrdverse print editions!
So my rights reversion for Liesmith and Stormbringer finally came through from Penguin Random House, and you know what that means?
The Dragon of Rosemont High, ch. 24.
“We’re all having a shitty time, asswipe! This is high school!”
He doesn’t, as it turns out, get far. Instead, he runs straight into Zoe in the hallway. Her eyes are wide and she’s breathing hard, like she’s been running too, which—
“Zee, I have to—” Eli blurts, at the same time as Zoe says: “Eli! Listen, I—”
They both stop, stare at each other for a moment, then blurt:
“No, me first!”
And it would be funny, maybe, if things weren’t so dire and Zoe didn’t look so panicked. Come to think of it, why did Zoe look so—
Eli doesn’t even get to finish the thought. Not when Zoe blurts:
“I saw it, Ee! In the flash. From the lightning. We were just, I dunno. Talking. Then the lightning hit and the lights went out, and everyone screamed. And it was kinda funny, y’know? Except, Ee. Ee, there was another one. More lightning. And in the flash, Ee. I saw it.”
And somehow, Eli just knows what she’s going to say. That little half-forgotten memory, from what seems like another lifetime, rushing to the fore:
“Eli. His shadow. It wasn’t his, it was the peryton’s.”
The peryton’s shadow. Just like the evil sorcerers in Zoe’s parents’ dumb Dungeons & Dragons book.
“Jake,” Eli says, and Zoe’s eye get even wider, whites seeming to almost glow both from the gloom and from the dark eyeshadow framing them.
“How—?”
It’s about that time, however, that the screaming starts. For real this time, not just the half-hearted shock of before. In between the sound, Eli can feel something. A sort of static hum and a thudding bass, like being too close to a live wire and too close to a concert speaker, all at once.
The Dragon of Rosemont High, ch. 23.
“Fuck!”
Eli ends up outside the Rosemont Heights Rec Centre a little before six, clothes damp from the rain and backpack still heavy with the weight of Jake’s chem book.
Jake hadn’t been home. Eli had found the address easily enough, and had been . . . sort of surprised, actually. It’s not like he’s been to a lot of trailer parks in his life, but the neat, modern, wood-paneled trailer with the double glass front doors and rooftop patio is not what he’d been expecting. Seemed like nothing in Rosemont was immune to gentrification.
No amount of knocking or ringing of the doorbell or peering in through windows had enticed anyone—Jake or his grandmother or otherwise—to appear, however, and things had been getting late. So Eli had moved on.
At the rec centre, Arthur and Zoe greet him at the door which, Eli has to admit, is a sight he thought he’d never see.
“Dude!” says Arthur, at the same time as Zoe announces, “You’re soaked!”
Zoe has changed since Eli last saw her, into a simple black dress. He almost thinks she’s out of cosplay until he sees her earrings, shaped like tiny silver bees. “Are you . . . dressed like a witch?” he hisses at her, while Arthur is busy off to one side doing something with a table full of finger food.
Zoe draws a sort of triangular shape in the air with her fingers. “My hat is full of sky,” she says, then winks.
Eli finds Morgan doing something with her violin in one corner of the room, not far from where a table has been set up with a memorial for Val. There’s a photo of him in a sombre, black frame, surrounded by pale white lilies and roses, plus a big book and fancy looking fountain pen for people to write messages. Morgan comes over while Eli is studying the arrangement, wondering if he should write something and, if so, what. Sorry I couldn’t save you, seems like the sort of thing that Zoe would sneer and call “manpain,” although maybe it doesn’t count when it’s another dude.
New books!
So I did a clean-up of my bookshelves yesterday, mostly chucking out the books I’d DNF’d but needed to put somewhere, plus a few ancient outliers that no longer, as they say, “sparked joy.” Also, by “chucking out” I mean “sent to the local book charity”; it’s a crisis hotline that runs a book fair every year to raise money.
Point being, I have space on my shelves again, which means… time to buy more books!
- One Thousand and One Ghosts, Alexandre Dumas. I’ve historically had an aversion to “The Classics,” probably because I got burned at a young age trying to read The Lord of the Rings, which I found turgid and tedious.1 After that, I just kind of… assumed all works written prior to like the 1980s were in the same style and avoided them en masse2 which… now that I’m thinking about it as an adult, is kinda a laughable assumption. Also, I’ve already gotten through both Frankenstein and Capital vol. 1, so… this thin little tome is not intimidating in comparison.
- Brave New World, Aldous Huxley. Well… I enjoyed 1984 way more than I thought I would,3 so we’ll try this one on as well.
- Metro 2033, Dmitry Glukhovsky. I watched a Let’s Play of one of the games, and it’s way easier to find in stores than Roadside Picnic and The Master and Margarita, which are the Russian-spec-fic-in-translation books I’m actually looking for, and will probably have to special order.
