Tag: reviews

The Dead Dance

Saturday morning with an LSU game on pretty early, at eleven this morning; I’ll still be drinking coffee at that hour. I slept well last night, which felt good–I love the night when the bed has freshly laundered linens and blankets–and Sparky even let me sleep in a little bit. My coffee is tasty this morning as I wake up and prepare for a day in which I probably won’t do much of anything other than read, watch football, and make notes in my journal. I feel a big tired this morning still, but it’s the final stage of the fatigue dying away. I may do some chores and picking up around here during the games, but I am sure by tonight’s Alabama-Tennessee rivalry game I’ll probably be quite sick of watching football games. Miami lost last night, so the rankings are going to be shaken up again, as they will be after all today’s games.

After finishing day job duties yesterday and running my errands, I settled into my easy chair and rewatched Scream, the original, and was reminded again of just how clever this movie is and why I love it so much. I took five pages of notes! The panel on crossing the line between horror and mystery also resonated and has stayed in my head… and I also remembered some things since, like authors we didn’t mention. I also very proudly finished and posted my newsletter on Clown in a Cornfield 2: Frendo Lives, which was a rave, and also has me in mind of slasher stories….the one on Scream is going to be a pretty good one, methinks. We shall see, I suppose.

After Scream, we settled in to watch our shows for the evening, before retiring to bed pretty early. I also picked up my copies of the third Frendo book, Clown in a Cornfield 3: The Church of Frendo, which sound delicious and a continuation of the exploration of trauma the characters have faced–as well as remembering the rules: in a trilogy, no one is safe in the third chapter–and the latest Donna Andrews. (I am four books behind on her series now.) I really do want to write a slasher novel, and have several ideas for one (my favorite potential title is Where the Boys Die); but I have numerous things I want to write before I turn my fevered brain in that direction. I’m going to work on something for the rest of the month (mostly short stories and a novella) before diving headfirst into Chorine for November. Ideally, I want to have the first draft finished by the end of the month so I can work on something else for December.

I am also planning on revisiting A Nightmare on Elm Street before spooky season ends. And today I am going to dive headfirst into Holokua Road by Elizabeth Hand while I am watching the games, if not starting it before the LSU game starts. I don’t know how LSU will do today against Vanderbilt; they’re pretty good this year, despite their sloppy loss to Alabama in Tuscaloosa. It’s not like LSU has been setting the world on fire this season anyway. So, that game could very easily ruin the energy of the entire day if I am not careful. I also have some short stories to read–I have several horror anthologies and author collections–while I continue to celebrate Halloween Horror Month until the very end.

And on that note, I am heading back into the spice mines for the day. I do have some chores to do this morning as well as some cleaning, filing and organizing. Have a great day, everyone, and I’ll be back tomorrow, bright and early and feeling rested, I hope.

Dangerous Type

Sunday morning in the Lost Apartment, and i am dealing with a hyperactive cat that wants to play so keeps leaping on me, claws out. I feel good and rested this morning, no fatigue, and so I am hopeful for a productive day. Paul will be gone most of the afternoon for a board retreat, so I am hoping to be able to get some things done.

I love my new vacuum cleaner, period. I’ve never had much luck with them; the last two or three I bought never worked that great to begin with and then stopped picking up anything entirely after only about six months of use. So, since the last one–and yes, I tried fixing them–stopped working, I’ve had to sweep the rugs and shake them outside, and they never ever felt truly clean. Well, I put the new one together yesterday and used it in the living room. I am very pleased. It looks so clean in there now…I am going to use it in the kitchen this morning so long as Sparky doesn’t make me bleed out before I can. His claws are SHARP. So I did some great cleaning and organizing yesterday, and will hopefully finish the downstairs today.

I can’t seem to find my phone this morning, either. There are worse things.

Yesterday morning I ran my errands, and then came home to work on the house while playing highlights of LSU football from past years on Youtube (I also sometimes watch when I am in a dark mood; the highlights are my happy place). I tried to read for a bit as well without much success, but that was from being mentally scattered as I tried to work on the house, too, listening to the highlights in the background, and occasionally sitting down to rest and watch for a moment, as I still had some physical fatigue working on me yesterday. But it was so nice to come downstairs this morning to a living room with a clean floor. It’s amazing how much of a difference that makes–just like how much cleaner it looks inside when the windows are clean. It’s too hot for me to clean the windows for at least another four weeks, but I am really looking forward to it.

In a little bit I am going to go read The Hunting Wives for a little while before getting cleaned up and buckling down for a good day of cleaning and writing and reading. I also want to work on an essay on El Dorado Drive by Megan Abbott for my newsletter–if you’re wondering, I’ve decided my book/television show/movie reviews belong on my newsletter. So, if that’s why you pop by here, and have been wondering why it seems like I’m not writing those anymore, I am–just in a different place.

I also want to start rereading Hurricane Season Hustle, since I am going to be getting back to work on it relatively soon. I have so much writing to do!

And on that note, I am going to go read for a bit and thus bring this to a close. Hope you have a happy and lovely Sunday, Constant Reader, and will be back in the morning tomorrow.

I love Venice, and would love to go back.

Just What I Needed

Monday and back to the office with me today. Yesterday was nice and relaxing; I worked on writing for a while, didn’t do as many chores as I should have, and watched a couple of shows. I didn’t want to get out of bed again this morning–no surprise there–and am a little bummed to not have another day off as of yet. But I’ll survive, as I always do, which is no more than I should expect, one supposes. It’s hard to believe that it’s August and my birthday is looming, as is football season and Bouchercon is also coming to New Orleans the first week of next month. I’ve got a lot to get done in the month of August, and I really need to buckle down and apply my nose to said grindstone. It’s just tough when you have to battle fatigue and exhaustion all the time.

