Unquiet
Things

 I shared these musings over on Patreon last summer, and because I have nothing lined up to post here on the blog while I am traveling this week, I thought I could share them here, too. Incidentally, over on Patreon today, I shared the perfumes that I am traveling with!

Along with sentiments and quotes from books and cinema, I often squirrel away observations and ideas from my rambling internal dialogues to include in future perfume reviews. I have pages and pages of notebooks with “inspired” scribblings like “a putrid effluvium of hatred, distrust, and malaise,” or “aggressively piquant, like Kali-Ma with a necklace of peppers and chilis,” or “the moldy salmon scrapings of the inner rind of the pumpkin.”

I was thinking today of how back in 2017 or so, I started listening to the TANIS podcast. I was a bit late to the party; I was convinced I didn’t care for podcasts, so I had never listened to any at that point, but a friend had talked up how creepy it was, and I was intrigued. I’m not going to be that patronizing guy who gives you a whole rundown of what this podcast is about, other than to tell you it’s a mystery pseudo-documentary type-thing. Everyone has already heard it by now, so you don’t need me to fill you in. (Also, I listened to maybe 20 episodes back then, and even so, I still couldn’t tell you what it was about.)

I never got very far into it and I suspect it’s because I made the amateur move of listening to it at 5am during my early morning walks, where the streets were all dark and the houses unlit, the entire neighborhood was sleeping, and I felt like the only person in the world…and those were the mornings when I was NOT listening to an extremely unsettling story. TANIS, on top of that, made me feel like I was having a heart attack every morning. I don’t even know if it was actually that scary, but situationally speaking, it was scary as hell.

Anyway, I was thinking about it today for some reason or another, and it occurred to me…hey! I’d like to have a perfume that reminds me of listening to creepy-ass episodes of TANIS at 5am in the morning, alone in the dark. WOULDN’T THAT BE FUN, RIGHT?!

I’ve narrowed down the elements I would like to see included in this fragrance…what do you think?

Mystery:

-A deep, shadowy base note that’s hard to identify. Perhaps something like vetiver or patchouli, but altered to feel unfamiliar.

-A faint, elusive note that appears and disappears, like wisps of fog in the pre-dawn light.

Tension:

-A sharp, almost metallic middle note that creates a sense of alertness, like adrenaline coursing through your veins.

-A hint of ozone, reminiscent of the charged air before a storm, keeping you on edge.

Unease:

-A slightly sour or bitter undertone, just enough to create discomfort without being overwhelming.

-A cold, damp note like rain on concrete, evoking empty suburban streets.

Low thrumming dread:

-A deep, resonant base note that you feel more than smell, like the vibration of distant machinery.

-Perhaps a very subtle animalic note, hinting at unseen predators.

Prickling, hair-raised sensation:

-A tingling, almost electric top note that creates a physical sensation of alertness.

-Maybe a hint of mint or eucalyptus, but twisted to feel unsettling rather than refreshing.

Empty world atmosphere:

-A hollow, airy quality to the overall scent, suggesting vast empty spaces.

-Faint traces of familiar human scents (skin musk? coffee?) that are more ghostly memories than present realities.

The overall composition could be described as a scent that starts cold and sharp, slowly unfurling into something deeper and more ominous. It should create a feeling of being acutely aware of your surroundings while also sensing that something is not quite right with the world. Also the feeling like you’re the only person awake in a world that’s holding its breath, waiting for something to happen.

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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Late last year, while immersed in research for a project that’s still taking shape in the shadows (more on that when the stars align), I stumbled across Federico Beltrán Masses and found myself instantly bewitched. The fashion elements alone could occupy me for hours. Ancient queens adorned in gilded coronets rise like celestial beings against ink-dark skies, their jewelry defying both time and gravity and possibly some secret third thing. Embellished with jasper, lapis, and beaten gold, their costumes blur the line between royal finery and ceremonial armor. Elsewhere, aristocratic women of the Raj recline on cushions of impossible luxury, their saris rippling with metallic threads that seem to pulse with their own inner electricity, catching lamplight and transforming it into something molten and alive. Figures in European evening dress display crucifixes that hover above alabaster skin like sacred moths drawn to flame, their religious symbolism transforming into something far more ambiguous and enticing.

All these inhabitants move through a universe where glamour operates as both elemental force and ancient sorcery—bending reality around its wearer until even the shadows bow in reverence, transforming everything it touches into shimmering opulence, gilt-edged splendor, and decadent magnificence that drips with honeyed light and velvet darkness in equal measure.

Born in Cuba in 1885 but claiming Spain as his artistic homeland, Beltrán created a world of such concentrated beauty that one might feel compelled to bottle it. What would it smell like? Perhaps a fragrance of moonlight-soaked jasmine and narcotic tuberose mingling with smoldering incense, a whisper of leather from Spanish riding boots, and the faintest hint of champagne and powder from a Venetian carnival. The base notes would be sandalwood and something darker—a touch of that velvet night sky he painted so often, somehow made olfactory.

His women exist in eternal twilight, their red lips whispering clandestine poetry if you leaned in close enough—perhaps the coordinates of a garden where sculptures come alive after midnight, or the true names of stars known only to those who’ve seen them from both sides. Their captivating gaze holds brutal, uncompromising secrets—histories of libertine pleasures and calculated cruelties that would appall, arouse, and inflame polite society in equal measure if spoken aloud. Looking into these eyes feels like I’ve wandered into one of Hammer Horror’s unseen footage reels—the ones rumored to contain scenes too mesmerizing for public release, where the vampire queens and countesses gather in their private salons after the cameras stop rolling, discussing philosophies of eternal beauty while their reflections slowly fade from antique mirrors.

Hollywood fell hard for this vision of nocturnal glamour. Rudolph Valentino became both friend and subject, inviting the artist to California where Charlie Chaplin, William Randolph Hearst, and Joan Crawford joined his constellation of admirers. Of course they did—Beltrán’s paintings feel like film stills from the most glamorous movies never made, where the lighting is always perfect and everyone exists in that precise moment when a cocktail glass shatters in slow motion but the liquid inside remains suspended in midair, capturing the chandelier light in ten thousand prisms while conversation continues around it, uninterrupted by physics or possibility.

The technical brilliance in his work awakens my childhood obsession with treasure chests and jewelry boxes—those glittering, tangled heaps of jewels that promised infinite riches. I’ve spent embarrassing amounts of time examining the precise way he captures gold thread in fabric, the luminous quality of pearls against skin, the perfect gleam of an earring catching candlelight. No wonder he scandalized London in 1929 when his “Salomé” was temporarily removed from exhibition—these paintings spark a hunger that goes beyond mere appreciation, as if beauty this intense might actually be something forbidden.

World War II’s darkening shadow over Europe ultimately obscured Beltrán’s brilliance, leaving him stranded in Paris without his gallery connections as his opulent visions suddenly seemed out of step with grim reality. Though he may not fit neatly into my current project, I’ve carefully filed him away in that mental cabinet where I keep all beautiful things that demand revisiting.  Each image I’ve discovered feels like peering through an enchanted looking glass into a world where champagne never goes flat and jewels never lose their luster, one where night is eternal, beauty is currency, and everyone’s lives are gilded with impossible glamour.

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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Here are some musings that I shared over on Patreon last month, but I had so much fun thinking about it, I thought I might share it here, too…

If you were ever inclined to summon me through olfactory means, forget the perfumes. Set aside the bottles with their crystal stoppers and pretentious names and the same four influencers waving bottles of Fulton and Roark in your face (anyone else notice this lately?) The scents that would draw me across time and space aren’t found in glass vials but in ordinary places hiding extraordinary power—a backyard tree, a garden herb, a lakeside path, a kitchen spice cabinet.

Lime Blossom

Our small lime tree produces blossoms whose fragrance bears no resemblance to the fruit itself. The scent is remarkably elusive—more delicate than jasmine, more ephemeral than honeysuckle, yet in their general fragrant family. It possesses a waxy, honeyed quality without any heaviness, a pearlescent aroma with the faintest sheen of green.

The fragrance never quite resolves itself—one moment offering a metallic brightness, the next dissolving into a gossamer floral sweetness. The blooms are small white stars against green, but their scent has a peculiar effect—you breathe it in and lose a bit of time. Not enough to notice consciously, but when you finally step away, there’s a subtle shift in the world. The angle of shadows has changed imperceptibly, or perhaps it’s the quality of light. Something has altered, but the transition was so gentle you can’t quite place what’s different.

Marjoram

Where lime blossom quietly steals time, fresh marjoram does the opposite—it gifts you time, expanding moments through unexpected memory. One brush against those leaves and suddenly my childhood unfolds before me—that worn, cardboard box of Avon potpourri Christmas ornaments from the attic, dust motes dancing in half-light. Time doesn’t contract but extends, allowing me to linger within recollections I’d forgotten I possessed.

Unlike other culinary herbs, marjoram plays a generous trick. It possesses a warm, slightly piney aroma laced with subtle citrus and an unexpected mustiness that makes no botanical sense. It carries the essence of Christmas in a 1980s suburban home, captured and preserved in an herb that has absolutely no business reminding me of holiday decorations.

