Last time on the Summoning, Chloe’s decided to go back and question the crawlspace ghosts.
PSYCHE
I WASN’T SETTING FOOT—bare, stockinged, or shoed—in that crawl space until I’d talked to the first ghost and asked all the questions Derek had raised.
If you’re not reading along with me, it’s hard to explain just how disjointed this part is. We go right from Chloe saying she wants to go in the crawlspace and Derek getting the flashlight to this.
Anyway, she decides to go hang out in the laundry room to do this, even though the one time the ghost has tried to lead her somewhere to chat it’s been the attic, and the attic and upper story are the two places where she’s been able to actually see it.
At least the ghost finally tells her that it’s not the medication causing the block. Thank god. It’s a magic spell. So, hallowed ground?
“Magic . . . ritual . . . important.”
“It’s important?”
“Not . . .not important,” he said emphatically.
Oh my god book why are you doing this.
Chloe is obviously a super necromancer, so she could probably just smash the spell. But then we’d lose this way of dragging the conversation out. Also, the fact the place is warded must be important! This is the only place we’ve seen any sign of warding (although I guess if wards work it might be that places like the hospital where Chloe doesn’t see any ghosts are also warded) and it’s a weird place where there were four supernatural kids all in one place AND it’s got dead people buried in the crawlspace. The fact someone said this place needed to have ghosts blocked probably matters.
Instead, Derek’s arm starts spasming.
A side effect of his condition, I guess, muscles developing in overdrive.
That’s really not how… oh whatever, just get back to the damn ghosts.
“Just as long as you don’t rip through your clothing and turn green,” I said.
“What?” His face scrunched up, then he got it.”The Incredible Hulk. Ha-ha.Incredibly Stupid Movie, more like.”
SHUT UP AND TALK TO THE GHOST.
I started with questions about the ghost himself, and learned he was a necromancer. He’d been at the hospital when I’d been admitted. Something about stopping ghosts from harassing the mental patients, which I didn’t really understand, but it wasn’t important.
What?
No, that’s really fucking important. That’s the first suggestion we’ve seen that ghosts are capable of interacting with non-necromancers. Back the plot train the fuck up, this is actual information and you damn well better investigate it.
No? Well fuck you too, Chloe.
Realizing that I didn’t know what I was, he knew I needed help. But before he could make contact, they moved me.
What? The hospital obviously wasn’t warded, so why couldn’t he make contact? She can’t even tell he’s a ghost on sight, as long as he goes into her room when she’s alone and doesn’t try to freak her out by jumping into scary form, he shouldn’t have had any trouble.
Anyway, he follows her to Lyle House. So ghosts can go whereever? Then how was Hobbs and the rest stuck in the basement of Chloe’s house?
He thought it was a spell, though when Derek challenged that assumption, the ghost admitted that it could be anything from the construction materials to the geographic location.
Where was the editor for this? He just said it was a ritual, as if there’s some very specific way of doing this, and now it can be anything?
All he knew was that the only places he could make even partial contact with me were the basement and the attic.
…but the obvious reason for warding the place is the bodies in the basement. Also, if he can contact her down there, why invite her up to the attic instead of down there again?
Also, why can Liz manifest wherever, and do so perfectly?
As for the bodies in the crawl space, he knew two things. One, they’d been murdered. Two, they were super-naturals. Put those together and he was convinced their stories would be important.
UM
NO
GETTING THE FUCK OUT IS IMPORTANT
We’ve established supernaturals are super RARE. This place has four supernatural kids in it at once. One of whom is maybe dead already. And now it’s also got a bunch of corpses in the basement that are also all supernatural people?
Chloe can come back for their story after she’s CONTACTED THE POLICE.
Part one: OMG DEAD BODIES IN THE BASEMENT also various illegal things regarding our treatment
Part two: by the way Officer they took away a girl earlier, her name is Liz, I’m worried she didn’t actually go to the hospital like they said.
“But they were just skeletons and dried up flesh,” Derek said. “Like mummies.
