Nearly NoonA melancholic’s cream-stained regency morning dress worn well past midnight, white muslin and satin grown heavy with torpor, lace-trimmed cap askew over hair unwashed and unpinned for days. Yesterday’s rice pudding congealing in bone china teacups, spiced cardamom linen sachets tucked into untouched pillows, the intimate smell of unwashed scalp beneath crumpled muslin caps. The ontological vertigo experienced by a doppelganger’s reflection – am I the copy or the original, is this morning or evening, why does this chemisette smell like vanilla and the milky price of sweetness, the ghost of tiny, crushed wings. The sleepless moon, bedimmed and bedeviled, bears witness to another pale, faceless shadow in the window.
Arcana Wildcraft Otherworld Marble checkerboard chilled beneath wan feet, the beauty and horror of a centuries-long waltz. Longing, glamour-twisted, pale and thistledown silver. Silk slippers worn to bone, candlelight cold and shimmering, dreams translucent, yielding, disorienting. A flittering fae floral of twilight shimmers, shadows, and sighs. A paradoxical longing of vanilla, an amber just beyond the mirror’s reflection. Uncanny pollen encompassing the bleak chill of winter in summer’s blazing throat, spring’s sweet promise as the last autumn leaf drops with the dying sun. Morning light, iridescent and impossible, and dreams, everpresent, beyond recall. (I think this was limited edition or seasonal, but it may be back at some point?)
Oddity Delulu Beautiful foolishness, madcap delight. Coloring book fruit bowls come to life scribbled wild outside every line, Aladdan’s cave jeweled jello towers giggling, wibbling, sweet reckless audacity of spinning til dizzy-drunk, dress helicopter-whirling eyeballs pinwheel-wild. Mandarin acid-bright, cartoon citrus. Rhubarb’s pink bite. Blackcurrant shadows pooling, brief gravity, wry mordancy. Peachy fuzz osmanthus, vetiver’s tannic grip, a self-aware undertow of flat champagne effervescence, Tartness with sass-filtered sweetness, bright bright primary colors, slightly chaotic energy of cars shaped like pickles and animals wearing tiny hats doing important jobs, delightfully absurd, winking impish. Breathless, tumbling; catching joy by its wrist as it races past.
It’s a scent that combines the feeling of radical kindness and demented glee and calls to mind why I love the stories of shows like Steven Universe. As a matter of fact, I think the whole cast of Steven Universe smells like this, the way they can be simultaneously deeply caring and completely unhinged with joy. That combination of genuine sweetness with chaotic energy – it’s Garnet’s cool confidence meets Amethyst’s wild abandon meets Steven’s pure-hearted enthusiasm. The fragrance has that same quality of being deeply good-natured but never boring, sweet but with enough “edge” to keep it interesting.
I just read John Green’s The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet and this is a scent that sort of makes me think of what he wrote here, “You can’t see the future coming–not the terrors, for sure, but you also can’t see the wonders that are coming, the moments of light-soaked joy that await each of us.”
D’Annam Japanese Whiskey I don’t drink a lot of whiskey, I don’t know the difference between whiskey or scotch or bourbon or rye. But if we do have whiskey in the house, it is usually a Japanese variety. We like Nikka or Hibiki. I think they have a slightly smoky, caramel-y, sandwoody, vanillic, chestnutty…whiskeyness? I don’t talk about beverages as much as I talk about perfume, so obviously I’ve got some work to do if I ever want to become a whiskey reviewer, hehe.
SO, in this fragrance, imagine the aspects of those notes, but you’ve cooked all the alcholic stinging sharpness out of it. You stir in the tiniest bit of sugar, and then you hand whisk the shit out of it like people did with that viral Dalgona coffee recipe during the early months of the Pandemic. Now you have this pillowy whipped, frothy cloud of slightly smoky, caramel-y, sandwoody, vanillic, chestnutty whiskeyness minus the boozy aspect. And you wear it like a pair of cozy handknit fingerless cashmere mitts.
This is a lovely cozy wonder of a scent, but it is $380, and I am not sure it’s THAT lovely, cozy, or wonderful!
Atelier des Ors Lune Féline ExtraitA hooded figure watching from beyond the shadows, but shadows of what, and why in a place no shadow should be? The insidious intrusion, the confounding juxtaposition, the thing found in the wrong place. The stirring of things best left unstirred. Resinous orchid musk, feral balmy, rotting-earthed humidity. Milky murk, like looking through the eyes of the dead. Honeyed spices part buried, cinnamon-cardamom-disinterment deferred, the ground is wrong, a terror in the terroir. The boundless and hideous unknown, a carnal effluvium of the eerie and the weird, reinterpreted as a not-too-bad, funky vanilla fragrance. Actually, kinda lovely.
Serviette Byronic Hero An underripe raspberry swimming in an oversized leather jacket, smoking the wrong end of a cigarette. The raspberry has Chuck Bass’s face. The shadow it casts is an equally scrawny and pitiful rose. The rose has no face, and yet it is screaming, white noise, static, a broken radio. The jacket sleeves hang past invisible wrists, past the point where wrists should end. Chuck Bass raspberry has dessicated and wizened and shrunk up into a little freeze-dried mummy, aged before ripening, a little mummy-berry rattling around the ashtray of your skeezy older cousin’s El Camino.
Hilde Soliani Miss Tranchant Ramshackle wooden pier, salt-bleached planks sea wrack rot, shifting scrim of slate sky. Miss Akranes contest, bright bunting wilting in salt spray and sea mist, dripping gown and cracked rubber boots. Icy rain of butter and brine, each drop a tiny oyster on the tongue. Fishing nets of pearl grey silk tangled with kelp and hollow percussions of fish bones; the iodine tang of seaweed rotting in tide pools where lobster traps rust and seashell sibilance, gurgles, whispers, salted and cured. Sea glass teeth, crowns of crab shell, scepter of driftwood and whalebone. Something ancient stirs beneath the harbor, pageantry for drowned gods. What the tide brings in, the mayor photographs for the brochure. What it takes away, no one admits to their children. Velkomin til Akranes. Sjórinn heilsar þér svanglega.
BPAL x Haute Macabre Draconis Hollow spaces where the gods of splendor and shadows used to live. A decadence of dreams without a dreamer. If a knife’s edge could be lush, it would smell like this, if an abattoir were opulent. If danger pricked thrice and bled on velvet were cast into the void. Satiny plums that ripened in the dark between stars, balsamic amber thick as the silence after the trembling last hymn dies. Musky patchouli rising from earth that never knew sunlight, spiced powder that might have been clove, might have been wine, might have been the bloody tears of marble saints. The bitter richness of nothing, damask curtains drawn over windows that face nowhere. An empty reliquary, precious, hollow, gleaming with an absence of excess. A devastating, desolate indulgence.
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This month in Rue Morgue Magazine, you can find my piece “An Uncanny Coterie: Confessions of a Doll Collector,” a love letter to all the creepy porcelain beauties that horror movies have trained us to fear. Those sweet-faced antique dolls with their fixed gazes and milk-white complexions, originally designed as childhood perfection but now possessed of the calculating malice of porcelain predators in pretty dresses.
It’s really just me confessing my love for the very objects that make other people cross themselves and back away slowly. My shelves are lined with eyeless porcelain ladies and babies clutching invisible rattles (or knives?), and I find beauty in what Francis Bacon called “some strangeness in the proportion.”
