The Art of Darkness gathers over 200 artworks across twelve chapters, musing on why artists have always been drawn to shadow. Symbolists and Surrealists making visible our inner landscapes, Pre-Raphaelites staging psychological dramas, artists like Goya painting his nightmares, Munch exploring anxiety and fear, Kahlo transforming pain into transcendence.
And the contemporary creators: Marci Washington‘s ghostly figures in rotting wallpaper. Dylan Garrett Smith rendering fauna and flora in ash and chalk. Caitlin McCormack crocheting delicate birds and skeletons. Darla Teagarden building surreal photographic narratives. Becky Munich‘s sly-humored sirens. Susan Jamison‘s luminous egg tempera paintings steeped in ritual. Rachael Bridge capturing twilight in impossible palettes. Stephen Mackey‘s dreamlike twilight worlds. Aron Wiesenfeld’s liminal thresholds. Caitlin McCarthy‘s spectral beauties and sibyls. Alex Eckman-Lawn‘s surreal collage portraits. Ruth Marten’s absurd alligator-laden interventions. Laurie Lee Brom‘s ghost stories. Bill Crisafi‘s woodland ritual. Amy Earles’ autumn daydreams. Nightjar art of Adam Burke‘s misty wilderness. Aleksandra Waliszewska‘s haunting nocturnal visions. Santiago Caruso’s darkly romantic illustrations. Gerald Brom‘s mythic creatures and feral witches.
We all experience the full spectrum of human emotion. The uncomfortable parts don’t vanish when we ignore them. But when we encounter them in art, something shifts. There’s richness in shadows, depth in contrast. These artists give form to feelings we couldn’t name otherwise.
This book is for… October book clubs looking for something visually stunning to discuss ❈ Libraries creating seasonal displays that celebrate the atmospheric and eerie
❈ Bookstagrammers, BookTokers, BookTubers building creepy nonfiction TBRs ❈ Anyone who starts their spooky season decorating in April
❈ Bookish eleven-year-old oddballs and the adults they became
❈ Art lovers discovering contemporary creators alongside historical masters ❈ Gift-givers seeking something thoughtful for the art lover, the goth, the perpetually curious
In The Midnight Shift, Detective Su-Yeon is investigating a series of apparent suicides at Cheolma Rehabilitation Hospital, where elderly patients keep jumping from the sixth floor with handwritten suicide notes but mysteriously drained of blood. When she encounters Violette (a Korean adoptee raised in France who now works as a mysterious vampire hunter) Su-Yeon gets an answer she wasn’t expecting: a vampire is targeting the hospital’s loneliest, most isolated patients, the ones nobody will miss. The novel alternates between Su-Yeon’s present-day investigation, Violette’s backstory in 1980s France (particularly her intense, Carmilla-esque relationship with a vampire named Lily), and the perspective of Nanju, a nurse at the hospital with her own complicated connection to the supernatural events. Cheon builds a marvelously moody atmosphere around the idea that vampires hunt “lonely blood,” that is, people so isolated that they’ve forgotten how to cry, whose abandonment has altered the very chemistry coursing through their veins.
The French flashback sections were fantastic, capturing Violette as a lonely adoptee drawn to Lily in ways that feel both dangerous and beautiful and vital. That gothic, sapphic tension could have sustained an entire novel on its own. The premise about vampires targeting society’s most abandoned people (the elderly patients warehoused in facilities where no one visits) is compelling social commentary wrapped in supernatural trappings, though this leans more melancholy and atmospheric than actually frightening.
But I found myself increasingly confused by things that were referenced but never actually explained or shown. Vampire lore is mentioned constantly (there’s some code between vampires and hunters, as well as specific rules about when Violette can kill them), but I never quite understood how any of it actually worked. How does Violette kill vampires? What exactly are the rules she keeps referencing? Who does she work for and why? Characters kept talking about things like they made sense, but the actual mechanics and logic stayed frustratingly vague. The characters themselves never quite came alive for me either: Su-Yeon drifts through her investigation in this oddly detached way, Nanju hints at interesting backstory but gets so little page time I couldn’t really get invested in her troubles, and even Violette (despite all her flashback chapters) I never fully understood what drove her or how she’d ended up in this life.
