Bookcover Spotlight #164

Comic of the Week #29

Comic of the Week has been on a long hiatus but I wanted to bring it back since I've been reading graphic novels and comics again. Every week I'm going to showcase a comic or GN cover- could be old, could be new- and share a few thoughts on why I think it's special. Do you like what I picked out? Let me know in the comments, and as always, if you have a favorite cover or piece of comic art, let me know! 

This week is Starfire #6 - a variant cover. Pepe Le Pew appears to have met his match.  

Movies That Suck - The Day of the Triffids

 

Movies That Suck is a feature where I watch a bad movie and share my reactions to it in real time. Sort of like live tweeting without the tweeting. I watch it so you don't have to! This will be spoilery I guess by definition, but since you probably won't want to watch these anyway it probably won't matter? But heads up anyways. So let's have a look...  

This week is Day of the Triffids. A movie I saw as a kid (and I remember it kinda freaking me out) but I hardly remember any details- and I've never read the book either. So we'll get to see what this is all about. The basic gist here is that a meteor shower blinds most of the human population, and with humanity in trouble the malevolent Triffids start taking over. I gather that the movie differs quite a bit from the book, and apparently the Triffids arrived from space in the movie, whereas in the book I'm not sure that happens? Well, whatever. We're watching the movie so we'll go with that. Alright, let's take a peek.  

What is a Triffid? Apparently a large, nasty plant that  eats humans. Because of course. So we start out with the meteor shower, like nothing ever seen before, and we're introduced to Masen, a navy officer, who has had some kind of eye surgery and is in the hospital recovering. His eyes are bandaged so he's unaffected. Oh and I love how he's smoking in the hospital! Ah, the old days. And he asks the nurse if she's as pretty as he's heard. Wow. Times were different. Also, there's a woman named Karen living in a lighthouse with her scientist (and drunk) husband Tom. He wants to get off the island so he can get some decent Scotch, and she reluctantly agrees- I gather he's on leave from his job somewhere, apparently on account of the drinking?  

The first fatality occurs in some kind of botanical garden as a rather unfortunate security guard gives us our first glimpse at the terror. The next morning Masen wakes up to an eerily quiet hospital, and when no one responds to his calls, he take off his bandages. He can see, but the hospital appears deserted- and it's been trashed too. He finds the doctor who treated him but the poor guy is now blind- as are most of the population of London, he surmises, due to the meteor shower. Meanwhile, on the island, Karen and Tom hear the news on the radio- just about everyone in England is blind, and crazy plants are on the prowl. 

Masen wanders through London as the blinded populace staggers around. At a train station he comes across a girl who can see- she's an orphan who ran away from a boarding school, and he rescues her from some asshole who wants to use her to help him get around. He also sees his first triffid when a dog pisses one off and gets killed (they don't show that). He's like let's get out of here and they head for his ship, but along the way Susan (the girl) almost gets attacked. They make it though to the ship, where they discover via radio that the phenomenon appears to be worldwide, and that ships at sea and planes in the air are flying blind, as it were.   

There's a particularly harrowing scene where the passengers aboard a plane panic, realizing that the pilot is blind, and then the plane crashes. Masen and Susan take a small boat to France and and are soon in Paris, which is eerily deserted, and after motoring into the county they come upon other survivors. A woman who can see takes them to a chateau, where a few people that can still see care for blinded people. Meanwhile on the island Karen screams a lot as a triffid gets inside the lighthouse, and Tom fights it off- if her screams were a weapon that thing would be toast. At any rate after killing it they examine it, and Tom makes this observation. 

"All plants move. They don't usually pull themselves out of the ground and chase you!"

Well said. And of course- it ain't dead. They go to bed and it... moves. As they're sleeping it starts to come upstairs- how does it know to do that?- and when Karen wakes up and sees its tendril on the stairway, she screams... and I just about fell off my chair scrambling for the speaker volume. For fucks sake. She musta scared the shit out of it too because it's gone and the downstairs is all trashed. They decide to barricade themselves in... 

Meanwhile in France things are a little more idyllic, but Masen is planning on going to Spain, hoping to find help there. Bettina, a blind woman who befriends Susan, seems to take an interest and doesn't want him to go. After a plane crash nearby and the appearance of more triffids, Masen is forced to take action when some convicts arrive at the chateau and start harassing everyone. I love the woman dancing on the table. Masen gets Susan and Miss Durant (the owner of the place) out, but triffids arrive (attracted by the music?) and it's game over for everyone inside. The convicts, sadly, are too drunk to mount a very effective defense. Bummer about Bettina though- she wanders blindly into a bunch of triffids and, um, doesn't survive.  