From childhood memories of periwinkle-dressed beauties to my current coterie of perfect, precious potential assassins, this is my meditation on embracing what makes others uncomfortable. Which has a real “I’m not like other girls, I like dark things” energy, ugh. I guess what I mean is I’m curious about the psychology of collecting things that make most people’s skin crawl; why some of us are magnetically pulled toward the very things that give us the creeps. Grab a copy when it’s on stands next week if you want to read about finding charm in what others consider cursed!
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I often think of getting a chance to visit my younger self, and after she’s gotten over the simultaneous horror of how fat I have gotten, but how cool my nose ring is, here is what I would tell her:
Stop. Fucking. Around.
I know, I know – you think you’re buying yourself time, that if you just wait a little longer, the thing you’re dreading will somehow become easier or disappear entirely. Spoiler alert: it won’t. What you’re actually doing is choosing to suffer twice – once in the anticipation, and once when you finally have to do the thing anyway.
I spent so many years getting myself into the dumbest situations because I was procrastinating or avoiding something or lying about something I should have done and never did. The elaborate cover-ups, the increasingly ridiculous excuses, the way one small avoided task would snowball into this absurd comedy of errors that was infinitely worse than just handling the original thing.
Today, I had to make a series of phone calls I was dreading. Without getting too much into it, my boss made a companywide announcement that was going to affect our part-timers and that it would occur “sooner rather than later,” which means absolutely nothing and is not in any way useful or helpful. So I got to be the one to call each of them personally and clarify things, which included giving them an actual timeline. The doing of this was never not going to suck. And I did not want to do it.
My younger self would have spent days catastrophizing about these calls. She would have imagined every possible terrible reaction, rehearsed scripts that she’d never use, and probably would have “forgotten” to make them until the last possible moment, making everything infinitely more stressful for everyone involved.
Instead, I just… made the calls. They were fine. Some people were disappointed, some were understanding, most were just grateful to have actual information instead of corporate vagueness. The whole thing took maybe an hour, and then it was done.
The dread of doing it will hurt you more, and you don’t need to spend even more time hurting. Life is going to hand you plenty of genuine suffering – toxic relationships, bad breakups, family drama, health scares, financial stress, random bullshit that isn’t even your fault. Why volunteer for extra? Why choose to torment yourself over something you have to do anyway?
That’s it. That’s the wisdom. Stop volunteering for extra angst. The thing you’re avoiding isn’t going anywhere, but every day you spend dreading it is a day you’re choosing to feel like garbage for no good reason.
Do the fucking thing. Your future self will thank you. Also, one day, someone will think they have the right to tell you that they don’t want you to get a nose ring, and when they do, I want you to just cackle like a loon right to their face and tell them to FUCK ALL THE WAY OFF YOU NO GOOD PIECE OF SHIT MOTHERFUCKER.
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If you were a child of a certain age in the 80s, you were undoubtedly aware of the rockstar sensation that is Jem, whether you were enthralled by the Saturday morning television show or enraptured by the shiny, poseable dolls. You probably never consciously had this thought while mesmerized by the boxes at Toys-R-Us, but it must have registered somewhere in your little brain that the box artwork possessed a crazy level of craftsmanship and attention. The illustrations felt too good, too real, too carefully observed for their humble cardboard home. Did it ever occur to me to wonder about the artist behind these marvels, the actual human person who created them? I can’t say it did, until I heard someone mention Sharon Knettell‘s name in a Hasbro package art documentary that Yvan was watching on YouTube the other night.
Knettell, it turns out, was a fine artist who brought a borderline obsessive level of dedication to what could have been throwaway commercial illustration. While other companies were slapping generic pretty faces on their doll boxes, Hasbro had somehow convinced Knettell to create what can only be described as tiny masterpieces of commercial portraiture.
Knettell grew up in Connecticut, daughter of a Mad Men-era advertising executive, marinating in the sophisticated high-end commercial illustration that most people only glimpsed in glossy magazines. Her father showed her work by the great illustrators of the era, and she was captivated by their technical perfection. But what she brought to Jem left even that rarefied aesthetic education in the dust.
She didn’t work from photos or sketches, no way, that would have been too simple! She hired live models, had custom wigs made in the exact colors and styles of the dolls’ hair, commissioned replica costumes down to the last sequin, and then painted from life using airbrush over colored pencil. FOR DOLL BOXES. The woman was essentially staging full Broadway productions just to paint toy advertisements.
The world she was illustrating demanded this approach. Jem lived in a universe of pure visual excess where every outfit was a statement piece, every hairstyle defied physics, and every performance blazed with soap opera glam rock energy—part Joan Collins, part Lita Ford, all spectacular nonsense. The story followed Jerrica Benton, a young woman who inherited her father’s music company and used a holographic computer called Synergy to transform into Aquolina Pink Sugar-haired Jem, the lead singer of an all-girl rock band called the Holograms. The show ran from 1985 to 1988 as Jem and her bandmates battled their rival group, the Misfits, for musical supremacy while navigating romance, friendship, and the occasional kidnapping plot.
Every character was a living mood board, head to toe. Jem’s wardrobe included holographic bodysuits and gowns that seemed to be made of liquid metal, while the Misfits favored aggressive styling with electric colors, wild animal prints, fishnet mesh, and cascading fringe. This was the world that Knettell had to translate onto doll boxes—entire universes of fluorescent glam-rock fantasy compressed into a few precious square inches of cardboard real estate.
What she delivered feels almost impossible when you think about it. While most doll boxes featured flat, lifeless illustrations that could have been anyone in anything, her work practically vibrated with energy. She painted Jem’s metallic pink dress with actual reflective depth, each fold catching imaginary stage lights. Pizzazz’s lime green hair had sculptural volume and movement, every strand placed with surgical precision. The sequined details on their outfits weren’t shortcuts or suggestions; they were individually rendered points of light, each one a tiny star in her meticulous constellation.
Because Knettell worked from live models wearing actual replicas of the dolls’ outfits, complete with custom-made wigs in those impossible neon shades, every pose had the authentic electricity of a real performance. Her models were inhabiting these characters, leaning into microphones with breathless intensity, gripping instruments like talismans, caught mid-gesture in ways that suggested actual music was happening just outside the frame.
Those box illustrations remain seared into collective memory decades later with incredible clarity. Long after the show ended and the dolls disappeared from toy store shelves, Knettell’s artwork endures not just as nostalgic artifact, but as a visual language that defined an entire generation’s understanding of what glamour, glitter, fashion, and fame could look like. Her illustrations went beyond selling articulated fashion dolls to become cultural touchstones; they still influence how we think about fabulous 80s fashion, style, and aesthetics decades later. The sentimental pull and reverence is so strong that mint-condition Jem dolls in their original packaging now sell for thousands of dollars, with collectors specifically hunting down boxes featuring her work like they’re chasing down lost Rembrandts or something.
In an era before social media, before Instagram filters and digital glamour became ubiquitous, she was already painting with the hyperreal aesthetic that would define how we present ourselves online decades later. Those perfectly lit faces, those impossibly vivid colors, that sense of performative perfection, it’s all there in her doll box art, a crystal ball showing our future obsession with curated visual identity.
Knettell continues to paint, though her focus has shifted from commercial illustration to fine art portraiture. Working primarily from life rather than photographs, she creates sumptuous oil paintings that showcase the same technical wizardry she brought to those Jem illustrations, but with a quieter, more contemplative approach. Her recent work follows a similar style to 19th-century Impressionist Edgar Degas, but Knettell has a different angle: where Degas painted the often exploited young dancers of the Paris Opera, girls caught in a web of poverty and predation, Knettell focuses on contemporary female dancers wearing theatrical, fantastical costumes, gorgeous celebrations rather than somber documentations of their world.