We watched the Netflix documentary series Amy Bradley Is Missing, which was interesting and terribly sad at the same time. I cannot imagine the pain of having a family member disappear without a trace the way Amy Bradley did off that cruise ship. As a disappearance of a family member is the crucial plot element of a book I am researching to write at some point in the future (The Summer of Lost Boys), watching this kind of counted as research for that, as it gave me insight as to how a working class family would react to such an occurrence and how the family would be permanently damaged….which also got me thinking about aftermaths to crime and horror stories. How do you go on with your life after fighting supernatural threats? Or after being a murder suspect? Or having someone close to you commit a serious and most heinous crime?

After dinner, we started watching a new Mexican erotic thriller series on Netflix, whose title translates to Unspeakable Sins. Like all Spanish-language erotic thriller series, there’s plenty of sex and nudity; we only watched three episodes (there’s two seasons of nine episodes each) but even trying to summarize the plot thus far–but the primary plot concerns Helena, a wealthy woman in a very controlling marriage to an older man, who starts having an affair with a very hot young escort, whom she convinces to flirt with her bisexual husband so they can get video of the two of them together and she can use the video as leverage to divorce him. Ivan pretends to be a journalist doing a story on Claudio, Claudio is attracted to him, but things go south–they fight and Ivan’s story is he ran away. But there’s blood all over the house and Claudio is now missing…can Ivan trust Helena or is she playing him for a fool, setting him up to take the fall for his murder?

That’s the primary story, but there are subplots as well that are just as intense.

Ivan is played by gorgeous Andres Baida. I mean…

Sexy Andres Baida
He was also in Control Z and Who Killed Amy?

Gorgeous, just gorgeous.

I also spent some time processing seeing friends from high school that I hadn’t seen in almost fifty years. (The fact that it’s been almost fifty years since I graduated from high school also needs processing, but that will have to wait until I am done with this initial processing.) Every time I’ve had a conversation with someone from high school in the last thirty years–it’s not often and it’s not many–how they remember me, and high school, are vastly different from how I remember things, but they also never knew how miserable and unhappy I was. I always put on a good face; I always try to make the best out of every situation I find myself dealing with as they come up, especially when it’s not something you can change or alter in any meaningful way. As I’ve stated before, I’ve always thought I was odd-looking and never really had a fit body until I was in my thirties. But…seeing pictures from back then…I was wrong about how I looked (I’ve always been wrong about that, frankly) and my impact on other people. Both women remember me as having a really muscular fit body and being handsome and very kind and considerate and thoughtful–and funny; I’ve always been funny.

And I did work on writing yesterday. I edited another piece and wrote out what changes need to be made to it to make it stronger. I also did some laundry and a load of dishes, but didn’t pick up too much of the mess in the apartment. I do enjoy spending down time with Paul and Sparky, and really wish we were both retired and just hanging out around the apartment all day. Paul likes to be busy, though, so I do think he will take some adjusting if and when he finally does retire. I won’t be retiring for another few years yet; not going at 65, much as I would like to, so I have to get my shit together leading up to when I finally do.

After work today, I have to make groceries on the way home, and I’m hoping to do some writing tonight before we jump back into Unspeakable Sins.

So on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Monday, Constant Reader, and I’ll be checking in with you again in the morning.

Walking in L.A.

But nobody walks in LA, as the song says. I did a few times, and always heard this song in my head as I strolled down Santa Monica Boulevard. I do miss my annual visits to Los Angeles to sign at A Different Light. I don’t miss the stress and anxiety of signings (will anyone show up? Will I make an utter fool of myself?), but yes, I used to walk down Santa Monica from my hotel and shop on my way to visit the store.

Ah, the good old days…

But it’s Pay-the-Bills Wednesday, always a fun exercise in depression that always ends up with the plaintive cry where did all my money go? At least I can pay them–for now, at any rate. I just really hate paying them and trying to remember all my user names and passwords; nothing makes me feel older than not remembering things.

I was tired when I got off work last night–and actually, was kind of dragging all damned day yesterday. I’m not sure why, either; I was kind of mentally lethargic–and when I am that way, I inevitably come up with new ideas…which is my brain trying to get me to not stress too heavily about not doing any writing: but at least I had some ideas! Insanity, but that’s the way my mind has always worked. I’ve really been wanting to write some more essays for the newsletter; I already have several done that I don’t want to send because I don’t want to become that annoying person dropping into the subscribers’ (I can’t believe I have subscribers!) inboxes all the damned time. I don’t think all my book/movie/television reviews need to necessarily go there? I don’t know. I originally decided to use the newsletter to write longer form essays–ones that were too big to go here–but somehow that evolved into my writing longer reviews of books and movies and television shows there as well. Heavy heaving sigh. I guess I am having a newsletter identity crisis….but now that I am up this morning, I’m thinking I don’t need to write reviews there; I can do shorter ones here and do the longer ones, the ones where I really have something to say about the art, on the newsletter.1

We watched some more of Olympo last night, and there was finally some more gay storyline; Roque, the gay rugby star, is now getting involved with a teammate (Sebas) who is only now beginning to experience same-sex desire, which should be interesting to see play out. Both are gorgeous, too–so was the closeted guy Roque was hooking up with until the closet case turned on him–and as Paul said, “the most interesting characters are the men–the women are unlikable.” He was right, of course, and I don’t think that is gay misogyny at play; they really are unlikable. It’s not as good or as involving as Elité, which took off like a speeding freight train from the opening of the very first episode; this one is more of a slow burn–the primary story of the season is doping, as it would be in most shows about up-and-coming Olympic hopefuls. There are some curiosities about the show–little mysteries that might become bigger story-lines as the show goes on, but for now, the doping is the primary story–as well as the homophobia Roque is experiencing on the rugby team and in the school.

