Hallowthon 2016 Anthology: What even is fear

It's the most wonderful time of the year again, friends and readers.  Like I said last October: "There are a hell of a lot of horror movies out there and a lot of the same things to be said about most of them: exploitation cliches with sexualised violence against women, weak women predated upon or protected by strong men, and people of colour treated as expendable for shock value.  Racist stereotypes as a source of villainy.  Sex corrupts the young and then they get murdered while the pure girls maybe survive.  We could do a hundred posts and they would all look basically the same."

So once again it's time for the Something Short And Snappy Hallowthon 2016 Anthology, in which the blogqueen and I provide you with quick notes on a dozen horror movies to swiftly judge them and help you find something worth watching on these cold dark nights.  This year's selection leans a bit towards the surreal and unusual, because that's just the tone 2016 has set for us all.

Detention
(CN: gore, murder, body horror)
Will: Blurbs for this movie describe it like a typical slasher, and the first few minutes make it look like it's going to be an unwatchable slasher--the blogqueen and I both considered whether we just wanted to switch it off.  We did not, and we were rewarded.  This movie is not a slasher.  This movie is a sci-fi Freaky-Friday-swap human-animal-hybrid alien-abduction time-travelling-space-bear reading-ahead-in-the-script-for-your-own-movie carnival of WTF.  I've never been high, but I'm 80% sure Detention makes equal amounts of sense regardless of your level of intoxication.  'Good' and 'bad' cease to be useful descriptors for this movie.  It is an experience that I do not regret including in my life.  That's not a recommendation, exactly.  (It does definitely have a share of jump scares and gore, but they're not the main feature by far.)

Erika: This movie is absurd, and I think I mean that in a good way? I struggle to find words for it, mostly just emphatic hand gestures while I make a series of vaguely confused squeaky noises, but that doesn't translate well to text. If you plan to actually sit down and watch a movie, this one could be a good call.

Hush
(CN: blood, murder)
Will: (Merciful spoiler: the cat is not harmed.  I actually liked most of this movie, so the fear that something would happen to the cat was a major damper.)  A deaf author moves out to a remote country home to work on her second novel, and a masked killer decides to hunt her.  While he's got various advantages, she's smarter and incredibly brave, so the battle of wits that makes up the bulk of the film is actually interesting, rather than just having a lot of a woman screaming as she runs uselessly from an implacable monster.  Most of the fear comes by ambiance and anxiety rather than jump scares.  The third act unfortunately trends back towards typical bloody slasher, and it felt like the writers couldn't decide between three different climactic fights so they just decided to use all of them in sequence.  On the other hand, having a deaf hero means that 90% of the dialogue is signed (if that's something you're looking for in a movie) and while Maddie explicitly views her deafness as a flaw for much of the story, she also--minor spoiler--ends up using the killer's hearing against him in the end, so I would tend to give the movie overall a good score on ability/ableism?

Hellraiser
(CN: Sexual violence, misogyny, gore, torture, murder, dragon)
Erika: I've seen Hellraiser twice now. I tried to talk Will through it, touching on villainous female sexuality, weird fetishes, and at one point a dragon if I remember correctly? I struggle to form a cohesive image of it in my mind. Largely because despite having seen it twice, it doesn't stick that vividly for me. Despite having a female protagonist, the movie is steeped in toxic masculinity. The one male character I actually liked was supposed to be laughed at for not being masculine enough and letting his wife be so awful to him. Because his wife mistreating him is a character flaw for him? It's got the usual sexist nonsense that many horror movies do, and I'm struggling to find anything interesting to say about it. It does have some really cool practical effects, and really gross gore stuff. If you're just in it for the grossness, sure, watch Hellraiser, but like a lot of Classics, you're not really missing anything.

The People Under The Stairs
(CN: Racist language, mutilation, torture, sexual violence, animal abuse. Just--everything. CN for All Of It)
Erika: Okay, so we were watching this movie while playing Sushi-Go, and I sort of only half saw the first half? This is important because I think there were a lot of black ghetto stereotypes in there but I'm not positive. It starts with a little black boy (unfortunately only ever called Fool, because that's what came up when his sister did a tarot reading for him) wrangled into helping case a joint to get money for his mother's surgery. The house they're casing has people who basically own the town and have been gentrifying the poorer neighborhoods.  They've chosen it because apparently they have gold in the basement, and not because they're just going to Robin Hood that shit. What is supposed to be a simple robbery goes very, very wrong when the two adults get killed by the owners of the house, and Fool finds out there is a hoard of pasty teenage boys in the basement. Not a subreddit--they're mutilated by the owners of the house, stolen by the couple (who are actually siblings because this wasn't gross enough already) but deemed "impure".

It's tense, it's gross, and a lot of the actually scary parts come from how deeply fucked up the people in it are. Actual distressed noises were made as I watched it. It does have some troubling issues with racism, but it also seems to be trying and do some interesting things with it? As I said, I missed chunks of the movie so I can't speak with confidence on the topic, but Fool is clever and tenacious and likable. SPOILER: the evil dog does die.

The 2016 American Presidential debate trilogy
(CN: Misogyny, racism, Trump)
Erika: Ok, so I didn't catch the first installment in this terrifying series, but I did see the second two. The whole premise seems laughable at first. A highly qualified woman is running to be president of the US against a bigoted angry cheeto. And they really amp up how absurd the Cheeto is. The viewer is often left wondering: how could anyone take this character seriously? But viral marketing aspect really helps with that, showing support outside of the actual debates on twitter and the like. I think the writers realized that and toned him down in the third installment, but the character still seems entirely unreasonable to me. That said, the meta stuff they've put out with it is what makes it truly horrifying. Have you seen some of those news articles on The Cheeto's actions? And the reactions to it? Pure horror because it starts to just feel so real. I feel and hope their conclusion will be obvious, but those of you able to vote in the US on which of these wins should go out and do so! If only because I'm not convinced the writers realized that The Cheeto isn't a legitimate option and need to understand that he isn't.  Make them understand. Vote him out of existence.


