Unquiet
Things

Last week on my blog, I wrote about “challenging the monkey’s face.” If you’re familiar with my annual sharing of Bashō’s New Year haiku, you probably know what I mean. If not, the piece is worth a read. It’s about questioning whether the traits we think are fixed – our monkey’s face – are really unchangeable, or if they’re just comfortable patterns we’ve never thought to challenge.

These waffles, for instance. Whenever Ývan suggests using some of my massive quantities of sourdough discard for waffles, I’m quick with my usual “nah man I don’t eat that shit” because I don’t do sweet breakfast. But I always forget about savory waffles! This morning: cheddar-chive-scallion waffles with fried eggs (using techniques from J. Kenji López-Alt’s recent video). Bonus: extra waffles for the freezer. I used this recipe, subbed buttermilk for regular milk, skipped the sugar, and added about 3/4 cup shredded sharp cheddar, and a tbsp or so each fresh, chopped chives and scallions.

(Speaking of challenging kitchen habits – I’m also working on cooking from my pantry more. I recently discovered an entire bag of quinoa hiding in there, unopened for who knows how long! It’s made me realize how quick I am to dismiss ingredients I think I don’t like, without really giving them a fair chance. Last year, I discovered I actually do like cilantro and that freshly grated nutmeg is amazing. So maybe quinoa deserves the same open-minded exploration? I’m trying different recipes and preparations, figuring either I’ll find a way I enjoy it, or I can eventually say, “I’ve tried this a dozen different ways, and now I know for sure it’s not for me.”)

And puzzles? There’s a monkey’s face I’ve worn for 48 years. I don’t do puzzles because they make me feel like an idiot. Not just jigsaw puzzles, but word puzzles, number puzzles, riddles – all of it. I really hate sitting with that feeling of being dumb or ignorant. But here’s a ridiculously simple realization I’ve finally reached: if I don’t want to feel that way, maybe I should work at getting better at these things? (When you actively avoid thinking about something, you don’t reach many conclusions.) So last week I downloaded the NYT puzzle app, and now I’m trying to start each morning with it.

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Ever since we solved the mystery of the Wrinkle in Time cover artist, I’ve been itching to share more of Richard Bober’s work here. His art pulses with an otherworldly luminescence – sometimes veiled by murk and shadow, sometimes blazing in full ethereal splendor.

In his horror work, this shimmer peers through layers of gloom: take his cover for an Alfred Hitchcock collection, where the master of suspense sits at his desk in an eerily shadowed room. The exquisitely blown glass lamps and lanterns suspended from the ceiling cast their glow through a heavy atmospheric haze, while behind him, the stark silhouette of an upraised arm clutching a knife cuts through all that diffused glitter – a perfect contrast of light and shadow, sparkle and threat.

This radiance struggles through a different kind of murk in his pulpy sci-fi pieces, wading through cosmic morass and alien atmospheres. But in his more fantastical works, that same light breaks free entirely – illuminating visions of impossible beauty. Take this utterly bizarre bar scene: at first glance, it’s teeming with aliens of every imaginable variety, but look closer, and you’ll find it’s set in what appears to be an old-world gentleman’s club, all dark polished wood and traditional elegance, complete with a figure in a powdered wig – yet overhead hangs a disco ball, transforming this stately space into some kind of interdimensional nightspot.

On the cover of Esther M. Friesner’s Mustapha and His Wise Dog, a dragon is emerging from what can only be described as a posh fantasy spa-castle-pagoda onto a balcony where regal figures blithely recline in a hot tub overlooking an iridescent sea.I have never read the book, and I don’t know what it’s about, so there’s no doubt that my description bears not one iota of relevance to the actual plot!!

Anyway, even his portrait of an orc – traditionally the most brutish of fantasy creatures – finds a balance between that shadowy murk and shimmering dignity. Ugly but make it fashion, as they say.

I discovered these pieces in reverse, really. First came his portrait of an aristocratic vampire lady while I was researching The Art of Darkness – a piece so captivating I desperately tried to include it in the book. Then there was that infamous 1976 Dell/Laurel Leaf paperback cover of A Wrinkle in Time, with its red-eyed specter and improbable winged centaur. That cover had lived in my memory since childhood, and when I began work on The Art of Fantasy, I knew I wanted to include this piece of beautiful nightmare fuel.

But I’d been down this road before – previous searches for the artist’s identity had led only to dead ends. By the time my hunt began again in earnest, my book was already at the printer’s, and my blog post about the mysterious cover artist had exploded across social media.

I had no idea then that the two pieces that had independently captured my imagination – the elegant vampire and the cosmic horror of the Wrinkle cover – sprang from the same artistic wellspring. Amid the avalanche of suggestions and theories that poured in during the investigation, there were these quiet, prescient hints – my friend Keith mentioned Bober’s name in my Facebook comments, and on Twitter, Wallace Polsom pointed out those distinctive sickly greens in Bober’s Hitchcock covers.

Adam Rowe of 70’s Sci-Fi Art, whose expertise in this era of illustration is unmatched, lent his considerable knowledge to the investigation. When Endless Thread took up the mystery (a whole story unto itself), their investigation would eventually prove these subtle clues significant, unraveling the threads that connected these works I’d loved for such different reasons.

While most of Bober’s work focused on the fantastical and the eerie, he occasionally turned his eye to still-life compositions with delightfully macabre results. The cover for 12 Stories They Wouldn’t Let Me Do on TV showcases a gleefully sinister collection – a bundle of dynamite, a bullet, a scorpion, a bottle of poison, some sort of firearm (a musket? I don’t know guns, okay?), and a skull with a lone eyeball rolling grotesquely in its socket.

It’s a vignette that, as it turns out, hints at an artistic legacy carried forward by his nephew.

As noted in the Endless Thread interview, Richard’s nephew Matthew remembers the Wrinkle in Time cover as the first book he had read that his uncle did the cover for, talking about it in school. He would later spend time in his uncle’s basement, where paintings were stored around a pool table, and eventually helped digitize Richard’s slides – an informal archive of work photographed on 35mm film.

But most meaningful were the countless nights spent watching his uncle work: “He would always let me sit there and watch him paint. So, many, many, many, many nights, I got to sit there and just watch him work on a cover or whatever he was working on. So I learned an incredible lot from that — to see the profession, what it meant to be a professional, you know, and just watch that. It’s… I can’t even describe what that meant to me.”

Matthew is an artist himself, and scrolling through his Instagram sends me into absolute paroxysms of demented glee. His hyper-realistic still lifes feel like the most perfect gatherings of misfit treasures – think of those sad little ceramic creatures you sometimes find in thrift stores, the ones with slight chips or haunting expressions that make other people pass them by, the forgotten mechanical toys and vacant-eyed dolls that seem to be asking for someone to take them home and give them new life.

In Matthew’s paintings, these precious oddities come together in the extraordinary gatherings. Porcelain doll heads with empty, searching eyes commune with clay skulls, while owls, bunnies, elephants and the most beautifully unsettling clowns gather for what feels like the coziest of strange tea parties. Wind-up alligators and other odd little mechanical toys peek out from the edges, each one seeming curious and somehow alive, as if caught in the middle of their own secret adventures. He captures every worn edge and chipped surface with such loving attention, transforming these overlooked treasures into something magical through sheer technical precision and an absolutely infectious sense of joy.

