I started watching A Christmas Carol with my mom when I was a little girl, and we still watch it every Christmas, although maybe not together. We watch the 1951 version with Alastair Sim as Scrooge. All other versions are wrong/inferior, except for the Muppet version, which is the second best version and also acceptable, because Muppets. That the Alastair Sim version of the film is the best version is one of the pettiest hills I’m willing to die on.
It wasn’t until I was older that I actually read the story. I try to read it most Christmases now, but don’t always succeed. I did in 2018, though. I’m not going to bother recapping it, as it’s a very popular/well known story, but I recommend everyone read it even if they don’t celebrate Christmas, rather than just watch the film. Or listen to the audiobook, that’s fun too., I’ve found that reading Dickens is a joy as long as you aren’t in school. Yes, he is quite wordy, but that is part of what makes it fun. His language is magic all its own.
As with many books gone Hollywood, reading the book is different than the film. I quite enjoyed the book, and it gave me one of my favorite opening lines ever:
Marley was dead: to begin with.
Come on! That’s great!
There are some other really famous lines too, which I love quoting at people who don’t necessarily know what I’m talking about (because I, too, can be a smug asshole). “Are there no prisons!? Are there no workhouses!?”
I also like the end, that Scrooge learns to “keep Christmas in his heart.” The entire thing is beautifully written in a way only Dickens ever seemed to master.
There’s also a lot of history surrounding A Christmas Carol (as there is around a lot of Dickens’ stories) and I find it particularly enjoyable for some reason, possibly because I connect it with the happy Christmases and nostalgia of when I was young, possibly because it’s just very interesting, and possibly just because it’s good. Is there a better story that embodies the spirit of Christmas?
The Victorians more or less developed the celebrations and traditions of modern Christmas. From caroling to Christmas trees, if you’re familiar with it, they developed it or popularized it. Maybe that’s a little broad, but it is generally accurate. The story is considered a zeitgeist of the Victorian age which I heard somewhere but also read on Wikipedia later so maybe that was stolen?
The legacy of the story is one that still touches us today. In the west, we frequently “do” Dickens’ vision of Christmas – we visit friends and family, give to the poor, sing songs, have dances, play games, have a special meal and take a day off from work. We’re more optimistic and more generous than we usually are. We “keep Christmas” the way Dickens’ Scrooge kept Christmas.
I’m sure not everyone loves the story as much as I do, and the actual realities of life at the time clash with the optimism of the story. But I firmly think this is a story that should be read by everyone for the language, lasting legacy, and cultural currency.
Category Archives: fiction
A Christmas Carol
This Body’s Not Big Enough For The Both Of Us
So, I’m pretty sure Edgar Cantero is a magician, because there is no way this story should have worked.
The offices of A. Kimrean and Z. Kimrean have one desk. One chair. One phone. A. Kimrean and Z. Kimrean share an office. They share a job. They share a body.
Twins who are ultimately half of a truly functional person – he’s logical, she’s creative, he’s ordered, she’s wild – they work as “Private Eyes” out of a dingy office by Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco, and have engaged in a battle for dominance since they were in utero.
A.Z. Kimrean infiltrate the inner circle of a California drug lord to discover who is murdering his sons one by one, and Cantero, with acerbic wit and clever writing, turns every noir and PI trope on its ear. This book is a witty, funny, biting, gender bending adventure about family, embracing being the hero of your own story, and basically being a fucking weirdo.
How the twins function doesn’t really matter. Their psych doctor (who is also like a mom to them) calls them chimeric twins. Adrian is the twin everyone wants on the case, Zooey not so much. Zooey is also a bit of a nymphomaniac and the twins are a hermaphrodite.
As I said, nothing about this story should have worked, and yet, the book was very enjoyable. It was funny, interesting, and incredibly fresh. As someone fairly familiar with the detective genre, it was pretty cool to watch this book subvert it at every turn.
This Body’s Not Big Enough For The Both Of Us is another Edgar Cantero book, so it’s probably not for everyone, but I enjoy Edgar Cantero, and I’m highly recommending it.
Escape From Asylum
Madeleine Roux’s Escape From Asylum was described as a “terrifying prequel to her Asylum series.”
I did not find it terrifying. It was disturbing, though. It was another YA novel but I overlooked it, considering it was supposed to be very scary. Again, disturbing yes, scary no. (The only YA novel I’ve found scary thus far was The Monstrumologist.)
