Books I've Read: The Getaway

 

I know...  This isn't the kind of book I usually read.  But something about the cover intrigued me, so I picked it up at the library and I enjoyed it more than I thought I would.

Set in a dystopian future where sea level rise has wiped out most of the coasts and people are fighting for resources elsewhere, Jay and his family have found refuge in Karloff County.  Karloff is a gated resort for the super-wealthy and to ensure the guests get the best possible experience, a large staff of "helpers" live within the walls to run everything.  Jay's family are helpers and grateful to be there where they don't have to fight for scraps of food and where life feels relatively safe.  

Until Connie, one of Jay's tight group of friends, disappears overnight without a word.  And then a huge influx of the world's richest people start pouring into the resort and not leaving.  And these guests expect even more than the regular guests and are not afraid to use their power to get what they want.  

Desperate to figure out what is going on and why their safe little community has suddenly become decidedly unsafe, Jay and his friends start digging for the truth.  And what they discover is worse than anyone could ever imagine.  Karloff County isn't just a vacation spot - it's been designed to be a bolthole for the world's most powerful, a place to hide while civilization outside the walls crumbles and burns to the ground.

As Jay and his friends uncover horror after horror about the place they've been happy to call home, they have to figure out whether it is more dangerous to leave Karloff County or to stay.

I enjoyed this book far more than I expected to.  Dystopia is not usually my jam, but this world was so preposterous, so over the top, I kind of believed it.  I mean, if the world is ending, why not hide out in a place that's like Disneyland times ten?  If you can afford it...  The characters were well drawn and distinct and I enjoyed trying to figure out what was going on alongside them.

So I'd recommend this one.

But don't just listen to me.  Here's the blurb:  

Welcome to the funnest spot around . . .

Jay is living his best life at Karloff Country, one of the world’s most famous resorts. He’s got his family, his crew, and an incredible after-school job at the property’s main theme park. Life isn’t so great for the rest of the world, but when people come here to vacation, it’s to get away from all that.

As things outside get worse, trouble starts seeping into Karloff. First, Jay’s friend Connie and her family disappear in the middle of the night and no one will talk about it. Then the richest and most powerful families start arriving, only... they aren’t leaving. Unknown to the employees, the resort has been selling shares in an end-of-the-world oasis. The best of the best at the end of days. And in order to deliver the top-notch customer service the wealthy clientele paid for, the employees will be at their total beck and call.

Whether they like it or not.

Yet Karloff Country didn’t count on Jay and his crew--and just how far they’ll go to find out the truth and save themselves. But what’s more dangerous: the monster you know in your home or the unknown nightmare outside the walls?

Weekly Goals 28-8-23

I have another stupidly busy week this week, so making any writing goals is silly.  Other than getting my next round of edits into my publisher.  As I suspected, more have come back...  Hopefully I can turn those around today.

I have one of those weeks where I'm out every night, so there's just no time for me to work on my own stuff. But maybe in the weekend...

What are your goals this week? 

Celebrate the Small Things 25-8-23

 

It's the end of the week, so it's time to Celebrate the Small Things...

What am I celebrating this week?

It's the weekend!

I got copyedits through on My Murder Year and have worked through those.  I suspect I'll get another round back because I rejected a few things that I'm pretty sure are in my publisher's style-guide.  I just find them really jarring to read and they ruin the flow of the writing.  So we'll see...

I have a pretty busy weekend planned, so again, not a lot of time to work on those edits to Guide Us.  I think I might have to take a day off work at some point to get through it.  But no point doing that until I know what I want to write.  Hopefully we'll get there soon.

The cats caught a bird yesterday and brought it inside.  It escaped in the kids' bathroom and both cats, plus one from down the street bailed it up in there.  Quite a commotion!  Not what I needed at 7:30 in the morning.  Luckily Lola caught it again and ran out of the bathroom.  I managed to get her to go outside and both the other cats followed.  She then dropped the bird and it flew away.  So it ended well, except maybe for  the cats.

What are you celebrating this week?

Books I've read: Someone is Always Watching

 

This was a weird one.  I really wanted to like it more, but I found it difficult to relate to any of the characters and none of them really felt 100% real to me.  Which may have been the point, on further reflection...

The book is set in a small community in which almost all the parents work for a single company.  Their kids all go to the same school and largely hang out with one another as a big friend group.  Blythe is a good girl, always doing what she should.  Unless Tucker is involved.  He seems to be able to encourage bad behaviour in her, and has been able to since they were small children.  Now they're banned form seeing one another and it's hard because Blythe thinks she might actually be in love with Tucker.

When one of their other friends, Gabrielle, appears to have a breakdown at school, things start getting weird.  Especially when the principal shows up dead and Gabrielle is covered in (his???) blood.  And then there are the weird dreams and memories of things that never happened that keep flashing through Blythe's head.  Is she going as crazy as they say Gabrielle is?  Or is something much more sinister going on?

It probably comes as no surprise that yes, it is something more sinister.  I won't say what though, because that would ruin the book for you....  

I found this a fast-paced read.  There was enough intrigue to keep things interesting and the pages turning.  I enjoyed the focus on memory and the unreliability of it.  I just wished the characters were a little more fleshed out.  They all seemed very privileged, living in this tight community where everyone's parents had a good, stable job and any major problem could be taken care of by someone at the company (which became a little sinister as things began spiralling for Blythe and her friends).

It's not the best book I've ever read, but it was entertaining enough and kept me turning the pages right until the end.

So I'd recommend it if you like thrillers and don't care too much if the characters have layers and depth to them.

