The Wednesday Stalks at Midnight
Mar. 31st, 2021 01:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
evelyn_bWhat I've Finished Reading
Bunnicula is an intrinsically hilarious concept if you're about seven years old and have seen a rabbit and heard of vampires. See, there was this bunny and we brought him home because he was so cute and fluffy, but guess what it turned out he was a VAMPIRE BUNNY who SUCKS THE BLOOD of vegetables get it because bunnies aRE vEGETARIANS! GET IT? WooOOOoooOOOO!
The problem with a bunny vampire who sucks vegetables dry is that there's no problem, really. No one's getting hurt. There's no fraught question of vegetable consent to explore. Vegetables aren't rising from the dead to cannibalize one another straight off the vine and then wander the streets with a haunted look in their nonexistent eyes. They do look a little weird with all the juice sucked out of them, but it's all the same to the compost pile. To give this funny concept the incomplete skeleton of a plot, the authors have to invent a semi-genre-savvy cat who immediately suspects that something vampiric is going on, then torments the bunny with garlic garlands and tries to pound a raw steak into its little bunny heart. Finally the humans intervene and the bunny vampire is fully integrated into its new home. The book is narrated by the family dog, a steadier, less genre-savvy character who only asks for something to chew on.
Does it hold up? Yes and no. As an adult reader, I could identify a number of places where I'd fallen over laughing at age eight. Did I actually laugh even once this time around? Not really. But I don't think that's because Bunnicula isn't funny; I think it's because Bunnicula isn't a book for middle-aged people.
The only thing that really raised my present-day eyebrows in this book published in 1979 is the dog's several-times-referenced craving for chocolate cupcakes, which one of the human children happily feeds him. How long has "don't feed chocolate to dogs?" been a mainstream warning? I don't remember if it was around when I was growing up or not.
What I'm Reading Now
Ring Shout has a wild premise (what if the 1920s KKK revival were just a thin cover for a really super grotesque demonic takeover of Earth?) and when you have that kind of premise, total confidence in the premise is everything; P. Djèlí Clark is more than up to the task and Maryse, the narrator, doesn't have time to be too coy or self-conscious or overly pedantic about the fact that she's weilding a magical vengeance sword against hideous hate vampires that feed on the fury of their human hosts until they can replace them completely; there's too much to do and too short a book to do it in.
As of a third of the way through, the only part of The Dark Forest I really like or care about is Luo Ji's imaginary girlfriend. See, he was dating this real woman who was an author, and one day she confessed to him that she could never really love him as much as she loved the fictional heroes of her novels, and he was like, "Wait, what?" so she challenged him to go home and try to really imagine the perfect woman for him, and just really linger on all the hot ego-affirming details. And he does! And then the imaginary perfect woman shows up in his mind and they take a bunch of walks and so on, and he goes back to his regular human girlfriend and tells her all about his weird experience and she's like, "Now you understand why I can never love a non-fictional man." And they both sort of nod wistfully as if this were some kind of meaningful commentary on the nature of fiction and relationships and fictional relationships. Now Luo Ji is trying to get his cop friend to find the real woman who most closely resembles his imaginary girlfriend using his vast array of high-tech cop tools. I don't know what he's going to do when he finds her.
If the whole book were Luo Ji's ridiculous fantasy girlfriend adventures (with cop friend), I'd have finished it much faster. But there's also all this tedious alien-contact exposition and it's like a massive fog rolling across my brain every time the characters start in explaining things to each other again, which is why I'm still only a third of the way through.
What I Plan to Read Next
Not the third book in the Three Body trilogy, that's for sure! I'm only still reading this one for the fake girlfriend story.
Bunnicula is an intrinsically hilarious concept if you're about seven years old and have seen a rabbit and heard of vampires. See, there was this bunny and we brought him home because he was so cute and fluffy, but guess what it turned out he was a VAMPIRE BUNNY who SUCKS THE BLOOD of vegetables get it because bunnies aRE vEGETARIANS! GET IT? WooOOOoooOOOO!
The problem with a bunny vampire who sucks vegetables dry is that there's no problem, really. No one's getting hurt. There's no fraught question of vegetable consent to explore. Vegetables aren't rising from the dead to cannibalize one another straight off the vine and then wander the streets with a haunted look in their nonexistent eyes. They do look a little weird with all the juice sucked out of them, but it's all the same to the compost pile. To give this funny concept the incomplete skeleton of a plot, the authors have to invent a semi-genre-savvy cat who immediately suspects that something vampiric is going on, then torments the bunny with garlic garlands and tries to pound a raw steak into its little bunny heart. Finally the humans intervene and the bunny vampire is fully integrated into its new home. The book is narrated by the family dog, a steadier, less genre-savvy character who only asks for something to chew on.
Does it hold up? Yes and no. As an adult reader, I could identify a number of places where I'd fallen over laughing at age eight. Did I actually laugh even once this time around? Not really. But I don't think that's because Bunnicula isn't funny; I think it's because Bunnicula isn't a book for middle-aged people.
The only thing that really raised my present-day eyebrows in this book published in 1979 is the dog's several-times-referenced craving for chocolate cupcakes, which one of the human children happily feeds him. How long has "don't feed chocolate to dogs?" been a mainstream warning? I don't remember if it was around when I was growing up or not.
What I'm Reading Now
Ring Shout has a wild premise (what if the 1920s KKK revival were just a thin cover for a really super grotesque demonic takeover of Earth?) and when you have that kind of premise, total confidence in the premise is everything; P. Djèlí Clark is more than up to the task and Maryse, the narrator, doesn't have time to be too coy or self-conscious or overly pedantic about the fact that she's weilding a magical vengeance sword against hideous hate vampires that feed on the fury of their human hosts until they can replace them completely; there's too much to do and too short a book to do it in.
As of a third of the way through, the only part of The Dark Forest I really like or care about is Luo Ji's imaginary girlfriend. See, he was dating this real woman who was an author, and one day she confessed to him that she could never really love him as much as she loved the fictional heroes of her novels, and he was like, "Wait, what?" so she challenged him to go home and try to really imagine the perfect woman for him, and just really linger on all the hot ego-affirming details. And he does! And then the imaginary perfect woman shows up in his mind and they take a bunch of walks and so on, and he goes back to his regular human girlfriend and tells her all about his weird experience and she's like, "Now you understand why I can never love a non-fictional man." And they both sort of nod wistfully as if this were some kind of meaningful commentary on the nature of fiction and relationships and fictional relationships. Now Luo Ji is trying to get his cop friend to find the real woman who most closely resembles his imaginary girlfriend using his vast array of high-tech cop tools. I don't know what he's going to do when he finds her.
If the whole book were Luo Ji's ridiculous fantasy girlfriend adventures (with cop friend), I'd have finished it much faster. But there's also all this tedious alien-contact exposition and it's like a massive fog rolling across my brain every time the characters start in explaining things to each other again, which is why I'm still only a third of the way through.
What I Plan to Read Next
Not the third book in the Three Body trilogy, that's for sure! I'm only still reading this one for the fake girlfriend story.
