didn't have the internet. I picked that hotel because its parking lot is also the finish line, and walking right from the end and into a shower was wonderful, but staying there with no internet for Friday night and the rest of the day on Saturday meant I plowed through the three books that I'd packed, and I had to drive over to Pigeon Forge to grab another one.
I needed to stretch my legs, anyway, even though my feet hurt, so it was kind of just as well.
Before all of that, though, I finished some books at home.
43) Somebody told me I would enjoy Riley Sager's Final Girls, and I did. It tells the story of Quincy, the lone survivor of the Pine Cottage massacre. Recovering from the loss of her college friends, Quincy is contacted by Lisa, the sole survivor of a murderous rampage through her sorority house, and Sam, who battled the Sack Man during her overnight shift at the Nightlight Inn. All three women are survivors of horror, and the media dubs them the Final Girls in a nod to the classic horror movie trope.
Years later, Sam has dropped off the grid, going into hiding. Quincy has built a life as a baking blogger with a handsome fiancée, moving on and looking forward until the night that Lisa contacts her, and then kills herself. Before Quincy can even respond to this news Sam appears on her doorstep, claiming to be worried, but something about her is a little off. She drinks heavily, shoplifts, and keeps asking questions about the night at Pine Cottage that Quincy has done her best to forget. She wants something, but what? And why didn't she tell Quincy that before coming to New York to see her, she'd been out west, visiting Lisa?
Sager moves back and forth between the past and the present throughout the book, contrasting the present day with the night at Pine Cottage as Quincy's memories come back. In the end, there are twists, as there are in all horror movies, but they fit the story. Overall, this was a good read.
44) I moved away from fiction to read Chuck Palahniuk's Stranger Than Fiction, a collection of true stories that sees the author of "Fight Club" travelling around the country to attend sex festivals, farming combine demolition derbies, wrestling tournaments, and other interesting but out of the way places. There are also personal essays here, dealing with the murder of his father or the time he tried steroids for a month at the gym, and overall this was a good, if sometimes unsettling, read.
45) The unsettling continued with Alissa Nutting's Tampa, which some article said was one of the most interesting books of 2013. (I'm a little behind, I guess.) It tells the story of Celeste Price, a smoking hot sociopath married to a policeman, who goes into teaching because she wants to seduce high school boys. She goes about seducing one, then another, and then spirals into a web of evasion and covering her tracks that includes drugging people, lying, seduction, and death.
While this is thematically similar to that book I read a few weeks ago, "The Manhood Ceremony", it was somehow less disturbing, possibly because Celeste knows all along that what she is doing is terrible, rather than the author trying to make her in any way a sympathetic character. You don't root for Celeste, and she doesn't want you to. It was an interesting read, but I feel like 2013 must have been a really bad year for the publishing industry if this was one of the best books.
46) Meddling Kids, by Edgar Cantero, was a really good book, and not just by comparison to the last one. The first of three books I brought with me to the half marathon, it tells the story of the Blyton Summer Detective Club, four plucky kids and their dog who, in the summer of 1997, unmasked the Sleepy Lake Monster, an old man in a costume trying to scare people away from the Deboen Mansion so that he could look for the fortune allegedly buried there.
13 years later, Andy, the tomboy, is wanted in two states and unable to sleep without nightmares of bodies, symbols, and terrible creatures crawling out of Sleepy Lake. Kerri, the beautiful redhead, tends bar in New York City, living alone behind locked doors with the grandson of the club's Weimaraner. Nate, the sarcastic horror movie fan, has committed himself to an asylum where he is constantly visited by Peter, the all-American jock. Peter killed himself a few years ago, but that doesn't stop him from dropping by. Determined to conquer her fears, Andy decides to get the team back together, to go back and solve the real mystery of the Deboen Mansion and the Sleepy Lake Monster, but she doesn't realize that Sleepy Lake has a lot of monsters, and they've been waiting for those meddling kids to return.
This book was nostalgic, hilarious at times, and also disturbing, and was a fast, entertaining read.
47) May Day, a short novella by F. Scott Fitzgerald, is one of those books that I can't remember if I've read before. It was published in "Tales of the Jazz Age" with other stories, and I know I've read that, but I had no impression of reading this before when I read it. A short tale of acquaintances from college meeting up a few years later in New York City, it deals with Fitzgerald's usual themes of youth, wealth, success, and mortality. It was an OK read, but I plowed through it in under an hour.
48) I was going to say that Wives, Fiancees, and Side-Chicks of Hotlanta, by Real Housewife of Atlanta Sheree Whitfield, was at the opposite end of the spectrum from Fitzgerald, but it's really not. The Fitzgeralds lived a tabloid life, and if reality TV existed in their time, they would have been on it. While Fitzgerald considered himself an artist, he also admitted that he wrote for the commercial market to sell stories, to support his more artistic work, and given his penchant to mine his own life and the lives of those around him for material, maybe Sheree's efforts in the same direction aren't really that far from his after all. (Except in the area of skill. Sheree may be a good talker, but she has an average vocabulary and writing level.)
This book tells the story of Sasha, who graduates college and heads to Atlanta with a year's worth of savings to become a fashion mogul. She has a plan, and is determined to let nothing stand in her way, even after a handsome basketball player tries to sweep her off her feet. Is he too good to be true? Is he worth taking her eyes off the prize, and following love instead of her goal? And what kind of person is his life of wealth and parties going to turn her into?
This was a quick read, but it's designed to be. Somewhat hilariously, Sheree only makes it 74 pages in before trashing another Real Housewife with the line, "at least Casey wasn't going out like one of those drunken reality TV housewives with a tampon string hanging out", and manages to get all the way to page 168 before Sasha utters Sheree's signature line, "Who gon' check me, boo?"
I got everything out of reading this that I expected to. I also got done with it too quickly, and had to go select another book from the Pigeon Forge Kroger, the first store I saw that seemed like it would have books inside. Had I wanted airbrushed t-shirts I could have stopped multiple times before then. Anyway, I ended up with this:
49) Into the Water by Paula Hawkins, the author of "The Girl on the Train".
Nel, a single mother, is found drowned in the local river, only months after her daughter's friend, Katie, was found in the same spot. Nel was known, and resented, throughout the village for writing an unpublished book about the women who have drowned in the river over the years, and now her sister, daughter, and the local police are wondering if her death was a suicide or murder. There are plenty of suspects, motives, and opportunities, and at one point I wondered if maybe the whole town got together in the middle of the night to kill her. That turned out not to be the case, but I found this somewhat unsatisfying, and some of my questions were still unresolved at the end.
