Greetings all and welcome, officially to May. I have somehow written 10 of these in a row without missing a deadline, which is about six or seven more than I thought I’d do. Way to exceed your own underwhelming expectations, self!
But that’s enough self-congratulation for one week. Besides, there’s a book that I am dying to tell you about, so let’s jump and pivot and shimmy and backflip right in.
Dare Me: A Novel by Megan Abbott
I borrowed Dare Me from the library because last weekend my Nerd Book Club was reading Fatale by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips.
(This is related.)
When I re-read Fatale #12, Brubaker singled out Dare Me in the back pages, where Megan Abbott also contributed a guest essay. (If you’re not reading any of his Image books in singles you are missing out on a lot — project updates, guest essays on genre fiction and writers, and pop culture recommendations from Mr. Brubaker himself.) “Cheerleader noir,” he said. “One of my favourites of last year,” he said. Was he ever not kidding.
In Dare Me, Megan Abbott puts together a gripping suspense story of lust, betrayal, deceit, death and shifting allegiances, and populates it with a squad of cheerleading high school girls. It’s a nasty re-imagining of a familiar story, but instead of trenchcoats there are cheer outfits; instead of glasses of bourbon whiskey there are illicit bottles of fruity liqueur stolen from parents’ liquor cabinets, and instead of untrustworthy young women there are … untrustworthy young women. The narrator of Dare Me is Addy Hanlon, high school cheerleader and best friend to cheer squad captain Beth Cassidy. They run both the squad and the school, but when new cheer coach Colette French arrives at the beginning of the year, things between these two girls change very quickly. As Addy and the rest of the squad begin to fall in with the new coach, Beth becomes the increasingly aggressive outsider, and Addy becomes torn between allegiance to her best friend and the magnetic pull of Coach French. Then, someone dies. And Addy’s loyalties really start getting tested.
Not only is Dare Me a nasty twist on a familiar genre, but it gives me an “in” to understanding these characters, characters who I thought lived in a world so different than anything I’d ever experienced. I love how Abbott uses a sparse, hard-boiled writing style to tell the story of these young women, but more than that I appreciate her reverence for the tropes of the noir style without being slavishly tied to them. To me, noir isn’t trenchcoats and Venetian blinds and femmes fatale: it’s a weak person stumbling into a situation way over his or her head, caught between conflicting allegiances and getting trapped by “the system.” Dare Me is that kind of noir. Addy is caught between loyalty to her horrifying best friend and a near cult-like allegiance to her new cheer messiah, and as each woman tugged on her I felt myself being torn along with her, not knowing who to trust. There’s an uneasiness to the book that doesn’t allow you to make snap judgements about the characters. Maybe Beth is a horrible bitch but maybe she’s also really looking out for Addy. Maybe Coach French is an inspiring role model or maybe she’s just using her. Just like Addy, I was never able to put a sure foot down. It also helps that the squad feels like the military that so many old noir characters were once a part of — yet another one of the many fun ways to compare and contrast the two settings.
Dare Me is more than just an exercise in style, though. Abbott writes her characters as inhabiting a heightened reality, which, let’s face it, is a good way to describe non-noir high school. These young girls, so sure of themselves as part of this cheer group but so unsure of their place within that group, were real to me, and their problems were real because I think everyone can relate to feeling like an impostor in his or her own life at least once. I loved the pace of the book, how high school time passes both so slowly and so quickly, so that things feel like they’ve always been this way but also that last summer was a really long time ago. Dare Me unfolds so slowly, giving you just a little more with every chapter, that you identify with Addy’s ignorance about her situation, her inability to see the whole picture until it’s way too late. Until it’s past way too late.
I’m leaving so much of it out because I want people to experience it relatively unspoiled. The sparseness of Abbott’s narration, the eerie parallels between the cheer world and the dark world underneath, the terrifying symbolism that’s peppered through the book, the twists that came when you didn’t think that there were any more to spare: Dare Me grabbed a hold of my neck from the first page and never let up. I finished it the day after I took it out of the library, and while I wouldn’t say that’s a terribly impressive feat by page count, it’s impressive because it’s not exactly breezy. It’s also impressive to me because it’s the first time I’ve done that in many years. I haven’t liked a book this much since Warren Ellis’ Gun Machine, which I read almost 18 months ago now. I am just starting my first re-read and I am already sucked right back in. Thank you, Megan Abbott, for this book, and thank you, Ed Brubaker, for the recommendation.
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As much as I loved Dare Me, though, last week wasn’t all death and cheerleaders. Here’s what else I got up to.
Comics – I am finally catching up on my Valiant digital back issues, and the first 10 issues of Archer & Armstrong by Fred Van Lente are a fun, wacky read. I have no previous exposure to the characters from their original series, but the modern-day Archer & Armstrong are drawn in broad strokes and their adventures are fast-paced, exciting, thrilling, and funny. If you’ve never read any Valiant comics but were intrigued by the relaunch, I would recommend picking up Archer & Armstrong. (I may have more Valiant recommendations in the future; there are issues of Harbinger and X-O Manowar burning a hole in my iPad right now, too.)
Comics – This week I finally finished the first Savage Sword of Conan phonebook-style tome from Dark Horse, which has collected black-and-white reprints of the original 1970s Marvel series. I never really understood the appeal of Conan, but this volume helped me see where Barbarian-mania came from. Roy Thomas does an uncanny job channeling Robert E. Howard, filling the book with flowery pulp prose. It’s the art, though, that’s the real revelation in this book. Any story illustrated by Jim Starlin will immediately catch my attention, and Tony Dezuniga also puts in a great showing; this was also my first exposure to Alex Nino, and his pages were a labyrinth of thin line and detail. The best, though, are the stories illustrated by John Buscema, particularly when inked by Alfredo Alcala. I would put down a good chunk of change for a full-colour collection of their stories. So I like Conan, now. Who knew?
Movies – I thought that I’m Not There, the movie inspired by the life and music of Bob Dylan, would be a write-off, but my curiosity eventually overcame my inertia and I ended up watching it. And I actually really liked it. It’s more lyrical than narrative, with Dylan being interpreted by six different actors, and the movie weaves back and forth between the plots. In one thread, Richard Gere is Bob Dylan as a retired Billy The Kid, walking through a town populated by Dylan lyrics come to life, and it’s shot like a soft-focus 1970s western. In another, Heath Ledger plays an actor in the 1960s whose life is falling apart, and he is filming a movie where he plays the version of Bob Dylan that Christian Bale played in the 1950s story. But my favourite is Cate Blanchett’s interpretation of nihilistic, drugged-out Electric Dylan. She stumbles and swaggers, her performance full of mumbles and tics and a raw energy that completely takes over the film. That alone makes it worth watching.
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And that’s all for this week, friends! Until next time, read Dare Me. Just read Dare Me and then tell me you loved it so we can be best friends. I’ll see you in seven days.
