Black Moon Mineral-sharp sourness, cedar and graphite alchemized in lunar essence (I initially wrote cedar and pencil shavings steeped in moon juice, hehehe.) Underground chambers are revealed, mineral veins exposed; xenolithic flora, Earth’s scar tissue, sprouts shadow-fed roots and subterranean blooms, ghostly and calcified fronds.
Luna Negra Jammy incense, midnight berry-stained narcosis, the plush blanket of shadows, falling into the darkness of dream. A sumptuous plummy-amethystine obsidian ode to the pantheon of night.
Schwarzer Mond Brooding resins, dark lurking patchouli, pitch-black pine blood, abyssal anise; a warped and wicked tripping of the tongue summoning that which dwells in shadow, feeds on secrets, and sleeps in the ancient wounds of cursed soil. Predatory, perilous, and potent, you know – a real good-time gal. And my all-time favorite BPAL scent since 2006.
Arcana Wildcraft Dreamer Fatal temporality in a pale pink slip dress, frayed lace hanging by threads. Kinderwhore but not really, now not anymore– a tragic, beautiful mess, elegiac-grunge. Rich jasmine/lime vintage expectations, lush vanilla coconut doll parts, sweet plastic ache doing anything-anything to feel something different, something real. Rhubarb discordant, off-kilter, jangling/janky knife’s edge self-destructive poetry of sour survival and want. The girl was always doomed. But bitches, she’s still here. She’s still fucking here.
Liis Celestial Object A tender comfort in the annihilating face of the aloof suns, the indifferent cosmos, the total dark sublime. A small silhouette emerging from deep shadow, arms extended skyward toward infinity, engulfed in a lullaby of sepia and softness and warmth. Sweet offerings from home planets, celestial pastries, caramelized starlight, golden toasted nebula dust; gossamer sweets of crystallized petals, preserved blossoms, fruiting flower essences, and orchard nectar suspended in jellied orbs of weightless honey. Souvenirs from stellar nurseries, wafer crumbs and fragmented nougat, half-remembered songs hummed against the void, rations for the long journey home.
Immortal Perfumes Madame Moustache is a soapy-cozy-clean musk that’s so cute, it is almost ridiculous. It conjures rosy dimpled cherub cheeks, pinchable and plump; its nose wants booping, its belly needs a little blooping poke! Bubbly and plucky, adorable beyond reason – honestly, this smells like a tiny, tooting kewpie doll fart, a gentle cloud of foaming soft white soap, creamy lather, gentle musk that feels like marshmallowy cotton balls, and sudsy skin. The fragrance notes mention campfire or tobacco, and I don’t smell either at all, but …something evoking that sort of warmth? But warmth as a vibe, not a temperature; the essence of snuggly vintage comfort, a fluffy, cushy familiarity. But there’s also a plastic-y porcelain floral aura, like doll skin coolness rather than human skin, pulse, and breath, creating this odd little tension between the intimate warmth and the artificial, cutesy collectible charm of something endearing that you might win from an olde-timey state fair, like a proto-Labubu in a bottle.
Air & Weather Lilac Purple hedge clusters, tiny white woodland bells dissolved to mist at daybreak’s soft, drowsy threshold. Salt-tinged vapors drift landward, cool and questing, ruffled wisps drifting low, just outside the curtains. An atmosphere like tentative hope, like hushed waiting, like a held breath. A lingering musk, gentle, scarcely perceptible, threading through the stillness. Sun lifts the morning, a brightening shift parts the grey, the air begins to ease and warm; with apologies to Emily Dickinson… not knowing when the Dawn will come, I throw open every window.
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I’m thrilled to share that I have some writing in the forthcoming issue of The Scent Strip! The Scent Strip is a quarterly perfume community newspaper published by Immortal Perfumes, featuring essays, reviews, recipes, artwork, and writing from fragrance enthusiasts, and this issue’s focus is “Spellbound,” …it explores the connections between scent and magic, from the historical suspicion surrounding women who worked with aromatic plants, to iconic “witchy” perfumes like Magie Noire and Poison, to practical rituals like simmer pots and the sacred language of incense. There are Tarot spreads, Gothic reading recommendations, literary witch character perfumes, and explorations of how fragrance functions as a tool for transformation and memory.
I ended up writing two things for this issue…!
“Scent As Spell” muses on fragrance as enchantment beyond simple glamour. Anamnesis (recovery of forgotten memory through scent). Palimpsest (when a fragrance relationship changes over years, layering new associations over old). Pharmakos (the poison that cures). Katabasis (when fragrance takes you down into shadow). And more! Old words I’ve borrowed and bent to describe experiences bigger than the usual perfume vocabulary.
“Fantasy Perfumes for Fictional Witches” envisions imaginary fragrance descriptions for 18 archetypal sorceresses from fiction. An exercise in fragrant forensics, reconstructing legendary witches through the invisible evidence they leave behind: the materials they touched, the spaces they inhabited, the sensory traces on spell-stained fingertips. Sea witches and swamp prophets, ancient healers and rebellious teenagers, each distilled into their essential scent.
Here are all of the books that I read between mid-July and the end of September. I tried to be better about writing my thoughts immediately after finishing each book this time around. Obviously, I haven’t got any deadline for posting these collections of book reviews, I am only writing for myself here after all…but once I have decided “ok now’s the time!” I’d really like there to be as little work as possible. Doing it bit by bit, one book at a time as I go along is much, much easier than letting all the read titles accumulate and then trying to remember all the details and write about 25 books in one week! If you are someone who shares book reviews, do you tend to write them one by one, or say, 5-10 in one go? What’s your process? Do you take notes while reading, or rely on memory? How do you balance being helpful to other readers without spoiling too much? And does your opinion of a book ever shift between finishing it and actually sitting down to write about it? Sometimes I find that books I thought I loved start feeling more kinda meh once I try to articulate why they worked, or books that annoyed me reveal something interesting or unexpected when I’m forced to be more analytical about them.
Anyway, there were a few books I DNFed (did not finish) this time around, and I am not sure if it is fair to include them, but I do think if I am going to do a round-up of stuff I have read, I want to include all of it, even the books that didn’t work for me. I wonder sometimes if DNF reviews might be more useful than positive ones, maybe there’s something to be said for knowing why someone abandoned a book and at what point, especially if you share similar reading preferences or have the same pet peeves. Plus, acknowledging when books don’t click feels like part of the real reading experience rather than only showcasing the successes.
Writing reviews as I went definitely made me more conscious of my reactions while reading. I caught myself thinking about things like when reveals change everything about a character retroactively, rather than recontextualizing what we already knew, or when the “surprise” feels unearned because no foundation was laid for it. I found myself noticing scenes that felt like filler rather than building toward anything, or when authors don’t trust readers to retain basic character information and keep hammering away at the same points. Sometimes these reactions struck immediately…I’d be one paragraph in and already thinking “this dialogue sounds off” or “I don’t buy this character’s voice” – while other insights crystallized in those first few hours after finishing, when specific moments were still vivid before getting smoothed over by time and other books. The downside is that sometimes I felt like I was reading with one foot outside the story, analyzing instead of just enjoying, though maybe that trade-off is worth it for actually being able to articulate why something worked or didn’t.
Anyway, yeah, yeah, all the backstory before I share the recipes. I know, I know. Get on with it!
Devil’s Day by Andrew Michael Hurley John Pentecost returns to his family’s Lancashire farm for his grandfather’s funeral, bringing his pregnant wife Kat to the isolated Endlands community for the first time. The Gaffer had been the keeper of local traditions and boundary lines that supposedly protect the valley from the Devil, and now John must decide whether to take on that responsibility during the annual sheep gathering and Devil’s Day ritual. Andrew Michael Hurley is fast becoming one of my favorite authors – if you’ve ever read Robert MacFarlane’s lyrical writing about ancient British landscapes and thought “what this needs is some creeping dread and unexplained rural menace,” then you’ve found your writer. The pacing is glacially slow, but it works perfectly for Hurley’s atmospheric style, allowing the bleak moorland and bitter winds to seep into every scene until the landscape itself becomes a character. Kat feels increasingly trapped and unwelcome among the suspicious locals, while John is torn between his old life and his deep, almost mystical connection to this harsh place that demands everything from those who try to survive there.
Swallows by Natsuo Kirino Riki, a broke temp worker in Tokyo, agrees to be a surrogate for Motoi and Yuko, a wealthy couple desperate for a child, after her friend mentions the hefty payout for renting out your womb. Kirino’s exploration of poverty and reproductive choices is genuinely compelling, even when her characters make baffling decisions with zero self-awareness – like Motoi wanting a kid to live vicariously through while Yuko doesn’t even want to raise a child she’s not related to. The frank discussions about sex and bodies caught me off guard (but maybe it shouldn’t have, considering the author) and there’s definitely a lot talking in circles without actually resolving anything, just seemingly endless back-and-forth conversations that don’t seem to go anywhere, but I found myself invested in following Riki’s disaffected journey through this morally complicated situation regardless. It’s messy and uncomfortable, which works for a story about people making terrible choices while desperate for money or babies.
Crafting for Sinners by Jenny Kiefer Ruth has been repeatedly shoplifting from New Creations craft store as revenge after being fired for her sexuality, despite her girlfriend Abigail’s warnings to stop – but when she’s finally caught, the employees lock her inside and hunt her down instead of calling the police. Which is weird enough, but their plans for her are clearly much worse. What should be a tense survival horror of Ruth fighting her way out using crafting supplies turns into an endless slog of her creeping between shelves while fretting about her blood sugar, and bizarre slapstick murder and destruction (I couldn’t tell if this was meant to be funny or not?? )The violence feels repetitively excessive, like it’s doing the work the plot should be doing, and random podcast segments get thrown in that feel like a missed opportunity to actually connect to the story. The ending itself worked until the epilogue takes a sharp turn that feels like something from a cheesy TV movie, completely undercutting everything that came before. I do love Ruth’s internal dialogue, though, which consisted chiefly of “fuck these fuckers.” Which, fair.