Every time I look at one of his pieces, I discover some new detail that makes my greedy little goblin heart do shriekingly clumsy cartwheels of delight.

Bober was famously private and perhaps a bit of a technophobe – he had no cell phone, no computer, not even long-distance phone service. His agent, Jane Frank, called him a recluse; in nearly 30 years of representing him, she only met him once, often accepting awards on his behalf at conventions while assuring people he wasn’t merely a figment of her imagination.

For a fascinating deep dive into Bober’s artistic philosophy and his complex relationship with tradition and modernity, I highly recommend this illuminating profile from the summer before his passing: Richard Bober: Gift of the Old Masters.

What truly enchants me about Bober’s work is its shimmering, glittering quality – a sort of luminous magic that infuses even his darkest artworks. Looking at these pieces, I want to gather up all of Bober’s paintings and stitch them into the most extraordinary ballgown – imagine the sweep of that skirt, each panel flickering between horror and beauty, between the mundane and the cosmic.

The bodice would be crafted from his Hitchcock covers, all those sickly greens and oceanic blues swirling together. The full skirt would be a phantasmagoria of his fantasy works – that hot tub dragon scene forming a shimmering border, while aliens and orcs and vampire aristocrats dance across the fabric.

And there, right at the heart of it, that nightmarish Wrinkle in Time centaur would spread its rainbow wings across the waist, its companion’s red eyes glowing like rubies in the folds of fabric. It would be a gown for a masquerade at the end of the universe, where all of Bober’s creations could finally meet and mingle.

I harbor this slightly ridiculous dream: that someday, The Art of Fantasy might go into a tenth-anniversary edition. Let’s be real – my books about weird, dark art are probably far too niche (and, I suspect, so far under the radar as to be subterranean) to ever be bestsellers, but wouldn’t it be something if that haunting Wrinkle in Time cover could land among its pages?

Not that it matters much – Bober’s art is out there now, inspiring new generations of readers and artists, no longer anonymous but celebrated for the strange and shimmering legacy it is. Still… a ghoul can dream!

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It hung on our basement door like a sentinel—a ragdoll caught in the merciless grip of an old-fashioned clothes wringer, accompanied by that unforgettable caption: “The truth will set you free but at first it will make you miserable.”

For years, I sat with my back against the cracked vinyl bench in our Milford, Ohio kitchen, watching that door’s decor change with the seasons: a rattling skeleton at Halloween, a jolly Santa during December. But the ragdoll always returned, resuming its position like a stubborn gargoyle, watching over our little trio as we grew: me advancing toward nine, my sister toward seven, the baby of us reaching five.

The kitchen was pure 1970s: mustard-yellow countertops that seemed to absorb every shadow, even in full daylight. I’d slouch at the table, pushing my mother’s Midwestern white lady interpretation of chicken chow mein around my plate, creating smaller and smaller piles until I could discreetly ball it into a napkin. Some nights, it was meatloaf; others, it was her chili spaghetti—a rotating cast of dishes I couldn’t stomach. “May I be excused?” I’d implore beseechingly, already half-risen from the bench. The ragdoll watched my every deception with its blank button eyes.

I never questioned its presence then. It was simply part of our small family home’s landscape, like the perpetual haze of Folgers coffee and Benson & Hedges cigarettes that hung in the air. But its message about truth and misery never quite stuck—I was already a practiced fibber by then, masking my own disgust at my mother’s cooking (sorry, mom) while instinctively developing the tools we’d need later for grander prevarications. By nine, these small acts of self-preservation at the dinner table were quietly preparing us for the years ahead, when truth-telling would become a more complicated matter of survival, when her struggles with alcohol addiction and mental illness became more apparent.

Looking back, I wonder if the poster knew what it was watching over: three little girls at a kitchen table, with me already adept at the art of selective truth-telling, my sisters no doubt soon to follow, if they hadn’t already surpassed me. The basement door might as well have been a stage curtain, with that tortured ragdoll as our silent audience, witnessing each small deception that was really just practice for the bigger ones to come. I wonder if it was appalled at its uselessness or if it found the little trio of budding dissemblers bleakly amusing. I also often wonder if our shared dark sense of humor began with the pained but resigned expression on this rag doll’s face. Most of all, I wonder… whatever happened to that poster?!

Yesterday, my middle sister texted me with barely contained-glee. This is the same sister who solved the JAW CRAZER mystery, by the way. She might be an even more persistent sleuth than me! She’d found it—the exact same freaky rag doll poster —listed for around $50 on a resale site. The photo brought an immediate rush of memories: the sticky give of vinyl against my back, the scrape of fork tines against plates, the strategic redistribution of unwanted dinners. She placed an offer immediately.

The offer was accepted, and that ragdoll will return to us after forty years—no longer a looming presence above our childhood meals but a cherished relic of the kitchen table where three little girls poked at questionable Chinese food and stodgy meatloaf, perfecting their poker faces, pretending to eat dinner.

P.S. I should note that I’m only speaking from my own experience with truth-telling and survival strategies—I shouldn’t presume to know my sisters’ relationships with honesty, then or now. (Though I suspect we all are all lying liars in our own ways, for our own reasons.)

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Every New Year’s Day, while social media floods with “new year, new you” declarations and ambitious resolution lists, I share my own little message – Bashō’s haiku: “Year after year / on the monkey’s face / a monkey’s face.” Perhaps it’s become my own kind of tradition, a cheeky little poke, a humble nudge, a reminder that my familiar face in the mirror greets me on January 1st, unchanged by the turning of the calendar.

I let go of the idea of resolutions long ago. Why make promises to become less – to lose weight, to take up less space, to need less? Instead, I set goals, always reaching for something more expansive – more understanding, more courage, more connection, more of myself. Usually just one meaningful intention for the year ahead. Not to change who I am, but to become more fully who I might be. Or at least, that’s what I’ve always told myself.

This year’s goal crystallized on January 2nd, emerging from a moment of pure exhaustion. I’d just survived two weeks of intense holiday people-ing with Yvan’s family, and my first-ever colonoscopy had just been rescheduled – after I’d already fasted for half the day. I was tired, hungry, and a bit cranky, if I’m being honest. As dinner time approached, I could feel myself sliding into my usual stress pattern: I’d either declare, “Popcorn for dinner!” or order tacos or something equally cheesy and greasy. It’s what I always did when overwhelmed. But then an interesting thought percolated: just because that’s what Sarah always had done, did she have to do it tonight? What if I challenged the monkey’s face? Instead, I threw some rice in the rice cooker and made a light veggie soup. It was infinitely more satisfying, undoubtedly better for my body, and I didn’t spend any extra money. A small victory–though maybe not as tasty.

I’ve been thinking a lot about my patterns lately, wondering where they all came from. They show up everywhere – in the particular way I need my morning coffee prepared (you don’t even want to know me if I run out of the right creamer), in how I arrange my days, in my quick “no” to spontaneous invitations. But are these patterns really protecting me, or have they just become comfortable ruts I’ve never bothered to question?

And what is it about uncertainty that feels so wobbly? When something disrupts my routines – even something as simple as having to settle for a slightly different cup of coffee – why does it ripple through my entire day like an earthquake? Is it really about the coffee, or is it about something deeper – some need for control that I’m only now starting to peek at?

I find myself wondering about all this scaffolding I’ve built around myself. Was it necessary once? Is it still? When did these supportive structures become constricting ones? Or have they always been both at once – offering security but demanding stillness in return?

