For those of you who may be wondering why I haven’t posted in a while: recently I was forced to quit a job I’d held for almost ten years for a company I’d been employed by for the better part of two decades. I have a new job now, but I’ve been training for the past few weeks and haven’t had time for anything. The training should be over by the end of next week and at that time I should be able to get my snarkings back on track.
Of course, it didn’t hurt that the next chapter I was snarking was the worst chapter in the entire series so far and is dedicated to nothing but exalting Rennie Christ Superstar and all her works and exulting in her victories over the Lacing family.
Anyway, I do apologize for the break in posting and will be reporting back from the snark trenches at the earliest possible opportunity. See you soon!
Kennealy-Morrison pads about two pages with filler regarding how Rennie got back to the motel and what she did after she got there and Elk Bannerman makes an appearance with a telephone in a briefcase that causes her to go on a reference spree name-checking The Man from U.N.C.L.E.and Illya Kuryakin before calling home to check on Turk. You know, the “co-protagonist” of the series.
So she’s in bed musing about what’s going on with Ned and whether she should try to get him a lawyer. So just because Marcus told her she needed to do it, she completely disregarded it? How mature. And she notes she isn’t going to go back to the festival because Jefferson Airplane isn’t playing for hours, so fuck the bands that are. How does she keep her job when she slacks off like this? Oh yeah, she includes her boss among the ranks of her worshippers/simps.
And now she finally remembers Ned has a wife, Demelza Poldark-Raven, whom she hasn’t even spoken to since her husband got—arrested? They haven’t said that yet, so what’s the problem? If Ned weren’t a complete moron in addition to being an asshole, he would have lawyered up himself, without his casual starfucker’s assistance.
Anyway, Rennie wants to go comfort Demelza Poldark and frames this to herself as a chance to be “helpful.” I see it as a way for her to make sure she’s seen being helpful and so gets attention and sympathy by proxy.
The Soncartneys are there, of course, even though I don’t remember being told that Graypaul and Pruelinda were friends with the Ravens, but Rennie needs to have her most famous, most important friends seeing her do something nice for someone else. Graypaul opens the door and “pulled her unceremoniously inside with an air of passionate relief.” Boy, sounds like he’s about to start fucking her, doesn’t it?
Demelza Poldark-Raven has turned into quite the delicate female in the hours since her husband got—arrested? I’m not sure. Graypaul describes this as “the local plod took Ned off,” so I can’t tell whether he’s actually been arrested. You know what could have helped with that? An editor!
Anyway, Demelza’s had a powerful attack of the vapors since then, as described by our Paul McCartney analogue.
…all she does is weep and lie there catatonically, and who can blame her.
Because the best thing to do when your man is hauled down to the police station is completely fall apart and force your friends to fuss over you rather than assist your husband. Otherwise, how can you be the center of attention?
Rennie spends a couple of paragraphs running down the room as not being worthy of the fame and power and glory of the Soncartneys, like the starfucker she is. Pruelinda is there and is also very glad to see Rennie, for what reason I’m not sure. She hasn’t shown any ability to calm down hysterical people in the past except by drugging them (Pamina in California Screamin’ and Pepper in A Hard Slay’s Night). But she’s Queen Emma Peel so I’m sure everything will work out.
So Demelza Poldark-Raven looks like shit and Rennie calls her by a couple of Welsh endearments and that’s all it takes for her to start crying in Rennie’s arms, which is so touching that it makes the Soncartneys cry as well.
Demelza decides that Rennie’s going to get Ned off the hook for killing Amander Evans—wow, that catatonia didn’t last long—and Rennie promises he’ll be home by lunch. Since Rennie is always right, I’m sure he will be. And she continues playing to her strengths by dropping “a ten-milligram Valium in a glass of water” and telling Demelza to drink it. When she does this, she’s talking to the other woman like she’s a child and calling her“a good little daffodil.” I’d use my psychotic break to beat the shit out of her for that, I can tell you.
Like the child she’s being treated as, Demelza wants to be sung to sleep. Rennie thinks Graypaul and Pruelinda should handle this, but they don’t want to, so Rennie gets to sing. So she’ll be replacing Niles Clay as the lead singer of Lionheart at some point so she can be the center of attention everywhere all the time?
And she’s playing the guitar too, you guys! I thought she played the piano, like she did in the previous book, but our protagonist is multi-talented. Rennie sings a folk song called “Melora” that she learned in college, presumably in her Journalism Ethics class for all the attention she seems to have paid, and her voice has become “a quite pretty soprano” even if not professional quality. I seem to recall the writer saying something less complimentary about Rennie’s voice in an earlier book, but I don’t remember what so I can’t call it out as a retcon. Plus, her guitar playing is “charmingly amateur.” It probably sounded like a cat being fed through a meat grinder, but moving on.
In addition to “Melora,” she does what’s described as an old Welsh lullaby called “Ar Hyd Y Nos.” Since Demelza’s a child, this puts her right to sleep. I do not like the infantilizing of women in this series, in particular Pamina Potter and Demelza Poldark-Raven. It reeks of internalized misogyny because you can tell this is the way the writer thinks a good, though lesser, woman (who isn’t Queen Emma Peel) should handle the matter of her husband’s death/arrest. It sure isn’t the way that a grown woman like Marjorie Lacing would handle it.
Now the Soncartneys are all in awe of Rennie’s singing and want her to become a professional, at which she demurs like a good narcissist to be persuaded and coaxed. They oblige with half a page of fulsome praise, and somehow Graypaul knows that Rennie’s first name is Ravenna. How the hell would he know? He was never told!
But she tries to make them promise not to tell Turk she can sing but they don’t. She has a very arch speech about how she learned to play that’s quite annoying and then the plot shoves its way back in when Rennie reveals to the Soncartneys that Ned found Amander and that’s why he’s “been brought in.” So is this trick arrested or not? This has become vexing.
For whatever reason Pruelinda doesn’t think Demelza knows Ned’s in the clutches of the cops, but then why would she have fallen apart like this? Is the writer paying attention to the words that emerge on her computer screen?
Rennie also believes that Demelza doesn’t know, which again leaves no reason for her behavior, and promises to have more security from War God Cherry Blossom’s firm put on the door. Who’s paying for that shit anyway?
And because we’re doing a soft reboot of California Screamin’, Rennie encounters Female Jimi Hendrix as soon as she steps out of the room. Like the charmless creep she is, she gets Female Jimi Hendrix to stay with the drugged and sleeping child-Demelza, as the Soncartneys are apparently as useless as tits on a bull. And how she does it is perfectly in character.
…Rennie explained hastily, and though she would never have been so crass as to remind Sunny that Miss Silver owed Miss Stride big-time for that little episode in San Francisco with Ro Savarkin, Sunny knew very well what was right and due, and instantly offered to spend the rest of the night companioning Demelza.
Female Jimi Hendrix doesn’t owe her jack shit for Ro Savarkin. Ro Savarkin owes her for Ro Savarkin. Female Jimi might just owe her for taking out Clovis Franjo, who planned to make her a drug runner, but the writer never bothered explaining whether Rennie had told her about this. But again we see Rennie’s main motivation for any good she does: to benefit herself.
Because Female Jimi Hendrix is now a child as well, Rennie “[got] her settled comfortably on the other bed in Melza’s room” and another bruiser of War God Cherry Blossom’s shows up, with a name that’s possibly stupider than his boss’s. This poor bastard’s name is Car Darch. I thought this was an anagram but then I Googled it and found out it’s a literary flex on the author’s part. And Car Darch is a woman in Tess of the D’Urbervilles, by the way.
So Rennie tells this guy to sit down and guard somebody and he does it for no particular reason other than Rennie is the living Queen Emma Peel.
The next section opens with her going back to Woodstock and a bunch of name-dropping, specifically of Sly & the Family Stone, John Sebastian, and the Who. Rennie recaps in summary to Mary Prax and we get a roll-call reference to the previous books and non-canonical murders in the series. However, either she or the writer has forgotten a few of them. The first four books are referenced, but also Airplane House (the murder that took place while Jefferson Airplane was touring with the Doors in Europe, which is also the tour during which Grace Slick claimed in her autobiography that she slept with Jim Morrison), Golden Gate Park (which I assume is the Human Be-In), the Avalon Ballroom, and Hyde Park (which I can only assume is the murder at Brian Jones’s funeral). The murders Kennealy-Morrison and her characters forgot about were at the Winterland and the Matrix.
