MST3KGB

"Tolstoy would have us believe that every happy family is happy in the same way. I for one don't buy that. It's impossible to imagine a family happy having learned their father will be released from his ten-year imprisonment in a gulag sharing the identical emotion with the family that has just won a meal for six at Pearson's Big Steer Restaurant. Tolstoy's an idiot for even suggesting it. Does he really expect us to believe that the happiness shared by the Marx Brothers, having just pummeled Margaret Dumont with body blows, is the same as that shared by the Howard brothers, Moe, Curly, and Shemp, having just extracted their dear friend Larry's head from a tight mine shaft? Tolstoy's starting to look like more and more of a jackass with each fresh example."

-- Mike Nelson, late of MST3K, on Anna Karenina and, improbably, the Baldwins.

When he's not dispensing pithy literary criticism, these days he's got a new DVD series out wherein he mocks old films, only this time somewhere in the Midwest instead of on the Satellite of Love. Mary and I checked one out the other night - Hollywood After Dark - and despite the fact that it features a prematurely-craggy Rue "Golden Girls" McClanahan as a stripper - we quite enjoyed it.

And thus concludes today's installment of "Gizmotronics Book Club".

Pretty Girls Go Insane*: Heartsick by Chelsea Cain

Heartsick by Chelsea Cain

"Whatever you think this is going to be like, it's going to be worse." -Gretchen Lowell

Like Los Angeles and Wisconsin, the Pacific Northwest is serial killer country, and Cain's tense, grisly novel seems right at home in the dreary Portland climate. And while it might seem far-fetched for a book to feature not one, but two fiends in a city of just over 500,000, this is, after all, the region that gave us the Green River Killer and Ted Bundy. So I buy it. I've only been to the area once, but the place gave me serious Wisconsin Death Trip bad vibes.

For ten years, the Beauty Killer task force sought to capture one of the Pacific Northwest's most prolific serial killers, operating on the assumption that they were dealing with a white male between the ages of 25 and 45. However, their man was really Gretchen Lowell, a psychopath with Breck Girl hair, heart-shaped face, and a flare with a scalpel.

At the end of her psycho-tenure, Gretchen kidnaps the head of the task force, a detective named Archie Sheridan, and tortures him for ten days before calling 911 to turn herself in. The book opens with a truly horrific scene, Gretchen pounding nails into Archie's ribs. Later on, the nails begin to look almost pleasant.

Archie lives, but is now a shell of his former self. He's hooked on Vicoden, separated from his family, and when he thinks no one's looking, he reaches into his shirt to trace the heart-shaped scar that Gretchen carved on his chest. And if that isn't creepy enough, he also visits her in prison every Sunday.

You may think I'm giving stuff away left and right here, but kids, that's just the backstory.

Because, you see, two years later there's a new killer terrorizing Portland. He preys on high school girls, rapes them, strangles them, and soaks their bodies in bleach before dumping them. The Beauty Killer task force is regrouped, and Archie is taken off disability leave to lead it.

For curious reasons that are gradually revealed, a pink-haired, emotionally damaged newspaper reporter is also welcomed to the task force. Susan Ward has been assigned to write a series on the "hero cop," warts and all, and she's equal to the task.

And though the novel has been drawing a number of comparisons to The Silence of the Lambs, these don't really hold up. Gretchen Lowell isn't helping them solve the current case; in fact, most of her scenes are torture scene flashbacks. Still, she's a diabolically intelligent manipulator, and a compelling villain, even behind bars.

The ending wrapped up a little more neatly and quickly than I would have liked -- I'd really anticipated something much darker and messier; however, Heartsick is a highly original thriller and impossible to put down.

If you liked...: the gruesome bleakness of Gillian Welch's Sharp Objects, this book is for you.
_____________________
* with apologies to Outrageous Cherry, who were surely writing about girls who are "fun crazy," not "tear out your guts with a crochet hook crazy"

Tater Chip Books

The Book of General Ignorance by John Lloyd and John Mitchinson
Never Shower in a Thunderstorm: Surprising Facts and Misleading Myths about Our Health and the World We Live In by Anahad O'Connor

Sometimes one wants a book to pick at rather than to read. This can be Herodotus's Histories, or more likely, it can be a book like the two here, which are books written by very smart people who are obsessed with trivia and know that the rest of us are, too. However, they are, essentially, also books that could have been written by anyone with a library card.

Our authors here are very different types of writers, but both have major media affiliations, which goes a long way towards separating them from the herd, as trivia books go.

O'Connor is a recent Yale graduate who landed a gig writing for the New York Times (damn those young overachievers!), including a popular health and science column titled "Really?" The feature largely proves or debunks a variety of old wives' tales, popular wisdom, and that article you read on Yahoo! News two years ago where scientists said something that you've been using ever since to justify your chocolate, latte, or exercise habits.

Whereas, the authors of The General Book of Ignorance are a producer and a writer from the popular BBC comedy-quiz show QI (Quite Interesting). The program(me) is hosted by Stephen Fry, English television personality and comedian (and author of one of my favorite books, Revenge), and also seeks to debunk commonly accepted answers to popular trivia questions. Alexander Graham Bell didn't invent the telephone, but does anyone really know the name of the man who did (well, unless they read The Book of General Ignorance)? Since correct answers are rare, points are awarded on the basis of the interesting-ness of incorrect ones and deducted for simply regurgitating common misconceptions. QI says, "It's okay to be wrong, but don't be obviously, boringly wrong."