The ending left me cold, partly because I was genuinely confused about what had actually happened and why. Things wrapped up quickly with what felt like important revelations, but I couldn’t quite follow the logic or see how the pieces connected. Maybe I missed something, or maybe crucial information just wasn’t on the page; either way, I finished feeling like I’d only gotten half the story. After all that atmospheric buildup, I wanted clarity and emotional payoff, but instead got rushed explanations that raised more questions than they answered. The ambition is clear: blending crime procedural with Gothic horror and exploring queer longing and cultural displacement, but the execution leaves too much unexplained. I kept reading because the mood and premise were enjoyably intriguing, but by the end, I felt like I’d watched a movie with several key scenes missing.
Bonus! Three new cryptid-inspired scents from Poesie (against an eerie Burchfield backdrop)…
Nessie: Tea steeped with blossoms and honey, a thick floral sweetness of highland flowers’ pollen suspended in viscous light. A kind of gold that pools slow, catches afternoon sun slanting through old glass, turns a chipped ceramic mug into a chalice. Wool blankets hung near yesterday’s fires, smoke absorbed into the weave, the ghost of peat clinging to fabric. Rain-grey mornings of soft, tannic ritual matters, steam as prayer, rising toward low clouds.
Mothman: Spiced warmth with its aggressive, bitter edges sanded down, autumn’s recognizable onslaught muzzled by dried leaves’ somber poetry, and tobacco’s civilizing influence. Red musk behaving itself for once, button-popped bodice replaced by a cashmere turtleneck, nutmeg simmering quietly, minding its own business instead of all up in yours. Unruly spices acting right, like their Gran is watching from heaven, turning potential chaos into orderly aromatic gorgeousness. Tea brewed strong enough to stain porcelain, threading through like the dirty bass line in a song you can’t stop humming, even though maybe it’s quite naughty, and who knows, maybe Gran IS listening.
Jersey Devil: Pine resin, cool and sharp, needles sun-baked but chilly, their green gone eerily concentrated and alien. Coastal salt drifts through forest density, ocean air wandering inland, turning shadows crystalline, evergreen ghosting translucent at the edges. Arboreal incense, blood-dark and frost-blessed, threading through branches that claw and clutch. Tea as shadow, as sanctuary, as a centering, grounding the strange marriage of forest meeting shoreline, land suspended between what roots deep and what erodes away, between darkness that grows and salt that preserves.
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?
After yesterday’s disappointment, I needed something good. Or at least something not terrible! Final Destination: Bloodlines was exactly the combination of not terrible and actually quite good that I was hoping for! Full transparency: I began watching this movie a month ago, but stopped after 20 minutes because I decided it would make good October fodder. And I was right!
The premise is ridiculous, and if you’ve seen even one, you know all you need to know: Death has a design, and if you mess with it, Death will find increasingly elaborate ways to correct the cosmic ledger with outrageously elaborate Rube Goldbergian setups. Is this movie dumb? Absolutely. Does it make any logical sense? Not even a little. Does it try to say something profound about fate, mortality, or the human condition? Well, sort of, a little? But that’s ok! But the big difference between this and yesterday’s crappy waste of time is that Bloodlines knows it’s ridiculous and leans into that with such absolute commitment and affection that it is genuinely joyful to watch.
The setup: In 1968, Iris has a premonition about a Space Needle-esque restaurant disaster and manages to save everyone. Flash forward to the present, and her granddaughter Stefani is having recurring nightmares about that night. Turns out Death’s been working through the original survivors and their descendants, everyone who shouldn’t exist because they were supposed to die that night. (I just visited the Space Needle recently, and I thought about that opening scene A LOT when I was gingerly stepping on the glass floor! As a matter of fact, those are probably the scenes that freaked me out most, which is why that’s mostly the imagery I’ve selected for this post.)
It’s a neat expansion of the franchise’s mythology that seems to respect what came before while giving us something new. The “bloodline” angle makes the stakes feel bigger and the design more convoluted and intricate.
But we’re not here for the plot. We’re here for the deaths! And Bloodlines delivers. An MRI machine. A backyard barbecue. A garbage truck. Everyday situations transformed into elaborate death traps where one wrong move sets off a cascade of carnage. The film understands these sequences work best when you can see all the pieces being set up, when you’re silently screaming at characters to notice the garden hose, the glass shards, the precarious positioning of that lawn mower.
The tone is exactly right. This isn’t torture porn, it’s slapstick with arterial spray. There’s a darkly comic sensibility running through every kill that acknowledges the absurdity without winking so hard it breaks the tension. When someone gets demolished in the most convoluted way possible, you’re allowed to gasp and laugh. The film gives you permission to have fun with the horror.
