Come on boys and ghouls! It's time to hop on Route 666 for a spooktacular
Paranormal Road Trip.
This week's stop is Rapid City, the setting of KAREN MEMORY, and our special guide is Elizabeth Bear.
Keep reading for a chance to win Karen Memory by Elizabeth Bear!
Elizabeth is the author of the Eternal Sky series, Jenny Casey series, Promethean age series, Jacob's Ladder series, New Amsterdam series, The Edda of Burdens series, The Stratford Man series, Bone and Jewel Creatures series, and the new steampunk novel Karen Memory.
Elizabeth's Top 5 Spooky Places in Rapid City
I might be cheating a bit here, because Rapid City is a fictional place,
and all its spook is spook I made up. But the world of
Karen Memory is
one where, in the very least, the so-called Creatures of the Lumberwoods
(the North American legendary fauna of tall tales and native theology)
do exist—so it’s conceivable that Karen could hike up into the hills
surrounding Rapid City and have a close encounter with a hodag or a
splintercat. (Watch out for the hoopsnakes, Karen. I hear they have a
nasty bite!)
So we’ll start with that, in fact.
#5 Spooky place in Rapid City… is actually a short day trip outside of
town. It’s the primeval temperate rain forests of the Pacific Northwest:
vast, towering, and dripping with moss. Their emerald canopies mean
deep, moist shade underneath. Dense undergrowth could hide just about
anything from wildcats to sasquatch, and you’ll never know what might be
peering at you from within the tangled canes of the nearest blackberry
bramble.
#4 Spooky place in Rapid City… the dockyards. Massive air and steamships
come and go from this Gold Rush town, relentlessly as the tide. They
haul out hopeful men and doomed dogs north to Anchorage for the gold
trail; hardwood timber for furniture, flooring, framing houses;
machinery and raw materials for foreign need. They haul
in silk, spices,
and indentured Chinese and Indian immigrants—little better than slaves
under the law—to work under brutal conditions in mines, on the
railroads, and in the prostitute’s cribs. Towering armatures controlled
by stevedores clank and hiss, hauling enormous shipping crates into and
out of holds. Men and women—ragged, down on their luck—scavenge or
whore.
#3 Spooky place in Rapid City… Bayside Market. You wouldn’t think so to
look at the bustling and labyrinthine market it shelters, but this
immense shed up on piles at the waterfront—it resembles an airship
hangar or a drydock, it’s so vast—is said to be haunted. Eager tourists
can wander between the stalls, attracted by heaps of golden melons or
bright red onions or glistening, jeweled berries (depending on the
season); rummaging around piles of baskets made in India and through
stacks of willowware bowls imported from China; stroking silk and
fawning over ready-made petticoats; nibbling sweet smoked salmon
seasoned with maple syrup—and never know that at night, when the wind
creaks the slatted walls and the hissing newfangled electric lights go
dark, it’s said that a ghostly, translucent glow can be seen gliding
between those same stalls. Those who have witnessed this say they’ve
glimpsed the outline of a young woman, always an aisle or two away,
slender and obviously distraught, running through the empty paths.
There are conflicting stories about her background—a suicide; a murder
victim; a girl who was distracted by grief, slipped down the granite
steps outside, and died. (It’s also possible that she’s something cooked
up by the Rapid City Board of Tourism: a nice genteel haunting is good
for business, after all!)
#2 Spooky place in Rapid City… this doesn’t appear in the book, but I’m
contemplating a short story about the Rain City Riverside, a notorious
local hotel. The Riverside occupies a good location close to the opera
house (Rapid City’s pride, joy, and cultural center). The hotel is Rapid
City’s only four-star establishment: fine dining, private baths, and at
least one of the steakhouse employees is actually French! (Sadly, it’s
the maitre d’hotel, rather than the chef, but on the frontier you have
to take what you can get. Nobody’s ever
seen a ghost in the Riverside—or
if they have, hotel management paid them off handsomely enough that
they’ve kept it to themselves.
But while the Riverside caters to mining and logging executives, it’s
also popular with those lucky gold miners who come back to civilization
with a bag of dust or a few nuggets in their pocket, ready to spend.
