The Aviary

I've been reading a lot of scifi and mysteries so far this year - I've only this weekend finished my first horror novel of 2023. Unfortunately, it was The Spite House by Johnny Compton, which was a huge disappointment. I wanted to like this book so much! Alas.

( Spoilers )

Now I'm going to have to go find myself a better horror novel to wash the boring out of my brain.

As previously mentioned, I have been rereading Pet Sematary. I finished it today, and have mostly learned that my vague 10-years-ago impression was correct and that I don't really care for it. I mean, it's not bad - certainly readable and entertaining enough. Just doesn't quite work for me. However! It has allowed to figure out a way to articulate why it doesn't work for me, which is useful.

So, a work of horror fiction is trying to produce certain emotions in the reader/viewer/whatever: suspense, dread, disgust, shock, horror, terror, etc. These all fall broadly under the larger umbrella of "fear", but different works mix them together in different ways and proportions, so you get a different-tasting cocktail of fear every time. Pet Sematary has a little horror, a little suspense and disgust, but it mostly runs on dread. Which I'll define for my purposes as "a Bad Thing is inevitably coming, there is no possibility of avoiding it, but we're going to drag out the time between now and the Bad Thing arriving as long as we can, because that will create tension in the reader."* With a side of "the Bad Thing will be brought about by the protagonist making a Bad Decision, and you get to feel dread about that too".

Pet Sematary wants to make the reader experience dread and it's very good at it. And that's why it doesn't work for me - I hate dread. The rest of the fear emotions I listed are things I enjoy experiencing in the context of horror fiction. They're why I'm a horror fan. But I don't find dread enjoyable on any level. Dread sits in my stomach in the same place that I experience real-life anxiety. It's not fun at all.

Contrast that with Misery, which I read right before Pet Sematary. Misery runs mostly on suspense (with a little horror and disgust) and that was fun - I tore through the book, I chose reading it over other activities, I enjoyed myself thoroughly. Pet Sematary, on the other hand, felt like a slog. I had to make myself read it, because the fear emotion it produced was so different and so dread-ful. There were a couple of times that I almost decided to stop reading - had it not been Stephen King, who is always engaging for me even when I don't care much for the particular book I'm reading, I would have. I've definitely given up on books before because they contained too much dread** and I couldn't make myself turn the page.

(Also the ending is anticlimactic and resurrected!Gage is uninteresting. Timmy Baterman, in the flashback, was interesting - Gage is a baby with a knife, like something out of a not-very-good slasher film. You get the silly slasher stinger ending too.)

Anyway. Just doesn't work for me. Also, again: none of the horror in this book would have happened if the characters were responsible pet owners who kept their cat indoors. Keep your cats indoors! It's better for the environment, it's better for the cat, and it lessens the possibility that you might try to resurrect your dead son as a horrible slasher movie monster.







*The difference between dread and suspense, to my mind, is that suspense is "a Bad Thing might be coming - is the protagonist going to be able to escape/prevent it?" Suspense allows the hope, however miniscule, that the dice will roll in the protagonist's favor. With dread, the protagonist can only roll a nat 1.

**The particular flavor of "I know this character is going to make an awful and self-destructive decision and I have to specifically dread that for age" will make me drop a book quicker than basically anything else.

Things:

- It is so dark outside today. I'm sure this is unpleasant for many people, but I am finding it so comfortable and soothing. The grey times are properly here! Hooray!

- Way back in the summer, I had hoped/planned to be attending the HPLFF in Portland this weekend, and so I requested some time off. I made the decision not to travel - spending a whole 3-day weekend in a movie theater no longer seems like a great idea - but I still have the time off, starting tomorrow and ending next Wednesday. So, I had a week-long vacation and now I will be having Vacation, part 2. My plan is to finish my current sweater and do some larger cleaning projects I've been putting off.

- The festival did offer a streaming option, so I am going to watch at least some of the films at home, but they aren't streaming them till next weekend.

- My tiny solo rpg has picked up some steam this week, so I've been actively playing it a lot. ( Cut for rambling rpg discussion. )

- I just checked out My Heart is a Chainsaw from the library today - it'll be October tomorrow, so it's time to start shifting towards more concentrated horror reading. I'm planning to go through the as-yet-unread horror on my bookshelves and try to read at least some of them.

This month, my library's Classic Book Group read Dracula and I was invited to their (virtual) meeting as the library vampire expert. This makes two meetings of this bookgroup I have attended. The last was in 2009. Both meetings were discussions of Dracula, because I am nothing if not consistent.

