10.31

Bluh, it’s another mammoth chapter.

He explains that the library only closes for major holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas.

these were the only days the Gatlin County Caster Library was open, which apparently wasn’t something Marian could control.

So casters have shit for political power – although given we’re talking about a separate facility just for the one family of casters around, which is generally composed of one shut-in with his own private library, maybe the fact one exists at all is a sign they’ve got stupid amounts of pull.

Also what the fuck is with this place? No one goes to the library, but it’s open every day including Sunday all the way into the night? My area only just recently clawed their way back to having libraries open in the evening!

Actually wait, why isn’t the caster library just open at night?

For some reason Marian decided to further not interfere by giving them Ethan-Prime and Genevieve’s letters, and yes, I mean the letters themselves and not photocopies, so old and delicate they were almost transparent because that’s totally what you do to old letters. No wonder their hundred year maps are crumbling, they probably took them out to make paper airplanes whenever they were bored! They also get all the other research stuff, presumably involving more irreplaceable fragile old papers.

Lena loved poring over the prose—“the days without you bleed together until time is nothing more than another obstacle we must overcome,” god damn it book that isn’t even good.

The more we read through the papers, the more it seemed like we were reading about ourselves.

They were slaveowners!

Ethan and Genevieve, a Mortal and a Caster


Yes that is absolutely the big division between people in the south.


desperate to find a way to be together, against impossible odds. At school, we faced some steep odds ourselves

oh good god.

Halloween was generally a pretty loaded holiday at Jackson. For a guy, anything involving costumes was an accident waiting to happen. And then, there was always the stress of whether or not you made the guest list to Savannah Snow’s annual blowout.

…so it wasn’t a loaded holiday at all, it was just a time where the potential existence of costumes allowed for possible fuckups and there happened to be a popular girl party.

God, Emothan, you are going to hang yourself when you leave this place and discover that everything you mildly dislike isn’t actually unique to your town.

Lena didn’t dress up and finds the idea funny, only to go on to say it’s a super serious holiday for her and so the stereotype is, in fact, exactly true. Thanks, stereotypes!

“It’s the most sacred night of the year, and the most dangerous—the most important of the four High Holidays. It’s our version of New Year’s Eve, the end of the old year and the beginning of the new.”

Why the fuck would it be, though?

I mean, it’s the harvest festival. It’s getting colder and darker and everything’s dying and you’re killing and butchering your animals while eyeing the long winter ahead. In your moment of surplus, surrounded by cut grain and the remains of your sacrificed livestock, it’s a good time to think on the dead and try to appease them, as well as the gods of all the things you killed. You can see where the mythology would build up naturally, without needing any supernatural basis.

I mean, the moon, yeah fine, the moon might be a material component of magic. But why is a harvest festival built around an obsolete pattern of living on an objectively important day?

Four holidays might be a reference to the quarter/cross-quarter days, but Halloween is on the cross-quarter and that would mean their sacred days are as far from equinoxes/solstices as possible, which is not only super weird but actively contradicts the fact that the moon’s distance from the sun is what determines magic type.

Finally, new year? No significant celestial events, plants withering around you, everything settling down for rest and sleep while they live off their stockpiles assembled in the rest of the year…that seems like the start of something to you guys? A time of clean breaks and new beginnings?

I mean, here’s a whole bunch of different New Years dates. You’ll notice there’s some recurring features – either it’s in the cold but post-solstice time, where the sun has returned and we’re looking hopefully toward the end of winter, or it’s in the spring, when winter has ended and there’s new stuff growing. The only one close to this listed is Ethiopia, and just go look at where that is on the map and consider why they might have some different monthly associations.

Now, if magic-user culture descended from Ethiopians or similar places resulting in the the coincidence their traditional New Years happened to be near the slaughtery harvest festival of other people, and that helped fuel its association with witchcraft, that might work (Not very well because the Ethiopian one is still based more on human cycles than material factors). But I don’t think Ethiopia exists because we’ve established black people don’t exist and that the genetics of the south do not include anyone from Africa. (There are African-American studies, but I have no idea what that could possibly involve at this point.)