So Masen and crew are in Spain now, I guess? They end up finding an ice cream truck and a Spanish couple who are about to have a baby, and a radio broadcast alerts them to a pickup point for survivors. And of course triffid attacks! Lotsa triffids. Susan figures out they're attracted by sound, so they use the ice cream truck to lead 'em away. Seriously. And this part of the story has a happy ending as Susan and Miss Durant make it to the evacuation point, and Masen manages to escape as well. So what happened to Tom and Karen? 

The triffids make it into the lighthouse and all looks grim, but wait- there's more. Tom discovers that seawater dissolves triffids- there's a fire hose up in the lighthouse- and man talk about sludge. What a mess! Beats getting dead though. So just like War of the Worlds, the answer is... right there. Although I understand that is not the original ending. The book does it differently, but I'm not gonna wade through all that. I'm good with triffids now. 

So did this suck? Well, kinda yeah. I mean it's old and silly, but you know the Masen/ Susan dynamic was well done, and with the addition of Miss Durant to the mix they sort of have their "found family" now. It ends well. Just don't expect to be wowed or anything.   

The Lies They Tell

The Lies They Tell is the third novel by Gillian French, and after reading her debut novel Grit last year, I knew I wanted to read whatever came next. It was a solid debut, not earth shattering but definitely good. And I'm happy to report this one is even better. I was pulled into this story from the get-go and flew through this book. I knew it was a mystery and a contemporary, and from the blurb I honestly didn't know exactly what to expect, but I was pleasantly surprised. Gillian French may just be an auto-buy author for me now. 

Our story concerns Pearl, a girl in a coastal Maine resort town who works at the local country club. Her dad is a handyman and caretaker who watches over rich peoples' houses during the winter, but he's out of work now after a fire gutted one of the houses he was watching. The fire not only destroyed the house but killed four members of the family who were sleeping at the time- all except Tristan, the oldest son. Tristan is like the crown prince of the local rich kids, so in that sense this is a fairly typical YA setup- the rich kid, the girl from the other side of the tracks, and oh let's not forget Reese, who is Pearl's best friend but she has feelings for him, and is not sure if he shares them. Yes, very familiar. In spite of that, everything worked for me. 

A lot of people in town blame Pearl's dad for the fire- not that he caused it, but that he survived and didn't see anyone, even though the police declare it an arson. So he's not really getting any caretaking jobs at the moment. He's also an alcoholic and a single dad, and he and Pearl have a nice relationship. She of course picks up the slack with him, and this is also a YA trope that's not exactly new, but here it feels alive. I felt for her dad even as I wanted him to stop drinking and get help. Pearl meanwhile is determined to get to the bottom of what really happened- and to do so she starts to get in with Tristan and the rich crowd. 

It's not hard since Bridges, one of Tristan's crew, has a thing for her and keeps bugging her to go out. She accepts and discovers that Tristan has a weird hold over his friends- they go out late at night in their boats and she has no idea where they go. There is the expected pull of loyalties between the rich kids and her friend Reese, and I was kind of hoping Pearl and Reese would work it out. At the same time Bridges, who appears initially to be an asshole, turns out to not be too bad- or is he? Like a lot of the rich guys he gets around with the ladies, and at one point Tristan almost seems to be warning Pearl off. What is his interest in Pearl? For her part, she finds herself strangely attracted to him even as her real motivation is to get to know him and find out what happened regarding the fire. 

I liked the mystery here, and the way Pearl was pulled into a different world, of money and privilege and secrets. You have the typical jerk Akil and the mean girl Quinn, but also the more vulnerable Hadley and the is he/ isn't he a jerk Bridges. I liked that Bridges in particular was nuanced- yeah he was after one thing but at the same time he genuinely cared about Pearl? Or did he? Your mind may change from chapter to chapter. The character I did not like was Tristan- he seemed like a brooding twenty-eight year old or something, not a teenager. Way too unrealistic. 

The setting is amazing. French really brings this town to life, but mostly the country club felt like a real place. The details of serving, the rich/ poor divide, the sense that the town is a whole different place in summer when the tourists arrive. The other thing I liked was that Pearl knows how to sail, and this comes into play when she goes sailing with the richies. Pearl herself is a great character, perhaps a little mature for her age as well- I mean she has it together pretty well- but I loved how she wasn't a doormat for Bridges, how the romance was very muted- she was not going to just be another conquest for Bridges or anyone else- and she was strong and caring as well. She's probably the best part of the book. So yeah- this was a winner. I loved it and highly recommend. 

I love this Australian version BTW. 