It was a super fun discussion that I enjoyed immensely. I was very restrained in my enthusiasm, only made one joke about train timetables, did no excited infodumping, and did not use the word "homoerotic" even once. The topic of "is vampirism oral sex?" was brought up but not by me. I did get to talk about magic blood transfusions, Renfield's weird fascinating religiosity, and the wonderful fact that Dracula calls himself "Count de Ville" at one point, which I had entirely forgotten. It is always wonderful to talk about this book with people who are new to it, and especially with people who are new to horror in general, because they always have some new and interesting thing to say that I have not considered and I love being able to once again see my favorite book with fresh eyes.

Also, I got to reread Dracula on work time and got paid to discuss it tonight, which I would absolutely have done for free.

Good times.

Today I started reading T Kingfisher's The Twisted Ones, which I had put on hold some time ago and about which I didn't remember anything other than the fact that I had been assured that the dog didn't die.

You guys, ( spoilers )

I am stupidly happy about this.

Hello friends! Would you like to recommend me a horror novel to read?

I just finished The Cabin at the End of the World by Paul Tremblay. Mr Tremblay is a compelling writer and I know that many people enjoy his work very much but I hated almost the entire book - I think I kept reading out of spite, more than anything else. Because he gets generally good reviews in horror circles, I had hoped that my extremely similar reaction to his Head Full of Ghosts was due to the fact that I tend to dislike possession horror a lot, but no. I just dislike his books.

Anyway. I want to read a different horror novel to get the taste out of my mouth, but cannot settle on anything. Would any of you like to suggest one?

Things:

- I have gotten so bad at updating, OMG.

- I bought new boots last week. They are Doc Martens and are black with secret rainbows. In that, they are coated with some kind of oil-slick looking substance that you can only see in the right light. I love them, but we are still in the breaking-in process so they hurt my feet.

- My mom is currently in Alabama (ferrying my grandmother to my aunt's house), so Dad and I are on our own. Since most of the tv shows we watch together we also watch with Mom, we're saving them till she gets back and I am getting random movies that look fun for for Dad and me from the library. So far, we have watched Lady from Shanghai and Field of Dreams. You guys, I had never seen Field of Dreams before and it is far and away one of the weirdest stories I've ever seen. I mean, I kinda loved it but wow. That is some weird baseball magic.

- Also, I have read too much Stephen King in my life to think that strange voices in the corn are ever something you should listen to. Don't build a baseball field! Burn down the corn instead!

- Relatedly, I am currently reading 14 by Peter Clines, and Dracula, and Caligari's Chlidren, which is a book on horror film from the late 70's. (Written just before Halloween. The author talks a lot about how horror film comes in waves and I have this weird gleeful joy that he's standing right in front of another one and doesn't know it. I hope he enjoyed it.) And, y'know, I am just a fundamentally happier person when part of my brain is thinking about monsters and horror film. I suppose that's why I always reach for horror when I'm in a bad place. But I am not in a bad place right now, so basically my monsters just make me happy.

- Today, I am meeting my sisters in Seattle for brunch and we are going to the ballet. That sentence sounds like it ought to belong to someone else's life, but it is indeed mine.

Yesterday, the children's librarian at Bainbridge made a difficult decision - we have a bunch of John Bellairs hardcovers with the Edward Gorey illustrations, and they just don't check out. They've consistently been on our dusty shelf reports (the reports of books that don't ever get checked out) for years now and we just don't have space to keep them. So they had to be weeded.

Now, this is a tragic thing. But, on the upside for me, she knows that I also love John Bellairs and she wanted the satisfaction of knowing that at least some of the books would be going to a loving home. Which is why I now have hardcover copies of The Lamp from the Warlock's Tomb and The Secret of the Underground Room with the Edward Gorey illustrations.



Friends! Do you like: kid-lit, excellent writing, gorgeously spooky things that aren't gory, inter-generational friendships, well-researched occult phenomena, American small-town life in the late 1940's, and happy endings that usually involve eating cookies? Then you should go to your local library and get some John Bellairs - save them from the dusty shelf report. You will not be disappointed.

