Memo to Human Resources - They Might Be Giants

Today is January 4th, 2025. The song of the day is "Memo to Human Resources" by They Might Be Giants.

What's on Your Mind (Pure Energy) - Information Society

Today is January 3rd, 2025. The song of the day is "What's on Your Mind (Pure Energy)" by Information Society.

Free money!

 Here's all the cash I found just lying on the ground over the course of 2024...

That's 163 pennies, 26 nickels, 27 dimes, 15 quarters, I think and a 5 dollar bill. For a record breaking*  $14.38 total. 

*Record breaking since 2015 when I started keeping track. Even without the fiver, the change beat last year's record of $8.18. 

Mother Mother - Tracy Bonham

Today is January 2nd, 2025. The song of the day is "Mother Mother" by Tracy Bonham. EVERYTHING'S FINE!!

2024 books

Books read in 2024. final sentence spoiler tagged in parenthesis after my thoughts. Last word is not tagged.

1. Mister Magic by Kiersten White - 30 years ago, a bizarre children’s show called Mister Magic stopped airing. There are no recordings of it online, and the adults who remember seeing it all sort of feel as though it were a fever dream. Some remember the host as a puppet, some remember him as a very tall, kind man. Most remember the songs that the children would sing and the lessons that Mister Magic taught them. It’s become a bit of an urban legend online, and Reddit and discussion boards obsess over the final circle of friends - Val, Jenny, Javi, Marcus, Isaac, and Kitty. Val has been living on a ranch in Montana with her father for the past three decades, and has no memory of being on the show, until, at her father’s funeral, three men who seem vaguely familiar to her show up. They’re Javi, Marcus, and Isaac. They let her know that they’re on their way to see Jenny at a house in Utah where a podcast will be talking about Mister Magic. As Val tries to regain her memories, the weirdness that was Mister Magic becomes more and more apparent. This was engaging and creepy and had me gripped for the first 2/3rds or so. And then it just got FAR too abstract and metaphorical for me to keep following. Pity. I think if the landing had been stuck, I’d be raving about this book, but as it is, I doubt I’ll remember it by year’s end. (Open the doors.)

2. Whalefall by Daniel Krauss - Moby Dick, with daddy issues. This was actually quite good… although bits of it were dense. But, basically, Jay Gardiner has had a contentious relationship with his father, Mitt, for several years. Mitt is …emotionally distant would probably be an apt description. And an alcoholic. And a perfectionist, who expects his son to follow his footsteps (but gives his daughters passes). Mitt is also a bit of a misanthropist, who prefers ocean life to that of humanity. Mitt has taught Jay tons of oceanic facts and has also trained him on how to be a professional diver. After Mitt dies in a mysterious diving related accident, Jay decides that the best way to get closure is to retrieve his father’s remains. While diving into the Bay where his father passed, he encounters a giant squid… which unfortunately gets eaten by a sperm whale, with Jay entangled. Jay has limited amount of oxygen and has to use his father’s knowledge and his own wits in order to survive this ordeal. The emotional side of Jay and Mitt’s relationship hit VERY close to home (tears were shed, at least twice). So why did I only give this 3 stars on goodreads? Well. The scientific accuracy of the novel is a double edged sword. Learning the facts and lingo of deep sea diving and whale anatomy WAS interesting, but also, for me, anyway, also sometimes difficult to parse. I loved the emotional aspects, and the scenario that Jay found himself in was compelling and frightening, I just wish bits of it had been told in a slightly dumbed down manner.  (Sleeper, arise!)

3. Starter Villain by John Scalzi - Charlie Fritzer is a 30-something millennial living in his deceased father’s house, trying to make ends meet as a substitute teacher. He’s divorced, and lives alone - with only his cat, Hera to keep him company. His estranged uncle, Jake Baldwin, was the CEO of a company that makes parking garages. When Jake dies, Charlie is notified he’s inherited his uncle’s business. Which, it turns out, is much more than parking garages. Jake was actually a multibillionaire villain, who had a volcano lair and research and development teams. But there’s also an entire league of supervillains that Jake was competing against, and Charlie has inherited those problems as well. Fortunately, Hera is there to help Charlie learn the ropes of being a villain, cuz all good villains have a cat with them. This was a light breezy fun little romp. I laughed out loud at several parts of it. (Time for us to go home.)