Why am I paying closer attention to the series than the writer did?
Rennie exposes her transactional view of relationships when she lets Mary Prax know that she has to give Baron Hollywood Hogan “something really big” to balance out her use of his plane and pilot to get Turk back to New York City. She has solving the murders in mind, which will work out as she’s the author’s self-insert.
For once, Mary Prax seems to recall her past history with being busted for murders she didn’t commit, but that’s in the rearview pretty quickly so we can get back to Rennie.
Although she’s “heartsick about Ned,” she still enjoys the sight of Pete Townshend hitting Abbie Hoffman in the head with a guitar, as it’s the kind of violence that resonates with her:
…for being an insufferable jerk, and oh, how many others, including herself, had dearly longed to do the same, and had cheered to see it…
There is no fucking way that Rennie Stride knows Abbie Hoffman. She’d have to give a damn about one cause or another to have made his acquaintance, and we all know Rennie cares about nothing but herself and her own aggrandizement. So I’m calling bullshit on this.
We get a brief moment of Jefferson Airplane getting ready to play at dawn, which is called out as a meaningful moment for the author in her memoir, but here we just get that it’s happening before the section ends. Any description of the performance would pull focus from Rennie, and we can’t have that.
The next section reintroduces Belinda Melbourne, one of the author’s two self-inserts from the second book. We get the information that Jefferson Airplane played thirteen songs, coming in second to Lionheart for the length of their set, and the crowd danced but I can’t tell whether the performance was any good. Later she runs them down as “[r]agged, sloppy, and nowhere near what they can really do.”
Anyway, Belinda begs a ride off Rennie back to Liberty (the town where the motel is) and also cadges a room for the day out of her, with the author careful to say Rennie “agreed happily.”
On the drive to the motel, Belinda hems and haws and beats around the bush about something until she finally admits she wants to be fixed up with someone and Rennie responds in the most artificial, self-consciously written manner possible.
“Who? Speak and be rewarded. If it lies at all within my power, and let me tell you my powers are considerable, I shall make it happen.”
No human being ever said anything like that. If you remove the “let me tell you” from what she said, it sounds like it could be straight out of The Sword and the Sorcerer. I still can’t understand why she didn’t continue with the Keltiad (other than the book of short stories) unless it was an issue about the rights to the property with HarperCollins. In other words, Kennealy-Morrison is shit with dialogue that isn’t subpar sword-and-sorcery.
Belinda finally ‘fesses up that she wants to bang Diego Hildalgo, the Jim Morrison analogue that we first met at Monterey Pop. Diego is also married, and Rennie spent quite a bit of time running down his wife in chapter 6. And Belinda also has a boyfriend named Hacker Bennett who’s a political reporter.
What’s Rennie’s response to this? I mean, we already know she wants to do this, but how does she express this to her “friend?”
“I told Turk ages ago that I was going to fix you up with Diego, when you finally dumped that idiot Hacker and when Diego finally decided he was ready for a real woman and dumped that gold-digging druggie tramp.”
That’s his wife, Rennie. In chapter 6 you said he was married to Portiapam. It’s not a simple matter of “dumping” her. There’s this thing called divorce that you were thinking about before Turk reminded you it was too declassee for his noble family and you rerouted into an annulment. And why is Hacker an “idiot” all of a sudden? In the two appearances he’s made in this series, Rennie’s had no feelings about him one way or the other. And have you noticed how her go-to insult is about the lack of intelligence of the person she’s insulting?
Belinda wonders if Diego Morrison is available and Patricia swears he is—whoops, I mean Rennie, with some more gratuitous insulting of Portiapam, whom she isn’t even bothering to give a name to here.
…he tossed the tramp out on her bony butt a month ago and hasn’t been with anyone since—except for the groupies, of course, but as you know they don’t count.
She then goes on to say that Diego Morrison paid Portiapam a bunch of money to leave, which still isn’t a divorce so it’s not nearly as over as she depicts it. She asks Belinda if she’s available and Belinda goes on a rant about Hacker Bennett nailing her shoes to the floor so she couldn’t leave and they are never ever ever getting back together. This is not supported in any way by anything we know about Hacker from the text. This is just poor writing.
Belinda starts to ask about Turk and Rennie cuts her off while knowing exactly what she was about to ask, then again when Belinda starts to ask about her. There’s an embarrassing attempt to introduce a ticking clock when Rennie says she’s running out of time, presumably to solve the murders, but swears that she will.
And—chapter! The internalized misogyny and slut-shaming are making a nice comeback. There’s still nothing in this chapter that couldn’t have been cut to make room for some plot-related action, but maybe Kennealy-Morrison was trying to make a word count. She’s still a better technical writer than Lori Foster, but that doesn’t make her good. I can’t believe this woman was once a professional writer.
Next time, chapter 16, in which Rennie flings insults and threats at Marcus Dorner, as is tradition, and Ned and Demelza Poldark have some presumably pseudo-comedic moments, and Ned tells the story of Amander, who is of course slutty as Rennie hates her.
The day before Woodstock starts is gorgeous, if described in terms that aren’t the most original, and Rennie is picking up Turk and Mary Prax to drive up to the festival in a rented car, just like when she and Mary Prax and their two casual fucks, Chet Galvin and Juha Vasso, drove to Monterey Pop in a station wagon that Rennie rented because she would never risk her precious “wine-red Corvette” to the unwashed masses at the festival. This time it’s a “dark-blue Mustang” and we get some local color about the neighborhood where Turk and Rennie live. Of course, since it’s their chosen abode, it’s perfect in every way.
…leafy old oaks and sycamores…lined their surprisingly Londonesque street: the prettiest block in the East Village—East Tenth just west of Second Avenue, where it met Stuyvesant Street across from the lovely and historic St. Mark’s-in-the-Bouwerie Church.
So we get their address again, and then Rennie goes on to repeat the story about Turk buying the three brownstones because the one was too small and the writer must think the readers have short-term amnesia. Or maybe the book wasn’t edited to remove the reptetition. One of these, I think.
Turk and Mary Prax come out of the brownstone(s) and we find out Rennie has decreed they can only have one piece of luggage each. And she’s made costumes for both of them to wear at Woodstock. What horrors of fashion lie in wait for us…
And everyone’s acting like a child again, because Turk and Mary Prax were racing to the car and Turk calls shotgun. How would he even know to do that? He’s British! Is that even a British custom? Both Turk and Rennie seems to have shifting nationalities, depending on what’s required by the plot. And I am so tired of their relentless childishness.
After they start driving, Kennealy-Morrison proves she is familiar enough with the streets in the East Village to tell us how to get to the New York State Thruway from their starting point. Notice we didn’t get this level of driving detail in California Screamin’. Then there’s a page and a half about how Rennie knows the route, which amount to her commuting from her family home in the Bronx to Cornell, and there’s some detail about the route and the river and a bunch of stuff we don’t actually give a crap about. While they’re on the way, they hear stories on the radio about the traffic jam on the New York State Thruway and stop at a place called the Red Apple Rest in the town of Tuxedo, where Turk likes the food. And, since Rennie’s narcissism hasn’t been indulged since the last chapter, Turk notes,
“Having the entire restaurant turn around and pause, with laden forks halfway to their slack, gaping mouths, to stare at us as we came in.”
Maybe they thought you were going to rob the place.
“We would have gotten less attention had we entered riding on dragons.”
Seriously, does the writer ever get tired of telling us just how super-duper-extra-special-with-cherries-on-top her self-insert is? This is one reason why I don’t think they would have moved to New York City if Rennie had anything to say about it—New Yorkers tend to be blasé about celebrities, and not enough attention would be paid to Rennie.
And then we get a really funny remark from Rennie about how she found the attention “legitimately…creepy and unsettling.” Oh, please, you fame-sucking abomination, you probably had a massive orgasm inside the door and that’s what they were staring at. And the fact that she had to say that she “legitimately” had these emotions about it indicates she’s lying.