Psychiatric hospitals have a special place in the American psyche (no pun intended). People were sent there for all kinds of reasons, even those who didn’t belong there and were frequently subjected to brutal, cruel experiments under the guise of “treatment,” which is sort of what happens here.
In this story, it seems pretty obvious that Ricky didn’t belong in an asylum. He was a kid who got into some trouble, not an honest to God sick person or a criminal or whoever else they committed there. His stepfather, who clearly dislikes him, has him committed with the complicity of his mother who, Ricky thinks, would let him come home if he could just talk to her. He isn’t like the other patients – there’s a man who thinks he can fly (sick) and a woman who killed her husband (criminally insane).
Unfortunately, Ricky’s time seems short when the (psychopathic) warden decides to enroll Ricky in his program that will not just “cure” him but will “perfect” him. Ricky decides he needs to escape immediately, and with the help of sympathetic nurse and a fellow patient, he sets his plans into motion.
I don’t really remember much about what happened at the end of this story, except that Ricky turns out to be gay, and I can’t exactly remember if that’s why he was sent to the asylum, or if he did something where I said, “Wow, he’s not really innocent.” I seem to recall the latter.
What I do recall is the feeling of horror when I realized the warden was experimenting on his guests, for lack of a better term. I should have honestly seen that coming, what else could be happening at an asylum like this? Much like the revulsion we feel when we watch what doctors used to do to asylum patients in documentaries, I felt that with this book. The claustrophobia, the feeling of helplessness and inevitability. The atmosphere was good.
But the story didn’t make me want to read more of the ‘Asylum’ series, and so I probably won’t. It wasn’t a bad book, it just wasn’t good enough to make me want to read more.
Those Across The River
Christopher Buehlman’s Those Across The River was one of my favorite books of 2018.
Failed academic Frank and his wife, Eudora, move down to Georgia, where Frank plans to write the history of his family and their plantation, and the terrible things that happened there. He inherits the land, or something like that. The townspeople are nice enough and the quaint rural ways all seem nice and harmless, but there a certain dread that plagues the townspeople. A certain presence. That presence demands sacrifice.
Buehlman does a terrific job of building atmosphere here. We spend a ton of time getting to know Frank and Eudora, and their neighbors. The setting, hot, depression era, rural Georgia where the air is humid and suffocating, plays an intricate part of the story in the sense that as Frank slowly feels oppressed by his circumstances, the reader does too.
It became increasingly clear to me what was haunting to the town, although the clues were quite subtle, I thought. I won’t spoil it here. I will say that I wish more horror stories were done this way; the subtle heightening of tension is brilliantly done and by the last hundred pages or so, you aren’t putting the book down.
There is one thing I did not enjoy about this book, and it’s the way Buehlman wrote Frank’s physical descriptions of Eudora. Jesus, guys, is it really so hard to write about women without comparing their bodies to fruit? Or flowers? We get it, Eudora’s got big boobs. Enough already, stop focusing on them. Additionally, if Frank called Eudora a sphinx one more time, I was going to set the book on fire out of sheer annoyance. These awful depictions of the sex didn’t ruin the book, there wasn’t enough of it in the book for it to ruin it, but good lord, just leave it out next time. Sometimes I think sex is something you do in private because it’s so ugly when you aren’t directly involved.
I do recommend this book. In spite of the cringe-worthy descriptions of sex between Frank and Eudora, I thought the rest of the book phenomenal. Just, maybe, don’t read it at night.
House
House is a very disappointing supernatural/horror story by Frank Peretti and Ted Dekker.
The premise is a really good one: a couple experiencing marital difficulties, on a road trip through the middle of nowhere in Alabama, find themselves stranded on the side of the road with their tires blown out. They find a big Victorian house not far away and are let in by the owners, where another couple, also experiencing car trouble, stay. Unfortunately, the owners and guests are locked in by a mysterious psychopath named White, who issues an ultimatum: they’ll be allowed to leave if one of the group is dead by dawn. If not, White will kill all of them. Or something like that.
Sounds promising, but it didn’t turn out like I had hoped.
Unfortunately, I didn’t know going in that Peretti and Dekker were writers of Christian fiction. There was a lot of people trusting in God and in each other and rediscovering their love to save themselves and all that boring nonsense. Maybe it could have been more successful with a lighter touch, but the “lessons” were really heavy handed. Plus, the ending didn’t entirely make sense, and the whole mystery of who White is was never solved. I googled later, and apparently this was supposed to take place in the same universe as some of their other stories, where I guess you get to learn more about the antagonist (who became, immediately, the most interesting part of the story and was never elaborated on).