Leprechaun
(CN: Comedic gore and violence,  ableism)
Erika: If you want a movie to put on in the background at your Halloween party that people might occasionally catch half a scene of and go "Wait what?" I highly recommend this one. It is campy and cheesy and absurd and the acting is about on par with porn. At one point they throw shoes at the leprechaun while running away so it has to stop to clean them to buy them time. It doesn't take itself too seriously, which personally I enjoy. I was too sober when I watched it, so I noticed there is one character who the writers wrote as "slow". There are a lot of unfortunate 'fat stupid comedic relief' tropes around him, and I don't think the writers knew they were coding him as autistic. With that in mind, there is some interesting dynamics around how other characters treat and react to him (mostly with kindness and affection). If someone else wants to sit down and actually pay attention to it (I do not recommend that; I was rooting for everyone to die so hard) I'd urge you to consider the accidental layers there as you do.

Doom
(CN: Gore, violence, misogyny, gross monsters)
Erika: If you follow me on twitter, you probably saw me tweeting through this. I'm bitter at the husbeast and the Alexs for making me sit through this when I can't drink and they all can. It opens with MANLY MEN BEING MANLY AND BY THE WAY DID YOU KNOW THEY WERE MEN WITH GUNS AND PENISES WHO ONLY THINK ABOUT PUTTING SAID PENISES AND GUNS IN WOMEN? No, really, that's 90% of the character development. This movie was unsure how seriously it was taking itself, but it was still too seriously. If they had just given up and gone full camp it could have been fun, but they didn't, so it's just kind of a sexist mess. The only named female character who is a doctor is called a "dumb woman" because she believed the people she was working for weren't evil. The Rock is Lawful Evil in deeply unbelievable ways. Karl Urban wins a fight against The Rock which, even having been weakened by CGI, is just not believable. Also Good and Evil are genetic? There is one scene where it goes into first person shooter mode that's absurd and kind of fun, but I'd give this one a pass.

Rites of Spring
(CN: gore, torture, murder)
Will: This is not a story.  This is one third each of two separate stories mashed together, which by my math still leaves us one third short.  One plot starts strong with a Bechdel-passing scene of two women in a bar discussing corporate politics, one trying to decide whether or not to admit that she was responsible for a recent failure after someone else has taken the blame.  They immediately get kidnapped by a gruff old man whose motivations are never fully explained.  I mean, it's not hard to piece together from incidental information: every spring, this small town sacrifices several people to some kind of monstrous entity to magically ensure good farming.  But I suggest a general rule: if your story is such a cliche that you just pull an Avril ("Can I make it any more obvious?") maybe it's such a cliche that you should do better.  The other plot, tangentially related, concerns a small conspiracy of people planning to ransom a rich guy's daughter.  Dunno about y'all, but I don't watch horror movies for disturbingly mundane and realistic murder scenes.  These two plots collide by chance and provide our unexplained monstrous entity with a crew of criminals to kill in the final act.  There's supposed to be something clever going on, because the well-meaning desperate dude in the ransom gang is the guy who took the fall for the captured heroine's mistake at work, so maybe they were going for some kind of weird reap-what-you-sow thing (that coincidentally suggests that our Final Girl brought all this horror on herself)?  There is a distinct lack of ending as well, although not as grievously as our next entry:

The Midnight After
(CN: blood, death, rape)
Will: A Hong Kong horror movie that I didn't realise was supposed to be satirical until I read its wiki page.  To again spare you my pain, let me say first that this movie literally has no ending and none of the weirdness is explained, which makes it all weird for weirdness' sake, and I don't know if I don't get it because I'm not from Hong Kong or what.  Which is too bad, because it's mostly pretty good weirdness: seventeen people riding a bus together at 2:30am find themselves abruptly alone in the world and desperately try to figure out what's going on.  Time travel?  Ghosts?  Some kind of magic disease?  A nuclear disaster?  David Bowie?  The answer appears to be 'yes to all' (especially Bowie), except that the movie ends as the survivors finally get on the road to finding possible answers, so we don't actually know.

There is a plotline that definitely requires some further discussion, because amongst all the other mystery and death, one woman is found dead and apparently raped, and we then later see that scene play out in flashbacks as the rapist is revealed by his accomplice.  I'm not sure why the writer thought this was an important thing to have, but the treatment of it is at least decent?  The actual scenes are played for revulsion rather than titillation, the victim isn't stripped for the camera or anything.  To my particular surprise, while some of the other men briefly argue for "rape is bad but what are we going to do about it now, kill him?", the women respond with "yeah, I have a knife right here" and everyone agrees this is as close to a court of law as they can manage when they're the only people in the world.  The actual execution is variously played for pathos and grim humour as each person stabs him once, some more enthusiastically than others.  The whole thing still feels rather unnecessary (fewer pointless rape plotlines in anything, please) but ultimately I can only complain so much about characters agreeing that rapists get no mercy.

It Follows
(CN: blood, death, sexualised violence)
Erika: There was so much hype about this movie, and it really didn't live up to it. I feel there was a lot of symbolism and depth this movie thought it had that I just wasn't getting. Like, I know the pools/water imagery was supposed to mean SOMETHING, but I'm not 100% sure what. Is that supposed to represent the main character's relationship with her sexuality? Peace of mind? There were some aspects I loved: the main character, upon becoming an assault victim, is rallied around by everyone rather than dismissed and questioned.  Although people do at first question if she is literally being followed by a demon or something, they don't try to talk her out of her fear, they just try to make her feel safe, which is refreshing. It would be more refreshing if consensual sex didn't lead to murder demons, but you know, take wins where we can. I also liked how the women were often shown in typical horror movie girl poses/outfits (the opening scene has a woman in a sheet tank top, shorts, and heels running around) but rarely are they filmed as sexy. We see Jay in underpants or a swimsuit often, but she's shown in granny panties and a one piece. The girls aren't wearing loads of make up that were supposed to believe is just what they look like. Their clothes aren't skintight and played off as comfortable and casual. It's weird, and worth a watch, but I wouldn't put it at the top of my list.

Will: The premise of 'what if the Terminator was an STI' is certainly horrifying, and the movie is pretty visually effective, but like the blogqueen I also spent a lot of time trying to figure out why the writers made various choices.  Was there a ton of symbolism I was missing?  If the monster takes the shape of 'whatever it thinks will get it close to you', why does it keep picking such bizarre and creepy forms instead of something compelling and comforting?  It does sort of do that eventually, appearing as the protagonist's father, but it has previously appeared as completely naked people (first female, then male), or as apparent murder victims, or various other disturbing forms.  Mostly I feel like this movie suffers because the problem becomes a sort of logic puzzle, like "Couldn't you make a deal with someone in Asia where you fly there every year or so to have sex, passing the curse back and forth, so that every time the monster finally climbs out of the Marianas Trench it suddenly realises it has to change direction again?"  And the characters never really try to get clever with the solution like that, so I'm just left with more thought experiments that I can't see in action.