4. Holes by Louis Sachar - Stanley Yelnats (the 4th) gets sent to an all-boys detention center where the boys have to dig holes in a dried up lake bed, and alert the Warden if they discover anything “of interest”. Oh, and avoid the deadly lizards and rattlesnakes that reside there. While there really isn’t a lot of plot to this - the boys dig; there’s eventual backstory to the history of the lake and some (surprise!) treasure that was lost there that gets dribbled out to us while the boys dig and deal with the adults who oversee them - the story was compelling enough that I kept going. (Fly high, my baby bird, my angel, my only.)

5. The Anomaly by Michael Rutger - Nolan Moore hosts a Youtube channel that is a mix of The X-Files and Indiana Jones. Led by reports from an expedition in 1909 about a mysterious cavern in the Grand Canyon, he and his crew head into the canyon, not truly expecting to find anything, but hopeful nonetheless. Once they DO find it, though, they discover that perhaps there was a reason the 1909 expedition lied about how to find this place. This took a while to actually get going - it felt like getting to know the crew and them getting to the cavern was about 100 pages. Not that that was bad, per se… just took a LOT of buildup to get there. But once they get in, it gets very tense and claustrophobic. And then it takes a massive hard swing into scifi land for the final 50 pages or so, which requires an enormous amount of suspension of disbelief. However, it was all in all an enjoyable read. Apparently, he’s got a sequel… MAYBE I’ll check that out. We’ll have to see. (We walked together back into the courtyard, and we stayed there for a very long time.)

6. 8-Bit Apocalypse: The Untold Story of Atari’s Missile Command by Alex Rubens - what should have been an article in BuzzFeed stretched out to fill 250 pages. Very little actual history (the beginning sections about Atari’s foundation were probably the closest thing that could be described as historical) and if there were any revealed secrets, I missed them. There were so many instances of Rubens repeating himself with the wordage slightly altered, it felt EXTREMELY like someone in highschool needing to hit a quota and not having enough to actually say.   I mean, it wasn’t ALL bad, there were some bits that were interesting - I was mildly intrigued with the story of Tony Temple and his interactions with the jackass Roy Shildt. And the first time I heard about developer Dave Theurer and his desire to implement an anti-war message into his game, it was sorta interesting. Having it repeated 700 times in slightly altered ways made it less so. But, I just kinda wish I had spent the time I used reading this book actually PLAYING Missile Command instead. (Though it appeared dead after declaring bankruptcy in 2013, the company has since reemerged as Atari, SA, with a focus on “new audiences.”)

7. Big Time by Ben H. Winters - I’ve enjoyed most everything I’ve read by Ben Winters, and this was no exception. But… the resolution WAS pretty abrupt, and I got major “this will become a series” vibes at the end. Too much was left open-ended. And honestly, the majority of the characters are people i wouldn’t mind spending another book or two with. But there was no indication that this was “book 1” or the start of a new series, so those feelings may be way off base. It was just the overall sense i got at the end of the book, because it was so… unsatisfying. For 90% of the book, though, I was having a great time. It starts off with a young woman named Allie escaping her would-be kidnapper, and worrying about her baby, whom the kidnapper…has no memory of. After that short prologue, we move on to our main protagonists, Grace, and her family - her elderly mother, Kathy, and her teenage nonbinary child, River. Grace is middle-aged and dealing with all the existential dread that comes along with realizing that… yeah, this is pretty much as good as its gonna get. Then, her path - thru work coincidences - crosses with Allie, and Grace gets rapidly sucked into a conspiracy with sci-fi elements. I love how Ben is able to combine genres so seamlessly, and I just really enjoyed all the characters in this. The sci-fi plot takes some suspension of disbelief to accept, but the ride is fun enough that I was (mostly) able to do so. I truly felt like this could have been about 50 pages longer, to provide a better resolution. But, hey, if it turns out that in a year or two, Grace and River are back to solve another mystery, I’ll be down with that as well. (River raised the remote to do so as Ajax looked directly into the camera and the future he’d made.) 

8. Everything is Fine Volume 2 by Mike Birchall - more murder, Big Brother surveillance and paranoia abound… along with giant cat heads in this second graphic novel collection of a webcomic. (Besides, it’s not like you murdered my husband, right?)

9. We’re Not From Here by Geoff Rodkey - At some point in the future, Earth becomes inhabitable. A small amount of humanity managed to move to Mars, but that isn’t sustainable either. Fortunately, scientists have found Choom, a planet that IS hospitable. It’s also already inhabited by 4 other species - the Zhuri (who resemble giant mosquitos), the Krik (who look like miniature werewolves), the Ooroo (giant marshmallows) and the Nug (I forget what they looked like). But, a few families opt to be the first to move there. They go into suspended animation, 20 years pass, they wake up…and find out that the Zhuri have changed their minds, and DON’T want humans living on the planet anymore. (Hey, we’re all in this  together.)