That is followed by a line that is not attributed to anyone; I think it’s Turk, but I can’t be sure because everyone sounds like Rennie all the time. It’s a bit of rural-phobic observation about how they managed to avoid the pitchforks and torches of the villagers. Who did nothing to them but stare, which made Rennie fall down convulsing with pleasure on the black-and-white linoleum floor and the breakfast crowd wonder if she needed a doctor but they minded their business. Mary Prax follows up this bit of unattributed speech by observing that it was probably their long hair, along with the tight jeans and bralessness of the two girls (they have not the maturity of women). So then Rennie’s happy because they managed to shock the squares.
The next section has some repetition that I remember from her memoir, including her referring to the traffic jam on the Thruway as a “vast parking lot” and Rennie “slewing her way out the nearest exit like a rally driver,” although in the memoir Patricia’s friend who was driving actually did that, but the rally driver reference was the same. There’s an unoriginal joke about a sign that I’m not repeating, and of course our Queen Emma Peel turns into the bestest driver ever, you guys.
Then she stops at a place called Kaplan’s to buy enough food for a battalion, even though Turk’s said he wants to leave on Friday night. What do you want to bet that the plot will stop him in his tracks?
Turns out they have motel rooms at a “rather utilitarian hostelry” in the town of Liberty, along with everyone else who’s playing and we get some of Rennie’s trademark name drops: “the Airplane, the Who, the Band, the Dead, Crosby, Stills and Nash…” There are also a bunch of PA announcements that we’re told are pranks that Rennie finds hilarious, but my mileage varies, and she has a very brief flashback to the Highlands Inn and Monterey Pop.
Rennie thinks the room isn’t grand enough for her, but Turk, as an actual musician who has toured, tells her this isn’t nearly as bad as it could be. And it definitely isn’t because the room has a fridge that they didn’t have to pay extra for. In 1969. They drop off their stuff in the rooms, have a drink at the motel bar, then head for the actual festival. We get some detail about the countryside and nearby towns—yeah, you can tell Kennealy-Morrison is writing from first-hand experience in this book—and for the second time (the first was at the motel but I didn’t mention it) Rennie mentions the possible need for a “speedy getaway.” No wonder the breakfast crowd at the Red Apple Rest thought they were going to rob the place.
As they get closer to the festival sight, they start seeing a bunch of abandoned cars because the occupants couldn’t get any closer and decided to walk—there’s also a passing reference to the fact that Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead had to do that as well—but because Rennie is Queen Emma Peel,
…perhaps the god of festivals was with her, as a bit of karmic reward for what she had endured at Monterey, for Rennie had no trouble driving in, and it was with a feeling of proud accomplishment that she turned off 17B at last onto a farm lane called Hurd Road, which led through woodland and fields to the festival site itself.
It never fails to amaze me how thorough the author is in her efforts to protect her self-insert from the smallest inconvenience, even getting stuck on the road because of traffic conditions. And what did she endure at Monterey, anyhow? An acquaintance of hers got killed and she unwittingly had sex with a murderer because she’s not as smart as she thinks she is. And what about the karmic reward she earned for manipulating Jacinta O’Malley into murdering Amethyst in the third book, which the narrative will never admit happened? Yeah, karma’s only a bitch when you don’t have a writer to run interference for you.
Then she thinks, Yay for me!
People are trying to hitchhike and Rennie won’t pick them up because the car is full (there’s one seat if you put the luggage in the trunk) and they give her the finger. And she thinks that’s “ungroovy.” You hate to see it.
Kennealy-Morrison actually wrote this better in her memoir, with more sympathy for the festival crowd, who were presumably the target audience for her book, but for this series they can go fuck themselves with rusty chainsaws because:
…more importantly, [the car] was full of rock stars, and Rennie wasn’t about to risk Turk’s and Prax’s privacy or indeed safety by picking up a weary stoned urchin or two.
So you admit there’s room for at least two more people in the car, huh? So you lied about it being full, then.
Besides, the exercise would do the little brats good—though when some of them leaped onto the hood of the car, thinking to ride in triumph into the site as if perched on a Mardi Gras float, she heartlessly sped up a bit and then braked, unceremoniously dislodging them. Crude, but effective, and no one got hurt.
No thanks to you, you callous privileged bitch! There is an equivalent scene in her memoir, without people jumping on the car, where she and her friend are driving through the crowd and the people are parting, and the image that Kennealy-Morrison uses there is “oil-rich Bedouin bimbos,” which indicates that in that book she was aware of her privilege and at least paying lip service to being bothered by it, but also presenting herself as special for having a moral conundrum about it.
I do believe that nobody got hurt, if only because if anyone had the writer would have forced them to apologize to Rennie for having the temerity to be injured by her queenly shenanigans. Just in case I haven’t said this for a while, the way you get readers to like and sympathize with a character is to have them treat people with consideration and overcome obstacles. Rennie needs to have her life blown up the way Harry Dresden had his blown up in Changes, but really it’s too late for even that to humanize her.
After that there’s about a page and a half of detail about the scenery and goings-on she’s witnessing and she has an exultant mental speech about the crowd in which she thinks they are people like her (I guess including the ones she tried to kill earlier for the crime of getting on her car) and they “all oppose that evil damn Moloch war that’s eating up so many of us who aren’t as fortunate as we here are, grinding them up in iron jaws, despite our best efforts to get them home…”
This is the first mention of the Vietnam War in this series, despite the fact that it was already well-established in 1966, when the first book started, and is one of its bigger examples of hypocrisy. Rennie, you have never lifted one well-manicured queenly finger to help even one single person escape that meat grinder. You have never marched with a sign, never taken part in a sit-in, and never had your head split open by a policeman’s nightstick. And it’s not just that you don’t care about the war; you don’t care about the civil rights movement, or feminism except as you can use it to benefit yourself and pull the ladder up behind you. You don’t give one single solitary shit about anything outside your rock world bubble—oh, pardon me, your “rockerverse” bubble of champagne and drugs and sex and reflected fame. You have all the depth of a mud puddle. Despite the author’s best efforts to make us think you concern yourself with things other than money and material possessions and social status, in other words, Rennie, you’re shallow.
That yurt structure from the prologue is the performer’s pavilion, and Mary Prax name-checks someone called Chip Monck, who presumably is that guy with no shirt on that we also met in the prologue. Then Rennie makes a maybe-joke about staying at the motel and writing her stories from there, as if to underline how much she doesn’t like her job, and Turk shuts that down. Good for him.
The next section begins with our Gruesome Threesome splitting up and Rennie obtaining a performer’s pass for the pavilion the same way that Kennealy-Morrison did in real life. Wow, I didn’t expect her to do this much cribbing from her actual life. However, she makes sure to tell us that Rennie got her press pass upgraded by her usual name-dropping, with Turk and Baron Hollywood Hogan being her cudgels this time, as nobody at Woodstock would respond to her calling herself Mrs. Stephen Lacing.
She and Mary Prax meet up and Rennie expresses—well, her emotions here aren’t clearly expressed, but she seems to be unsettled because her family spent a lot of time in the area and she isn’t able to compartmentalize her current life and her “very Turk-centric future.” There’s a little more vague foreshadowing that doesn’t amount to anything yet.
And—chapter! I wonder if anyone at all told Kennealy-Morrison what a bitch Rennie is, and that it’s not a good idea to make your self-insert character such a callous, greedy, grasping, hypocritical lump of cardboard as that might cause people to draw conclusions about you. Somehow I doubt it.
We’re still stuck in the wheel-spinning section of the narrative. To give credit where it’s due, though, the descriptions of the area are better than what we got in California Screamin’, although the festivalgoers don’t seem to warrant that kind of loving detail and attention, possibly because they’re so far beneath Rennie she can almost run them over with her car and expect to experience no consequences. Then again, when has Rennie ever had to deal with any consequences of her own actions?
Next time, chapter 6, in which Belinda Melbourne turns up again, as does Diego Hidalgo (the Jim Morrison analogue that somehow isn’t fucking Rennie), and a guy drops dead for no reason. I guess that’s the first murder? And some more stupidly named people appear.
So we’re just finishing up A Hard Slay’s Night, the fourth book of the Rock & Roll Murders: Rennie Stride Mysteries. The post for Chapter 25 is complete and will be posted tomorrow. I’m working on the post for Chapter 26, which should be posted on Saturday, and the post for the epilogue will be posted either Sunday or Tuesday, depending on when it’s ready to go, so this book will be thoroughly snarked by next week.