There are three series, each about a different boy and his elderly friend: Lewis Barnavelt (and his uncle Jonathan and their neighbor, Mrs Zimmerman, both of whom are witches), Anthony Monday (and Miss Eels, a librarian at the library where Anthony volunteers), and Johnny Dixon (and Professor Childermass). I'll give you a recommendation from each series:

For Lewis Barnavelt, you should start at the beginning with The House with a Clock in its Walls. Lewis comes to live with his uncle Jonathan, but Jonathan's house used to belong to a wizard working to bring about the end of the world and there is a clock hidden somewhere in the house, ticking down to Doomsday. I basically stole this book from my third grade teacher and read the cover off before I returned it to her.

For Anthony Monday, try The Dark Secret of Weatherend, in which Anthony and Miss Eels have to stop an evil wizard from transforming the world into an icy wasteland. There's a scene in this book where they almost get killed by leaves that I think about every autumn.

And for Johnny Dixon, start with The Curse of the Blue Figurine. There's ghosts, dead priests, possession, Egyptian artifacts, and evil magic rings. It's pretty great. Honestly, all the Johnny Dixon books are pretty great.

There's also an adult novel - The Face in the Frost - which is about two wizards and is lovely (and scary enough that I don't listen to the audiobook at bedtime). Well worth checking out.

So go - read John Bellairs! And then come back here and talk to me about it, because these books were a mainstay of my childhood and I don't get to talk about them nearly enough.

Things:

- So I started rereading Carmilla instead. I say "rereading", because I have technically read it before, but I was about 9 years old and missed pretty much everything important and don't really remember it at all. But hey, 22 years later, it's pretty great.

- The last 15 minutes the library was open tonight, we had no patrons. So it was just me and the other nerdy person who works there, standing around talking about stuff. And I discovered something inexplicable - I knew that he had watched at least some Farscape, because he understood a reference I made to it some months ago. But tonight it came out that he has only watched the first season and isn't really sure that he liked it and I'm pretty sure I just sort of sputtered at him incoherently for a minute because Farscape! ::flaily hands:: I mean, intellectually I understand that there must be people who don't like Farscape but I don't really grok the idea, y'know?

- There are children outside my window, chasing one of the local wild rabbits with a fishing net. (Okay, it may be a feral rabbit, as it is piebald.) I viciously hope it will bite them.

Yesterday, Mom and I drove to Gig Harbor to do some thrifting and go to a community theater production of Dracula. I bought a scarf and a hot water bottle*, we had frozen yogurt, and there were vampires.

It was, bizarrely, the most book-accurate adaptation I've ever seen. To the point of having large swaths of dialogue taken directly from the original. They conflated all of Lucy's suitors into one character - Dr Seward, of course, because he's the one you have to keep - and they telescoped the timeline a little, so Mina and Jonathan were around for the Bloofer Lady, but everything else was there, even the absurd blood transfusions. It was community theater, of course, so the acting wasn't stellar and the guy who played Renfield was over the top for my tastes but still, it was a lot of fun.

It's amazing to me how much I still love this story. It's one of the oldest of my fandoms that's still around - only Sherlock Holmes and Phantom of the Opera are older - and I still want to spend time revisiting it, reimagining it, expanding on it. It's still absurdly important to me and every time I think that I'm totally over vampires, totally done with them, I find some new and ridiculous Dracula-related thing and the love comes back.

Anyway. I totally put the audiobook on my ipod to listen to today. 8)


*Because I had been looking for one for a while - they are surprisingly difficult to find in brick-and-mortar stores where I live. Also, it is the best thing ever, OMG. So ridiculously cozy!

In which I am stymied:

I know there was an audiobook made of John Bellairs' The Mansion in the Mist. I know this because I remember listening to it, and I remember it vividly because I made the mistake of trying to use it as a bedtime audiobook.* I do not therefore understand why I cannot acquire said audiobook in anything but cassette tape form. It is very frustrating. I have the book and could just reread it, of course, but it is not the same.

Tangentially, has anyone out there read any of the John Bellairs books that were finished/coauthored/written outright by Brad Strickland? Are they any good? Several of them appear to be Johnny Dixon books and he was always my favorite, but I am wary.



*I did this with The Face in the Frost too, because I am an idiot.

I realized yesterday that Halloween is coming up and I haven't actually read any horror in months. So I took myself to the Horror Writers Association website to look at the Stoker awards.

This is always equal parts totally fun and really frustrating. It is totally fun because there are always bunches of books that I've never heard of, let alone read. (Laird Barron has a novel out? How cool is that?) And it is really frustrating because I find all these books and note down the titles of the ones that sound cool and then my library has none of them.

Fortunately, the ones on the First Novel list tend to be fairly inexpensive if bought for the kindle.