What captivates me most is the precision of the association—not Christmas broadly, but specifically those ornaments, that cardboard box, that particular December quality of light in our living room. The scent doesn’t evoke a generic holiday memory but rather a moment so exact and crystalline that it feels like time travel of the most personal kind. It’s not that marjoram smells like Christmas; it’s that marjoram smells exactly like my Christmas, circa 1987.

Cypress Loam

A walking path circles a small lake behind the library in the neighborhood where I grew up. I lived there from ages 8 to 28, knowing every corner of that landscape as only a child-becoming-adult can. On the side where the cypress trees grow, their knobby “knees” breaching the soil, resides a wonderful aroma. Sweet, earthy, damp, with a subtle touch of spice that eluded identification for years.

I left Florida for seven years, convinced I’d never return to the place you’re supposed to leave behind forever. Then life happened—grandparents fell ill, a relationship ended—and at 36, I found myself living just five minutes from my childhood home. The first time I walked that library path again, the cypress loam scent hit me with such force that time compressed and expanded simultaneously. Recently, Yvan sprinkled cinnamon on damp soil for some pest-related issue, and that combination—spice mingling with mineralic soil—recalled exactly those library walks, those years before and after, the place I couldn’t escape.

The scent is earthier than a temple but somehow just as sacred. When sunlight streams through the cypress canopy and the ground releases its secret aromas, a perfect moment emerges where everything feels alive and ancient at once. If Miyazaki’s forest spirits possessed a scent signature, this would be it—that specific mineralic dampness that reveals why ancient cultures believed trees could talk. The cypress loam doesn’t just evoke a location but a timeline—the person I was, the person I became, and the unlikely circular journey that brought me back to where I began.

Cardamom

Unlike the other scents that connect to memory or specific places, my relationship with cardamom stands apart. It’s not entangled with nostalgia or childhood or anyone else but me. It defies categorization—refusing to fit neatly into any olfactory family. While other spices lean decidedly warm (cinnamon being the prime example), cardamom exists in contradictions. Cool and woody one moment, then floral and green the next, with unexpected piney-lemony facets that appear and vanish like apparitions.

My attraction to cardamom reminds me of what occult scholar Pam Grossman says about witches: “Daughters, mothers, queens, virgins, wives, et al. derive meaning from their relation to another person. Witches, on the other hand, have power on their own terms.” Where my other beloved scents derive meaning through their connection to my past or to places I’ve known, cardamom demands nothing but direct experience. My love for it isn’t mediated through memory or association—it exists purely in the present moment, sovereign and self-contained.

I find myself in the kitchen, mortar and pestle in hand, inhaling deeply over freshly ground pods like some sort of spice pervert. When perfumers attempt to capture cardamom, they typically emphasize its warmth, yet miss its strange, alien coolness—that medicinal edge that renders it so utterly fascinating. I’ve sought perfumes solely for their cardamom notes, but nothing quite captures its peculiar magic. It exists in its own parallel universe, following none of the established rules—autonomous and complete, requiring no validation beyond its own existence.

So there they are—the four scents that would instantly draw me into your summoning circle. What scents would I need to conjure you? I would be delighted to know which non-bottled aromas would call your spirit across the veil.

The photo is actually a lemon blossom from our lemon tree, but details, details.

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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Hello, dear readers of Unquiet Things!

I wanted to take a moment to clear up something that’s come to my attention recently. A thoughtful commenter clicked the “Subscribe” button here on the blog and wondered if that was the same as subscribing to my newsletter, Trinkets & Treasures.

They are completely different things!

When you click the “Subscribe” button on this site, you’ll receive notifications whenever I publish a new post here on Unquiet Things. It’s a great way to make sure you never miss a blog update about all the dark delights I explore here. Which is nice! But my newsletter is its own beast entirely.

Unquiet Things vs. Trinkets & Treasures: A Tale of Two Entirely Different Things

Unquiet Things serves as my little gallery/presentation space in this weird corner of the internet – it’s where I share my favorite gothic romance cover artists, avant-garden runway shows, or perfume reviews. Or all the other stuff I write about! While I don’t take it overly seriously, it’s a space very dear to my heart.

Trinkets & Treasures, on the other hand, is like stopping by my house for a cup of tea and random chatter. It’s where I share:

• Whatever books or music have grabbed me lately
• My current skincare/perfume/clothing obsessions
• That recipe I can’t shut up about
• Sometimes even my strange dreams or midnight revelations!

A Gentle Disclaimer

If you enjoy what I share here but haven’t subscribed to Trinkets & Treasures, you’re experiencing only one side of my creative world. But I also want to be clear: if you’re here for my blog posts about weird art and spooky stuff, please know that the newsletter is a completely different vibe. Don’t sign up expecting more of the same, only to feel bamboozled when you receive a recipe for sourdough biscuits and a link to my favorite Japanese giallo jazz fusion band of the moment. I’m sparing us both the inevitable unsubscribe, which would absolutely, 100% hurt my feelings.

Where to Find This Mysterious Newsletter

To subscribe to Trinkets & Treasures, you’ll need to visit its dedicated page, which is completely separate from this blog. You can find the link to Trinkets & Treasures in the menu that runs across the top of the page – clicking it will take you to a Flodesk signup page. See image above to help you find it! Or just click any of the links that I’ve peppered throughout this blog post.

If you’re curious about what you’ve been missing, here are a few past issues to give you a taste:

Trinkets & Treasures Volume 38  New music, nostalgic tee shirts, and a newly commissioned pendant
Trinkets & Treasures Volume 37  Super tasty sourdough biscuits and another good tee shirt 
Trinkets & Treasures Volume 36 The best, most cozy-chic lounge set and sheet pan grilled cheese sammies

And if you’re looking to subscribe to blog updates, you’ll find that option in the email field on the right-hand side of the page (see image above.) If you’re curious about the blog post featured in these screen caps, you can find it here: Nothing Weird Here: Max Frey’s Perfectly Normal Sea Creatures.

A Brief Note About Support

My blog and newsletter are free and will never be behind a paywall. This site is now and will always be ad-free because honestly, I don’t want a bunch of ads junking things up and making the site look all garbagey. What I am saying is: this site makes no money. I work full time in my very boring, non-writing job, and I spend my spare moments writing for the blog and the books I have published (which make very little money, and I definitely could not live off of them.)

If you’ve ever appreciated, thrilled to, resonated with, or found useful anything I have ever written, I do have a Kofi link if you’re feeling generous, and if you like my writings on perfume, you can certainly support me through my Midnight Stinks Patreon.

If you’d like to show your support in other ways, comments and shares always make my heart soar (as opposed to unsubscribing, which makes my heart SORE!)

And of course, if you’re already subscribed to both this blog and my newsletter- you’re a true friend indeed! Thanks for hanging out with me in both my public gallery and my more casual space. Thanks as always for being here, however you choose to connect with this frou-frou fantôme and weaver of the weird.

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The Forest Brims Over by Maru Ayase caught my eye first with its cover, and then pulled me in with its premise – a woman transforms herself into a forest after being endlessly mined for material by her novelist husband. Through multiple perspectives (everyone except our forest-woman, interestingly, until the very end), we see how her husband used their relationship as fodder for his books, molding her into a fictional version who existed purely for male pleasure. Like much Japanese literature I’ve read, the story’s power lies in what’s left unsaid, letting the metaphor of transformation speak louder than any explicit commentary – at least until the final chapter, which shifts into something more direct. There’s something deeply satisfying about the image of choosing to become nature rather than remain someone’s muse – it’s like those fantasies of disappearing into the woods to become local folklore made literal. Though the cover drew me in more than the concept initially, that resonance has stayed with me.

Witchcraft for Wayward Girls by Grady Hendrix In 1970, at the Wellwood Home in Florida, pregnant teenage girls are hidden away, their stories silenced, their futures predetermined. Fern arrives scared and alone, joining other girls who’ve been cast aside by a world that refuses to see them. This book broke my heart wide open. When Hagar, the cook, (one of the most empathetic–but also most grumpy and put upon– adult characters in this book) snaps at a male character that ‘nobody sees these girls,’ I felt something fundamental shatter inside me.” Her words captured the profound violence resulting from the denial of their humanity—how they are punished for circumstances often beyond their control and stripped of every choice The story follows Fern and the other girls as they discover a form of power through witchcraft—a metaphorical and literal reclamation of agency in a system designed to erase them. It’s a narrative about survival, friendship, and the quiet, fierce magic of girls who refuse to be forgotten. I finished the book in tears, overwhelmed by its power. Some stories punch you in the gut. This one reaches into your chest and rearranges your entire heart. I will say the witchcraft aspects feel somewhat uneven—more a tool of a specific character’s agenda than a fully realized magical system. And a serious content warning: the birthing scenes are graphic, almost gratuitously so. It’s as if Hendrix is overcompensating, trying so hard to authentically tell a story he’s not sure he has the right to tell that he pushes the visceral details to their absolute limit.