The Devil's Hand
(CN: blood, nudity, brief sexual assault)
Will: Both better and worse than I expected.  The setting is an Amish commune in the modern day, where they have a prophecy about 'the Drommelkind' (devil child?) that seems to start coming true when six girls are all born on the same night.  There is much muttering and grumbling about whether they can be redeemed or should be killed for everyone else's protection.  So, there's the pretty swift Bechdel pass when most of our main characters are women, and it's at least sort of interesting to have Amish characters not presented as inherently backwards and wrong--but there are also the tiresome standbys like the Evil Stepmother, and the horror sequences mostly consist of the girls dying one by one at the hands of a hooded figure.  The primary antagonist is the leading elder of the town, who we also quickly and clearly see is a creeper and probably repeat molester, and there was some potential for interesting dynamics when one of the girls insists they rally people against him while others cling to excuses and veneers of religious purity.  Overall, I was hoping this was going to be a movie that argued 'the devil' is unnecessary when we're capable of justifying evil to ourselves in the name of righteousness, and maybe a self-fulfilling prophecy where it's the moral panic and vicious response that causes disaster after all... but that is not what we get.  The final scenes of the movie don't make a lot of sense (the killer's identity is easy to spot on a meta level, but comes out of nowhere plotwise) and, like Ender's Game, we're sort of left wondering whether the story is claiming the 'bad guys' were right after all or what.

Mr Jones
(I'm not sure any particular warnings apply, but I'm open to suggestions)
Will: This is that rarest of creatures: the bloodless horror movie.  Our protagonists are a young couple whose marriage is a bit rocky, who decide to move out to the middle of nowhere for a year to film the Greatest Nature Documentary Of All Time and discover that their closest neighbour is a famously reclusive anonymous artist dubbed "Mr Jones".  Of course, Mr Jones isn't actually an artist; he's some kind of supernatural sculptor with ulterior motives involving the world of dreams and nightmares.  I really don't know why the writers decided this needed to be done in 'found footage' style, especially since they abandon it repeatedly, but I still enjoyed several aspects of the movie.  Rather than being a stock Nagging Wife, Penny actually gets to have some depth and agency, and she's at least as important to the investigation as Scott.  The aesthetics are satisfyingly creepy without falling back on blood, and after spending the first act shouting "Your neighbour is clearly a killer warlock" at the protagonists, I was gratified by the slow realisation that the expected cliches didn't apply.  It's not as striking and artistic as it wants to be, but overall I approve.

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That's all we were able to get our hands on this month, but as a supplement the blogqueen also suggested this list (by quality individual Joey Comeau) of horror movies without sexual violence.  And at some point we really will post something in regards to Scream Queens, the comedy/horror/satire slasher series that occasionally does interesting things with terrible people.  It'll be surprisingly deep for something that is intentionally super shallow.

Drizzt Do'Urden and the failure of fantasy racism

(Content: discussion of racism and other oppression.  Fun content: I hope you like elves.)

I should preface this with a giant disclaimer (in case there was any question) that I'm white, so this whole post is an extended 'it seems to me...' and I don't want to speak over anyone's experiences.  I don't think I've seen anyone address this specific flaw to supposedly progressive fantasy; I'd be happy to link to any such works if y'all know of them.  (Also, I think a lot of what I say below can translate to representation of other demographics and types of oppression, like LGBT people and comic book mutants, but it's Black History Month, so that's where we focus.)

Pictured: either my family tree or a box of assorted entertainment crackers; who can tell?

The best thing that speculative fiction can do is show us a bizarre new world that loops into our real mundane world right now and gets us to see something in a new way.  Consider classic Star Trek's episode about an alien cop chasing a fugitive, each of them literally half paper-white and half ink-black, divided down their centre line, but the cop is convinced that he's racially superior because he's black on the correct side.  The Snowpiercer movie (thankfully nothing like the original comic) is a beautiful, layered, sickening, and ruthless exploration of capitalism and literal class war.  And if I start talking about Discworld novels we'll be here all day.

Countless stories--like Star Trek there, and like Forgotten Realms and Lord of the Rings and X-Men and basically every other serialised speculative story sooner or later--take the opportunity to criticise racism, usually by showing us elves and dwarves scowling at each other or something.  The first problem with this kind of scenario is that it extrapolates human 'races' (a nebulous and nonscientific concept) into entirely different species, so that the story is about (white) humans learning to get along with weird other-y pseudo-natural entities (of colour?).  We can do better.  But, at the same time, there's no reason that identifying with the badass werewolves or dragons or fae should be restricted to white people either, so yes, let's have elves with high tops:

Pictured: painting of an armored elf with distinctively black features, by Nick Robles.

Running with this, writers sometimes give us a paragon of virtue like Drizzt Do'Urden.  Drizzt is one of the most iconic characters in modern fantasy: a renegade drow (dark elf, literally black-skinned) from the underground city of Menzoberranzan who grew up disgusted by his people's cruelties and so ran away to the surface, where he roams the land of Faerun slaying monsters and rescuing the helpless.  He is, of course, nevertheless hounded at every turn by people who see his black skin and assume he's a monster.  I won't speak to authorial intention here, because I haven't read RA Salvatore's mind at any point in the last thirty years, but there's only one common reading of Drizzt's story and what it symbolises for our world.  We readers look at these presumptuous bigots, who think the only good dark elf is a dead one, and scorn them for failing to get to know Drizzt before judging him.  We know better and we are enlightened.

Drizzt is a good guy.

Drizzt isn't like other drow.

Drizzt is one of the good ones.  A credit to his kind.

#notalldrow

But the thing about those narrow-minded common peasants who flinch or scream at the sight of Drizzt walking into town is that they're only wrong this time.  With literally any other member of his species, they'd be absolutely right to freak out, because a powerful and sadistic murder-specialist would have just said hello.  That's not racism; that's basic probability and pattern recognition.

Fantasy racism like a fear of dark elves is ultimately a terrible allegory for real-world racism because the dark elves have worked long and hard to gain that reputation for monstrosity, whereas in the real world white history is basically a laundry list of the other nations and peoples we've slaughtered and enslaved and oppressed for monetary gain, political power, or occasionally just for sadistic fun.  In order for Drizzt the onyx-black elf hero to be an actual metaphor for black people in North America, our continent would have to live in constant fear of invasion from a subterranean army of African-diaspora wizard-ninjas, and I figure there can't be more than five or six million registered voters who actually think that's a concern.