Fox by Joyce Carol Oates Since I DNFed this after two chapters, I can only comment on what I experienced before giving up. Francis Fox is a charismatic English teacher at an elite boarding school whose car is found submerged in a pond with body parts nearby, leading to questions about his true identity and dark secrets. Despite Oates’ undeniable command of language and literary prowess, there’s something about her long-form prose style that I find insufferable – she becomes excessively verbose in a way that feels like a terrible slog rather than artful crafting. I love a beautiful turn of phrase and well-crafted sentence, but Oates pushes beyond that into smugly pretentious territory that tests my patience. “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been” is probably one of the most effectively unsettling things I’ve ever read, which proves she can be brilliant when constrained by shorter forms – but her novels feel indulgent and meandering in comparison. I know a lot of folks think she’s a brilliant genius so I feel like a lowly worm even having an opinion about it, but sometimes literary titans just don’t work for you personally.
With A Vengeance by Riley SagerRiley Sager’s books are wildly inconsistent, and this one lands solidly in the “outrageously worst I’ve read from him” category – yet I somehow continue to eagerly anticipate each new release like a senseless, slavering lunatic. Anna Matheson lures six people who destroyed her family in 1942 onto a luxury train from Philadelphia to Chicago, planning to confront them about their crimes and deliver them to authorities waiting at the destination – but someone starts murdering her targets during the overnight journey. The entire premise is absolutely ridiculous: How does she get six suspicious strangers to just… go along with getting on a mystery train? What authorities would agree to let a civilian deliver six potential criminals like some kind of vigilante instead of investigating themselves? Her whole “confrontation and confession” plan is painfully naive – why does she think these people will suddenly admit to decades-old crimes just because she threatens them with legal consequences? What could potentially be a tense locked-room mystery becomes a repetitive mess where characters stumble across bodies, accuse each other randomly, then move on to the next murder without any real investigation. The plot relies on absurd coincidences rather than clever deduction, and the whole thing falls apart the moment you think about the logistics for more than two seconds.
Death of a Bookseller by Alice Slater Roach is a longtime bookseller at a struggling branch of Spines bookstore who becomes dangerously fixated on Laura, a new children’s bookseller brought in (along with colleague Eli) to help rejuvenate the failing location. When Roach discovers they both have an interest in true crime – specifically that Laura’s mother was murdered by a serial killer – she becomes convinced they’re kindred spirits, but Laura wants nothing to do with her increasingly unhinged attempts at friendship. What’s marketed as a mystery is really more of a psychological exploration of two deeply flawed people, and both main characters are thoroughly unpleasant in different ways. Roach is genuinely repulsive – greasy, stalkerish, and obsessed with killers rather than victims – though I suspect I was so put off by her partly because she mirrors the tiny edgelord in my own heart, sneering at “normies” while thinking she’s more interesting and superior to their beige blandness. Laura and Eli waltz into the store like they own the place, which immediately predisposed me to dislike them from the start. The repetitive routine of work, pub, hangover actually felt surprisingly cozy to read about, even though it was probably meant to illustrate how these characters are stuck and stagnating. The book raises interesting questions about the ethics of true crime consumption (I find the whole “fan” culture around it pretty distasteful myself), but this feels more like watching two awful people circle each other than a compelling thriller…which, perversely, made it quite readable.*
*I make an effort to note the personal synchronicities I experience whilst reading a story, and here’s yet another: “An elderly gent in a stained three-piece tweed suit buys The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared.” I literally just watched the film adaptation of The Hundred-Year-Old Man the weekend before I read that line.
Murder Ballads by Katy Horan Ever since I first heard Ceoltoiri’s haunting version of “The Cruel Sister” on their Women of Ireland CD 25 years ago, I’ve been haunted by that moment when “the harp began to play alone” – those goosebumps still chill me every single time. Katy Horan’s Murder Ballads feels like the perfect companion to that long fascination, bringing together her beautifully unsettling illustrations with meticulous research into twenty traditional murder ballads and their real-world origins. She doesn’t just retell these dark stories but excavates their histories, tracing how some songs evolved from actual murders while others spring from pure folklore and mythic tradition. Her approach is both scholarly and sensitive, restoring humanity to victims often reduced to cautionary tales while examining the genre’s troubling roots in patriarchal violence and white supremacy. Each ballad entry includes recommended recordings, making this as much a gateway into the music as it is a cultural study. Horan’s art has a strange, folkloric beauty: darkly whimsical but never twee, weaving folk tradition and rustic charm alongside a gothic sensibility that’s been touched by shadow and mystery. A quality of illuminated manuscripts crossed with old Appalachian almanacs and herbalist guides. For anyone drawn to the darker threads of folk tradition, this is an essential and beautifully crafted exploration of how real tragedy and timeless myth both become song.
Gifted and Talented by Olivie Blake (with cover art by Tristan Elwell!) The Wren siblings (Meredith, Arthur, and Eilidh) gather after their tech mogul father’s death to await the reading of his will, each harboring their own spectacular failures despite their privileged brilliance. Blake has created something genuinely entertaining here, a darkly comic family saga that shows off her talent for finding perfect absurdity in dire moments and revealing devastating psychological truths through keen observation. Her humor lands just right when describing a turbulent flight where everyone thinks they’re about to die (“The pilot had somehow left his microphone on and was crying audibly, which was not very beneficial for the vibes”) or capturing how someone like Arthur’s wife Gillian protects herself emotionally (“Gillian refused to cut herself on any blade she hadn’t forged herself”). What Blake does so well is find the exact right metaphor for complex emotional states and locate genuine comedy in genuinely terrible situations. The sibling dynamics feel authentically messy and competitive, each character brilliantly flawed in their own way, while supporting players like Gillian and Arthur’s other romantic entanglements add layers to an already complicated family web. But Blake’s narrator can be exhausting in that way a too-clever sibling becomes, the voice that initially presents itself mysteriously as “god” before revealing its true identity, the relentless stream of witty observations that sometimes go on way too long, like listening to someone who knows exactly how brilliant they are and won’t let you forget it. The pacing drags under all this cleverness, with 500 pages devoted mostly to psychological excavation rather than things actually happening. Still, when Blake succeeds (which is often) the insights into family trauma, privilege, and the crushing weight of unrealized potential feel both hilarious and heartbreaking.
The Weird and the Eerie by Marc Fisher Mark Fisher’s final completed work examines two distinct but related modes that haunt literature and film: the weird and the eerie. Fisher defines the weird as “the presence of that which does not belong” while the eerie emerges from “a failure of absence or a failure of presence” – something being where it shouldn’t be, or nothing being where something should be. I’ll be honest: much of this went over my head, particularly when Fisher ventures into theoretical territory about jouissance, transcendental exteriority, and various ontological abstractions. And about a million other concepts. But what’s remarkable is how intensely fascinating it remained even when I couldn’t follow his philosophical threads. Fisher’s discussions of Kubrick and du Maurier were particularly compelling – his analysis of the alien agency in 2001’s monolith and the undisclosed forces lurking in The Shining’s hotel, plus his reading of “Don’t Look Now” as a story about how denying the power of foresight actually contributes to the very disaster you’re trying to avoid. His readings made me want to immediately rewatch and reread everything he discusses, which is probably the highest compliment you can pay a critic. He can find the eerie in everything from ruins to capital itself (describing our economic system as an invisible force with tremendous power to destabilize society), which feels both illuminating and mildly unhinged. Very much the kind of insight that makes you wonder if you’re learning something profound or just getting successfully convinced by a very smart person’s obsessions. A key distinction Fisher makes is that these modes aren’t about horror but about “fascination for the outside, for that which lies beyond standard perception, cognition and experience.” Most people would lump weird/eerie stuff in with horror, but Fisher argues they’re actually about something different – not fear, but a kind of magnetic pull toward the unknown or inexplicable. It’s the difference between being scared of something and being weirdly drawn to it, like staring at a road accident or feeling compelled by abandoned places. Though without that context, it sounds like so much academic throat-clearing.The book works best when he’s doing close readings of specific works rather than building grand theoretical frameworks, though I suspect readers more versed in critical theory would appreciate those sections more than I did. This feels like essential reading for anyone interested in weird fiction or liminal spaces, even if – especially if – you don’t understand all of it.
The Old Ways: A Journey On Foot by Robert MacFarlane I could swear I’d already written about Robert MacFarlane’s The Old Ways – I reference him constantly in my blog, newsletter, and perfume reviews – but it turns out I’ve just been thinking about him so much I assumed I must have written about this particular book already. His dense, poetic prose is both the reason his books take me years to finish (you can only absorb a few paragraphs at a time, plus he keeps leading me to places I know nothing about, sending me down endless rabbit holes of side-reading) and why they’re so deeply rewarding. This exploration of Britain’s ancient pathways – the forgotten drove roads where cattle were herded to market, pilgrim routes to holy sites, smugglers’ tracks, and even sea lanes between remote islands – reveals a vast network of routes that crisscross the landscape like invisible threads connecting past and present. MacFarlane walks the perilous Broomway, a tidal path across Essex mudflats that’s only passable at low tide and has claimed countless lives, sails to the remote rock of Sula Sgeir where men still harvest gannets in an annual ritual unchanged for centuries, and traces the Icknield Way, supposedly Britain’s oldest path. His luminous prose shows how these ancient ways persist alongside our daily world rather than separate from it, whether he’s following Edward Thomas’s footsteps or sleeping rough in Hebridean caves. One passage particularly struck me: “For some time now it has seemed to me that two questions we should ask of any strong landscape are these: firstly, what do I know when I am in this place that I can know nowhere else? And then, vainly, what does this place know of me that I cannot know of myself?” The idea that landscapes hold knowledge we can only access by being physically present in them, and that they might serve as mirrors revealing hidden parts of ourselves, feels like the heart of why his writing resonates so deeply – it suggests our relationship with place is far more intimate and revelatory than we usually acknowledge. The book works as both travel writing and meditation on how landscape shapes consciousness, revealing the stories embedded in every footpath and the ghosts that walk beside us on these old routes.
The Woman In Suite 11 by Ruth Ware Lo Blacklock returns ten years older but somehow spectacularly less wise, apparently not emerging from her last ordeal with better judgment or a more solid sense of self-preservation. When she unexpectedly gets invited to the press opening of a luxury Swiss hotel owned by reclusive billionaire Marcus Leidmann, it reignites her desire to restart her travel journalism career after a decade as a stay-at-home mom in Manhattan. She’s hoping to snag an interview with him, but instead gets a late-night call summoning her to his room, where she finds a woman claiming to be his mistress and begging for help escaping some life-threatening situation. Rather than, say, calling hotel security or literally anyone with actual authority, Lo decides to personally shepherd this sketchy acquaintance across Europe in what becomes an increasingly ridiculous cat-and-mouse chase. Our main character’s decision-making is so spectacularly terrible that you’ll spend the entire book wondering how she managed to keep two children alive for years. I can barely remember The Woman in Cabin 10 from over a decade ago, but this feels like a sequel that exists solely because the first book was successful, not because Lo’s story needed continuing.