But anyway, point is it’s general Halloween spiritual veil is thin etc etc. He asks if this “Otherworld” is the afterlife and she explains “Sort of. It’s the realm of spirits.” so basically no goddamn answer, she just used a vaguer word for ghost that could mean something else too as a response fucking explain dammit!

He says that wow so it’s just like the stereotype there too! And no, it’s actually all about remembering the Casters who were persecuted for their differences because that’s right, it’s time for another showing of witch trials were totally real and killed actual witches and weren’t at all a societal mechanism for murdering women and the occasional man on other grounds SUCK IT MORTALS IT’S ONLY WRONG WHEN THEY BURN ACTUAL WITCHES. Then she sneers about how there were witch trials all over and not just in Salem but no mortal textbooks mention that even though yes they fucking do.

Look. If the fact this a complete travesty of actual history doesn’t seem like a reason to knock it off, how about the fact it’s just so fucking stupid and yet so fucking everywhere? Goth-sue girlfriend is a breath of fresh air compared to the rotting corpse stench of OH HEY GUYS I JUST HAD THE COOLEST IDEA WHAT IF THE WITCH TRIALS WERE ABOUT ACTUAL WITCHES? And while the idea the people who are identical except for being superior to us in power are somehow persecuted is generally pretty dumb, this book so far has been nothing but about how casters can fuck up mortals! Ravenwood is saved because of dark magic while everyone else’s homes burn. Geneviere almost gets her boyfriend back to life/does and something else terrible happens, which is far more than most people can say. Current Ravenwood can do anything ever and they have everything they could even want provided. Ridley can make people walk off cliffs. Lena can explode things. Ridley’s brother can drive you nuts with illusions and her dad can actually turn your blanket into poisonous snakes. And everything bad about being a caster has had to do with other casters or how magic in their particular family works.

Meanwhile, the sole mortal contribution to trouble has been bullying Lena for looking weird, which is not exactly the exclusive province of casters, and shooting Ethan Prime, who was a mortal in the first place and killed for something completely unrelated.

On the way, they see the wolfdog and he suggests letting the dog just ride in the car already and she says he wouldn’t get in anyway. Then they see Link dressed up as a cheerleader because that was going to be the Halloween theme for the basketball team.

With everything else that had been going on, it had slipped my mind—at least that’s what I told myself.

Sounds like someone’s too full of himself to dress in drag.

Since I had started hanging out with Lena, I had developed a hot hand on the court. Now I was starting center instead of Earl, who was not too happy about it. Lena swore there was nothing magic about it, at least not Caster magic. She came to one game and I made every shot.

You might think this is stupid and sueish. You’re wrong.

The drawback was, she was in my head throughout the game, asking me a thousand questions about foul shots and assists and the three-second rule.

THAT’S so stupid and sueish we had to recalibrate the meter. Not only is he suddenly the best basketball player despite presumably practicing even less than he already is, but he’s perfect even while chatting telepathically about other stuff the entire game.

He also speculates that maybe she’s behind the fact Emily’s been having trouble doing her usual pyramid thing but makes a point of how he’s not going to ask about it. Because Lena’s a persecuted caster, while Emily’s the persecuting whorebag currently at risk of breaking her neck! I can’t believe people could ever burn casters at the stake merely for using their “natural gifts” to torment and kill the rest of their village.

Anyway, Link bitches about Emothan not dressing up, Lena compliments his look, Link complains about how weird makeup is and he doesn’t get how “you girls” stand it, and she objects because of course she almost never wore makeup; she didn’t have to.

Which is to say, bitches need to look pretty but bitches also need to stop holding everyone up putting on their makeup! They should look pretty always without their boyfriends ever having to wait.