Her current paintings feature life-sized figures in elaborate theatrical dress—a woman with bright teal hair adorned with purple flowers, wearing a sequined dress against a floral backdrop; a dancer in a vibrant red wig and heart-patterned tulle skirt, holding a single red rose like she’s accepting an invisible standing ovation; a ballerina in a fluffy pink tutu posed gracefully on a blue stool, every fold of fabric rendered with the same obsessive care she once lavished on Jem’s holographic gowns.
The same eye that could make Jem’s burnished minidress seem real enough to touch now captures the luminous whisper of light across a portrait subject’s face, bringing the same lyrical expressiveness and energy to fine art. Whether she’s painting rock stars for toy boxes or dancers for museum walls, Knettell understands something essential: art is about elevating the already extraordinary to the truly, truly, truly outrageous. That eight-year-old standing mesmerized in the Toys-R-Us aisle knew they were witnessing something magical, even if they couldn’t put it into words. Art is magic. And that kind of magic doesn’t just sell dolls—it makes kids believe in impossible things, elevates toy packaging to gallery-worthy work, shapes how entire generations think about glamour, and changes how you see the world.
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Another year, another impossible garden dream deferred by Florida’s hostile relationship with anything green and growing. While my tomato plants surrender to the heat before they can produce a single fruit worth harvesting, I console myself with Loewe’s utterly ridiculous tomato bag – a luxury leather love letter to the vegetables I’ll never successfully cultivate. It’s absurd, it’s sold out, and it perfectly captures my annual summer solstice ritual of mourning crops that never were.
This year’s ensemble is built around that tomato-shaped talisman, paired with a simple sundress in the neutral shade of dead leaves drying on the vine, an olive cardigan for the aggressive air conditioning that makes Florida summers bearable, and white sneakers adorned with playful peeking hearts that seem to wink at the absurdity of it all. The jewelry leans celestial – gold sunburst earrings to honor the longest day and chunky rings that catch the light. I briefly considered adding the matching tomato bra and panties from Fleur du Mal, but decided that might be taking the theme to an embarrassing extreme – even for me. While I may hide indoors until sunset, I can still dress like someone who appreciates the sun’s theatrical peak performance, even from a safe, climate-controlled distance.
Consider this my sartorial offering to the season – a collection of pieces that celebrate abundance and growth and all the bright, beautiful things that thrive when I’m not directly involved in their cultivation. Here’s to another summer of admiring other people’s tomatoes and wearing mine instead. Usually, I’d just add this year’s ensemble to my old summer solstice collection post and share it across social media, but since I’m taking a 2.5-month break from the digital noise, this tomato-centric vision gets its own dedicated space here on the blog.
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Here’s a hymn to welcome in the day Heralding a summer’s early sway…
I’d been wearingOrigins Ginger Essence for a decade of summers before I finally wrote about it in 2021:
“…like waking up on the first day of summer vacation and launching yourself out of bed with a whoop and a holler into the magnificence of a beautiful cloudless day, a sky so blue you feel you’re staring eternity in the eye, and eternity is having a pretty great day, too. The first day of knowing you’ve got two and a half months ahead of you where you have zero obligations and no one is making any demands of your time. As adults, we probably haven’t experienced that complete and utter and glorious freedom in a long time, and this bright, effervescent, zingy scent of spicy fresh-chopped ginger, and aromatic tangy citrus peels (and a nearby saucepan of simple syrup, just outside our peripheral vision) is as close as we might get to those storybook early summer holiday feels. See also all the lyrics from The Decemberists song June Hymn. “A panoply of song” is exactly how I’d describe this fragrance.”
I guess what I never included in that feel-good word salad is the shadow side of this bright, effervescent scent. There’s another story woven into this fragrance—one about loneliness, complicated relationships, and the particular kind of hope you conjure when you’re settling for far less than you deserve.
Read the full story over at my Patreon today, where I explore how this joyful summer scent became intertwined with one of the most emotionally complex periods of my life. This post is available to all Patreon members, including those on the free tier—no payment required, just a quick sign-up to join the community.
Patreon support is one of the few ways I actually earn money for my writing. I’ve never monetized this blog and never will, and while I’ve published books, the reality is that small advances and piddly royalties mean I’m never escaping my day job—my last book came out nearly two years ago and still hasn’t earned out its advance. If you’ve ever found value in my words, whether here or anywhere else, Patreon is the most direct way to support the (often schmaltzy, mostly ridiculous) writing that matters to you.
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I am having a Hot Grandma Summer. I am no grandmother (I don’t even have kids let alone grandkids), and I mean Hot as in overheated and on the verge of a meltdown, not wildly attractive. Just so you know where I am coming from. But in trying to make myself as comfortable as possible over the next few months, I am taking a page from the books of grandmothers.
I am wearing capri pants, which I recall a friend making fun of a few years ago. Whatever! This hemp pair was an Instagram ad from a place called Toad & Co. and I was influenced because their models looked cool and comfortable and like their pants had air conditioning. I bought a pair for myself, and they really do feel like it! These dowdy clam diggers that end mid-calf can BREATHE. I wear them with an Iron Maiden tee shirt.
I’ve been braiding my hair back in a Princess Leia hairdo that gets it completely out of my face. Not the fancy ceremonial ones from the throne room, but the practical Hoth braids when she’s gotten down to business. My hair is long enough now that I can wrap it around itself and stick a few bobby pins in to hold everything in place. I could do a claw clip but that always looks sloppy. This is much tidier, and it is definitely a little Tasha Tudor old-fashioned (which I love), but most importantly, it keeps everything off my neck when it’s ninety-five degrees and humid, and I am sweaty and broiling and overstimulated by the feeling of hairs touching my face.
I schedule time to watch my programs. Not binge-watching or catching up on shows, but watching my programs with the gravity of someone who has made an appointment. I love the specificity of that phrase – it makes passive television consumption sound like a medical procedure or a civic duty. Currently, I’m working my way through old episodes of Midsomer Murders, which is perfect grandma viewing. Cozy English villages, murder by hedge trimmer, John Nettles looking concerned while standing next to a flower bed. It’s exactly the right pace for someone who is having an evening snack of prunes and Sleepytime tea. I’ve spent the last few years so busy reading (which I will never complain about, but) I haven’t been watching much of anything at all. Thinking about it this way makes it a little easier to step away from a book. Also, my eyes aren’t great, and I need to give them a break every once in a while!
I grow vegetables because I like to see a pile of colorful vegetables stacked high in a basket (see also spilling-over jewelry boxes and dragon’s hoards), and because there’s something deeply satisfying about eating a pepper that you watched grow from a tiny seedling into something substantial enough to stuff. This year I’ve got peppers and eggplant, which seem to handle the Florida heat better than most things. The kale proliferates with zero help from me, and I’ve got lots of herbs that I use approximately half of but I don’t feel guilty wasting them because I like to look at them and sniff them, too. Our squashes all got destroyed by vine borers, which was disappointing but not surprising. Florida heat kills a lot of stuff. Which is why next summer I think I might just try growing pretty flowers. A harvest of colorful blooms is almost as good as a pile of vegetables!
I pickle things, which sounds very industrious and domestic goddess-y until you realize it’s basically just shoving vegetables into jars with vinegar and waiting. I’m terrified of canning, so I’m not over here poorly sterilizing jars and giving people botulism – this is all refrigerator pickles that get eaten within a few weeks. Mostly cucumbers, onions, and carrots. I like sharp, sour, tangy things, and the more with which to give me a pinched and puckered face, the better.