The practical effects are gory, gorgeous chaos. Bodies don’t just die—they’re eviscerated, impaled, crushed, and dismembered with genuine craftsmanship. Kind of makes you appreciate the artistry while also wanting to look away and maybe puke a little bit.
Tony Todd. Oh, Tony Todd. His final film role is here, playing the series’ mysterious mortician who always seems to know a very weird amount about Death’s design. He was clearly unwell during filming, and watching him deliver his lines with that iconic voice coming from a visibly weakened body is heartbreaking. The film gives him a proper sendoff, finally explaining his character’s connection to everything in a way that’s both satisfying and surprisingly moving. It shredded me, honestly. This absolutely legendary performer, knowing his time was limited, giving us one last performance that’s a goodbye to his character and (whether intentionally or not, but it surely must have been) a meditation on mortality itself in a franchise built around cheating death.
Bloodlines gets it: you don’t need to pretend you’re saying something profound to make an effective horror movie (or an effective movie, period). This is a movie about wacky, sadistic Looney Tunes-esque cartoon deaths, and it never tries to dress it up as something more important.
It’s funny, it’s gross, it’s inventive, and in its own weird way, oddly heartfelt. Exactly what I needed.
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Haunted tiki bar, spectral mai tai floating in the periphery while some scratchy exotica album plays from a speaker you can’t locate, Martin Denny maybe, or Les Baxter’s jungle fantasies, that mid-century escapist thing that was already nostalgic for something that never existed, already haunted by its own appropriations, its own colonial fantasies dressed up as lounge entertainment, which is absolutely not what this fragrance is about but it’s where my nose took me, this tiki bar detour having nothing to do with the brand’s actual abandoned mansion concept.
The fruit here does exactly what I want fruit to do in fragrance, which is be weird about it, ashen and dusty and somber, bruised and semi-preserved like fruit that’s been drinking alongside the patrons, drifting in its own languid dissolution, melting into the upholstery, losing definition under hazy torch light, not trying to be fresh or bright or engaging, just strange and a little sad and smoky.
There’s a mustiness here, old wood and older paper, that particular smell of closed-up places where the air has gone stale and sweet at the same time, resort towns in the off-season where the bars are shuttered and the bamboo decorations gather dust and you can still smell a thousand phantom drinks soaked into the floorboards, lime and orgeat and something vaguely tropical gone sour in the humidity. Beach cottages abandoned after hurricane season, with everything softly deteriorating in the damp air, fruit bowls forgotten on kitchen counters, paperbacks yellowing and swelling and smelling like vanilla and wood pulp slowly decomposing, all of it fading together. This is October in places where October doesn’t mean sweaters, where fall is more conceptual than meteorological, where the season changes because the calendar says so, but the air is still thick and warm.
Something resinous and golden underneath, woody-amber earthiness, not cold-earth but tropical-earth, the smell of wood that’s never known frost, rooms that stay humid year-round, dust that never quite settles because there’s always moisture in the air. The smokiness like the ghost of a bar where fruits lounged and got tipsy, daddy-o, got a little loose, a little wild. The kind of abandoned that’s specific to semi-tropical places, where things don’t freeze and die back, but just slowly molder and transform, go spectral in the heat.
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?
First things first: Weapons. That’s the title. Just… Weapons.
The film’s concept: a witch is using spellwork to “weaponize” people, turning them into instruments of violence through dark magic. And what do the filmmakers decide to call this? Weapons. Because when you have a potentially interesting supernatural premise about possession, control, and human bodies turned into literal weapons through witchcraft, why bother with nuance or intrigue in your title? Why not just take your core concept and reduce it to the most literal, obvious single word possible? It’s a title for an Idiocracy timeline, the kind of aggressively dumb choice that makes you wonder if anyone in the room raised their hand to suggest, perhaps, something with a shred of mystery or poetry to it.
As for what Weapons is actually about: In the town of Maybrook, Pennsylvania, seventeen children from the same third-grade class wake up at 2:17 a.m., walk out of their homes with their arms outstretched, and vanish into the night. Only one student, a quiet boy named Alex, remains. His teacher, Julia Garner, arrives at school the next morning to find her classroom empty save for this one traumatized child.
The town immediately turns on Justine. Someone spray paints “WITCH” on her car, parents hound her at meetings, and she becomes the focal point of everyone’s rage and grief. Among the devastated parents is Josh Brolin, whose obsessive investigation into his son’s disappearance leads him down increasingly dark paths. The film unfolds through multiple perspectives: the aforementioned two, as well as the school principal Marcus (Benedict Wong, who they did so dirty here), a troubled cop, and a desperate junkie.