No. Skeletons don’t have lungs to talk with and mummies require an extremely dry location. The crawlspace was damp, which would encourage deterioration, and the bodies were obviously more intact than you say.
ALSO THEY WERE SUPERNATURAL PEOPLE LIKE YOU DEREK WHAT ARE THE ODDS OF THEM BEING IN THE CRAWLSPACE.
The ghost informs us the house is a mere sixty years old, which only makes all this even stupider. Sixty years is not particularly long, and it could easily have been a group home for a large portion of that time, so how can you easily tell that the bodies are definitely from before then?
Also Derek doesn’t see why this Lyle guy matters. Because if the bodies weren’t from when it was a group home then they’re from when it was his home, you pair of brainless fish!
The ghost tells them Lyle was a sorcerer.
That made Derek stop when I relayed it.
“The guy who built this place was a sorcerer?”
What, the fact there’s multiple dead sorcerers and whatnot in the basement is no big deal, but one more person being a supernatural guy is?
“Dark magic. Alchemist. Experimented. On supernaturals.”
How trite.
“How does he know so much about this guy?” Derek said. “He followed you here, didn’t he?”
“Everyone knew,” the ghost replied. “In Buffalo. All supernaturals. Knew where he lived. And stayed away. Or didn’t.”
See, this is what I’m complaining about with the supernatural community.
So they all know this guy is into human experimentation, and they never do anything about it? They just keep away and leave him to nab any baby supernaturals like Chloe.
This is also why I can’t see what the masquerade is doing for them. All it means is they have less protection from someone like this.
Derek continues to not see what being in the house built by a guy who experimented and killed supernaturals that’s now being used to house supernatural kids thought to be mentally ill, at least one of whom was either recently killed or had something experimental done to her has to do with him. This is because Derek, like Chloe, is a moron.
Of course, so’s the ghost because he doesn’t point this out and just says well maybe, maybe not.
Suddenly, lightning strikes and reanimates the remains of his brain.
A sorcerer built this place sixty years ago; there are supernaturals buried in the cellar; and now we’re here, three supernatural kids. The group home is named after him.
Unfortunately, it leaves as quickly as it comes.
It seems too much to be a coincidence, but I’m just not getting the connection.
You’re getting drugs they don’t bother to explain and sent off to a hospital to for murder if those don’t work. Surely the connection is obvious.
They finally head off to the damn crawlspace again. Chloe asks for advice on not accidentally reanimating everyone again.
go easy. Soft. Your power. Too strong.”
“My powers are too strong?”
I couldn’t suppress a smile. I might not be certain I wanted these powers, but it was kind of cool to hear that I had more than the average necromancer. Like taking an IQ test and finding out you’re smarter than you thought.
Something I’m sure Chloe has no firsthand experience with.
Also oh my god book stop pointing out she’s a sue.
She tries and the ghost immediately says there’s something wrong.
“Too strong,” the ghost said. “Unnatural.”
Yes, raising the shambling dead in an unholy mockery of life happens to be being done in an unnatural way when it’s Chloe, as opposed to the natural way of doing all that.
Derek immediately gives her the “no your wings are beautiful” response, because after hearing about people getting experimented on hearing someone has oddly boosted powers raises zero red flags. On the other hand, anything to keep the plot on track.
How long is this book? I wonder if all the padding could come from having to meet a word limit or something.
Is this the author who you said was a TV writer? That could also explain all the drawn-out dialogue and Idiot Plot; that stuff doesn’t work all too well audio-visually, but it is a complete disaster when someone tries to translate it into print.
Oh, it’s definitely to hit a word limit. By my estimate there’s only a chapter or two of actual plot between Chloe seeing the first ghost and currently. Every single conversation has people misunderstanding and needing the other person to repeat or rephrase the bit of actual information. It’s ridiculous.
Hunger Games was the TV writer, this is actually just standard YA hackwork. I’ve probably read a billion of them and this is the formula. Sometimes I’d just read the opening chapters then jump to the last few to see what was actually going.
Speaking of HG, are you considering seeing the movie? I’m kind of curious, since the first one (which was the least offensive) definitely seemed like it would work better in non-literary form, but just from the stills I’ve seen the treatment of Effie and Saint Peeta is going to make me want to ragequit like fifteen minutes in.
