Jesse > Recent Status Updates

okay considering the arc went from thinking that she had to contain the bear to realizing that the bear was potentially an ally, the story quickly moving from his plot to sew chaos to working on the side of Russia makes a lot more sense.

Like dang the Konstantin subplot ends in a really tidy way and feels really earned, too, even what passes for compassion. And I’m all, no way!! This book ain’t even close to over! And then, ohhhhhh yeaaaaah, the Tartars.

🎉

At a certain point I am realizing that the overall story arc of this series is more or less mimicked by The Wolf and the Woodsman, with an emphasis on the history of the Jewish faith in the Slavic countries, just to a much less satisfying effect. It’s knocked my experience with Reid down a peg.

Arden’s prose is so awesome and there is no encumbrance by unneeded peanut galleries and pithy banter. Vasya looks for the winter king and finds her own family’s history in the process, looking down long memories of midnight. She is intelligent, terrified, and not very much in love if at all anymore with the winter demon, and she can see it all in the memory of his old ways of power.

Arden is such a great writer. Of all the Russophilic works that have come out that I’ve read—Shadow and Bone, Ava Reid’s, and Arden—I prefer Arden by a wide margin. I think that Reid’s Wolf and the Woodsman speaks to that Jewish heritage that is completely absent in this historical fantasy, which is commendable, but the rest of this prose is so much stronger.

No peace!! This book starts out right where The Girl in the Tower left off, with enormous as well as immediate ramifications for Vasilisa. There is also a bit of a return to form as we have a familiar pairing of villains, just operating on a much larger stage than Vasilisa’s hometown. I want to see Konstantin get his comeuppance SO HARD. The whole mob violence is just brutal.

This story doesn’t really marinate in its twists. The council of rogues is defied, like, several times; we get a history at the creation of the sovereign state of Philadelphia; and then Trenmore gets a good swashbuckling show where he strikes the perverted Liberty Bell, which—for whatever reason yet to be explained—sends the travelers back to their own time, though I assume it annihilates the villains.

This is very roundabout a dystopian novel but due to where it’s placed in history it has more of the air of the weird / speculative fiction of its age. It’s still really fun! Now that we are in the contests we get a sense of just how absolute the tyranny of Penn Service is. There’s a lot of info that’s communicated by Loveliest in an off-hand fashion that makes the world-building feel like it’s zooming by.

We are now in Philadelphia 200 years in the future, after having passed through the Dunsanian fantasy of Ulithia. We haven’t hit upon the main features of this dystopia, yet, but we know that everyone has a number, and some people are submitted to some sort of a series of Contests. Also, holy shit, Trenmore. The Irishman gets super violent when he can’t understand why neo-Philly is the way that it is.

The least likely situation here is that Bob manages to randomly pick the one building to burgle that his very good friend managed to be housed in at the time, and that he was surprised by a thief who was looking for… the dreaded Heads of Cerberus!!!

Now that we are here in “Purgatory” we can see what sort of madness ensues as castles mysteriously manifest and robots ride around on horses.

Melville ends with some insights into the Tahitian monarchy’s court and ultimately ships off, leaving fictional friend Doctor Long Ghost in his devil-may-care indolence among the Tahitians. I’m not sad to see him left; he is a merry prankster but I wonder whether he is a pastiche of Melville’s worst impulses, distancing the author from less gentlemanly conduct. Not that he didn’t have romance in Typee.

Melville and Long Ghost leave their potato farm to wander toward a whaling ship that is docked in another part of the island. This takes them past a few interesting oddities, like a Tahitian bootlegger. There is also a sort of exotic dance that he describes that he apparently witnessed on Typee, though it’s attributed here to a fictional Tahitian village.

Melville and Long Ghost work on a potato farm on another island with a Yankee and a Londoner. They goof off, hunting, and Melville gives us a bit of the idea of how commerce in the Society Islands goes on. There is something in the story that bemoans the “indolence” of the natives, but I am tempering this with Melville’s subtext that life on Tahiti was well enough prior to foreign powers.

Melville in this case is in the position, having spent a not insignificant amount of time among the more or less untouched Typee, to evaluate what western culture has done to the Tahitians. This section includes a more sympathetic account of the activities or missionaries, the subtext of which is more in alignment with his scathing remarks in Typee, grounded in the superficialities of their Christian “conversion”

The mutinous crew is imprisoned on a French warship before being moved far inland in Tahiti, under the care of the islanders. Melville’s observations on personal experiences with the Tahitians are dovetailed with extracts from historic texts that he borrowed from, giving this story a very semi-educational view of French Polynesia. It’s a bit different, too, from Typee.