What I'm getting at when I say #notalldrow is that Drizzt's experience, being a variously privileged individual walking into vulnerable spaces full of people who have been hurt before by people who look like him (and who know that he has the power to hurt them further), is the experience of the oppressing class, not its victims.  White people, especially but not exclusively white men: we're the drow.  When Drizzt sees someone afraid of him at first glance, it's not because they've been arbitrarily taught that black people are inherently inferior and disgusting.  If we read these scenarios and all we think is "Bah, foolish bigots, we Drizzt would never be so villainous!" we're only reinforcing the idea that vulnerable people owe us their reflexive trust or they're the real racists.

To the credit of Drizzt's fictional persona, he sympathises with these people and is patient with the caution strangers take around him.  At least, this is a good aspect of his character if it's taken as a model for, say, white people to not go around acting indignant that people of colour aren't always ecstatic about our presence.  From the 'surface' reading of his story, where Drizzt is the victim and he is patient with having to work to personally win over every single racist he meets... that's suboptimal to say the least.  The tangle that this kind of speculative fiction has made of power dynamics makes it harder to draw any conclusive arguments out of the text beyond a lukewarm 'everyone should be good to each other'.  That kind of 'equal opportunity learning' gives us stuff like the unholy mess that was Disney's Pocahontas, in which the indigenous Powhatans are also guilty of prejudice against strangers just because the white people are here to conquer, pillage, and murder.  I cannot even.

Fantasy racism doesn't speak to real-world racism as long as it seeks to justify its existence: as long as those simple innocent farmers are afraid of orcs because orcs are literally and objectively the twisted embodiment of malevolence forged by an evil god to burn the world, fearing orcs isn't racism, it's self-preservation.  Fantasy that wants to tell us that racism is bad has to start by admitting that racism isn't a defense mechanism but a weapon--a philosophy that helps the people in power convince everyone else that it's okay to kill and exploit those other people, without provocation, because they just don't deserve any better.  Stopping racism is about acknowledging and revealing and destroying that idea, and it's got to be done in us, the privileged, oppressing class.

I'd love to add some examples here of fantasy racism done properly (purely as propaganda and not based on objectively truth) but... I'm not sure I can think of any.  Even in Discworld, the conflicts between trolls and dwarves ultimately come back to 'both sides bear guilt'.  In the Warcraft universe, primary example of a setting where orcs are heroic protagonists as often as villains, the orc-human divide stems back to those one or eight times that the orcish horde got cursed into raging berserkers and tried to burn down the planet.  In settings like Star Trek (and often Star Wars, depending on the book) aliens often are pretty one-dimensional in ways apparently defined by their species.  I think a good case can be made regarding house elves in Harry Potter, but that'd be a book unto itself and there are plenty of people who feel the text ultimately fails to make a proper case distinguishing the racist propaganda from the truth.  If any of you readers have encountered a good speculative treatment of how racism functions that doesn't make these kinds of errors, I would love to hear about it.

Let me end by sharing with you a quote from Chris Rock, in an interview from 2014 which I was lucky enough to encounter this week:

So, to say Obama is progress is saying that he’s the first black person that is qualified to be president. That’s not black progress. That’s white progress. There’s been black people qualified to be president for hundreds of years... The question is, you know, my kids are smart, educated, beautiful, polite children. There have been smart, educated, beautiful, polite black children for hundreds of years. The advantage that my children have is that my children are encountering the nicest white people that America has ever produced. Let’s hope America keeps producing nicer white people.

Hope everyone's been having a good Black History Month.

Storm Front, chapters ten and eleven, in which the worst and best of the book are on display

Sorry for the delayed post this week, folks.  I blame the unfathomable depths of my hatred for this dude.  At least a better plot shows up in this part of the story.

(Content: misogyny with a sex worker zest.  Fun content: literal word porn, muppet anguish, Ming-Na Wen being badass.)

Storm Front

Chapter Ten: This Book Is Noir, Dammit, NOIR*

Dresden drives away from Bianca's mansion in a loaner car from the tow trucker, but stops not far away to use a pay phone to call the victim's friend and sex-co-worker, Linda.  Forgive the pun, but apparently Linda's voice is like aural sex (I feel shame, if it helps) given the buffet of adjectives Butcher pours all over it:

The phone rang several times before a quiet, dusky contralto answered. [...] "Mmmm," she answered. She had a furry, velvety voice, something tactile. [...] She laughed, the sound rich enough to roll around naked in.

That's seriously only a sampling of it.  More effort is going into convincing us that this unseen woman is totally still worth having sex with than has been spent to explain Dresden's entire living situation (phenomenally rare superpowers and permanently broke).  There's one thing here worth a second glance:

"I'm not occupied. At the moment." 

In archaic English (1400s or so), using 'occupy' to mean 'currently having penetrative sex' wasn't wordplay--that became the default meaning.  It was considered an obscene term for centuries.  People said 'occupy' for sex so much that the word was kicked out of polite conversation.  When was the last time we managed that as a society?  Sure, no one says 'gay' to mean 'happy' anymore unless they're going for wordplay, but it's not considered obscene exactly.

I wonder if the current US presidential campaign will make people stop talking about 'trump card' like it's a good thing.

Anyway, Dresden says he's investigating Jennifer's death, Linda calmly panics and says she has to go and has nothing to say thanks okay bye.  Dresden fumes for a moment before deciding that, from Linda's new job as a driver for some rich couple, and the background noises, she's probably at O'Hare airport, so off he goes, luckily finding a "silver baby limo" still waiting at the second concourse he checks.  I'd make a wildlife documentary joke (the baby limo has an increased reflective capacity to confuse predators, but its hide will turn matte as it matures, to improve solar uptake) but I've got a million of those and we'd be here all night.  Dresden calls her again from another pay phone (did those still exist in 2000?  I guess) and uses the Objectively Worst 'flirting' response: "I like women who play hard to get".  She hangs up on him again, so he walks up and knocks on her window.

Linda gets another paragraph of description, because apparently just giving one to her voice was inadequate.  Highlights include: "a little too much eye shadow, [...hair] which hung down close to her eyes in insolent disarray [...] a predatory look to her, harsh sharp".  Dresden repeats his desperate need to talk to her about Jennifer, and she concludes: "And I like a man who just won't stop".