Plus, I love that name: Roque.

I only have one more day of work this week after today thanks to the 4th of July holiday, which seems kind of muted this year. Not surprising, since the entire country is being reshaped in the image Christian Nationalists have been pushing for since Brown v. Topeka Board of Education was decided by a decent Supreme Court, as opposed to the conservative activists currently sitting on our present-day court. I mean, it’s not like the country has ever lived up to its ideals; our country’s sad history of racism, homophobia, and misogyny goes back all the way to Columbus arriving in the West Indies (Spain and Portugal really never get enough credit for kicking off colonization and inventing racism).

I started thinking our empire was beginning to crumble in the 1980’s–I just hoped it would wait to collapse into authoritarianism after I died.

Ah, well. Somber thoughts on this July 4th Eve Eve. I try not to talk about politics or what’s going on in the world; if you come here to read this blog periodically where I fall on the political spectrum shouldn’t come as a surprise to you. I try to leave talking about politics and world events out–I am hardly an expert, and adding to the angry on-line chatter isn’t really appealing to me: there’s no point in preaching to the choir, and anything I say isn’t going to convince someone who disagrees with me that they are incorrect (and vice versa; I don’t engage with conservatives because I will never agree with them on anything, really), and all it does is get me riled up. Sure, I’ll sometimes give in to the urge and go all Julia Sugarbaker here–ignorance and deliberate stupidity get under my skin like nothing else, but I try to resist the urge because I prefer to save my energy and time for productivity. I’m back to not engaging with anyone monstrous on social media–I find blocking trash more satisfying than scoring points off a troll anyway, which is performative in the first place, since all you are doing is showing your followers how witty and smart you are.

Sigh.

Maybe it’s just me, but it seems like this is a more New Orleans-style summer than we’ve had in years. It’s already miserable outside when I leave the house for work, and even more miserable later in the day when I’m running errands. I know it’s worse because my sinuses and allergies are really kicking in this year–wet and humid with the thick heavy air, the heat, and the sun beating down mercilessly from above; we’ve also had a lot more rain (another sign of insane humidity) this year than we’ve had in the last few. I think the weather, coupled with trip recovery (I was in a car for almost twenty hours over four days), is why I’ve been so out of it this week.

I kind of hope we have some delightful thunderstorms this weekend, too; so I can snuggle under a blanket in my chair while reading. Sparky has been very attached to me since I got back–demanding my lap to sleep in when I get home from work every day, wanting to ride on my shoulders while I do things, and being incredibly playful, too. He really is a dear thing.

And on that note, I am heading back into the spice mines. Have a lovely Wednesday, Constant Reader, and I’ll probably check in with you again tomorrow morning. Till then!

Seriously, where were all these muscular pro wrestlers during my adolescence?
  1. Which means I’ll be moving some of those reviews from the drafts on my newsletter page to the drafts here; and deleting some of the ones in the draft files here. ↩︎

Dancin’ Shoes

Christmas Eve Eve, only day in the office for the week. It’s in the forties here in New Orleans this morning, and it feels every degree of it here in my office nook this morning. I think we’re going to be fairly slow today–although I’ve been wrong about these things before. Cold makes me ache a bit and not want to get up from the bed, but here I am. I can sleep late in my warm bed the next two mornings, after all. Yesterday was nice. I got up and ran my errand, thus remaining ensconced inside for the rest of the day. I worked some, got some chores accomplished, and we watched Alien Romulus (which I enjoyed, but felt derivative) and then went back to The Day of the Jackal, which we’d started the night before. It’s a fun watch, with a little too much extraneous filler (I really do not care about the Jackal’s private life, or that of the MI6 operative trying to catch him), but Eddie Redmayne is pretty good as the Jackal.

Of course, The Day of the Jackal takes me back to the 1970’s, and the search for Carlos, both terrorist and assassin. He got a lot of press back then. Frederick Forsyth wrote the novel The Day of the Jackal, and it was originally made into a film back then. When “Carlos” first emerged, people started calling the assassin/terrorist “the Jackal” because he was similar to the character in the Forsyth novel–already a bestseller, the branding of a real life person as the fictional character drove even more sales of the book. Everyone in the 1970s, it seemed, knew about Carlos; we even did a week on him in my Current Events class in high school. I know I read the book but didn’t see the film; and I’ve essentially forgotten most of it since then. Terrorism was seen as a major issue for the world at the time; and Americans were very smug because there had been no terror attacks inside the United States at the time, so we saw terrorism primarily as a “foreign” problem (until 9/11). Carlos was so known and prevalent that Robert Ludlum created Jason Bourne in The Bourne Identity to fight and either catch/kill Carlos. The 1970s were such a different time, or at least it was for me. I was old enough to be aware of the news and the world, but I wasn’t educated enough to understand what it all meant, what the root causes of international problems actually were, and I was in the midst of my indoctrination into the mythology of American exceptionalism and its equally awful twin, White Supremacy. It wasn’t until the Reagan administration that I began to unlearn everything I was raised to believe and began seeing the reality beneath the propaganda.