My hands hurt nowadays but I’m still knitting, albeit very slowly, like a determined turtle with inflamed joints and a concerning click in their wrist. After 20+ years of knitting, I have discovered I like working on socks best – they’re portable, they don’t require too much thinking, and even knitting the same pattern a million times, they’re still interesting. First, you knit the cuff, which leads into the ankle, and before too long, you’re turning the heel and decreasing for the toe stitches, and you’re never really working on one part long enough for it to get tedious. For years, I knit complicated lace shawls, trying to one-up myself with each new project, but at this point, I know my skills and my limitations, and I am just here for a reliable, good time. (I think a reliable, good time is a common thread woven throughout grandma core.) Anyway, I’ve been working on the same pair for months because I only knit a few rows at a time while watching my programs. At this rate, John Nettles will solve several more murders before I finish the heel turn.
I spend a lot of time on the screened back porch these days, iced drink sweating in my hand, bare feet cool on the concrete while the ceiling fan spins lazily overhead. I listen to birds – not in any serious birdwatching way, I couldn’t tell you what half of them are, but their constant chatter is hypnotic, and I love imagining that they have very important business to attend to. When we can only hear the calls but can’t see the birds, I use the Cornell Merlin app to figure out what’s making all the noise. I always remember how I’d see old people sitting on their porches, looking for all the world like they are doing absolutely nothing. But, man, I get it now. Yvan and I sat out on the porch two weekends ago for four hours just talking and listening to birds and it’s a good time.
I take magnesium baths because I read somewhere that magnesium is good for sleep and joints and muscles. I don’t usually have trouble sleeping, but I don’t want to take any chances! I sink into hot water and let the day dissolve while I think about absolutely nothing, which is harder than it sounds but gets easier with practice. Sometimes though, I watch YouTube videos of single Japanese ladies making dinner, or ASMR head spas.
I do my strength exercises so if I fall down, I can get up. This seems like essential life skills at forty-nine. I do the NYT puzzles and I am getting very good at Wordle, which makes me feel smugly accomplished in a way that’s probably disproportionate to the actual achievement. I attack my hobbies with the enthusiasm of someone who has given up any illusion that they give a single shit about their job. My job has never been my passion and I’m not about to start now, which means I can throw myself into crosswords and knitting and pickling with complete abandon and zero guilt about spending three hours on a puzzle.
In 2016 I suddenly remembered the library existed and have been making up for lost time ever since. I read my library books with the devotion of someone who feels like they need to personally justify the entire public library system through sheer volume of usage. I’m currently holding for about 50 gazillion books and I am about to incite an old lady beatdown on whoever it is that’s taking so much time with the new Riley Sager novel. Seriously, how long does it take to read a cheesy thriller? There’s something both maddening and delightful about the digital library hold system – it’s like having a very slow, very unpredictable book fairy who sometimes delivers exactly what you want to your tablet and sometimes makes you wait four months for the privilege. I’ve been reading a lot of nature writers recently. I do love me some Robert MacFarlane, but his dense, poetic prose sometimes lends itself to spending three years on one book because you can only read a few paragraphs at a time, so I’ve been gravitating toward lighter nature writing – the kind where someone walks around looking at birds or trees and tells you about it without requiring a philosophy degree to follow along. Terry Tempest Williams, Annie Dillard when I’m feeling ambitious, Sy Montgomery when I want to read about octopuses being weird and wonderful. I like reading people who are paying attention to the world in ways I wish I was better at, especially when I refuse to leave the house for four months at a time. I am also on hold for something called The Bean Book. This feels like peak grandma energy to me.
I’ve been listening to a lot of Ella Fitzgerald and Alice Coltrane and bossa nova, plus some Khruangbin and Skinshape – atmospheric and expansive music that feels sophisticated, spacious, and contemplative. Ella is for Sunday mornings with coffee, when her voice feels like the perfect soundtrack to moving slowly through the house in my pajamas. Bossa nova is for when I’m cleaning or cooking – those gentle rhythms make chopping vegetables or folding laundry feel less like chores and more like meditation. Alice Coltrane, Khruangbin, and Skinshape are for lighting incense and reading at night, Alice’s harp and their ambient textures floating through the room while I sink into a book and let the day officially end.
I’ve also got very specific personal sayings I’m incorporating into my mental dialogue this summer: “Be grateful, not hateful!” and “Always choose the option with sprinkles!” These are my own little grandma mantras, though you probably get the context in which they might be used, and they may work for you, too. “Be grateful, not hateful” is for when I catch myself sliding into resentment or bitterness and need to redirect toward appreciation instead. “Always choose the option with sprinkles” is about picking joy and the more delightful choice when I have options, even if it seems silly or indulgent. It’s so easy for me to get sucked into feeling sorry for myself in the summertime, and I am trying to combat this in even the most cheesy ways. These cheerful little sayings are deliberately upbeat, slightly corny wisdom that feels very much in the Hot Grandma Summer spirit.
I am also taking a break from social media again this summer – 2.5 months this time instead of the one month I did last year – and so I have no idea what’s going on with anything or what’s hip or cool or which celebrity said what stupid thing this week. Where this once made me frantic with FOMO, now, it just feels like the most unimaginable sort of relief.
You might look at all of these things and think…Sarah…this is pretty much exactly what you’ve always done as long as I’ve known you! Ok, you got me. I have always worn shapeless, comfortable clothing and loved murder mysteries and dreamy music. I’ve been knitting since I was twenty-five and cooking since forever. Maybe calling it Hot Grandma Summer is just giving a name to what I was already doing, or maybe I just wanted an excuse to buy new pants. Either way, here we are.
Last week I wrote about my folk horror summer survival guide, and this week I’m talking about Hot Grandma Summer, which might seem like I’m all over the place, but hear me out. I am doing these in tandem. Both are ways of connecting to older rhythms – whether that’s ancient folklore or traditional domestic practices. Whether I’m lighting incense and reading about stone circles, or sitting on the porch with an iced drink, watching heat lightning, and listening to tinny jazz on Bluetooth speakers, it’s in service of creating time and space for myself that feel untroubled and mellow (yes, even the eldritch dread of the old gods, I am counting that, too.). Both involve slowing down and being intentional about what I consume, creating comfort through specific, curated experiences.
The hemp capri pants work for both projects.
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Good morning to everyone except commenter Leila, because this is another navel-gazing event, and we all know she is not here for that! If, similarly, you thought my last personal blog post on my personal blog was too much personal introspection and not enough hard-hitting journalism, on, this, my unmonetized webspace that I have been paying for for 20 years, probably without any contribution from you, Leila, you might want to skip this one too.
Today, we’re diving even deeper into the premium navel-gazing experience with a therapy session conducted entirely through Kindle highlights. Yes, you heard me right, I’m about to psychoanalyze myself through other people’s sentences, and to be frank, it’s probably more effective than actual therapy sessions I have had.
This sounds ridiculous, but it actually makes perfect sense when you consider how books function in my life. Rereading my own posts, I realize I’ve been circling around the same truth for years without ever naming it directly: books are not objects in my life—they are participants. They are co-conspirators in the grand project of becoming human, active agents in the ongoing conversation between who I am and who I’m becoming. What I’ve been documenting in my writing about bibliomancy, synchronicity, and the deep defense of bookish identity is really a love letter to this particular form of animate companionship, this peculiar intimacy between reader and text that transforms both parties in the encounter. The teenager who hid behind library stacks reading Interview With The Vampire wasn’t just escaping—she was apprenticing herself to a different way of being in the world, learning that books could teach her how to breathe in a world that often felt too loud, too bright, too demanding.