Hailey Piper’s A Game In Yellow seems a lot like Robert W. Chambers erotic fanfic to me- though I’ll admit I haven’t read the source material, which made it tricky to tell what’s creative reimagining and what’s original lore. At the center of the story are Carmen and Blanca, a young couple caught in that intense, everything-feels-life-or-death phase of a relationship. Carmen becomes fixated on what she sees as their sexual problems – though I was never sure if these issues were real or just in her head. The setup has potential – an underground drug den where they meet the enigmatic Smoke, who deals out passages from a cursed play. Read just enough without going mad, and apparently you get this survivor’s euphoria that gets you super horny. But while these elements hint at cosmic dread, they never quite coalesce into something truly unsettling. I found myself more drawn to the supernatural elements – the reality-warping effects of the play, the mysterious Smoke, the hints of something larger lurking at the edges of reality – but even these took too long to really manifest. I found myself disconnected from pretty much everything about Carmen and Blanca’s relationship. Carmen’s desperate pursuit of… something… left me baffled – I couldn’t grasp what was driving her or why everything felt so urgent. Maybe it’s that particular brand of twenty-something relationship intensity that I just can’t relate to anymore. And while I have no judgment about how other people choose to explore intimacy and power dynamics, the sexual content here felt needlessly complicated and fraught. It didn’t help that Blanca remains this oddly distant figure throughout the story, making it even harder to understand what exactly Carmen was so worked up about. The ending finally delivers the cosmic horror I was waiting for, but getting there means wading through relationship drama and sexual tension that I never cared about. I wanted more weird horror and less of everything else. Publish date August 2025; ARC supplied by NetGalley

Gothictown by Emily Carpenter reminded me of those creepy small-town horror novels by John Saul I devoured in the 80s, which has me thinking about how horror changes when we center different perspectives. Where those stories followed men who seemed to exist outside the domestic sphere of daily life, Gothictown’s Billie is firmly grounded in the minutiae of family life – running a restaurant, dealing with a six-year-old, managing a marriage. When she uproots her family from New York to a suspiciously cheap mansion in Georgia, we’re tied to her daily rhythms even as the horror creeps in. It’s different reading this at 48 than reading Saul at 11 – the domestic details that make Billie’s world feel real also somehow dilute the eeriness (I hate writing this; it feels like I am dismissing domestic labor and family work…but that was my honest thought as I was having it.) The book doesn’t help itself by revealing too much too early. We know the town’s secrets, and we’re left to watch Billie stumble toward revelations we’ve already pieced together.

Nothing Ever Happens Here by Seraphina Nova Glass I am always interested in a new story from Seraphina Nova Glass, and this may be my favorite yet. A quintessential winter mystery set in northern Minnesota, the book captures the isolation and quiet tension of a snow-covered small town. Shelby Dawson is trying to rebuild her life after a brutal attack, but when threatening notes start appearing on her windshield, her fragile sense of safety shatters completely. At the Oleander assisted living facility, a group of seniors becomes unexpectedly central to her story. Florence leads the charge, transforming local gossip into a viral podcast investigation. Their involvement isn’t just comic relief—it’s a really neat exploration of how marginal voices can drive a narrative, as these seniors bring collective wisdom, stubborn determination, and an outsider’s perspective to Shelby’s desperate situation. The multiple perspectives could have felt disjointed, but Glass weaves them together through a shared sense of uncertainty. Mackenzie’s mysterious missing husband, Shelby’s ongoing threat, and the seniors’ investigation create a web of tension that keeps things moving along. Set against the cold, isolating backdrop of Minnesota, the story explores how community—in all its messy, imperfect forms—can be a lifeline. The bad guy is almost comically predictable, but there’s something oddly satisfying about that predictability—it’s part of the book’s cozy, hygge-like charm. I found myself completely caught up in the ride.

The Bachelorette Party by Camilla Sten I keep reading Camilla Sten’s books even though they never quite hit the mark for me. After picking up The Lost Village (which I’d hoped would channel the unsettling vibes of YellowBrickRoad), I’ve found myself in a pattern of reading her work with diminishing returns. This one lands somewhere in the middle – a locked-room mystery on a remote Swedish island where, a decade ago, four friends vanished without a trace. Now there is a new group arriving for a bachelorette party, including a mysteriously disgraced true crime podcaster hoping to solve the original disappearance. All the ingredients for something interesting and fun and tense are there, but like Sten’s other books, the execution just doesn’t deliver–in fact, I find it falls pretty flat. The characters never quite come alive, the plot twists veer into absurd soap opera territory, and by the time we get to the dramatic reveal, I found myself more puzzled at the predictability than shocked at the surprise. Yet somehow, I know I’ll probably pick up whatever she writes next, banking on the promise of something I’m probably projecting onto these books but which I will never find in their pages. Publish date June 2025; ARC supplied by NetGalley

The Ghostwriter by Julie Clark is, oddly enough, the second book about a ghostwriter I’ve read lately. This one’s definitely better than the last, though that’s not saying much. It follows Olivia, a ghostwriter who’s carefully kept her connection to Vincent Taylor under wraps – after all, who wants to advertise that their father is a renowned horror novelist who might have killed his siblings fifty years ago? But when she finds herself broke and desperate for work, she ends up ghostwriting the memoir where he’s finally promising to tell the truth about that night. The bones of a good story are there, but I kept getting hung up on things that didn’t quite work – like how Olivia’s mother is just… completely absent from her life with barely any explanation, or how we’re supposed to believe in these deep relationships between characters who’ve been lying to each other from day one. Publish date June 2025; ARC supplied by NetGalley

Hungerstone by Kat Dunn Do we really need another Carmilla retelling/reimagining? Absolutely. Of course we do. Kat Dunn’s Hungerstone reimagines the classic vampire narrative through Lenore’s eyes, transforming a familiar story into something entirely her own. Set against the violent backdrop of the industrial revolution, the novel follows Lenore, trapped in a loveless marriage and a suffocating social system, whose world shifts with the arrival of the mysterious Carmilla. The story is Lenore’s through and through—her hunger, her awakening, her rage. While some might complain about the lack of extensive backstory for Carmilla, that misses the point entirely. Carmilla is a catalyst, a spark that ignites Lenore’s transformation. The novel burns with a slow, deliberate intensity, building to a climax that leaves you wishing a certain character had met an even more devastating end. Dunn crafts a narrative that is part gothic horror, part feminist manifesto, exploring desire, oppression, and a woman’s monstrous potential.

Mayra by Nicky Gonzalez tracks the reunion of Ingrid and Mayra, childhood best friends whose connection has long since dissolved. When Mayra unexpectedly invites Ingrid to a secluded house in the Florida Everglades, what begins as a potential rekindling quickly transforms into something far more unsettling. The story weaves between past and present, revealing the intricate, often fraught landscape of their friendship—a relationship that was never comfortable, which in fact, seemed awfully fraught, tenuous, and one-sided, with Ingrid never quite knowing where she stood with Mayra. Ingrid’s imagination drives the narrative, making her an unreliable yet captivating guide through the novel’s increasingly strange terrain. Her internal world is so big, so ridiculous, that even when the plot threatens to unravel, she remains compelling. The house itself becomes a character—isolated, labyrinthine, as mercurial as the swamp surrounding it—mirroring the unpredictable dynamics between Ingrid and Mayra. While the book occasionally feels like it’s losing its way, particularly towards the end, there’s an undeniable magnetic pull to the story that keeps you turning pages, curious about what bizarre turn might come next. Publish date June 2025; ARC supplied by NetGalley

Heartwood by Amity Gaige follows Valerie Gillis, a nurse who goes missing while hiking the Appalachian Trail in Maine. The story unfolds through multiple perspectives, primarily focusing on Valerie’s struggle to survive in the wilderness, Beverly Miller’s search efforts as a game warden, and Lena, a retirement home resident whose connection to the story feels tenuous. Valerie writes fragmented letters to her mother, revealing her physical and emotional journey as she tries to stay alive in the Maine woods. While Lena’s narrative initially seems disconnected and somewhat frustrating, her perspective offers an intriguing outsider’s view that subtly echoes the book’s underlying themes of absence and maternal connection. Beverly leads the ground search, wrestling with her own internal conflicts, while Lena contributes an unexpected layer to the investigation. The book moves between Valerie’s survival, the search efforts, and the intricate backgrounds of the characters, exploring loss, resilience, and the complex bonds between mothers and daughters.

The Bass Rock by Evie Wyld is a haunting exploration of women’s experiences across centuries; the story follows three women linked by a Scottish coastal house and the enduring weight of male violence. Sarah flees accusations of witchcraft in the 1700s, Ruth navigates a less-than-ideal post-war marriage, and Viv uncovers family secrets while mourning her father. Evie Wyld weaves these narratives together with a raw, unflinching intensity that makes the novel both deeply painful and impossible to look away from. I love how place becomes more than a backdrop, becoming a silent keeper of memory, a geological record of human struggle—the Bass Rock itself feels almost sentient, watching these women’s stories unfold across time. There’s a profound ache in narratives that are this bleak and uncompromising, that insist on bearing witness. It’s weird to say you “enjoy” a story like this, which is less a traditional story and more an examination of how women survive, but I found much about this book to love, too.

