Arctic Light

Continuing to catch up on my bookposting backlog with a book from a couple months back ...

This book is (it turns out) the fourth in the horror-comedy series that starts with John Dies at the End. I didn't actually realize this when I picked it up, because I was caught by the title and then by the first few pages of intro text which are a series of Craigslist-style ads for prosaic magical items from other universes, such as a cursed glass patio table that shows the reflection from whatever was happening there 24 hours ago ("One leg is a little shorter than the other, so it does wobble") and a DVD boxed set of a mission to recover astronaut corpses from the moon ("Also from an alternate dimension, I guess; disc 4 is scratched and may not play in your machine").

So that gives you an idea of what the whole book is like. I really didn't feel the lack of having read the previous books, because the whole thing is disjointed, deeply weird, a mishmash of different POVs and timelines and found-footage-style inserts, and it's creepy in some places, dirtybadwrong in others, and very funny. Not all of the jokes landed for me, but many of them did, and while it's dumb dudebro-ish humor at times, it's also mostly free of the cringiest sort (but see caveat about the first book at the end of this review) - that is, it's not *ist in any way I noticed, it's not mean-spirited, it's actually a surprisingly sweet book given the occasionally gross and splattery horror plot, about a group of volunteer monster-hunters who clean up alternate dimensional incursions into our world (and other weirdness). Their general terribleness at their job is only exceeded by their courage in being devoted to doing the things no one else will do.

Actually, that was one thing which worked unexpectedly well for me. I do not normally like incompetent main characters, and these guys - well, technically, two guys and a girl - are really bad at monster hunting. It works for me in part because the author has a really good sense of comic timing (e.g. one character explains that he will definitely not set the woods on fire while destroying monster eggs because he knows what he's doing; cut to everybody hanging around while the fire department extinguishes the flaming woods several hours later) but also because it really underscores that they're ordinary slackers who are struggling hard to fight with things that are Army-caliber threats and all they've got is three nerds with makeshift weapons. I ended up being drawn into the book in part just because they're so brave and so devoted to each other - they are bad at this, but they're trying so hard and they're absolutely dedicated to protecting each other as well as the town to the best of their somewhat limited abilities.

It's a funny, gory, occasionally stupid, and surprisingly upbeat horror-comedy. I really enjoyed it.

After that, I tried reading the first book (John Dies At The End) because I had enjoyed this one so much, and it is more what I was expecting for the type of book that it is - that is, extremely early-2000s edgy bro-ish humor. (The first book evidently started out as an online series of Reddit-like posts from the early 2000s, and that's exactly what it reads like.) I feel as if the latest book shows 20 years of growth, maturity, and general perspective on life ending in a fairly positive place; the first book is definitely nowhere near there yet, and I stopped a few chapters in. I'll go back to it eventually, and the rest of the series, because I like the characters enough to follow them even through the shakier bits, but I think I needed a break from the author's chaotic, balls-to-the-wall style first.

Well, that sure was a book. That I read.

The tl;dr gist of it: in 1982, a young woman, Viv, working as an all-night motel clerk in a small town in rural New York goes missing, along with a string of other young women in the town she lives in. In 2017, her niece Carly shows up to try to find out what happened to her, and soon begins to realize the motel is haunted.

The eeriness and ambiance of the motel is genuinely really fun - not outright horrifying, but tense and creepy - as is the general sense of the motel and the town never having really moved on much from the 80s. And the mystery was interesting enough to keep me reading, with the layered mysteries of Viv trying to solve the other girls' murders in the 1980s and her niece trying to solve theirs and hers in the modern day.

Eventually, though, it all ended up in a 7-car coincidence and bad decision pile-up.

( Major spoilers )

I finished this tonight after reading it in bits and pieces over the last week or so! I am VERY tentatively using my horror tag on this because it really isn't horror in any meaningful sense, but I imagine it would be pleasant reading during the fall season because there's a ton of Salem/witch/spooky ambiance.