The Hunger We Pass Down by Jen Sookfong Lee Alice is an overwhelmed single mother trying to manage her online diaper business while dealing with her resentful teenage daughter Luna, her screen-obsessed son Luca, her hard-edged mother who’s finally ready to share the family’s dark history, and a new boyfriend who doesn’t quite understand what he’s walked into and which sucks for him because Alice isn’t ready to introduce him to her family anyhow. When Alice starts waking up to find all her household chores mysteriously completed overnight, it kicks off a story that uses shifting timelines to focus on each of the women in her family – her great-grandmother’s horrific experience as a comfort woman during WWII, her orphaned daughter, Alice’s mother, and Alice herself – showing how trauma moves and transforms through each generation. You know how the best part of any creepy story is when everyone’s getting increasingly freaked out but nobody wants to say anything because they’ll sound crazy? That mounting dread where people are secretly theorizing and panicking on their own until something finally forces them to compare notes? Most authors can’t stick the landing once that moment hits, and unfortunately, this one falters too, once things start becoming apparent and real conversations start happening. This was an absolutely great story for me until that inevitable moment when the mysterious thing is acknowledged and addressed – Lee builds all of that tension beautifully, but once things come into the open, it all gets wrapped up too quickly and chaotically, leading to a spectacularly bleak ending. Despite my complaints about how everything ends, the parts that worked were numerous – Lee’s mastery at building that creeping dread, the genuine mystery of what was happening to Alice, the complex tension in the family dynamics, and the deep love these women have for each other despite everything they’ve endured. The prowess of both the writing and the storytelling made it worth reading even with the disappointing conclusion, and overall I think it was pretty good.
There’s Someone Inside Your House by Stephanie Perkins Makani Young is trying to leave her dark past behind in small-town Nebraska when students at her high school start getting murdered in increasingly gruesome ways. Perkins delivers death scenes that feel ripped straight from a cheesy teen horror flick; they’re weirdly over-the-top yet not terribly disturbing, which gives the whole thing a cozy familiarity that’s actually kind of comforting. This could have been a novelization of just about any teen scream flick, and leaning into the nostalgic recognition of that predictable territory was weirdly satisfying and hard to resist. The problem is that the killer’s identity and motivations are surprisingly weak – we barely know who they are before the big reveal, and their reasoning feels underdeveloped and kind of stupid. The constant hinting about Makani’s mysterious past also gets tiresome when it turns out to be nowhere near as dramatic as all the buildup suggests. It’s definitely more YA contemporary with horror elements than true horror, but as a fast, silly read that doesn’t take itself too seriously (or …at least I didn’t take it too seriously), it was entertaining enough junky fun.
The Locked Ward Sarah Pekkanen Georgia Cartwright is locked in a psychiatric ward for violent offenders after being accused of murdering her adoptive family’s biological daughter, and her only hope is the twin sister she’s never met – Amanda, who gets sucked into Georgia’s drama despite having zero reason to trust someone she literally just learned exists. The instant psychic twin connection thing is pretty laughable and the plot stretches believability to the breaking point with its soap opera-level twists, but somehow I still tore through it in record time despite being annoyed by the short, choppy chapters. It’s frustratingly addictive in that way where you know it’s awfully dumb but can’t seem to put it down.
The Wasp Trap by Mark Edwards Six former colleagues reunite for a dinner party to honor their recently deceased professor who brought them together in 1999 to work on a revolutionary dating website based on psychological testing, but the evening quickly turns violent when they’re held hostage and forced to reveal their darkest secrets. The group includes Will (a failed writer turned teacher), Sophie (his former missed-connection living aimlessly), Rohan (struggling financially and hoping for a bailout), Lily (the brilliant tech mind working on something top-secret), hosts Georgina and Theo (the power couple who built a tech empire but are hiding family tragedy), and mysterious newcomer Fin who no one has ever seen before but who seems suspiciously cozy with the catering staff. Edwards builds the tension efficiently once the house is locked down and cell service disappears, using dual timelines to gradually reveal how their work on the dating algorithm (which could also identify psychopaths – “The Wasp Trap”) connects to their current predicament. Even though I could feel a big reveal approaching, the reality of it was actually unexpected. I enjoyed it despite the book bouncing between serious suspense and moments that felt almost silly, but somehow I still tore through it.
In Hellions, Julia Elliott crafts deliriously bizarre stories of languid Southern Gothic weirdness and the muggy-fuggy fantastical, where teenage Butter keeps a pet alligator while hunting for the Swamp Ape, a college student transforms into a satyress under the tutelage of her shape-shifting Wild Professor, and neighborhood kids become entranced by Cujo, a mysterious trampoline performer who morphs between beauty and hideousness. Each story is drenched in the humid, swampy atmosphere of the South – you can practically feel the heat pressing against your skin and smell the kudzu-thick air as Elliott weaves together folklore, horror, and dark comedy with breathtaking skill. Her prose is lush and intoxicating, building worlds that feel completely, immersively, almost overwhelmingly otherworldly, and profoundly resonant perhaps because I recognized something kindred in her descriptions – she writes about place and atmosphere the way I ramble in my perfume reviews, for example “…brutish, mystical—as though Gregorian monks had been turned into bears by a witch” feels like something I might write about a wild, earthy, resinous woody fragrance. This collection completely transported me, especially reading it in the sweltering August heat, sun-fevered and heat-struck – the perfect companion to Elliott’s sultry, folkloric stories, and I found myself rationing each tale because I desperately didn’t want the experience to end.
Cold Eternity by S.A. Barnes Halley is on the run from a political scandal and takes an under-the-radar job on a massive space barge storing thousands of cryogenically frozen bodies – Earth’s wealthiest citizens from over a century ago, all waiting to be revived when the technology that never quite worked right to begin with catches up to their dreams of eternal life. She’s supposedly not alone; Karl, the guy who hired her, is apparently on another level doing constant repairs, and she can hear him banging around at all hours…but she’s never actually met him in person, only talked to him through comms. The whole setup screams “something is very wrong here,” especially when you’re floating in the void with no escape route, surrounded by thousands of what are basically corpses that might not stay dead, completely dependent on life support systems that could fail at any moment, knowing that if something goes wrong, no one will hear you scream or come to help. Barnes excels at building all of that claustrophobic paranoia as Halley wanders the ship carrying the psychological pressure of being the only conscious person responsible for thousands of “lives” while navigating passages where you could easily get lost forever. The twist itself was actually kind of fun, even though I saw it coming, but the way everything wraps up after that felt underwhelming, and, as always in this author’s books, there’s a hint of romantic tension that felt unnecessary for horror. Barnes has a real talent for atmospheric dread, but I keep waiting for her endings to match the strength of her beginnings.
One Of Our Kind by Nicola Yoon Jasmyn and King Williams move their family to Liberty, California, an all-Black planned community of wealthy, successful residents, hoping to find like-minded people who share their values. I really loved reading about Jasmyn’s family dynamics and her relationships with the few friends she makes who share her growing unease about their new home, but the more I think about this book, the more problematic it starts to feel. Jasmyn is supposedly a compassionate social justice advocate, but she’s constantly judging other Black women for their hair choices and life decisions in ways that feel deeply uncomfortable. The premise is intriguing, this supposed utopia where residents seem more interested in spa treatments than activism, and it becomes genuinely creepy and upsetting as Jasmyn watches people she cares about get increasingly pulled into the wellness center’s influence while she desperately searches for answers, only to be gaslit from all corners. But the execution is full of plot holes that became impossible to ignore, and the pacing is a disaster – Yoon waits until the very last moment to reveal what’s really going on, then rushes through the resolution so quickly that it feels abrupt and unsatisfying. There’s a story here about community and belonging (probably? or is this meant to be satire and I am not seeing it?) but it’s muddled by a protagonist whose rigid ideas about authentic Blackness make her hard to root for, and an ending that left me questioning what message Yoon was actually trying to convey.
What Hunger by Catherine Dang Ronny Nguyen is fourteen, stuck between childhood and high school, spending her summer in suburban limbo while her golden-boy brother Tommy prepares for college. When tragedy hits and destroys her family, followed by assault at her first high school party, Ronny discovers a terrifying new appetite that becomes both her salvation and potential destruction. This isn’t just body horror, though; it’s a visceral coming-of-age story about Vietnamese-American identity, generational trauma, and the particular rage that comes with being a teenage girl surrounded by people who don’t understand, who won’t protect you, who dismiss you and deceive you and disappoint you. Dang writes Ronny’s downward spiral with the kind of raw, raging intensity that feels urgent and deeply satisfying, like tearing off a scab, or finally getting to scream at the top of your lungs at the worst person you know, or really, just push back at everything that’s been crushing you – there’s this sense of escalating release and justified rage that felt inevitable and necessary. Ronny herself is wildly compelling; I found her acting out thoroughly enjoyable because after everything she endures, she’s entitled to her fury. And when the truth about her mother’s past finally comes out, it recontextualizes everything in ways that made me want to immediately reread the whole thing. I’m about to compare two books about Asian American girls with dangerous appetites, which feels reductive in exactly the way that would make Ronny say “that’s another Asian,” but Monika Kim’s The Eyes Are the Best Part really is the closest comparison – though where Kim’s book felt more contemplative, What Hunger is fiercer and more unforgiving (and I’m not pitting these titles against one another, they’re both good).