The Escape - flash fiction

This flash fiction is inspired by this image. It's also a continuation of a story I did last year, in which a woman in a post apocalyptic city- known rather ironically as Sanctuary- discovers that there is far more to her supposed safe haven than she ever could have imagined. You can find that story here if you're interested. 

The birdsong almost brought her to tears. Living so long underground, with only occasional glimpses of blue sky and limited contact with nature, she almost felt overwhelmed now. But time was of the essence and she dare not tarry long. It was only a matter of time before her absence was noted, and then there'd be no going back. She dare not go back anyway, though, right? Not after what she'd seen. She had no choice now, she told herself again, hoping that sooner or later she would actually believe it.

Unbidden, her thoughts trailed back to her ill- advised foray into the undercity, that vast labyrinth of maintenance tunnels and access shafts underneath Sanctuary. She had quickly become lost, venturing deeper than she ever had, and a wrong turn somewhere had taken her to a place she had rather not seen. The green hue, the tanks of bubbling liquid with their human occupants, and worse- the piles of bodies, naked and discarded almost as if they were refuse. Many of them with cables attached to ports in their necks. It was all too horrible to imagine, and if she hadn't seen it herself she'd have never believed it.

What was happening under Sanctuary? Somehow she had escaped discovery, had stumbled off through flooded tunnels, seeking a way back to familiar areas. Instead she had narrowly avoided patrols of armed men, and heard mutterings about an unauthorized intruder, so clearly something was amiss. Most likely she'd tripped an alarm somewhere. Before long the nature of the tunnels had changed, and she realized that she was no longer within the margins of Sanctuary. She suspected few before her had come this way, and once again mentally cursed herself for her curiosity.

Now she was free. Or as close to free as perhaps she had ever been? It was hard to know, given the discoveries she had made- would it be better to go back, try to pretend she had seen nothing, hope she was not discovered? Or should she take this opportunity, flee while she could, and hope for the best- alone and friendless in the great outside? She stood there, on the brink, with the sun warming her skin and the trilling of the birds all around. The wind ruffled her hair playfully, and she could smell the water, the air, even the trees and greenery of the nearby shore. All she need do is swim there, melt into the trees, and she'd be gone. But where would she go?

Everyone had heard the tales of safe havens, of scattered communities that rejected the strictures of Sanctuary and the other big cities. Supposedly there was one not far away, a few days' hike at most. Could she find it, and if she did, what would she have to offer? Yet what choice did she have, in the end? To be discovered, or if someone realized what she had seen- that would not end well.  

She heard sounds from below, and looking down the way she had come, she could see lights flickering. They had found her. Or soon would. She had no choice now- descend the shaft and flee again through the tunnels, or make her play. The sounds were getting closer- she could hear voices now. And something else- a mechanical voice, not speaking so much as emitting signals and electronic chatter. A tracker drone.

She could see the lights below her now, could sense something- the drone probably- starting to ascend the shaft. It's metallic gibberish increased in intensity. With a prayer on her lips she dove, and gasped in spite of herself at the cold water. Then she began to swim. 

Can't Wait Wednesday #32

 So here's a midweek round up of what I'm reading watching, etc. Plus Can't Wait Wednesday, hosted by Wishful endings. So sit back, raise a cuppa, and see what's new! And share what you're up to.  

This week my Can't Wait pick is The Winds of Winter - yes I know there's no release date yet! And I've just about given up- but you never know!     

What I'm Reading

What I'm Watching

Listening 

Misc Stuff

 This week Movies That Suck (?) will feature Day of the Triffids!      

Top Ten Books With Sensory Reading Memories

  

 Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly feature hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl. Each week a new Top Ten list will be posted. Everyone is welcome to join. Link back to The Broke and the Bookish so everyone can check out other bloggers' lists. It's a fun way to get to know fellow bloggers.

This week is Top Ten Book Books With Sensory Reading Memories. Or something. I don't know, but I'm going with books that mean a lot. It could be a book that resonates for a certain place or time or just a book that has specific memories attached. So let's take a look!     



This one belonged to my uncle and I was captivated by it. I read it a bunch of times. 

I just wanted an excuse to put this one on here. 

Awful cover but I read this a ton of times for the extra details. Also the prologue takes on a special significance given The Last Jedi. 

I read this one a lot. 

I read quite a few of the Tintin's growing up. 

Same w/ these- I'm not even sure which ones I had but I know I had some. 

I clearly remember reading this on a summer day in the backyard. 

I've told this story before but this was the book I was reading when I skipped class one day in college- I was sitting in a hall by a big bank of windows and the professor walked by after class. Awkward.  

It's funny how I can remember where or when I bought certain comics. 

I read this book all the time- it was probably my first post apoc read and it just paints such a vivid picture.