Alien Romulus, on the other hand, was quite fun but seemed to me, at least, to be a bit derivative; with scenes that were direct callbacks to the first two movies, with lots of dramatic tension and suspense and more than a few excellent jump scares (although at one point I said aloud, “There’s always at least one more, people”–only to have one appear within seconds. The idea of a soulless corporation looking to use and exploit the incredibly dangerous creature(s) at the cost of any number of human lives certainly resonated, since that’s where we’re at in this country at the moment. I recommend it–I think in the chronology of the movies this one comes after the original–but you don’t really need to have seen any of the earlier films to enjoy this one. They are all linked, of course, but each movie (at least the ones I’ve seen) can stand alone on their own individuality.

I also blame George Lucas for the entire concept of prequels and filming series out of order.

I’m looking forward to the holidays this week primarily because of two days off from work, more than the holiday itself. I don’t feel very Christmas-sy this year, frankly, and I certainly didn’t last year with my arm in a brace and all the irritation that entailed. I’m going to get us a deep dish Chicago-style pizza pie from That’s Amore tomorrow, and on Christmas day we’re planning on seeing Babygirl, which will be our first trip to a movie theater since before the pandemic. I think I have to come into the office on Friday this week–not a big deal, since I have two extra days off this week–to cover for someone for the holidays. I work one day, then am off for two, come in for two more, am out for another two, in for another two and then out for another. Yes, these next two weeks are going to be completely disruptive.

SIgh.

I did start getting back into the Scotty book yesterday, rereading and editing as I go on what is already done on the book and plan out the rest of it. I also have some short stories due that I need to write, too. Yikes, indeed. I have a lot to do, don’t I, and I really need to stop blowing off my free time and getting back to serious work on my writing. This Scotty book is going to be a lot of fun; wild and crazy and endlessly silly and full of “really, Greg?” moments. I love when my mind finally snaps back into Scotty mode; it seems like every time I write one I go into it with an overly serious mindset that needs to be snapped out of somehow. I also worked on one of my essays yesterday, about racism in the original texts of a Hardy Boys mystery (The Mark on the Door) that I am hoping to finish and post this week, as well as a meandering essay about Christmas and the holidays and how easy it is to offend the very weak faith of most Christians. (Or I could finish my lengthy diatribe about being groomed as a Christian–and fuck you in advance if you @ me about this; I don’t want to hear your dismissal of my very real experiences, thank you very much.) Although I do suppose setting a goal of writing a Substack essay every week might be a bit much. I write one of these posts every day, not to mention emails and so forth…so yes, I do already write quite a bit, at least 500-1000 words per day on here (closer to the 500 count, and averaging probably less than that, more like). It is a conceit of mine that I do not consider writing this post every morning as words written for the day; I never have. Perhaps I should start?

And on that note, I am getting cleaned up and putting on some warm clothes to face the day. Have a lovely pre-Christmas Eve, Constant Reader, and I’ll be back at some point, I am sure.

Heart Full of Soul

Saturday morning in the Lost Apartment! We’re having a cold spell here in New Orleans (yes, I know a high of sixty and a low of fifty-one is spring from most of you that live north of I-10, and you break out the tanks and shorts and sunscreen, but this is the time of year down here where you don’t feel like the climate is actively trying to kill you when you go outside, and it’s lovely), which is wonderful; I woke up feeling very well rested yesterday and had a very productive day. I wasn’t tired the way I usually am on Fridays, and managed to get all my work-at-home duties done, my blood work taken care of, picked up the mail, and made groceries. I’ll have to run out to the store again tomorrow to pick up a few things, but I don’t mind. My new watch came in the mail–I lost the Fitbit charger, and realized hey I don’t need to have one anymore since our insurance changed–so I ordered a cheap Timex on-line. I spent some more time with The Reformatory (it’s so good, so compelling and so horrifying at the same time; societal horror on top of supernatural and just breathtakingly brilliantly done), and worked on my chores whenever I needed a break from my computer duties. I also think the weather change has something to do with my energy picking up again; it might be finally healing from all the medical shit I had done last year (coming up on the one-year anniversary of my first-ever major surgery), and I always sleep better when it’s cold…although that does make it harder to get up in the mornings. I mean, I never want to get out of a comfortable bed as it is, let alone a warm comfortable bed on a chilly morning!

I got all the dishes done and did the bed linens; I also started picking up around here a bit more. I’ve really let the house slide badly since the surgery; it’s more than a little horrifying to think I’ve let it all slide for this long. I am really going to utilize the time Paul’s gone to do a real nice deep clean on the apartment. It’s long overdue. I also am trying to decide what TV show to binge while he’s gone; I’ve never watched Sex and the City (I’ve seen one episode) and I stopped watching Desperate Housewives midway through the first season when I missed one and didn’t know how to get caught up on it. (Both of these came to mind from watching a Youtube video while I was doing some quality assurance on paperwork, whose theme was “When Your Main Character Becomes The Villain,” which focused on Teri Hatcher’s character Susan (I remember getting really annoyed with her that first season), and used Sarah Jessica Parker’s Carrie Bradshaw as another. I realized I’d never watched these shows that were hugely popular with other gay men (the show-runners on both were gay men), so it would be interesting to see them now, all these years later, and perhaps even make a project out of it? I’m leaning towards Sex and the City because the episodes are shorter, and I don’t there are as many, which is a terrible reason, isn’t it?

