BookChunks: A Subsidiary Franchise
Biblically Accurate Vampire Car Crash Now
When I was a kid I read this book called Unwind, which was a dystopic YA book set in a world that had compromised on the abortion debate by allowing parents melt their kids down at any point between being born and their 18th birthday. There’s a lot going on there that I really don’t want to touch because the only reason I’m bringing it up is that there’s like one line halfway through the book where the author throws out that this world solved racism by replacing the words “black” and “white” with “umber” and “sienna.” Like nobody is racist anymore because of that word change. This literally never comes up again and is so bonkers to just toss in there like a little paprika and I probably think about it every two months of my entire life, which is a sort of power I suppose.
Anyway I’m a little sleepy this week so I just want to tell you about a couple of things in books I’ve read recently that are similarly trapped in my skull, forced to rattle around in there for the rest of my life.
Agatha Christie’s Gun Man
Lucy Worsley’s biography of Agatha Christie (colon: An Elusive Woman) is really good for a lot of reasons. It’s empathetic and detailed and thorough. It is also how I found out that Agatha Christie had a recurring nightmare her whole life where she would be talking to a loved one and then that loved one would get a look in their eye that would make Christie realize that this wasn’t a loved one at all but was in fact some kind of monster she called The Gun Man. There are no further details furnished. How can you not be obsessed with someone like this.
Erica Berry’s Poison Chard
I feel a little bad talking about this one because it really hits best after you’ve read most of Wolfish but this is potentially the thing I think about the most on this list so let’s compromise and you promise you’ll read Wolfish like, right after this. Wolfish is a really good book I will definitely be covering in more detail later that revolves around the nature of fear and the nature of wolves, both as metaphorical conduits of this fear and also as embodied organisms we are having a hard time sharing our country with. Towards the end of Wolfish, Berry writes about a period where she was living at a cooking school in rural Sicily. One evening she and two students start feeling sick after eating a chard salad that they hand-foraged on the farm and realize, when they are in the countryside hospital, and the student who had a second helping is unconscious, and the doctors are on the phone with a specialist in Parma, that they picked and ate poisonous mandrake instead. It’s really hard to properly relate how captivating, and harrowing, this story is, from the first foreboding feelings that something has gone very wrong to the unbearable wait in the hospital bed to learn if the antidote will arrive too late. It’s one of the craziest things I’ve ever read and I think about it all the time.
Patricia Lockwood Describing Her Partner As A Psychedelic Frog
I have almost physical pangs of jealousy over Patricia Lockwood’s ability to capture her loved ones in prose. I am not kidding when I say I would submit to invasive brain surgery if it would guarantee me the ability to someday write about people I know with this much loving, specific, artful, glowing accuracy. Several of her constructions in Priestdaddy just reverberate continuously in my head, from various descriptions of her sister (“tricked-out club Chewbacca;” “highly literate female Tarzan;” “jaguar who went through a human puberty;” “speaks a made-up language largely consisting of the words ‘ayyyy’ and ‘baybay’ in various combinations, interspersed with nuanced and meaningful growls. She’s always wearing a tiny fur vest and some kind. If I tracked her through the woods on a snowy night, I am sure she would leave paw prints.”) and her dad, the titular Priestdaddy (“When we came home later, my father was wearing his most translucent pair of boxer shorts, to show us he was angry, and drinking Bailey’s Irish Cream liqueur out of a miniature crystal glass, to show us his heart was broken.”). But maybe my favorite is her description of her now-husband when he first met her family (around the same time he met Lockwood herself, since they had become acquainted in an online poetry forum): “‘He seems so… calm,’ [my mother] told me in an undertone. ‘Maybe too calm.’ Indeed, his eyes looked like lotto balls floating on currents of air, and he exuded the trippy peacefulness of a psychoactive toad. He never wasted a movement, and exhaled quiet wafts of new age music. He seemed to actually soothe all people within a six-foot radius of him. I had never been so intrigued.”
Twilight Off-Camera Fifty-Car Pileup
It’s not important how* but I found myself in possession of Midnight Sun a while back. It’s unthinkable to me someone wouldn’t know what this is but just in case, Midnight Sun is Stephanie Meyer’s retelling of the events of Twilight but from Edward The Vampire’s point of view. It is also roughly the size of the Bible. I’ve looked this up and it’s not true at all but it feels like it should be. Anyway it takes a long time to read, even more if you count all the breaks you have to take to sigh loudly like I did. I could write probably a dissertation on things I found interesting about Midnight Sun as a text but the one I want to talk about here is the details it lends to the climactic events of Twilight. For anyone who doesn’t know or can’t recall (again I can’t even IMAGINE a person who fits this description), at one point an Evil Vampire manages to trick Bella into following him to a secondary location by pretending he has her mother held hostage. Bella slips away from the Good Vampires to go give herself up for her mom, because she lacks basic critical thinking skills. So anyway, there are all the Cullens, given the slip, with a desperate need to catch up to Bella before she dies in a dumb way (this is basically an everyday consideration. Like Bella was born with a biological tendency to die stupidly, it’s crazy). At this point Stephanie Myer basically snaps off a 15-page Fast and the Furious sequence where the vampires steal multiple sports cars (which are named, by make and model, by Stephanie Myer, Car Freak). At one point one of the vampires fucking tosses a lambo into oncoming traffic***, incurring unknown casualties (unknown because the vampires don’t really care that much and leave the area) and probably shutting down metropolitan Phoenix for days. I am incandescently angry that Myer couldn’t be bothered to give the director of Twilight a heads up about this and thus deprived all of us of the ability to know that while James is spending like 15 minutes Threateningly Advancing Upon Bella in the Thematic Mirror Room all the Cullens are Tokyo Drifting down the I-10.
*gifted a copy by my best friend who annotated by hand all the parts she thought were crazy**
** all of them
*** this may not have happened verbatim but I promise it’s close.