ITCH! by Gemma Amor Josie was a character I initially found hard to connect with. She’s back in her isolated hometown near the Forest of Dean after escaping an abusive relationship with her ex-girlfriend Lena, staying with her emotionally unavailable father, who offers little in the way of comfort or support while she tries to figure out what comes next. The opening felt sluggish, with Josie doing a lot of nothing while a lot of nothing happened, and even after she discovers a woman’s ant-covered corpse in the woods, the relentless hallucinations and phantom insect sensations kept the story feeling meandering and trapped inside her head. However, as other characters are introduced (Angela, the pub owner where Josie works, who was friends with her late mother; Jacob, an elderly pub regular and town historian; and even surly Detective Wilkes), they energize the entire narrative, and the pacing picks up. As Josie starts engaging with actual people instead of just phantom bugs and her own spiraling thoughts, the story finally comes alive, weaving together the murder mystery, suppressed memories that slowly surface, and the town’s eerie Devil’s March festival, connected to the missing women. The folk horror elements surrounding this festival felt authentic and unsettling in that old-custom way, those passed-down practices we still follow without really knowing why, which makes you wonder what exactly you’re participating in and what dark consequences might result. More than a body horror tale, this turned out to be the atmospheric folk horror I didn’t know I needed this summer. As revelations about her father surface, Josie’s earlier brokenness recontextualizes completely: not weakness at all, but survival. The story takes a genuinely perverse and sadistic turn that I can’t spoil, but the feminist themes around silencing women who speak up are devastatingly effective. Watching Josie slowly reclaim her strength made that slower beginning completely worth it, and by the end, seeing her refuse to be anyone’s victim anymore felt deeply satisfying. A story that will absolutely reward your patience if you can push through the slow drag of the earlier chapters.
Room 55by Helena Kubicek Boye felt like reading a novelized film adaptation – flat, lifeless, and more outline than actual story. Anna Varga takes a position at Sweden’s notorious Säter psychiatric clinic, where her predecessor has vanished under suspicious circumstances and she starts receiving mysterious notes and warnings about the infamous Room 55, but as intriguing as that sounds, the execution never lives up to the premise. The ultra-short chapters (some barely a page) constantly switch between a dozen different points of view, making it impossible to build any momentum or investment, and the individuals Anna interacts with – colleagues, administrators, and patients are basically one-dimensional stock characters – no one is really fleshed out, and we know them mainly by their worst qualities. Despite all the setup about Room 55’s dark secrets, the payoff feels disappointingly thin, and I was expecting something atmospheric and eerie, but this felt slapdash and oddly unengaging for a story set in a creepy psychiatric facility.
The Unseen by Ania Ahlborn If I didn’t have strict bedtime rules, this would have been one of those books that kept me up until 4am, desperate to finish it. Isla Hansen is grieving a recent miscarriage when a mysterious, mute child appears on her family’s Colorado property, and despite having five kids already who desperately need her attention, she becomes immediately obsessed with taking him in. Her husband Luke and their children notice something deeply wrong with the boy – he’s unnerving in ways that go beyond just being traumatized – but Isla won’t hear any criticism of her new foundling. At first, I was so frustrated with Isla’s tunnel vision, especially since she already has all these kids who need her, but as the story unfolds and the true nature of what’s happening becomes clear, being angry with her becomes much more complicated. The book is thoroughly disquieting and creepy in similar ways to how Josh Malerman’s Incidents Around the House scared me so badly that it made me cry. When what’s actually going on finally becomes clear (or as clear as it could be considering how confused I became) it’s an unexpected surprise that I didn’t particularly welcome, but Ahlborn kept me completely invested even as the story went places I wasn’t prepared for. I can’t wait to scour my library for more unsettling titles from this author.
Girl Dinner by Olivie Blake I’m not a new mother (or an old one, I have zero children) and I have never given a single shit about sororities, but Olivie Blake’s story of two women’s desperate hunger for something more than what they have drew me in completely. Nina is clawing her way toward success through The House, the campus’s most exclusive sorority, knowing that as a woman she has to play a rigged game and believing this sisterhood might be her only way to win. Meanwhile, Sloane is drowning in new motherhood and academic mediocrity until she becomes the sorority’s faculty liaison and begins obsessing over these perfect, successful women. As both women get drawn deeper into The House’s rituals and traditions, Nina discovers that the sorority’s legendary success comes with some very specific requirements, while Sloane starts digging into what makes these women so impossibly perfect and realizes the price of perfection might be more than she has an appetite for, that perhaps she’s bitten off more than she can chew (and what exactly is she chewing anyway?). Blake’s writing can be frustratingly dense and overwrought – all meandering sentences and self-indulgent details that make you work for every paragraph – but when it clicks, it’s genuinely impressive, and it starts clicking more often the deeper you get into the story. What really makes this book work are the relationships – Sloane meeting Alex and settling into their friendship, Nina navigating her developing bonds with her “sisters” as well as her frequent chats with her actual sister. Blake captures these moments in ways that make all the verbosity worth it. And I loved how she digs into these bigger philosophical questions about how much darkness you can handle before it breaks you, about the cost of really seeing what’s wrong with the world. Maybe it’s heavy-handed, sure, but she nails these moments where her characters are grappling with impossible choices and the weight of too much knowledge. But then the ending completely lost me – it happens so quickly and confusingly that I couldn’t even figure out what was supposed to have happened, let alone why, and after all that careful character building, it felt like Blake just threw her hands up and decided to wrap things up as abruptly as possible. To sum up, I liked this book–loved it even!–until I hated it.
The Storm by Rachel Hawkins As someone who’s spent most of my life melting through Florida summers, Rachel Hawkins absolutely captured that relentless Gulf Coast humidity that turns everything into a swamp. As much as I hate the reality, reading it fictionalized always makes me feel like I’ve come home, and that’s what St. Medard’s Bay, Alabama does in this story – although home in this case is not just muggy but also murderous. The hurricanes themselves become characters here, each storm named and destructive in its own way, with the approaching weather creating a constant sense of dread that perfectly mirrors the human drama unfolding at the Rosalie Inn, where Geneva Corliss is struggling to keep the family business afloat after being dumped by her boyfriend and left to care for her mother Ellen’s deteriorating memory. When Lo Bailey shows up after forty years away with writer August Fletcher in tow (who’s supposedly helping her tell her side of the 1984 hurricane death of married politician Landon Fitzroy), Geneva quickly discovers that her own family is tangled up in this decades-old mess in ways she never suspected. While Lo is supposed to be this magnetic, charming woman, she mostly comes across as loud and obnoxious; even if age has mellowed her reckless, selfish younger self, I never quite understood what made everyone so drawn to her. And honestly, though, Landon was such a complete piece of shit that I spent the whole book completely apathetic to the mystery of who killed him- whoever did it was doing God’s work. It’s a quick, absorbing read that gets a bit far-fetched in that way mysteries do when every coincidence lines up just a little too neatly, but the oppressive storm-season tension kept me turning pages anyway.
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Herculine by Grace Byron The unnamed narrator of Herculine has been dealing with literal demons since her conversion therapy days, and when one particularly nasty entity starts stalking her through New York, she flees to rural Indiana where her toxic ex-girlfriend Ash has started an all-trans commune utopia. The early sections with the narrator and her city friends actually worked well; there’s genuine warmth in those relationships before everything gets weird and demonic out in the sticks, but once she arrives at the commune and meets the other residents, I found myself struggling to stay invested in what was happening. Byron spends most of the book building this slow atmosphere of something being off (the girls stop talking when the narrator enters rooms, there are cryptic books in the library, weird rituals happening), but then suddenly explodes into full-on demonic chaos so abruptly that it never felt earned. The over-the-top final act with demons running wild and people disemboweled came out of nowhere, and while horror doesn’t usually scare me anyway, by the time everything was falling apart, I was more bewildered than engaged. There are probably interesting ideas here about community and trauma and what happens when desperate people make questionable choices, but too much felt underdeveloped to really connect. While everyone seems focused on how unlikable the characters are or how often someone mentions ketamine, what really struck me about this book is how incredibly horny every single character is – and I mean that both literally (everyone’s bodies are changing, hormones are surging, everything feels electric and overwhelming) and in terms of this raw, almost frantic hunger for connection, validation, belonging, anything that might fill whatever emptiness is eating at them.
Pinky Swear by Danielle Girard centers on Lexi, whose surrogate and childhood friend Mara disappears just days before her due date. When Mara shows up after sixteen years fleeing an abusive husband, their rekindled friendship leads to Mara offering to carry Lexi’s child. The premise immediately drew me in, and I finished it in two days because I genuinely wanted to know why/how/etc. the person carrying the child of their best friend would just up and vanish. But…the execution proved frustrating in several ways. The character relationships felt unclear; Lexi’s husband exists in some undefined separated-but-not-really state that made their relationship hard to parse and their interactions hard to follow. The backstory involving their three-person friend group (including Cate, who died young) unfolds across different timelines and POVs in ways that became confusing. I was more than halfway through before I realized the traumatic event I thought had happened to one character actually happened to another. The ending ultimately broke my suspension of disbelief entirely. Without giving anything away, the resolution relies on the protagonist’s self-taught expertise in a highly specialized field, transforming what could have been a compelling thriller into something that felt implausible. While I’m willing to overlook plenty of dramatic license in summer thrillers, this particular narrative choice pushed beyond what I could accept. The bones of an engaging story were present, but the muddled plotting and strained finale undermined the whole thing.
A Good Person by Kirsten Kingwas an absolute riot. Lillian is spectacularly awful – narcissistic, delusional, and completely unhinged, the type of person who has turned self-destruction into an art form and is immune to embarrassment, which is quite frankly, enviable. Lillian has zero filter and does all the awful things most people would never dare to, she is completely shameless about being the worst. And yet somehow I was rooting for her chaotic journey the entire time. When her undefined non-relationship with Henry ends badly, she drunkenly hexes him… and then he actually dies. Watching Lillian navigate being a murder suspect while simultaneously trying to claim her “rightful” place as his grieving girlfriend is outrageously audacious; this woman is terrible, and I absolutely loved every minute with her.
Spoiled Milk by Avery Curran Emily and her classmates at Briarley School are devastated when their golden girl Violet dies in a horrific accident, so naturally they decide to hold séances to contact her spirit, as you do. What starts as teenage grief and amateur spiritualism quickly spirals as students start dying in increasingly brutal ways and supernatural corruption spreads like an infection, rotting the morals of both students and staff. The cast of girls feels authentic in their messy, complicated relationships – jealousies, crushes, petty cruelties, and fierce loyalties all tangled together, while Emily herself is a prickly, obsessive narrator whose fixation drives much of the tension. I found myself completely absorbed in the mounting dread and genuinely creepy horror elements, even though the ending dissolved into chaos without really resolving much of anything.
The Woman Dies by Aoko Matsuda, which I realized too late was a flash fiction collection, ranges from three-sentence fragments to brief sketches…which explains why so many of these pieces felt rushed and underdeveloped when I was expecting traditional short stories. The feminist messaging is often unsubtle and heavy-handed, and I found myself relying on the author’s explanatory notes at the end to understand what many of the stories were actually about. I ultimately DNFed it halfway through because it was starting to feel like a frustrating slog through someone’s unedited notebook rather than a cohesive collection.