10. Freaks by Brett Riley - Hate read thru this. Around page 50 or so, I said out loud to Steph, “I hate this, but I can’t stop reading it”. Bits were okay, I guess, but overall, the writing was subpar and the story wasn’t anything great either. Characters were all flat and not really likable. The basic plot - in some hick town down in Arkansas (I think) there are 4 outcasts in high school that get bullied pretty much daily. One of the group has an uncle who was into the occult. They dig out his books, and start messing around with them. As a result, they obtain super powers, and open a dimensional portal bringing a four armed super strong vampire type creature into our world. There are two sequels to this, but I’m not anywhere near interested enough to get them. (And if those kids got in the way, not even God could help them.)

11. Geiger vol 1 by Geoff Johns - Graphic novel that collected the first six issues of “Geiger”. In 2030, nukes go off, Tariq Geiger survives the blast, and gives him super radioactive powers. 20 years later, he’s become a myth - The Glowing Man. In Las Vegas, the survivors have devolved into fiefdoms. The Prince wants to murder the Glowing Man (the last time they met, the radiation left the prince disfigured), and there’s political backstabbing at play as well. The first few issues of this were …kind of confusing and not super great. It started to pick up around issue 3 when Geiger meets up with some orphaned kids on the run from the Prince, and he becomes their adoptive father figure. Around this time we also start getting hints that there are OTHER superhero type folks out there (and sure enough - there’s other series out there that focus on some of them - Redcoat, and Robot Joe, for example…) Anyway… once it kicked into gear and sort of found its voice, the story was…okay. But nothing super exciting. I don’t know taht I’ll actively seek out the other Unnamed books, because this didn’t wow me, honestly. (How about we all discuss it over some pre-war whiskey.)

12. Sure, I’ll Join Your Cult: A Memoir of Mental Illness and the Quest to Belong Anywhere by Maria Bamford - Oh, crud. I didn't write anything after I read this, and now I don't know what I really thought. Maria Bamford is an acquired taste, but I've certainly acquired it. If you like her standup, you'll most likely enjoy this memoir. (In practice, it’s me answering questions about my beliefs and behaviors, looking for patterns in my life (like illegal parking [or procrastination or compulsive whale-watching]) that create chaos and what I might replace them with.)

13. You Like It Darker by Stephen King - Short stories! Overall, a good collection. A few were duds, most were pretty good, a few were excellent. Here are the stories and the final sentences:
    Two Lucky Bastids - We start off the collection with a pretty good yarn. Main character’s dad was a famous writer, who didn’t get famous until late in life. He had a best friend who became a famous painter, also late in life. After his dad passed, he found out that there was a secret to how and why the men obtained their fame. I liked this a fair amount, but the Judge Judy anachronism -which, of course, others online have noticed and criticized as well - took me out of the story, and was enough of a mistake that it dimmed the overall tale. It truly should have been caught by an editor or proof reader. (I tell myself that, and mostly I believe it.)
    The Fifth Step - ehhh. One of the ones that I didn’t care for. It was super short, and had a twist ending, but overall …didn’t seem to have a point? Like it was just designed for shock value, maybe? (“You’ll be in my prayers tonight,” Jack said.)
    Willie the Weirdo - this one ALSO was short and had a twist, but it stuck with me for a few days. Later I saw some people online criticizing it as having been almost an exact copy of a short story King had written years ago. Perhaps… I haven’t gone back to reread that story, so I can’t compare the two. But this one, while not having a lot of substance, was written intriguingly enough that I enjoyed it. (“Yes,” Willie said, and stroked the skin between his lip and nose with one finger.)
    Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream - one of the top tier stories, and the longest of the batch. Danny Coughlin has a psychic dream about the location of a murdered woman. It bugs him enough that he goes to investigate, and discovers that, yep, there’s a dead body there. He calls it in to the cops, and promptly becomes their prime suspect. This felt like a nice blend of King’s delve into crime novels with a pinch of supernatural seasoning. The nitpick of the victim being a hitchhiking young woman (!!??!!) was one that didn’t ping on my radar at first, but Steph pointed out to me, and, yes, does seem QUITE unlikely, but overall, not enough to truly ruin the story for me.  (There's nothing to say.)
    Finn - another one that was …not exactly my cup of tea. The extended torture scenes felt excessive. (Then he pushed off.)
    On Slide Inn Road - a family takes a short cut through a pretty deserted area, and encounters some ne’er do wells. Things do not go as anyone could have expected. This wasn’t great, but wasn’t bad. Pure mid grade King.(And Frank does.)
    Red Screen - HATED THIS. (In the dark, Sandi Wilson smiles.)
    The Turbulence Expert - an okay speculative semi-supernatural type story that didn’t quite feel fleshed out enough. Sort of like he had the idea and …kinda slapped a bare bones story around it. (The turbulence struck over Oklahoma.)
    Laurie - Gots to be careful when walking in Florida. (Then he put his dog down to go about her business.)
    Rattlesnakes - Lots of people are calling this a “sequel” to Cujo. It’s been YEARS since I’ve read that, so I don’t know if that’s an adequate description. It DOES follow up with some of the (human) characters from that story, so, there’s that. I’ve often said that ghost stories aren’t ones that particularly scare me. And while this didn’t really provide a lot of scares, it was a compelling read. Although the “falsely accused” motif from Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream seeped into this too, which felt.. Like, why you going to that well so often?  Still. This wasn’t bad at all. (God help me!)
    The Dreamers - Revival-lite. Good stuff, though. A Vietnam vet volunteers to help a doctor doing dream studies. Turns out the doctor is tinkering with nature of the universe…and is finding things that are best left alone. (Not for me.)
    The Answer Man - Made me cry. I’d say it’s the best story of the collection. And…possibly one of the best short stories King has ever written. A young lawyer in the 1930s comes across a mysterious man who claims to be able to answer any question for a small fee. Is knowing the future all it’s cracked up to be, or is part of the joy in life the mystery of how it will all unfold?  This was just an all around wonderful short story. (It was yes.)