Pictured: Kermit screaming as deafeningly as me right now.

Apparently in Butcher's version of reality, sex workers are incapable of not flirting, even when they are being pursued by a strange man who wants to ask them dangerous questions about their murdered friend.  At no point does she say 'Fuck off, creep', or 'I'm calling the cops' or just mace him.  She's a veteran sex worker and the chauffeur for a rich couple, driving their solid gold limo to the airport--there is exactly zero chance she doesn't have three flavours of pepper spray, a taser that can cook a frozen turkey, and an entire gun show in the glove compartment.  No, she's a sex worker, and that means that she is always conjuring boners, all the time in everyone, even her enemies.  Faith and fucking begorrah.

She keeps doing it even while he asks her about her recently murdered friend.  Linda admits to knowing Jennifer, having "shared a bed" (more girl-on-girl for the male viewer!), and regular threesomes with Tommy Tomm.  After literal pages of how Hard it is for Dresden to focus while talking to her, he realises--LE GASP--that she's trying to confuse him with boners so he won't realise she's hiding something!

So we're clear on relative badness: go back to literally any part of Eye of the World, no matter how much I hated it at the time.  Yeah, even that part.  This here is worse.  These pages are worse than the entirety of that book.

Dresden strikes upon the key question ("When was the last time you spoke to Jennifer Stanton"--what an unexpected direction!) and she drops the flirting instantly.  Turns out she called on Wednesday, the night of the murder, and she was supposed to have joined Jennifer and Tommy, but she'd had to work.  That, she assures us is the extent of her knowledge, so I'd skip the rest of this scene, except it's so bad and if I have to suffer, so do you.

Linda tells us that Jennifer would never get tangled up in anything dangerous or immoral:

"She was sweet. A lot of girls get like--They get pretty jaded, Mr Dresden. But it never really touched her. She made people feel better about themselves somehow." She looked away. "I could never do that. All I did was get them off."

Pictured: Kermit's face warped into overwhelming sorrow, like mine.

This tragic sex worker is only capable of selling sex, not actively improving the lives and self-esteem of her clients.  Very sorrow, such subsuming of self in the service of men, wow.  This also serves to assure us that Jennifer was someone worth mourning--she didn't get jaded like all those other sex workers.  She was more like a person, or at least cared about people (men).  Is that as bad as this gets?  No, it has one more circle of hell for us:

"Why," I asked her, the words slipping out before I thought about them. "Why the slut act?"

What's this?  Has Dresden noticed that he's basically writing a straight-faced parody and revealing some clever--oh, fuck it.

"Because it's what I do, Mr Dresden. For some people it's drugs. Booze. For me, orgasms. Sex. Passion. Just another addict. City's full of them." She glanced aside. "Next best thing to love. And it keeps me in work. Excuse me."

Yup.  That's where this ends up.  Linda can't stop flirting because she's a sex addict constantly looking for her next lay.  Now, look, I'm sure (I hope) that a considerable number of sex workers do actually enjoy their work, but you'll find a lot more addicts among their clients.  The idea that your average sex worker just desperately wants to screw all the time is a fantasy as indulgent as Dresden's mighty blasting rod.

Pro tip for dudes writing sex workers: don't; you're almost definitely atrocious at it.

Linda's employers, the ultra-professional Beckitts, arrive and demand to know who Dresden is; Linda claims he's an old boyfriend and tells him to take off.   Mr Beckitt cops a feel of Linda as he gets into the car, while Dresden notices that Mrs Beckitt's face reminds him of soldiers released from German prisoner-of-war camps after WW2: "Empty. Numb. Dead, and just didn't know it yet."  Because if you want precise characterisation, the best direction to leap in is something associated with Nazis.  That's definitely ideal for your scenario, and not a howling cliche used every time someone wants to be dramatic.  At least pick a different war.

Dresden heads inside the airport, gets coffee, and considers what to do next--he needs do to paying work, and interrogating Linda doesn't count, so he either does the murder-magic research Murphy wants, or he digs more into Monica's missing husband.  The latter is less likely to get him decapitated, so Dresden calls the only pizza place close enough to the lakehouse, and is soon put on the line with the cracking-voiced teenager who delivered to Victor Sells.  The kid immediately goes into "I told you I'm not gonna say anything to anyone" sputtering, and Dresden runs with it, getting the terrified kid to drop a few specifics: that he saw an orgy going on inside, and that he ran into a photographer as he left (explaining the unsubtle film canister mentioned some chapters ago).  The kid hangs up soon after, being much better at saying 'no' than Linda was.

Dresden brushes the whole thing off as "an advanced case of male menopause" on Victor's case, because apparently 'midlife crisis' wasn't misogynistic enough.  He hasn't yet realised that, as this novel's B-plot, the whole thing is going to turn out to be some kind of giant magic-related conspiracy.

(Question for the audience: are there psychometric magics in this setting?  Like, you can find a person via an object they've touched, or vice-versa?  I kind of assume there is, since Dresden apparently specialises in finding lost objects, but finding photographer dude or Victor himself would be way easier if so.  Just wondering if that remains consistent later.)

Dresden returns home and gets jumped by one or more goons just outside his door.  Foot on his neck and baseball bat smiting the ground next to his face, Dresden is told to stop snooping or else, and then left.  He stumbles inside, but of course as a protagonist, after some aching and groaning, he takes it all as motivational:

"You are not some poor rabbit, Dresden!" I reminded myself, sternly. "You are the wizard of the old school, a spellslinger of the highest caliber. You're not going to roll over for some schmuck with a baseball bat because he tells you to!"

Are you though, Dresden?  Highest calibre, I mean?  We keep coming back to this: you're either one of the less-than-two-thousand people in the world who can wield magic, and therefore spectacularly powerful by any reasonable measure and have no reason to live in fearful poverty, or you're a low-rung hobbyist whose physics-defying abilities are irrelevant in the magical hierarchy and indeed the societal power structure in general.  Any chance you'll make up your mind soon?

Dresden makes some tea and grabs his gun--sorry, his "Smith & Wesson .38 Chief's Special", because this is that kind of book--having decided that the goons were almost definitely sent by Marcone, and they would be more put off by a gun than a wand.  Then it's time to start reverse-engineering that murder magic after all.