Heads Will Roll by Josh Winning A summer camp for cancelled celebrities turns into a bloodbath in Heads Will Roll. Willow, a sitcom star who tweeted herself into infamy, finds herself among a group of strangers with their own secrets at Camp Castaway – a no-phones, no-real-names retreat where people go to escape their public disasters. What starts as a chance to reset quickly becomes a nightmare when campers start dying in increasingly gruesome ways, pursued by a local legend known as Knock Knock Nancy. It’s pure horror movie nonsense: mindless fun with plenty of gore, jump scares, and the kind of campy horror that feels like a throwback to classic slasher films. It’s not trying to be high art, just an entertaining escape.

The Hitchcock Hotel Stephanie Wrobel A Hitchcock-obsessed hotel owner invites his five college friends to a themed reunion weekend, each harboring deep-seated secrets and old grudges. Alfred Smettle’s meticulously planned gathering at his Victorian hotel—complete with movie screenings, props, and an ominous aviary of crows—quickly becomes a pressure cooker of long-buried tensions and potential revenge. The twist was, frankly, disappointingly dumb.

This Might Hurt by Stephanie Wrobel A story weaving multiple perspectives about a cult-like retreat on a remote Maine island, This Might Hurt follows sisters Natalie and Kit as they navigate a world of psychological manipulation and hidden secrets. Natalie receives a threatening email from Wisewood, the isolated self-improvement center where Kit has been living for six months, cut off from the outside world. The threat implies Natalie has a secret that could destroy her relationship with Kit forever, pushing her to investigate the mysterious retreat. Set on a remote Maine island, Wisewood promises to help its members become their “Maximized Selves” through intense psychological conditioning that quickly reveals itself as something far more sinister. The cult’s methods are both fascinating and horrifying—a system designed to strip away individual identity under the guise of conquering personal fears. A third perspective adds depth to the narrative, slowly unraveling a haunting backstory that connects to the sisters’ present-day struggle. At its core, the book is less about the cult itself and more about the complex dynamics between sisters, childhood trauma, and the various ways people try to escape their past, whether it’s denial, magical thinking, or radical reinvention.

The Universe in Verse: 15 Portals to Wonder through Science & Poetry by Maria Popova The Universe in Verse is the kind of book that makes you want to call someone you love and read passages out loud, just to share how incredible it is to be alive. Maria Popova explores scientific wonders not as cold, distant facts, but as living, breathing stories that connect us to the vast, mysterious universe we inhabit. She pairs scientific discoveries with poetry in a way that feels like watching two old friends finally meet—each illuminating the other’s beauty. Reading this, I found myself stopping constantly, struck by how a poem about mushrooms or a description of dark matter could suddenly make me feel both impossibly small and unimaginably significant. It’s a book that doesn’t just inform you, but reminds you to look at the world with something close to reverence—to see the magic in a mathematical equation, the resilience in a tiny flower, the wild possibility in every moment of existence.

Horrorstör by Grady Hendrix Before Grady Hendrix became a horror darling, he wrote Horrorstör, a novel that feels very much like a writer finding his footing. Amy’s just another retail drone at Orsk, the IKEA knockoff that’s slowly crushing her soul, when things get seriously weird. What starts as random store vandalism turns into a nightmare that proves working retail might actually be hell—literally. The book’s catalog-style design is clever, and the early stages of supernatural weirdness are genuinely unsettling. But for all its promise, the story feels like exactly what it is—a first novel. The characters never quite escape being types, and the horror elements become increasingly scattered as the night wears on. It’s an interesting experiment that hints at the brilliance and imagination of Hendrix’s later work, but remains more interesting in concept than in delivery. As a huge Grady Hendrix fan, it pains me to write those words, but I suspect that’s why I put off reading this book for so long.

The Last One at the Wedding by Jason Rekulak Frank Szatowski gets the call he’s been waiting for—his daughter Maggie inviting him to her wedding after three years of silence. What should be a moment of hope quickly turns weird at a billionaire’s estate where Maggie’s marrying into a family that feels completely off-kilter. Frank is that guy who means well but manages to make everything awkward, stumbling through interactions with a mix of desperation and social ineptitude that’s painful to witness. He’s so determined to reconnect with Maggie that he misses—or refuses to see—how many red flags are waving around her new family. The novel wants to be a tense family thriller, but gets bogged down by Frank’s relentless inner monologue that’s more exhausting than intriguing. It’s like watching a well-intentioned but utterly clueless person bumble through a situation that’s clearly going sideways, and you just want to look away—but for some reason, you can’t. Imagining that Frank may have been based on a real person honestly makes me die inside a little bit (ok a lot, actually.)

Bloom by Delilah S. Dawson A sapphic horror that starts at a farmers’ market, Bloom completely captured me with its delicate, meticulously crafted world. Ash’s little booth—with its handmade soaps, perfectly arranged honey jars, and lush plants—felt like something I’d stop at every Saturday, totally charmed. There’s something magical about these small-town cottage industry operations, and Dawson nails that intimate, almost ritualistic feeling of local market culture. Rosemary, an assistant professor fresh from a breakup, becomes completely entangled with Ash. Her obsession builds slowly, and I found myself both fascinated and horrified by how the book plays with desire—the way attraction can make you ignore every single red flag waving right in front of your face. The horror elements aren’t jump-scare scary. They’re the kind of unsettling that makes you go, “Wait, what?” followed by a genuine “Holy shit.” I read a lot of horror, so I’m not easily surprised, but this book went places I absolutely did not expect, in a sort of “Wow, she really went there.” kind of way. Rosemary’s inner dialogue was my biggest struggle. It seemed as if it were trying for poetic and intense, but landed in this strange space between feeling performative, bordering on some real “My inner goddess is doing the dance of the seven veils” bananas-baloney-bullshit ala 50 Shades Of Grey. That ending, though! Kudos to you, Delilah Dawson.

The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson The Argonauts is like trying to understand a conversation happening in the next room if the room was underwater and the speakers were having a dialogue in a language you don’t know, and then you realized they were actually talking to themselves. This profound disorientation is exactly how Maggie Nelson weaves together musings on Barthes’ idea of love as a constant renewal, Judith Butler’s theories of gender performativity, and her own intimate experiences of partnering with Harry Dodge and becoming a parent. I didn’t recognize half the references, and there were moments when the academic language felt like an impenetrable wall. And yet. Nelson captures something true about the raw, uneven texture of human experience—the way love transforms us, how we struggle to articulate our most intimate experiences. She writes about pregnancy, partnership, and queer family-making with an honesty that cuts through academic jargon. I’m not sure I fully understood everything, but I felt like I was witnessing something important—a story that kept slipping between my fingers every time I thought I’d grabbed hold of it. What does it mean to love someone? To become a parent? To exist outside traditional stories? Nelson explores these questions by diving into everything from avant-garde film theory to psychoanalytic texts, scattering esoteric philosophical breadcrumbs that make you feel simultaneously incredibly brilliant and profoundly stupid. Something about the Argonauts and replacing ship planks, something about becoming—I’m not entirely sure I understood it, but it felt like she was asking: Who are we when we change? When we love? When we exist in ways that challenge how others see us? She doesn’t give you neat answers. Just more questions, more uncertainty.

Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times by Katherine May is the kind of book that feels like a conversation with a friend who’s trying to make sense of life’s difficult moments, albeit a friend with a seriously cushioned life plan. Katherine May explores “wintering” through experiences that are decidedly not available to most—cold water swimming in picturesque locations, watching the aurora borealis, investigating dormice hibernation between trips to Iceland. She weaves together personal stories of her husband’s illness, her son’s school challenges, and her own medical issues, connecting these moments to broader reflections on nature’s cycles with a kind of privileged introspection. May’s journey winds through homeschooling, literary references to C.S. Lewis and Sylvia Plath, and explorations of how various creatures and cultures endure difficult times. I kept wondering what this book would look like if written by someone who can’t simply step away from work, who doesn’t have the luxury of metaphorical (or literal) winter retreats. Her perspective is undeniably comfortable, with chapters about bathing in Icelandic hot springs and walking through bare winter woodlands. Yet there’s still something compelling about her core message: that we all need times of rest, of pulling back, of allowing ourselves to be less than productive. It’s a book that compelled me to ponder how I might adapt its sentiments to my own low cycles and cold seasons, even as I recognized my own wintering might be of the bargain bin variety. And yet, I really loved the book—May’s writing is beautiful, her ideas profound, her turns of phrase incredibly moving. I struggled to reconcile my appreciation for her insights with the recognition that this approach to healing is simply not accessible to most people.

