Unquiet
Things

Here’s a hymn to welcome in the day
Heralding a summer’s early sway…

I’d been wearing Origins 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.

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.

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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!)

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.

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?

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?

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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 Evil for Colombian religious community horror, The Reflecting Skin for 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 Barrowbeck for 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 Spring for 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?

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BEAUTIFUL DEATH from bloodmilk x BPAL
Aubrey Beardsley’s most depraved illustrations liquefied into something exquisitely quaffable. Jade and amethyst, narcotic and fatal. Shadowed mirrors tarnished and strange; a chandelier drowning in cobwebs; spider-bitten, bruised blackberry dread coiling low in your guts. Medieval torture devices materialize unbidden—Catherine wheels and iron maidens, promises of torment a perverse allure. The aromatic green menace haunting libertines and bohemians, emerald-tinted Victorian wallpapers slowly poisoning sleepers and dreamers beneath verdant, elegantly ruinous patterns. A harbinger of malefic ecstasy, a finger dipped in something that shouldn’t be touched, mustn’t be tasted, yet somehow cannot be refused.

BHELENA from bloodmilk x BPAL
A tableau vivant, marionette birch brooms sweeping in the sun past the face of a corroded moon; tears of resin wept by pine, coniferous shadows through stained glass windows, fragments of jewel-toned light escaping from behind black lattice. The peculiar, electric luminosity preceding a devastating storm—air charged with anticipation and dread simultaneously. Loïe Fuller’s serpentine dance as captured by Koloman Moser in watercolor and ink; her golden wings catching impossible light as she transforms from mortal to archangel before transfixed audiences. A wine-dark languor sweetened with just enough honey to make you mistake midnight for dawn.

Jouissance Parfums La Bague D’O A fluid-filled bag, a saline breast implant, as vessel for a single rose. An anemic rose getting a transfusion from a fainting couch. A human furniture type of installation, like someone standing naked, stock still, throat tipped all the way back, a lone rose arranged in their mouth. In an utterly sterile gallery.

Bath & Body Works Guilty As Fig Fig appearing as quick pencil sketch, half-erased; floating vanilla blossom clouds dissolving in May breezes; soft laundry musks in cotton tees worn threadbare from a hundred gentle cycles; the ghost of last summer’s jasmine tangling through the latticework of dreams; cyan swimming pool polaroids, chlorine filtered and faded.

Arcana Wildcraft Yggdrasil is a scent that immediately called to mind a passage I’ll never forget from Robert MacFarlane’s The Wild Places: “All travelers to wild places will have felt some version of this, a brief blazing perception of the world’s disinterest. In small measures it exhilarates. But in full form it annihilates.” An exhilarating, annihilating coniferous expanse. Primeval pillars connecting earth to heavens; green darkness sleeping, dreaming, without witness, beyond time; crystallized needles trapped in amber tears dripping slowly for millennia; smoke suspended in frozen-canopied cathedral stillness, heartwood rings marking winters too numerous to count; the forest’s indifference, wilderness continuing its slow communion with eternity while you stand mute and temporary and already forgotten.

Armani Privé Bois d’Encens: A peppery craggle of stones where incense once burned or might burn yet, vetiver roots drinking the ghost of unburnt smoke, cedar planks weathered by ceremonies that left no ash, flint poised, tinder arranged, the space between intention and flame where autumn’s last bitter breath meets winter’s sterile promise, austere echoes creaking through lofty spaces that know neither warmth nor chill, dusty light filtered through vacant windows, fresh in the way that morning air tastes sharp and sour before the sun softens its edges, the potential for incense hovering like a prayer never spoken aloud. Though at first glance, it might not be immediately apparent, Todd Hido’s photography comes to mind when I smell this – an atmosphere of ordinary spaces shedding their daytime purpose to become threshold places, a pause in time between being and non-being, a thing neither fully present nor absent.

The Birthday Cake Collection from Poesie…

Anne Carrot ribbons from a vintage peeler; cinnamon bark cracking under fingernails stained with garden soil, cream cheese clouds drifting heavily across late October skies, cake batter coating the back of a crooked wooden spoon, the vegetal beta carotene sweetness of autumn afternoons preserved in butterfat and spice.