Sometimes I catch myself counting the costs of being so set in my ways. How many connections have I missed because spontaneous invitations feel too daunting? How many opportunities have slipped by because they didn’t fit neatly into my established patterns? What would it feel like to say yes more often to the unexpected? Would it be as terrifying as I imagine?

But then the practical questions start nagging: how would I even begin to challenge these patterns? Which ones are truly essential to keeping me functioning, and which are just habits pretending to be needs? Is there a way to experiment without risking collapse? Could I start small – maybe accepting a slightly different morning schedule, or trying new approaches to familiar tasks? Would each small deviation really build tolerance for uncertainty, like gradually strengthening a muscle? Or would it just feel like constant, needless stress?

And what about authenticity? If I challenge these patterns, these reflexive resistances, am I betraying something essential about myself? Or am I perhaps discovering something more essential that’s been hiding behind all these careful routines?

Lately I’ve been staring at Bashō’s haiku differently. I used to see it as a comfort, a justification. But maybe I’ve mistaken my face for a monkey’s for too long.

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In this year’s Yule collection, Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab celebrates a decade of spectral encounters and spiritual comfort. Here we find grandmothers’ crystal candy dishes alongside parlor séances, Christmas candles burning beside ghostly doubles, and even a mouse stealing bites of lavender-dusted popcorn. From bayberry memories to midnight confections, these scents flicker between darkness and light, between what was and what lingers. Sometimes they’re jaunty and bright, other times they’re weighted with musty glamour and golden memories – but always, they offer solace in winter’s darkness, whether through sweetness, strangeness, or sacred remembrance.

Here are my thoughts on some of these haunting, comforting fragrances.

The Season of Ghosts (bergamot, frankincense, rose geranium, ginger, lemongrass, and blood orange) Opens with the candies that lived in grandmother’s crystal dishes – the confectionary citrus sweetness of pillowy circus peanuts and tangy jellied oranges glowing like stained glass. But it’s the turn it takes, the transformation that haunts: a slow bloom of golden musty glamour that hints at powder puffs and hat veils, of the musky, mossy, bronze grandeur of those perfumes that filled rooms with their presence and lingered for days in fur coats. It’s finding faded sepia-tinted photos in an ornate old candy tin of your grandmother from that unmistakable era, each image radiating the warmth of a moment when time moved slower, and youth seems older than our own age now, more weighted with substance and shadow.

Midnight Marzipan (a ground almond snowpack glistening under a chilly scattering of sugar-bright stars, standing out against a night sky of the darkest cacao) I braced myself for the marzipan in this one; I didn’t even realize I did it, but when I finally smelled what was actually happening in the scent, I realized I had been holding my breath. Though I love marzipan –adore it!– both in scent and taste, it can overwhelm with the high-pitched peal of sugary sweetness. What I got instead was the deep, full, resonant, sonorous richness of barely sweet, dark, dark chocolate. The marzipan was a soft, trilling frill, fluttering at the edges. A duet between Darth Vader and Megan Mullally, where the Dark Side of the Force becomes velvet cocoa-dusted truffles and somehow makes Karen Walker’s signature giggle feel like sugared almond stardust on snow.

Faunalia (a thick, starlit, unspoiled forest, with a burst of wild musk, opobalsamum, black bryony, mandragora, and hemlock) Like opening a forgotten storybook, where the forest’s scent rises between pages tinged with the echo of vanilla – not the sharp bite of pine or wet earth, but something once growing but softly bespelled, slumbering and subdued. The musks feel antique rather than wild, a soft sepia tone rather than vivid green. It’s what you might smell if you pressed your nose to an illustration of dark woods in a Victorian fairy tale, where the ink itself carries old magic and time-worn pages hold the memory of primordial forest and ancient greenwoods.

Poor Monkey (pink lotus root and fig milk with ylang ylang, bourbon vanilla, soft myrrh, fir, khus, and sandalwood incense) Like preserves made from petals gathered too early for dew – a tender, translucent jelly that holds summer’s sweetness suspended in light, the way an altar holds its morning offerings. Fresh figs split open like pale stars, lotus petals floating in milk-white bowls, and unburnt sticks of sandalwood waiting patiently – sweetness as a promise, like tomorrow’s devotions already taking shape in the quiet hours before sunrise.

Pomegranate Milk The red sun races through winter-stained snow like Dracula’s eyes in that final chase – all grenadine turned lurid and glowing with the day’s dying light. Why does this perfume also remind me of Japanese candy discovered in the back of an import shop, that distinctive musty-sweet chalkiness? Perhaps it’s the way time and context reshape sweetness into something stranger – in sunset’s crimson hour or years on a forgotten shelf, what was once simple pleasure takes on an elegant decay.

Porcelain Krampus (brown leather and a bundle of switches encased in pale white orris root and rice powder, translucent white musk, Himalayan ambrette seed, and milky vanilla.) She sits pristine in tissue paper, this porcelain child with cool milky skin and frost-pale curls, radiating a sweetness both powder-pure and glazed smooth – like marshmallows dissolving in winter air, like sugared pears turned to frost on the windowsill. Though she glows with innocence, you know better. That’s why her tiny severed hand lives in your pocket, wrapped in a handkerchief, small and impossibly perfect, still trailing that haunting whisper of confectioner’s sugar and cold cream. You tell yourself it’s for safe-keeping, and perhaps that’s true in a sense,  but really, you’re keeping yourself safe –from her gaze in the dark each night, as she watches you from high on her shelf, with a smile that’s patient and sweet, and ever-so-slightly wrong.

Hard Cider Cake (a thick, spongy white cake spiked with hard apple cider and frosted with whiskey-laden buttercream) A possum-riding gnome rolls up in a car made of twigs and acorns. “Get in, loser,” they grin, “we’re having cider with the Green Man.” What they pour is fresh-pressed and unsweetened, with something unexpectedly verdant lurking in its depths – like drinking autumn sunshine filtered through new spring leaves. The old magics are simple ones: apples and leaves, earth and air, each sip tasting of secrets whispered between the roots of ancient trees

A Cup of Tea in the Verandah (black tea and bergamot shimmer in the glow of sunlit amber as cypress boughs cast lingering shadows, the heart blooms softly with jasmine sambac and tender orris) A single bloom emerges from craggy castle walls like a long-lost, long-gone friend impossibly appearing in morning light – its petals glowing rosy with the same translucent warmth as sunbeams through stained glass. The stone beneath holds secrets in its tea-stained shadows, cool and tannic as bitter centuries of words unsaid, feelings unreturned. Memory blooms here, unbearably delicate yet persistent and softly strangling as ivy, reaching through time toward a cup that was never filled.

Phantom Team of Horses (a spectral cacophony of shimmering, translucent dun sandalwood, grey amber, and wraith-chilled chestnut galloping through the mist-cloaked shadows of time, a clattering of clove and black pepper, and a crack of phantom leather) Through mist and gloaming, phantom hooves prowl and roam – a nutty-woody-resinous haunting that refuses to settle into silence. The wood whispers like morning fog, barely there; a subtle saltiness clings to the chestnut’s echo, while grey amber broods beneath it all, murky as twilight in forgotten hollows. Like those ghostly horses that never quite reach their destination, these scents circle and hover, their spectral stampede more whisper than thunder, more shadow than storm.