This is a breezy, funny, very readable comedy/absurdist magical realism/coming-of-age book about a girls' hockey team in Massachusetts (Salem area) in the 1980s who sell their souls to the devil (or more accurately to Emilio Estevez, kept by one of the girls in the sort of celebrity binder shrine that almost everybody had in the '80s) to win the state championship. I almost put it down a number of times in the first few chapters due to an almost complete lack of interest in either high school sports or the minutiae of life as a suburban teenager, in the 80s or otherwise. But the voice is strong enough to carry it - I think it says a lot that I was pretty thoroughly hooked despite finding almost everything about the actual subject matter very much not my thing.

It's just very intensely itself. This book absolutely commits. It wasn't always what I wanted, but I deeply admire its commitment to being the incredibly unique thing that it is, and in the end I liked what it was.

We Ride Upon Sticks has the extremely unusual narrative voice of first person plural ("we"), with no specific individual team member narrating, but rather a general sense that the narration is by the team as a whole entity ("we did this that summer"), switching in and out of all of their individual POVs as we get a feel for the individual lives of 11 different characters. It works without being confusing even before this central spoiler of the book: ( The spoiler in question )

I think it gives you a pretty accurate idea of the book's general style (in addition to selling their souls to Emilio Estevez) that one girl's bouffant 80s hairdo is referred to as The Claw, has its own narration, and gives the others orders, and it's entirely unclear (in most cases, anyway) whether this is actually happening and whether anyone else can hear it, but it's exactly on par with other weirdness of the "being a teenager is just strange, man" variety such as locker vandalism, parental shenanigans, and the ongoing question of whether one of the adult coaches is having an affair with one of the kids or if this is just the result of the teenage gossip mill acting out for shock value.

One thing I did truly like is that the book skipped past a lot of low-hanging narrative fruit about teenagehood, especially since all 11 of the team members are given equal weight in the narrative: the kids aren't relentlessly bullied, although bullies and cliques are obviously present in their lives; their home lives are weird and complicated but neither idyllic nor miserable; the two Asian kids, one Black kid, and multiple queer kids in the group all have their own things going on. The team members' triumphs and their tragedies are the kinds of petty things that happen in high school, have all the meaning in the world to them at the time, and may or may not matter that much later on.

In light of that, I had mixed feelings about a major aspect of where the book turned out to be going: ( It's all spoilers from here )

p.s. You can read another review of the book at Skygiants' DW, which is where I heard about it. (Contains spoilers.)

In 1980s New Hampshire, a little girl discovers that she has the ability to ride her bike across a covered bridge to find any lost thing, anywhere in the world - at a cost. Meanwhile, a serial killer who preys on children can also take himself in and out of the world in a similar kind of way in a Rolls Royce with the license plate NOS4A2. Inevitably they're going to crash into each other.

I bought this after being sold by the first few pages, and I found the first, oh, third or so of the book incredibly gripping, very twisty and mysterious with wonderful descriptions of 1980s/90s small-town childhood and people grappling with their powers, which come with both soaring highs and terrible lows. The climax was also very good. And in between, there is the middle. I remember thinking around the midpoint of the book that if we've hit this point in the plot already, what's going to happen in the rest of the book? Well, there sure is a lot of it, depressing to the point of feeling in places like misery porn. I read most of the book yesterday, but put it down in the middle of what should have been a gripping action sequence because I just couldn't handle the combination of the villain's absolutely awful viewpoint and the protagonist getting the shit kicked out of her physically and emotionally for the past 200 pages.

But then when I picked it up again this evening, once I slogged onward through a little more of that, the climax turned out to be very good and the ending actually made me cry a little. I feel like it could have stood to be about a third shorter, not necessarily because any specific part of the sequence of events wasn't potentially interesting on its own, but because the cumulative effect of all of it was really hard to take and started to feel repetitive after a while. I don't think we needed quite that much of serial killer POV, meeting interesting people only to have them die, and the heroine being in and out of mental hospitals, being a terrible mom, and getting beat up.

But I liked the ending enough that my overall feelings on the book are very positive! Just ... there was a lot of middle.

I also feel like I need to mention that my used copy of the book had a bookstore receipt (for this book) tucked into it from Bangor, Maine, which under the circumstances feels like it should be the start of another book in this one's genre.

( A handful of (pretty big) spoilers )