Chapter Eleven: A Brief Interlude Of Actual Plot

We catch up with Dresden the next morning, sleepless, hextuple-checking his "calculations" on the magic.  Apparently the spell is impossible or the killer is godlike.  I'm very curious what kind of math goes into murder magic, but we won't hear any of that.  Dresden immediately takes off to see Murphy.

Things were bad. They were very, very bad!

Gripping.  General guideline: if you're using exclamation points outside of dialogue, they had better be ironic.  When they're not, I start reading in the voice of a failing standup comedian--one who doesn't know the difference between loud and funny, but has just realised that the audience does.

Dresden gets to the police station and is forced to wait (by a "greying matron", not the usual "mustached old warhorse" who would trust him like he deserves).  He can see down the hall to Murphy's office, though, where she stands:

...with a phone pressed to her ear, wearing a martyred expression. She looked like a teenager having a fight with an out-of-town boyfriend, though she'd tear my head off if she heard me saying any such thing.

Shucks, Dresden, I'm just a simple country lawyer, but maybe that's because you reflexively infantilise every woman you meet and Murphy (nominally a mighty cop) knows she has to constantly fight back if she wants you to take her seriously for ten seconds ever again.  I suggest we reverse the metaphor, and hereafter a teenage girl having a phone-fight with an out-of-town boyfriend shall be described as 'looking like a detective trying to get the chief to acknowledge that, even if she's a loose cannon, she gets results, dammit'.

While Dresden's waiting, some kid shows up at full sprint out of the holding cells, freaking out, Dresden tries to tackle him (ineffectively, because he's a squishy wizard) and they collapse into a painful heap, but the kid does stop trying to escape.  Instead he screams at Dresden:

"Wizard! I see you! I see you, wizard! I see the things that follow, those who walk before and He Who Walks Behind! They come! they come for you!"

The cops show up to drag the kid away and explain that he's a ThreeEye junkie, sending Dresden off into a spiral of frantic speculation, because "for reasons I don't have time to go into now" he really is marked with the shadow of He Who Walks Behind, a murderous spirit that one of Dresden's enemies once sicced on him.  He survived with a scar on his aura, which only wizards should know how to see, but the junkie apparently did as well, meaning--zomg--ThreeEye really does give people the Third Sight.

(I think I would actually really enjoy the 'oh, btdubs, I'm marked with the shadow of a spectral hitman, long story' aside if it appeared in a book that I didn't already hate.  I love a good noodle incident, even if I'm skeptical that Dresden can spare pages talking about how sexy a woman's voice is or how bored he is in the waiting room but not to explain what enemy he made who put a multiplanar contract on his head.)

Dresden further informs us that Third Sight is overwhelming, either tearjerkingly beautiful or awesomely awful, and that wizards learn to keep it shut most of the time or they go mad.  Possibly more dangerously than that, junkies run the risk of seeing through the masquerade and 'forcing' a vampire or other disguised beastie to kill them in pre-emptive self-defence, which he calls "double jeopardy" because he never went to law school.

Murphy shows up with coffee for him, filled with sugar just the way he likes it, because apparently she's his boss and his assistant.  (Spoilers: it's only going to get worse.)  She does demand 50 cents for it on the way to her office.  Her office does get some description, with its aikido trophies and sleek new PC (she unplugs it before Dresden walks in) and paper nameplate taped to the door as a reminder of how quickly she can be fired.  It's better characterisation than any other woman has got in the book so far, I'll give it that much.

Dresden explains the magic situation: he was right that it was a thaumaturgic ritual, but his math shows that it would take a hilarious amount of energy to do to even one person, let alone two.  Murphy suggests the "wizard version of Arnold Schwarzenegger pulled this off" and Dresden explains that being focused with your energy isn't the same as having a lot of it.  He provides us with an abruptly racist and bizarre metaphor involving "some ancient little Chinese martial-arts master" who can't "lift a puppy over his head" but can "shatter a tree trunk with his hands".  Yeah, that's not how anatomy works.  I mean, here's Ming-Na Wen breaking through concrete with a ruinous spearhand technique:

You're all welcome.  But: that still involves having muscles.  She can probably also slam-dunk an SUV.  I remember the last taekwondo master I trained under, and yes, he looked like a kindly grandfather, but there was nothing frail about him.  It was like shaking hands with a vise.  The magic men made of nothing but skin and bones who can headbutt mountains into valleys are just weird orientalist fantasy.

Anyway. Dresden goes on with the other possibility, which he says is less likely: a group of wizards, hard limit thirteen, all working together.  That requires absolute trust and devotion, so it's mostly only possible with a fanatical cult.  Either way, he has also worked out that the point of the murders wasn't to scare Bianca, but to send a message to Marcone, as part of the new secret drug war in Chicago between ThreeEye and conventional narcotics.

This chapter, in various ways, feels like it's from a much better book.  A book that's about wizards getting involved in mafia wars, and not about a parade of varyingly-naked skinny white women who would totally have sex with Dresden if only he weren't so tragically Devoted To Justice.  I suppose we're only halfway through.  Maybe it's going to get better?  Eventually?  Oh, who am I kidding, I know we still have Love Potion hijinks coming soon.

Murphy tells Dresden to give her a list of names of people who could have pulled off the killing spell, Dresden refuses, she threatens to haul him in for obstruction and says it's her job to be a cop, not his (true, and well done Murphy).  I would like to ask again about the existence of wizard cops, and whether Dresden (now that he understands the situation and has evidence that he couldn't be the killer) might not do better to inform the White Council of his findings.  But Dresden's pounding headache, which has been building momentum for a page, finally decides it's time for a quick end to the chapter, so he passes out on her office floor.

Next time: Murphy plays Florence Nightingale for no good reason.

---

*I suppose I should make a consistent note that these books don't have chapter titles and I'm just making them up for funsies, lest new readers be confused that the titles are so much more entertaining and thoughtful than the text.

Speaker for the Dead, chapter six, part two, in which subtitles are misused

(Content: actually this one is pretty okay? Fun content: xkcd and aliens and phrasing and fruit.)

This is not a fascinating chunk of book.  This is Orson Scott Card making sure everyone knows he has a rudimentary knowledge of Portuguese and it's super-authentic.  I will do what I can for you.

