Books: The Final Girls Support Group By Grady Hendrix (2021)

“In horror movies, the final girl is the one who's left standing when the credits roll. The one who fought back, defeated the killer, and avenged her friends. The one who emerges bloodied but victorious. But after the sirens fade and the audience moves on, what happens to her? Lynnette Tarkington is a real-life final girl who survived a massacre twenty-two years ago, and it has defined every day of her life since. And she's not alone. For more than a decade she's been meeting with five other actual final girls and their therapist in a support group for those who survived the unthinkable, putting their lives back together, piece by piece. That is until one of the women misses a meeting and Lynnette's worst fears are realized--someone knows about the group and is determined to take their lives apart again, piece by piece. But the thing about these final girls is that they have each other now, and no matter how bad the odds, how dark the night, how sharp the knife, they will never, ever give up.”

While The Final Girl Support Group pays homage to the last four decades of slasher films, the books themes writer Grady Hendrix trots out gets lost in the seemly torpid James Patterson inspired dialogue and Hendrix’s attempt to appeal to a certain sub-group of teens who came of age in the late 1980s and early 90s. It wants to be a clever dissection of the genre, but can’t get over what is an essentially B-film horror schlock.

I caught early on that this book was also a sort of attempt to explore male misogyny and a lot of women’s obsession with true crime books and local murders. We get the men who hate women and women who become enamored of popular male killers –and how they can be easily manipulated, these impressionable teens. Then he tries to use those tropes and themes to give women the ability to fight back.

My biggest issue was keeping all the characters straight –I mean all the women in most of these horror films are essentially the same character. There is really nothing to separate them, to make them stand apart from each other. And it didn’t help I felt no emotional connection to even the main protagonist, Lynn. I can’t understand anyone, let a women, who suffer such trauma, but Lynn never made anyone, even herself, remotely likable.

Another mixed bag for me, an interesting (maybe brilliant) dea but executed in an only half interesting way. Which is funny, considering I’ve had the basic same issues with his two previous novels, My Best Friend’s Exorcism and The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires.

I don’t know, maybe this may have worked as a novella more than a novel.

Books: Doctor Who: The Silent Stars Go By by Dan Abnett (2011)

 

“For centuries the Maintainers have worked. With no help from other worlds, they subsist on the food they can grow and that's little enough. But their purpose, their whole life is to maintain the machines that will one day make their world as habitable as old Earth. Life used to be hard. Now as their crops fail, livestock sickens, and the temperature drops, it's becoming impossible. This year's Winter Season Feast won't be the usual celebration. It's not a time for optimism or hope - and it's not a time to welcome unexpected guests. The Doctor, Amy, and Rory find a society breaking apart under the strain. Tensions are mounting, old rivalries are coming to the fore, people are dying...and then the Doctor's old enemies, the Ice Warriors, make their move. With the cold-hearted threat of invasion, the real battle for survival begins. Or does it? The Doctor begins to suspect that behind everything lies a deadlier, and even more chilling danger.”

The Silent Stars Go By is a fine, often fun tale involving the 11^th Doctor, with Amy and Rory Williams Pond. Abnett is a prolific writer of comics (for both Marvel and DC) and novels set in the Warhammer universe, but this is not his first dealings with Doctor Who universe. He wrote a Torchwood novel in 2007 and contributed the framing device to the 2011 anthology novel, The Story of Martha.

The first half is a bit soft, with ill attempts at humor that often make Amy look dumb, but the book does pickup after a bit to become an exciting and well-thought tale about terraforming, and (harking back to the Classic Doctor Who serial The Face of Evil) use of the way language, words, and ideas morph over the generations. So the world building and this well thought out language drift make up for the slow and predictable start. While the reader knows the Ice Warriors (or Martians) are involved with the plot, it takes way too long for them to become useful –and maybe that was done because what happens (including then the startling original Transhumans) would’ve shaved a lot of pages off the book, so Abnett added a lot of the unnecessary running around. Still, as has happened before, the Ice Warriors are not really proper villains.