The Phenomena of Witchcraft (green balsam, bay leaf, fossilized amber, blackened vetiver, and clove bud cloaked in oud) The morning after a midnight revel, musty clove smoke and primordial resins mingling in the morning’s murk and morass. When witches trade their broomsticks for bar stools – all that wild green magic gone deliciously seedy, forest herbs trampled underfoot in an alley behind a dive bar, sacred incense mingling with spilled spirits. Like knocking thrice on heaven’s door and getting an answer from somewhere decidedly south.

Frau Holle (snow-covered pines, witches’ herbs, bestial musk, flax, and ethereal flowers that represent both birth and death) Sometimes, we run across a perfume that bears little resemblance to our expectations when it comes to its blueprint of notes. Such is the case with this atmosphere of bracing winter mint and bitter forest berries, scattered across the rapidly dissipating warmth of a recently vacated featherbed. The fog from the hearth is dusky and strange, like herb-steeped milk in an abandoned bowl.

Lavender Kitchen Mouse (lavender cotton candy fur and vanilla popcorn balls, sent skittering out of the kitchen with a good-natured wave of our polished wood rolling pin) For a popcorn devotee – nay, a popcorn zealot who would happily survive on nothing but perfectly popped kernels for the rest of time, dental floss bills be damned – there is nothing quite like that first hit of toasty corn. Whether it’s movie theater butter pooling in the ridges, nutritional yeast giving it that umami funk, or simply sea salt bringing out corn’s inherent sweetness (and let’s be clear: adding caramel, or indeed any form of sweetness to popcorn, is an unforgivable crime against both nature and the pure pleasure of popped corn). But here’s something entirely unexpected: that perfect salty-corny base sprinkled with lavender’s crisp, herbaceous brightness. Like finding fresh sprigs tucked between kernels, adding an aromatic sharpness that cuts through the savory warmth. It’s a weird combination and probably shouldn’t work – much like how finding a beady-eyed little mouse nibbling in your popcorn bowl as you reach for another handful would be pretty jarring – but somehow, this odd little creature has charmed its way into my heart.

Ube Sufganiyot A soft swirl of fried dough, a scant sifting of powdered sugar, and a filling that melts all its elements – white chocolate, pistachio, and coconut – into one creamy, nutty reverie. Pair this with Lavender Kitchen Mouse above for the perfect snack box curation at an all-night Wes Anderson movie marathon, where every treat is just slightly offbeat and endearingly peculiar.

Paysage (the pale moon pouring magic: Tunisian opium and mugwort with blackened bourbon vanilla, tuberose, glittering white musk, datura accord, wild plum, and tobacco absolute.) In the bottle, I know exactly what this is: my mother-in-law’s Jólakaka, all rum-soaked candied lemon peel and winter warmth. But on skin, it transforms into something far more mysterious – like a lemon icicle in one of those classic locked room mysteries where the detective finds nothing but an inexplicable puddle of water beside the body. Sharp and crystalline yet impossible to grasp, bright citrus frozen into a vanishing elegance, leaving you to question whether you really understood what you experienced at all.

Eighteenth Lash (vanillekipferl plunked in a pile of pine needles) Buttery, crumbly, melty cookies with a base of bitter, oily walnuts and a rich, caramelized shortbread bottom…baked in the steam and sap of an enchanted pine’s resinous heart, they’ve taken on the deep forest’s secrets – as if being born in the heart of an ancient conifer has imbued them with its balsamic soul. Wear this scent and imagine this treat while Chelsea Wolfe’s haunting voice carries you far over misty mountains cold, where dark things sleep in hollow halls beneath the fells.

The Human Double (a shadow-blackened fougere steeped in an uncanny, discomfiting lavender tar) Imagine if lavender went sepulchral, if coumarin turned to ash, if oakmoss grew on graves – this is the shadow-self of a classic fougère. Though we don’t know this one’s building blocks, we know its intentions: the familiar herbal notes have been submerged in something black and viscous, like catching your reflection in a darkened window at midnight and watching it linger after you’ve walked away. Doppelgangers embody pure existential horror – they violate our most fundamental sense of uniqueness through their unheimlich theft of selfhood. This is what happens when your double claims your signature scent as its own, and worse, wears it with more authority than you ever did.

Gently, Gently, They Are Timid (candied orange and pink peppercorn, sugared freesia petals, vanilla bean, and white honey) “The weird the Spirit brings,” as mentioned in the lyrics of this perfume’s inspiration is jaunty and bright, and indeed spirited. This could be the signature scent of the most gleeful parlor ghost, whose enthusiasm for the spectral life is utterly contagious. The first manifestation brings bursts of rosy spice and diaphanous flower petals before settling into its true form: a tatted lace doily holding the memory of creamed toffees and sugared meringues, all grounded in something as smooth and refined as the cream in a proper lady’s tea. The spirits probably attend her séances just to watch her elaborate table-floating mechanisms with fond amusement – they’re happy to play along with a hostess who goes to such lengths to entertain them.

Lavender Avocado Toast (a toasted slice from the middle of a springy, oaty loaf blessed with a rich green schmear and sprinkled with lemon juice and lavender sea salt) This is not the avocado toast I was expecting – but rather a delicate, floral violet-tinged lavender jam mingling with thick, cultured salted butter of such distinct creamy richness, all melting into warm, crusty golden toast that’s been dusted with what might be flower-infused sugar, might be fairy dust. This is what happens when your trendy café is secretly run by flower fairies who’ve decided to put their own enchanting spin on the brunch menu.

The Flame of the Bear (fir resin, bayberry, myrrh, mistletoe, and oak bark) When I smell The Flame of the Bear, memory catches in my throat like pine smoke: the same grandmother who brought out those crystal dishes of candy I mentioned in The Season of Ghosts had a bayberry candle whose scent is everything that Christmas is to me today, as an adult: a soft sweetness twined with delicate spice, the very essence of evergreen twilights and December promises. She would unwrap it from tissue paper with such care, as if it held more than just wax and scent – and of course it did. Some scents are time machines, and this one carries me back through winters past, when love could be captured in something as simple as candlelight and its reflection in her eyes. I can’t smell this without seeing her light it, then reaching for my hand (so I wouldn’t touch it!)

Krampus Kreme Latte (hazelnuts, almonds, and coffee beans sweetened with heavy cream froth and honey and spiced with ginger, black pepper, black cardamom, and cacao.) When I smelled this extremely robust coffee scent, I thought, “woweee, this smells like spicy Krampus coffeeshop romantasy #booktok drama!”

KRAMPUS’S FORBIDDEN GRIND
#1 in Demon Romance
(CW: coffee addiction, consensual soul bargaining)
When artisanal coffee roaster Peppers McGee* accidentally summons Krampus with her darkest, most potent brew yet, she doesn’t expect him to become her most demanding regular. The way he salaciously savors her honey-kissed foam and black pepper sprinkle makes her wonder if he’s hunting for more than just the perfect cup. Between the scorching intensity of fresh-ground beans and the sweet heat of their growing attraction, Luna must decide: keep playing it safe with her usual roasts, or risk it all on a blend that could consume her completely.

“The coffee shop demon romance I never knew I needed” – BookTok
“Finally, a Krampus who knows his way around an espresso machine” – Literal Demons Book Club

*Peppers McGee shows up in a lot of my perfume stories! See also Blue Oud by Cognoscenti and Eldritch by Pineward

The Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab 2023 Yule collection is currently live and available for purchase. As this is a limited edition series, sample sizes imps are not available.