- Injection, vol. 3, Warren Ellis. Why did I buy this but not volume two? Er… oops.
- After years of on-again-off-again reading, I got halfway through the second book, and was up to… some bit where Gollum is crawling across a mountain range? Or something? Anyway, I realized that, a) I didn’t care about anything that was going on, and b) there was nothing actually forcing me to keep reading and I could stop at any time. So I did, and never went back, and never regretted it. [↩]
- With the exception of my Poe and Lovecraft phases. [↩]
- Which is to say: I thought I would tolerate it as A Classic and kinda skim the boring/sexist bits, but… actually ended up legitimately loving it and devoured the whole thing. [↩]
The Dragon of Rosemont High, ch. 22.
“She’s a real Stacey, I’ll give you that. So I guess I wouldn’t blame you.”
Nothing much else happens for the rest of the evening. Eli cooks dinner with Aunt Addi, and sends some texts back and forth with Zoe, just to make sure Arthur’s not doing anything . . . Lacroix-ish. He’s not, judging from Zoe’s enthusiastic replies (im corrupting a lacroix with my wicked witchy ways!), and that makes Eli feel a little better.
Addi isn’t so enthusiastic about Val’s wake, partly because of the whole murders thing, but mostly because of who extended the invitation.
“Arthur’s . . . okay,” Eli says, and almost can’t believe he’s saying it. “He apologized for being a jerk. Kinda.”
Addi sighs, stabbing at her spaghetti with her fork, smashing apart the meatballs distractedly. “It’s not Arthur I’m worried about,” she says. “Yvonne Lacroix is . . . dangerous. More than you know.”
“Okay, Aunt Addi,” says Eli, who think he knows exactly how dangerous the woman is. More so than Addi does. “I promise I’ll be careful.”
In the end, Addi agrees to let him go, but only after he assures her Zoe will be there as well. This, as it turns out, isn’t even a lie.
arthur wants to ward the rec centre, Zoe texts, as Eli is messing around with his computer, trying to turn “Waifu Perfect Class 2” into something appropriate for a wake (“Melancholy Perfect Class”, Eli calls it, if only in his head). just in case
Prolly a good idea, Eli replies. Then he sends Zoe a rough cut of the track he’s working on. Her only reply is to send back a list of her favorite depressing Vocaloid songs, so Eli figures he’s still got some way to go.
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What does the murky history of [the novel 1984‘s] telescreen tell us about the way we live now? The hints about an old man’s reluctance and television’s power suggest that totalitarian overreach might not start at the top – at least, not in the sense we often imagine. Unfettered access to our inner lives begins as a choice, a decision to sign up for a product because we ‘feel the need of it’. When acting on our desires in the marketplace means signing over our data to corporate entities, the erosion of choice is revealed to be the consequence of choice – or at least, the consequence of celebrating choice.
Henry Cowles on what Orwell knew.
As someone who first read 1984 relatively recently, the telescreen was definitely something that struck me as being one of the book’s more eerily prescient elements.1
- I’m assuming here, perhaps overly kindly, that no one at, sat, Apple or Facebook was trying to intentionally recreate the technology… [↩]
The Dragon of Rosemont High, ch. 21.
“I lied. I wasn’t scared. I was guilty.”
At 2:30, Eli gets a text from Aunt Addi, reminding him about Doctor Mallory.
Mallory is Eli’s shrink, and has been since Eli moved to Rosemont. He is . . . okay. Mostly they just talk about stuff and Mallory uses a soft voice and makes suggestions like “have you tried starting a new hobby?” or “running seems to help, doesn’t it?” Eli really only goes because it makes Aunt Addi feel better. He doesn’t think Mallory is a bad person or anything, it’s just he’s so . . . old. And white. And sometimes says old white man things like “I suspect you saw a lot of violence, growing up,” like he thinks Eli came out of some lurid TV cop-show version of East Harlem, circa 1995, and not twenty-first century Midtown.
As it turns out, about the most violence Eli ever saw “growing up” was watching cops manhandle homeless people off the subway. So much for that life, he supposes.
So it’s not like Eli thinks Doctor Mallory is bad, exactly, but he also doesn’t feel the need to correct the version of Elias Drake Mallory obviously keeps in his head. Eli knows this means Mallory isn’t going to be doing him much good, mental-health wise, but the guy’s Rosemont’s only psychologist and it’s not like Eli’s got other options. So he goes along, to keep Aunt Addi happy, and says vague and non-specific things, to reassure Mallory that he is just some surly damaged urban projects kid, or whatever it is the old guy thinks.
Mallory’s office is on Main, a couple blocks from the school. Eli has a note from Aunt Addi to bail out of class, and only just manages to dodge getting escorted by one of the Rosemont High’s finest. Like the “security officers” ever did shit for Eli when he was getting beat up by Arthur’s goons, and like they could do shit against a peryton, if one decided to chase Eli through the middle of Rosemont proper.