Perhaps what I’ve been documenting all along is the evolution of a reader who has learned to see books not as static repositories of information, but as dynamic partners in the ongoing project of making meaning from the beautiful chaos of existence. Each book I’ve ever loved has left something behind in me—a way of seeing, a turn of phrase, a deeper understanding of what it means to be human—while simultaneously taking something with it: my attention, my wonder, my willingness to be changed. This is the transaction I’ve been celebrating without naming it, the sacred exchange that happens when we allow ourselves to be truly read by the books we think we’re reading.
Anyway, that’s my theory about books as living participants rather than passive entertainment—and maybe this will become a recurring exploration here, this investigation into how literature actively shapes us. But for now, I want to share something more immediate: a collection of Kindle highlights I’ve been saving lately. These are the sentences that made me pause and think “yes, exactly”or “oh shit, that’s me” or simply made me want to remember them. Some felt intensely personal—sharp moments of recognition—while others struck me as good or interesting or solid ways of thinking about life, the universe, and everything.
DANIEL GARZEE FOR SICKY MAG, “THE WEIRDIES”
Marginalia Psychotherapy
“She had always had a hard time seeing potential. It was why she was terrible at thrift store shopping: She needed to see beautiful things presented with fanfare, ideally in a stark white retail space staffed by thin, mean women.” —The Glow by Jessie Gaynor
This one made me laugh out loud because it’s so brutally accurate about my own aesthetic limitations. I am absolutely that person who needs things curated and presented properly before I can see their worth. Put me in a thrift store and I’m overwhelmed by the chaos, unable to spot the vintage treasure buried under a pile of polyester nightmares. But show me the same piece styled in a boutique window, and suddenly I can appreciate its beauty. It’s embarrassing how much I need external validation to recognize value, whether in objects or sometimes even in myself.
“Mia does this a lot, an achievement immediately becoming the new baseline and needing the next new thing.” —Happiness Falls by Angie Kim
The hedonic treadmill in one perfect sentence. I do this constantly—finish a project, get a small success, and instead of savoring it, immediately reset to “okay, but what’s next?” My brain refuses to let me sit with accomplishment for more than five minutes before it starts badgering me about how this achievement doesn’t really count and I need to prove myself all over again. It’s exhausting being unable to just be satisfied with where you are, even momentarily.
“Most people, whether they like to admit it or not, find pleasure in discussing things that are none of their business. Talking about people is fun.” —Ghost Music by An Yu
Thank you, An Yu, for giving me permission to admit what we all know but pretend we don’t: gossip is delicious. Not the cruel, destructive kind, but the basic human fascination with other people’s lives and choices. I love knowing who’s on the outs, who had a dramatic breakup and a spectacularly unhinged meltown on Facebook, who’s having a weird midlife crisis. It’s anthropological curiosity dressed up as social connection, and I cannot pretend it’s beneath me. It’s actually one of my favorite pastimes.
“I think engrossed is what I really want to feel most of the time. It’s such an ugly word, ‘engrossed,’ for such an absolutely beatific experience.” —The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green
John Green articulated something I’ve always known about myself but never pinned down to words: that complete absorption in something is my preferred state of being. Whether it’s a book, a project, or even just watching someone else be passionate about their thing—I want to disappear into it entirely. The word “engrossed” does sound clinical and unattractive, but the feeling itself is exhilirating. It’s when I feel most like myself, most alive, most present. Everything else feels like I’m just marking time until I can get back to that state of total immersion.
And then there are these three quotes that hit me like a triple punch to the ego, all circling around the same uncomfortable truth about my relationship with ambition and effort:
“There’s never been a reality in which I could be a serious thinker, a serious writer. I’m a Floridian.” —Worry by Alexandra Tanner
“Seeing yourself in print is such an amazing concept: you can get so much attention without having to actually show up somewhere.” —Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott
“I’d spent my life reaching for something bigger but wanting something easier.” —Just Like Mother by Anne Heltzel
These three quotes form an unholy trinity of my deepest writerly insecurities. Tanner’s Florida comment made me snort-laugh because yes, there’s something inherently unserious about being from here, about having been shaped by strip malls and humidity and Florida Man headlines. How can you be a profound intellectual when your formative experiences happened in this broke down shithole?
Lamott’s observation about print attention hit even harder because it’s so perfectly calibrated to my introverted writer’s dream: all the validation, none of the human interaction. I want people to read my words and think I’m brilliant, but I absolutely do not want to have to stand in front of them and prove it in real-time. Give me the byline, skip the book tour.
And then Heltzel just went ahead and summarized my entire life philosophy in one devastating sentence. Yes, I want to write something important, something that matters, something bigger than myself—but can I do it from my couch, in my pajamas, without having to network or pitch or perform? Can greatness come with early bedtime and minimal social anxiety? These quotes forced me to confront the uncomfortable truth that I want the rewards of serious ambition while maintaining the comfort of my small, manageable life.
“I am missing some fundamental element of preservation.” —The Bass Rock by Evie Wyld
And finally, this one, (and I know exactly what’s missing: common sense.) Basic self-preservation instincts that normal people seem to have been born with. Like not eating pizza that’s been sitting on the counter for two weeks, or avoiding abandoned streets at 4am, or using the safety doodadder on the mandolin slicer. I’m the person who will think “eh, it’s probably fine” in situations where a little healthy self-preservation would serve me well. It’s not that I’m actively trying to harm myself—it’s that I’m missing that little voice that whispers “maybe don’t do that” before I do something that could easily be avoided with just a tiny bit of forethought.
Ways of Thinking About Life, the Universe, and Everything
“Words aren’t enough, which is where art comes in, I suppose—but that’s just as complicated in a different way.” —Bury Your Gays by Chuck Tingle
We spend so much time trying to articulate the ineffable, to capture complex emotions and experiences in words, and sometimes we just… can’t. Art fills that gap—painting, music, movement, whatever—but then you’re dealing with interpretation and subjectivity and all the messy complications that come with trying to communicate through something other than direct language. It’s a beautiful acknowledgment that all forms of expression are imperfect, but we keep trying anyway because the alternative is silence.
“Through art, paradoxes of consciousness resolve for me. I see what I will never see. I know what I will never know. And I survive what I will not survive.” —John Green, The Anthropocene Reviewed
Encountering someone else’s creative work that allows us to experience impossible things—to live through experiences we’ll never have, to understand perspectives that aren’t our own, to process emotions and situations that would destroy us in real life. Art is a safe way to expand the boundaries of what it means to be human without actually having to endure everything humanity has to offer.
“This is why I respect chain-smokers like myself,” O said. “I make my own body a room of bad air.”
“Don’t you have an air purifier in your room?”
“Yes,” she said with a sigh. “Being human is like that.” —Y/N by Esther Yi
The perfect response to basically any frustrating, contradictory, or inexplicable aspect of existence. Someone simultaneously using an air purifier while chain-smoking, creating and solving the same problem at once, then shrugging about it with the ultimate explanation for human contradiction. It’s the most relatable thing imaginable: our endless capacity for self-defeating behavior paired with resigned acceptance of our own absurdity. Why do we doom-scroll while trying to meditate? Why do we buy organic vegetables and then eat them with processed cheese? Being human is like that. It’s simultaneously an explanation and a cosmic shrug. Very Homer Simpson-esque.