Need more Yule scents? Have a peep at my Yule reviews from 2023, 2022 and 2021 and a single review for 2019 though I could swear I have several years’ worth of BPAL Yule reviews floating around that out there. And I know this because…

…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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BPAL Antique Lace Through the tiny gabled window of a dollhouse attic, a secret scene unfolds: a miniature lace shawl lies draped across a trunk, its delicate stitches dusted with what could be petit four crumbs, could be breakfast cereal marshmallows – fairy-sized sweets scattered by some forgotten child’s hand. Beside it, pearly mothballs like strange sugar drops rest among cobwebby linens that exhale their milky-musky-powderiness. From a diminutive crystal perfume bottle in the corner, phantom florals and delicate vanilla mingle with dust motes in the afternoon sunlight, the whole tiny world held in perfect, timeless suspension. (This is a scent I have had for a long time but have never reviewed until now. I am sad to say that I think it is long discontinued)

In Arquiste Venice Rococco, I am reminded of that iconic scene in The Company of Wolves, and my imagination does the rest: the wedding party dissolves into wolves, but their powdered costumes and countenances still hang in the air – rice-white, chalk-soft, cloud-thick, falling like snow in a fairy tale gone corrupt and perverse. Powder piles in drifts against the walls, powder floats in sheets through candlelight, powder settles like ash on abandoned masks, powder dusts every surface until the mirrors suffocate in white. The scent floats between reality and nightmare, each breath drawing in more sweet, choking powder. Underneath all those layers of white lies something wild – teeth behind the powder puff, claws stirring up fresh clouds with every step. This is what’s left at the banquet table after the cursed aristocrats’ lycanthropic transformations, their abandoned feast drowning in drifts of violet-white dust, confections, and silverware scattered like bones beneath a blanket of perfumed snow.

I have a discovery set from Anjali, whose only scent I have had any previous experience with was Under The Mango Tree, via the Seattle Perfumers discovery set.

I am still in the midst of sampling them, but here are thoughts on a few so far:

– Monsoon Madness: Sitting by an open window on a rainy morning, curtains fluttering in the damp breeze, a single rose in a vase before you. Its crimson blooms, a vivid velvet contrast to the early glooms, offer their dawn song to the ghostly morning light. Beneath it, a misty musk mingles with barely-there spices, like steam rising from wet earth. The fragrance undulates like those curtains – whispering past, then drawn back, never still, never quite solid.

– Mantra: Where pools of clearest water catch the light, seek the violet that blooms beneath no soil. Bright as amethyst, suspended in golden amber, yet flowing like honey through crystal streams. Each ripple reveals its secret – a flower preserved in liquid that cannot wet, a sweetness that flows yet never moves. Beneath it all, warm amber holds these fragments, a fleeting eternity captured in impossible depths.

– Tiger Bright: In halls of cedar and cypress, vetiver traces a map in sharp strokes. In the shadows, leather guards ancient secrets, pepper sparks like flint on stone. Then – at the perfect moment, revelation: when sun meets crystal – hold aloft the light of spice through smoked glass. Turmeric and coriander illuminate what was always there and mark an X in gold. The fragrance hovers like illuminated dust – austere yet radiant, earthbound yet strangely weightless.

Eauso Vert Fruto Oscuro: In the basement of an ancient Spanish mission, there’s a forgotten wine cellar where the air is thick with centuries of fermentation. The massive barrels have burrowed into the cellar floor, their wooden staves blackened with time. Here, the California Raisins – those claymation creatures of 80s fame – have found their true calling as bacchanalian priests of a midnight sabbath.

They dance in the dark, their wrinkled bodies glistening with communion wine that’s gone deliciously corrupt. The sacrament itself has evolved, developed consciousness, learned to crawl out of its casks at night. It carries the memory of fruit that ripened past the point of virtue, fruit that chose to embrace decay as a form of transcendence.

Black cherries prowl, lush, wayward creatures of the night, leaving trails of wax and ink in their wake, while patches of moss grow in impossible shades of purple. Somewhere in the darkness, a quince tree has taken root in the stone, its fruits fermenting on the branch, dripping jam that tastes like the midnight confession of wicked ghosts.

This is fruit that has rejected the sun, each drop a tiny black mass, an unholy celebration of fruit that’s gone ravenously feral in the dark.

TLDR; fruit as creature of the night; goth California Raisins; a black mass of unholy cherries

Born to Stand Out Be My Cookie What begins with the promise of toasted grains and caramelized sugar spreading across a baking sheet in a pre-heated 350 degree oven. soon collapses into an unpleasant fruity morass of rehydrating dried fruits – raisins, cranberries, apricots, dates – forgotten in weak rum and lemon juice until they’re all swollen and sodden and gross. (I was trying to come up with a really disgusting Lovecraftian adjective to describe the distended, grotesque nature of the scent at this point, but I gave up. These pulpy masses dissolve murkily when stirred reluctantly into lumpy, sticky porridge whose very revolting nature renders it immediately abandoned. Time passes, and what remains is merely a cloying potpourri, less a deliberate composition than a reminder of culinary aspirations left to wither on a countertop. Alternately, a fruit cake that mysteriously drowned in a lake in 1984 but somehow appears on your holiday table every year like clockwork, bloated and putrid, its origins forever unknown and unspoken.

A Lab On Fire What We Do In Paris is Secret is a perfume I reviewed several years ago, but after recently catching a whiff of it, I concluded that I wasn’t mean enough the first time. In this perfume, I catch whiffs of three fragrances I absolutely loathe – the worst of the worst: KvD Saint, Thierry Mugler’s Angel, and V+R’s Flowerbomb, each contributing its own special brand of cloying falseness, lurking in here like problematic d-list influencers. The combination of bright, honied heliotrope, candied litchee, and powdery vanilla marzipan creates something so aggressively artificial it’s like that specific brand of try-hard glamour that screams, “I learned about luxury from watching unboxing videos.” It’s not badly made; it’s just so deliberately vapid and performatively trendy that it makes you wonder if it’s trolling you. The kind of perfume that would absolutely post a Mukbang video of itself eating other, better fragrances and then crying for the camera in a halo of ring lights.

DSH Perfumes Manhattan is firelight through a vintage lens – all warmth and no flame, the way old films captured hearths in silver-screen shadows. The glow feels richer than memory, grounded in something earthy and lush, a cherry left at the bottom of a glass, soaked in honeyed spirits, plummy with promise. A bitter note cuts through the sweetness, a tiny nibble under the gazes of those who love you, a warmth so enveloping and tender it breaks your heart just a little and brings tears to your eyes. You recognize it instantly: that feeling of safety and love that you can only experience now through the lens of nostalgia because you’ll never be that young or small or loved that way again.

The scent wraps around you like a childhood memory that softens into sadness when held too long. It’s the kind of velvet golden haze that catches in your throat now, because you know such perfect shelter can’t exist outside of memory, outside these few precious frames of black and white film where the firelight always burns just right, and everyone you’ve ever loved is still young and beautiful and waiting in the next room. This is a softly devastating scent, and one that requires emotional steadiness to wear – it has a way of dissolving the present and opening rooms in the memory where beloved ghosts forever wait patiently for you with open arms, where the little heart you long outgrew is forever full.