Books: Double Whammy By Carl Hiaasen (1987)

 

"R.J. Decker, star tenant of the local trailer park and neophyte private eye is fishing for a killer. Thanks to a sportsman's scam that's anything but sportsmanlike, there's a body floating in Coon Bog, Florida -- and a lot that's rotten in the murky waters of big-stakes, large-mouth bass tournaments. Here Decker will team up with a half-blind, half-mad hermit with an appetite for road kill; dare to kiss his ex-wife while she's in bed with her new husband; and face deadly TV evangelists, dangerously seductive women, and a pistol-toting redneck with a pit bull on his arm. And here his own life becomes part of the stakes, for while the "double whammy" is the lure, first prize is for the most ingenious murder.”

This was Hiaasen’s second solo novel. He had written three more traditional thrillers with William Montalbo, but with his first tale, Tourist Season, it became clear that Hiaasen was going to bring a new voice to thrillers, one more silly and outrageous, yet still ugly and violent. In essence, he created a whole new subgenre of mysteries that writers like Tim Dorsey and Janet Evanovich would draw success years later. As much as Hiaasen loves Florida, he clearly loves showing its dark side, the juxtapositions of rich, influential white conservative fake Christians who must deal with the white trash, and POC, and the other crazy denizens that populate his books.

It does get off quick start, even with the boggling down of facts about bass fishing. Decker is a likable guy with a short temper, but who clearly is trying to live a better life. But he does come off a bit weak. The deaths are violent and worthy of noir-style tales. The difference here, much like Donald E. Westlakes Dortmunder tales, some of the villains are dumb as a box of hair.

A fun, inventive book, even if mystery mixed with farce doesn’t work all the way through.

Books: Lily and the Octopus By Steven Rowley (2016)

 

“Ted—a gay, single, struggling writer is stuck: unable to open himself up to intimacy except through the steadfast companionship of Lily, his elderly dachshund. When Lily’s health is compromised, Ted vows to save her by any means necessary.”

As Ted explains, “It’s Thursday the first time I see it. I know that it’s Thursday because Thursday nights are the nights my dog, Lily, and I set aside to talk about boys we think are cute.…We get into long debates over the Ryans. I’m a Gosling man, whereas she’s a Reynolds gal.” The thing Ted notices that fateful Thursday is an octopus (which, of course, is a metaphor for a tumor). For most of the novel, the thing over Lily’s eye remains an octopus, because Ted (through writer Steven Rowely) cannot fathom the reality that he will be losing his faithful companion. Ted’s friends and his therapist do call him on this, but eventually they know this is Ted and Lily’s journey. The plot falls into magical realism, which works for a good percentage of the time. It can be laugh out loud funny as well. For lover’s of animals, this book may make them weep, and non-animal lovers will continue to be baffled by how these pets become so in grained in our lives.

Lily and the Octopus is defiantly a quirky book and while I love quirky tales, I did feel the book could’ve worked more as a novella than a full blown novel. But I liked Rowely’s The Guncle, so I thought I give this a whirl. It’s a rather quick read, as well. I'll read his second novel, The Editor, sometime in the coming weeks.

Books: Doctor Who: Verdigris By Paul Magrs (2000)

 

“High above London is a ship the size and shape of St Pancras railway station. On board, the Doctor and Iris Wildthyme are bargaining for their lives with creatures determined to infiltrate the Earth in the guise of characters from nineteenth-century.” Or if that is not enough, we get this from the Doctor himself near the end of the book: 'Let's see. We've got the disappearance of all UNIT personnel, excluding the Brigadier, and Mike Yates, who has turned into a cardboard shadow of his former self, we've got a spacecraft full of very irate, hand-bag worshiping aliens hovering above the planet, we've got a forest of deadly trees on fire, a mysterious green man who seems to be our sworn enemy, and, on the other hand, we've got killer robot sheep and the safety of Jo and Tom to account for. Is that a fair summary?"