But don't just listen to me.  Here's the blurb:

Blythe and her friends—Gabrielle, and brother and sister Tucker and Tanya—have always been a tight friend group, attending a local high school and falling in and out of love with each other. But an act of violence has caused a rift between Blythe and Tucker . . . and unexpected bursts of aggression and disturbing nightmares have started to become more frequent in their lives.

The strange happenings culminate in a shocking event at school: Gabrielle is found covered in blood in front of their deceased principal, with no memory of what happened.

Cracks in their friendship, as well as in their own memories, start appearing, threatening to expose long-forgotten secrets which could change the group’s lives forever. How can Blythe and her friends trust each other when they can’t even trust their own memories?

Weekly Goals 20-8-23

 Work is so busy at the moment it's hard to make and really substantial goals.  I just don't have the time or energy to achieve them.  I kind of knew this was going to happen so I'm even more frustrated with myself that I didn't get through all the revisions on Guide Us before I went away on holiday. Especially since I have a book coming out in early October and am going to have to switch to promo-mode for that soon.  I probably should have started that now, to be honest...

Why aren't there extra hours in the week?  Or an extra day, just for getting your own shit done.  Would be so useful.

So this week I'm going to continue working through Guide Us to make sure the changes I already made are well bedded in.  I'm hoping this might help me to figure out what I need to write in those extra two chapters I think I need toward the end...

What are your goals this week?

Celebrate the Small Things 18-8-23

 

It's the end of the week, so it's time to Celebrate the Small Things...

What am I celebrating this week?

It's the weekend!

And boy do I need it!  This week has been nuts.  I threw my back out on Monday (tying my shoe - yeah, I'm getting old), so that wasn't a great start to the week.  It's feeling much better now, but still a little twingey, so I'll be taking things easy for a while.

Work has been super busy and it doesn't look like it's going to calm down much in the near future.  And between my brain travelling at a million miles an hour trying to get through everything I need to do and my back hurting, I haven't slept a lot this week.

So the weekend is very welcome.  I'm going to curb my movie withdrawal symptoms and catch up with some of the mainstream films I missed during the Festival, starting with Barbie and Oppenheimer.  My partner has a client working here all weekend, so it's probably a good idea for me to get out of the house.

I'm working through Guide Us, hoping the changes I made are working.  I'm not hating them so far, although I am wondering if there may be too many party scenes.  Is it too much to have three parties?  I mean, high school kids would probably go to at least three parties in a six-month period, right?  And each is for a different purpose - one is a general rager, one a birthday party for the twins and one the cast party at the end of a show.

What are you celebrating this week?

Books I've Read: Wanderers

 

This is a LOOONG book.  Long enough I had real trouble holding it to read in the bath.  It kind of reminded me a lot of The Stand, but more contemporary.  Very much more contemporary.  Eerily so, to be honest.  This book was published in 2019, so was written well before COVID first reared its ugly little head, yet reading it now, you'd never believe the author hadn't already lived through 2020.  Does Chuck Wendig have a time machine?  An uncanny psychic brain?  Access to his own invention, Black Swan?  

I don't know.  But he sure got a lot of stuff right.

The book starts with a teenage girl, Shana, finding her sister, Nessie,  in the throes of a mysterious affliction.  She walks, seeming without purpose, and can't be stopped.  If she's grabbed, or detained or in any way thwarted in her progress, her temperature rises and she starts swelling.  Obviously Shana lets go.

Soon another walker joins Nessie. The another and another.  Every couple of hours a new one joins what becomes known eventually as "the flock".  Police are called, but when they try to detain one of the walkers, he basically explodes.

Then the medics are called in.  The disease control specialists.  Is this some new plague?  Aided by a seemingly sentient computer called Black Swan, Dr. Benjy Ray gets called in to help.  An infectious disease expert, he's been out of a job for a while after falsifying some data during a previous case.  He's only allowed back in now because for some reason, the AI wants him and only him.

The book wanders with the flock and the disease experts as they traverse the country, following the increasingly large crowd to an unknown destination.  Meanwhile, a small-town priest tries to make sense of what is going on through his own lens and winds up capturing the attention of some white suprematists who are using this strange plague to further their own agenda.

I won't spoil the book for you by telling you exactly what happens, but I found it odd how neatly the plot captured so much about the world COVID left us with.  The way the world has become so divisive.  The growing power of these terrifying right-wing organisations with their guns and sense of superiority.  The fear of disease and attendant fear of other people.  The government's seeming unwillingness to do something before it was too late.

Like I said, did the author travel through time?

I enjoyed this book, even though I felt like it meandered a bit.  I didn't mind that though because it really captured the daily boredom of following something like this.  The doggedness of wanting to know what's going on, but being unable to make sense of any of it.  The way humanity can be at both its best and its worst simultaneously.

So I'd recommend it.  

But don't just listen to me.  Here's the blurb:

Shana wakes up one morning to discover her little sister in the grip of a strange malady. She appears to be sleepwalking. She cannot talk and cannot be woken up. And she is heading with inexorable determination to a destination that only she knows. But Shana and her sister are not alone. Soon they are joined by a flock of sleepwalkers from across America, on the same mysterious journey. And like Shana, there are other "shepherds" who follow the flock to protect their friends and family on the long dark road ahead.

For as the sleepwalking phenomenon awakens terror and violence in America, the real danger may not be the epidemic but the fear of it. With society collapsing all around them--and an ultraviolent militia threatening to exterminate them--the fate of the sleepwalkers depends on unraveling the mystery behind the epidemic. The terrifying secret will either tear the nation apart--or bring the survivors together to remake a shattered world.