Emma Scarlet seeds caught between perfect teeth; bloody berry stains bleeding through white cloth napkins, cake layers light as tissue paper; rouged lips brushing bone china; crumbs scattered across tatted lace.

Juliet Cool, piney cardamom pods drowning in honey, an amber jar hurled and shattered across old ceramic tiles in a fit of pique, golden liquid pooling languorously in afternoon light; bitter tree nuts cracking between strong deft fingers, shells scattered underfoot, too warm and drowsy to care, mahogany armoires and sandalwood chests exhaling their precious oils into scorching rooms, siesta stretching endlessly beneath shuttered windows, a surrender to the shadow of the sun stretching across weathered terracotta walls.

Mathilda Fudgy coffee thick and dark; sandalwood incense drifting from small altars, a dusting of dark, aromatic grounds offered up as prayer, the sharp and bitter and sweet and unctuous drawing richer smoke from burning wood. Private, intensely personal ritual, the intimacy of small devotions.

Scout Perfume as lesbian pulp fiction blurb: Sharon was a good girl who loved innocent coconut cake… until she met Veronica and her jar of sinful candied cherries! What happens when the innocence of this sugar-sweet babe meets those luscious cherry-red lips? One taste of those syrupy, brightened fruits and Sharon discovers hungers she never knew existed. Will she return to her vanilla world of church socials and proper ladies… or surrender to the sticky-sweet decadence that Veronica’s red fingernails promise? A torrid tale of confectionery corruption and the dangerous women who seduce with sugar!

Burberry Hero Parfum Intense unfolds like dusty amber tobacco nestled in a mahogany humidor, cedar oils so intense they conjure a romance novel Fabio carved entirely from fragrant wood; golden resin pooling in the grain of his impossible biceps, abs you could grate cheese on if they weren’t made of aromatic cedar, pectorals broad enough to land a helicopter if they weren’t so heavily forested with sawdust, a sprinkle of black pepper like errant chest hairs poking through his unlaced pirate blouse. Thighs like ancient oak trunks offering not seduction but the domestic comfort of a Snuggie, strong arms thick as timber promising Calgon-take-me-away escape, the performative masculinity of rippling wooden muscles dissolving into something unexpectedly nurturing, pipe tobacco sweetness without the acrid burn, fragrant wood shavings soft enough to curl up against those carved shoulders. Fragrance as guilty pleasure romance novel, the kind you read alone in Cheeto-stained sweatpants: Johanna Lindsey’s never published ‘My Lumber Lord’s Love Log.’

Incense Rori feels like building an altar to the temple of dreams – not that it smells like any of these things individually, but the way someone in a dream can be your mother even if they look nothing like her, the golden balsamic woodiness conjures walnut and mulberry and rosewood; the creamy gentle spice suggests whipped orange blossom honey, marigold-infused sandalwood attar, ink perfumed with clove and honey and musk. Applied before sleep and still whispering the next afternoon, it becomes a nightly ritual for dream incubation, precious enough to justify its price not for special occasions but because sleep itself is the special occasion, the potent pantheon of dreams deserving its own sacred preparations.

The discovery set from Air & Weather

Spilled Milk What happens when confection becomes performance art? Elaborate sugar sculptures dissolving under cascading cream; crystalline roses and spun-sugar ballerinas melting into sweet rivers, froth of sweetened milk cascading down intricately carved faces, delicate fondant flowers and buttercream architecture liquefying into pools of pure sweetness, warm dairy – heavy cream, whole milk, half-and-half – turning ornate edible masterpieces into sticky syrup.

28 Flower What does morning taste like to a garden? Cool rain drumming on greenhouse glass; greenery sap stuck to garden snippers left out overnight, wet soil between bare toes during morning garden rounds, the sharp green snap of stems cut too close to the root, spring water collected in terra cotta saucers placed under dripping eaves.

