Jeff > Recent Status Updates

Very cool artwork.

Slightly tedious wordplay at the beginning but otherwise a cool opening. Bird Box vibes. Spooky house with heavy doors that close behind the protagonist on their own, check.

Her own theory--that whole dissertation thing. Because she was a scientist. Actually specialized in the thing that she was fighting. A brief recollection after about 150 pages of neglect.

So many obviously unresolved(able) threads, I knew this was headed for a shortcut, like most of the other ambitious aspects of the book. But this. Erica is above Tales from the Crypt fare, but you wouldn't know it here. The old Thinner plot, which was probably wasn't totally unique when Bachman wrote it.

This Terminator 3 section is undeniably fun, but the foundation was never built to sustain these abrupt character shifts. No suspension of disbelief. A very poor imitation of Jack Torrance.

And that's even worse.

This far in and now she's telepathic? The underlying premise that a mycologist is being told <spoiler>by her daughter that a fungal infection can be relieved by one person giving it to another</spoiler> is so frustratingly absurd, even if everything else had been smooth, this would kill it. Every chapter starts with a painfully obvious setup that results in the inevitable conclusion two pages later as a cliffhanger.

The big reveal at this point in the story should have been a looming presence that we suspected but were unsure about, rather than a blaring siren that the reader has been exasperatedly waiting for the protagonist to notice. This is like a ghost story where the ghosts are all caught on camera every night and nothing happens to the footage or the photos, the victims just choose not to do anything about the proof.

44 chapters of outrageous disobedience, lying, threats, and admission of wanting to hurt people and animals...then suddenly she's strict with her daughter.

This book's spoiler-heavy summary ruins more than just the potential suspense of the plot.

The nonchalant approach to the kid's ominous threats and clearly homicidal behavior has gotten ridiculous. Maybe because this is the author's first attempt at a straight horror story, but these are all the cheapest methods for achieving haunted house horror, right down to the basement our protagonist is in denial about avoiding at all costs. Ferencik is so much better than this, especially about naturalism.

The underlying theme of naturalism has really taken a backseat to haunted house thriller nonsense.

Kid logic can be maddening, but this is total absurdity. When you're writing speculative fiction, it's a shame to spoil the illusion by making something as mundane as parental care totally impossible to believe.

A little like a half-assed Shirley Jackson, this is starting to remind me of incompetently written haunted house horror, where each chapter ends with characters getting amnesia after an unexplainable event and deciding everything was in their heads, so they'll go to bed. The William Peter Blatty routine isn't working, either.

World's worst therapist. She got 10 minutes out of the first hour long session, then a single question out of the second session. Also, even in a chaotic time of life, no adult listens to children make physical threats and just says "okay see you later!" The only way this gets resolved now is the unreliable narrator trick, which, though acceptable, would be disappointing this far into it.

It's a lot to ask for your reader to believe that a parent would repeatedly allow dishonesty, deflection and dismissal from their own child on a sensitive subject, then become so convinced of the child being dangerous as to lock them out of their bedroom.

It took you eight years to test the substance that killed your spouse? This is all very cordyceps adjacent, but the focus on empiricism is where this falls apart--it's a known hallucinogen but no one knows if it's safe or has ever tried it? And a mycologist brought it home from another country knowing it was unidentified to consume it himself?

Given the slow reveal of this plot, the description of the book is really unfortunate. The reader could really enjoy the wild speculation of this first third, instead of being frustrated at the dramatic irony.

Glad the abandoned line of questioning routine didn't extend to the therapist (completely). Started with a Good Son vibe but now headed towards The Exorcist. A little strange that both she and her father had spouses try to kill them for totally unrelated, random reasons, but the tension is still perfect.

She has to hobble the pacing here by having the mother conveniently lose interest in pursuing her line of questioning each time the daughter starts to explain what she hears. It's a little frustrating, but it's inarguably effective and the momentum is unstoppable right now. Sometimes it's hard to put a book down because you love an author or a series, this one is just written with hooks buried in every paragraph.

Ferencik is back! Girl in Ice was a good consolation prize, but it's been a long time since we got a novel like this.

What an epigraph to start things off--wish I could quote this one. So excited for Ferencik's first book in 5 years. This one looks like it may follow in the tradition of her best stuff--a palpable tension from page 1.

Looking back on their experience, they thought it was rather exciting and in fact, two days out from Liverpool on our return to Britain, Neil, bored with the shipboard routine, said "I'm fed up, Dad, I wish we were back on the raft!"

If any single civilized factor in a castaway's character helps survival, it is a well-developed sense of the ridiculous. It helps the castaway to laugh in the face of impossible situations and allows him, or her, to overcome the assassination of all civilized codes and characteristics which hitherto had been the guidelines of life.

This goes a long way to show the lessons learned from Bligh's mutiny: "...any departure into the realm of orthodox authority at this stage is specious nonsense, and the crass idiocy of creating work for "idle" hands should be instantly exposed as such. There is usually plenty of time for discussion about policy decisions and if people know why they are doing a thing it helps them to do it."

Remember that it is easier for exhausted castaways to travel by sea than by land, and to destroy one's craft making a useless landing on an uninhabited island which won't support life, or on a part of the coast which is cut off from habitation, is to waste the effort expended on reaching it.

"I have noticed tropic birds four hundred miles out in the Atlantic from Barbados, and if they can travel as far as that, they can go much farther. "

Not the soundest logic.

Interesting that Robertson embraces Cook's anecdote about drinking turtle blood, but he tells us to ignore the ship's surgeon's experience, who sees the blood making sailors sick.

Definitely could use more evidence for this claim: "Robin, who refused the enemas, showed no particular disability because of it, unless his delirium could be regarded as a sign that he was perhaps more dehydrated than the rest of us."

Based on the authors' writing and my own understanding of survival techniques, if I had to choose between the two opposing views of drinking seawater presented here (Robertson against, Bombard for) I would trust Robertson. That being said, Bombard lasted almost twice as long as the Robertson family, and he was able to walk to a rescue station, whereas the author admits he collapsed after reaching the rescue boat.