The fifth book in the series is Go Ask Malice, which should begin on either January 31 or February 2. If I stick to the three-times-a-week posting schedule, it should be completed by the end of March. Scareway to Heaven, the sixth book in the series and the longest one at 462 pages, should begin at the start of April and end at the beginning of June. The seventh book in the series is Daydream Bereaver, which we should begin at the start of June and end around the second week of August. The eighth book in the series, Ruby Gruesday, was never published in full and only exists as a fragment consisting of the prologue and first chapter as a teaser at the end of Daydream Bereaver. That should take a week, so the entire series should be finished by the third week of August.
As I said earlier, this series took so much out of me that I’m only doing standalone books after this for a while. The next snark I’m doing after the Kennealy-Morrison series is Handbook for Mortals by Lani Sarem, as my entry for the young adult genre. I was just going to do a standalone piece about the use and misuse of magic, but as long as I bought it, I might as well go for a full-length snark. I should start posting for this book around the end of August and should finish around the second week of October.
After that, I’ve chosen an old-school Harlequin romance (the romance genre, naturally) that traumatized me when I first read it at the age of twelve. It’s called The Impossible Boss and was written by an author named Jane Corrie that I have no other information about. I should start this around mid-October. It’s a very short book (fourteen chapters and 187 pages), so it should be finished by the third week in November. For this book, I’m issuing a blanket content warning for psychological abuse.
For the last book of 2023, I’m looking at Laurell K. Hamilton’s first novel, Nightseer, as my entry in the high-fantasy genre. From what I’ve read about it, it seems to be the story of a Dungeons & Dragons character she played once, although I can’t say that for sure. Because of the time I had with Rennie Stride and some things I didn’t remember being in the Merry Gentry series, I will not be snarking that series. The start date for snarking this book is around November 21 and should be finished by the end of the year.
Some other future snark candidates I’m looking at are Stephenie Meyer’s The Chemist, Sarah by JT Leroy, and The Lost Goddess by Tom Knox. I may do the book Life Expectancy by Dean Koontz. The Caitlin Kittredge Nocturne City series is still around, but I won’t be touching that for a long while, if ever.
Christmas morning starts out the chapter, with Rennie coming downstairs at the start of buffet brunch. This is a meal that wasn’t mentioned in the stomach-churning list of meals that started out chapter 4, where a buffet breakfast was listed but not a buffet bunch. How many meals does the writer think English people eat? This also coincides with the gift-giving, natch. I envision Rennie murdering everyone because nobody got her jewels.
She sits with Mary Prax and War God Cherry Blossom, who apparently are back together for no reason, and has gotten her grab-bag presents before “she fossicked under the tree for her presents from Prue and Gray, and Prax, and Ned and Melza, and Eilish and a few other guests…” and I have a Lori Foster Servant series flashback with the word “fossick,” which Merriam-Webster defines as “to search about,” and cites it as primarily an Australian or New Zealand usage. If so, why the hell is Rennie Stride from the Bronx using it?
Then she has the thought “Food first, prezzies later.” Stop talking like a child! This is another example of how characters can’t have different voices—Mary Prax was the first one to say “prezzies” and sound like a six-year-old, and now Rennie does it. And this was not common usage at the time.
Watching her eat is boring as shit, and the writer dispenses with that quickly in order to catalogue her haul from the gifts she’s been given, including but not limited to:
…a solid-silver Georgian pincushion in the shape of a swan, its velvet pad bearing a dozen antique jeweled stickpins, a tiny diamond star brooch from Gray and a big topaz ring from Prax, together with a crocheted leather shawl and a rose-gold bangle from the grab-bag…
I think the writer means straight pins instead of stickpins above, as those are two different things. Plus, solid-silver and grab-bag don’t need to be hyphenated. But the pincushion from Pruelinda was a thoughtful gift for someone who was Mary Prax’s plus one and got invited as an afterthought. Graypaul definitely spotted the jewel lust at first sight and thought a “tiny” diamond was the least he could offer.
There’s some “boasting” on Rennie’s part about Pruelinda’s gift and we find out Mary Prax got something not as cool, which Rennie tells her to give back if she doesn’t like it, and Mary Prax responds like this.
“No, no, mine, mine!”
Mary Prax sounds extraordinarily childish in this book. I mean, neither she nor Rennie had an ounce of maturity to the point where I refused to call them women, but she seems to have been knocked back to the age of six by the experience of transatlantic travel. But she does make a good point that the silver swan pincushion could be a shot at Rennie because she’s a rock critic. Wait a minute, don’t you mean “queen of more general pop-culture content,” Mary Prax? Stan Hirsh is the rock critic now and most likely won’t show up in this book.
Then Rennie sees that Turk left a present for her and the section ends without her opening it, presumably to add suspense. Was there ever any doubt that King Gary Stu would give Queen Mary Sue the jewels she so covets?
The Boxing Day fox hunt starts out the next section, with Rennie of course being an Olympic-class horseback rider because she’s been riding since she was little and gets Pruelinda’s horse from the stables, since the lady of the manor is sitting out the hunt, along with her husband and Saccharine Shootingwoods, to cater to the guests who’ve committed the sin of not fox hunting. And I was right in the last section when I thought Mary Prax and War God Cherry Blossom were back together, because they’re skipping the hunt too in favor of staying in bed. I guess the source of their breakup wasn’t something that Kennealy-Morrison cared to examine at all, let alone at length, any more than the source of their reunion.
Turk isn’t there either, which actually bothers Rennie and she manages to make herself look like a stalker by asking everyone about him and Pruelinda tells her that he’s staying at the family house twenty miles away. Better get started on that walk, Elizabeth Bennet!
So Graypaul figures out why she’s asking, thereby doing more credible deducting than Rennie did in the entire previous book, and “jeered” at her for it. He may be my favorite character in this book now!
“Not wondering who might be staying there with him, are you? Who might be sleeping there with him, are you? No, of course you’re not! Because you couldn’t care less, could you: you’re all over him, completely cured, aren’t you. Yes, I can see that you are.”
Not quite Jasper Alan Rickman Goring, but he’ll do for now, especially since her next line is a “teasing” remark about hating him. And he’d be the opening murder victim if he weren’t rich and famous enough to dick ride.
So there’s some boring exposition about the fox hunt and we get Rennie’s thoughts about it. Of course she hates killing innocent animals even though “she did have that fox coat—ranched, not trapped or hunted—and saw nothing wrong with it” but she loves riding and the bloodlust and has an overwritten passage extolling both.
While she’s busy trying to kill an innocent fox and have its blood smeared on her forehead—guess the writer watched Poldark but not Flambards—she spots somebody in seasonally-appropriate clothing walking through the woods, which are not Graypaul’s property, by the way. Even though nothing has happened to make her think this person might be some kind of threat, she calls Graypaul’s attention to the intruder in a histrionic manner and thinks he may be a hunt saboteur, and he doesn’t see this person but says he’ll send someone to check, then the section ends. Rennie must have felt the murder plot a-calling from three chapters away.
Kennealy-Morrison wimps out on the blooding and the hunt doesn’t catch the fox.
Everybody’s hanging out in the local pub at Elf Pommerel (there are several villages with the word pommerel in the name and this one’s the most remote) and Rennie’s feeling all self-satisfied and name-drops the Plantagenet royals and the War of the Roses before she spots Cleve Farris of Dandiprat and Allen Goodwyn of the flaming cocaine habit talking in a corner of the inn with “a smallish man in ragged tweeds that no self-respecting tinker would be caught dead in,” but can’t get a good look at him. Ned Raven of Bluesnroyals and his wife Demelza of Poldark confirm that Cleve and Allen rode out with the hunt but Ned doesn’t remember seeing them after that and the “weird cat” Rennie notices talking to them is gone when she calls his attention to their table. The writer needs to be consistent with her period-appropriate slang because she just sounded pretty anachronistic there.
When they’re leaving the pub in a Land Rover to go back to the castle/priory, Rennie spots the “weird cat” from the pub and he proves to be the owner of Bagaby Bottom and has a name just as silly, Balto Wallace, and an occupation to match: he writes Highland “bodice rippers,” NOT “bodicerippers” as Kennealy-Morrison writes it. Melza of Poldark calls his books porn, which indicates she’s just as sex-negative as Rennie.