More sea shenanigans. This section encompasses the voyage to Tahiti once the captain’s abscess on his taint goes south and the generally mutinous feeling of the sailors who don’t want to be stuck sailing on the boat under the first mate, who they don’t really like. This includes the more or less unsympathetic ear of the British counsel, who is on familiar terms with the despised captain.

There is a lot of nautical jargon that William Hope Hodgson used when writing his stories that I only sort of grasped. Melville, in illustrating the sailing jaunt that dominates the first part of this story, does some of the same thing, but this story is aided by copious footnotes that help to explain some things that I could never have grasped from the narrative as well as more esoteric references.

Well, Miss Marple isn’t so much of a force of nature in this novel, but I’m pretty excited to see how she wraps up this case!

As a classic Agatha Christie novel, this is a great Dramady. Someone is dead, there are a lot of sitcom-ish events going on, there’s a lot of intrigue, and the Vicar is the perfect narrator, canting the story just the right amount with his dry, jaded humor.

I am inclined to believe that Lettice Protheroe murdered her father, with Dennis making the crank call to establish her alibi.

Now that I have so many Christie books under my belt I can only imagine that no one is proven innocent until the final reveal. Like Marple talking about intuition, I am seeing echoes of Roger Ackroyd as well as Death on the Nile. The only thing I’m pretty certain of is that Lestrange is the Colonel’s first wife. Marple herself is a conspicuously irregularly appearing character.

This book rests on a bunch of initial assumptions with Miss Marple, by way of the vicar, directing the actions of the police who are out of their element in the village. As always, there are a ton of human elements bumping up against each other, and once we have—as far as we know—the sympathetic confession pair out of the way, we’re out to sea as to who the most likely suspect is.

It’s a fun setup. The Vicar as a narrator understandably has shades of Roger Ackroyd about it but he is a more fun character in his sort of jovial cynicism and his playful relationship with his much younger wife. Redding is set up as the obvious first and primary suspect, but there’s no shortage of potential perpetrators. There’s always the chance that the Colonel was murdered in a case of mistaken identity…

“Person to Person”

David is getting mysterious calls—in his BRAIN—at night. Is it a secret government project that is attempting to use brain to brain communications to limit espionage? An inventor with a device to foster said communication? His abusive father? The devil? Or, as his therapist posits, is it his subconscious? Whatever the origin, these night calls are dangerous for David’s psyche.

“From Shadowed Places”

A very sexually and racially charged story where a young man has been cursed by a spirit in service to an African witch doctor and an anthropologist—a young and stunningly beautiful African American who did a field study of the Zulu—is the only one who can save him. It’s complicated by the man’s girlfriend, who is there for the ceremony, and her father, a skeptical doctor.

“The Funeral”

A howler where a funeral parlor is engaged by a vampire to belatedly celebrate his unlife, the attendants being a Transylvanian cast of characters who get a bit unruly toward the end of the service. The twist ending is that the proprietor, Morton, finds himself being engaged by what appears to be a Lovecraftian horror and rising to the occasion for the sake of the money involved.

“Mad House”

This is a melodramatic character study of an asshole whose impotent rage has literally poisoned his house, turning it into a genius loci. Or, well, a “haunted” house. His wife is in the process of leaving him during this story, which is the tipping point for the house’s ability to “express” itself. This story has a lot more meat in it than some of the prior sketches.

“Dress of White Silk”

It’s amazing just how little Matheson explicitly shows in these stories, allowing so much space for the imagination to work. It’s like, did this girl somehow devour her mom? And it’s related to her mom’s dress? What the heck?? What the hecccckkkkk????

Mary Jane had it coming

“Dance of the Dead”

Four college kids in post-WW3 America demonstrate some bizarre future culture where they drink. They visit a night club whose featured entertainment is a plague zombie whose muscular twitches are treated as a “dance” that the jazz musicians improvise music for. There is something here about Peggy’s conversion from well-intentioned freshman to Matheson-droog.

“Witch War”

This one is one of those sketches that doesn’t really meditate on what it presents: a future where girls with god-like powers fight by using nightmarish conjurations from their imagination. I have a vague feeling that this is something of an analogue for the atomic bomb. The girls treat it as a playful sampling of their power; their “controller” thinks of them as monstrous.

“Prey”

A relatively older young woman (33) buys her boyfriend a weird Native American fetish doll—“He Who Kills”. It has a gold chain that is said to keep its spirit imprisoned and, wouldn’t you know it, the darn thing fell off while Amelia was being emotionally manipulated by her mother into breaking off her bf’s birthday party. The ending isn’t what I expected at all.