14. The Need by Helen Phillips - Molly is a paleobotanist and a mother of two young children. One night as she is preparing her kids for bed, she thinks she hears an intruder in the house. (The first chapter, alone, by the way, was a super effective short story just by itself, but it kept going  and I really enjoyed this book.)This short novel was well written, and kept me guessing the entire time. It continuously walked the line between creepy and mundane, with Molly’s daughter Viv being a rich source of “Is she saying this because of what’s going on, or is it just a 4 year old being a weird 4 year old?” This was largely a character study, and an investigation into motherhood, and the stress of being a mom, and a woman with a job, and …I’m rambling. I liked this a lot, is all I’m saying. I don’t want to spoil things, because truly - going in blind is absolutely the best way to enjoy this novel. Some of the events that happen would not be half as shocking if you knew about them beforehand.  My only criticism is that the ending was a little TOO ambiguous for my liking. Maybe i’m just dumb (maybe??) but the final couple of chapters and the epilogue… just didn’t click with me. (But the children were not alarmed, for they were with her, safe and she bore them onward.)

15. The Downloaded by Robert J. Sawyer - I usually enjoy Sawyer’s novels, but this novella about two groups of people who had their minds uploaded to a computer, and their bodies cryogenically frozen (one was a group of astronauts going on a journey to build a new world, the other was a set of convicts doing prison time) didn’t quite work. It was still entertaining enough, and certainly had cool concepts, but the character development wasn’t there, and, while I’m as liberal as Sawyer is, a lot of this DID come across as preachy or shoehorned in. I think, honestly, if this had been a longer work, and had allowed the characters and world to breathe some, that I would have enjoyed it more than I did. (“It certainly is.”)

16. How to Sell a Haunted House by Grady Hendrix - Another one where I didn't jot down my thoughts at the time, only to discover NOW that I didn't. I liked this. A brother and sister who are somewhat estranged have to put aside their differences after their parents die to sell their childhood home. Which, turns out, has some supernatural shit going on in it. (When that happened, she called her brother.)

17. The War of the Givens by Daniel Price - The trilogy of the Given sisters - as well as 97 other “orphans” rescued from our timeline and brought into AltAmerica by scientists from a far flung future comes to a close. Like the previous two volumes, this was 700 pages of timey-wimey fun. I can not even imagine the amount of planning and notes that must have gone into writing this entire thing, but my hat is definitely off to Daniel Price for pulling it all off. I think overall, it might not have been *perfect* (keeping track of this enormous cast was a struggle, and once the inevitable war finally kicked in, and deaths started happening, some of them didn’t hit as strongly as they probably should have) but it was close enough for me to be in complete admiration. I think this series will probably be one I think about from time to time (heh) for the rest of my life. The Pelletiers, Ioni, Amanda and Hannah, and Evan (among others) are characters that I spent enough time with that they’ve become like real people to me. (It was time.)