Anyway everyone loves the cheerleader look, further hammering in that Emothan is just a wet blanket. Then, because I guess the author finally realized that so far the persecution has been caster -> mortal, the actual cheerleaders turn out to be witches with copies of Lena’s crescent moon birthmark. Which, weirdly, actually might be a real witch feature.

I don’t know, actually. I mean, my first impulse was that’s pretty nasty, but then, they don’t seem to have gone particularly far with this. They’re not dolled up to be ugly, they’re not acting crazy, they’re just tying Lena into their witch outfit. As far as cruelties go, that’s a lot tamer than they should be able to manage. Where’s the junk necklace and the fake blood on their hand from punching out the window? Why are they mostly in witch outfits instead of straight up parodying the freak?

The future generation of the DAR headed toward us.

Book, you’re a pile of shit who has no place criticizing others like this.

Emothan, continuing to bizarrely show no understanding how how the place he supposedly spent his life and finds mindkillingly predictable works, decides to charge right in with the brilliant opening gambit of pretending he doesn’t get it’s a costume and insulting them for forgetting to wear one. Which he says while still lacking a costume of his own. Luckily Link shows up to give an actual burn.

“Hey girls, I thought we were comin’ as bitches. Oh wait, that’s every day.”

One that doesn’t make sense given Lena’s social status versus the girls, but hey, at least it’s a response to his surroundings that isn’t the pile of idiocy that is Emothan’s every action.

An uncredited girl tells him she’ll tell his mom he was hanging out with Lena and he’ll get grounded. What, no mention of telling her he was calling the whole cheerleading squad bitches? That doesn’t sound like language his mom would approve of. Then Emily informs us that Lena’s super special birthmark that perfectly matches the magic symbol that keeps showing up is a witch’s mark, how shocking!

Emothan just runs off on the tangent of if he’s Lena’s boyfriend or not. Emily, god bless her, brings us back to the present with a bunch of dumb threats. Then they move off and Lena uses her powers so that when they try to wash the crescent moon off (…because apparently their witch costumes mocking Lena were for the pre-class morning only. I don’t think the author understands that doing something to insult someone in front of people all day is a lot bigger of a deal than just doing something like that in front of them for a minute and then taking it off) it doesn’t work!

The black moon-shaped mark was only smearing bigger and blacker, not coming off at all.
…
Savannah tried to wipe the black moon off her own cheek. “Mine isn’t comin’ off, either.” The moon was now smeared across half her face.

This doesn’t quite turn into magical blackface, at least. What she does is make it so their makeup retroactively turned out to be a sharpie instead of an eyeliner pencil.

By the end of the day, everyone at Jackson was talking about the cheer squad. Apparently, every one of the cheerleaders who dressed up as Lena had somehow used a Sharpie to draw the innocuous crescent moon on her face, instead of eyeliner. Cheerleaders. The jokes were endless.

Yeah I’m really seeing how casters are the persecuted group.

The book apparently doesn’t understand you can in fact clean off sharpie and insists the dumb bitches will be stuck with it for days.

He then talks about how much he loves holding her hand. No matter what it felt like, whether I was burning or blowing out light bulbs or getting struck by lightning, I had to be close to her. which is of course totally different than a siren, because that’s evil and being obsessed with doing something even when you’re getting shocked each time is totally different.

Having apparently tuned out their morning conversation, he suggests she hang out at his house and hand out candy/snuggle on the couch watching movies, and she reminds him that hello, most importantest holiday ever.

not to mention the danger. I’d never open my door to strangers on a night of such Dark power.”

Okay but wait. The moons aren’t in sync with the calender. There should be plenty of half moons during Oct 31sts across time, and new moons, and all the various forms between. What happens if you get a moon for doing the other type of magic at this date? Does it just not matter because it’s stuck on DARK no matter what, or does it mean you can do either kind, or are both kinds dangerous to mess with? And if a set date can have a set alignment, why don’t other dates have that as a similar consideration?

Really it’d make so much more sense for them just to be using a lunar calender.

(Also this would seem to be suggesting that yes, the invited-in loophole is just a thing in their magic, else opening a door wouldn’t matter much.)

