March 23, 2025

I'm trapped on an island now what

And don't even bother saying let's go find the fully stocked outboard motorboat because obviously that's scuttled. That's like being trapped on an island 101.

I’m really struggling to come up with a preamble for this.

You know how sometimes, when you are a character in a book, you have to travel to an island just off the coast, usually in inclement weather/with a cadre of rivals/enemies/ex-lovers/in a barely functioning boat that is sure to not be there when you go to look for it after the first weird happenstance that everyone is still able to laugh off? This is like that!

Here’s the thing about Trouble Island. Was my excitement about the setting, a remote island in the middle of Lake Erie used by bootleggers as a dropoff point between the US and Canada during Prohibition, somewhat dampened by the fact that everybody in this book talks like a couple of goji maca snakaroons with the “why I oughtta” and the “listen here, sweetcheeks” and the “I’m gonna give you ‘till the count of ten to get your ugly, yellow, no-good keister off my property before I pump your guts full of lead ”? Absolutely not. This is a murder mystery that takes place on a chilly island full of a mixture of stock characters from a game of Clue and several mobsters who are, for all intents and purposes, sentient Tommy Guns wearing fedoras. It’s like if Roxie Hart found herself, due to Mysterious Circumstances, forced to pose as a maid for a procession of old-timey gangsters and dig dead bodies out from under the pier. And I love that for it.

I genuinely, in my bones, can still not believe that the author landed the plane on the premise for You Are Fatally Invited, which is that six mystery authors are invited to a famous anonymous writer’s house off the coast of Maine for a retreat but end up the victims of a series of revenge-based murder games. There’s mysterious beeves. There’s alter egos. There’s secret passageways and also, potentially, a completely unrelated serial killer running around.

If you liked “The Menu” and wished someone would gene-splice it with Clue, that’d be really specific but luckily for you, they made that and it’s this book. Or if you were into the PC game they made in 2005 based on Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, GET OUT OF MY HEAD. But also maybe you would like to see the map of the house in that game, which presumably looked like that because of 2005 computer game design reasons, with all the rooms weirdly square and bordering the external walls in a way you really don’t see in non-hotel settings, be gloriously reincarnated in print form (I hear you asking, wouldn’t that just be And Then There Were None, the book? But I can’t confirm this because I’ve never read it).

For the record, the above is the map from You Are Fatally Invited, and below is the map of the second floor from The Adventure Company’s CD-ROM rendition of The World’s Best-Selling Mystery of All Time ™.

And before you go “oooh, the map from the book is clearly an allusion to a Clue board and not meant to be a literal map, that even becomes explicitly clear over the course of the book’s narrative,” I don’t even want to hear it. I mostly just want to talk about the computer game still, specifically the insane design choices they made for the character of Vera Claythorne. You’re telling me you haven’t even cracked hair texture yet but you had an entire department devoted to sideboob research?

Good call.

I can also hear you saying, “Did you not even consider reading And Then There Were None for this, considering it clearly fits the theme of this newsletter?” And to that I say, I only have so many hours in the day to both read and look up low-poly renditions of sideboob and I feel comfortable with the balance I’ve struck.

What if you were an OUT-OF-WORK PASTOR and you got HIRED to go to a REMOTE ISLAND in SCOTLAND to kick out the SOLE INHABITANT because the landlord wants to RAISE SHEEP THERE but then you FELL DOWN and wound up being NURSED BACK TO HEALTH by him and forming a BOND THAT TRANSCENDS LANGUAGE??? What if that happened to you???

A little housekeeping before you go!

I’m in the process of moving from Substack to Buttondown! Hopefully this will not cause any disruption and you will not even notice any interruption of my stream-of-consciousness, barely edited thoughts about Y2K-era PC games (and books, I guess) delivered straight into your brainpan but I apologize in advance for any weirdness and thank you, as always, for Being A Subscriber!