Through this fragmented structure, which works …sorta…for about the first two perspective shifts and then becomes exhausting, we eventually discover that Alex’s “great-aunt” Gladys is actually a witch who has moved into the family home. Using bells, talismans, and blood-soaked branches, she can turn people into zombified puppets and siphon their life force to sustain herself. She had Alex bring home personal items from each of his classmates, which she used to activate and summon them to her basement, where they’ve been kept in a trance-like state ever since. Meanwhile, poor Alex has been forced to spoon-feed soup to his catatonic parents and seventeen classmates to keep them alive.
The “horror” of Gladys is almost entirely predicated on the fact that she’s old and sick. Her wrinkled skin, her frail body, her age itself, all presented as inherently monstrous and terrifying. When she puts on makeup and a wig to venture out, the film frames it as grotesque. It’s lazy shortcut horror that substitutes “eccentric old lady is scary!” and “wrinkles are bad!” for actual menace. We never even see her plan working; she looks just as decrepit at the end as the beginning. So what was the point? Why did she think stealing children’s life force would help her? The film has no answers because it hasn’t actually thought any of this through.
The characters make baffling decisions that exist only to keep the plot lurching forward. When Gladys cuts Justine’s hair for a spell, why not just grab something from her car right then? Why keep Alex alive when he becomes a massive liability—the ONLY surviving kid, living in a house with newspaper covering every window?
Yes, the police investigate Alex’s house…once. Gladys does her creaky old lady act, they leave satisfied, and that’s it. In a small town. After the most bizarre mass disappearance imaginable. With the FBI supposedly involved. Okay…? Meanwhile, the entire town has turned on Justine based on nothing, but nobody thinks the weird newspaper-covered house with the sole surviving child warrants a second look? Lordy be with the lazy writing that needs everyone to be stupid for the plot to function.
And then there’s the inexplicably dumb dream sequence where Josh Brolin sees a giant automatic weapon with “2:17” displayed on it, floating above a house. It’s heavy-handed AND ham-fisted imagery (it’s so bad I have to use both) that mistakes obviousness for profundity. A floating gun with a timestamp! Get it? Do you get it?!! The film seems desperate for you to think this means something deep, but it’s just sloppy visual shorthand. Too blunt to be unsettling, too undeveloped to serve as actual commentary. It’s probably there because Cregger thought it would look cool and vaguely Important.
The segmented structure feels like padding. The junkie and cop segments exist purely to deliver exposition and get themselves caught so they can serve as weapons in the climax. Remove them entirely and you lose twenty minutes but virtually nothing of substance.
Speaking of the climax: Alex somehow knows how to use witch magic (how? why? can anyone do this?) and turns his hypnotized classmates against Gladys. They tear her apart in a scene that can’t decide what it wants to be—is this supposed to be horrifying? Darkly funny? Both? The film lurches between treating the violence as genuinely disturbing (children ripping an elderly woman to shreds) and playing it for absurdist laughs (look how over-the-top this is!), but it never earns either response. It needed to commit to one tone or find a way to blend them skillfully, the way something like, say, Evil Dead 2 manages. Instead, you’re left watching something that feels accidentally ridiculous when it’s trying to be serious, or oddly mean-spirited when it’s trying to be fun. The spell breaks, the kids go home (wait, didn’t the opening narration say they were “never seen again”?), though most remain mute and traumatized. Alex’s parents are institutionalized. Roll credits.
I didn’t find it scary, not even remotely. Not that I need my horror to be massively scary! Sometimes, inflicting a mild sense of disquiet works just fine! But this was a few cheap jump scares, zero sustained dread. Julia Garner’s performance is flat and unengaged. Benedict Wong brings genuine warmth to Principal Marcus, and the film thanks him by having his character violently bash his boyfriend’s head in before being killed off unceremoniously in the middle of traffic. Lovely.
Weapons mistakes withholding information for building mystery, conflates visual obviousness with symbolism, and passes off “weird old lady” for a functional villain. It’s mystery-box storytelling at its most hollow. Booo!
Not exactly the auspicious start to the month I was hoping for. At least there are 30 more chances to find something better? Peep at my Notion list to get a gander of what I’d like to watch this month, maybe you’d like to watch along with me!
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?
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.
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?
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.
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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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