Dearest by Jacquie Walters Flora’s husband is deployed, leaving her alone with her newborn daughter in a quiet, empty house. Exhausted and isolated, she begins experiencing strange occurrences—voices in the baby monitor, glimpses of something just out of sight, her childhood imaginary friend reappearing. When her estranged mother suddenly shows up after years of silence, Flora believes her salvation has arrived. But something isn’t right. The atmosphere grows more unsettling, with an increasing sense that something fundamental is off. Midway through, a revelation drops that made me actually gasp out loud—the kind of twist that completely reorganizes everything you’ve been reading. Jacquie Walters (who incidentally has the same name as my stepmother who died a few years ago, so this was super weird to see in my “new for you!” book lists) creates a suffocating exploration of one woman’s most vulnerable moment, where motherhood, memory, and …something darker… intersect.

Someone in the Attic by Andrea Mara As the story opens, Anya (who seems like a real piece of work) is murdered in her own home while in the tub enjoying a glass of wine, after a masked figure drops from the attic—setting off a chain of events that pulls in her old school friend Julia, newly returned to Ireland from San Diego. Julia then discovers a TikTok video showing an intruder in her own house, a nightmare scenario made more chilling by her young son Luca’s repeated warnings about someone watching him at night. As someone who lives and breathes horror, I would have taken those warnings seriously from the first moment…unlike these characters who seem frustratingly oblivious to the danger. The novel taps into a web of past connections, mysterious neighbors, and the uneasy feeling of a supposedly secure gated community. While the premise is dread-inducing (an ex broke into my home once, and I know how it feels to have the sanctity of your safe space violated), the story gets tangled in multiple subplots and red herrings that blunt its initial terror. What starts as a sharp exploration of domestic fear slowly loses its edge, ending with a resolution that feels more forced than frightening.

Sick Houses: Haunted Homes and the Architecture of Dread by Leila Taylor was a delightful rabbit hole for anyone fascinated by creepy architecture and the psychology behind our fear of certain spaces. Taylor takes us through everything from real-life haunts like the Winchester Mystery House to the gothic Victorian mansions of cinema, exploring why these places make our skin crawl. I particularly loved her examination of the “witch house” and how aging women living alone somehow became symbols of dread in our collective imagination. The book has that perfect encyclopedic quality – like chatting with a fellow horror enthusiast who’s connecting dots you never considered before. While sometimes feeling like a collection of thoughtful essays rather than a cohesive whole, Taylor’s scholarly approach paired with her genuine enthusiasm for horror references both familiar and obscure makes this a fascinating journey for anyone interested in the psychological underpinnings of haunted houses.

Immaculate Conception by Ling Ling Huang wowowow – this book is an exhilarating, terrifying examination of art and agency and trauma and what is real and who is real and it absolutely consumed me. It’s a deeply intense narrative about two artists, Enka and Mathilde, whose friendship spirals into an extraordinary meditation on creativity, obsession, and the boundaries between people. Huang is doing something so original and provocative that I’m not sure any other contemporary writer is exploring these territories with such depth and insight. This is the kind of novel that will set your brain on fire. If you loved Natural Beauty and were eagerly anticipating Huang’s next move, this novel will exceed every expectation. What makes the book truly remarkable is how Huang constructs its narrative. The setup is so precisely calibrated, circling subtly around profound ideas before delivering them with seamless grace. At its core, the novel wrestles with an extraordinary paradox: despite an almost impossible intimacy with the characters’ inner worlds, there remains something fundamentally unknowable about human nature. Enka emerges as a particularly complex force—a character who seems to be perpetually destroying the connections around her, embodying a raw exploration of art, agency, love, and loss. The book becomes a profound meditation on the boundaries between creation and destruction, between knowing someone and the ineffable mystery of human experience. Publish date May 2025; ARC supplied by NetGalley

Julie Chan Is Dead by Liann Zhang When supermarket cashier Julie discovers her estranged influencer twin sister Chloe dead, she impulsively steps into her glamorous life – only to discover it’s not nearly as picture-perfect as the filtered Instagram posts suggest. I loved the bitchy, snarky voice of Julie throughout – her outsider perspective on influencer culture is both hilarious and cutting as she navigates Chloe’s superficial friendships and brand deals. The tension builds when Julie joins a retreat with Chloe’s fellow influencers on a secluded island, where it becomes increasingly clear that someone might know her secret – or worse, had something to do with Chloe’s death. The second half kicks the story up into the kind of weird supernatural/magical realist territory that I really appreciated. While I didn’t necessarily connect with any of the characters (they’re all pretty terrible people), the absurdity of influencer culture and the emptiness behind their carefully curated personas made for an entertaining read with some genuinely funny moments.  Publish date April 2025; ARC supplied by NetGalley

Saltwater by Katy Hays I had high hopes for Saltwater, and the premise was certainly interesting – the suspicious death of Sarah Lingate in Capri and her family’s annual return to the scene, only to find her necklace mysteriously reappear 30 years later. The story initially appears to be following Lorna, a family assistant who accompanies the Lingates to their annual Capri trip. We’re led to believe she’s helping Helen Lingate escape her controlling family, but then Helen becomes more central to the narrative. But nothing is really what it seems, and by the end, I wasn’t quite sure whose story it was meant to be. This narrative misdirection could have been intriguing, but the twists that followed were wildly implausible and stupidly unbelievable. I was intrigued enough to keep reading so I could find out what they were, and then mad at myself and the author once they were revealed. Capri makes for an interesting setting – steep cliffs, luxury villas, and the isolation of island life all contribute to the mystery. The Lingates themselves are a properly toxic bunch, which helps maintain interest even as the plot becomes increasingly far-fetched. I kept turning pages to see what happened, drawn into the mystery despite my growing skepticism. By the time the final twists arrived, I felt more frustrated than satisfied with where the story had gone. Without spoiling anything, the revelations require such stretches of logic that they undermined what could have been a fantastic family mystery.

Television for Women by Danit Brown wasn’t the supernatural tale I was hoping for (not sure where I even got that idea from) but rather a stark portrait of postpartum struggles. Estie is an absolute mess – and I mean a MESS. I have never encountered in all my years of reading a character who made such perplexingly asinine decisions. She’s uncertain about her pregnancy, her marriage to a newly unemployed professor, and then motherhood itself. To be fair, her husband Owen got fired because he lied about his degree, so he’s a bit of a self-pitying shithead himself. Not exactly the rock you’d want beside you when bringing new life into the world. There’s also a fair bit of generational trauma at play – Estie’s mother suffered similarly and was extremely depressed many years after her children were born. You can see Estie wrestling with the fear of repeating her mother’s patterns, crying in the bathroom while her daughter stands outside wondering if she’s okay. Her best friend Alice has gone silent since learning about the baby, which I found confusing since Estie seems to have many fond memories of their friendship. But from what we see in the story, Alice doesn’t seem to care much about Estie at all, making me wonder if their connection was largely one-sided or if Estie overinflated its importance. The book’s unflinching look at the realities of early motherhood – the endless dirty laundry, sleep deprivation, and identity crisis – felt brutally honest. Estie’s relationship with her cat Herbert was more developed than her connection with her baby for much of the story, which made the cat’s fate particularly disturbing. I more or less enjoyed this, but found myself frequently exasperated by Estie’s relentless self-centeredness. While I can’t speak to the accuracy of the postpartum depression portrayal (being happily child-free myself), I found myself repeatedly wondering what on earth this woman was thinking. Publish date June 2025; ARC supplied by NetGalley

The Dream Hotel by Leila Lalami presents a chilling near-future where dream surveillance technology can detain people for crimes they haven’t yet committed. Sara Hussein, a mother of infant twins, finds herself detained at LAX after returning from a conference when her Dreamsaver device flags her as a threat to her husband based on her dreams. What’s supposed to be a 21-day observation becomes months of detention in a facility where rules constantly change and every infraction extends her stay. I enjoyed the book’s exploration of dream analysis and surveillance technology – these themes are always fascinating to me. Sara’s struggle against this dehumanizing system while desperately missing her family created a compelling narrative throughout the story. The introduction of the second POV character (I think her name was Julie?) wasn’t as well-integrated. She appears initially as a new inmate but gets released suspiciously early. Later, we discover she was gathering data on the inmates while undercover, with some connection to the technology company. We get a few chapters from her privileged perspective, hosting dinners and such, but then this thread fades away. The contrast between her freedom and Sara’s confinement could have offered more insight if their stories had remained more connected. I found the premise incredibly fascinating and Sara’s character well-developed – her frustration and determination felt authentic as she navigates this Kafkaesque nightmare while missing her husband and infant children. The dream analysis technology felt disturbingly plausible, which made the story all the more effective.