The legend is that Old Boston, the owner of the Griswold Claim in
Alaska, spent a little too much time out in the wilderness—and by the
time when he was finally ready to ship back to Rapid City, he’d gone
more than a little mad. Whether the violent deaths of himself, three
other miners, one bartender, and a saloon girl in the hotel bar were
performed by his own hand (as the hotel still insists) or by the hand of
an enraged tommyknocker (a kind of mine gremlin) he’d captured in
Alaska and smuggled home in a steamer trunk with the plan of selling it
to a traveling exhibition (as the lone survivor of the massacre, the
maimed and traumatized piano player, maintans) is not known one way or
the other.
If there was a tommyknocker, it was never captured, and no one knows
what became of it. Which might be why the hotel denies its existence.
They do have extensive wine cellars, however.
#1 Spooky place in Rapid City… the Underground. As with Boston, Seattle,
and a number of other coastal towns, Rapid City has had an ongoing
problem with flooding and high tides. So Rapid City adopted the same
solution as these other municipalities! Which is a pretty lousy solution
while it’s under construction, honestly—it involved building retaining
walls along the edges of the streets—leaving sidewalk pathways between
street and building so doors are still accessible—and then raising the
street with fill to a new ground level. This has the side effect, as you
might guess, of providing a terrible, terrifying, dark, narrow well
around the ground floor of every single affected building, which you
must enter in order to get in or out of those buildings—at least until
the streets are finished, and the sidewalks are closed over, and new
entrances are cut at the new ground level.
Of course, then those wells
remain down there, even darker now with a
sidewalk on top! And the wells aren’t connected to one another, so in
order to get from one building to the next, you have to scramble up and
down ladders. About as much fun in hoop skirts and bustles as a
pre-novocaine root canal. And the best side effect is that the wells
become havens for all the sorts of things you might not wish to do in a
public street—from pissing and furtive sex to muggings, assault, and the
disposal of bodies.
Urban planning at its finest, and very, very spooky indeed.
Thank you Elizabeth for giving us such a haunting tour of Rapid City!
To learn more about
Elizabeth Bear and her books, please visit her website. You can
add Karen Memory here on Goodreads.
We are also having a fantastic book giveaway to celebrate the release of KAREN MEMORY by Elizabeth Bear.
Karen Memory Book Giveaway
We are giving away a hardcover copy of Karen Memory to one lucky winner!
To enter, please leave a comment on this post, and include your email address so we may contact you if you win. This giveaway is open to US and Canada only. Giveaway ends March 3, 2015 midnight EST.
Karen Memory by Elizabeth Bear.
“You ain’t gonna like what I have to tell you, but I'm gonna tell you
anyway. See, my name is Karen Memery, like memory only spelt with an e,
and I'm one of the girls what works in the Hôtel Mon Cherie on Amity
Street. Hôtel has a little hat over the o like that. It's French, so
Beatrice tells me.”
Set in the late 19th century—when the city we now call Seattle
Underground was the whole town (and still on the surface), when airships
plied the trade routes, would-be gold miners were heading to the gold
fields of Alaska, and steam-powered mechanicals stalked the waterfront,
Karen is a young woman on her own, is making the best of her orphaned
state by working in Madame Damnable’s high-quality bordello. Through
Karen’s eyes we get to know the other girls in the house—a resourceful
group—and the poor and the powerful of the town. Trouble erupts one
night when a badly injured girl arrives at their door, beggin sanctuary,
followed by the man who holds her indenture, and who has a machine that
can take over anyone’s mind and control their actions. And as if that
wasn’t bad enough, the next night brings a body dumped in their rubbish
heap—a streetwalker who has been brutally murdered.
Bear brings alive this Jack-the-Ripper yarn of the old west with a light
touch in Karen’s own memorable voice, and a mesmerizing evocation of
classic steam-powered science.
Release Date: February 3, 2015
Genre: Fantasy, Steampunk
What did you think of Elizabeth's picks for spooky places? Does Rapid City sound like a place you'd like to visit?
Last week on Paranormal Road Trip we visited
Louisville with Shiloh Walker. Next week we'll be traveling to Australia with Cassandra Page.
Join us for another spine-tingling Paranormal Road Trip...
if you dare!
, and steampunk novel 
.