Speaker for the Dead: p. 97--107

Ender settles into his room in one of the original colony's plastic shacks and stows the Hive Queen under his bed, wrapped in towels.  After all, he's just a detective in town to investigate three suspicious deaths and the religious leaders of the planet have been telling everyone not to trust him or anything he says, so I can't imagine why he'd want to take any kind of security precautions.  It occurs to me that, in addition to everyone assuming he Little Ones collectively murdered Pipo (and now Libo), rather than it being the work of a lone pequenino-Jack-the-Ripper, no one seems to think for even a moment that Pipo might have been killed by a human who knew that if Pipo died in the forest everyone would assume it was aliens.

Was there a police investigation of his death?  Does Lusitania even have police?  Is it a crimeless utopia?  Come on, we have to have something to show for the last three thousand years of existence.

The Hive Queen remains 100% totes certain that Lusitania will be her new home, although she hasn't actually told Ender why.  She's barely talking to Ender at all, and she launches into a somewhat poetic run-on sentence explaining that it's so hard to talk to humans but the philotic mind she's found on Lusitania--one of many, she says--is so much easier to connect with, and so with apologies she withdraws:

<...Forgive us, dear friend, forgive us if we leave the hard work of talking to your mind and go back to him and talk to him because he doesn't make us search so hard to make words and pictures that are clear enough for your analytical mind because we feel him like sunshine, like the warmth of sunshine on his face on our face and the feel of cool water deep in our abdomen and movement as gentle and thorough as soft wind which we haven't felt for three thousand years forgive us we'll be with him...>

Huh, that's exactly how my first girlfriend broke up with me.  It's okay, Ender.  The spontaneously manifest consciousness of the internet still loves you.

I can't blame the Hive Queen for closing off "until you wake us until you take us out to dwell here", because the only thing worse than sharing thoughts with Ender for ten years would be sharing thoughts with Ender for three thousand time-dilated years.  Boy could take a decade just thinking about how hard it is being the only person in the room who actually thinks of everyone else in the room as real people.

(xkcd #610)

Ender is left thinking about how he's going to have to deal with the church and the xenologers and twenty-two years of buyer's remorse from the xenobiologist who summoned him, and his longer-term discomfort with the idea that, if the Hive Queen does settle here, he will have to do the same.  He recognises that he's avoided really connecting with anyone but Valentine in about twenty-five years, and the thought of being a permanent citizen is daunting.

"I can hear your heartrate falling and your breathing getting heavy.  In a moment you'll either be asleep, dead, or lacrimose." 

"I'm much more complex than that," said Ender cheerfully. "Anticipated self-pity is what I'm feeling, about pains that haven't even arrived." 

"Very good, Ender.  Get an early start.  That way you can wallow so much longer."

Wow, even Card has realised how excessive this is.  Do we have hope of a change?  Ah, but no, the whole point of that exchange is that awareness of something doesn't translate at all into resistance to it.  Petra even says as much in Shadow of the Hegemon, when she talks about an incredibly clichéd play that nevertheless moved her to tears as she dissected its tropes.  (That's not a link to TVtropes.  That's a link to the actual definition of 'trope', which is the only one I actually use, because I am a colossal hipster and I own nine bowties.)

Ender asks Jane for a map of the colony and she says they don't have one because everyone knows where everything is, which is just fantastic.  No cops, no city planning, population of like 5000 people constantly growing but with an absolute limit on the space they're allowed to remain within, and no one keeps a map. Awesome. They do, however, keep a map of the sewer system, from which Jane extrapolates the buildings.  She projects this into Ender's room, because his shack is totally sweet and has a holographic terminal "sixteen times larger than most terminals, with a resolution four times greater".  I hope that becomes plot relevant, or else Card just randomly decided that Ender deserved a widescreen space TV.

The colony cuts off at the fence, where there's an electromagnetic field to keep anyone from crossing over.  It causes incredible pain if you touch it, but Jane doesn't say it actually creates force, so I'm wondering if someone sufficiently determined couldn't just leap through and bear the hurt for a second.  Agony fields make terrible walls.  Ender talks about whether the humans are trapped within or the Little Ones are trapped out there, separated from the rest of the universe.  Jane wins:

"It's the most charming thing about humans.  You are all so sure that the lesser animals are bleeding with envy because they didn't have the good fortune to be born homo sapiens."

But unfortunately there's no further exchange on this subject and I am left wondering again how Card can write things like that and then go on to write things like everything else he writes.

Jane explains that the only settlement the humans have contact with is about a kilometre inside the nearest forest (where all the males live inside a log house), and satellites (they do exist!) have confirmed that just about every forest on the planet contains its maximum sustainable population of Little Ones.  On request, she zooms in to show Ender the space where Pipo and Libo died, which now has three trees nearby--the ones that grew out of Rooter and two more Little Ones found dead in the same manner since then.  The leading hypothesis is that trees are named for the dead and humans aren't part of the tree religion, therefore we don't get trees named for us.  I figure there's zero chance the trees aren't made of people; my only question is whether the Little Ones are larval trees or if they get trees planted in them to absorb their minds at time of death.

"Except that I've found that rituals and myths don't come from nowhere.  There's usually some reason for it that's tied to the survival of the community."

Oh, good, Ender knows the fundamental principle of every skeptical detective who doesn't yet know that they're going to discover some mundane ritual secretly has actual supernatural (or superscientific) significance.

"Andrew Wiggin, anthropologist?" 

"The proper study of mankind is man." 

"Go study some men, then, Ender."

PHRASING; BOOM!  (Don't forget Jane is the internet--she is partly composed of all that Ender/Alai fanfic that Ender obviously wrote as a teenager and posted anonymously to AO3 where it formed a lesser-known religion, Speaker for the Queer, which centres on very empathetic people helping others understand the truth about their orientation and identity after someone tells them that heterocis is the only normal.)

Tragically, it turns out that what Jane actually means is that she thinks he should go meet the Ribeiras (Novinha's family).  The computer network has been coded to deny Ender information on where anyone lives, but Jane being Jane, she's already hacked that--they live in a relatively isolated house behind the observatory hill, because apparently there's an observatory hill.  Ender says he'll need to find a guide anyway, to avoid giving away that their computer security is as dust and ash to him.  He and Jane have a weird conversation about how she's got all the power and she wants to make sure he does what's in her best interests.  I can't figure out what brought that on, given that her only "vested interest" here is that Ender doesn't screw up his redeemer-of-the-alien-monsters shtick.  Ender asks for a promise:

"When you decide to hide something from me, will you at least tell me that you aren't going to tell me?" 

