crab report: turning this into a general dump thread for genre books, i was gonna move onto some other giant animals (slugs, moths, frogs, etc) but the first one i tried was so dispiriting i abandoned the whole genre - it was a book called “the conquerer worms” by brian keene about giant worms, worm cults, etc. if you told me those were the ingredients i would have assumed i’d be all in BUT there turned out to be some important caveats there as well:
- the first part of the book is written in character as the musings of a colourful, curmudegonly grandpa making feisty quips and reminisces about his wife and his time in the war and also comments about the changing nature of the world today etc, it was awful, it was like going to see a play and one of the actors starts doing a “voice” that they’re obviously really proud of coming up with and you realise with a sinking feeling that they’re not going to stop,
- it’s all “post apocalypse” theme, my personal least favourite horror setting, many excuses to have a ragbag team of survivors get into arguments while talking about water rationing and shit. cult stuff is usually fun but in this case felt a bit too Left Behind-y for me (rampaging gangs of satanists sacrificing people on rooftops, etc)
- this is petty of me but i found out about this one browsing some goodreads list of giant animal books and thought wow this brian keene guy has a really active fanbase for some reason, all of people who seem very familiar with his work. i hope he’s not one of those guys who makes a living performing their own success to some online nerd cult a la max landis, yet when i looked it up
but idk anything about himso probably i’m being unfair, maybe the podcast is just a side thing… maybe thousands of people are talking up his worm novel on its own merits… nevertheless good faith became just that bit harder to extend. anyway that’s how i ended up reading one of those novels with a cover of a woman running away from a house instead.
i never knew what was up with this genre. i know there are 500,000 books with basically this cover and premise, and had some sense of what they probably were about - big house, dark hints, manor lord with unsettling bluebeardy attributes - but i never had a strong sense of just what kind of content could lead to so many iterations of a template. and now i know! it’s sentences like this:
”There are two courses open to a gentlewoman when she finds herself in penurious circumstances,” my Aunt Adelaide had said. ”One is to marry, and the other to find a post in keeping with her gentility.”
these are the very first lines of the novel setting out the aesthetic goals very strongly: it’s All Fuss, All The Time. YES everyone will talk in very rounded full sentences heavy with Implication, YES there will be characters named things like Aunt Adelaide talking about “gentility” with a straight face, YES social life is a prison but one filled with clues that, if interpreted and acted on correctly, could at least make it potentially a Sexy Prison.
we meet our heroine (self-description: “A young woman of medium height, already past her first youth, being twenty-four years old”) on the train to the mysterious territory of Wales:
One of Aunt Adelaide’s numerous friends had heard of ”Connan TreMellyn’s predicament.” He needed the right person to help him out of his difficulties. She must be patient enough to care for his daughter, sufficiently educated to teach her, and genteel enough for the child not to suffer through the proximity of someone who was not quite of her own class.
on the way there she gets a chance encounter on the train:
” May I look at your palm ?”
I hesitated and regarded him suspiciously. Could I offer my hand to a stranger in this way? Aunt Adelaide would suspect that some nefarious advances were about to be made. I thought in this case she might be right. After all I was a woman, and the only available one.
this is basically the Base Conundrum of the book and it’s actually what makes it pretty engaging reading - it’s very gamelike in a weird way. our heroine is stuck in a world where everyone but her seems to know more about what’s going on; her job is to extract as much information as possible, but always has to trade off some of her protective coating of propriety to do so. if her [propriety] score drops too low she will presumably meet the horrible offscreen fate of the fallen woman, if the [information] total is too low she risks marrying the wrong guy or being imprisoned by a ghost or something. on the way there are puzzles (how to win over the baron’s horrible child?)
Alvean shrugged her shoulders. ” If we don’t,” she told me brusquely, “you’ll have to go. I’ll have another governess. It’s of no account to me.”
She looked at me triumphantly and I knew that she was telling me I was merely a paid servant and that it was for her to call the tune. I felt myself shiver involuntarily. For the first time I understood the feelings of those who depended on the goodwill of others for their bread and butter.
Her eyes were malicious and I wanted to slap her.
and also timed events like ballroom dances and stuff. ongoing plot mysteries pop up as an incentive to keep collecting [info]: a mysterious singing child who had been kicked in the head once by a horse, the manor’s departed mistress may or may not be dead and someone can sometimes be seen in her room at night, etc.
a funny thing about the propriety vs information tradeoff is that often i guess the best hacky way for the protag to minmax it is by just waiting for one of the menials to start gossiping to her and then to act disgusted by the whole thing to compensate:
” There’s some as say that they’m not the sort to wait for blessing of clergy.”
” Well, perhaps they are not.”
I felt wretched. I hate this, I told myself. It’s so sordid. So horrible for a sensitive girl like Alvean.
but in general it’s ok to pump the maids since they’re already beyond the pale of respectability
The sisters looked very much alike just then. There was about them both a certain expectancy which sickened me. I thought I understood the expression in the faces of these lusty girls. I suspected that neither of them was virgin.
the castle lord is brooding and sardonic as can be expected but it’s funny that most of the book’s most swooning passages are less about this specific guy and more about like, the abstract concept of wage labour. imagine having your future and shelter entirely determined by the extent to which you can placate this aloof, unpleasant caste of possibly murderous inheritance freaks. whether or not this reads as romantic i think will vary a lot with personal experience, but i am at least enjoying the vague sense of dread and there’s always the possibility that the protagonist will haul off and attack a child. it would be nice if some giant worms turned up as well, though (wistful)…