5 Pillar Review: "Jinnu" by Meagan J. Meehan
Click to viewI can typically listen through or bail on a Chilling Tales for Dark Nights offering fairly easily. But with this effort I felt the urge to dive in and start reviewing a piece. It honestly started minutes into the listening, when an overly modern writer attempting to capture a more Gothic style managed to shoehorn the word "problematic" into the prose, shortly after "privileged" made an appearance. The thing is, converged thinking trends towards the obvious as leftist memes & dogwhistles will appear in everything created. There's no option not to with that mindset.
Our story begins with a prelude describing the vast estate and declining bloodlineof the Blackborne family (guessed spelling).
The estate was opulent, a palace among mere mansions. Yet to Chelsea Blackborne, it was a miserable prisonof boredom and routine. Grand, yet familiar, and familiarity bred contempt.
And how familiar are we with the declining scionsof a once noble lineage? With Chelsea, a classically ugly Ritch Bitch trope, a spoilt child who is jealous of a beautiful and virtuously impoverished maid servant Sarah? There were very few places for this story to go from origins like this.
Sarah worked at the estate three days a week, and as much as Chelsea tried to ignore here, there was something about the servant that captivated...and enraged her.
Because yes, its important to note one character's time schedule. Let's hear about her vacations days and benefits package from the teamster's union while we're at it.
One day, Chelsea had been in town with her father on a rare outing to the curiosity shop, and heard a groupof young men whistling and shouting. Several stableboys were desperately vying for the attentionof Sarah as she hurried down the street, wicker basket in hand, obviously on an errand.
Catcalling. Stableboys.
Let that sink in.
This is the "10 hours in New York" video frame that the writer is working from, and stuck in. And Look at that sentence! It's clear the actual author recieved no help in editing, or is getting paid a penny per word... my strikethrough is to illustrate one of the most meager attempts at editing that passage that a person could make. But even that effort is- superfluous, as you shall soon see.
Chelsea didn't mind staying in Ms Iverson's care, since she had diligently studied plants and herbs, and knew precisely how to spike the old woman's tea and make her fall into a long, deep slumber.
Okay. You see that? You see that there? That sentence at comes in at the 10:22 markof a 42 minute podcast? That's your opening sentence. Your main character, protag or antag, is in the midst of, or has just finished, doing something. Not a damned word preceeding that sentence of what is, supposedly, a horror story, provided any unique tension. Not grandpa's suicide, not long dead uncle's curio shoppe, not how pretty and perfect servile Sarah is, none of that needed to appear before Chelsea breaks a taboo.
Meagan writes paragraphs on what a brat Chelsea is, about how she throws tantrums and runs off a series of tutors, when all that was necessary was this sentence. She slips an old lady a Mickey Finn and goes into the attic where she's not supposed to go. I mean seriously, anything else about how pretty Sarah is or ugly Chelsea is could be interspersed later in the story after an active opening sentence.
This is a short story here, not a Mercedes Lackey novel. Time is of the essence. Short fiction moves at the Speed of Pulp, Meagan!
So she goes up into the attic, pulls a mysterious trunk downstairs, and releases a thing.
-It's body was white, yet (and) vapid, like a ghost -
I woulda gone with vaprous myself. Vapid just makes it sound ditzy. Also, unnecessary words. So many unecessary words!!
-although it better resembled an insect than a human. It had long, spindly limbs, arms, legs, fingers. And large black eyes. Its nose was non-existant it's mouth merely a small straight line at the bottomof its oval head. It had no hair, or clothes. Its gender was indeterminable.
BWA-HAHAHA! Of course by 15 minutes, after "privilege" and "problematic", we go on about Gender.
But seriously. This description reads like a classic grey alien. But Chelsea thinks it's a genie.
So on Jinnu's advice, Chelsea j'accuses Ms Iverson of "caressing" her, forcing her out, rigs a piano's wires to snap, lashing Sarah's pretty face, then years later, kills her father with poison when she reaches adulthood. All the while feeding Jinnu table scraps, birds, rabbits & cats she catches.
And a skill at picking locks looks like it wll not be used again. So Meagan's overwrought excesses seem to be including a Checkov's skill that won't be brought up again, nor needed to be described in the first place.
Time ticked by, its rules non-applicable on the Blackborne property.
And soon enough Chelsea is past 20, and going full Seymore Krelbourn from Little Shop of Horrors. Luring Poor people back to her estate for Jinnu to feast upon them.
Authorities never came to the estate asking questions, the poor were seldom missed.
And once you're commited to an SJW mindset, the actual tropes accessible in writing are limited. It really is what makes so manyof their works derivative. They remove any Legos that don't forward their propaganda. Even the wealthy in decline are Eebil, the poor are oppressed & victims, yadda yadda. It's fascinating to have a wide-open Overton Window and a TVTropes arsenal of pattern recognition. Every lefty fic becomes exponentially worse when you have a greater understanding of how many places a story can truly go if you give it a chance.
And then Chelsea is kept immortal by the Jinnu, slowly bringing in people to feed Jinnu as the decades pass and Chelsea doesn't age. And by the process, the entire story feels like it's dragging on unecessarily. I don't think I've ever experienced time dilation by listening to an audiobook, but here we are. We've taken the most dreary route possible from the eraof horse & buggy to the modern age.