“Now, what in God’s name could happen to you in sight of your own house?” —‘Salem’s Lot by Stephen King
This is Susan trying to convince herself she’ll be safe investigating the vampire-infested Marsten House because she can see her own home from there. Within pages, she’s grabbed from behind, and by the end of the book she’s one of the undead stalking the streets of Salem’s Lot. It’s such a perfectly human bit of magical thinking—creating arbitrary boundaries around danger and then actually believing in them. Of course proximity to safety doesn’t make you safe, but we tell ourselves these stories anyway because otherwise we’d never leave the house. Susan’s logic is so reasonable and so completely useless, which makes what happens to her even more devastating.
“The world was filled with forgotten places that had been something else once, had contained something else once, renamed by whatever you did there now.” —Absolution (Southern Reach, #4) by Jeff VanderMeer
Transformation is never clean, we’re always building on top of something usually without fully understanding what we’re covering up. Reading Absolution, I kept thinking about how certain catastrophes feel predetermined, how the past keeps bleeding through no matter how thoroughly we try to rename it. There’s something unsettling about the idea that every space carries the weight of what it used to be, that our attempts to reinvent places (or ourselves) are always incomplete.
Your turn: what quotes have been psychoanalyzing you lately? Please feel free to share your own marginalia therapy sessions in the comments!
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I was watching a BookTube video a few months ago when someone casually mentioned they didn’t start reading until a few years ago. I weirdly found that comment upsetting, and it sent me spiraling back to sixth grade, wondering if these newly-minted book enthusiasts were the people who made reading feel weird and wrong when I was small. I thought about Mary Josenhans, who wasn’t even in my class but somehow knew enough about my reading habits to tell one of my younger sisters that I was a big nerd – not even bothering to insult me directly, just trying to make a kid feel ashamed of her sibling. Mind your own business, Mary. (Shoutout to Mrs. Haney, though, who gave eleven-year-old me a copy of Pet Sematary and changed my life.) I wasn’t really even properly bullied as this was just one incident, not a pattern; mostly I was just ignored and neglected by other kids – but that one moment taught me that reading marked you as socially unacceptable.
I bet Mary J. has a popular BookTok account where she uses trending audio to arrange her book spines by color and has half a dozen Stanley cups prominently displayed. And that’s where my petty, intrusive thoughts really kick in: what if some of these people building careers off books are the same ones who once made bookworms feel like freaks? Don’t get me wrong – I’m genuinely glad when anyone discovers the joy of books, no matter when it happens. There’s no timeline for falling in love with stories, and I’m not trying to be some literary gatekeeper deciding who gets to call themselves a reader. It’s probably unfair, and maybe it’s just my algorithm, but reading genuinely seems to have become trendy in a way it never was when I was growing up hiding out in bathroom stalls reading Interview With The Vampire. Suddenly everyone’s a book influencer, BookTok is a thing, and reading is… cool? After decades of it being decidedly not cool.
Which brings me to what’s really been bothering me. In true Taurus fashion, I’ve been stewing over something that I read all the way back in 2019 – an essay arguing that “liking books isn’t a personality.” The author positioned bookishness as essentially a consumer identity, a performance of intellectual superiority rather than genuine love of reading. Their argument fits into this broader pattern where there’s apparently a cultural sweet spot for how much you’re supposed to care about things – not too little (then you’re basic or uncommitted) but not too much (then you’re obsessive or weird). Their ideas have been bouncing around my head ever since, especially as I’ve watched similar takes spread through think pieces and comment sections. I’ve been meaning to write something about it, but I didn’t know what. I still don’t know exactly what my point is, but I have a lot of thoughts. (And as I have shared before, “I don’t know” is perfectly ok and a great place to start!)
John Lavery, Miss Auras, The Red Book
I was a shy, scared child who didn’t want to talk to anyone and desperately didn’t want them to talk to me. In a world that felt perpetually too loud, too bright, too demanding of interaction I wasn’t equipped to give, books offered something revolutionary: a place to direct my gaze that felt entirely legitimate. Here was conversation where no one had to speak aloud, where I could disappear so completely that teachers would have to call my name twice to pull me back from whatever story had claimed me.
I was that kid spacing out in class because I was thinking about Nancy Drew’s latest mystery or Harriet’s tomato sandwiches – why did they sound so appealing when I’d never even tried one? During recess and lunch, while other children navigated the complex social ecosystems of playground politics, I found corners – behind the library, under slide, in a classroom corner – anywhere I could unfold a paperback and follow Meg Murry through time and space or wander Middle-earth with Bilbo.
Reading became my escape mechanism. Books taught me how to be alone without being lonely, how to find richness in solitude, how to build an entire interior universe that no one could take away or mock or misunderstand. When I read now about people dividing readers into “authentic” versus “performative” categories, I wonder: what do you call the child who read to survive?
As I grew older, books remained my refuge, but the reasons I needed refuge kept shifting. When our mother’s alcoholism escalated during my teenage years, I escaped into Stephen King’s horror and The Exorcist – fictional demons somehow made more sense than the chaos at home. As a broke twenty-something, I fell into a weird Russian literature phase – Dostoevsky and Tolstoy felt appropriate for the existential weight of those years. I discovered Francesca Lia Block’s Weetzie Bat, a splendid book of pink bougainvillea and gritty fairies that showed me Los Angeles could be magical, that weirdness could be beautiful. It made me start looking for that same magic in Daytona Beach – which was a stretch, but still. In my thirties, trapped in an abusive relationship, I discovered gothic classics – The Mysteries of Udolpho, The Castle of Otranto, The Monk – stories of women trapped in crumbling castles that felt uncomfortably familiar.
Now, in my forties, nearing fifty and increasingly aware of mortality, I find myself terrified that I will never read everything I want to read before I die. This isn’t anxiety about missing some arbitrary cultural literacy checklist – it’s the particular grief of knowing there are entire worlds I’ll never get to visit, entire conversations I’ll never get to join.
The stories that save you when you’re seven don’t just disappear when you turn twenty-seven, or thirty-seven, or forty-seven. They become part of your emotional foundation, layers of experience that shape how you interpret everything that comes after. When I was eight and read about Lucy Pevensie finding Narnia in the back of a wardrobe, I internalized the possibility that magic might be hiding in plain sight, behind any (maybe every!) door. When I discovered Rebecca at nineteen, I became obsessed with the unnamed narrator’s invisibility, how small and uncertain she felt in a world of people who seemed so sure of themselves. Years later, after my mother, aunt, and both beloved maternal grandparents died, I reread Beloved and understood something fundamental about how trauma lives in bodies, how the past never stays buried.
Books are not separate from my personality; they’re foundational to it. To suggest otherwise feels like suggesting that your childhood doesn’t count toward who you are, or that formative experiences are somehow less authentic than casual preferences.
Ethel Porter Bailey, Reflections
What irks me about this conversation is how everyone seems to have forgotten what it was actually like to be a reader before reading became cool. There’s this weird revisionist thing happening where people act like loving books was always socially acceptable, like bookishness is some invented consumer identity instead of something kids actually got teased for.
I don’t disagree that performative bookishness exists – it’s everywhere now. But this framework completely erases people like me, for whom books weren’t about performance or status. They were necessity. When that essay discussed the Marie Kondo backlash, dismissing people’s reactions to throwing away books as mere attachment to consumer objects, I wondered: has the author never met someone for whom those books were actual lifelines?