Freakslaw by Jane Flett A traveling carnival of outcasts and misfits arrives in the repressed Scottish town of Pitlaw in 1997, seeking revenge for years of being cast out, never allowed to settle, and punished simply for existing. The premise is compelling – a carnival full of society’s rejects descending on a bigoted town with centuries of pent-up violence ready to be unleashed – but the execution feels oddly toothless despite all the sex and violence. Flett’s writing has this strangely innocent quality that keeps the story from going as dark or wild as it should, like it’s trying very hard to be transgressive and edgy but never quite commits to the chaos it promises. The whole thing reads more like a coming-of-age story than the brutal revenge tale I was expecting.
Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng by Kylie Lee Baker Cora Zeng works crime scene cleanup in Chinatown, scrubbing away the remnants of brutal murders while trying to process her own trauma after watching her sister Delilah get pushed in front of a subway train. When Cora and her oddball coworkers Harvey and Yifei start finding bat carcasses at their cleanup sites – all involving murdered Asian women – she realizes there might be a serial killer at work, just as the Hungry Ghost Festival begins and strange things start happening in her apartment. Baker weaves together supernatural horror with unflinching commentary on anti-Asian racism during the pandemic, creating something that’s genuinely creepy while also brutally honest about hate crimes and the particular vulnerabilities of Asian American women. The friendship between Cora, Harvey, and Yifei becomes the heart of the story, giving warmth and dark humor to balance the gore and social commentary, and I found myself completely absorbed in their dynamic even amid all the horror. I also loved watching Cora’s relationship with her aunt develop – those scenes added emotional depth that made the bleakness feel grounded in real family connections rather than just trauma. It’s bleak and pretty gruesome material handled with skill – both as effective horror fiction and as a necessary examination of how fear and prejudice turned even deadlier during COVID.
We Live Here Now by Sarah Pinborough After a near-fatal accidentEmily and her husband Freddie move from London to a creepy Dartmoor country house called Larkin Lodge , hoping for a fresh start to save their troubled marriage. Emily immediately feels something wrong with the house – especially the third-floor room – but the weird events only happen when she’s alone, so nobody believes her, and her post-sepsis condition means she can’t trust her own perceptions anyway. Pinborough builds a genuinely atmospheric haunted house story with all the Gothic moodiness you’d expect, though the raven narrator felt like an unnecessary gimmick, even if I eventually understood why she included it. Also, I found it hard to believe that someone who calls herself a “bookworm” (my Kindle note said “12% into the book and she’s already told us she’s a bookworm three times, sheesh we get it”) had somehow never read Edgar Allan Poe. That’s…certainly an authorial choice. The concept has potential, and there’s a decent twist, but I had wanted something more clever and inventive than what she delivered – it felt like she had interesting ideas but didn’t quite execute them in a way that felt fresh or surprising. The characters never really came alive for me, and while the atmosphere works, the whole thing felt more predictable than I was hoping for from Pinborough.
The Echoes by Evie Wyld Max has died and now exists as a ghost in the London flat he shared with his Australian girlfriend Hannah, watching her grieve while slowly learning about all the family secrets she kept from him during their relationship. The story jumps between timelines – Max’s afterlife observations, their relationship before his death, and Hannah’s traumatic childhood growing up on a goat farm in rural Australia near a former school for stolen Aboriginal children. Wyld weaves together themes of generational trauma, colonial violence, and how the past haunts the present through multiple perspectives, though the ghost narrator device feels somewhat gimmicky compared to the more grounded family drama. I didn’t find this quite as compelling as The Bass Rock, but both books have their own strengths – this one is perhaps less immediately readable but still thoughtfully constructed, just in a different way.
Too Old For This by Samantha Downing Seventy-five-year-old Lottie Jones has been enjoying her retirement from serial killing, spending her days playing church bingo and gossiping with friends, until investigative journalist Plum Dixon shows up asking uncomfortable questions about her past. One thing leads to another, and suddenly Lottie finds herself back in the murder business, discovering that getting away with killing is much harder when you’re dealing with arthritis, technology you don’t understand, and the general physical limitations of being a septuagenarian. Downing has created an absolutely delightful antihero in Lottie – she’s sharp, witty, and surprisingly relatable despite her murderous tendencies, and I found myself genuinely rooting for this polite, tea-serving grandmother even as the body count climbed. This was a complete hoot from start to finish, and honestly, Lottie felt more authentic and engaging than most of the younger protagonists I’ve been reading lately in thrillers or literary fiction. She definitely needs to team up with Janina from Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk and Beverly Sutphin from John Waters’ Serial Mom for the ultimate Ladies of A Certain Age Murder Club.
Asylum Hotel by Juliet Blackwell What is it that draws people toward abandoned spaces? Is it the eerie appeal of places caught between purpose and purposelessness, the melancholy romance of decay, or maybe our fascination with impermanence – the reminder that even the most solid things eventually fall apart? Whatever the appeal, you’d think a creepy 1920s hotel with a dark history would be the perfect setting for atmospheric horror, but this book squanders that potential entirely. Architect Aubrey Spencer meets YouTuber Dimitri Petroff while photographing the abandoned Seabrink Hotel, they spend one night together, and the next morning he’s found dead at the base of a cliff – so naturally she decides to investigate his death despite knowing him for less than twelve hours. Blackwell seems more interested in writing endless quippy dialogue between Aubrey and her friends than building genuine suspense or stakes. dd constant joking and banter completely undermines any sense of danger, even when people are being stalked and murdered – gallows humor can work as a coping mechanism, but this just made everything feel frivolous and low-stakes. The whole thing reads like an excuse for the author to write witty conversations rather than an actual mystery, with too many pointless characters, too many subplots, and a ridiculous resolution that comes out of nowhere.
These Familiar Walls by CJ Dotson When Amber moves her family into her childhood home after her parents are murdered, freaky supernatural events begin alongside flashbacks to her disturbing friendship with a troubled neighborhood boy. The “little psycho next door” trope makes me deeply uncomfortable, especially when it involves kids too young to trust their instincts about a genuinely dangerous child, and that discomfort carried through this entire book (turns out I needn’t have worried about Amber, though, she’s quite the piece of work.) It was all working well enough for me until about three-quarters through, when the twist became obvious, and while the concept itself was fine, Amber’s character transformation felt jarring – she flipped from morally ambiguous to a completely different person rather than revealing hidden depths organically. The whole reveal felt poorly executed, especially since you get no sense that mild-mannered Ben could have been involved in anything sinister, and I’m still not sure if I missed earlier hints about the kids’ true relationship to her or if the book really did keep that detail under wraps until the reveal.
Disorientation by Elaine Hsieh Chou Burned-out PhD student Ingrid Yang is desperately trying to finish her dissertation on revered Chinese-American poet Xiao-Wen Chou when she stumbles across a mysterious note in the archives that sends her down a rabbit hole of discovery about who this literary icon really was. What starts as academic desperation spirals into campus-wide chaos involving book burnings, protests, white nationalists, and drug-fueled hallucinations as Ingrid’s investigation exposes uncomfortable truths about academia, cultural appropriation, and her own complicity in systems she never questioned. The cast includes her best friend Eunice (who’s dating a terrible tech bro), her Japan-obsessed fiancé Stephen (whose “translations” are really just dictionary work), and her nemesis-turned-ally Vivian Vo, a radical activist who initially seems like a caricature but develops into the book’s most compelling character. I get why some reviewers find this heavy-handed, but Ingrid strikes me as genuinely imaginative and prone to seeing the world in exaggerated terms, which makes the over-the-top satirical elements feel like natural extensions of her perspective rather than authorial hammering. Chou tackles internalized racism, Asian fetishization, and academic gatekeeping with the kind of blunt force that comes with real awakening, it can feel obvious because epiphanies often do, like a philosophy 101 student suddenly understanding power structures for the first time. The character development is satisfying, watching Ingrid evolve from someone who once forbade her parents from speaking Mandarin to her as a child into someone finally engaging with her own identity and community. Vivian’s arc particularly impressed me; she starts as the stereotypical insufferably smug campus radical but becomes the character with the most genuine depth and moral clarity. While some plot points strain credibility (the white nationalist stuff felt a bit much even for satire, and I can’t even believe I am saying that), the emotional core rings true, especially Ingrid’s journey from self-erasure to self-awareness.
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I watched one random video about some Japanese stationery awards and became immensely and immediately influenced. You know how it goes – thirty minutes later I’m adding things to online shopping carts like I’m preparing for the apocalypse and the only currency will be perfect gel pens and washi tape.
The haul arrived, all pristine and beautiful in its carefully designed packaging. Kire-Na highlighters in sweet colors that made my heart do a fluttering thing. An adorable letter set so aesthetically pleasing I wanted to frame it instead of use it.
And then came the familiar paralysis!
I become scared to use the nice things I buy. It’s all so pretty and I start fretting about doing it wrong or stupid or placing a sticker in a not-exactly-perfect spot. The Japanese stationery sits there looking at me accusingly while I continue using my beat-up old pens because what if I waste the good stuff on something crappy and dumb?
This is, objectively, insane behavior. I could get hit by a truck or fall off a craggy cliff or get kidnapped and stuffed into a hyperbaric chamber for four years, and I’d have so many regrets about not using those cool highlighters. (Also, yes, we just finished watching Department Q, which explains the oddly specific kidnapping scenario.)
Anyway, I’d written about this exact tendency before in a post called “Do The Fucking Thing, Little Sarah” that I never actually shared because it was over the summer and I wasn’t posting to social media, but …also because I was scared it wasn’t perfect enough. The irony was not lost on me!
So last weekend I decided to break the pattern. Sort of.
I bought a big ass water bottle specifically to showcase my Rebecca Chaperon sticker collection – accumulated over months of backing her Patreon – because hydration shmydration, this was always about the stickers. But instead of letting them languish in their pristine sheets forever, I enlisted Yvan to help place them. This way I got the satisfaction of actually using them without the anxiety of potentially messing up the placement myself.
Hey, baby steps count too!
I also grabbed one of those beautiful green highlighters and marked a passage in Mark Fisher’s Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures, a bit about how “futuristic” music has become just another retro style, how we’re stuck thinking Kraftwerk still sounds like the future even though it’s as dated now as big band jazz was in the ’70s. Fisher’s pointing out how cultural time has “folded back on itself” instead of moving forward, how we’ve lost that sense of linear progression and ended up in this weird simultaneity where decades blur together. Which sort of felt profound? Something about being trapped in aesthetic loops, about how innovation calcifies into nostalgia. The world did not end. The highlighter did not judge my choice. The book survived the interaction.