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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Eye of the Beholder by Emma Bamford lures you in with an irresistible setup – a ghostwriter arrives at a glass mansion (writers! rich people’s excess! all the stuff I love!) in the Scottish Highlands to pen a famous cosmetic surgeon’s memoir, only to find her subject mysteriously absent. Despite its predictable twists and stupid, unconvincing romance, something about this moody thriller kept me turning pages. The atmospheric setting and beauty industry backdrop create an intriguing world, even if the story doesn’t quite deliver on its promise. As a writer, I found myself particularly invested in Maddy’s professional journey, though the resolution of her work situation left me fuming. A flawed but weirdly compelling read.

Glass Houses by Madeline Ashby follows Kristen, a “chief emotional manager” at a tech startup, who along with her colleagues and their eccentric billionaire CEO Sumter, finds themselves stranded on a mysterious island after their plane crashes. The survivors discover a high-tech mansion that proves to be both shelter and threat, as people start dying one by one. The story weaves between island events and Kristen’s questionable character and complex past, creating a tense thriller that mixes near-future tech with classic locked-room mystery elements.

Parents’ Weekend by Alex Finlay follows five college students who vanish during a campus event, leaving their parents to confront both their children’s secrets and their own. While Finlay’s writing is formulaic – so much so that I can’t even remember characters who apparently appear in multiple books – his short chapters and quick pacing make this a dependable palate cleanser between more intense reads. Not remarkable, but it serves its purpose as a literary breather when you’re tackling denser works alongside it. Publishing May 2025

The Blue Hour by Paula Hawkins unfolds on Eris, a tide-locked Scottish island – that eerie claustrophobic setting that has served gothic horror so well in works like The Woman in Black and The Third Day. Like those stories, here the tide itself becomes an antagonist, twice daily conspiring to trap you with your fears. When human bones are discovered in a famous artist’s sculpture, an art curator must visit the island’s sole inhabitant, but can only leave during the brief windows when the causeway emerges from the sea. Hawkins uses this natural prison to amplify questions of creativity, isolation, and control through a slow-burning mystery that’s more interested in the psychology of its characters than shocking twists. The rising waters become a countdown clock that transforms every decision into a possible trap.

The House That Horror Built by Christina Henry drops us into a horror fan’s dream job – cleaning a reclusive director’s mansion filled with creepy movie props. The premise sounds like a wonderland for horror fans, but the execution stumbles with repetitive internal monologues (how many times can our protagonist second-guess a moving prop or remind us she needs a new job?) and a rushed ending that fails to deliver on the setup’s promise. While I appreciate any story that features horror-loving characters, this one needed tighter editing to trim the padding and build actual suspense.

Darkly by Marisha Pessl Louisiana Veda, the enigmatic creator of the Darkly game empire, crafted board games that pushed well beyond simple entertainment. Her elaborate puzzles, steeped in Victorian gothic aesthetics, garnered a cultish following before her mysterious death rendered them collector’s pieces worth millions. Enter Arcadia “Dia” Gannon and six other teens, chosen from across the globe for a coveted internship at the Veda Foundation. Their summer quickly transforms into what appears to be Veda’s final, unreleased game – one that never made it to production, perhaps for good reason. Pessl’s world-building shimmers with dark imagination, carrying forward the same haunting intrigue that made Night Film so compelling. The games she’s invented feel startlingly authentic, each one a clever fusion of artistry and psychological manipulation. Dia’s sharp perspective keeps us invested as the mystery deepens, and the plot unfolds in clever layers. A swift, addictive read from an author who excels at crafting dark tales about brilliant, enigmatic creators and the chaos they leave in their wake.

Victorian Psycho by Virginia Feito introduces Winifred Notty, a governess who arrives at dreary Ensor House, where in three months’ time, she informs us that everyone living there will all be dead.  Winifred is tasked with educating the Pounds children in subjects ranging from English and French to ornamental needlework, and in the course of their lessons and bedtimes, we learn that while outwardly embodying Victorian propriety, Winifred’s carefully constructed persona belies a chillingly dark imagination and inner world. As she becomes further entrenched in the estate’s oppressive atmosphere and uncovers the Pounds family’s peculiar proclivities, Winifred finds it increasingly challenging to maintain her façade. If you relished Maeve Fly’s violently irreverent antihero and unhinged plot, you’ll find Winifred Notty’s distorted and uniquely vicious mind equally captivating in this eerie, blunt, and grotesquely humorous masterpiece. Warning to sensitive readers: maybe don’t. Publishing February 2025

Rivers Solomon’s Model Home is an unrelentingly haunting tale centered on the Maxwell siblings – Ezri, Eve, and Emmanuelle. Their childhood in a gated community outside Dallas, where they were the only Black family, was marred by strange and terrifying events in their home at 677 Acacia Drive. This traumatic past has kept them at a distance from both the house and their parents in adulthood. The siblings’ forced return home following their parents’ mysterious deaths sets the stage for a confrontation with their history. As they delve into family secrets and attempt to unravel the truth behind the house’s disturbing occurrences, Solomon crafts an atmosphere of intense unease and palpable dread. I already love reading about the complex dynamics between the siblings, and Solomon’s portrayal of the family kept me invested throughout. I found myself particularly drawn to Ezri’s perspective, though it was often a difficult and heartbreaking place to be. Spending time in Ezri’s head was truly horrifying at times, as their trauma and struggles were so vividly portrayed. Model Home was not anything like I expected. Solomon doesn’t pull any punches when it comes to dark themes and disturbing scenes – it’s a brutal read, no doubt about it. But I found myself unable to put it down, even when it made me uncomfortable. If you’re up for an intense, unsettling read, this book offers a bold, unconventional take on the haunted house story. It’ll make you think, and it’ll take you deep into the heart of family secrets and hidden horrors.

The Unworthy by Agustina Bazterrica Religious extremism meets environmental apocalypse in The Unworthy, where Bazterrica continues her exploration of how quickly humanity devours itself. Inside a mysterious convent, an unnamed woman documents her experiences among the “unworthy” using whatever materials she can find – including her own blood. While less viscerally shocking than Tender is the Flesh’s literal cannibalism, this tale of a brutal religious hierarchy creates its own kind of horror as it examines how power structures consume the powerless. I didn’t find this one as strong or as compelling as her previous work (in fact, it was a bit of a slog in some parts), but Bazterrica’s unflinching style still provokes profound discomfort. Publishing March 2025

In Beta Vulgaris by Margie Sarsfield,  the mundane task of harvesting sugar beets in Minnesota becomes a surreal descent into one woman’s spiraling depression. What begins as a straightforward story about seasonal work to escape debt becomes something far more devastating – and weirdly compelling. Through Elise’s eyes, we experience not just the physical labor of the beet harvest, but the exhausting weight of existing in a mind that’s constantly at war with itself. Sarsfield renders disordered eating, self-loathing, and crushing anxiety with such stark familiarity that you find yourself nodding in recognition even as you wince at the truth of it. It’s all threaded through with a caustic, mean-spirited humor that somehow makes the relentless internal monologue bearable – even darkly entertaining. When mysterious voices begin emanating from the beet pile and workers start disappearing, you’re not quite sure if you’re witnessing a psychological unraveling or something more sinister. The genius is that both readings work, and both are equally horrifying. Publishing February 2025

