Reading October (so far)
Oct. 16th, 2020 04:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brigdhThe White Road by Sarah Lotz. A horror novel set in modern-day England and Nepal. Simon is a mid-twenties slacker, working at a coffee shop and half-heartedly running a website of dumb videos – until he decides that the perfect click-bait would be footage of actual dead bodies. He chooses those of a group of young cavers who were trapped and died in a sudden flash flood; due to the difficulty of getting into this particular cave in the first place, the bodies have been left there since their tragic death a few years ago. Simon hires a stranger off the internet to serve as guide to this closed-to-the-public cave, and off they go.
Unsurprisingly, things go wrong. Simon comes out of the cave with a pretty serious case of PTSD, as well as hearing voices – the incarnation of darkness? the ghosts of the cavers? the memory of the guide? something else yet again? – as well as the footage he searched for. After it's uploaded, the site suddenly becomes profitable, and Simon's friend pushes him into climbing Mount Everest to film more dead bodies. In what is a more implausible turn of events than seeing ghosts, Simon manages to secure a place on climbing team despite extremely little experience on mountains, and is shortly thereafter making his way to the summit. Meanwhile, the book turns to the story of Juliet, who is racing to be the first woman to climb Everest without using oxygen tanks. She's been having some weird experiences up there alone on the ice; experiences that seem tied to what Simon witnessed in the cave. This tension is summed up by a T.S. Eliot quote which is repeated again and again throughout The White Road:
“Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
there is always another one walking beside you”
Nicknamed "the third man", this real concept (described by multiple climbers and other people in extreme life-or-death activities) stalks both Juliet and Simon, a confusing, mostly unseen presence whose intentions are ultimately left unclear: malignant or helpful?
Lotz is a writer who is extremely good at depicting an environment and making you feel like you're there. The cave and Mount Everest are both excellently vivid settings, and she wrings every drop of creepiness out of them. I also found the details of how mountaineering works to be fascinating; granted, I've never read much about Everest before, but I had no idea of quite how complicated and long the process of preparing to climb it is. So that's all well-done.
Now for the negatives: the cave portion is by far the scariest part of the book, and it only takes up the first quarter or so; everything after that is a gradual let-down of realizing that The White Road is just not going to reach those same heights. I think caves might be inherently scarier than mountains – after all, I can think of dozens of creepypastas and horror movies set in caves, and none on mountains.
The characters are a collection of interchangeable cardboard cutouts; none of them feels three-dimensional or real. To be fair, flat characters are a pretty common problem in horror, and not one I necessarily mind if the scares are there. The flatness is all the more emphasized in that Simon has a habit of nicknaming everyone he meets after various media references: "Depressed Harry Potter", "a low-rent version of Tom Cruise", "Tilda Swinton [...] not in looks exactly, but in presence", and so on.
The opening caving section is wonderfully terrifying, and the Mount Everest portions are interesting as a story of mountaineering, but overall The White Road is a fairly forgettable book. I enjoyed it, but I'd only recommend it if you've already read 'Ted the Caver' and watched 'The Descent' and are desperate for more.
The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones. A horror novel set on a modern-day Blackfeet Indian Reservation. Years ago, four friends – boys in their early twenties – do something bad while out hunting for elk one winter. Not terribly bad, not anything worse than the dumb things a lot of us get up to in our late teens or early twenties, but these four are spectacularly unlucky in that one of their victims turns out to be something more than the usual elk. And now she's out for revenge.
Part One of the book focuses on Lewis, the only one of the friends to have left the reservation; he's seemingly the most successful, with a wife, stable job, and new house. This part of the The Only Good Indians is mostly psychological horror. Minor creepy occurrences begin to build, but the constantly lurking question is if they're actually happening, or if Lewis only thinks he's being haunted and is about to do some real bad things because of that misconception.