These are small victories, but they are good and they matter! Every time I choose to use something instead of hoarding it “for later” or “when I deserve it” or “when the moment is perfect,” I’m practicing a different way of being in the world. One where I get to enjoy the things I bought to enjoy, where the pleasure is in the using rather than the having.
The stickers look excellent on the water bottle. The highlighted sentence glows warmly and weirdly on the page. And somewhere in my brain, little Sarah is doing a tiny victory boogie (a real small one because Sarah doesn’t actually dance) because she finally did a fucking thing.
If you enjoy posts like these or if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have written, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?
Richard Houston (c. 1721–1775), after Philippe Mercier, Morning. Mezzotint with some etching, c. 1750.
As someone who writes about art and culture and has a modest but established presence online, I get my fair share of collaboration requests. Most are perfectly reasonable; people introduce themselves, explain their project, and clearly outline what they’re proposing. But occasionally, I receive something so bewildering that it becomes…I don’t know…let’s call it a learning experience for all involved.
Earlier this morning, I received an email with the subject line “collaborative project.” Intriguing! The entire body of the message read: “I wrote a book on [insert niche but somewhat vague spiritual topic here].”
That’s it. No introduction, no explanation, no proposal. Just a statement of fact delivered with the confidence of someone who clearly expected me to… do something with this information.
My initial internal response was a confused “and…?” But I try to give people the benefit of the doubt, so I responded: “Hi [Name], congrats on your book. I’m curious/confused…did you intend for there to be more to your message?”
The reply: “No, I was just wondering if you were willing to work through my book?”
“Work through” the book. Still no title, no description, no explanation of what this would entail. I began to wonder if English might not be their first language, or if they were perhaps new to professional communication. A quick search revealed no online presence for this person as an author, which only deepened the mystery.
At this point, I was genuinely trying to understand what they wanted, so I asked for clarification: what type of collaboration they had in mind, what their book’s current status was, what they might be offering in return, and their timeline and budget if applicable.
Their response was a revelation:
“I was looking for someone to read it and maybe draw pictures and submit with me! It’s a manuscript. It’s about [subject matter]. No editing, just pictures!”
At this point, I had to clarify the obvious: “I am sorry to say, I am not an artist. I can’t even draw stick figures! I think you may have me confused with someone else, I’m a writer who focuses on art and culture, but I don’t create visual art myself.”
But anyway, let me break down what they were asking:
Read their entire unpublished manuscript (ostensibly for free)
Create illustrations for it (no doubt also for free)
Do the work of helping them submit it to publishers (I am guessing this would be unpaid as well.)
All of this based on zero information about the actual content, quality, or potential of the work
The scope of the request was… impressive.
Plot Twist! It gets weirder! Just when I thought this saga was over, another email arrived:
“Are you sure you didn’t make that tarot deck? I think you might have sent the wrong one.”
I stared at my screen. A tarot deck? What tarot deck? I responded with genuine bewilderment: “Now I am even more confused. I have never created a tarot deck, or any oracle deck, or divinatory device. I am the author of The Art of the Occult and assorted titles and the creator of the Unquiet Things blog. Which tarot deck are you referring to? And what is it that you believe I sent you?”
Because truly, I think I’d remember doing something as awesome as creating a tarot deck.
At this point, I started wondering if I was dealing with a bot, some kind of automated outreach gone wrong, or someone who had me thoroughly confused with multiple other people. The combination of vague collaboration requests, complete lack of research about what I actually do, and now mysterious tarot deck accusations was starting to feel less like ordinary confusion and more like a glitch in the matrix, or the beginning of that horror movie where the masked killers just knock on random doors to see who answers.
So. What Went Wrong Here? This email exchange is a perfect example of how not to approach potential collaborators. The failures include:
Lack of basic information: A collaboration request should include your project’s title, a brief description, and your credentials or experience. “I wrote a book” tells me nothing.
No clear proposal: What exactly are you asking for? Editing? Promotion? Creative partnership? The word “collaboration” covers a lot of ground.
Assumption of free labor: Creative work, whether writing, illustration, or editing, is professional work that people get paid for. Asking someone to illustrate your manuscript for free is like asking a plumber to install your bathroom “for the exposure.”
No research: It became clear they had no idea what I actually do. I write about art; I don’t create visual art. A few minutes on my website would have clarified this.
Backwards approach: They led with the vaguest possible description and only revealed the actual (unreasonable) request after multiple exchanges.
Just a few thoughts on better outreach from someone who has reached out a time or two. Although…look, I really resent being put in the position of delivering “teachable moments” here—who am I to teach anyone anything? We’ve all been beginners at some point, I’ve sent my share of cringey emails in my early days, and I’m sure many of us can look back and wince at our first attempts at professional communication. The learning curve is real, and there’s no shame in not knowing how to do something you’ve never done before.
That said, from my own experience receiving these kinds of emails, here are some approaches that tend to work better when I get them:
In my experience, I respond better when people lead with who they are: A brief introduction, including background and relevant experience, goes a long way.
I find it helpful when the project is described clearly: Title, genre, current status (published, manuscript, proposal stage), and a concise description of what it’s about.
What works for me is when people explain the collaboration: What specific role would I play? What would they contribute? What would I contribute?
I appreciate when there’s some thought about mutual benefits: What’s in it for me? Payment, shared credit, promotional opportunities, creative fulfillment?
It’s obvious when someone has done their research: They demonstrate that they understand what I do and why I might be a good fit for their project.
Basic professionalism matters: Proper grammar, relevant links or samples, and respect for people’s time.
Here’s the thing that seasoned or more experienced writers and artists understand, but people who haven’t navigated this might not: creative folks get a lot of these requests. We have to be selective about how we spend our time and energy. A vague, poorly thought-out approach suggests that the project itself might be similarly unfocused.
Moreover, asking for free creative work reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of the creative economy. Illustration, editing, design—these are skilled professions. Would you email a lawyer and ask them to casually “work through” your legal case? Would you contact an accountant and ask them to “maybe do some numbers” for your business?
But it was important to me to be kind (no matter how annoyed I was.) Despite my internal eye-rolling, I did try to help this person understand how to approach this better. I explained that I’m not an artist, suggested they research freelance illustrators who might be a better fit, and gently noted that for future outreach to potential collaborators, they might want to lead with more details about their project.
Because I really don’t think they were intentionally trying to take advantage. I think they genuinely didn’t understand how any of this works. We all have to start somewhere, and figuring out professional norms isn’t always intuitive.
Whether it’s automated spam, a confused individual managing too many conversations poorly, or someone who’s simply not operating in consensus reality, I’ve decided this is where I get off this particular train.
The Takeaway: If you’re a creator who gets these kinds of emails, remember that setting boundaries doesn’t make you mean, it makes you professional. You can be kind while still protecting your time and expertise.
And if you’re someone looking to collaborate, maybe take a step back and ask yourself: Am I approaching this person the way I’d want to be approached? Am I offering something of value in return for what I’m asking? Have I done my homework about what they actually do?
We’re all figuring this stuff out as we go. A little preparation and consideration goes a long way to making the recipient more receptive and to making you look less of a weirdo.
Have you received memorably strange collaboration requests? I’d love to hear your stories—and your theories about what’s actually happening in exchanges like these.
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What happens when you take the aesthetic of stumbling upon mysterious photographs in dust-thick, cobwebbed abandoned attics, combine it with the somewhat eccentric but actually quite sensible wisdom of consulting Magic 8-Balls for creative guidance, and add a stuffed companion who contributes the shadowy elements to this artistic collaboration? You enter the bewitchingly strange artistic universe of Benz and Chang, where watercolor and walnut ink conspire to create “fake vintage photos” that feel like they’ve been haunting antique shop frames since 1923, patiently waiting for someone to discover their secrets.
Each painting operates as a visual puzzle that reveals its supernatural elements only after prolonged viewing – the ghost limbs, the doubled reflections, the figures caught perpetually between looking forward and glancing back over their shoulders like they’re trying to keep track of all their simultaneous lives.
Benz creates work that captures the particular brand of sustained strangeness we all live through at some point – those changes that feel permanent but stubbornly resist normalcy, like psychological double exposures where past and present occupy the same frame. His paintings emerge from a practice that balances intuitive channeling with deliberate misdirection, where seeing something that belongs in a painting means adding it, consequences be damned.
Sometimes the collective unconscious speaks in riddles, and sometimes it speaks through an oracular toy suggesting you add more mysterious doubling to your Gothic tableau, or perhaps another ghost limb hovering at the edge of the frame. This is an artist who listens to both voices with equal attention, creating paintings that feel less like artistic inventions and more like recovered documents from a parallel timeline where the supernatural seeps with subtle mystery into everyday life – proof that make-believe, when rendered with care and conviction, transforms into its own kind of truth.
The One You Meet at the Crossroads is Yours Alone, 1912
Unquiet Things: Your partnership with Chang – a stuffed cat who “supplies the dark”- feels like its own kind of evocative narrative. How has this fictional collaboration influenced your approach to duality in your work, particularly in exploring the boundaries between real and imagined?
Benz and Chang: When I started the Benz and Chang paintings, I wanted to make fake vintage photographs. Just like as if you were in an antique shop or the attic of an abandoned house and stumbled across a beautiful and haunting photo in a frame. I wanted to make paintings like that, and this is why I use actual vintage frames from antique shops to frame my work. I decided that, in order to paint make-believe vintage photos, it would help to have a make-believe photography studio partner. I say Mr. Chang supplies the dark because it’s absurd and also maybe true. He has the ability to traverse between the earthly realm and the underworld.
The Moon Howls Back at Me, 1918
Your work explores deeply personal moments of transformation – fear, grief, mystical encounters, mortality. What draws you to express these profound human transitions through the language of shadow and reverie, the supernatural and surreal? How does the ghostly aesthetic of early 20th-century photography help you capture these moments of the liminal and the ethereal?
I work intuitively, and if I can get anywhere near the collective subconscious, I feel like I’m succeeding. I’m also usually working something out from my own life. To tap into the collective subconscious, I prefer using make-believe, nonsense, and pretend. I think Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland makes a good example of this. We can all relate to falling down a rabbit hole these days.