18. The Tally Stick by Carl Nixon - This was good, but it was rather depressing. In 1978 the Chamblain family is going to be moving from London to New Zealand for the father’s new job. Two weeks before, they decide to go on a vacation around the country. They get into a car crash, which kills the mother, father, and youngest child instantly. The three remaining kids - Katherine, Maurice, and Tommy - survive, but, spoiler - are never rescued. In 2010, Maurice’s remains are found near the ocean. Among his belongings - his father’s watch, and a “tally stick” - which is a piece of wood used to keep track of debt. Forensic tests indicate he died sometime in 1982. What happened in those 4 years between the crash and his death? And where did he get the tally stick? And why did he have it with him? We jump back and forth in time to get these answers (and others) and like I said, while it was well written and compelling, it was dark material. (His last indignant protest hung in the salted air alongside the sharp cries of the gulls.)

19. A Thousand Steps by T. Jefferson Parker -Laguna Beach, California, 1968. Matt is 16, and a typical teenage boy - got a paper route, a girl he’s interested in, and an interest in art and drawing. His older brother, Kyle, is serving a term in Vietnam, and his older sister Jasmine is about to graduate senior year. But Matt’s idyllic summer is ruined when a schoolmate ends up dead on the beach. Her body showing signs of drug abuse. Things get worse when Jasmine has an argument with their mom, and doesn’t come home. As the days go by and there’s still no sign of Jasmine, Matt tries to get the police to investigate, but to little avail. He takes it upon himself to locate his sister. I liked Matt a lot, he was a good kid, growing into a good man. I didn’t care for Matt’s deadbeat father, and when he came back into the picture, I was wishing Matt would ditch him completely.This coming of age story/mystery was okay, but I sorta wished it was just a little bit shorter. And while the author has written like 30 other books, I don’t know that I’ll seek any of them out. (Bitchen.)

20. Phantom Road volume 1 by Jeff Lemire - graphic novel about Dom and Birdie in some sort of strange limbo carrying what might be an alien life form in Dom’s tractor trailer. The two meet after Birdie and her fiancee are in an accident, where they hit the alien …thing. Dom almost hits Birdie when she is recovering from the car wreck, and the two of them put the …whatever it is… into Dom’s truck. Unfortunately, they also find themselves in some sort of dimension between realities being chased by generic zombie type creatures. The portal between worlds seem to be thinnest at Bernie Bear truck stops, so they’re heading to the next one. Back in our world, an FBI agent named Weaver is searching for them. She has flashbacks to her childhood when she entered the limbo zone, so she knows more about it than most people. This was just the first volume, so we’re really only getting introduced to the world. I’m intrigued enough to keep going… (Shlunk!)

21. Phantom Road volume 2 by Jeff Lemire - more backstory is provided for Dom, Birdie, and Agent Weaver, and the Other Place gets SOME more info dripped to us, although it remains frustratingly ambiguous. There is some added mystery in both the Other Place and the real world (with cape guy and Hugo Hamm, respectively), that boht seem like potential for rich storylines, however, it appears that the series is on hiatus, and so who knows if we’ll ever get conclusions. (And I’d like to welcome you both to Project Jackknife.)

22. Fever House by Keith Rosson - This was super fun! I love me a good genre-blending, and this did that pretty darn well. It started off as a noir/crime book, focusing on Hutch Holtz and his partner, Tim, going to collect money - and maybe break a few bones, if necessary - for their boss, Peach. But when they go to a methhead’s apartment who doesn’t have the cash, and discover a severed hand in his freezer, things start to get a little weird. Things get weirder as they quickly discover that being near the hand causes people to feel intensely aggressive and violent. Peach orders them to bring the hand to him. This would probably be interesting enough, but we soon find out that a top secret government agency is currently hunting for the hand as well. Because up until a few months ago, the hand was in their possession. It worked its mojo on one of the people guarding it, and he ended up losing it in the public. The agency also has Saint Michael - who has (among other things) the ability to remote view - up his sleeve to help them locate the hand. I really enjoyed the characters in this - everyone is three dimensional and flawed - and I greatly enjoyed the world building (and eventually, heh, the world destroying). There’s a sequel that came out this year, which I’m glad of, because this did end with very little actual closure. So, I’ll definitely be reading that when I get a chance. (Katherine runs through the night,toward her son.)

23. Bubble by Jordan Morris - graphic novel that was geared more toward Millennials and Gen Zers. About a group of young ‘uns making their way thru life on a hostile alien planet that has bubble communities wherein people live their everyday lives, and are only occasionally interrupted by aliens attacking them. When that happens, Morgan (and people like her) steps up to save the day. Morgan was raised in the “Brush” - outside of the bubble - and therefore knows how to neutralzie the threats of the native wildlife. Not all the humor landed for me with this - the jokes were chuckle-worthy, but not hilarious - and most of the characters felt…fine, but not anyone I was especially enamoroued with, ya know? I felt like those failings (“failings”)  were more due to me being aged out of the target demographic, and not necessarily the fault of the story. I don’t know. The artwork was pretty great, and this wasn’t *bad*, just didn’t win me over as much as it maybe would have if I were 20 years younger. (You certainly are special boys, aren’t you?)