King Sorrow by Joe Hill I don’t know if I’m as enamored with Joe Hill’s writing as I was a decade ago; I think (and I know this is unfair to say) it’s because he’s sounding more and more like his father. I know Joe Hill is not that much older than me, but somehow, his characters and dialogue all have a “How do you do, fellow kids?” energy that had me cringing out of my skin in certain scenes. King Sorrow follows Arthur Oakes and his friends, Donna, Van, Allie, Collin, and Gwen, at Rackham College in Maine as they summon a dragon (just a casual, totally logical plan) to free Arthur from local drug dealers forcing him to steal rare books. At Colin grandfather’s estatewhere the friends often gather, surrounded by the old man’s extensive occult collection, they call forth King Sorrow to do their bidding- and of course, deals with dragons being what they are it becomes an uncontrollable nightmare. The narrative feels like several stories in one, which might explain the nearly 900-page length. I didn’t have any problem with the length in theory, but found myself falling in and out of the story as it shifted between different time periods and character perspectives. For all its supernatural elements, the book is ultimately about the weight of terrible choices and how they ripple through decades of these friends’ lives. Despite my frustrations with the dialogue and structure, I still cried like a baby at several points. Hill’s true gift is creating characters you care deeply for and friendships that feel genuine and earned. No matter how dorky their language/exchanges sometimes became, I loved these characters and felt invested in their struggles with guilt, responsibility, and the consequences of their choices. Publish date October 2025; ARC supplied by NetGalley

Eat the Ones You Love by Sarah Maria Griffin Shell is 32 and freshly derailed from her bland, planned life—broken engagement, lost job, and now living back in her childhood bedroom in her hometown, despite being surrounded by family, feeling increasingly untethered. When she lands a job at a flower shop in the Woodbine Crown Mall, it feels like a last-ditch attempt to reclaim some sense of direction. Neve, the shop’s owner, offers her a chance to restart, but something else is watching—Baby, a sentient orchid with intentions that go way beyond photosynthesis. Sarah Maria Griffin’s novel moves with a quiet empathy, tracking the strange ecosystem of a dying mall and the workers finding unexpected connections. The growing tension between Shell and Neve provides a tender undercurrent to the story, even as Baby’s hungry consciousness threatens to consume everything around it. Despite the horror threading through its pages, the novel finds something deeply human in its exploration of survival and desire. A wolf in orchid’s clothing, indeed.

Jennifer Higgie’s The Other Side: A Journey into Women, Art and the Spirit World is absolutely brimming with information and insight about women artists connected to spiritualism and the occult. I found myself constantly pausing to look up artworks, exhibitions, and quotes mentioned throughout – from familiar figures like Hildegard of Bingen and Hilma af Klint to fascinating spiritualist artists I’d never encountered before. The memoir elements woven throughout added so much to my reading experience, despite some reviewers apparently hating this approach. When a book’s subject fascinates me this much, I naturally want to know about the person behind the words! Higgie’s personal reflections give the historical accounts a warmth and resonance that purely academic writing would miss. What made this book particularly special for me was experiencing so many “literary synchronicities” while reading – those magical moments when Higgie’s explorations seemed to be in direct conversation with other texts I’ve been thinking about or concepts I’ve been mulling over. As for the complaints about not enough images – this was never marketed as an art book in the first place, so I don’t understand that criticism at all. The rich descriptions and historical context Higgie provides created vivid mental images that sent me on numerous research rabbit holes, which is exactly what I want from this kind of book.

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A free read for everyone on my Patreon today: The April Marinade This month, I’ve been communing with bottles that sigh, weep, and dream in shades of green—feral greens that reclaim abandoned places, that seep through sidewalk cracks, between forgotten stones. Green as both color and voracity—ancient, insatiable, gloriously indifferent to human concerns. Beneath concrete and compromise, the truth emerges: we’re all still crawling with green.

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One Day Jasmine Tea I didn’t expect to fall in love with a green tea scent in the year 2025, but I think that is what just happened. I’ve spent years avoiding green tea fragrances, having mentally filed them away with air fresheners and fancy dish soap, the sanitized accord of late-90s department store counters or the chemical approximation haunting hotel lobbies. One Day Jasmine Tea opens with that unmistakable aroma of a jasmine green tea steeped just a minute too long. There’s an emotional precipice there— an elegant pleasure on the verge of becoming bitter, bleak, and brooding on the tongue. But…not quite.

This is the scent of Uncle Iroh’s teashop after hours, the quiet moments when he sits alone, brewing one final cup while dust motes drift through evening light. The jasmine here isn’t some overly sweet and sultry floral but a stubborn, complex presence that blooms with the same quiet certainty as Iroh’s wisdom. “The flower that blooms in adversity is the most rare and beautiful of all,” he might murmur, though I think that’s actually from Mulan. There’s a transparency to the composition that cuts through any lingering cloying or animalic concerns – a herbaceous clarity like the mind clearing before a moment of mediation. Something earthen anchors the lightness, the way roots hold soil against rain, preventing erosion without calling attention to their essential work. Between these elements weaves an oolong note, a citrusy orchid thread that connects high and low like the lightning Iroh teaches Zuko to redirect – neither diminishing nor amplifying the current, simply guiding it to where it needs to go.

The fragrance stays steadfast, refusing sentimentality and yet somehow feels like an embrace that contains multitudes. It carries Iroh’s complexity—grief for his son, hope for his nephew, and the particular wisdom that comes only after you’ve lost everything and rebuilt from scratch. It manages to embody everything that made Uncle Iroh a steadying hand on the tiller, regardless of whether you first met him as a child or discovered him as an adult seeking comfort in animated wisdom. When evening falls on the Jasmine Dragon, what remains is the ghost of petals suspended in cooling liquid, a clean mineral afterimage lingering on skin; an echo of a proverb that only reveals its truth years after you first heard it.

It’s definitely not just “hot leaf juice.”

RE: Francesca Bianchi Sex and the Sea In Sex and the Sea–the perfumer wants us to imagine an intimate encounter at the beach (no thanks, lady, that sounds gross and dumb), but I needn’t have worried. This bright, giggly floral perfume is what happens when a Bath & Body Works sampler collides with a John Anster Fitzgerald fairy painting—a canvas promising Dionysian chaos that ultimately delivers nothing more than mild corporate ennui. Imagine a scene teetering on the brink of jubilation. Fairy figures hover like static electricity, poised for wild revelry but perpetually stuck in performance review mode. They look ready to erupt—tiny wings trembling with potential pandemonium, side-eyes loaded with maximum sass—yet somehow remain frozen in bureaucratic limbo. The kind of gathering that threatens spectacular chaos but settles for awkward small talk and tepid canapés.

Mimosa unfurls like the most passively aggressive bath product imaginable—powdery and sweet, that specific floral note that whispers “corporate compliance” instead of actual excitement. It’s the scent equivalent of mandatory team-building: technically pleasant, fundamentally forgettable. The pineapple note screeches like the most aggressive body spray top note—high-pitched, sharp enough to make your ears ring. A tiny giggle promises excitement but quickly fizzles. Underneath, a sour green vanilla stretches out—not quite cucumber, not quite sweet, just that weird vegetal edge that makes you go, “Huh. I don’t even see any cucumbers on this spread.”

From the concept to the execution I don’t think this one was ever going to be for me, but in the end it’s somehow even worse. Definitely several giggles short of a rager.

Arcana Wildcraft Love is Legal smells like a raisin soaked for a thousand years in demerara syrup, lit on fire on a sparking pyre of aromatic woods and sizzling cardamom pods, and burnt as an offering to Anck-su-namun. The sweetness isn’t confectionary but funerary—exactly what might have sealed a pharaoh’s tomb while mourners wailed outside.

The smoke hangs thick, refusing to dissipate around copper bowls of burning resins. There’s a peculiar duality here, twin capacities for terror and tenderness—first the sacred knowledge that bodies must burn to release souls, then the careful preservation of what remains.

There’s that scene in The Mummy where sticky black substances transform Imhotep’s lover into something neither living nor dead. This fragrance captures that exact moment when these materials become vessels for dark miracles. The woods don’t just smoke but consume themselves completely, a miniature celestial death. We are only alive because our sun is burning out, after all—and this perfume knows it, celebrates it, wears that knowledge like an amulet against the throat.

The House of Brandt’s London Fog is some spectral cousin to fog—something that exists in the otherworldly luminosity of Agnes Pelton’s “Winter, 1933.” The perfume pulses with the same geometric abstractions that hover in Pelton’s misty void, not the creamy bergamot-laced Earl Grey of marketing copy, but a cold, misty-creamy radiance emanating from some unseen source rather than actual tea or milk.

Imagine if fog machines at every art school party since 1987 had been secretly emitting tiny particles of Pelton’s visionary essence instead of glycerin—a milky bath of fog that somehow has its own consciousness. The promised vanilla isn’t gourmand or even particularly sweet—it’s the idea of vanilla translated through some cosmic filter, the way the visionary artist rendered natural phenomena as pulsing light forms floating in electric blue atmospheres. The promised lavender exists only as a faint purple outline around a gossamer cloud, a geometric frame containing something vast and dreamy within it.

The scent creates a numinous space around the wearer, a sanctuary of vapor and light. Whispers of lemony citrus thread through lactonic vanilla, while soft sandalwood provides not structure but a luxurious dissipation—a comforting dissolve into soft, meditative disembodiment that feels both intimate and infinite at once.