After an incredible climax halfway through, which makes it very, very clear that this haunting is real, The Only Good Indians switches genres to essentially become a slasher story, complete with a really excellent Final Girl. Though the mental games continue, and I love how most of the deaths are not done by the monster herself, but by how she's able to mainpulate one character against another. The worst horrors are the ones you commit yourself, after all. There are so many amazingly frightening images left behind by this story: a silhouette half-glimpsed through the blur of fan blades; an elk calf, kicking its way out of the womb; the removal of teeth; an old car falling off the cinderblocks it's propped on; ants on a boot. God, just – this book is so filmic, and so good, and so scary.
I had high expectations going in, and The Only Good Indians succeeded over and above them. The early buzz made me think would be literary fiction, perhaps more concerned with social justice than with monsters, and while it handles that aspect of the plot wonderfully, it's also a genuinely terrifying horror novel, one of the scariest I've read in a few years. Honestly, I loved this, and if you've been putting off reading it, stop that! It's Halloween season, and the perfect time to get yourself a copy of The Only Good Indians.
Note: several dogs die gruesomely, in ways that are graphically described. As do humans and other animals, but I know a lot of people are particularly sensitive to dog-death.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
Unsurprisingly, things go wrong. Simon comes out of the cave with a pretty serious case of PTSD, as well as hearing voices – the incarnation of darkness? the ghosts of the cavers? the memory of the guide? something else yet again? – as well as the footage he searched for. After it's uploaded, the site suddenly becomes profitable, and Simon's friend pushes him into climbing Mount Everest to film more dead bodies. In what is a more implausible turn of events than seeing ghosts, Simon manages to secure a place on climbing team despite extremely little experience on mountains, and is shortly thereafter making his way to the summit. Meanwhile, the book turns to the story of Juliet, who is racing to be the first woman to climb Everest without using oxygen tanks. She's been having some weird experiences up there alone on the ice; experiences that seem tied to what Simon witnessed in the cave. This tension is summed up by a T.S. Eliot quote which is repeated again and again throughout The White Road:
“Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
there is always another one walking beside you”
Nicknamed "the third man", this real concept (described by multiple climbers and other people in extreme life-or-death activities) stalks both Juliet and Simon, a confusing, mostly unseen presence whose intentions are ultimately left unclear: malignant or helpful?
Lotz is a writer who is extremely good at depicting an environment and making you feel like you're there. The cave and Mount Everest are both excellently vivid settings, and she wrings every drop of creepiness out of them. I also found the details of how mountaineering works to be fascinating; granted, I've never read much about Everest before, but I had no idea of quite how complicated and long the process of preparing to climb it is. So that's all well-done.
Now for the negatives: the cave portion is by far the scariest part of the book, and it only takes up the first quarter or so; everything after that is a gradual let-down of realizing that The White Road is just not going to reach those same heights. I think caves might be inherently scarier than mountains – after all, I can think of dozens of creepypastas and horror movies set in caves, and none on mountains.
The characters are a collection of interchangeable cardboard cutouts; none of them feels three-dimensional or real. To be fair, flat characters are a pretty common problem in horror, and not one I necessarily mind if the scares are there. The flatness is all the more emphasized in that Simon has a habit of nicknaming everyone he meets after various media references: "Depressed Harry Potter", "a low-rent version of Tom Cruise", "Tilda Swinton [...] not in looks exactly, but in presence", and so on.
The opening caving section is wonderfully terrifying, and the Mount Everest portions are interesting as a story of mountaineering, but overall The White Road is a fairly forgettable book. I enjoyed it, but I'd only recommend it if you've already read 'Ted the Caver' and watched 'The Descent' and are desperate for more.
The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones. A horror novel set on a modern-day Blackfeet Indian Reservation. Years ago, four friends – boys in their early twenties – do something bad while out hunting for elk one winter. Not terribly bad, not anything worse than the dumb things a lot of us get up to in our late teens or early twenties, but these four are spectacularly unlucky in that one of their victims turns out to be something more than the usual elk. And now she's out for revenge.