24. What We Mean By Yesterday vol. 1 by Benjamin Marra - graphic novel that is a collection of webcomics. Bruce Barnes - high school teacher, and all around loser - gets into situation after situation where the world causes him to eventually lose his shit and go into a rage. This was like 550 pages, but each page was just a four panel comic, and many of them were dialog-free, so it went extremely quickly. I think I zoomed thru it in maybe an hour? Slightly less? I spent much of the time hoping it would get better, or that Bruce would become someone I could actually root for. Neither happened.Since this is an ongoing webcomic, it didn’t have a conclusion to the “story”, and the place where it cutoff was also pretty much a cliff hanger. Even so, I won’t be picking up volume 2.(Because it’s too early to call Wombat a missing person.)

25. Not All Robots vol 1 by Mark Russell - graphic novel set in 2056 where robots and humans co-exist, but not particularly easily. Robots do all the work, humans…just live and let them, basically. There’s tension between the bots and humans, as a lot of the bots see themselves as unappreciated and on the verge of being replaced with mandroids (upgraded robots that look exactly like humans, and can be customized). Anyway, all very basic satire about …well, pretty much everything we’ve been living thru in the 2020s so  far. There were enough twists and amusing enough jokes and sympathetic characters that I’m on board with seeing where this goes. It also DID get progressively darker as it went on with actual stakes (the bots accidentally (?) asphyxiate the entire bubble city of Orlando!!). Hopefully there’s more to this to come. Lord knows there will be enough real life events to provide material. (And build something new.)

26. The Devil by Name by Keith Rosson - the sequel to Fever House. I liked Fever House a great deal, and I LOVED this. There were flaws, for sure - there was a prophecy at about the midway point, and so after that point, it became a “how is this person going to get to this location” situation of just moving chess pieces around. And the ending felt a bit rushed. But, I didn’t care. The writing is just so good, and the world building was SO good. And the characters felt so SO real. I don’t know. Fever House started off as a couple of mobsters getting involved in something supernatural, and then found its footing and just said, “Screw it, I’m a zombie apocalypse story”. And this was like, “Hell yeah. I’m a zombie apocalypse story. Let’s see how things would really freaking play out, shall we?” This takes place 5 years after Fever House ended, and it’s simply amazing at the thought that went into the world building here. I loved seeing how people have adapted to actually living in a season of The Walking Dead. And the idea that there’s a girl - in France, of all places, lol - who has the ability to cure the fevered was brilliant. Naomi has this gift that she doesn’t understand, and is just trying to make it in a shitsack world. Her captors, Denis and (Christine, I think it was?) are horrible people, even if they did rescue Naomi from ANOTHER set of horrific monsters. Bonner is back from the first book, and he’s in his own sort of hell, since he is, at least partially, to blame for everything being the way that it is. If he’d acted quicker, so many lives could have been saved. He’s seen his death due to the Eye, and so he knows that he has a bigger role to play in the apocalypse, whether he wants to or not. And Katherine. Oh, poor Katherine. Her ex, Matthew, was TRULY the cause of it all. And her son, Nick, has become a fevered. She torments herself by keeping him chained up, because she can’t bring herself to kill him. And then there’s Dean, the ragman, who might just be the epitome of a good person. This was contained enough that it was the end of the story, but there were also enough open ended threads that if this were to be a trilogy, I would be there in a heartbeat. Any chance to get to spend some more time in this world would be fine by me. (And the three of them begin making their way toward the woman in the wire.)