Linden Can an ineffable thing also be a platonic ideal? Tissue-thin blossoms suspended in pale morning light; bees’ dreams of endlessly circling invisible nectar sources, spring greenery touched with the faintest breath of honey, petals so delicate and precisely what linden should smell like that you can only point and say “there, that.” It’s everything it should be, and only just that.

Raleigh Gold What if opulence came in small, chewy packages? King Midas’ dried fruit mix spilling from golden bowls; dates and figs heavy with ancient sweetness, walnuts touched by gilded fingers, every dried apricot crystallized into amber, treasured delicacies hoarded in marble-lined pantries where sunlight never fades the jewel-toned preserved fruits.

Bon Parfumeur Myrrh Shadow 403 smells like the Crypt Keeper’s signature ice cream flavor, an inexplicable combination of sour medicinal powders and resinous, demulcent sweetness. Apothecary ice cream served in dusty parlors where softly spiced cola syrup was dispensed by skeletal hands, bittersweet olde-timey remedies dispensed, ironically, in a dusty tomb lined with crumbling marble shelves and cobweb-draped medicine bottles, stone walls saturated with the balsamic phantasmagoria of centuries-old incense. It vaguely recalls the whispery smoke and mysterious veils of Annick Goutal Myrrh Ardente – except Myrrh Shadow 403 emerged from the freezer creamier, sweeter, colder: mystical tree resins churned into midnight, ghoulish horror host gelato.

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?

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I’ve been thinking about green slime. Not in a weird way—well, maybe in a weird way. Specifically, I’ve been thinking about a particular moment from You Can’t Do That on Television, a low-budget Canadian sketch show that aired on Nickelodeon in the ’80s. For those too young to remember: if any character said “I don’t know,” they got a bucket of green slime dumped on their head. Peak television, truly!

This relationship we have with uncertainty and not knowing has been rattling around in my head for years—it shows up in so much of my writing and honestly feels more urgent now than ever. We’re drowning in information while starving for wisdom. Fake news spreads faster than actual news. Even real news comes at us so relentlessly that if you don’t know how to think critically, you’re basically defenseless against the chaos.

Here’s the good news: no one’s going to dump slime on your head for saying “I don’t know.” You’re allowed to not have an opinion on everything. You’re allowed to sit out conversations where you genuinely have nothing to contribute. You don’t have to fill every silence with words just because the silence makes you uncomfortable.

In a world that rewards hot takes and instant opinions, admitting ignorance has become a radical act. We weren’t always like this. Socrates built his entire reputation on “I know that I know nothing”—wisdom starts with recognizing what you don’t actually know. But we started treating uncertainty like a character flaw instead of a starting point.

I was just reading about “intellectual humility”—basically the willingness to admit when you don’t know something. There was a study with high school students where they asked kids to rate themselves on statements like “I am willing to admit it when I don’t know something.” The ones who scored higher? They were more motivated to learn, used better study strategies, and ended up with higher grades. Their teachers, who hadn’t seen the test results, independently rated these same students as more engaged.

So here we have kids who admit their limitations outperforming the ones who project certainty. Which makes me think we’ve been taught to value the wrong kind of confidence—the kind that performs knowledge rather than seeks it. By rewarding performance over curiosity, by making it easier to fake expertise than admit ignorance, we’ve created a culture that celebrates the wrongest and worst type of people—the ones who talk loudest instead of think deepest. (Yes, I know wrongest isn’t a word, and maybe I am wrong to use it, but I think in this context it might be perfect.)

And here’s the thing that makes this even more maddening: the people who know the least are often the most confident about what they’re saying. I just learned that this is called the Dunning-Kruger effect—the less you actually know about something, the more likely you are to overestimate your expertise. Meanwhile, real experts tend to be more cautious about making claims because they understand how complex things actually are.

We’ve all been there—trapped in conversations where someone’s obviously making stuff up as they go, but they keep talking because silence feels like defeat. You know the type: they’ll tell you to turn off the GPS because they’re convinced they know a shortcut, then you end up stuck in traffic headed the wrong way, fifteen minutes late. Or they barge into conversations they know nothing about because their need to contribute outweighs their self-awareness of how little they actually understand.