Anyway, Rennie’s snotty as hell about someone whose books she’s read in the past.
“Him? That ratty little man? That’s Balto Wallace? Gosh! I thought Balto Wallace’d be seven feet tall and red-bearded and go around in a kilt with a claymore slung across his back…And the books aren’t even historically accurate. I just read them for the sex.”
And that is the most enthusiasm for reading we’ve heard her express in the entire series so far.
Rennie does make the connection that he was the guy she thought was a “hunt saboteur,” and Gray remarks that he doesn’t give a shit about foxes, and the subject is dropped in time for the section to end.
Since the writer remembered this is a mystery novel, when we return from commercial break, Rennie’s sitting next to the fire drinking port out of Waterford crystal and chewing on why Cleve Ferris was out hunting (Graypaul answers that he does this to develop social contacts) and why he and Allen Goodwyn would be talking to a local landowner named after a heroic sled dog. I’m surprised she hasn’t jumped to the conclusion that they are the country-house burglars. Cleve, as the hip rock star, knows what fancy jewelry everyone in his set has, Balto the Sled Dog knows what they have in the way of security as he lives in the neighborhood, and Allen Goodwyn probably is the fence. Stealing at a party is pretty easy as the hosts hire extra security and, more importantly, extra servants. Valuables can go into a pocket quickly when everyone’s engaged in checking each other out and nobody notices servants. Wonder if that smiling nameless minion in chapter 2 is one of the burglars.
Somehow this wasn’t clear to me before, but Allen Goodwyn is the manager for Dandiprat that they’d been having trouble with (Future Me: actually Cleve Ferris is their manager, but the writing is unclear or I was bored–one of these). Ned the asshole calls him incompetent and also sleazy, which is quite something coming from a man who propositions other women in front of his wife and calls it a joke when the answer is no.
Then we get over two pages dedicated to running down Cleve Ferris and Allen Goodwyn—whom I’m assuming is the Albert Goldman analogue from the similarity of names, so he’s probably going to be a murder victim or murderer soon, although for Albert Goldman the writer much prefers victim, the bloodier the better.
None of it’s very interesting, so I’ll break it down to what I think are the important points.
Cleve does drugs. Everyone in the milieu does too, but like Tam Linn, he’s also dealing, even though it isn’t mentioned that he’s dealing the so-called “bad drugs” that they look down on even as they use them, as witness Rennie’s use of speed.
Cleve also gambles, which causes Rennie and Mary Prax to remember Jasper Alan Rickman Goring, my favorite character of the series. The writing is quite bad here, to the point where we can’t tell whether they’re talking about Cleve or Allen Goodwyn, and a reference to “his clients” could be either one—drug customers or musicians being represented—until Pruelinda has to question who they’re talking about and apparently I was right and it is Cleve.
This is why you need an editor, people!
So War God Cherry Blossom tells Rennie and Mary Prax that he’s driving Graypaul’s car back to town and they’re going with him. Mary Prax is pleased at having a man make her decisions and Rennie’s too “knackered” to care and thinks about Turk’s unopened Christmas gift.
And—chapter! Man, the writing at the end of this chapter was the worst I’ve seen in this series. When characters in the scene can’t even keep track of who’s being discussed, it’s time to open your wallet and hire an editor. I cannot believe this woman used to write for a major publisher and had a certain level of success.
Next time, chapter 7, and we’re still two chapters away from the first murder. Rennie and Mary Prax go back to London, there’s some more detail about the country-house robberies, Turk shows up again, and we find out that Robin Kelloway was the one who got his hand cut in the prologue. It’s about as interesting as it sounds.
Rennie starts the chapter out by instigating a confrontation with Gerry Langhans by going to his hotel room and beating the door down because she’s pissed off she didn’t know he punched Pierce Hill, quit his job, and threatened to kill him. Oh, I don’t know. Has he seen you since then? I’m thinking not.
Gerry makes the point that she’d seen most of it for herself, but Pierce made “professional as well as personal threats” after that and Rennie name-drops all the fictional characters that witnessed the scene. Wisely enough, Gerry manages to distract her by asking if she thinks Pierce killed Baz and she doesn’t think so because it’s too obvious. Okay, gotcha. Pierce Hill will be a murder victim instead as he is despised by Queen Mary Sue. When the cops questioned him, Gerry says he admitted what he’d done and has the remark that he wished he’d hit Pierce harder, which isn’t clear if he said this to the police or just to Rennie. Here’s how she reacts to that.
“I like to think that’s my influence at work,” said Rennie, shaking her head, but her eyes danced with approval.
Boy I really am not liking Rennie much. How is this character supposed to be likable? She has no control over her emotions and very little over her behavior. She sees violence, or the threat of it, as the perfect solution to most interpersonal conflicts. And if she doesn’t like someone, they are irredeemably, irrevocably bad and there is no redemption for them unless they fall down on their knees and worship her. Maybe this kind of character could work in fantasy, but not in a series that’s supposed to be a grounded historical mystery series. And just to drive this home, Gerry in the next paragraph calls the cops “pigs” and Rennie has the following response.
“No, don’t,” said Rennie. “Don’t call them pigs. Some of them are, sure, but most of them really aren’t. I used to think that, too, until I got to know a few, and saw how they work. So no gratuitous pig-calling, please. At least not unless it’s warranted.”
Why, you mealy-mouthed hypocrite! In the first fucking chapter of this book, you were calling the cop you just got finished screwing a “racist pig!” But cops are okay now because they’ve allowed you to be part of the investigation and are acknowledging your value and specialness? But I don’t think you really feel this way. I think this is just your way of asserting your superiority over Gerry, because he did to Pierce Hill what you didn’t have the courage to do. Of course Gerry agrees as she is Queen Mary Sue and wants to know what she’s going to do.
She quotes Dylan at him and alludes to seeing the performers because that’s what she’s being paid to do and asks that he stay in his room in the most childish, condescending way.
“You just stay here and stay out of trouble, will you? Can you do that for me? Yes? There’s a good lad!”
Rennie sounds like she’s talking to a dog here, rather than a grown man. Two paragraphs from now, she refers to this as “her orders,” even though it’s phrased as a request above. Who are you to give orders to anybody, Rennie, especially in the contemptuous way that you did? And this is supposedly a childhood friend of yours!
Earlier she told Gerry that she’d talk to the cops for him, although I don’t see the need because I got the impression that they didn’t have any serious suspicions about him. Has she forgotten that Pierce Hill isn’t dead? She opens the door to her room to find “Romilly Ramillies” sitting “huddled” inside. I guess Kennealy-Morrison forgot that Romilly’s last name is Revels, even though it was mentioned several times in the first part of the book. You know who could have caught that? An editor!
It would be a good idea for Rennie to start locking her doors, but she doesn’t recognize this even though she mentions the Marjorie-blackmail incident in her mind. Another blind spot in the writer’s worldview, I guess. Romilly says the door was ”standing open” and she “didn’t want to leave the door unlocked.” Then you’re smarter than Rennie.
Anyway, Rennie takes a look around but can’t tell if the place has been searched because she’s an utter slob (which we haven’t been told about prior to this) and decides it was Mary Prax or housekeeping, just the way she decided those noises at Ro’s safe house were a cat and what she heard at Mojado Hot Springs was her imagination, even though there have been two murders and she’s involved in the whole business, which could have drawn the killer’s attention. She’s not nearly smart enough to survive, but she will. She will.
So we get some clothes porn for Rennie (“a minidress of her own design: black with tiny white flowers, the cuffs, collar and hem edged in eyelet lace,” if you’re interested) and Romilly admits she’s the one who fired off the shots back in chapter 7. Rennie takes this very casually and asks her why in a stilted manner. Turns out Romilly was trying to kill Danny Marron because Becca got acid-fried due to him. Rennie doesn’t believe it and Romilly confirms that she did but isn’t a good liar as she won’t look straight at Rennie. Doesn’t she know that the best liars maintain eye contact when lying? Guess not.
Rennie calls her bluff by saying she’s on the way to talk to the police, so Romilly can come along and confess, and then Rennie will, from her position of queenly omniscience, tell them that she’s lying. Of course the older woman folds in the face of the author’s will.
“I understand why Marjorie is afraid of you—oh yes, she is!”