He goes home and wonders if maybe the reason Amma heads home every Halloween is actually to do her magic stuff.

Maybe it was a good night for reading chicken bones in the graveyard, too.

God Emothan I know the book isn’t giving much but you could at least work with what you have. Last time you saw her doing magicy stuff you saw her bitching about how the full moon was bad news for it because it’s for dark magic. Lena just said this was dark magic night in case you couldn’t guess that yourself. So, probably no, not a good time.

“You goin’ to that party over at the Snows’?”
“No, I’m just gonna stay home this year.”
She raised an eyebrow, but she wasn’t going to ask. She already knew why I wasn’t going. “You make your bed, you better be ready to lie in it.”

So seems she’s a fan of the small town shunning and ostracizing kids.

He keeps thinking about what Lena said about dark power and opening doors, so he ends up just putting the candy bowl in front of the door and calling it a day.

Then, late at night, he hears someone at the door.

I clicked off the TV and looked around for something to pick up, but there was nothing. I picked up an old game console, lying on the floor in a pile of video games. It wasn’t a baseball bat, but some decently solid old-school Japanese technology. It had to weigh at least five pounds.

Okay, this is really stupid. I guess the author threw it in so we’d know he plays videogames, and it is the most organic mention so far, but has she never held one of those? Not only are they not exactly the sort of thing you would get a good grip on, but they’re attached to things with wires.

Plus, no one would say “an old game console” it’s “my old game console” unless you’ve got a whole stack of them, in which case you’d probably specify which one it was.

So he creeps over, carrying this thing over his head, and he sees it’s his friend’s mom, her car, and a whole plate of delicious brownies.

“Just a minute, Mrs. Lincoln.” I flipped on the porch light, and unbolted the front door. But when I tried to pull it open, the door jammed. I checked the lock again, and it was still bolted, even though I had just unbolted it.

Welp. That’s pretty –

I unbolted the lock again. It bolted shut with a snap, before I could take my hand away from it. “Mrs. Lincoln, I’m sorry, my door seems to be stuck.” I rattled the door with all my weight, juggling the console.

I don’t know why the fuck people do this.

Okay, so you can have the whole suspense thing where the character doesn’t realize their danger but the reader does. Except here it’s him being irrationally anxious, followed by ignoring explicit supernatural warning signs. He obviously wants to get his face eaten by vampire witches or the dark similarity of his neighbors they raised to do the job for them.

A perfectly reasonable way of doing this would have been for the door to just seem jammed, or to be unable to turn the bolt in the first place. But no, he sees the house spirit/actualfax ghost relocking the door for him and he just tries harder to get the door open.

Also, just as inexplicably as he chose the game console as a weapon, he’s inexplicably not just setting the damn thing down upon deciding it’s stupid and he should let her in.

Anyway, then Amma’s protective charm falls down from over the door, and yes he explicitly explains it’s her charm and that apparently this is something she does to cover every opening in the house for Halloween, and then he complains about how there’s also some mysterious force that’s keeping his house locked up, and then the door opens, and how are you so fucking stupid.

She explains the brownies are a peace offering, which, weird for an adult to be doing to a child but hey, this is the south, where game consoles are good weapons and don’t involve any cords.

She held them out expectantly. I should’ve asked her to come in. There was a formula for everything. I guess you could call it manners, Southern hospitality.

Where apparently inviting someone in is special hospitality you only get in the south and not a standard.

Anyway, I guess he can store up common sense, so all the stuff he earned ignoring the obvious can now be spent on masculine intuition that women be mad bitches:

But I had tried that with Ridley, and it hadn’t gone so well.

So instead he points out that her son’s not there, and she says that of course because he’s at the Halloween party thanks to quite a number a phone calls on my part so also in the south, parents call other parents to ensure their children go to the cool teen parties full of the underage alcohol and the teen sex. Or maybe their standards for awesome teen parties are just very, very different than anything I’ve ever heard.