Part One of the book focuses on Lewis, the only one of the friends to have left the reservation; he's seemingly the most successful, with a wife, stable job, and new house. This part of the The Only Good Indians is mostly psychological horror. Minor creepy occurrences begin to build, but the constantly lurking question is if they're actually happening, or if Lewis only thinks he's being haunted and is about to do some real bad things because of that misconception.
After an incredible climax halfway through, which makes it very, very clear that this haunting is real, The Only Good Indians switches genres to essentially become a slasher story, complete with a really excellent Final Girl. Though the mental games continue, and I love how most of the deaths are not done by the monster herself, but by how she's able to mainpulate one character against another. The worst horrors are the ones you commit yourself, after all. There are so many amazingly frightening images left behind by this story: a silhouette half-glimpsed through the blur of fan blades; an elk calf, kicking its way out of the womb; the removal of teeth; an old car falling off the cinderblocks it's propped on; ants on a boot. God, just – this book is so filmic, and so good, and so scary.
I had high expectations going in, and The Only Good Indians succeeded over and above them. The early buzz made me think would be literary fiction, perhaps more concerned with social justice than with monsters, and while it handles that aspect of the plot wonderfully, it's also a genuinely terrifying horror novel, one of the scariest I've read in a few years. Honestly, I loved this, and if you've been putting off reading it, stop that! It's Halloween season, and the perfect time to get yourself a copy of The Only Good Indians.
Note: several dogs die gruesomely, in ways that are graphically described. As do humans and other animals, but I know a lot of people are particularly sensitive to dog-death.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
no subject
Date: 2020-10-17 12:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-10-20 08:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-10-17 02:09 am (UTC)“Who is the third who walks always beside you?
Ooh, I hadn't thought of that as a horror premise, but considering how unsettling I found it in the poem and how it's stuck with me since, I can definitely see how it could be!
no subject
Date: 2020-10-20 08:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-10-17 04:03 am (UTC)Powell and Pressburger's Black Narcissus (1947) is partly a horror movie and the mountain setting is essential to it, but I wouldn't call it mountain horror in the same way that, indeed, The Descent is cave horror. I'm interested that this novel starts with depths and then turns into heights, but I'm sorry to hear the two extremes aren't more integrated, or the heights better done.
It's Halloween season, and the perfect time to get yourself a copy of The Only Good Indians.
I should. I really like Stephen Graham Jones.
no subject
Date: 2020-10-21 09:42 pm (UTC)Indeed, that's clearly what the author was going for (several characters make reference to the underground/world's highest point parallel), but the mountain half just wasn't strong enough to provide balance, alas. Or at least for me it wasn't – I wonder how someone with a fear of heights or some other relevant phobia would have read it.
I should. I really like Stephen Graham Jones.
This is the first I've read of his, but I'm very much determined to seek out more.
no subject
Date: 2020-10-17 06:28 am (UTC)Ooh! Both of these sound really good. I read Stephen Graham Jones's Mongrels in 2018 and while I really enjoyed the writing I didn't care too much for the plot; The Only Good Indians sounds more up my alley plotwise. This is way outta left field, but the description of The White Road reminded me of Ian Cameron's The Mountains At The Bottom Of The World where some (unlucky?) people discover the home of violent prehistoric apes in a mountain in the Chilean Andes. A fun read, extremely pulpy :^p
no subject
Date: 2020-10-21 05:37 pm (UTC)reminded me of Ian Cameron's The Mountains At The Bottom Of The World where some (unlucky?) people discover the home of violent prehistoric apes in a mountain in the Chilean Andes. A fun read, extremely pulpy
Oh, wow, that does sound like delightfully cheesy fun!
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Date: 2020-10-17 05:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-10-21 05:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-10-21 05:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-10-21 06:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-10-17 07:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-10-21 05:51 pm (UTC)