"This is getting way too deep for little old me." She was a caricature of an overfeminine woman.

Earlier she encouraged Ender to cheer himself up by getting more exercise, while projecting herself in the form of a Little One in the middle of a chorus line of "leggy women".  I don't know what the fuck Jane's deal is supposed to be, but so far she's mostly composed of plot convenience and stereotypes of Wrong Femininity (the use of sexuality and deception for personal benefit) and I have the feeling I'm not supposed to like her nearly as much as I do.  The final book in Timothy Zahn's Conquerors Trilogy has a brilliant AI as one of the viewpoint characters, and I feel like that kind of story (sneaking around inside data networks the way spies sneak through air ducts) could be awesome with Jane in the lead.

Ender finally heads out to the praça, where kids are playing football.  Most of them are just showing off, but a boy and girl are duelling, standing three metres apart and kicking as hard as they can at each other without flinching.  Ender asks people to show him to the Ribeira house and the kids steadily drift away until only the duelling duo are left, plus the little girl who fetches the ball for them, and another boy with electronic eyes.

Only one eye was used for sight, but it took four separate visual scans and then separated the signals to feed simulated binocular vision to the brain.

I'm like 70% sure that doesn't make sense.

The other eye contained the power supply, the computer control, and the external interface.  When he wanted to, he could record short sequences of vision in a limited photo memory, probably less than a trillion bits.

By my math, that's about 100 gigs, so... several hours of moderate-quality video, no?  I have the 90-minute Sherlock premiere on my computer in 720p HD and it's 1.6 gigs.  This is why Star Trek TNG started referring to data in 'isoquads', because it sounds big and technical but no one will ever be like 'I can fit that on a sticky note'.

The girl kicks a crotch-shot at the boy, who winces in pain, but she says he twisted to deflect, and he insists he did not.

"Reveja!  Reveja!"  They had been speaking Star, but the girl now switched into Portuguese. 

The boy with metal eyes showed no expression, but raised a hand to silence them.  "Mudou," he said with finality.  He moved, Ender translated. 

"Sabia!"  I knew it!

And it goes on like this.  Half the dialogue over the next few pages is made up of short phrases of Portuguese and then the narrative giving us the English translation.  And then when they notice Ender:

"Porque está olhando-nos?" asked the boy.  Why are you looking at us? 

Ender answered with a question. "Você é árbitro?" You're the artiber here? The word could mean "umpire," but it could also mean "magistrate."

Aside from me loving the idea that Ender is actually terrible at Portuguese and sounds ridiculous to them (yes, my copy says 'artiber' instead of 'arbiter', which I choose to take as a translation of his incomprehensible accent), I'm just boggled that we've paused the soap opera murder investigation in space for a Portuguese vocabulary lesson.  And then gratuitous Space Vocabulary when Ender calls himself a stranger:

"Stranger?  You mean utlanning, framling, or raman?" 

"No, I think I mean infidel."

I know it's important for Ender to be all dangerous and sassy to get Olhado to like him, but that question made no sense.  Lusitania has no utlannings; everyone's from the same village.  Humans by definition can't be raman to another human.  The only possible answer was framling, and the only possible reason to ask that question was to remind everyone that Card invented some words.

Ender wins over Olhado, who finally reveals that people call him Olhado, but his real name is Lauro Suleimão Ribeira, and the littlest girl is Quara.  Jane adds his bio in Ender's ear: he's 12, the fourth child, lost his eyes "in a laser accident", those are seriously her exact words, what the hell does anyone use lasers for on this world, and notes that the first significant thing she has managed to uncover about the family is that they are apparently willing to defy the bishop.  Ender silently notes that Olhado enjoyed deceiving Ender and enjoyed revealing the surprise even more--he hopes that Jane doesn't follow that example, and I'm back to wondering if maybe it wouldn't be easier to make Jane seem sinister by actually having her do something morally suspect, rather than just constantly giving her the side-eye until it seems natural.

Outside the village, Miro (Novinha's eldest son, the xenologer apprentice, you remember him) is on a hillside in the shade of some trees, looking down into the village.  ...Wait.  Wait what.  There's a fence and an Agony Field and laws saying not to let the Little Ones see any human technology and no one but the xenologer is allowed to leave the perimeter and there's a hill where you can just secretly look down over the fence and see most of Milagre WHAT.

There's also a Little One there with him.  More translation, this time fractionally more interesting:

"Miro," whispered Leaf-eater.  "Are you a tree?" 

It was a translation from the pequeninos' idiom.  Sometimes they meditated, holding themselves motionless for hours.  They called this "being a tree." [....] 

"Is it going to rain?" asked Miro.  To a piggy this meant: are you interrupting me for my own sake, or for yours? 

"It rained fire today," said Leaf-eater. "Out in the prairie."

They can see the shuttles.  THEY CAN SEE THE SHUTTLES.

THEY FREAK OUT ABOUT ACCIDENTALLY SAYING 'ACROBAT' BUT THEY LET THE LITTLE ONES SEE THEIR STELLAR OBSERVATORY AND THEIR SPACE SHUTTLES.

EVERYONE ON THIS PLANET IS FIRED.

Leaf-eater is desperate to meet the Speaker for the Dead, and begs Miro to bring him as soon as possible: "I root my face in the ground for you, Miro, my limbs are lumber for your house."  Yeah, they are definitely trees.  Miro says he needs to learn if the speaker can be trusted first, and reflects that the Little Ones never seem to understand the idea of 'stranger' or 'malice'.  While this confuses and frustrates him, he doesn't seem to think it has any particular contradiction with their constant inter-forest wars.  God, these scientists are awful.

Miro tries to make a pun by telling Leaf-eater to "vai comer folhas", "go eat leaves", but Leaf-eater is just confused and calls him crude when Miro explains the joke, proving at least that the aliens have an actual sense of humour.  Miro thinks that Leaf-eater always seems hostile, and he'd rather hang out with the one called Human, even though Human is smarter "and Miro had to watch himself more carefully with him".  This also makes no sense to me, since Miro appears to have gone the full interventionist route by telling the Little Ones about interstellar civilisation and Speakers and shuttles.  What's he got to watch?

He spots Olhado carrying Quara home, and then sees they're followed by a strange man, who he realises has to be the speaker, and sprints down to intercept.  Next week: Card goes full soap opera, Ender goes social worker, and everything is terrible.