27. The Beast You Are by Paul Tremblay - Collection of short stories. As usual, it was a mixed bag. However, I'd say that these were, mostly, ones that I either didn’t care for or down right disliked. They weren’t ALL bad, but, overall it wasn’t a great collection. Tremblay is an interesting writer. I think he’s got some real talent, but, he’s also got a tendency to go EXTREMELY meta, and also indulge in ambiguity. Both of these traits rub me the wrong way, and I think moving forward I might be a tad bit more cautious seeking his stuff out. For now… here’s the 15 stories from this collection, along with the final sentences:
Ice Cold Lemonade 25¢ Haunted House Tour: 1 Per Person - Middle aged Paul is going through some boxes of his old stuff, and comes across a picture that causes him to remember back to his teenage years. As a teenager Paul has a crush on a neighbor girl, Kelly. She, and her younger sister, are out front selling tours of their ‘haunted’ house. He opts to go on the tour, and the girls walk him through their house, with Kelly telling Paul various stories of people who supposedly died in their home over the years. This was a decent story. (As I slowly walk out of the TV room and up the stairs toward the suddenly-alive-with-sound second floor, I don’t know what I’m more afraid of: seeing the ghost I stile grinning in the dark or seeing myself.)
Mean Time - super short (like a page and a half) story that had creepy elements to it, but just …didn’t come together for me? It’s just a telling of story of a possibly mentally ill neighborhood man who would draw lines of chalk around the ground. This is essentially what I mean when I talk about his ambiguity being a problem. I don’t know what this was supposed to *mean*. (I watched him until my parents came in and found me asleep and curled up in the windowsill.)
I Know You’re There - Silas and David were married for years, until one day David died of a heart attack. Silas recounts the story of discovering David’s body to friends and family, with each re-telling of the story being slightly different, and increasingly creepier. This one drew me in, but, again, didn’t quite seem to stick the landing. (In Silas’s later days and years, the same feeling (if he were to describe the feeling for someone else, though he never will, he’d say it was a knowing and not a feeling), the same certainty will overcome him, the certainty that David is there, around the next corner as Silas paces their home, or David is there, behind a door about to open or the door that was just closed, or David is there, behind the shower curtain or David is there, hidden by a tree only a few paces from the hiking path, or David is there, on the other side of the bad with Silas lying on his side and unable to sleep, and every time, when Silas turns with a whisper a scream on his lips, he sees nothing.)
The Postal Zone: The Possession Edition - One of the other …facets that Tremblay has, is to go back to A Head Full of Ghosts characters. Almost like he’s trying to do the Stephen King thing of having everything connect to each other? It…doesn’t work for me. Whenever he brings in Merry and Marjorie and Karen Brissette, I get more annoyed than excited. Like, just let that story be, and stop picking at it, dude. ANYWAY. This was like a spin-off of that, where it was letters to the editor talking about The Possession, which was the fictional reality-TV show that was at the center of AHFoG. This story felt sort of like Tremblay dealing with people nitpicking the novel somewhat? I don’t know. It was…okay, but I really do think dropping that universe would be for the best. (Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeek!)
Red Eyes - heh. Of course, immediately after that, this story is another Marjorie/Merry tale. Sigh. It seems to be another story that Marjorie told Merry about a giant monster with red eyes. Whatever, dude. (Perhaps they had always been red.)
The Blog at the End of the World - okay, this one worked for me pretty well. It’s a collection of blog posts, so it’s mostly chronologically backwards, other than some of the comments on the posts, which, the majority of are immediately after the post, but a few are sprinkled in months later. The entire thing therefore becomes a sort of warped maze wherein events from earlier pay off as you dig further into the past. I don’t know, I'm not explaining it very well, but it felt very clever to me, and it just worked. The story itself is about the blogger having a friend -who was convinced of conspiracies about the world ending via pandemics - dies mysteriously, and them dealing with their grief over that. (The windows in the doors were dirty, black with grime, and I didn’t see anything.)
Them: A Pitch - Err… This was not really much a story, as it was …a pitch for a graphic novel that would be an adaptation of the movie Them! Yeah, the one about the giant ants. Ambiguity strikes again!! (What do you think?)
House of Windows - a man notices a building that gets bigger each time he walks past it. (That’s when everything changes.)
The Last Conversation - sci-fi-ish tale of a person (“you”) waking up with no memory in a strange room and a woman (“Anne”) helping you get your memories back. I liked this one quite a bit, despite the experimental writing aspect of it. (You consider the origin of this time during which you’ve been awake and not-awake and conclude it is, for the moment, unknowable.)
Mostly Size - another really short one (about 2 pages total) that …just wasn’t developed enough? It’s about a kid named Max doing school work while a giant monster rampages his city. (And when the end came, it was still there.)
The Large Man - um. This one was just weird. A reporter (Mr. C___) is investigating strange deaths from a large man who may be composed of animals. (We begin with the Great Swarm that issues from Mr. C___’s mouth.)
The Dead Thing - Teenage girl in an abusive home gets worried when her younger brother, Owen, brings home a shoebox with something inside it that is presumably a dead animal. (nothing)
Howard Sturgis and the Letters and the Van and What He Found When He Went Back to His House - I liked this one. Howard Sturgis is an elderly man who works as a substitute teacher. One day, he finds a letter from a company he’s never written to, The CIRCE Group. The letter says how excited they are by what Howard sent them, and that with that information, they’re going to invent something that will change the world. Howard is intrigued, but since he knows it's a case of mistaken identity, he writes back to them telling them so. The CIRCE Group does NOT take this news well. I felt like I would have enjoyed this being, if not a novel, at the very least expanded into a novella. The idea of someone discovering a creepy-ass organization by accident and getting involved in a larger than life conspiracy, and then having to figure out what to do is just really compelling. And the ending of this was one of the creepiest out of the collection. (It had been improved, just as he was improved, just as we’ll all be improved.)
The Party - a couple attend a party with an “end of the world” theme. Which is played off as ha ha, “end of the world” hipster-ish…but as the night wears on, becomes pretty evident that is rather serious. (She raises the tumbler in the air, tipping it out toward Frances, toasting her.)
The Beast You Are - siiiiiiigh. 200-ish pages of free-form poetry. Written, supposedly, by K. Bristle. It’s an epic poem, and, I’ll admit that bits of it worked. But, it was also very very much a chore to get thru the entire thing. It’s about a village called Bevaur that is made up of animals. Every 30 years, the animals have to make a sacrifice to a great beast named Awn. The three sacrificial animals are supposed to be drawn by lottery. It’s -much later - revealed that the lottery is rigged by the politicians in power. As children, Magg, Mereth and Tol were chosen. Tol is killed by Awn. Magg grows up researching the history of Awn. Mereth grows up to become a murderer, every few years killing politicians and members of the Cult of Awn as a form of revenge. (While waiting impatiently
for an answer that would never come,
Mereth paced and muttered and flexed her claws
working out her next move,
and she did not notice
the physical transformation
had already begun,
and at some time during
that eternal evening,
Mereth stretched,
swelled,
crossed over,
and ceased being
who she had been,
and became
something else
that someone else
had already named.)