Poesie Persephone Rising In a parallel cosmos where abduction never happened, Persephone Rising emerges untethered from underworld shadows. Not the reluctant queen but the goddess who chose her own ascension.
Pomegranate here isn’t the fateful seeds of captivity but bright explosive bursts—a celebration of life’s vibrancy, the scattered rubies of liberation. The sugared violets don’t whisper secrets of darkness but instead sparkle with morning dew on petals never touched by netherworld air. These aren’t funereal flowers but triumphant blooms stretching toward perpetual spring. The sandalwood and vanilla orchid create not the suffocating luxury of an underground palace but the earthy-sweet foundation of a goddess coming into her own power—the scent of divinity unfurling without interruption. No halfway existence, no divided seasons. Something luminous and gossamer dances at the edges. Not the weight of a seduction that reshaped mythology, but the buoyant radiance of a goddess rising through her own agency. The body electric, carefree and unfettered, never bargained away for six seeds of compromise—playful notes of someone whose brow was never creased by the solemnity of sorrow. This is Persephone complete, unbifurcated—spring that never learned winter’s name.

Poesie Hades What becomes of the god of the underworld when his story lacks its central theft? This fragrance answers with quiet subversion. There’s something contemplative here, almost monastic—clean yet somehow ancient. Here is Hades who never ascended to claim what wasn’t his. Not the predatory fog of abduction but a crystalline solitude—the cool, expansive emptiness of a throne room perpetually missing what it never knew to want. Something in this scent carries the contradiction of sunlight penetrating deep forest shadows—warmth that shouldn’t exist in darkness but somehow does. Not the stereotypical gloom of the underworld but a calm, steady light uncomplicated by possession or desire. Not passion but the unexpected vulnerability of a god eternally untouched. There’s tenderness here, and a strange innocence preserved by isolation. The boundary between realms remains unviolated—not a portal for theft and trauma but a liminal space respected, left uncrossed. This fragrance holds the dignity of restraint, the hushed sacred quality of desire never acted upon. No pomegranate stains here—only the translucent stillness of a domain complete unto itself, ruled by a god who never learned to yearn beyond his borders. Between these two fragrances lies the negative space of a myth unmade—the sweet relief of a story never needing to be rewritten, sanitized, or reclaimed. Just two deities, whole within themselves, existing in separate completeness across an unviolated boundary.

Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab The Dregs of a Bottle of Vanilla Extract is what happens when you abandon your witchcraft supplies in the garden during a thunderstorm and return to find something unexpected has birthed itself. The remnants of Snake Oil’s characteristic molasses-thick vanilla incense (this is not meant to be a Snake Oil spin-off as far as I know, but that’s what I smell!) are here, but they’ve been washed with rain and submerged in soil until they’ve gone feral. That first breath is unmistakable petrichor – that post-storm mineral tang with its peculiar astringency that normally makes my nose wrinkle in distaste – but here it doesn’t outstay its welcome. Instead, it transforms, pulling the sweetness of vanilla back from the brink of excess and anchoring it to something more elemental. What begins as two opposing forces—decadent vanilla luxury versus earthy, rain-soaked austerity—eventually melds into something that feels like sweet, damp secrets buried under fallen leaves, waiting patiently to be unearthed.

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The Serpent in the Carnations (Snake Oil-soaked carnation petals, spiked with a dash of clove and allspice.) Wait, haven’t I smelled this before? Flipping through last year’s reviews, I discover I’ve already waxed poetic about this scent. And yet here I am, astonished all over again, falling into the same serpentine trap. The enchantment is complete; I’ve forgotten I was already enchanted. This is the second time I’ve declared this my favorite from a collection, which tells you everything you need to know about its power. I stand by every word of my previous devotion – the art nouveau femme fatale, the mortuary spice of carnations, Snake Oil’s heavily sugared incense creating that wicked bohemian ghoulishness. The layers of decadence unfold like those Symbolist paintings themselves. The very pigments ground from these carnation petals and serpent scales, mixed with poisonous metals and the tears of corrupted saints. This fragrance emanates from Salome’s skin as she dances, each veil she drops releasing another layer of this scent into the room, until even the most virtuous observer feels their resolve melting away. It lingers on Klimt’s Judith as she approaches Holofernes, infusing her with terrible purpose and unwavering conviction.This is decadence crystallized into a new element on the periodic table – one that devours light, creates shadows where there should be none, and causes flowers to bloom backwards into the earth. I want to bathe in it not once but daily, create a religion around it, convert followers through scented whispers. The Serpent in the Carnations isn’t just corrupted by forbidden knowledge – it’s the reason knowledge became forbidden in the first place.

The Fourth Veil (ripples of sage-green silk covered in a mossy velvet-burnout pattern of wildflowers and slithering ivy) conjures a very specific, very private sanctuary of nostalgia for me. When I was very young, there was a moon-shaped waxen knick-knack… I think it was meant to be a room freshener of some sort, but it hung from a cord, and my mother was using it as a curtain pull. I used to hide behind the dusty, pleated fabric and drag my nails over it, scoring the smooth surface, collecting the sweet, powdery floral wax on my fingertips, which I would then run through my hair so that I could smell it all day. This scent echoes that pleasant waxiness and builds on it with something that smells like a wildflower and algae shampoo, sweet and brackish and slightly herbal, and a note that channels the olfactory version of arsenical wallpaper, verdant trompe-l’œil tendrils climbing over a musky base of translucent, chalky minerals that seem to trap light and transform it into something vaguely bioluminescent.

Pink Fuzzy Handcuffs (pink cotton candy, candied rose, and vanilla sugar) transforms what could be a cloying rose soliflore into something unexpectedly compelling – like stumbling across a street vendor in some fantastical night market who specializes in tanghulu made not from strawberries or cherries but from enormous, dewy rose petals. Each crystallized bloom catches the neon lights, creating jewel-toned fragments that shatter between your teeth with a satisfying crack. The sugar shell is a hyper-concentrated, almost electric pink that buzzes on your tongue and makes your fillings ache in a kaleidoscopic way. This is a gleeful, rosy, sugar-spun audacity.

The Pearl (a salt-encrusted cocoon overflowing with almond blossoms, sweet patchouli, and dried peony petals whipped into orris butter) opens with an unexpected fruity-tarty-sweetness, as if someone had sliced a perfectly ripe persimmon atop a bed of dried apricots. This initial surprise fades as the scent settles into something truer to its nature. It becomes the olfactory embodiment of iridescence – if the pearlescent interior of an abalone shell could release its shimmer as fragrance. There’s something mineral and organic happening simultaneously here, like salt crystals forming on driftwood at low tide. From there, the scent unfolds in luminous ripples, revealing the strange not-quite-colors that exist inside shells – those blues that aren’t blue, the pinks that aren’t quite pink, the greens that seem to flicker in and out of existence depending on how the light hits. It smells exactly how that color-shifting, mysterious inner world of abalone looks – ethereal, ancient, and somehow both oceanic and otherworldly at once.

Horreur Choco-Tique (dark chocolate, ruby cocoa, blood musk, golden honey, thick black wine, champagne grapes, tobacco flower, plum blossom, tonka bean, oakmoss, carnation, benzoin, opoponax, and sugar cane) Imagine licking a chocolate lollipop only to discover an impossibly tiny stained glass cathedral trapped inside it. Press your eye against the glossy cocoa surface and see microscopic nuns bathed in divine grape juice light, aubergine and amaranthine rays streaming through intricate amethyst-hued filigree whorls and whirls of the vitreous panes. Each lick dissolves another layer of bitter chocolate veneer, revealing more of this sugared sanctuary within. The chambers grow increasingly purple-stained as you reach the center, where fermented grape sweetness meets cocoa dust in an unlikely communion. Somewhere in the sticky core, a miniature priest made entirely of dark chocolate lifts a tiny candy chalice of Concord concentrate to lips that will never taste it, forever frozen in a moment of grape-stained reverence.

Plume of Incense (tendrils of sandalwood, agarwood, and cypress incense, moss silk, calla lilies, and yellow amber) Cypress leaps out first – almost tactile in its intensity, a lemony-green sharpness that feels like running your hand along a prickly branch. Then the scent shifts and settles, becoming a soft, languid incense drifting through empty rooms. It transforms into an indolent sphinx of a fragrance, stretched across sun-warmed stone, with delicate wisps of aromatic smoke curling from its enigmatic smile. The agarwood and sandalwood form the creature’s body, substantial yet somehow also ethereal, while the yellow amber creates its half-lidded eyes that watch with ancient, unhurried patience. This incense has all the time in the world to gradually enchant you into reverence, each tendril of smoke winding around your senses with the languorous confidence of something that knows eternity is on its side.

Mars and Venus (a stolen moment preserved for eternity in a gleaming amber jewel, entombed in malachite swirls of oakmoss and velvet) Forget enemies to lovers, this scent captures lovers to landscapes, passion transformed into geological wonder. A clean, crisp amber polished smooth by ocean tides holds the memory of ancient heat at its core. The fragrance shifts into mossy-musky dampness, like vegetation slowly reclaiming abandoned statues in a forgotten garden. When warmed against skin, it exhales a humid velvet aura, luxurious yet wild, as if cosmic bodies once pressed together have now cooled into mineral formations still somehow radiating their original warmth. Time has crystallized divine indiscretion into something that will outlast even the gods themselves, leaving only this aromatic evidence behind: a perfumed fossil of desire.