What was the value of one night in the mansion to the outside world? A year? A decade? A century? Cheslea couldn't say.
Worse- from the beginning, we've been stuck with the sort of character where we won't care if they answer these questions or not. Part of the problemof the writing style is that it renders our villains boring. The playof the years, once Chelsea's immediate household are done with, goes by in sterile fashion. The house exists, Chelsea occaisionally ventures out, brings people in and kills them offscreen. The interactions are all too vague to elicit any emotion. There are no screams in the night, no desperate, failing struggles against a supernatural beast and the crazed, icily beautiful witch that plays its consort. This is a horror story with no sense of horror, terror, foreboding. There's 9 minutes to the end. I'm at the 34 minute markof 42 minutes and I don't see, nor give a damn if there's a climax, nor do I honestly expect one.
Meagan's story reads as: Filler. Almost a good start. Well worn premise. Aborted story arcs. More Filler. Then some Filler, followed by a bitof Filler on the side. Home stretch though, people! I'm writing this as I listen to it in the middleof the night!
34:16 Oh hey, now Cheslea's a cannibal, and did we give a damn? Not really. I mean, hell, some reader's might have assumed she tried every drug on the shelf before it was illegal back in the Edwardian era, not hitting up cannibalism until hamburgers came about.
She took to joining Jinnu in its meals, devouring everything but the bones, which she used to decorate the manor's interior. She was especially fondof human skulls.
And with no protagonist in this story, such descriptions have no meaning. This isn't a passage in a story, it's a setting in a tabletop RPG. This is character backstory for someone else to engage with, maybe. I know Kevin Winkless & Kevin Siembieda would equally take an axe to this to fit eitherof their publications. But the problem remains- there is nowherein this story for a person to give a $#!+ about whathappens to who. Characters were aborted 15 minutes ago and the reader doesn't have a handhold with which to invest themselves emotionally in the goings-on.
You roll up a character and send them into Chelsea Blackborne's houseof bones with an evil critter in the garden. You don't passively watch the years roll by for her as her crimes tick by with the dispassionof historian's bullet points.
Hey! So Jinnu tells Chelsea to spread rumors that the house is haunted to attract new victims so she doesn't get caught on cameras or something. Apparently even he groks that you need to introduce adventure for someone, somewhere at somepoint. Now if only this had been introduced at least halfway into this story?
Approximately two weeks after Chelsea's latest visit to town, which would have been as much as two decades in the outside world , four teenagers scaled the fence and stormed the garden like vikings set on pi llaging a vi llage.
Say hello to our next horror cliche victims! Already falling to the mighty Axeof Kevin!
So their cellphones fail them inside the garden (of course, there are RPG rules for that effect even). And Chelsea kills them.
All right! We're gonna have a shrieking slaughterfest in grand guignol fina-nope. A sentenceof "She swept down up on them" and they dead. Christ, this encounter began at teh 35 minute mark, and it's over at the 36. There is no tension in this story!
*sigh* I think we're winding down here, cops looked up the dead kids posts on social mediato find out about their planned excursion to the Blackborne estate. Jig is up, I guess! Oh well!
Oh, and this text.
But she thought wrong.
Cliche city here, folks. Right down to tired idoms.
Huh. Jinnu sleeps in a "silvery cocoon." I got a guess as to where this is headed...
Nope- it's not a spaceship.
And Jinnu kills Chelsea and looks for a new human, crawling into a bystander's car trunk. The End?
So- if anything valuable is gained, it's a crash courseof the flawsof muchof modern fiction. Jinnu is the sortof storyelling that the Pulp Revival/Revolution was founded to cure. The opening line'sof Meagan's story are dry descriptionof a banal setting, one that even the principle character describes as boring. The reader is not invited to ask any questions. It lacks moral peril, impact, romance, mystery, and action. Noneof Misha Burnett's 5 Pillars are invoked.
It lacks Action: At no point is the resolutionof any conflict in doubt.
There's no Moral Peril: Chelsea is already as awful a creature as Jinnu right from the start. Everything is merely an expected downhill slide, and at no point does she question her path. She's just following lockstep in her parent's estabilshed greed, evil and murde-WAIT, I was thinking of Chelsea Clinton, not Chelsea Blackborne.
No Romance: Chelsea is at no point implied to be emotionally attached to the world she inhabits, she remains from beginning to end a creatureof pure nihilism. No passages invoke deep emotion even to play to gloriesof her slaughter. The scale of time is too compressed to perform that task.
The deeds lack Impact: Because nothing is resolved, and there was no attempt to attach oneself to the characters outside providing the most rudimentary cliches to illustrate a generic "good" in Sarah, who is merely a victim tossed away in the first third of the story, and an unemotive "bad" in Chelsea who manages to perform a centuryof murders and crimes in effortless dispassion.
Not a bit of Mystery: All the cards are laid out at the beginning, and throughout, there are no revelations, no deeper meaning, no greater world. One event follows the next with minimal requisite explanation. It's not a narrative, it's a laundry list. And I realize I've read Yiff-Fic with more invcationof the 5 Pillars than this story.