Or, on a deep emotional level, we can all relate to being too big and too small. I think one of the enduring qualities of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is a portrayal of the universal human experience, abstracted by a thick layer of nonsense, make-believe, and pretend. I think that using early 20th Century imagery adds a level of obscurity in that is Other. It’s another time, another place, a culture we like to think we understand, but which is still very foreign. It naturally occults and mythologizes. I also just like old things. I like old things just because they’re old.
Paper Crowns at the Museum, 1924
The use of a Magic 8-Ball as an artistic oracle is intriguing. Could you elaborate on how this method of inviting chance into your creative process began? In what ways does this approach of randomness and uncertainty shape the dreamlike qualities that permeate your work.
I started working with the Magic 8-Ball and also coin tosses because I had problems making decisions. It was a tool to help prevent me from getting stuck. Now, I think it contributes to the dreamlike quality of the work by helping me restrain the overwhelming presence of my will. I am constantly fighting my own impulses to Make Sense.
Your paintings reveal different layers of meaning through multiple viewings – what begins with the feeling of peeking at a vintage photograph unfolds to glimmers of strangeness and hushed giggles of a dream-logic absurdity. It gives a sense of impossible deja vu, a feeling of ineffable familiarity juxtaposed with a sort of inevitable unreality, veiled with fanciful melancholy. How intentional is this process of revelation? What interests you about creating works that demand multiple viewings to fully appreciate their complexity?
First off, thank you for being so kind. I feel like you really get the work, and I appreciate that. While I work, my brain does this annoying thing where it’s always racing ahead to build meaning. I’m always intentionally misdirecting and subverting. I like it best if I only have a tenuous hold on what a painting means to me, and very often I’m only chasing a feeling. Most people see my paintings in their very own way, and that’s the way I like it.
Cheshire Cheshire, 1870
Your recent “Changeling” exhibition at Haven Gallery marks an intriguing evolution in your work – especially in your shift from sepia tones to more vivid color. In the show statement, you speak of living multiple lives, both consecutive and simultaneous ones. How did this exploration of multiplicity influence your move toward a more surreal, colorful palette?
I keep being asked about the multiple lives statement, and looking back maybe I should have phrased it differently. I do believe in reincarnation in the Samsara sense, as opposed to the more pop culture speculative sense. But really, I was talking about multiple lives more in the sense of simultaneous lives. When most people talk about leading “multiple lives”, it can get dark. People hiding infidelity, drug use, being sociopaths at work, etc. But in a more normal sense, we all live multiple lives. For me, simultaneously, I am a vaguely successful artist and also a very specific flavor of software architect. I aspire to live a “normal” life, and I am from a different planet. So there is an artist and a technology worker who specializes in creating and maintaining order. There is a person who actually just wants to appear normal in the world, and someone from a different planet.
When I was a little kid, I didn’t look anything like my parents or brother, and people would ask where my copper hair came from. One of my mother’s answers was that they found me in New Mexico, living with a family of rabbits under some bushes. So even in my family mythology, I came from somewhere else. The show title “Changeling” referred to the folk tale sense of a fairy child who has been substituted into a mortal family.
Miriam, 1931
The Many Reincarnations of Cleopatra, 1957 watercolor
Your “Maybe Not the Norm” exhibition at Riversea Gallery presented such compelling visions of psychological doubling – those conjoined figures on the velvet fainting couch, the figure simultaneously peering around a corner while looking back over their shoulder. How do these moments of divided attention speak to your exploration of permanent change? What drew you to express this contemporary state through these particular Gothic motifs?
More double lives. Double consciousnesses. Making friends with your other lives. There is also a piece in there about reincarnations of Cleopatra, which is one of my favorite things to meditate on, after Mehitabel the cat (from Don Marquis “Archy and Mehitabel”).
Good Bye, 1918
Your artist statement mentions early experiences with spirits and hauntings. How has your relationship with supernatural themes evolved alongside your artistic practice?
I’m not sure if I have anything resembling a satisfying answer for this. It’s something I experience, and it’s a part of the way I move through the world. If anything, it’s all only become more mysterious and elusive, instead of making any kind of sense.
In the Dark All the Cats Are Grey, 1910
Ghost stories seem to transcend cultural boundaries, appearing in narratives worldwide. How does this shared language of the supernatural influence your approach to connecting with viewers? What universal human experiences do you seek to tap into through these spectral imagery?
Ghost stories fascinate us. They are about the persistence of memory. They are a cultural manifestation of our ultimate existential questions. They are a meditation on the relationships between the body, soul, memory, and personality. They haunt, they guide, they instruct, they deliver messages. They are mystery.
Benz and Chang studio photos – Alicia Justus and Mister Finch
Benz and Chang studio photos – damaged ambrotype from collection
Benz and Chang studio photos – Jana Seven and Sara Swink
Your studio must be such an intriguing space, given the dreamlike nature of your work. What objects, images, or elements surround you while you’re creating? How does your environment influence these haunting images you create?
I have been collecting vintage photos for decades. Mostly I have photos from the early 20th century, but also some from the 1800s. Most of my collection is of people in costumes, photos of mediums, fake ghost photos, and a small collection of silent film celebrities. I particularly collect people in bat and cat costumes.
Also have a really tiny collection of art from various artists. List of artists in the photos:
Beyond the supernatural elements in your work, what moments or observations in daily life catch your artistic eye?
Old things. I like old things just because they’re old. I like the interiors of old buildings. I like trees and animals (especially cats). I like books to read and also as art objects.
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…because “photo dump” is such a dumb, gross phrase. So what do we call it instead?
Anyhow, we escaped Florida’s end-of-summer heat by flying directly into Seattle’s heat wave, because we’re geniuses at travel planning! We first spent two nights on Vashon Island in a cottage with a composting toilet that came with mysterious instructions (helpful notes about peeing, radio silence about everything else), a yellow lab who appointed himself our personal shadow, roadside blackberries thorny, tangling and trailing in every direction (mostly the direction of our mouths), and our first glimpse of Thomas Dambo’s towering recycled-wood trolls. Also, I posed a question about that toilet over on Threads, and man oh man, some people got mad. Everybody poops! What’s the big deal?
Back in the city, that monstrous betrayer Google Maps, spent three days fibbing to us about “flat” routes that turned out to be brutal mountaineering expeditions, we watched salmon similarly fight their way up the locks while seals lounged nearby, and a seagull skulked around with a big fish hanging out of its beak, stopped by Immortal Perfumes’ charming studio, and afterward discovered the magic of the Aperol spritz slushy, and then spent a perfect temperate evening at the zoo listening to Ginger Root and Japanese Breakfast while sitting on grass with a stupidly expensive blanket we’d bought in the giftshop at the somewhat nearby National Nordic Museum (where we encountered another troll! )
I walked on the Space Needle’s glass floor despite vivid Final Destination-style disaster scenarios playing in my head, and practically next door, Dale Chihuly’s glass installations completely blindsided me—I’d never heard of him and walked in with zero expectations, only to discover that Chihuly had created these vast, glowing environments that felt more like walking through solidified light and color than looking at traditional sculpture.
I encountered one of my own books in the wild at the Frye Museum gift shop where I got to live out every author’s secret fantasy of sneaking bookmarks between its pages, we grabbed coffee at the KEXP coffee shop where Michelle Zauner interview was streaming (possibly live, which felt like perfect timing), and spent one of our final days in Ballard, hunting down bagels and gelato and breweries and pizza and one bookstore in particular where I scored a copy of Kenji López-Alt’sThe Food Lab at Book Larder while nurturing the completely unhinged fantasy that my longtime Serious Eats hero – you know, the guy whose recipes saved every home cook’s risotto and chili for an entire decade – had obviously been camping out in this one Seattle bookstore all week, just patiently waiting for me specifically to wander in so he could finally discuss proper recipe development techniques. He wasn’t there, though! Rude.
And of course, we played Magic: The Gathering everywhere we went, because our dorky habits transcend geography. I got sick on my third day there, which was a huge bummer, because there were some folks we were hoping to see…but next time, Seattle! There will definitely be a next time.
This photo is b&w because my roots look really terrible
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September’s marinade centers on fragrances that transcend literal description—the ones so deeply embedded in memory they work whether you can smell them or not. These are meditations on atmosphere over notes, exploring everything from windswept shores harboring corrupt inns to woodland paths where forest spirits might dwell.
I know I said no more free Patreon posts, but I realized I probably need to give people a taste occasionally, to see what they are missing…
You’ll notice this roundup looks different – some reviews are just glimpses, with full versions available on my Midnight Stinks Patreon. I’m experimenting with this format because while this blog draws readers interested in all sorts of weird and strange things, not everyone who follows me here is necessarily obsessed with whether something smells like “the Crypt Keeper’s signature ice cream flavor” or “a vampire with a bizarre sweet tooth stumbled into a Precious Moment gift shop.”
The Patreon is a dedicated space for fragrance obsession – where the actual scent nerds congregate and where I can dive into the more challenging, uncomfortable perfumes that need proper context. It’s become this wonderful community of people who specifically want to geek out about whether a perfume conjures “goth California Raisins” or makes you wonder if “someone fed all their perfect girlfriend material into an AI machine.” The full reviews live there because that’s where my fellow stinkers actually want to explore the full spectrum of olfactory weirdness with me.
Marissa Zappas Carnival of Souls An involuntary grimace quickly smoothed into polite blankness, a gagging masked by a throat-clearing. “Is everything ok?” “Oh, it’s nothing, I’m fine” and proceeds to throw up in mouth just a little, not too obvious. Honeyed floral cream turning sour, saffron like dried grass mixed into warm milk that’s started to separate. Coconut cream sweet and plasticky with oddly-spiced grave dirt patchouli sediment settling at the bottom. An eerie seriousness that doesn’t land and instead evokes a wobbling, wonky naiveté, dewy-eyed and desperate so much as to be repellent. I’ve found everything I have tried from Marissa Zappas too subtle, too fleeting, stories in which the characters and plots are instantly forgettable, leaving you wondering if anything ever happened at all. Carnival of Souls continues this pointless parade of almost-perfumes.
4160 Tuesdays Rhubarb & Custard No tart fruitiness, no bright rhubarb sharpness but rather waxen vanilla cream, powdery musk, the ghost of an Avon moon pomander. Unctuous citrus-like-but-not sweetness filtered through something fatty and cozy and comforting, maybe cheesecake, maybe childhood. Motion sickness of the soul as memory unlocks behind glass. The queasy pleasure of nostalgia in a bottle. I wrote more about this scent for my Patreon folks!