All in all, it wasn’t the worst book I ever picked up, but I certainly am in no rush to read more stories by these guys. Thanks but no thanks, boring Christian novelists.
Apparently this bizarre and disappointing book was also made into a film for some reason. I read the synopsis of the film. It looks even worse than the book. Wild.
Meddling Kids
Edgar Cantero’s Meddling Kids was one of my favorite books in 2018. In fact, it might be one of my favorite books ever.
In a Scooby Gang meets Lovecraft adventure of horror and comedy, four former child detectives and a descendant of their faithful weimaraner – an equally faithful weimaraner – take another look at their last case which, due to the bizarre nature of the case, one of them still cannot believe was simply a guy in a mask.
Andy, who convinces the others to reinvestigate, pinpoints that case as the trigger that destroyed their lives, haunted by the memories of their nights out in the forest. Andy is a tomboy, now butch lesbian, with a criminal record wanted in several states. Kerry, child genius and would be biologist – is plagued by nightmares, unable to finish college, and descending into alcoholism. Nate (the nerd) checks himself into and out of mental institutions, and Peter (the Golden Boy) becomes a successful Hollywood actor until he takes his own life not long after Kerry starts college. Peter now manifests as a hallucination that only Nate can see and hear.
As a devoted Scooby Doo fan, there was no chance that I wasn’t going to read this book. As a less devoted Lovecraft fan, there was no chance that I wasn’t going to read this book. And as a not devoted but totally remembers reading the stories Nancy Drew fan, there was no chance that I wasn’t going to read this book.
If you’re looking for a logical detective story, you’re not going to find it here. What you will find is a tale of broken people who reunite to unbreak themselves, just a little bit. In spite of the fact that you’re basically dealing with three broken people, a telepathic dog, and broken hallucinated person, this book is fun and funny. I laughed out loud quite a few times.
I don’t think this book is for everyone. This book draws heavily on those child detective stories we all read as kids, as well as Scooby Doo, and it draws a lot from the Cthulhu mythos. If you don’t like any of those things, it’s probably not a book for you, as those things don’t seem to be for everyone. Cthulhu especially doesn’t seem to appeal to a lot of people, and a lot of younger people don’t seem to be all that familiar with it. It just feels like a lot of people aren’t going to get the book because they’re not going to be familiar with its brilliant campiness and nostalgia.
Put another way: if you only like watching Scooby Doo, you probably won’t like this book. People never fail to amaze me in that they went into a book expecting to read a novel length version of Scooby Doo, this isn’t what it was, and they hated it. DUH, you idiots, it was never supposed to be a novelized version of Scooby Doo.
One of the biggest complaints I’ve seen leveled at the book is that the writing was all over the place. It was, but I took at least some of that to be part of the point. And anybody who has read The Supernatural Enhancements knows Edgar Cantero does weird stuff like that. I didn’t love The Supernatural Enhancements because the story was meh and I expected more. I felt like I got exactly what I expected here.
I saw one or two people complaining the story was transphobic but I missed that. I’m always a bit hesitant to label people “phobes” anyway and overall I’m usually an insensitive cow, but I feel like transphobic here was a leap. I don’t assume trans people are evil because of this book. I never did anyway, but here we are.
Anyway, I recommend this book highly, even though I know a lot of people aren’t going to like it, and honestly…I don’t care. It was good, nostalgic, campy fun and totally in line with what I expected from Cantero and from a book inspired by a cartoon, a horror author, and some detective books. It’s not a novelization of Scooby Doo.
Oh, and it is most definitely not a kids book.
The Coldest Girl in Coldtown
The Coldest Girl in Coldtown was the last Holly Black novel I read in 2018, and honestly, I think it was my least favorite.
I think I missed the boat with vampires, guys, I really did. They can be scary monsters, and I enjoy them to some extent but…I don’t find them sexy, I don’t find their angst particularly interesting, I don’t enjoy their love stories.
This was all of those things, except I did enjoy the world building in this novel.
Tara is a teenager who goes to a Coldtown because she’s afraid she’s going to become a vampire after her leg gets nicked by a vampire fang. She wakes up after a party and everyone is dead except her ex-boyfriend (who is definitely going to become a vampire) and another vampire. She sets them both free, and her leg gets nicked by the emerging vampires.