Somewhere between Google and ChatGPT, we lost sight of how not knowing is where discovery begins. Google made us lazy about looking things up, but AI might be making us worse—it generates answers with complete confidence even when it’s spectacularly wrong. Just last week, the Chicago Sun-Times had to issue corrections after ChatGPT generated a completely fabricated summer reading list complete with fake book descriptions and nonexistent titles. AI is basically the Dunning-Kruger effect in algorithm form, making things up and presenting fiction as fact.

I stumbled across a study where researchers had people read articles about either “the benefits of admitting what you don’t know” or “the benefits of being very certain.” Afterward, 85% of the humility group sought extra help when they needed it, compared to only 65% of the certainty group. Something about simply reading that it’s okay to not know made people more willing to actually learn.

The smartest people I know are the ones who say “I don’t know” the most. They ask better questions. They listen instead of just waiting for their turn to perform expertise they don’t actually have. Watch any naturally curious person and you’ll see the healthy human relationship with not knowing. “Why does that happen? How does this work? What if we tried something different?” Pure curiosity, no shame attached. Then somewhere along the way we get trained that not knowing equals failure, that questions without clear answers are somehow less valuable than memorized facts.

Scientists methodically chip away at uncertainty, philosophers debate it endlessly, but artists seem to have figured something out that the rest of us missed. They don’t just tolerate mystery; they relentlessly pursue it and alchemize it into paintings, sculptures, novels, songs. They make art from the very thing the rest of us try to avoid. David Lynch built an entire career exploring what can’t be explained—and never bothering to explain it. The Surrealists made the unconscious visible, exploring the inexplicable, enigmatic, and elusive.

What if mystery isn’t failure? What if it’s possibility? Medieval illuminators spent lifetimes trying to capture divine visions, knowing they’d never fully succeed but finding meaning in the attempt. Van Gogh painted swirling night skies that no astronomer would recognize but somehow captured something true about how the cosmos feels. Louise Bourgeois spent decades excavating trauma through her sculptures, not to solve it but to understand it differently.

(And if anyone’s been wondering about my next book, there’s a few hints for you.)

But here’s what puzzles me: if admitting ignorance helps us learn better, why does it feel so uncomfortable? Why do we keep pretending we know things we don’t?

Your brain actually hates uncertainty—neurologically, not knowing can trigger the same threat response as physical danger. We’re wired to fill gaps in knowledge, even with complete nonsense, just to make the discomfort stop. Social media turned this into a performance where you’re supposed to have takes, opinions, reactions—preferably hot ones that get engagement. God forbid you just… don’t know something.

I don’t particularly enjoy being wrong, but I’m genuinely excited when someone can convince me to change my mind about something. There’s something thrilling about discovering you were looking at something completely backward or that there’s a whole layer of complexity you never considered. Sometimes, “I have no idea” is the most honest and interesting thing you can possibly say. That’s where the good stuff starts.

I keep trying to wrap this up with some perfect slime metaphor, but nothing’s landing and I can’t figure out why I’m forcing it. Maybe because the point isn’t the slime. The point is I don’t know.

And maybe that’s exactly where I need to be right now—not knowing where this is all heading, fumbling clumsily around between the thing I’m trying to say and whatever it’s becoming. Between the book I think I’m writing and the one that’s actually emerging.

The ancients used to build shrines at crossroads—those in-between places where possibilities intersect. Maybe not knowing is just another kind of crossroads, a place where transformation becomes possible. Where old certainties go to die and new understanding might be born.

Do I need to build a little crossroads altar to the unknown? Light some candles for mystery, leave offerings for confusion, and make sacred space for productive perplexity and the beauty of bewilderment?

What mysteries are you sitting with lately? What questions are you learning to love instead of trying to solve? What’s on your current altar of the unknown?

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?

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Have you ever had that feeling that someone is watching you from just beyond the tree line? That prickling sensation on the back of your neck while wandering a misty forest path? Perhaps it was Ed Binkley, sketchbook in hand, documenting your encounter with his meticulously detailed woodland denizens before you even realized they were there.

