Scarecrows, a haunted ski lodge, and lake cryptids.
Katherine Arden's Small Spaces series.
Hi, friends,
I cleaned all of our birdfeeders this weekend, filled, and hung them out… and I’m happy to report that we’re already being eaten out of house and home. As always, chickadees are the sassiest, but I give the titmice a lot of Brazen Points for constantly stealing the squirrels’ peanuts.
Sitting out in the backyard for more than five minutes results in being covered in falling leaves—that’s only SLIGHT hyperbole, it’s kind of absurd—and we’ve started using the woodstove regularly, so the cozy season is very definitely upon us.
Reading: Small Spaces, Dead Voices, and Dark Waters, by Katherine Arden
I’ve been enjoying this series so much that I used the release of Dark Waters as an excuse to re-read the first two, and that was a Solid Life Choice on my part.
These books are warm, they’ve got humor and heart, they feature lots and lots and LOTS of delicious-sounding food and good smells and cozy fires; they’re about family and friendship and confidence and learning to trust other people, as well as trust yourself.
Also, they’re genuinely, delightfully scary.
In Small Spaces, Ollie, Coco, and Brian have to survive the Smiling Man’s scarecrows.
In Dead Voices, they have to escape Mother Hemlock and the world behind the mirror.
In Dark Waters, they’re up against an ancient monster in Lake Champlain… and for the first time, they have to protect their parents and an old friend, too:
“Why aren’t you guys freaking out more? There’s a giant water snake trying to eat us, we’re stuck in a tree, and there was a guy just there who wanted to axe us, and you think he might be a ghost, and this is awful.”
Brian and Coco looked at each other. “Not our first time?” offered Coco after a moment, a little helplessly.
Like The Smashed Man of Dread End, Dark Waters falls into the dark fantasy/horror realm, but it’s grounded by emotional realism. It deals with the fear and trauma that these kids are trying to process, and with the fact that they’re doing it alone, without any adult support. Their parents are all concerned about them, but they don’t know what is wrong or how to help—it’s always nice to see adults depicted as three-dimensional human beings who don’t have all the answers, but aren’t completely oblivious, either.
I loved that Arden explored Brian’s situation more—due to the events in the first book, he pretty much walked away from his old friends and from his regular activities, and that hasn’t gone unnoticed by his parents or his old friends. And even more than that, I loved that the kids—Brian and Coco in particular—realize that while, yes, they’re the protagonists in their own stories, that EVERYONE is the protagonist in their own personal story.
In other words: Yes, the Smiling Man has it in for them. But no, they’re not actually alone in that.
They’ve felt alone and they’ve been in a truly terrifying place for months and months, but they’ve had each other. The same cannot be said of Phil, one of Brian’s former friends:
He’d been sure—he’d been completely sure—that what had happened to them in October had just disappeared from everyone else’s minds. That he, Ollie, and Coco were the only ones struggling, the only ones in trouble.
And if they weren’t? What did that mean?
Given the storyline, introducing another character was mechanically necessary. But I really, REALLY like that it also supports the idea that the center of the universe is largely a matter of perspective. That looking at the world through a Chosen One filter is maybe a tad reductive?
Also, again, giant lake monsters.
Overall, compared to the previous two books in the series, Dark Waters was a less-successful read for me. The first two books worked as both companion novels AND as stand-alones, whereas Dark Waters feels more like the penultimate installment in a series than it does a full story in its own right. It’s lining things up and getting all of the pieces in place for a Big Showdown with the Smiling Man in the next book—and spoiler, it ends more with a To Be Continued than with a satisfying end to the adventure.
That said, I am FULLY INVESTED and very much looking forward to—what I assume will be—the conclusion of the series.
Added to the TBR:
The Ghoul Next Door, by Cullen Bunn
The Haunting of Aveline Jones, by Phil Hickes
The Hatmakers, by Tamzin Merchant
Watching: Bloody New Year (Norman J. Warren, 1987)
I put this one on because it featured a shipwreck and a haunted inn, which matches two of the three Arden books I talked about above.
Sadly, no scarecrows.
Also sadly: It is terrible.
There’s a group of teenagers—all British and one American, the actors look to be in their late 20s at the youngest—who get into an inexplicable brawl with some Young Toughs at a fun fair, so they jump in a boat to escape. None of that makes any sense, but don’t worry, none of the rest of it does, either.
Their boat sinks; they end up on an island and find a hotel. No one appears to be staffing said hotel, and it’s decorated for New Year’s Eve in the ‘50s, but they all go in and make themselves at home, because that’s what you do when you’re in a horror movie.
Things just start happening: objects move by themselves, the cast keeps seeing random people in mirrors, someone gets attacked by a fishing net, a movie starts playing by itself and then a man jumps out of the movie and kills one of the teenagers, a sea monster jumps out of a table… basically it’s like someone used Mad Libs to write the script.
Anyway, there is good-fun-terrible and bad-boring-terrible, and this is more on the bad-boring-terrible end of the spectrum.
All that said, at least I got to see a KILLER VACUUM:
A few links:
Open Culture: A 110-Year-Old Book Illustrated with Photos of Kittens & Cats Taught Kids How to Read.
NYT: Read It and Scream: 8 Knuckle-Biting, Nerve-Ripping New Tales, Just in Time for Halloween.
Obit: Jerry Pinkney.
Obit: Gary Paulsen.
Guardian: Ursula K Le Guin Prize for Fiction to Launch in 2022.
Publishers Lunch: Bestselling YA Authors Announce — And Then Withdraw — Realms of Ruin, As Community Says NFW to NFT Storyworld.
If you weren’t on Twitter during the few hours that Realms of Ruin was a thing, here’s an explainer at The Mary Sue.
I hope you all have a great week!
Talk to you soon,
Leila