Yes, book culture gets commodified like everything else. But the existence of BookTok lifestyle branding doesn’t cancel out the reality that books genuinely changed some of our lives in ways that go much deeper than aesthetic choices or social signaling
When I post about a book that moved me (and if you follow me anywhere, you know I do this all the time!) I’m not performing bookishness for social credit. I’m doing what humans have always done with stories that matter: trying to share them, trying to find other people who might be changed by them the way I was. The impulse to say, “You have to read this,” isn’t about demonstrating intellectual superiority – it’s about the very human desire to connect over shared wonder.
What these critics don’t understand is that loving something deeply doesn’t preclude also enjoying the social aspects of that love. The fact that I sometimes read for community doesn’t invalidate the times I read for survival. The fact that I enjoy discussing books doesn’t mean my attachment to them is somehow less authentic than someone who reads in perfect solitude.
For those of us who were shaped by books from an early age, reading isn’t something we do – it’s something we are. It’s in the way we process emotions through narrative frameworks, the way we understand complex situations by thinking about which stories they remind us of, the way we’ve learned to find meaning by paying attention to the kinds of details that writers notice.
When people say “liking books isn’t a personality,” I wonder what they think would be left if you removed all the ways that books have shaped how I think, how I feel, how I understand relationships and power and beauty and loss. What personality would remain after you extracted all the stories that taught me how to be human?
Maria Bashkirtseva Konstantinova, At a Book
Some of us remember when being caught with a book at the wrong moment meant social death. Some of us remember teachers who rolled their eyes at the kid who finished assignments early and pulled out a novel, remember classmates who treated reading for pleasure like a personal attack on their lifestyle choices.
The fact that reading has become trendy, that bookish aesthetics are now Instagram-worthy, that literary culture has been monetized in ways previous generations couldn’t have imagined, none of this changes the reality that books saved some of our lives in ways that went far beyond entertainment or education or cultural capital.
The people who dismiss deep engagement as performance are often the ones who have never experienced anything deeply enough to understand what they’re critiquing. They mistake intensity for pretension because they’ve never felt intensity themselves. They confuse passion with performance because they’ve never been passionate about anything that couldn’t be contained within socially acceptable boundaries.
But I think some of us know better. Some of us know what it means to be saved by books, to be formed by stories, to carry entire libraries inside ourselves as emotional infrastructure. Some of us understand that reading isn’t just something we do – it’s something we are.
Let’s maybe switch the focus. Instead of me defending what I love, I want to know: what gets you jazzed? What deep passion have you been made to feel freakish for? What thing that formed you have people dismissed as performative or shallow?
Tell me about the thing you love that supposedly “isn’t a personality.”
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 can feel it coming – that familiar dread that settles in my bones as the days stretch longer and more punishing.
The mosquitoes have already begun their ancient blood rituals, those vampiric sentinels of summer preparing their campaign of torment. Soon the very act of breathing will become an ordeal, each step outside a confrontation with air so thick and hostile it feels like drowning on dry land. The wall of soup will slam into you the moment you cross the threshold, coating your lungs with Florida’s particular murky brand of atmospheric malice.
Within moments your body betrays you, generating its own swampy ecosystem of butt and boob sweat, transforming you into a walking greenhouse of misery. The sun ceases to be a source of life and becomes instead a cosmic interrogator, beating down with the relentless rhythm of existential punishment. You begin to suspect this is what purgatory actually looks like – not fire and brimstone, but endless strip malls baking under merciless light.
My vegetables will surrender before the solstice, another year’s worth of hope incinerated by Florida’s hostility to anything green and growing. The ten-second summer rains will arrive like false prophets, promising salvation but delivering only Florida’s signature petrichor of hot asphalt and abandoned dreams. If the rest of humanity suffers seasonal depression when winter steals their light, I am cursed with reverse SAD, my soul withering as the days grow longer and feeling more like The End Of Days.
But there’s something almost instructive about this brutality – the way it cuts through the glossy veneer of recently built retirement communities and amusement park facades, coffee shops and kava bars, revealing something far more primal underneath. This heat doesn’t care about your manicured lawns or climate-controlled shopping centers. It reminds you that the land itself is older and more indifferent than all our attempts to tame it, that these forces were here long before the first concrete was poured and will be here long after it all crumbles back to sand.
With this terrible knowledge searing through my brain as I face another summer of elemental punishment, I find myself craving stories that understand these ancient, uncaring powers – a complete folk horror immersion.
I’m constructing this survival arsenal with one crucial rule: everything except the music has to be new to me. There’s no time in my short, brutish life to revisit familiar territory when I’m actively drowning in seasonal despair. I need fresh material that can cut through the heat-induced fog, stories, and images I haven’t already processed and catalogued. The music is different – I already know these artists will deliver exactly the emotional alchemy I need, whether that’s channeling rage or facilitating transcendence. But the films and books? Those are gambles. Calculated risks based on synopses and whispered recommendations, built on the hope that other people’s folk horror obsessions might save me from my own geographic curse.
Music
Some days the heat makes me want to burn everything down, and in that enraged mood, I need violent apocalyptic Americana that matches Florida’s hostility with equal fury. Murder by Death’s biblical doom, The Builders and the Butchers’ Pacific Northwest gothic, Amigo the Devil’s twisted folk narratives, Bridge City Sinners’ folk punk darkness, and Heathen Apostles‘ supernatural country – all of it designed to channel that bone-deep anger at being trapped in this swampy purgatory into something cathartic.
But other days require a different kind of escape – transcendence instead of rage. For when I need to dissassociate and float away from Florida’s oppressive reality entirely, I turn to the ethereal: the hypnotic Czechoslovakian folk horror of Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, Thorsten Schmidt’s fictional TV soundtrack Hereford Wakes with its “curious folk miniatures and blurry electronic library music,” Klaus Morlock’s hauntological synth folk on Bethany’s Cradle, and The Hare and The Moon’s ghostly takes on traditional British standards. These create otherworldly soundscapes that make ordinary afternoons feel like wandering through a 1970s BBC children’s program about ancient burial mounds or late night public access educational programming about traditional crafts where the seamstress only stitches tiny burial shrouds and the woodcarver only whittles tuneless eerie bone whistles.
Still, other days require a third, secret path – when the heat has drained all fight from your bones, and transcendence feels too ambitious when you need music that understands the strange melancholy of existing between worlds.Alela Diane, Emily Jane White, Marissa Nadler, and Jolie Holland create haunted Americana that sounds like it’s drifting up from old graveyards, songs sung by women who commune with spirits and remember the names of forgotten places. Their voices carry the weight of ancestral grief and ancient knowing, perfect for those suspended afternoons when you’re too heat-drunk to rage but too restless to fully escape, when you need to feel like you’re channeling something deeper than just your own seasonal despair.
And then there’s the wildcard: Matt Berry’s Kill the Wolf for when Florida’s rabid broiling delirium has broken your brain so completely that you need something equally unhinged to match the absurdity of your predicament.
Films
This is where my gamble gets riskier – a collection of folk horror films drawing from familiar traditions but offering new stories I haven’t yet experienced, chosen based entirely on promises of landscapes that hold older memories than Florida’s tourist traps. I’m betting that Starve Acre’s creeping rural England dread and Enys Men’s eerie Cornish isolation can transport me somewhere the heat can’t follow, where ancient stones remember purposes that predate strip malls.