Binkley’s art feels less created and more… discovered, as if he’s somehow gained access to a hidden archive of supernatural field notes. His faeries, shamans, and assorted cryptid curiosities peer from the pages with such specificity that one suspects he must keep have recruited them as sources and informants, feeding him scraps of imagination and starlight so that he may best capture their likenesses in exquisite detail. There’s a sense of authenticity to these beings—they seem to exist with complete lives beyond the boundaries of the page, carrying personalities, histories, and perhaps even opinions about which mushrooms make the best rooftops.

“Corvid Priestess” peers from the pages of my book, The Art of Fantasy: A Visual Sourcebook Of All That Is Unreal with a gaze that suggests ancient knowledge and ritual importance. Her avian elements aren’t fancy accessories selected on a whim—they’re integral to her identity as a being who bridges worlds. The remarkable fusion of human and bird creates something wholly original, a priestess whose connection to corvid energy manifests through both spirit and form. One imagines her presiding over moonlit ceremonies, communicating in languages both human and avian, serving as translator between realms.

Binkley’s worlds exist next door to our own, like that neighbor’s house you’re pretty sure hosts something freaky every full moon but can never quite catch in the act. In “Soul Whisperer,” a veiled figure guides spirits to their next existence with all the calm efficiency of a supernatural TSA agent. Their veil—adorned with beads and tiny bones—makes music “like tiny wind chimes, inaudible to the rest of us,” which is just as well because the last thing you want when crossing to the afterlife is a jangly soundtrack announcing your arrival.

The textures in Binkley’s work invite closer inspection and are so tactile you’ll find yourself absently trying to pet your computer screen. Every feather, strand of moss-like beard, and antler-etched rune is rendered with precision that transforms flat images into seemingly tangible beings. His technique marries digital sketching with traditional colored pencil in a harmonious artistic union that preserves the warmth of handcrafted art while embracing technological possibilities. The result feels both ancient and immediate—beings documented in their natural habitat rather than merely imagined.

“Scout” embodies youthful vigilance and has all the hallmarks of that kid in the neighborhood who somehow always knows everybody’s business before they do. This watchful entity seems caught mid-reconnaissance, probably reporting back to some elder woodland power about the shitty humans who keep leaving energy bar wrappers in the sacred grove. The slight head tilt practically broadcasts, “I saw what you did last summer solstice.”

Binkley’s figures inhabit a rich tapestry of folklore and fantasy literature, from high-fantasy to horror to dreamscapes. These beings explore varied emotional territories while maintaining the distinctive thread that connects all his creations—a sense that these beings belong to coherent, complex societies with their own rules, rituals, and relationships.

In “Mantis,” we meet another hybrid being, one who has embraced the full mantis lifestyle. Its elongated limbs and complex garments suggest a society with fashion magazines, designer labels, and possibly a “What Not to Wear (When Decapitating And Eating Your Mate”) reality show. The figure has perfected that quintessential mantis vibe, that stillness unique to mantids—an unnerving quality of absolute presence that makes you wonder if you’re being sized up as prey or simply observed with alien curiosity.

“Chrysalis” showcases our fascination with transformation, and who among us hasn’t experienced an awkward transitional phase where we’re neither fully one thing nor another? (Minus the literal exoskeleton and carapace detritus, presumably.)

The figure exists in that universal state of becoming that feels simultaneously exciting and mortifying, the human equivalent of butterfly soup, that vulnerable yet wildly potential state where you’ve committed to shedding your old self but haven’t quite figured out what your wings look like. Like three chapters into writing a book with no clear ending in sight, and you haven’t fully worked out exactly what it is you’re writing about yet or how any of it relates to anything else at all, and actually, I don’t even know if that example relates to this artwork in the slightest, but that’s where I am at mentally right now!

“Listener” depicts a being tuned to incomprehensible eldritch frequencies. The meditative pose suggests active reception of cosmic broadcasts—picking up everything from tree gossip to star conversations to the subtextual grumblings of tectonic plates. Would such sensitivity be a gift or a curse? Would the constant chatter of atoms and echoes of ancient sounds drive one to madness? Or would it connect one to the universe in deliriously strange and wonderful ways?