Arcana Wildcraft The Stars Aldehydes, electric, immediate; sharp brightness dilating your pupils involuntarily in a dark room. Charles Burchfield’s Orion in Winter translated into scent: stars throbbing with impossible light, night sky crackling with energy. Meadow grass electric chorus, alive, buzzing, participating in the same frequency as hyperaware consciousness. Three in the morning and your mind is racing, a thousand moth wings, each drawn to multitudinous flames, darkness reaches its deepest saturation point, clocks hold their breath. Not anxiety, not exhilaration, but a secret third thing that my typo revealed to me just now: axhilirating [axhilirating: adj. the specific exhilaration that contains within it the seeds of its own anxiety; excitement at the precise frequency of existential dread.] Fairy lights threaded around the orange tree, infused with the spirit of the fruit; juiced, bulbs and strands and all; gulped in a single breath, time hiccups, everything shifts and blurs, cold light pooling in your lungs like a chandelier of stars, like the crushed peal of a high, clear bell, like swallowing the click of diamond high heels on marble. Something plasticky, glassine and strange—this entire thrumulent, glintiform experience sealed in a clear envelope, preserved for examination later, when you’ve had proper sleep and can make sense of this crackling complicity with life the universe and everthing, when standing in a winter meadow looking up at burning stars felt less like metaphor and more like a language that you, the only person left in the world awake and alive, can speak.
Chanel Paris – Deauville Iced lemon slices in a cut-glass bowl, encased in ice; fresh, crisp herbs soaking in ice water, subtle as a lacy front or two. The memory of a glass of sweet white wine, a honeyed, floral Gewürztraminer wisp; round, rich, luscious, and strangely absent for all its suggestion. Somewhere between charming and refreshing, gentle with a glint in its eye; Not overly polite yet definitely inoffensive, nothing weird you can put your finger on, but there’s a phantom shimmer, a flickering presence, an impossible-to-name thing, which makes it either perfectly frustrating or frustratingly perfect.
Mark BuxtonWood & Absinth The phrase “fresh and clean” makes my skin crawl, probably because I associate it with people who make cleanliness feel like a personality trait, who turn basic hygiene into aspirational lifestyle content, who kind of make you feel like a slob just by existing. Meanwhile, I hate to shower (I do it, but I don’t like a single second of it!) and generally resent having to participate in hygiene theater; the whole thing is exhausting. Wood and Absinth sidesteps this entire obnoxious charade. Saponified anise, woody-soapiness that hits the sweet spot of ease; herbal bitterness like the toothpaste I’d choose because mint grosses me out, because the sight of someone working gum in their mouth makes me want to puke, because what’s wrong with breath that smells like bagels and lox anyway. This is uncomplicated, which I mean as praise—not complex, not trying to conjure memories or transport you somewhere else, just a reliable background scent for everyday wearing when I don’t want to think about it, but I also want something that smells like me. Wood, water, bitter leaves; simple, straightforward ingredients that coalesce in a scent that is ….what would I call this? An unfussy staple, slightly elevated? A functional fragrance, unembellished but not boring? This is a competent perfume that might benefit from a less clunky summation, but I’m not sure if a fragrance that’s merely competent deserves much more work on my part.
DSH Perfumes Prophecy My immediate reaction to Prophecy: “This is an incense for the GIRLIES.” Not austere or monastic or churchy or smoky-sacred; this is more of a “burn this stuff in the background of your IG reels while Hozier sings something brooding about desire and divinity and you arrange rose quartz crystals on your nightstand” vibe. Pastel tarot deck spirituality. De-saturated dragon’s blood. A dreaming without a dreamer, that ethereal mystical atmosphere floating free, no deep spiritual practice required. An outer light reflected or an inner light unveiled, either way it’s been retouched for social media, aesthetic enlightenment run through a vintage Lightroom filter. Creamy, almost fruity, almost floral incense—except not quite incense; aureate suffusion that smells like how luxe body cream feels. Whipped honey vibe; you could take a juicy bite of this tawny chunk of resin. Baby’s first incense, but I can see how it becomes A Whole Vibe, build an entire aesthetic around it. The DSH site notes that it’s a bestseller, which makes perfect sense…it works well enough for what it’s trying to be, but it’s too sweet, too fluffy for me. My prophecies need a bit more doom and gloom.
Reviews for all three scents from Poesie’s Persephone Uncrowned collection can be read by members over on my Midnight Stinks Patreon. Someone on Reddit yelled at me about these reviews!
Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab Angst Psychic shockwaves of cognitive estrangement – what demented pleasure to recognize beloved scents transformed into their shadow selves. Of the two wolves inside me, this delights the freak who admires a perfumer capable of subverting grapefruit and ginger so thoroughly. Grapefruit distilled to its most accusatory elements; ginger gone a bit septic, medicinal rather than spiced. The feverish chaos of sickness made olfactory, an eerie parade of familiar notes whose expressions now exude subtle paranoia, discomfort, distrust. The landscape of unease settles: coniferous shadows lean too close, fruit-sour brightness concentrated to vinegar and bitter quinine, the delirium and dread of existence seeping through pores like chilled and electric, frantic fever sweat. It dries softer, and tangier and fizzier; a jittery-prickly rose-gold ruby panic shrub.
Orto Parisi Seminalis is another one that can be found as a Midnight Stinks Patreon review. It might be a bit triggering, and just dropping in here if you’re not expecting it feels like a not cool thing to do.
And finally some first impressions of some very kawaii, extremely literal and hyperrealist Asian dessert fragrances from Mochiglow. This, too, can only be found on my Patreon.
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Artists construct worlds and invite us to enter – but not all of these realms exist in the same dimension of possibility. Some paint shimmering aquatic empires where sea-born royalty holds court among coral spires, others sketch ethereal meadowlands where fairy folk conduct their moonlit parliaments or crystalline metropolises that scrape the bellies of alien clouds.
These brush-wielding conjurers birth pocket universes hidden within dewdrops and volcanic paradises, where phoenix-flame gardens might bloom eternally. Whether bound for territories unmapped or realms beyond discovery, these visual doorways help us abandon reason and dive into the secret chambers of wonder we’ve locked away inside ourselves.
Martina Hoffman, Universal Mother
Martina Hoffmann charts entirely different territories – the vast inner cosmos where thought transforms into blazing visions and dreams acquire the weight of sinuous reality. Her painted domains throb with otherworldly enigmas that exist beyond telescopes or diving bells, territories where gossamer wing-forms curve through oceanic depths of perception and feminine archetypes emerge from coiling galaxies of living energy.
Here, landscape constructs itself from pure mind – swirling tentacled vortices of cognition, mandala-patterns forged from solidified meditation, and floating forms where undulating wisdom flows through currents of liquid contemplation. Personal awareness expands into cosmic recognition, every painted detail marking waypoints in the infinite terrain of consciousness knowing itself, of perception awakening to its own vastness.
In her painting The Garden, we step through the looking glass into what Hoffmann calls our “secret garden, where your soul unfolds its wings unhindered and freely.” Here, beneath a pale, radiant orb, twisted trees stretch skyward with the fluid grace of dreams gaining substance, their branches curve into the glowing moonlight as if drawing sustenance from pure illumination, while dense foliage creates canopies of emerald contemplation that pulse with ancient rhythms. Even the shadows here are glossy and glowing, transformed by some alchemical process that turns darkness into another form of light.
A pathway of warm, golden radiance winds through this verdant mindscape, inviting exploration deeper into territories where the familiar laws of botany yield to the stranger logic of inner sight. The blues and greens that saturate this realm become the visible frequencies of tranquility and growth, painted reveries where every leaf carries the weight of revelation and every shadow holds the promise of hidden wisdom waiting to unfold. This becomes the inner sanctuary where, as Hoffmann suggests, we can “safely connect with your inner self and consciousness to ‘in-vision’ your life’s path anew daily.”
Martina Hoffman, CONTACT II
The same sinuous energies that curve through these moonlit trees flow throughout Hoffmann’s painted territories, manifesting as the biodiversity of consciousness itself – coiling tentacles that undulate through cosmic depths, ethereal appendages that bend like thoughts given substance, and snake-like forms adorned with phosphorescent patterns. Her explorations deliberately echo the planet’s biological richness, bringing forth what she calls “new varieties” of beings that may exist in undiscovered oceanic depths, or perhaps represent “projections of future species” emerging from our collective unconscious.
Martina Hoffman, Creatrix
Her Universal Woman archetype emerges repeatedly from these swirling forms – sometimes crowned with mandala-like radiances, other times merging directly with the undulating wisdom that seems to carry DNA-level knowledge through her painted domains. The oceanic blues and cellular greens that define The Garden resurface across her work, creating underwater atmospheres where otherworldly enigmas pulse with the rhythm of expanded awareness.
Martina Hoffman, Vessels of Stone
Hoffmann approaches these painted explorations with explicit therapeutic intent. “Paintings may function as mirrors reflecting the individual viewer’s consciousness,” she explains, positioning her work as both personal archaeology and collective healing tool. Her stated mission extends beyond individual transformation to planetary awakening, an attempt “to portray spirit as the one universal force beyond the confines of cultural and religious differences.” Growing up between cultures in Cameroon instilled her early understanding that “there’s only one spirit and one humanness,” a conviction that infuses her artistic practice with social purpose alongside spiritual seeking.
Martina Hoffman, Dynamic Life Form
Through her brush, Hoffmann offers us passage into territories that sprawl both within and beyond our familiar borders – painted proof that the most exotic domains we might explore are the infinite landscapes of our own awakening perception. Her philosophical uncertainty enriches these explorations: whether her creatures “truly exist, are yet to manifest in nature, are pure projections of future species, or are part of our collective unconscious” remains an open question she cherishes exploring through art.
Martina Hoffman, Traumtier
In this creative freedom, every spiral and serpent carries us deeper into the mystery of what it means to be conscious in a universe where imagination and reality cross-pollinate each other like wandering comets seeding gardens across stellar nurseries, where undiscovered species might emerge from the depths of both ocean and psyche, and where what is and what might be live and breathe and exist fantastically in symbiotic communion.
Martina Hoffman, Meduse
Martina Hoffman, Dragon Rider
Martina Hoffman, Bioluminescence
Martina Hoffman, Aligning to the realm
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