We’ve never seen any evidence of this because Marjorie is an adult who is largely in control of her emotions. We can infer that Rennie’s mother-in-law loathes her for her contempt and disrespect and general immaturity and, oh yes, the pain she inflicted on Stephen, but there’s no fear there. Once again Kennealy-Morrison’s jerking off about how formidable her self-insert is.
Romilly let us know that she thinks Becca’s the only one who could have used the shotgun, which Rennie shoots down in the strongest language, citing the fact that Romilly didn’t keep the guns under lock and key—so not a responsible gun owner—and lots of people were in and out of the house. Rennie also uses the word “snuck” as the past participle of “to sneak” before it was standard usage, which in the 1960s was “sneaked.” But I guess we can always use another word that rhymes with fuck.
Then Rennie lists the reasons Becca couldn’t have taken an impulsive shot at the man who destroyed her life as her own refusal to believe it due to the fact that they know her and love her and it “isn’t in her nature.” Well, we’ve been told she isn’t herself anymore, so what does that do to your argument? Also, every murderer in the world was known and loved by at least one person, which didn’t stop them from becoming murderers.
The next section is where they go to the police station and Rennie tells the whole story to Marcus and he tells Romilly the police have decided to ignore the whole thing completely, no doubt assisted by the idea of the Revels money and influence, although he doesn’t say that. Rennie infers from his manner that the police know who fired the gun and gets all excited at the prospect of knowing something the general public doesn’t and thinks she might know who did it too, and the section ends. Yeah, I guess we didn’t need to know what she told them. I assume it was that Brandi was the one who took the shots because she was the only other candidate mentioned besides Becca and Romilly and because Rennie hates her. We’ll see.
Then Romilly’s gone and, for whatever reason, Rennie’s being allowed to hang out and strategize with Brent Gilmore, Audie Devlin, and Marcus. She thinks it’s “irregular” and doesn’t know what she’s doing there but isn’t willing to question it as it benefits her. We get two and a half pages of chewing over possible motivations for Baz Potter’s murder. Pierce Hill’s overextended in his personal finances and Baz’s death would benefit him financially; they’ve also ruled out Gerry Langhans as a suspect because he’s Rennie’s friend—whoops, I meant because he has no motive. I question whether this book was written in chronological order because unless she was skipping around when she was writing it, there’s no reason for her to seemingly keep forgetting who’s dead. Gerry would have been suspected for Pierce Hill’s murder–he never spoke to Baz Potter once in this book. Marcus puts forward Roger Hazlitt as a suspect, only to dismiss him to Rennie’s great relief, and then she tells them something that must be important and leaves. There’s some unlikely dialogue regarding Rennie’s awesomeness and the section ends.
Rennie remembers after leaving the police station that she’s getting paid to report on the festival so she decides to drop in but isn’t excited and runs down “the bulk of the Saturday afternoon lineup” as “the kind of non-black blues that set her teeth on edge.” Oh, so she does know the word black. I thought she just knew the hip racial slurs. She likes British blues like John Mayall and Eric Clapton and blues-rockers (presumably like Ned Raven’s Bluesnroyals) but everything else is “problematic.” And that’s a word that is definitely an anachronism in 1967 in the sense it’s being used.
One of the acts she deigns to watch is Big Brother & the Holding Company with Janis Joplin and it’s a page and a half of Rennie and Mary Prax raving over her. There’ s some information about how this performance wasn’t filmed but Janis went to John Phillips and got him to let them play half a set on Sunday night so they could be filmed. Then Kennealy-Morrison puts a bunch of her own opinions in the mouth of one of the guys in Powderhouse Road who doesn’t interest me enough to list his name and he and Rennie spend two paragraphs bitching.
Country Joe & the Fish comes on next and do a good set, so Rennie has no complaints, but none of the rest of the acts are good enough to compel Queen Mary Sue’s presence, including the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, whom she liked in the first book, but I guess either she changed her opinion or the writer forgot. You know who could have caught that? An editor!
Rennie goes across the festival field and sees some kids playing on the roof of a barn and is charmed. There’s some byplay with a deputy sheriff and the kids getting to the ground before Rennie turns around and Danny Marron is there taping the kids. As soon as she sees him she starts bitching at him and he responds by asking why she hates him when she doesn’t know him. Good question, but he won’t get a satisfactory answer as Rennie is always right.
She lists Becca as her reason and he hints that Romilly has to think he’s the reason for Becca’s condition because she can’t handle anything else and Rennie doesn’t believe him. She also blames Brandi for “[s]tealing the man she loved,” and again people are not jewelry that can be slipped into one’s pocket. A human being can decide who they want to be with and leave someone else. This does not necessarily mean that the person said human being wants to be with is at fault.
So Danny tries to be nice and wants them to be friends, the idea revolting Rennie so much she’s rendered speechless. He invites her and Mary Prax over to Waterhall the next day and wants her to help him with an idea he has which is basically music videos. What can I say, Danny was ahead of his time.
Rennie resists his charm because she’s been trained to by her expensive journalism education, which she threw in the garbage at the sight of Mary Prax, but apparently Danny isn’t as pretty. She says she’ll mention it to Evenor and he’s happy with that. She wonders what he’s done with the footage he shot of Baz’s corpse and decides to go to try and find out.
And—chapter! The last few chapters seem to be more wheel-spinning and are proving harder to get through than I thought they would. They’re still not a patch on the first few chapters, but they’re bad enough.
Part of that is Rennie’s characterization. Maybe if Kennealy-Morrison had intended her to be unsympathetic this might be more interesting, but she just can’t seem to see that having this obvious–and obnoxious–a Mary Sue is a quick way of making the reader hope she falls victim of the killer in a more permanent way than the killer in the first book managed.
Next time, chapter 16, wherein we get the Saturday night performances at Monterey Pop and Plant Prettylady is a big hit and Rennie finds out Plant is now Turk Wayland’s girlfriend, so she hooks up with Finn Hanley, and the end of the chapter reveals a new murder victim. Three guesses as to who it is.
California Screamin’: Murder at Monterey Pop, the second book in the Rock & Roll Murders/Rennie Stride Mysteries, was published in 2009, two years after the first book, which according to the publication dates of the books in her Keltiad series is pretty normal for her. The title is a twist on the song title “California Dreamin’,” and is the first book in the series with a song twist title. It still has a book title, a book subtitle, a series title, and a series subtitle, which is still too many titles, but that isn’t going to change so moving on.
If you check the Also By page at the start (technically I had to open the book but I’m giving myself a dispensation), the author lists herself as Patricia Kennealy Morrison. The first book listed is Strange Days: My Life With and Without Jim Morrison, her memoir. The second one is Son of the Northern Star, which was a historical novel about King Guthrum and Alfred the Great, which is listed as forthcoming. For whatever reason, this book was never published, which is a shame, because I read an excerpt for it on her Facebook page and it is the best thing she ever wrote. I would much rather have had that book than the Queen Mary Sue wankfest that is Ungrateful Dead.
Then she moves on to list the books of the Keltiad series, with nine books listed. There were nine books in that series at the time of her death, but the final book was the short story collection Tales of Spiral Castle, rather than The Beltane Queen, which is listed here as forthcoming. From a post on her blog, it seemed like she’d been working on this book for years and it was never published. I think she may have wanted to finish the last trilogy in the Keltiad, which would have consisted of The Deer’s Cry, The Beltane Queen, and The Cloak of Gold, but it never happened.
Then the books of the Rock & Roll Murders: Rennie Stride Mysteries are listed and include the first four books, with the fourth book, A Hard Slay’s Night: Murder at the Royal Albert Hall, listed as scheduled for publication in 2010.
Interestingly, from Kennealy-Morrison’s blog, Love Him Madly, the third book in the series, was completed before the second book, no doubt because this is where the Jim Morrison analogue appears and becomes a main character.
The cover is once again by Andrew Przybyszewski and is once again beautiful. The background color is still dark blue shading into purple with the subtle black paisley pattern and the Psychedelic Art lettering for the title, but the colors of the text have changed. The artist uses lime-green for the title and lavender for the subtitle, with the author’s name in orange. There’s still a bar separating parts of the text, but this time it separates the title from the subtitle, rather than the subtitle from the author’s name as on the first book.