Embrace the dark side, Gregalicious.

I slept well last night. Paul was out at an event, so I was home alone for most of the evening, and went to bed early when I started getting sleepy, around nine. It must be the cold (to us) weather. I do have to run out to get the mail and make some groceries, but for the most part I’ll be lazing around here, picking up and cleaning and moving things to clean behind or beneath them and so on (I am waiting to move the couch until Paul’s not here; there’s no telling what Sparky has under there–although he doesn’t try to squeeze his way underneath there anymore). I did cruise through my streaming services last night to see what is on there that I want to watch (I was also searching for Sex and the City and The Assassination of Gianni Versace, of which I’ve never seen more than the first episode), and I cleaned off and organized my desk–which was really nice to come down to this morning–and it’s nice to have all the dishes and laundry done. I’ll probably do some more cleaning and organizing around the kitchen/laundry room this morning, around reading more of The Reformatory. LSU will probably lose to Vanderbilt tonight, and if they do, I won’t be too mad about it. I’m enjoying Vanderbilt’s improbable season, and I can’t help but pull for them since they are always such an underdog every year. Tulane1 is also doing well again this year, which is fun–New Orleans really gets excited for Tulane when they’re doing great, and it’s fun seeing people heading for the tailgating in their green garb waiting for the streetcar along the neutral ground of St. Charles Avenue when I’m driving home from uptown. I’m working on an essay about religion, hoping to work on finishing a short story or two this weekend, and getting back to work on the book.

I also am thinking about rewatching Saltburn, so I can finish my essay about it. It’s not longer timely, of course, but it’s an interesting movie that I think bears some Gregalicious perspective on it. I still have some Imposter Syndrome (“who cares what I think? I never studied film as art.”) when it comes to expressing my opinions on art outside of my own form (literary arts), but reviews are basically what you liked and didn’t like, and I really enjoyed Saltburn, and want to dig through its multiple layers to get down to the heart of the matter. I think I’m going to read a queer mystery next, probably The Lavender House by Lev Rosen, which I’ve been wanting to dig my teeth into for quite some time. I am feeling so much better these days, and I have to say during this lengthy recovery from a major trauma to my body I was beginning to wonder if I was ever going to get back to normal, and if that exhaustion I felt almost constantly was something I was just going to have to live with and teach myself some work-arounds2 that I no longer need to do anymore. I don’t need to be constantly efficient when I am doing errands, planning and mapping out the route and order in which I do them to save a few minutes here and there, which is dumb. I also know it’s not going to kill me to leave the house again for something I’ve forgotten as it really isn’t a hassle to do so, or stop on the way home, and so forth. Tomorrow I most likely won’t leave the house at all, other than walking to the gym in the late morning–I need to get back into that routine, since I should be focused on getting into the best shape possible for what is coming3 under this new regime of horrors. My hopes aren’t high…when you have to depend on Republicans to save democracy…I just can’t believe more people didn’t think January 6th was disqualifying.4

So much for the “land of the free.”

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. I need to have breakfast and get another cup of coffee prepared before I repair to my easy chair with Tananarive’s amazing book–I really need to exhaust her backlist–and I suppose I’ll have the television on for games today that I won’t pay a lot of attention to for background noise–probably Mississippi-Florida, Kentucky-Texas, and LSU-Vanderbilt tonight. But I hope you do have a marvelous Saturday, Constant Reader, and I’ll probably be back later.

It’s a mystery!

What are the odds Facebook will want to take this down as a sexual image? After all, everyone knows butts are for sodomy.
  1. It’s also weird for Tulane to be doing better than either LSU or the Saints. ↩︎
  2. Since getting properly diagnosed and medicated for generalized anxiety disorder, I have begun to realize just how many things I do are workarounds to lessen the anxiety–which I am noticing now because the anxiety is (mostly) gone. ↩︎
  3. I’m hoping for the best but preparing for the worst. Project 2025 is coming, thanks again, MAGA trash. ↩︎
  4. Then again, look how long emancipation took here, and how long Jim Crow lasted. The USA has been one long history of atrocity after atrocity, truly something for fragile white cishet people to truly take pride in as their heritage. ↩︎

Somebody’s Watching Me

A month or so ago, Ira Levin’s A Kiss Before Dying was one of those “special deals for ebooks,” and I can never pass up a classic for a mere $1.99 (I generally replace my hard copy books with ebooks when they are on sale, so I can donate the real book; but Ira Levin novels will never be donated), which put me in mind of him again (the book is a crime fiction classic), and I started thinking about what is the best part of two of my favorites by him, Rosemary’s Baby and The Stepford Wives, which is the slow build of paranoia until the heroines are completely convinced that everyone is in on it and there’s no one she can trust. This is what I consider “women’s noir,” which is books that depict and explore women’s fears (which is why Gothics were so popular, I think; the wife can never trust the husband and always thinks he is trying to kill her–before the real culprit is exposed and they have their happily ever after. This, to me, mimics what it’s like for a woman when she gets married in real life; she wants to believe in her marriage and love, but how many times has that turned to ashes and dust in reality? Husbands kill wives or cheat on them or leave them; all these marriage fears were tentpoles of Gothics). I was going to revisit both novels–I had some other things I wanted to talk about with The Stepford Wives, and its similarities to Rosemary’s Baby, but I couldn’t find my copy of the latter so went with the former.

