Look how much fire I'm not on

[rivkat]

This semester, I'm still not late on anything, just vaguely one step ahead of all my obligations, and it feels like victory. Someday I will even write fiction again.

Incredibly well written story about fraternities that is also about law. Warning for white men behaving badly, exactly as you’d expect. Intro:

One warm spring night in 2011, a young man named Travis Hughes stood on the back deck of the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity house at Marshall University, in West Virginia, and was struck by what seemed to him—under the influence of powerful inebriants, not least among them the clear ether of youth itself—to be an excellent idea: he would shove a bottle rocket up his ass and blast it into the sweet night air. And perhaps it was an excellent idea. What was not an excellent idea, however, was to misjudge the relative tightness of a 20-year-old sphincter and the propulsive reliability of a 20-cent bottle rocket. What followed ignition was not the bright report of a successful blastoff, but the muffled thud of fire in the hole.

Also on the deck, and also in the thrall of the night’s pleasures, was one Louis Helmburg III, an education major and ace benchwarmer for the Thundering Herd baseball team. His response to the proposed launch was the obvious one: he reportedly whipped out his cellphone to record it on video, which would turn out to be yet another of the night’s seemingly excellent but ultimately misguided ideas. When the bottle rocket exploded in Hughes’s rectum, Helmburg was seized by the kind of battlefield panic that has claimed brave men from outfits far more illustrious than even the Thundering Herd. Terrified, he staggered away from the human bomb and fell off the deck. Fortunately for him, and adding to the Chaplinesque aspect of the night’s miseries, the deck was no more than four feet off the ground, but such was the urgency of his escape that he managed to get himself wedged between the structure and an air-conditioning unit, sustaining injuries that would require medical attention, cut short his baseball season, and—in the fullness of time—pit him against the mighty forces of the Alpha Tau Omega national organization, which had been waiting for him.

It takes a certain kind of personal-injury lawyer to look at the facts of this glittering night and wrest from them a plausible plaintiff and defendant, unless it were possible for Travis Hughes to be sued by his own anus. But the fraternity lawsuit is a lucrative mini-segment of the personal-injury business, and if ever there was a deck that ought to have had a railing, it was the one that served as a nighttime think tank and party-idea testing ground for the brain trust of the Theta Omicron Chapter of Alpha Tau Omega and its honored guests—including these two knuckleheads, who didn’t even belong to the fraternity. Moreover, the building codes of Huntington, West Virginia, are unambiguous on the necessity of railings on elevated decks. Whether Helmburg stumbled in reaction to an exploding party guest or to the Second Coming of Jesus Christ is immaterial; there should have been a railing to catch him.

Holly Black, The Coldest Girl in Coldtown: Vampires are real, and they are partially contained in cities, along with people who are Cold (bitten but not yet turned, who will only turn if they drink human blood). It’s possible to return from being Cold, but extremely difficult because blood is so tempting. Bite victims are supposed to go to a Coldtown, but it’s very hard to get out even if they wait out being Cold. Tana, who survived a childhood attack by her Cold mother, finds herself nearly the sole survivor of a massacre—along with her ex-boyfriend (now Cold and hungry) and a strangely compelling vampire. Plenty of fun, though you have to be willing to accept a fair amount of slaughter for that fun.

Margaret Ronald, Soul Hunt: Evie Scelan, the Hound who can find anything by scent, is back. She’s got a steady boyfriend with only a teeny rage problem, a date with the Wild Hunt to pay back the insult she dealt its members, and weird sudden weaknesses dragging her down. When she figures out what it was that she unwittingly gave a guardian spirit to save her now-boyfriend’s life, her troubles should lessen—but there’s kind of a god in town, bringing problems of its own. I think there are no more of these books coming, but this ends in a pretty good place, so I can be satisfied with Evie’s story.

Joe Hill, NOS4A2: As someone who went into the same field as her father, I’m well aware of the sometimes tough choices you face with respect to your own identity (as well as the not inconsiderable insider advantages). In this, a novel about a young woman with the power to travel places using a bridge she creates with her mind, and the child-destroying vampire whom she encounters as a girl and then years again as a mother, Hill has leaned hard into writing the kind of horror that Stephen King might have written. King’s True Knot even shows up, as a mention. This book has all the elements one expects from the typical King novel: a superpower with costs; an alcoholic parent and the damage that does to a child even though the parent really does love the child; bad guys of pure evil; supposedly jolly things turned gruesome; sexual abuse (not explicit, but stomach-turning). I was impelled to keep reading until the end, but there were points when I had to stop because getting there was so upsetting. If you like King, you might like this … or you might find it like Diet Pepsi when you wanted Diet Coke.