In The Last Session by Julia Bartz, social worker/art therapist Thea can’t shake the feeling she knows the catatonic patient who shows up at her psychiatric unit – a connection that leads her straight into the tangles of her own messy past. When the patient briefly surfaces only to vanish, Thea follows her trail to a wellness retreat in New Mexico where couples supposedly work through relationship and sexual trauma. The retreat’s increasingly invasive exercises force Thea to confront not just her missing patient’s story, but her own complicated history with a predatory pastor and teenage experiences that left deep scars. The story veers into some wild territory involving reincarnation and cult dynamics, which might lose some readers along the way who are looking for more basic mystery/thriller business. Despite Thea making some questionable choices that stretch belief (especially for someone working in mental health), there’s something compelling about watching her barrel through every red flag in pursuit of answers. P.S. For fellow perfume enthusiasts like me who always notice perfume in their stories, there’s a Clinique Happy mention in these pages. Publishing April 2025

Absolution by Jeff VanderMeer returns us to Area X decades before its formation, weaving together three distinct timelines that demand your complete attention – I had to set aside all other books to fully immerse myself in its complex web. Through a doomed science expedition, a worn-out operative named Old Jim, and the first official Area X exploration team, VanderMeer crafts a story that feels both inevitable and horrifying. I found the novel’s most chilling insight in the insinuation that certain catastrophes are predetermined, but that their severity might be negotiable – if we could even recognize the difference between salvation and extinction when it stands before us. Like looking into an abyss that stares back, Absolution offers only the briefest glimpse of something vast and incomprehensible that will needle at your brain forever, maddening fragments of understanding you won’t even be able to articulate by the time the next book appears.

I picked up It Will Only Hurt for a Moment by Delilah S. Dawson, craving a spooky artist retreat story, and I wasn’t disappointed. To be fair though, I always crave thrillers or mysteries featuring artists or writers at the center! The plot follows Sarah, a potter escaping an abusive relationship, who joins a secluded artists’ colony. Things take a horrifying turn when she unearths a body, and it only gets worse as more corpses appear and her fellow artists start acting bizarrely (somewhat reminiscent of the possessed students in Lois Duncan’s YA gothic horror Down a Dark Hall, if anyone remembers that?) Sarah’s journey from victim to investigator kept me on edge, and she was an absolute hoot – her snarky inner monologue often had me laughing out loud despite the increasingly disturbing events. While the ending felt a bit rushed, I loved the vivid setting of the crumbling resort and the quirky cast of increasingly unhinged artists in this thoroughly enjoyable and very satisfying read.

Guillotine, also by Delilah S. Dawson serves up a fashion-obsessed protagonist who’ll endure a terrible date for a shot at her dream job, only to find herself trapped on an island with the ultra-wealthy family from hell. While it aims to skewer the one-percent with both satire and actual skewering, the story works better as an over-the-top revenge fantasy than social commentary. A quick, gleefully graphic read that’s entertaining enough if you don’t think too hard about it.

Starve Acre by Andrew Michael Hurley follows Richard and Juliette as they grapple with their young son’s death in their isolated Yorkshire house. While Juliette turns to occultists and Richard obsessively digs for an ancient hanging tree’s roots, something darker than grief begins to take hold. When Richard unearths the skeleton of a hare that slowly, impossibly begins to regenerate, Hurley’s folk horror takes a turn from psychological to supernatural. The ending refuses to offer even a glimmer of light in the darkness – what some read as peace feels to me like something far more chilling.

The Doll Factory by Elizabeth Macneal Victorian London seethes with dark possibility in The Doll Factory, where aspiring artist Iris works painting doll faces while dreaming of real canvases. When she meets Pre-Raphaelite artist Louis Frost, she strikes a deal to model in exchange for painting lessons, opening a door to the fascinating world of radical Victorian art. But during the construction of the Great Exhibition, she also catches the eye of Silas, a taxidermist whose obsession turns the novel from historical drama into something much darker. Despite my aversion to romance plots, the rich blend of Pre-Raphaelite art history with gothic suspense made this one worth my time.

The Sphinx and the Milky Way: Selections from the Journals of Charles Burchfield collects intimate journal entries from American painter Charles Burchfield, distilling his vast 10,000-page journals into a small but potent volume. Through his eyes, we experience both the transcendent and mundane – from counting cricket chirps to tell the temperature, to profound reflections on infinity while studying pussywillows. Burchfield’s entries reveal a mind deeply attuned to nature’s mysteries, yet also touched by very human struggles with depression and money worries. His observations shift seamlessly between precise detail and cosmic wonder, creating a quiet but profound meditation on what it means to truly see the world around us. If you’re a sensitive spirit yearning to find meaning in this chaotic world, this book isn’t just a recommendation – it’s essential nourishment for your inner life.

Chuck Wendig’s The Staircase in the Woods reunites four adults haunted by their friend’s disappearance on a mysterious woodland staircase twenty years ago. When the stairs reappear, they’re forced to confront both the supernatural and their own unresolved guilt. While Wendig’s premise is intriguing, and the supernatural elements create an eerie atmosphere, the characters’ trauma exists more in description than experience – we’re told of their deep psychological wounds but never quite feel them ourselves. Though Wendig has a devoted following and he seems like a really nice guy, this emotional distance and utilitarian prose style keep me from fully connecting with his work.

Susan Barker’s Old Soul begins in an Osaka airport, where a missed flight leads Jake and Mariko to discover they share a haunting connection – both have lost loved ones under inexplicably similar circumstances. Their paths crossed with a dark-haired woman who moves through time collecting photographs and leaving broken lives in her wake. Jake’s search for answers takes him through neon-lit cities and across sun-bleached deserts, gathering testimonies from those who’ve encountered this ageless wanderer as she shifts between names and identities. In New Mexico, an ailing sculptor named Theo holds pieces of her story that reach back through centuries. Barker weaves these testimonies into a mesmerizing tapestry, each account adding layers to a mystery where immortality and predation twist together in the shadows of human grief. The novel unfolds with patient, elegant menace, delivering what I felt to be one of the year’s most original and compelling horror stories. Publishing January 2025

Christian Francis’s novelization of Session 9 transports Brad Anderson’s cult horror film to the page, following an asbestos removal crew through the moldering corridors of Danvers State Hospital. The story tracks the psychological deterioration of Gordon Fleming and his crew as they navigate the asylum’s shadow-filled halls, where decades of dark history seep through crumbling walls. The disturbing psychiatric sessions of former patient Mary Hobbes weave through the main narrative, her fractured voices echoing against the backdrop of peeling paint and broken windows. While the novel may not capture every nuance of the film’s suffocating atmosphere, Francis keeps a steady hand on the growing tension as the crew descends deeper into the abandoned institution’s maze-like passages. The result feels more like a companion piece than a reimagining, preserving the core elements that made Anderson’s film so unsettling.