Since 2015, the term “gaslighting” has come back into vogue, with small wonder. Gaslighting can make you question your own judgment and your grasp on reality1; something many of us have experienced over the past nearly ten years and it isn’t an enjoyable experience.

Paranoia, combined with not being believed, makes for a fantastic novel that is very difficult to pull off; I can think of any number of films and books that use paranoia as a driving theme for their plots, and I always enjoy them. There really is nothing more frustrating than being being not believed about something that’s happened–or is happening–to you. It can make you crazy, make you question yourself and your own grasp of reality. It’s horrible and cruel in reality, and it’s something everyone can relate to because we have all not been believed at some point in our lives. It’s happened to me enough times (including losing jobs) that it certainly resonates with me. (I have an idea for a gaslighting/paranoia short story that I’ve been wanting to write for some time now.)

So, needless to say, I greatly enjoyed reading my advance copy of Alison Gaylin’s upcoming January release, We Are Watching.

It’s been the longest day of Meg Russo’s life, and it isn’t even half over. Her stomach gnaws at her, her hands heavy on the steering wheel. But when she glances at the clock on the dashboard, she sees that it’s a little shy of 11:30 a.m., which means that Meg, her husband, Justin, and their daugheter, Lily, have only been on the road for an hour. They’ve got at least three more hours on the thruway, and then they’ll have to contend with the series of veinlike country roads Meg and Justin haven’t traversed since their own college days. If they don’t hit too much traffic, they should be in Ithaca by five, which now feels like some point in a future so distant, Meg is incapable of envisioning it.

Time is strange that, the past eighteen years zooming by in an instant, all of it leading up to a single day that’s already lasted eons. Meg blames the stress of last night, wanting everything to be perfect for their daughter’s send-off, which led to thoughts of Lily’s first visit home for Thanksgiving break, which in turn made Meg think for the millionth time about how cold their house gets in the fall, and how Lily always complains about it. New windows, Meg had thought, lying in bed with her eyes open, envisioning insulated windows to replace those paper-thin sheets of glass, the same windows that were here when she and Justin bought the place twenty years ago–and it was a fixer-upper then. What if Lily came home to new windows? Meg mused, still awake in the wee hours of the morning. Will she have changed by then? Will she have grown too sophisticated to get excited over a warmer house? And so on, until the sky was pink and it was time to wake up and Meg had barely slept at all.

I’ve enjoyed Alison Gaylin’s work since I first read And She Was back in 2012, and have been a fan ever since, gobbling up each new book as she releases them. She has always been a terrific novelist, but what has been amazing to watch is how she pushes herself to do better with each book, tackling bigger themes and creating believable, relatable characters you can’t help but want to root for. We Are Watching may be her best yet, starting as a slow burn but building into an adrenaline boosting rollercoaster of a thriller.

The book opens with Meg and Justin taking their daughter Lily off to college, with all the emotions and fears and sense of loss that comes with a child leaving home and starting to move into their adulthood. Meg is likable, and so is her family. But as they drive a carload of skinheads pulls up alongside of them and start taking pictures. Meg reacts very strongly–so strongly that even I was like take a chill pill, girl!–which eventually leads to a crash that kills Justin, leaving the two women shattered shells of their previous selves. Lily decides to take time off from college and even Meg becomes housebound, despite needing to run her book store in the small Hudson Valley town they live in.

But things slowly begin closing in on both Meg and Lily; who were those skinheads in the other car? Why are truly strange, cult-like people showing up in the store or in town, chanting weird things at them? As Meg’s paranoia and fear grows, it soon becomes apparent that a religious cult is targeting her and her family, but why? But to find the truth, Meg has to not only survive the cult, which seems determined to kill her and her child, but when she has the time, to dig back into her own past to discover the truth–because the truth is the only thing that can set them free.

This book is fantastic, and I couldn’t put it down. It has all the hallmarks of a great Gaylin novel–a compelling and relatable main character doing the best she can in a terrible situation; a twisty plot full of surprises; and the kind of strong writing that makes her sentences and paragraphs sing.

Preorder it now and thank me in January when you finish reading it.

  1. The film this term comes from, Gaslight, is a great movie and Ingrid Bergman is terrific as the wife who isn’t sure if she is losing her mind; she deserved her Oscar and the film still holds up–and a very young Angela Lansbury makes her screen debut in it. ↩︎

Hell is for Children

Hollywood has always been interesting to me, ever since I was a kid. I am not as obsessed with Hollywood and celebrity culture as I used to be; I used to love awards shows but now find them kind of tedious and a lot of to-do about nothing very much. Paul and I used to watch any and every awards show, regardless of what they were for; now it’s just easier to follow live updates and skip the forced, awkward scripted banter and speeches where winners attempt to thank everyone they know before the band starts playing them off.1 That’s always cringey to me–not for the person the band is playing for, but for the event itself. I get that they want it to end on time, but at the same time it seems bad form to celebrate someone and then cut them off as they do celebrate? Your mileage, as they say, may vary.

One thing I did notice when my Hollywood fascination was at its peak was how cleaned up and sanitized Hollywood bios were, as opposed to the fiction written about Hollywood. You’d never know, for example, from reading a biography of Spencer Tracy that he wasn’t just “good friends” with Katharine Hepburn, or that Roddy McDowell never married for a reason, or that some stars may have been forced to have sex with casting directors, agents, and producers to get started. But those marvelous Hollywood novels (dismissed and disdained by critics as trash) were so much fun to read, and they always ended in tragedy. I also always wondered–affairs and divorces were also fairly common amongst Hollywood celebrities–how much truth there was in those stories; often I could identify characters as real people (for some books–cough Valley of the Dolls cough–trying to figure out who the characters were based on was part of the fun of reading them). And of course, the existence of “studio fixers”–yeah, there’s still a bunch of stories from Hollywood’s past we may never know the real story behind, let alone the stuff they buried so completely it’ll never be known–definitely speaks to the need for them, so yeah, Hollywood had a lot of secrets.