Discarded Weapons (toasted rice, almond cream, champaca resin, fig, and roasted coconut meat) The camera pans across perfectly toasted rice grains, each one glistening with a hint of savory oil. A steady hand sprinkles roasted nuts, arranging them in a mesmerizing pattern that took fourteen takes to perfect. The creator’s chopsticks move to the dessert compartment, revealing jammy Fig Bar Cookies topped with large flakes of sea salt that catch the light like tiny crystals and coconut shavings, their edges curled and caramelized from slow caramelization. A sweetness remains restrained, a mellow complexity. Our lunchbox artisan steps back, still filming, and watches the comments section explode with hearts and flame emojis. This fragrance hits that sweet spot between culinary art and comfort food – savory, sweet, and somehow both elaborate and profoundly satisfying at once.

Snake Skin (a sinuous leather variant of BPAL’s Snake Oil) Charting the void with phantom maps, new territories over familiar terrain. Leather emerges first, strangely mentholated and cool, running your hand against the grain of scales. Snake Oil’s incense weaves through the leather landscape, a compass that points to itself, creating landmarks that shift each time you attempt to find them. An unexpected almond whisper hides in the coils, sweet and slightly bitter, the pit left behind after devouring whole the fruit that was forbidden. Engulfing its own origin, repeatedly shedding and reforming as it warms on skin, leaving behind the undertow of the past while somehow still carrying it forward- the same beast viewed through different dimensions, simultaneously ancient and newborn, forever caught in the moment of transformation.

The Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab 2025 Lupercalia collection is currently live and available for purchase. As this is a limited edition series, sample sizes imps are not available.

Need more Lupercalia scents? Have a peep at my Lupers reviews from 2024 and 2023 and 2022 and 2021 and 2020. Looks like I skipped a few years but we’ve also got 2017 and 2016 reviews as well!

…PSSSST! Did you know I have collected all of my BPAL reviews into one spot? I’m about a year behind with adding new stuff to the document, but as it stands, there are over 60 PAGES of my thoughts and rambles on various limited-edition scents from Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab over the years: BPAL REVIEWS BY S. ELIZABETH (PDF download)

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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Long before I lost my heart to ladies in billowing nightgowns fleeing from ominous manors, I fell head over heels for a teenaged titian-haired sleuth with a penchant for stumbling upon—and solving—mysteries full of hidden jewels and midnight whispers. Nancy Drew, with her blue roadster and ever-present flashlight, was my first literary love. And it was Rudy Nappi’s captivating cover illustrations that first beckoned me into her world of hidden clues and intrepid adventures.

I can still remember tucking those yellow-spined books into my bookbag after library day (the most anticipated school day, obviously!), counting the moments until I could unfold their mysteries on the bus ride home. Nappi began illustrating Nancy Drew in 1953, bringing a distinctive magic to the series. His Nancy always seems caught in that perfect moment of suspense—peering around corners, examining cryptic objects, or caught in mid-investigation.

Looking at Nappi’s work now, I love how he captured Nancy. She’s smart and composed, her face alert and searching, but never scared. Even when she’s facing shadowy strangers or weird phenomena, she has a confident calmness that fascinated me as a kid who was afraid of everything from motorcycles and helicopters and other loud noises to Lou Ferrigno as The Incredible Hulk to Dr. Kneehaus, who I suspected was always itching to jab me with a needle. But Nancy never ran from noises in the attic or anywhere else—she walks straight toward them, flashlight in hand.

I always loved his color choices—those deep blues, rich greens, and warm glowing windows against dark backgrounds. His moonlit scenes where Nancy’s investigating abandoned places, her figure bright against the darkness, pulled me right into the story before I’d read a single word. The Lilac Inn cover was always my favorite. I had a particular fondness for anything adorned with flowers, a preference that hasn’t changed much over the decades.

And the covers with jewels or gems held a special enchantment for me. The Clue in the Jewel Box? The Spider Sapphire Mystery? I was instantly captivated. My childhood attraction to glittering treasures clearly foreshadowed my adult appreciation for all things that shimmer and sparkle.

Nappi had a theatrical flair to his compositions. Nancy often stands in doorways, on staircases, or at garden gates—right at that exciting moment between safety and mystery. Her practical skirts and sensible shoes (I desperately wanted those penny loafers) kept things grounded, even when the stories ventured into the wonderfully far-fetched. Nappi really knew how to use light and shadow, drawing your eye exactly where he wanted—usually to Nancy or the clue she’s finding. His buildings, whether crumbling mansions or abandoned lighthouses, feel both specific and somehow timeless.

I see so many connections between these Nancy Drew covers and the gothic romance art I collected later. Many of the same artistic techniques appear in both: dramatic lighting that creates suspense, architectural elements that frame the protagonist, and compositions that guide the eye to critical details. Both genres showcase women in atmospheric settings – old mansions, shadowy gardens, moonlit landscapes. Both capture moments of tension and revelation. Nancy’s poised alertness with flashlight in hand represents one approach to mystery, while the emotional intensity of gothic heroines embodies another. Rather than opposites, they feel like different facets of the same attraction to the unknown. As my reading tastes evolved, I found myself drawn to both visual languages – the clear-eyed investigation and the emotional response to mystery, each compelling in its own way.

Nappi had an extraordinary ability to conjure an aura of mystery in every illustration. Even covers for stories I initially thought wouldn’t interest me drew me in through his visual alchemy. What captivated me wasn’t simply his skill at depicting scenes from the books, but how he manifested the very essence of mystery—that delicious sensation of secrets waiting to be uncovered, of ordinary objects and places harboring extraordinary significance. These covers sparked my lifelong love affair with mysteries and the mysterious, teaching me to see the world as a place where wonder hides in plain sight, waiting for the observant eye to discover it.

I’d spend hours with these books, mentally placing myself alongside Nancy as she solved each mystery. (Poor Bess and George—in my imagination, they frequently found themselves bumped to make room for me.) The covers themselves became doorways to adventure, promising stories that would satisfy my growing appetite for mystery and revelation.

There’s something comforting about Nancy’s world in these illustrations. The danger feels real enough to be exciting but never truly terrifying. The mysteries seem complex but always within reach of solving. Nancy herself has this perfect mix of caution and bravery that spoke to my curious but fearful younger self. These covers promised that smart thinking would always win out—and I was here for it.

Looking back, I can trace the genealogy of my aesthetic obsessions directly to these Nancy Drew covers. The seeds planted by Nappi’s illustrations eventually blossomed into my fascination with gothic romance art. The visual vocabulary he established—secrets lurking in shadowed doorways, mysterious objects holding untold stories, architecture as a character in itself—became the foundation for my later artistic attractions.

I see a clear connection between Nancy and the gothic heroines I’d later fall in love with, one that goes deeper than their surface differences. Both have a special way of noticing what others miss, even if Nancy expresses it through methodical sleuthing while gothic heroines often rely on intuition and emotional awareness. The visuals evolve beautifully between genres too – Nancy’s trusty flashlight beam sweeping across dusty attics becomes the gothic heroine’s flickering candle casting shadows on stone walls. What draws me to both is how they remind us that truly seeing the world around you – paying attention to details others ignore – reveals life’s hidden stories. As a child, I found this lesson in Nancy’s careful observations; as an adult, I discovered it again in the atmospheric worlds of gothic covers, where I realized that perhaps mystery itself isn’t just something to solve, but something to savor – a state of heightened possibility that awakens our most vivid imagination.

These books, which I first found in my elementary school library in second grade, didn’t just entertain me—they shaped how I see the world. Just look at the titles: moss-covered mansions, crumbling walls, whispering statues, tolling bells, broken lockets, twisted candles, crooked bannisters, spider sapphires, glowing eyes. This is the vocabulary that still colors my imagination—a gothic kaleidoscope I’ve never outgrown.

I see a clear connection between Nancy and the gothic heroines I’d later fall in love with, one that goes deeper than their surface differences. Both have a special way of noticing what others miss, even if Nancy expresses it through methodical sleuthing while gothic heroines often rely on intuition and emotional awareness. The visuals evolve beautifully between genres too – Nancy’s trusty flashlight beam sweeping across dusty attics becomes the gothic heroine’s flickering candle casting shadows on stone walls. What draws me to both is how they remind us that truly seeing the world around you – paying attention to details others ignore – reveals life’s hidden stories. As a child, I found this lesson in Nancy’s careful observations; as an adult, I discovered it again in gothic illustrations, where I began to appreciate what might be called the art of the unknown – that exquisite space between question and answer where possibilities shimmer like jewels in candlelight, sometimes more precious than certainty itself.

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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What if the deep-ones’ hybrid offspring wore couture? What if the transformation from human to something else were not just biological but sartorial?

In a foggy maritime underworld of jagged rocks and ambient sounds of crashing waves, models crawled, slithered, and contorted themselves forward in the Elena Velez Fall 2025 Ready to Wear collection (“Leech.”) Opening the show was Anna Delvey—ankle monitor and all—a bizarre yet somehow fitting choice for a collection that seems to revel in subverting expectations. I don’t know why I am still laughing about that, but I am.

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