My tentative list spans continents and decades: Starve Acre for that English farmland horror where grief opens doorways to darker forces, Men for Alex Garland’s fever dream of genuinely threatening countryside, Children of the Stones for classic 70s British wrongness beneath quaint village life. Then deeper into international territory – Poison for the Fairies for Mexican childhood darkness,Exhuma for Korean ancestral grave disturbances,Celia for Australian political paranoia mixed with childhood terror, Luz: The Flower of Evilfor Colombian religious community horror,The Reflecting Skinfor that bleached-out American prairie nightmare, and The Severed Sun for isolated religious community horror where domestic violence unleashes forest beasts with shimmering white eyes.
Each one promises a different flavor of ancient power – whether it’s Celtic stone circles, Korean shamanic traditions, or vengeful forest creatures that understand how violence can tear open doorways between worlds. The hope is that these films will do what Florida summer prevents: remind me that there are places where seasons mean something, where the land itself participates in human stories instead of just trying to kill you with humidity – though I’m increasingly aware that many of these ‘ancient’ European folk traditions I’m drawn to are echoing something even older, the displaced stories of people who understood these landscapes long before colonization renamed and reshaped them.
What am I missing? I need more recommendations for folk horror that can transport me completely away from this godforsaken peninsula.
Books
When the films aren’t enough and I need complete submersion in worlds where crossing certain thresholds has consequences and the old gods haven’t been murdered by modernity, I’m banking on literature to provide the kind of deep, slow burn that can sustain me through months of elemental punishment. These are all uncharted waters for me – calculated gambles based on whispered recommendations and tantalizingly dark synopses, with Sadie Hartman of Motherhorror’s comprehensive Instagram posts being absolutely instrumental in building this folk horror bibliotheca of dread.
My literary arsenal spans centuries and landscapes: Brom’s Slewfoot for Colonial New England witchcraft and ancient spirits deciding between healing and destroying, Andrew Michael Hurley’s Devil’s Day for Lancashire folk traditions and the sacrifices required to belong to the tribe, plus his Barrowbeckfor Yorkshire-Lancashire border darkness where ancient forces demand payment as two thousand years of history comes to an end. . Kate Worsley’s Foxash promises gothic menace in 1930s Essex smallholdings, while Elliott Gish’s Grey Dog offers 1901 schoolmarm horror where something beastly lurks in the woods, matching a woman’s uncontainable rage.
Then there’s the water horror of Danielle Giles’ Mere, set in 990 AD Norfolk where holy sisters face something unholy in the fens, and Olivia Isaac-Henry’s Sorrow Springfor 1970s village worship of sacred waters with sinister truths flowing beneath. Gabrielle Griffiths’ Greater Sins brings 1915 Scottish bog body discoveries during wartime, while Tom Fletcher’s Witch Bottle explores repressed guilt through a milkman’s nightmares in remote northwest England.
For contemporary folk horror, there’s Monique Asher’s The Red Knot – isolated Alaskan island murders with cult leader daughters and missing girls, and Jodie Matthews’ Meet Me at the Surface for Bodmin moor secrets, night hunting, and folklore notebooks linked to dead ex-girlfriends. Benjamin Myers’The Gallows Pole promises historical Cragg Vale Coiners with stag-headed visions, David Sodergren’s The Haar brings Scottish fishing village fog that delivers madness and death, and Lucy Rose’s The Lamb offers gothic mother-daughter cannibalism in the forest.
The goal is total immersion- books that can make me forget I’m sweating through another Florida afternoon and instead convince me I’m following foggy footpaths that lead to places that shouldn’t be named aloud. Stories that understand the hungry land keeps its own account, where trespassing on certain fields during certain lean months gets you invited to harvest festivals where you’re the guest of honor and the main course.
But again, I’m building this arsenal in real-time. What folk horror literature should I be adding to this survival strategy? Especially anything that can make me believe in places where the stones remember the ancient names, where the seasons still follow their proper rhythms, where the land itself holds stories that predate pavement and knows the difference between sacred and profane.
What Am I Missing?
This feels like a good start, but I know there are catastrophic holes in my strategy and time is running out. What podcasts should I be devouring while I’m trapped inside working from home, watching the heat shimmer off the pavement like malevolent spirits mustering their forces? Are there folk horror games that can rip me away from this cursed reality and drop me into fog-shrouded moors while my air conditioner screams its death rattle against the inevitable? Art books filled with woodcut demons and ancient symbols that might serve as the only talismans capable of surviving the coming subtropical apocalypse?
I’m begging you – what else belongs on this list? Graphic novels where the trees have teeth and the soil remembers every scream? Weird little zines that reek of grave dirt and patchouli, smuggling forbidden knowledge from places where winter still exists? Folk horror perfumes that smell like river moss, and leaf litter and a grain of lightfall out past the timber line? Clothing that feels like wearing shadows harvested during eclipse season, or cut from fabric that whispers when you move, like dried leaves or distant prayers? Foods that taste roots and salt, smoke and bone, like little ritual sammies prepared by hedge witches?
What about candles whose flames flicker with the memories of abandoned parish churches, their wax threaded with earth from crossroads and fragments of bone? Tea blends called “Carrion Comfort” and “Blood Tithe Blend” that steep your soul in the accumulated wisdom of village cunning women who remembered when the old festivals mattered? Jewelry carved from hawthorn wood cut during winter solstice, or iron rings hammered by blacksmiths who still left offerings for the forge spirits?
I crave tarot decks painted with British Isles folklore – green men and corn dollies and things that dance around standing stones. Incense made from herbs gathered at dawn in places where fairy rings still grow, soaps infused with vervain and wolfsbane, rowan ash and iron filings that village wise women once used to ward off the kind of malevolence that now festers in parking lots under fluorescent lights. Home shrines assembled from wheat sheaves and rowan berries, stones pulled from ancient burial mounds, prayer books written in languages earlier than Christianity.
What about oil blends pressed from plants that only grow in places where blood was once spilled for harvest blessings, or bath salts mixed with water drawn from holy wells where pilgrims once sought cures? Threadbare shirts from bands with names like “The Barghest Choir” or “Gallows Hill Collective,” whose lyrics read like confessions found in burned-down churches, who only perform at crossroads during new moons, whose melodies allegedly drove entire villages to dance themselves to death. Ceramic vessels shaped like the offering bowls found buried beneath medieval foundations?
I’m even desperate enough to cultivate plants that folklore claims can see through deception – rowan and elder for my windowsill, anything that witches once used to mark property lines or hung above doorways to keep the wrong things from entering. Green things that carry the genetic memory of when humans knew better than to build cities in swamps, that might whisper solid instructions for surviving places where the land holds patient, overheated grudges. Literally anything I haven’t yet imagined in this escalating desperation to construct defenses against a climate that seems personally vindictive?
Because the clock is hammering toward that first day when stepping outside becomes an act of self-immolation, when the very air transforms into a living predator and every breath tastes like surrender and sulfur. I’m about to discover whether millennia of human terror and folklore can possibly stand against Florida’s weaponized meteorological hatred. This godforsaken peninsula certainly had its own stories once, sacred tales of water and wind and growing things in all seasons before it became a tourist hellscape, stories that were systematically butchered along with the people who told them. That’s exactly why this place feels so spiritually poisoned, why the heat doesn’t just flay your flesh but seems to incinerate the very memory of autumn from your bones.
So what am I missing? Help me expand this inventory and shore up my collection before I’m reduced to a heat-drunk casualty, clawing at windows and hallucinating about places where October means actually something other than marginally-less-homicidal-than-July.
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