And now, knowing what I know about powerful Hollywood figures and how they behave? I’d be more surprised if they didn’t see the contract players as a harem of men and women for them to play games with.

I also have a tendency to avoid highly praised writers and books (and other forms of entertainment, of course), because I always end up disappointed, which is fault of neither author nor their work. Jordan Harper has been praised a lot, so I was hesitant to read him…but having now read Everybody Knows, I don’t regret waiting to read it because I saved a real treat for myself.

For want of a better word, wow.

Los Angeles burns.

Some sicko is torching homeless camps. Tonight they hit a tent city in Los Feliz near the 5. The fire spread to Griffin Park. The smoke makes the sunset unbelievable. The particles in the air slash the light, shift it red. They make the sky a neon wound.

Mae waits outside the secret entrance to the Chateau Marmont. She watches Saturday-night tourists wander Sunset Boulevard, their eyes bloodshot from the smoke. They cough and trade looks. They never thought the Sunset Strip would smell like a campfire.

Mae moves around the sidewalk like a boxer before the fight. Her face is sharp and bookish, framed in a Lulu bob. She wears a vintage floral jumpsuit. She’s got eyes like a wolf on the hunt–she hides them behind chunky oversized glasses. Nobody ever sees her coming.

Jordan Harper is an amazing writer. That’s where we need to start with this book. Yes, the story is compelling and fascinating and dirty and sleazy and makes you kind of want to take a Silkwood shower. The characters–all of them, from the two leads on–are defined and fully dimensional, with interior lives and motivations. Our two main characters, Mae and Chris, are modern-day fixers…but in modern times they’re called “flacks” and work for “p.r. firms”, even if their job is the same as the tough guys who worked for MGM and Warners and Fox back in the day. But the writing is what sold me on book and writer; those opening paragraphs are as fine a series of opening paragraphs I’ve ever read. The dialogue is real, the characters are awful but you understand why they are awful–and both Mae and Chris have seen their fair share of horrific cover-ups and helping their clients get off scot-free every time they get in over their heads. In the very first chapter, Mae is on the job helping a young former child actress transitioning into adult roles out of drug overdose situation in her rooms at the Marmont, and her quick thinking and moving gets the young woman out of there without being seen or caught.

Mae is very good at her job.

Her boss sets up a meeting with her–off the books, away from the office–but on his way to meet her, he is murdered. It’s supposedly a car-jacking go wrong, but Mae has to wonder, is it? He’d seemed like he was about to hit a financial bonanza, but needed her help. Mae decides to look into his murder–which Chris winds up working as well from another direction. Mae and Chris didn’t work out the first time–but they’ve never forgotten each other, and soon join forces. Both were coming to the conclusion that their jobs were sleazy and they were helping bad people get away with doing bad things, and when they realize what is at the root of all the trouble, they see it as an opportunity to make some cash and perhaps do a little good on their way out to retirement.

And what’s going on in Hollywood is something horrible, indeed.

I loved this book, and deeply resented not having the time to read it all the way through in one sitting, so am really glad I made the time to sit down and finish it–in one sitting. I was about forty or fifty pages in, and sat down and didn’t budge till it was done. That authorial voice! The influence of the hardboiled masters is clearly there, but Harper has his own distinctive style and authorial voice that makes him unique in the business–and that’s not an easy thing to do.

I can’t wait to read more of his work.

  1. I do think this aversion, or lack of interest, in awards shows has come from attending so many writing awards banquets, and yes, it’s a lovely problem to have. At some point I will go talk about my antipathy to awards…but must and always will confess to loving being nominated for things. My jones for that itch to be scratched has happened more than I could have ever dreamed. ↩︎

Close Enough to Perfect

I don’t remember when and where I first met Tara Laskowski; my memory has become a sieve over the years and the bout of long COVID in the summer of 2022 didn’t help much, nor did any of the things that have gone on for the last three or four years. But I’ve liked her from the very first–I love that she loves Halloween and centered one of her books arounnd it–and when I read her debut novel, I became a big fan. She, along with Carol Goodman, are killing the Gothic suspense novel genre, which has always been one of my favorites ever since I was a kid and discovered Mary Stewart and Victoria Holt and that Phyllis A. Whitney also wrote books for adults. She followed up her sensational debut One Night Gone with the Halloween book, The Mother Next Door, and it was also magnificent.

So I really was looking forward to her third novel, and Constant Reader, it did not disappoint.

Ever since Zack told me about The Weekend, it’s all I’ve been able to focus on. Most people would naturally be at least a little nervous to meet their significant other’s family for the first time.

But most people aren’t dating a Van Ness.

“Earth to Lauren.” Zach snaps his fingers, grinning over at me. He left work early to get on the road sooner and didn’t have time to change, so he’s still wearing his suit, purple tie slightly askew but knotted even after hours of driving.

“Sorry,” I say, tugging the ends of my hair. “Zoning out.”

“You look like I’m driving you to your death,” he says, then grabs my hand and squeezes. “Don’t worry. I promises it’ll be fun. Even if my family’s there.”

