Book Reviews: Werewolf of Fever Swamp, Stine; Social Creature, Burton; The Water..., Hardy

[juushika]

Title: Werewolf of Fever Swamp (Goosebumps Book 14)
Author: R.L. Stine
Narrator: Ramon de Ocampo
Published: Scholastic, 2017 (1993)
Rating: 3 of 5
Page Count: 145
Total Page Count: 495,095
Text Number: 1766
Read Because: personal enjoyment, audiobook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: Move to Florida; fear there's a werewolf in the swamp nearby. This is pretty fun. The atmosphere is consistent and strong, 100% and always about swamp and werewolf. Every chapter ending in a cliffhanger makes for constant fake-outs that undermine the actual scares, but it's also so tropey that it's difficult to fault it, and at this length it doesn't overstay its welcome. My only real complaint is the elder sister character, who has no personality beyond what will most conveniently build social tension into the plot. As far as I remember, I didn't grow up with this, but it feels like what I expect from Goosebumps: atmospheric, totally committed to the bit, but definitely silly.


Title: Social Creature
Author: Tara Isabella Burton
Published: Anchor, 2019
Rating: 4.5 of 5
Page Count: 280
Total Page Count: 495,375
Text Number: 1767
Read Because: personal enjoyment, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: A broke almost-30-year-old woman trying to make it in New York is swept into an unlikely friendship with a capricious socialite. This is a hell of a ride, with a consistent ability to one-up itself, always escalating. The short sentences and paragraphs, the self-awareness and the gimmick of a second-person address (I'm always a sucker for that), the near-parody of excess, debauchery, and social pettiness, the toxic female romantic friendship: I adored this almost without reservation. It's addictive, funny, ballsy, well-sketched, and totally catnip to my id.

All that said, the final third didn't grab me as much as the rest. What follows is a deep-dive into the ending, the non-spoilery version of which is: in an attempt to be satisfying, this unfortunately oversimplifies things. Lavinia's motives are too clear; when Louise adopts her place, she inherits those motives. And they're not two-dimensional: "for a boy" is an explanation which belies a more complicated slew of unconscious motives and desires; and Louise's experience with them proves how nuanced they are, and Mimi adds further depth (which Lavinia's relationship with Hal largely erases). So it's not awful; still, the thirst for male attention is so much less interesting than the toxic female romantic friendship that shines in the rest of the text. Anyway, I bickered with it but also ate it like a too-rich dessert & it's going directly in my reread pile.


Title: The Water Shall Refuse Them
Author: Lucie McKnight Hardy
Published: Dead Ink, 2019
Rating: 2 of 5
Page Count: 255
Total Page Count: 496,735
Text Number: 1771
Read Because: reviewed by tamaranth, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: After her little sister drowns, Niff and her family stay for the summer in small Welsh town, seeking a change of scenery as they try to get their lives back together. When a plot twist is this obvious, is it predictable writing or a claustrophobic sense of inevitability? This is a question I'd ponder more if I cared more about this book. The ingredients for success are here (the distinctive setting of a hellishly hot summer; the potential in that claustrophobic inevitability; wild, awful young girls always make for an intriguing premise) but it doesn't work for me. A lot of reviews mention folk horror; this is that, but mostly it gave me literary horror, which I find to be very samey: cruelty towards animals used for shock value, body shaming, and a predictable twists wrapped around laborious, character-driven pacing. Atmospheric, yes; but interesting, not so much.