The illustration is a vendor’s table with jewelry and belts and shawls spread across the top. There’s a tablecloth of what looks like coarse off-white linen over the table, and the Blood Guitar appears at the lower edge of the cloth as a half-guitar bloodstain. From the appearance of the guitar, it’s now an acoustic Dobro, rather than the Fender Stratocaster of the first book. Across the bottom of the cover is the series title and subtitle in pale lavender letters and a standard font.
The back cover copy begins with
Turn On, Tune in, Drop Dead
This is the same beginning as the first book. Out of curiosity, I checked the rest of the books and the back cover copy all starts out with this phrase, which is a twist on something Timothy Leary said.
June, 1967.
That puts the beginning of this book approximately eight months after the end of the first, just to establish a timeline. Ruby Gruesday, the last incomplete book in the series, was set in October 1970.
In San Francisco, the Summer of Love is in full swing. In fact, it’s about to hit its highest moment…or its lowest.
Nicely nonspecific.
Reporter Rennie Stride is covering the Monterey Pop Festival, where her two best friends will be appearing along with rock titans: Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, the Byrds, the Mamas & the Papas. And sharing the spotlight with blazing new comets: Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Otis, Redding, the Who…
I guess the two best friends are Mary Prax (her girl-crush) and Plant Prettylady (a charity case who thinks she’s her friend but Rennie and Mary Prax make fun of her behind her back). The colon before the list of name drops should not be there. And it should be “and the Mamas & the Papas.” And then the plot kicks in.
But not far from Monterey, an anti-festival is also happening—Big Magic. As both events unfold, Rennie encounters old friends and new enemies.
Because all her old enemies are dead or defeated. And this puts the lie to the book subtitle, because the murder is actually at Big Magic, if I remember correctly (Future Me: I did not–there are three murders in the book, two of them at Monterey Pop).
And when people start turning up dead in the psychedelic crossfire, she goes looking for justice—or vengeance—for them all…
The last line is much better and more dramatic than the one that ended the copy for Ungrateful Dead. Then there’s the following paragraph:
“California Screamin’: Murder at Monterey Pop” is the second of The Rock & Roll Murders: The Rennie Stride Mysteries, a series of novels set in the Sixties music scenes of San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York and London. The next will be “Love Him Madly: Murder at the Whisky A Go-Go.”
Not much there to snark. The title of the third book did change to Murder at the Whisky (not sure why unless it was a space issue).
The author bio is the same as the one on the first book, with “tenth book” changed to “eleventh book.” The author photograph is also the same and stays the same for the entire series. The photographer is listed as Linda Bright.
There’s a blurb at the bottom of the back cover from Michael Lydon, who’s credited as “critic, musician, author.” His website indicates he did a lot of Civil Rights journalism and had the kind of connections in the music world that Rennie Stride has. It seems like a positive blurb, but what he’s calling out positively is the milieu and the music. He doesn’t say a word about the story itself, like the guy who did the first book’s blurb. Interesting.
The book has a prologue, 24 chapters, and an epilogue, so it should take about two months to cover. My posting schedule will remain Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday.
This chapter promises that we’re going to get more of Eric’s character, albeit in his writer-assigned role of Rennie’s gay brother-in-law and full-time cheerleader. There’s an uncharacteristic moment of truth when Rennie thinks she hasn’t seen much of him since she moved out (and whose fault is that?), but then she pivots to how “deeply angry” it makes her that he can’t live his life openly and the writer assures us that the secret of his gayness is “safe” with Stephen and Marcus and Rennie and Mary Prax, at least two of whom he had no say in their being told. Well, we know neither Stephen nor Rennie could keep their yaps shut, so maybe Eric should remember that saying about “Three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead.” And I have candidates if he’s taking suggestions.
So Eric and Rennie are having tea before going out with Stephen and—this has not been mentioned ever—his sisters (who knows how many he has because we’ve never heard of them) and their husbands to set up a party for General Lacing. And we get Rennie rationalizing a little food porn while Mary Prax “rattl[es] a tin gruel cup on the bars of her cell.” Don’t be histrionic, it’s three hots and a cot.
They’re talking about family and societal expectations of Eric fathering a child and they sound exactly alike in dialogue. Kennealy-Morrison needed more dialogue tags identifying the speaker if they’re all going to sound alike. Eric also mocks his mother to Rennie and we get the information that he has a boyfriend named Trey (which I don’t think was in use as a name or a nickname in 1966) whom he’s been with for eight years. According to Eric, his father isn’t “imaginative” enough to “notice or comprehend” and Marjorie’s in denial. Trey’s parents are basically the same way.
There’s an interesting section where Eric admits he’s jealous of Mary Prax for being bisexual—hey, so Rennie didn’t keep her mouth shut about that either!—so she can pass as straight whenever she wants and talks about marrying a lesbian and producing an heir because he loves his family. I’m not sure I understand why, since Stephen is the only family member I could believe he loves. Eric clearly has quite a poor opinion of his mother and doesn’t seem close to his father or his sisters, so maybe he just loves the idea of a family, or the Lacing name? (Future Me: this is something he has in common with Rennie, except that Rennie doesn’t even have a family member like Stephen that she values. Never in this book does she really think about her parents, except that they live in the better section of the Bronx and gave her a little money when she got married, or her sister Dana, except that she went to college with Grace Slick. She never calls them, she never writes them, she never wonders if they’re all right. It seems like they’ve been discarded as of no further use, like Stephen will be after the second book. It’s kind of reminiscent of how Kennealy-Morrison handles the part of her life in her memoir before she came to New York City and started working for Jazz & Pop, i.e. very little if at all.)
Then he starts fellating Rennie for how brave and admirable she is for not fulfilling her mandated role as family bride and I feel like this is about the dozenth time this has happened, with different people doing the fellating. It hasn’t gotten any more interesting since the first time.
Rennie has a faux-woke moment of recognizing that she gets her favorite tea all the time because the kitchen servants are paid to remember what it is. In case you’re wondering, it’s a Harrods blend (so imported from England, then) brewed with spring water. Why, no, she’s not high-maintenance at all.
Then we get into a retelling of Rennie acting up at a society preservation group meeting that Eric says is when he knew he “loved” and “adored” her, but which I’m pretty sure will just cement her as a five-year-old throwing a tantrum to me.
Anyway, the group she’s part of is called the Painted Ladies. It’s called a society preservation group which I think means they help preserve historic houses in San Francisco, but the explanation I just gave you is clearer than anything you’ll get from the writer. She’s gotten home late from trying to sell her seamstress creations and is as tired and cranky as any five-year-old when Marjorie tells her she needs to change clothes and attend the meeting.
In what may be an editorial fail but I don’t intend to go back and check, it seems like she was trying to sell her seamstress clothes before she got the job at the Clarion, but I’d thought that came after because she needed the money to finance getting out of the house. Whatever.
Marjorie isn’t sweet enough to Rennie to suit her, so in revenge she puts on a Jackie Kennedy pink Chanel suit (which she did keep after her big move-out) , complete with pillbox hat and gloves, along with a pearl choker and her engagement ring, puts an unspecified something in her pocket, and goes down to the meeting, where she’s really pissed off by the unworthy women around her and we get an ominous present-time remark about how if they had done any preservation work she wouldn’t have done what she did. Oh, I think you could have found an excuse to do what you want regardless, Rennie. You always do.
And just what did she do that was so rebellious and convinced Eric to “love” and “adore” her? She dosed the tea at this meeting with two tabs of LSD, “Owsley’s best.”
I take it back—I was far too kind in calling her a five-year-old throwing a tantrum. If she’s a child, she’s Rhoda Penmark in The Bad Seed. How does an adult justify acting this way? Well, she’s just so special and authentic and shit and these bitches are a bunch of stuffed shirts who deserve anything our Queen Mary Sue decides to inflict on them!
Here’s how an adult would deal with the situation. When Marjorie tells her to go upstairs and get dressed for the meeting, an adult would say no. If she continued pressing, an adult would still tell her no and indicate this answer isn’t going to change. What’s Marjorie going to do if she keeps saying no, drag her into the meeting by her hair? Somehow I doubt that. Rennie made a choice here and decided to hurt people because she can’t handle her own anger (in some jurisdictions, dosing someone with drugs without their knowledge is considered “infliction of bodily harm“). It does speak to what seems like a naivete about drugs by this middle-class child. In fact, we get a passing mention in a previous chapter that Rennie was doing speed (one of those hard drugs the writer thinks Tam Linn deserved to die for using) to stay awake and make her clothes. This is one of many instances of hypocrisy on her part that we’ll be seeing over the course of this series.