Coldtowns are places set up by governments to police vampires – think vampire ghettos but fancier, because are vampires ever not glamorous? Anyway, Tana gets involved with this vampire who wants to kill this other vampire, and her sister shows up, and then Tana gets bit for real or something and is trying not to become a vampire…
The whole thing just wasn’t that interesting to me. I enjoyed the world building, but other than that the book didn’t have a lot of highlights. I enjoy what I’ve read of Holly Black for the most part but some of the stuff she writes makes me wonder about some of her heroines. In the last book I read by her, The Darkest Part of the Forest, I thought Hazel was a bit of a sociopath and I remember thinking that it wasn’t normal that Tana woke up in a bloodbath of vampire violence that had wiped out entire teenage house party and basically felt no ill-effects from this, or even seemed really bothered by it while it was happening to her.
On the way to Coldtown, Tana also ends up having to deal with two teenagers who are dying to get to Coldtown to become vampires. Their names are ‘Midnight’ and ‘Winter’ and they have a blog. I don’t know if Black was stereotyping the shit out of stupid goth kids on purpose, but she nailed it here. I was embarrassed by their cringeyness and they weren’t even real people.
Anyway, I preferred The Darkest Part of the Forest. Coldtown isn’t bad, exactly, but it wasn’t my type of book and I wouldn’t revisit it.
The Monstrumologist
Guys. The Monstrumologist was a YA book by Rick Yancey.
I can’t believe they let people under 14 read this book. As a 30 year old, this book scared the shit out of me, and I’m no stranger to horror books.
The story follows Will Henry, the orphaned assistant of Dr. Pellinore Warthrop, who specializes in the study of monsters. Warthrop also employed Will’s father, James. It is revealed that Will’s father had some kind of parasite in him that Will also has, that Warthrop helped him manage. The novel takes place in the 1880s in an alternate version of New England – clearly there are monsters in this America. Think Supernatural but without the humor and brotherly bond to make you feel better about things.
Will and Warthrop eventually end up hunting a pack of Anthropophagi. Anthropophagi are cannibal monsters (as it turns out they were imported by Warthrop’s father, also a Monstrumologist) decades previously. In order to stop the Anthropophagi, Warthrop enlists the help of Jack Kearns, who is fantastic at killing things. As the story goes on, it becomes clear that Kearns is a sociopath but is very good at his job, and this is typically why he is tolerated by Warthrop, although the two men are similar in certain ways.
I got through this story as an audiobook, and maybe that was part of the reason the effect was so chilling. Everything about this story freaked me out – the claustrophobic atmosphere of Warthrop and Will’s house and lives, the choice of monster, the fate of the sea captain Warthrop and Will visit, the location of the Anthropophagi den, Kearns identity…the whole thing combined into one of the most terrifying books I ever read.
It freaked me out so much that I’ve yet to finish the series, and I’m usually committed to a series if I liked the first book. I did like it. It did it’s job, and scared the shit out of me. I read the general synopsis of the series and I just know the whole thing is going to get worse. I don’t know if I’ll ever finish it. It just bothered me too much.
If I’d read this at a kid I’d have had nightmares for months. I had a couple of nightmares as a 30 year old.
If you want to read a real horror book, this is it. It doesn’t matter that it’s YA. I don’t know if other people found it as scary as I did, but to me, this book was scary AF.
Vlad
Vlad was a novella by Carlos Fuentes that I didn’t enjoy much, but a lot of other people seemed to really like it.
Set in Mexico City, our star vampire is once again on the lookout for a new place to call home, and Yves Navarro, a respected attorney, and his wife, a real estate agent, become trapped in his web.
This was a shorter book than others I read that year and while I liked the vampire storyline, some of the other aspects made me feel…gross. I suppose the vampire legend in the Dracula form is gross all the way around – an undead man runs around praying on young girls. Ew.
I read a review of this book a long time ago that stuck with me on Fuentes’s social commentary through this story. I’ll leave it here:
This was an okay story. Didn’t love it. It was short, and I thought that was great.
John Dies At The End
So this book was under the horror label at the library and I guess it kind of was, but mostly it was just weird. Don’t get me wrong, it was darkly funny and enjoyably weird, but weird.
I can’t even begin to recap it. I can’t. It was drugs, and aliens, and time travel and…it was insane. I do recommend it for the pure insanity. It really was funny. But…oof. What a wacky shitshow.
words in scarlet ink 