I watched it with sound off, but from visuals, Effie = raeg, but perhaps Saint Peeta might at least get characterized as saintly instead of being an asshole called one, which would upgrade it from raeg to merely questionable.
I don’t know if I’ll see it, at least not when it’s in theaters. I don’t watch movies much.
Just watched the trailer. Hatehatehate for the portrayal of Effie, but I think it will probably be an entertaining, if mindless, movie. I don’t really see movies, but I may end up going out of morbid curiosity. I have no idea how they’ll keep Katniss as a likable protagonist through two more movies, though. Even people I’ve talked to who loved the books hated her by the end, and Collins obviously didn’t intend it that way.
I think acting could do a lot. Much of the problems are because we’re in her head, so there’s no possibility of excusing her actions with better reasons.
And the final book will probably gain a lot from being tightened up. Like with Coin. What was screwing things up there was that Coin wasn’t being portrayed as cackling evil in a consistent manner. Cut out all the filler and waffling, and just have an establishing scene of her dining on puppies or something, and Katniss’ constant insubordination and eventual murder suddenly looks lots better. And so on.
My god, it’s worse than the “Character B repeating every subject of Character A’s sentences as a question” format in any given 4Kids! dub.
Wait, so was the ghost dead from the beginning, hanging out at the hospital, or did he die at the home?
Also, no, you don’t say, “not important” that much in a story, that the whole point, to make more plot points.
And why not make this whole conversation like a dialog? Yes it would be long, but the interaction between Chloe and the ghost could be interesting. Heck, this is the first time in years she has had a “normal” conversation with the undead. There is even room for comedy in the fact that Derek cannot here the ghost.
The ghost was chilling at the hospital (it’s not clear if that’s his place of death or if he headed there) then followed Chloe to the home.
And don’t be silly! Why would we want to watch Chloe talk to the ghost when the only important characters are Chloe and Derek?
I think one of the biggest problem with this series is that you have to have read the author’s other series that’s set in this universe to understand anything about what’s going on in the universe and why certain things are the way they are. Like one of the big reasons Super naturals don’t come out into the open is because there are a good number of them that are dangerous for humans. Like werewolves tend to eat humans, vampires have to completely drain a human of blood once a year to keep on living, several necromancers are also grave robbers to get parts for completely pointless rituals, and half demons can be anything from a normal person with x-ray vision to someone who can incinerate a person when they get angry. There are also clairvoyants, but the only important ones use their powers to be the world’s best paparazzi (I really really wish I were kidding with this) and have incest babies to make their powers stronger.Here, it seems really stupid that they wouldn’t come out because it makes sense for chloe to, in the main book series it makes more sense because you know more about the world.
But they don’t seem to get along, so why wouldn’t the less dangerous ones like the sorcerers sell out the ones they hate, like the werewolves? Why wouldn’t some individual do it for personal gain even if it screwed over the rest? What about people who just screw up? Or the average kid finding out they’re in a place that tortures other supernaturals to death – at least some of them are going to figure that they’d rather people found out about magic than that they were tortured to death. There’s more to keeping a giant masquerade going than just that regular people are going to be freaked out if they find out the truth. You need the threat of far worse punishment and very active monitoring.
They have some monitoring. There’s a council that watches them carefully, so any threat is dealt with, at least in America. They monitor news papers, blogs, and things like that. There’s also these super rich super awesome business sorcerers that kill and torture for many things, like exposing the secrets of the supernatural world. I also think the author went out of her way to show every human, except for one or two, who has gained knowledge about magic people to be desperate to get some of that magic. To the point that they were incinerating potentially magical children.
I don’t think it would work like that at all in the real world, and I don’t like the system in these books, but the author doesn’t look like she’ll be. I think it would be better to do away with the masquerade, and see how the world would deal with supernatural things existing. I, being the huge religion and spirituality nerd, would love to see the impact that verifiable proof of demons, angels, souls, and various gods existing would have on religions and beliefs.