I’ve developed a particular affection for Binkley’s goblins—those delightful domestic prankers who, I’m convinced, live in my own home. What else explains the earring that vanished from my bathroom counter, only to materialize six months later inside the House of Psychotic Women tote bag I hadn’t used since last winter? Or the specific creak my hallway floorboard makes at 3:17 AM with metronomic consistency?

Just last week, I set my coffee mug down while checking email, only to find it had migrated to the top of my bookshelf when I turned back around. The mug, notably, had a Terry Pratchett quote about magic on it—clearly my resident goblin has a flair for the ironic. Binkley’s illustrations give these mischief-makers faces and forms, validating my suspicions that I share my living space with creatures whose entertainment comes at the expense of my sanity and organizational systems.

That’s okay, goblins; I love your crazy ways!

In our world of increasingly mass-produced, algorithm-approved visual pablum, Ed Binkley’s intricately artful fantasies feel like stumbling upon a secret garden where the plants talk back and have opinions, the bugs have human faces and agendas, and there are secret societies teeming beneath your feet, just below the range of hearing, and beyond the range of sight… but surrounding us constantly.

His creatures and beings communicate the stance of those who have traveled far, possibly through dangerous terrain, to seek admission to mysteries beyond our perception. The gravitas in their bearing suggests responsibilities beyond mortal comprehension—perhaps they maintain boundaries between dimensions or ensure that certain ancient entities remain slumbering.  And yet their fusion of hybrid features with expressive humanity suggests perceptions which, though must differ wildly from our own, lurks a consciousness with recognizable emotions and thoughts that experience the universal mixture of awe and terror, hope and uncertainty, the willingness to be transformed by what comes next, that comes from merely being alive, from existing.

Each Binkley piece carries that uncanny feeling of recognition – not because you’ve met these specific beings before but because some ancient part of your brain has always known they’re out there, watching, waiting, and occasionally borrowing your good stork-handled stitch-snipping scissors without asking. His art whispers: the world is weirder, wilder, and more wonderful than they (you know, THEY) would ever have you believe.

Who are you going to believe? Them? Or Ed Binkley? I believe you, Ed.

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?

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[Note: This piece was initially developed for other purposes, but I’ve adapted it for my blog—balancing information for longtime readers familiar with this story while exploring the deeper connections between horror and healing for new readers…who might happen to be horror fans.]

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Friends, I have some exciting news to share! My article “She Died As She Lived: Deliciously (Notes From A Death Café)” is published in the current issue of Rue Morgue Magazine, and I’m thrilled to announce that this piece marks the beginning of my new role as a regular columnist for this beloved publication! I’ve been sitting on this news until I could hold a physical copy in my hands, but now it’s here, so I guess it is official!

My journey with Rue Morgue has been a series of is-this-real-life??? moments. First came the thrill of being interviewed about my book The Art of Darkness—seeing my thoughts and work featured in a publication I’d treasured for so long felt surreal. When the opportunity arose to contribute a piece on horror-inspired perfumes for their March/April 2025 issue, I poured my heart into examining how scent artists capture the essence of fear in fragrance. But becoming a regular columnist? That’s a dream I hardly dared to imagine.

My Ghoul Next Door column debuts with an exploration of Death Cafés – those gatherings where strangers meet over tea and cake to discuss mortality. Some longtime readers might remember my blog posts about hosting these events in Orlando from 2014-2016, and I’m excited to revisit the topic for a wider audience. What exactly the column will cover going forward is still evolving, but expect a strange brew of the weird and wonderful things I’ve long been passionate about – a space for exploring oddities and curiosities, weaving together the beautiful and the macabre, the strange and the melancholy. I’m looking forward to sharing these explorations with Rue Morgue’s readers.

The current issue featuring my debut column is now available, and I’d love to hear what you think if you get a chance to read it! Thank you all for supporting my particular brand of weirdness all these years. Here’s to many more adventures in print!

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