This is a great opening, and it sets up the story perfectly. Our sympathies are immediately with Lauren. Laskoswki has put her into a situation we can all relate to: the terror of meeting your partner’s family and the discomfort that comes with it, the self-doubt, the need to be liked and accepted. Zach is a Van Ness, too, and while we aren’t really certain what that means yet, it’s important and stressful enough so that Lauren, in communicating her thoughts and feelings, thinks it bears mentioning and we should understand how she feels. It works, and that outsider feeling (and haven’t we all felt like an outsider at some time? See Saltburn) keeps the reader’s sympathies with Lauren completely.

But there are three more point of view characters–two other women, one a Van Ness by blood and the other by marriage–which is always a difficult feat for an author to pull off, but making those voices distinct and clearly different from each other is what makes the book work. Harper, Zack’s sister, is harsh, tough, cold and vindictive. She runs her own beauty company and blog, VNity, which is struggling. Elle is married to Harper’s twin brother Richard, who oversees the vast Van Ness holdings, and like Lauren, has some serious “pick me” energy too; she joined the Van Ness family and has wiggled her way into the family by asserting herself as well as trying to take over the role of family matriarch, as their mother is dead. Their mother, Katrina, was a tough woman who was hard on her children, but babied the youngest, Zack–which the twins have always resented. The retreat, this Weekend, is a celebration of the twins’ birthdays, with a huge party being thrown the Saturday night of that weekend, spent up at the Van Ness Winery, in the Finger Lakes section of New York.

So yes, that Gothic feeling is there almost from the start. The wide-eyed young innocent, coming to the big family estate in a remote part of the country (see also, Beware the Woman by Megan Abbott) into a situation where she’s not sure she can entirely trust her boyfriend. The house is filled with secrets, too–hidden rooms, secret staircases and passage ways–and a lot of sibling resentment, bitterness, and anger begins bubbling up to the surface almost immediately.

There’s also a fourth POV character, known only as the Weekend Guest, who hates the Van Ness siblings and is trying to bring the entire family down as a brutal winter storm bears down on Van Ness Winery…

What a terrific read! Get a copy–you can thank me later.

Feliz Navidad

I do love me a good cozy mystery.

Cozy mysteries often get little respect from the other subgenres of crime fiction, and their authors likewise generally only get respect from their cozy colleagues; but the disdain they get from a lot of other crime writers is actually kind of criminal. It’s no easier to write a cozy than any other form of mystery; if anything, I would think it would be harder to write about a murder without much blood, no violence, no profanity, and no sex on the page. Part of the reason I decided to write A Streetcar Named Murder was the challenge of writing one, and it was far harder writing that book than it was writing the ones in other subgenres of crime; I wish I had a dime for every time I backspaced over a profanity I’d automatically typed; I curse a lot and so do my characters.

So while I am writing a new cozy–the sequel to Death Drop–I thought I’d read some while I wrote to get a good feeling for the subgenre.

And I am finding one can never go wrong with Raquel V. Reyes.

Halloween was a week away, and we didn’t have s single decoration up. The living room was littered with shopping bags, extension chords, four-foot-tall plastic jack-o’-lanterns, and one handsome Frankenstein.

“Babe, we’re going to need a ladder and a staple gun,” Frankenstein said.

“Can you borrow one from a neighbor?” I asked as I squeezed my foot into a shoe that had fit perfectly a few weeks ago but was now tight. My costume, like my husband’s, was a modification of something I already had. I’d taken a white apron and smeared it with beet juice. In red marker, I’d written Chef Vampira on a paper toque, the tall hat fancy chefs wore. I was not a trained chef, but I had reached local stardom with my two cooking shows, Cocina Caribeña and Abuela Approved.

“Do I look undead enough? Do I need more white makeup?” I asked.

I got a copy of Raquel’s Lefty Award winning novel for Best First at Left Coast Crime in 2022. I read it later that year, and kind of fell in love with the series and its main cast. After years of living in New York and working as a food anthropologist, Miriam, her husband and son all move to his hometown, Coral Shores–a town within Miami’s borders. As she found her footing in this rich and posh neighborhood of McMansions and racist snobs (including her mother-in-law) she gets involved in a murder when someone–her husband’s ex and whom his mother wanted him to marry–died of poisoning right in front of her at a charity luncheon–and Miriam develops a nose for mystery.

This second book in the series is a welcome second offering. This time out, there are bodies everywhere. Did the chef at the country club accidentally fall to his death, or was he pushed?The mother of the victim in the first book is found unconscious and incoherent on the side of Miriam’s house. Her neighbor is found unconscious and frothing in the mouth on Halloween night, so she has to take in his dog until he’s recovered. AND her mother-in-law has coerced her into putting together the charity fundraiser at her snooty country club, so she is constantly picking at Miriam…even in front of her grandson. And then there’s another murder. Miriam can’t help sleuthing, everything keeps building until the night of the gala–when Miriam gets to the truth finally and puts her own life at jeopardy.

I love this series. I love Miriam, and I love that Reyes doesn’t italicize Spanish words (she says she writes in Spanglish) and that she authentically sprinkles Spanish organically through the books. I love that the books focus on Caribbean cooking, and how it developed culturally and anthropologically. I cringe at the racism Miriam experiences (while getting angry at it; I despise bigotry), and I really care about Miriam; which is the key to writing a good cozy mystery: a main character the reader can identify with and like.

Do read this series. I can’t wait to get my hands on the third!