Plus, has she ever heard of a drug interaction? How did she know none of them were taking drugs which might cause a reaction when mixed with LSD? Simple answer: Rennie didn’t give a shit if everybody at this meeting died.
I can see what Kennealy-Morrison intended in writing this. She wants to deliver an amusing comedic deflation of the stuffed shirts that she’s been so careful to construct by making them strawmen with no names or personalities (just like everyone Queen Athyn murdered in the Long Hunt section of Blackmantle) and not allowing them to speak for themselves, just like she denied Tam Linn the ability to speak and move and live before he was murdered, and assumes that we’ll cheer and giggle along with her self-insert. She didn’t seem to realize that this involves ignoring the fact that Queen Mary Sue acted out of sheer childish pique and didn’t care whether any of these society women jumped out a window and killed themselves or went psychotic as a result of their involuntary drugging. And, in fact, she did not write this scene! We see the women getting dosed without their consent and the time period between then and the moment they are in full-blown trip is skipped over.
Fun fact: it’s almost impossible to find any information about someone drugging someone else nowadays without their knowledge unless it involves date rape drugs. By the logic employed above, one could make a case that Rennie thinks it’s okay to dose a woman with Rohypnol and drop her off at a bar if you’re in a bad mood and this woman’s a frigid bitch and your mother-in-law offended you because she’s a stuffed shirt and needs to learn how to have fun.
Of course, since Rennie is Queen Mary Sue, nobody has a bad trip (although Kennealy-Morrison definitely knew about those if only from gossip back in the day), injures themselves, or goes psychotic. No, they all have good trips and are spiritually awakened (at least temporarily) by having their bodily integrity violated. Marjorie apparently didn’t get any electric tea and knows Rennie did this. Really, you don’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to make that deduction. For once Rennie gets yelled at (this is the only time in the book Marjorie raises her voice), and here’s what she does.
She looked Marjorie square in the eye, then took off her shoes and gloves, unpinned her hat and let hair cascade down. And then she’d marched barefoot out of the room. In the doorway, she’d turned to survey the mild lysergic chaos she’d left behind.
Yep, little dogies, I think my work in this here town is done…Blowing the smoke off two imaginary six-shooters, Rennie had moseyed on along, the psychedelic marshal who’d just cleaned up a very uptight Dodge.
Here’s where we start running into the difference between how Rennie sees herself and how other people (were she a real-world person) would see her. She presents herself as this mischievous, truth-telling paragon of authenticity, but I think the people around her would see her as insufferable, delusional, and dangerous.
I’m having a hard time seeing Marjorie as the villain here. Just think of what you’d do if your son brought home a hypocritical gold digger who made it her mission in life to let you know how much contempt she has for you and piss you off. I’m surprised the first murder victim in this book wasn’t Rennie, lying dead in a sprawl of bell bottoms and long hair at the bottom of the front stairs, and Marjorie looking sad and concerned as Jessica Lange at her Oscar-winning best while telling the police, “The drugs, you know. She thought she could fly. I tried to catch her but…I was too slow. I hope you’ll be discreet. Stephen, well, he’ll have a hard time accepting it.”
Because Kennealy-Morrison must have had a belated realization of how repellent her self-insert’s behavior is, the next paragraph has her admitting (or paying lip service to societal conventions) that what she did was “bitchy,” “mean,” and “nasty.” No, Rennie, the word you’re looking for is HARMFUL. It was HARMFUL to dose people with drugs against their will. And ILLEGAL as well, let’s not forget ILLEGAL, but we all know the law doesn’t apply to our Queen Mary Sue.
Of course she manages to make it all the fault of Marjorie and the society women, and it seems like Rennie might have a major inferiority complex that she compensates for by behaving like a despotic queen. It’s their fault because they’re condescending, and Marjorie deserved it because she keeps trying to make Rennie perform her duties as a society bride. She ends her monologue by saying she didn’t mean to hurt anyone, but it’s more like she didn’t care if she hurt anybody.
Eric proves himself to be as much of a shit as everyone else in this book by finding this funny enough to “wip[e] away tears of mirth.” You were my last hope for an audience identification character in this book, Eric, so thanks for making sure I know everyone who approves of Rennie is a creep. Well, maybe there’s still hope for Marcus. Or Plant Prettylady.
Then we get a good half a page of reassurance that nobody suffered any ill effects from the poisoning that Rennie forced on them because no action our Queen Mary Sue takes can ever result in lasting harm. And then we get another half a page of Eric fellating Rennie about how wonderful and special and alive and real she is and, as a gay man, he doesn’t even have the excuse of being blinded by his boner the way Stephen is.
Then we get a two-paragraph flashback to Rennie arriving at the airport for the first time and meeting him and Stephen has a sweet sign to greet her with. He’s way too good for her. Then Rennie tells Eric the marriage is over and he tells her they’ll always be family. Well, that’s teeth-rotting enough for today.
And—chapter! This was a short one and I can’t figure out why, since Rennie was the center of attention. Well, at least it showed me Eric’s lack of character before I spent any more time investing in him. And nothing in this chapter had to do with the damn murder plotline. Again. Sigh.
Next time, chapter 11, wherein Rennie remembers that Tam got murdered too and decides to use some of the musicians she knows as the Baker Street Irregulars that she sneered at Marcus for trying with her. But I guess it’s a good idea if she was willing to steal it.
Just a brief entry about what my guidelines are for the books/movies/TV series I snark or intend to snark in the future. Primarily this is about books, but does apply to movies/television as well. Number one: no nonprofessional writers/creators. I won’t be doing any books published by Youtubers, as I’ve seen enough snarks of those on Youtube to indicate that the technical grammatical/formatting issues alone would be too intense for me. I’m still debating doing a post on the magical system in Handbook for Mortals, but Lani Sarem is not a professional writer so that’s still in question.
A corollary of nonprofessional writers is that they tend to be self-published. I’m making an exception for the Rock & Roll Murders/Rennie Stride Mysteries by Patricia Kennealy-Morrison even though this series was self-published under her Lizard Queen Press imprint because she was a midlist author with HarperCollins for 15 years, so I consider her a professional writer.
Number two: I will not snark a series that’s more than 10 books long (sorry, House of Night). I think that’s too intensive a time investment for me at this point. This may change, but that’s one of my guidelines right now.
Number three: I won’t snark bad comedy, because you can be funny about something serious that’s bad, but I’ve found in the past I can’t be funny about bad comedy. Number four: I’m going to try to do a book/movie/TV show in every genre. We’ll see how that goes.
Candidates for Future Snark (if you have any ideas, please let me know in the comments:
Literary: White Lotus by John Hersey or Sarah by JT Leroy
Urban Fantasy (the Servant series goes under paranormal romance): the Monere series by Sunny, the Nocturne City series by Caitlin Kittredge, and/or the Merry Gentry series by Laurell K. Hamilton
High Fantasy: the Axis Trilogy by Sara Douglass
Young Adult: The Immortals series by Alyson Noel
Celebrity-penned novel (I’m not even sure I will wind up doing this, as almost by definition celebrities are not professional writers): Modelland by Tyra Banks, L.A. Candy by Lauren Conrad, and/or The Truth About Diamonds by Nicole Richie
And thank you for visiting! I’ve started this blog because I felt the need to snark deserving targets for quite some time now. A lot of the bloggers I read on a regular basis (in particular Jenny Trout) do the snark to perfection, but they take on high-profile targets such as the Twilight and 50 Shades of Gray series. Not to say that there’s anything wrong with this, but there are just as many deserving subjects that haven’t drawn quite the ire because they aren’t high-profile.
I will do some pieces on higher-profile subjects (I’m working on a piece about the magic system–such as it is–in Handbook for Mortals), but at least for now I intend to focus on lower-profile works that have evaded wide scrutiny. The plan as it stands is to snark mainly books and television shows, although I may do a movie here and there if I think it warrants inclusion. The subjects in the immediate future for this blog are the Servant series by L.L. Foster and the British TV series Ultraviolet from 1998.
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