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Women in Horror Month: Book Review: Fractured Tide by Leslie Lutz

cover art for Fractured Tide by Leslie Lutz

( Bookshop.com | Amazon.com )

Fractured Tide by Leslie Lutz

Blink, 2020

ISBN-13 : 978-0310770107

Available: Hardcover, Kindle edition, audiobook

 

Seventeen-year-old Sia is essential in her mother’s business of chartering trips for tourists wanting to scuba dive. A newbie scuba diver she has been assigned to help navigate a shipwreck is lost, and in her search for him, she senses an underwater threat. When she finds and retrieves her charge, it is too late.  Her mother calls another charter boat, full of high school students, to take Sia, her brother Felix, and the other passengers back.  Just as they’re moving to the second boat, the engines of both boats die, and they are cut off from any radio or cell phone contact, unable to contact the Coast Guard, and running out of water in the middle of the ocean. Then the creature Sia sensed in the shipwreck rises and uses its deadly appendages to sweep everyone over the side and destroy the boats. Sia, Felix and two of the students from the second charter, the only survivors, wash up on a desolate island with almost no food or water, trapped there by the giant sea monster blocking their escape. Sia and the other survivors are pretty well-developed, but not especially likable or cooperative given that if they can’t work together they are probably all going to die.

At first this looked like a straightforward killer animal story, but then it morphed into a survival narrative with science-fictional elements as well (it’s been compared to Lost). Yet there were a lot of things that didn’t make sense for any of those kinds of stories. The creature didn’t discriminate in its destruction of the boats, so it’s odd that the few people Sia has some kind of relationship with (her brother, the boy she thinks is cute, and his ex-girlfriend) are the only survivors. Sia is telling the story in a series of diary entries that she starts writing to her father, who is in prison, in a notebook she discovers shortly after washing up on the island (the story occasionally switches from first to second person as she directly addresses him, which can be confusing) and, in addition to being trapped on the island geographically, and by a killer sea monster, the survivors also seem to be trapped in time. Is this all going on in Sia’s head, or some of it, or is it all really happening? It was confusing, and not at all what I expected.

The parts with the sea creature were terrifying, as were the descriptions of running out of water or getting lost in the dark while scuba diving, and the effects of time repeating on all the characters and their actions took the story into the realm of the bizarre and hallucinatory by the end, but the story didn’t flow naturally– it really was a fractured narrative– and that detracted from my ability to really sink into the story. I’m not sure what I really think of how it worked, but I did love the author’s vivid imagination and description of the thrill and exhiliration Sia felt scuba diving, even in the most dangerous places, under the sea, and the author’s examination of what the thoughts might be of a teen in a tricky family situation with an incarcerated parent. Recommended.

 

Reviewed by Kirsten Kowalewski

 

Posted on February 5, 2021 by , Reply

Musings: Clown in a Cornfield by Adam Cesare

 

cover art for Clown in a Cornfield by Adam Cesare  (  Bookshop.org |  Amazon.com )

Clown in a Cornfield by Adam Cesare

HarperTeen, 2020

ISBN-13 : 978-0062854599

Available: Hardcover, Kindle edition, audiobook

 

Clown in a Cornfield has the cover art, title, and pacing I’d expect from a pulp paperback from the 1970s-1980s, but a very contemporary feel. It takes place in a small, rural town in Missouri. Quinn Maybrook has just moved from Philadelphia to Kettle Springs, where her father has taken over the town doctor’s practice to give both of them a fresh start after her mother died by drug overdose. A year prior to the events of the book, Cole Hill and his friends livestreamed a prank for their YouTube channel that led to the accidental death of Cole’s younger sister, and shortly before the story begins, Cole attempted to burn down an abandoned factory owned by his father’s company, Baypen. Baypen’s mascot is a clown, Frendo, and it might as well be Kettle Springs’ mascot, as well.

Quinn’s first day at school gets a rocky start when she is caught in the crossfire between Cole and his friends and the science teacher as he angrily ejects them from his classroom, but she soon finds herself included in the group. Quinn discovers that almost everything they do is to get an on-camera reaction. A dangerous prank at the town’s Founder’s Day parade causes a lot of anger in the community, especially from the sheriff, who holds a lot of power and is a very convincing man.

The teens have planned a party in a barn in the middle of a cornfield on the farm of a family who has left on vacation, and despite the damage, a huge crowd arrives to drink and dance. That’s when Frendo, the clown, shows up, and events quickly escalate into a large-scale, fast-paced, violent, and bloody massacre.

Small, rural towns in mid-America tend to be very conservative, very white, and attached to traditional values. They are mostly financially depressed, mainly because nearby manufacturing has failed and family farming isn’t very profitable. Gun ownership, especially for hunting, is common. And communities are usually small enough that their identities center on high school sports, including the mascots. I’ve worked in a really small, rural town, and every day when I got off the highway exit I drove past miles and miles of corn. Cesare really captures the character of these communities, and while some characters are relatively stock, such as the sheriff, others are well-fleshed out.  I especially was impressed with the portrayal of Rust,  who could easily have been a cariacature of a gun-happy redneck but instead was a nuanced, thoughtful, and resourceful character. There’s also positive representation of gay characters, and an interesting Asian “mean girl”.

My daughter didn’t feel that the motivation for the massacre was believable, but having watched the events of the past week play out, I can now fully believe that clowns could turn in a violent and deadly way on people they feel alienated from if they believe there is a threat to their way of life. Clown in a Cornfield moves along quickly and may appeal to reluctant readers. Slasher fans and teens looking for a terrifying, gory story will find it here. Highly recommended for grades 9+.