28. Second Coming by Mark Russell - Graphic novel that was hilarious, and …sorta deep? I’m not nearly as into trashing religion as i was in my younger years - i largely just don’t give a crap WHAT the truth is about the afterlife - but I know that I would have fucking ADORED This take down of the Christian God. (I still liked it quite a bit now, lol) So, anyway, yeah, God is presented as this clueless, although mostly well-intentioned, buffoon who has a good mix of toxic masculinity in him as well. His solution to overpopulation caused me to literally laugh out loud because it was so genius and idiotic at the smae time. ANYWAY. God’s pretty fed up with humanity, and has mostly turned away from them. But Jesus - portrayed as forgiving to a fault, and maybe a bit naive as well - has decided he wants to come back to earth to give it another go. God decides his only son needs someone to help show him the ropes on how to not have things go poorly like they did last time, and decides to have Sunstar (a Superman stand-in) be the one who will be Jesus’s watcher, bodyguard, and mentor. Hijinks ensue. This was a lot of fun, and I wish our library had the other two books in the trilogy, because I want to see what else happens with these yahoos. (I’m pregnant.)

29. Lost Time by Tas Mukanik - Graphic novel, probably for a preteen audience. Evie ends up separated from her family by getting sent back in time to prehistoric times. She befriends a pterosaur and has to survive the wild and try to find a way to get back to her present time. Art work was adorably cute, the story/plot was somewhat shallow, seeing as who the intended audience was, but this was a harmless little distraction that I zipped thru. (I’ll show you.)

30. I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom by Jason Pargin - The dude who wrote the “John Dies at the End” books (I enjoyed the first, felt like the second was diminishing returns, and don’t think I got thru the 3rd) is back with a standalone novel about a Lyft driver named Abbott who gets involved with a young woman named Ether who asks him to help her transfer a mysterious box across the country to a man promising to pay them a large sum of money. Three’s Company-level of misunderstandings occur -mostly on the internet- resulting in the FBI and a violent biker to pursue them. This was amusing for a good portion of it. Having Abbott espousing some incel-adjacent viewpoints was….a choice. Ether’s off-kilter way of looking at the world and society was endearing. The internet’s cluelessness caused me to laugh a few times. The ending …didn’t quite stick the landing, but I don’t know how else it could have ended and still maintained the overall light tone. (I want it known that I just wish to be friendly and that I’m not just looking for somebody to hold my ladder.)

Lollipop - Mika

And the bonus song of the day is "Lollipop" by Mika.

The Town That Lost Its Groove Supply - The Minus 5

Today is January 1st, 2025. The song of the day is "The Town That Lost Its Groove Supply" by The Minus 5.