He then explains that Link’s mom had always been an odd duck. Busy getting books taken off the library shelves, teachers fired from the schools, reputations ruined in a single afternoon. so once again, we see that his town has a wide diversity of people. Then he says the anti-Lena crusade (currently involving getting upset once about a smashed window, months ago…) has been totally different because it’s been personal, unlike her laser focused life-destroying powers toward everyone else. Seems the way it’s been different is its utter ineffectiveness.

(Also apparently you have your library is run by someone who gives zero Gatlin-related fucks and no one goes there in the first place so what library was she removing books from?)

But so the book has said and so it now is, with her explaining that she’s realized she shouldn’t be his enemy because it’s just the girl making him act that way and Lena’s the real evil. He refuses to let her in, Just Knowing she’s some evil dark monster, and when she pushes the brownies at him they bounce off an invisible barrier and end up shattering on the ground.

Mrs. Lincoln backed down the porch steps warily

And that’s it for her. A good end to the chapter, I think. Was she some construct that just looked like her, or is the real women actually some terrifying danger? But it isn’t the end! Instead, he just goes back inside and then suddenly later he hears Lena screaming for help and he can feel she’s in horrible pain. So he rushes over to Ravenwood, which is now some gothic castle. There’s guests everywhere he don’t react to him screaming for Lena and Macon (I’m still not clear why the guy has two names) and are described as shadowy so I’m still not entirely sure if they’re real or not, but it seems like it. At least, they’re corporeal and real enough that he can stumble into one of the dancers and it’s apparently a normal-feeling shoulder he grabs and the guy staggers from transmitted pain to bump into another person. But still no one actually reacts to him barreling through on his Lena search.

He ultimately finds her curled up on an alter in agony while her family stands in a circle around her doing some mysterious Latin chanting! I was thinking this meant they were doing it to her for whatever reason (deciding she wasn’t worth the risk after all or maybe trying to purge the darkness out) but no they’re trying to stop whatever it is and it just isn’t doing anything.

“We were wrong. There’s no safe haven for her here.” A beautiful woman about my grandmother’s age with spirals of black hair spoke. She wore strands of beads around her neck, piled one on top of the other, and ornate silver rings on her thumbs. She had the same exotic quality Marian possessed, as if she was from somewhere far from here.

Somewhere white, though, because when Marian got a physical description it sure mentioned her skin color. Although the bit about curly hair makes me wonder if it’s trying to say she’s of mixed blood – seems a long shot, though.

Anyway, he throws himself through the circle to Lena’s side and that knocks way the evil thing.

“It’s not possible. He’s a Mortal. He’s not one of us.”
“How could a Mortal break a Sanguinis Circle? How could a Mortal ward off a Mentem Interficere so powerful that Ravenwood itself came all but Unbound?”

Words words words. I’m really sick of the plotline about how the made up nonsense isn’t following its own rules.

They exposit clumsily that Sarafine did this and We can’t stop her from coming for the child because killing your target is absolutely a thing you do when you’re confident you can just walk in and get them and that Sarafine’s getting more powerful by the day because of more nonsense because a coherent magic system is for books that aren’t set in bizarro South.

“Striking us here, on this night. She was just making a point.”
“And what point would that be, Macon?”
“That she can.”

Yeah, attacking on the night dark power gets the biggest boost ever really is the best way to prove you can do it whenever you want to.

You know what would’ve been so much better? This being the day after. So we end with the weird brownie barrier thing for the chapter, then when we think Halloween has been safely navigated, Lena’s attacked because Sarafine’s proving she can do it whenever she wants and doesn’t even need the special day to get past their wards.

He’s a Mortal, and we all know Mortals can’t possess power on their own,” Macon snapped

So apparently Amma doesn’t have any power of her own. I guess she has to ask a ghost to handle every charm she makes.

But anyway Emothan’s totally got power to protect Lena somehow anyway, and they’ll just continue to not investigate if he’s getting power from an outside source the way it seems is the established way mortals can do shit.