Contains: extreme violence, gore, murder, body horror

 

 

Posted on January 14, 2021 by , Reply

Book List: Chosen Ones: Most Unlikely To Be Chosen

We all know the “Chosen One” trope that is prevalent though all kinds of literature and media from King Arthur to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and its mutated dystopian form that divides families and communities, as in Veronica Roth’s Divergent and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale to produce its hero.

But being the “one girl to save the world” or “the Boy who Lived” isn’t always what it’s cracked up to be. Recently, I’m seeing a number of takes on Chosen Ones that are a little different.

cover for Chosen Ones by Veronica Roth  ( Bookshop.org )

Chosen Ones is Veronica Roth’s newest book, and after her runaway success with Divergent, a series grounded in the “chosen one” trope, it’s interesting to see what she does with it.  In it, the government receives a prophecy that could describe any of a number of children. It’s not clear which one is the Chosen One in the prophecy, so all five of the children are trained together to defeat the Evil One. Roth focuses on what happens when the battle is over and the Chosen Ones grow up. Is the battle really over, though?

 

cover art for Slayer and Chosen by Kiersten White  ( Bookshop.org )

Slayer and Chosen are Kiersten White’s contributions to the Buffyverse. Twins Nina and Artemis live in an Irish castle with what’s left of the Council of Watchers, two months after Buffy shut down all interdimensional portals and destroyed magic, killing off many of the Watchers and potential Slayers, and disappeared. Nina has always felt inferior to Artemis, believing she is only good at being the castle medic, and pretty much everyone around her has shared that belief, but it turns out that she is much more than anyone could have expected.

 

cover art for Un Lun Dun by China Mieville     ( Bookshop.org )

Un Lun Dun by China Mieville is an older title, but one I just encountered myself. It looks like it’s going to be a conventional “Chosen One” story, but plays with the tropes in some surprising ways. Londoners Zanna (the prophesied Chosen One) and her friend Deeba enter UnLondon, a surreal alternate London that gives a new life to the broken and out-of-date things that have been discarded or forgotten by the original Londoners. UnLondon is threatened by a fantastical, sentient version of a very real problem; Smog. Unfortunately for Zanna, the prophecies aren’t exactly right, and Mieville knocks home to the reader that you don’t have to be chosen to save the world. With living words and clothes made from the pages of books, this has a lot in common with The Phantom Tollbooth, but it has some very dark and grim moments among the playfulness, and its urban, underground alternate reality is very reminiscent of Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere. 

images for covers of Simon Snow series books by Rainbow Rowell ( Bookshop.org )

Carry On and Wayward Son are the first two books of a trilogy about Simon Snow (the third, As The Way The Wind Blows, comes out in 2021), the hero of a fictional series created in Rainbow Rowell’s standalone novel Fangirl, where the main character writes fanfic about the series, which itself seems to be loosely based on the Harry Potter books. In Carry On, supposedly the last book in a series of eight, we learn that Simon was told by a Dumbledore-type character that he was chosen to defeat the evil Humdrum. While Simon has his good friend Penelope watching his back, he’s basically no good at magic, his girlfriend has dumped him, he isn’t all that excited about being a Chosen One. Fangirl’s Cath mainly focused on a developing romantic relationship between Simon and his vampire nemesis/roommate Baz, and that is pretty essential to the plot. Wayward Son follows Simon after his final battle with the Humdrum, at a loss of what to do with himself or even communicate with the people who care about him. In an attempt to break him out of this state of mind, Penelope and Baz suggest a road trip across America. It’s kind of an interesting idea to explore “what happens next” in this way, but the lack of communication, especially between Simon and Baz, throughout the majority of the book, drove me bonkers. In both books, Baz is the most interesting and shows the most growth. It is interesting to see Rowell play with and critique the Chosen One tropes while shifting the focus, and the overt LGBTQ+ love story.

cover art for Trials of Apollo by Rick Riordan box set  ( Bookshop.org )

The Trials of Apollo series by Rick Riordan is the most adult of Riordan’s series in the Percy Jackson universe. Beginning with The Hidden Oracle, the fifth and last book in this series, The Tower of Nero, was just released a few months ago. In this series, the arrogant, selfish, handsome Apollo, god of music, prophecy, the sun, and archery is tossed from Olympus by an angry Zeus in the form of a powerless, pimply teenager and forced to serve a sullen tween girl while making up for the harm he has thoughtlessly caused for others, not just in the past but in the present, which turns out to include not just redeeming himself but saving the world. This series has some great LGBTQ+ representation, not just in Apollo but with other characters.

 

cover art for Unchosen by Katharyn Blair  ( Bookshop.org )

Unchosen by Katharyn Blair, soon to be released, takes place in an apocalyptic dystopian future, where a plague called the Crimson that is spread by eye contact is turning people into ravenous, flesh-eating, intelligent zombies. Charlotte, the narrator, is the unnoticed middle sister to Harlow, who leads a band of survivors, and Vanessa, the Chosen One. Charlotte and Vanessa share a bedroom, and as Vanessa mutters prophecies in her sleep, Charlotte writes them down. When raiders seeking the Chosen One attack their encampment, Charlotte claims to be the Chosen One in order to protect Vanessa.

 

   ( Bookshop.org )

The Year of the Witching by Alexis Henderson has a completely different approach and it is the closest to straight horror on this list. This story takes place in an isolated, patriarchal, oppressive, religious community.  The protagonist, Immanuelle, doesn’t know she was chosen for anything special, and doesn’t want to be. She has not been told or even given a choice in the role she will play in the destruction of her community.

 

Posted on December 27, 2020 by , Reply
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