Paul Magrs Verdigris is an attempt at all out comedy of Doctor Who, in particular the early 1970’s version with the Third Doctor (set sometime between the serials The Daemons and The Three Doctors). It’s a send up of post-modernism that tries to explore what made this version of the Doctor tick. It introduces Iris Wildthyme is a time traveling adventuress (a Time Lord or Time Lady, depending on your POV, and a potential early version of River Song), who travels the universe in London double-decker bus, which seems smaller on the inside. Iris is the Doctor’s self-proclaimed paramour, with a fondness for alcohol and cigarettes (I kept thinking of Amelia Ducat, the eccentric artist that helps the Fourth Doctor in the serial The Seeds of Doom). She, and her assistant Tom, is here to help the Doctor, but in all fairness, she seems to muck things up, including telling him things that have yet to happen to him.

This book also tries to parody The Tomorrow People, called The Children of Destiny, but while there are a lot of great ideas here, the book only works for me sometimes. I appreciated some of the in-jokes, with Iris making fun of the Third Doctor –after all, he is most establishment, the most authoritarian, the most sanctimonious of all the Doctors- as well as the idea that the top people of UNIT, the Brigadier, Benton and a cameo appearance by Liz Shaw all work in a grocery story is a hoot, but most seem a bit silly. It is a very silly novel, I guess.

I did find it interesting that the Doctor had a home outside of UNIT and his TARDIS, something the series never really explored. But a lot of the tale does not get explained, especially Verdigris and his “Green” magic, which is apparently different from Black and White magic. The fact that Doctor Who has avoided the supernatural is because explaining magic is complicated on a science fiction series.

Books: The People We Hate at the Wedding By Grant Ginder (2017)

“Paul and Alice’s half-sister Eloise is getting married! In London! There will be fancy hotels, dinners at ‘it’ restaurants and a reception at a country estate complete with tea lights and embroidered cloth napkins. They couldn’t hate it more. It’s the story of a less than perfect family. Donna, the clan’s mother, is now a widow living in the Chicago suburbs with a penchant for the occasional joint and more than one glass of wine with her best friend while watching ‘House Hunters International.’ Alice is in her thirties, single, smart, beautiful, stuck in a dead-end job where she is mired in a rather predictable, though enjoyable, affair with her married boss. Her brother Paul lives in Philadelphia with his older, handsomer, tenured track professor boyfriend who’s recently been saying things like ‘monogamy is an oppressive heteronormative construct,’ while eyeing undergrads. And then there’s Eloise. Perfect, gorgeous, cultured Eloise. The product of Donna’s first marriage to a dashing Frenchman, Eloise has spent her school years at the best private boarding schools, her winter holidays in St. John and a post-college life cushioned by a fat, endless trust fund. To top it off, she’s infuriatingly kind and decent.”

I find, like reading Grant Ginder's Honestly, We Meant Well, of two minds with The People We Hate at the Wedding. Despite it setting in multiple places, the novel is a very New York take, filled with some pretty unlikable people who –despite some very fortunate lives- many New Yorkers probably think are normal.

I mean, it’s good idea for a novel, as it tackles families, siblings, and even parents and how we all interweave ourselves. But the book never gets to place where I thought it would go. And on top of that, I can’t really say what I was expecting it to go. Still, its smart read, with some witty takes on life and how see things differently. Paul’s relationship with his mother is still rather bizarre, and his anger is somewhat justified, but I can’t see why it took them both so long to understand each other. Despite the unbelievable aspect that their mother would take up smoking pot, Donna seems like the most decent character in the book. Alice is fun, and Eloise remains somewhat of stereotype British socialite who seemly has hanger-ons than true friends.

But gawd knows, I love dysfunctional family books, and they’re a dime a dozen these days, but I somehow (again, I don’t know why) anticipated something more satirical than what I got. It is funny, but never to the point where I needed to stop and damp out tears.