While both books have their charms, O'Connor's didn't say a whole lot that isn't already known by the discerning reader. We know that chicken soup is good for what ales you, that a poppyseed bagel can make you fail a drug test, and that the key to losing weight is generally to eat less and move more. However, I did learn some interesting things from him about seafood and scabs. The book includes a handy chart, listing the seafood with the most Omega-3 and the lowest concentrations of toxins, which I've now committed to memory. Also, everything your mom ever told you about treating a boo-boo is probably wrong; they ought to be covered, kept moist, and (yes) picked at occasionally.

On the other hand, I learned a ton of things I had no idea about from The Book of General Ignorance, including the technological contributions of the Scottish, the fashion contributions of the Croatians, and the culinary contributions of the French. And there's also a very funny story about Napoleon and a rabbit hunt gone bad.

Still, despite the cranky Guardian digested read about the latter, you couldn't go wrong with either if you need a good public transit, airport, doctor's waiting room, or bathroom book, and I suppose that's fairly high praise. Nobody says that kind of stuff about Sister Carrie.

Setting New Standards in Off-Topic Posting

Okay, this has as much to do with books as does Funky Winkerbean with chuckles these days, but after a week or two of catching up with Mad Men and the latter part of an evening spent scouring YouTube for 90s era music videos, we at TBIfY have the following to say:

If Greg Dulli of the Afghan Whigs doesn't join the staff at Sterling Cooper Advertising by May sweeps, there is no justice in the world.

Then I Remembered That This Is America

I read the post at Bookninja titled Arts Pages Abuzz With Frey, and the whole James Frey thing seemed so long ago and far away and unequivocally over, that for an instant I actually thought the headline was referring to Joss Whedon's Fray.

Because in that instant, it made more sense to me that the NYT and the Guardian would be writing about a comic book that's four years old and putting a typo in the headline than dragging this thing out again.

Happy Roald Dahl Day!

While on our honeymoon in England, Potts and I picked up a collection of Roald Dahl's short stories to read on the train from Falmouth to London. We came upon one story that involved a beekeeper, his wife, and their frail infant daughter. The baby refuses to eat until the beekeeper comes up with a very creepy plan to make her gain weight. And to this day in the Potts/McCoy household, one of us need only utter the title of this story to make the other break out in shudders: "Royal Jelly."

So here's to the works of Roald Dahl, skeeving out children and adults alike for over fifty years, in the best way possible.

From The Witches:

"Grandmamma," I said, "if it's a dark night, how can a witch smell the difference between a child and a grown-up."
"Because grown-ups don't give out stink-waves," she said. "Only children do that."
"But I don't really give out stink-waves, do I?" I said. "I'm not giving them out at this very moment, am I?"
"Not to me you aren't," my grandmother said. "To me you are smelling like raspberries and cream. But to a witch you would be smelling absolutely disgusting."
"What would I be smelling of?" I asked.
"Dogs' droppings," my grandmother said.
I reeled. I was stunned. "Dogs' droppings!" I cried. "I am not smelling of dogs' droppings! I don't believe it! I won't believe it!"
"What's more," my grandmother said, speaking with a touch of relish, "to a witch you'd be smelling of fresh dogs' droppings."
"That simply is not true!" I cried. "I know I am not smelling of dogs' droppings, stale or fresh!"
"There's no point in arguing about it," my grandmother said. "It's a fact of life."

To celebrate Dahl Day yourself, take a quiz, use the word 'gobblefunk' in a sentence, or read up on Dahl's short stories for adults. And check out "Royal Jelly." Eek.

In other news, not everyone is happy about Roald Dahl Day.

Behind the Rape of the Lock: The Scandal of the Season by Sophie Gee

The Scandal of the Season by Sophie Gee

One fatal stroke the sacred hair does sever
From the fair head, for ever, and for ever!

I was immediately struck by the clever premise of The Scandal of the Season, but wondered, really, how interesting was a book that fictionalized the events surrounding Alexander Pope's "The Rape of the Lock" going to be? Along with Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal," Pope's mock epic is one of those works that sounds hilarious to high school students when it's explained in modern language. What they don't expect is that they're going to have to hack through some truly dense 18th century verbiage to get the jokes. Most give up, which is not to say that the hacking isn't worthwhile. There are always two or three kids in the class whose eyes light up when they get to Swift's sentence about baby ragout.

And Sophie Gee's novel is not only clever, it's absolutely delightful, peppered with witty banter, forbidden trysts, and Jacobite plots to murder the queen. The book begins with the young Pope traveling to London with the Blount sisters, partly to drum up some publicity for his latest poem and partly to woo the elder Blount, Teresa. She'll have nothing to do with him, though, and is holding out for a wealthier prospect, preferably one without a hunchback.

Though the Blounts have a good name, they're deeply in debt, and the girls have this season alone to snare mates before word of their financial ruin leaks out. Teresa relies on the friendship of her beautiful and well-connected cousin, Arabella Fermor; however, Arabella has lived in the city long enough to see Teresa for the grasping nobody she is.

And Arabella has other things on her mind, not least of which is the attention of Robert, Lord Petre, one of London's most eligible bachelors. Despite her good judgment, Arabella becomes Robert's lover and believes he'll marry her even though he's financially out of her league. And Robert isn't a total rake - he loves Arabella and believes he can convince his family to approve the union. Meanwhile, Pope watches the affair unfold at masquerades and garden parties, and uses its doomed end to compose his best-known work.

Gee's eye for historical detail is rich and precise, but it's her dialogue that sells the story. Characters live and die by their wit, which goes a long way towards explaining how a middle class Catholic with a hunchback could gain access to London's elite. And despite living in a superficial society where much is expressed in euphemism and pun, the relationships between the characters are surprisingly deep, and sometimes moving.

If you liked...: Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Choderlos de Laclos or the work of Jane Austen, this book is for you.