The Summer I Ate the Rich by Maika Moulite and Maritza Moulite What’s a teenage zonbi to do when she’s got culinary ambitions and a taste for human flesh? In The Summer I Ate the Rich, Brielle Petitfour balances her dreams of becoming a chef with caring for her chronically ill mother and managing her secret identity as a half-zonbi. When she lands an internship at a pharmaceutical company and starts running an exclusive supper club for Miami’s wealthy elite, Brielle finds herself serving up dishes with very special ingredients sourced from the local mortuary. (I do wish we’d gotten more of an explanation and description of the purpose of this. We somewhat see the results, but I wanted to know more of the hows and they whys.) Despite its horror premise, the book reads more like a YA drama, complete with a romance between Brielle and Preston, the son of a powerful pharmaceutical dynasty. Drawing from Haitian zonbi lore rather than Hollywood-style zombie stories, the authors create an unexpectedly glossy take on what could have been a much darker tale. The story weaves together elements of young love, family dynamics, and class disparity, while keeping its more gruesome aspects surprisingly subtle. Publishing April 2025

No One Gets Out Alive by Adam Neville plunges a desperate Stephanie into the cheapest room she can find, where unnerving encounters quickly devolve into inexplicable terrors. How is this place so cold and dark and hopeless? Where are her housemates that she can hear muttering and sobbing through the walls? Her vile landlord Knacker and his towering, unwashed cousin Fergal add human menace to the supernatural dread – and Nevill excels at making both equally terrifying. Stephanie’s financial anxiety alone had me stressed before anything violent or otherworldly happened! But at over 600 pages, the story is unforgivably bloated, with one late scene taking what feels like twenty pages just to literally light a match. I’m keeping this review brief because if you decide to immerse yourself in the book, you’re already signing up for plenty of reading.

Lost in the Garden by Adam S. Leslie had me at its premise: a forbidden village, a world trapped in an unnatural permanent summer where ghosts roam freely, and that marvelously unsettling folk-horror vibe I can never resist. When I couldn’t find a library copy anywhere, I broke down and bought it. What a letdown. Though I enjoyed Leslie’s writing style and the way he could turn a phrase, the story meanders endlessly before even reaching Almanby. We spend 450 pages with characters I never connected with – particularly Heather, who reads like a hyperactive feral toddler rather than an adult, and Antonia, whose simmering but persistent obsession with Heather drives them through pointless wandering. I usually DNF books this tedious, but having actually paid for it, I stubbornly kept reading, hoping it would click into place. It didn’t. I’d give Leslie another try – he can write when he wants to – but this book desperately needed a ruthless editor.

I could not possibly end 2024 with what turned out to be the most disappointing read of the year (see Lost in the Garden, above), so I had to squeak in one more. The Bewitching by Silvia Moreno-Garcia weaves together three timelines of witchcraft and dark academia, following grad student Minerva as she investigates an obscure horror writer whose famous novel was inspired by her roommate’s mysterious 1930s disappearance. As someone who loves academic mysteries and deep dives into forgotten authors, I was hooked by the premise alone. While the ’90s setting initially charmed me with its familiar touchstones (Minerva’s Discman loaded with The Pixies, The Sneaker Pimps, and about twenty other familiar things, along with references to things like the Molly Tanzer Library and a philosopher named Stephen Graham Jones), the constant cultural name-dropping eventually felt like too much of a good thing. Moreno-Garcia deftly handles the multiple narratives and ties everything together neatly, though seasoned mystery readers might spot the twists coming. As Ruthie Langmore says, “I don’t know shit about fuck,” and even I was able to see who’s who and what’s what and where things were going. Still, this atmospheric tale of dangerous magic and buried secrets kept me engrossed to the last page and was a way better end to the year! Publishing July 2025

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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As another year draws to a close, it’s time for my annual tradition of sharing the things that made life a little more interesting, beautiful, or manageable throughout these past twelve months. While scrolling through my camera roll and peering into dusty browser bookmarks, I’m reminded that our tastes and needs aren’t easily categorized – one day, I’m seeking out antique porcelain dolls; the next, I’m hunting down mushroom-themed kitchenware or researching the coziest socks. So I have tried my best to organize everything but it’s sort of all over the place!

These yearly round-ups have become something of a diary for me, marking not just the things I acquired but the shifting interests and small obsessions that carried me through the seasons. Some are practical solutions to everyday problems, others pure whimsy; a few might spark recognition (“oh, you loved that too?”), while others might seem delightfully bizarre. That’s the beauty of these personal inventories – they’re as much about the story they tell as the items themselves.

Before I dive into this rather extensive list of needful things, I should mention that not everything here is a 2024 discovery. (Some I might have even mentioned in last year’s Needful Things!) Some are old favorites that proved their worth yet again, while others are new finds that quickly became essential. There’s no rhyme or reason to the order, just an honest accounting of the things that brought value, joy, or inspiration to my days.

WEARABLE DELIGHTS

❇ Thigh Society cooling shorts (so good for wearing under skirts and dresses)

❇ TomboyX adjustable compression top (good if you got the ol’ body dysmorphia and don’t like the feel of your boobers flopping)

❇ Rio Wolf Protect Trans Folks shirt from Shop Kalma

❇ This perfect black sweatshirt from Altar + Orb

❇ I have a few pairs of basic staples that are stupid expensive but very worth it because they get A LOT of use:

– these yoga pants from Kira Grace (I have both the capri and regular length; I use them as pajamas)
– these even more expensive black linen pants from State the Label (summer pants)
– these black pants from Universal Standard (winter pants)

❇ I bought the Scorpio coat from Lala because I was hoping to wear it to Asheville this past Thanksgiving, but for obvious reasons, the trip fell through. It’s still a great coat.

❇ I’ve always loved the look of Dr. Martens, but I find them complicated and uncomfortable. These Dr. Marten Chelsea boots are easy and perfect.

❇ This frock from Fraktura is my version of the little black dress, but for everyday wear. I got this a few years ago, but it probably gets more wear than anything else in my wardobe.

ADORNMENTS & TREASURES

❇ This year, I picked up a few pieces from some of my favorite jewelers, and they’ve become everyday items:

– The Perpetua necklace from Flannery Grace Good

– The Passe-Partout necklace from Under the Pyramids

– These little acorn earrings from Alexis Berger

❇ I also really got into vintage gold jewelry this year and picked up some lovely pieces from the following shops…

– Gold chain and shield from Caron Power jewelry

– Garnet ring from Victoria Sterling Antiques

WORKSPACE IMPROVEMENTS

I’ve written before about my tendency to tolerate things rather than change them, but this year I really tried to not make my life harder than it had to be!

❇ I am on the phone all day for my day job, and I have a permanent crick in my neck from cradling the receiver between my ear and shoulder. I finally decided to join the future and bought a headset. I still hate to work, but OMG, this has made things a million times easier. I hate that my best purchase of the year is the most boring one, but it is true.

❇ Between the books, the knitting, the perfume, the books– and did I mention books??– my desk is a mess. I bought a little shelf to roll under my desk for my books. Second best purchase of 2024.

❇ This is a masking tape and Sharpie mount to stick on your refrigerator, so it’s always handy to date and label the broth you’re freezing. There are probably lots of uses for it, but that’s what I do.

❇ A scissor holster??? Seems like the silliest thing ever? Except when you stop to consider how often you find yourself asking, “Where’s the scissors?” They’re on the fridge, next to the masking tape!

SUSTENANCE & PROVISIONS

❇ We’ve been doing soup for breakfast for the past few years, and I like to serve some little sides to go alongside it. These savory, tangy mushrooms are so good! And re: little sides, I love these little scalloped dishes to serve them in.

❇ As someone who does not love pancakes, waffles, or biscuits, I’m forever seeking OTHER uses for leftover buttermilk, and this roasted chicken recipe was probably the best chicken I’ve ever made.

❇ I have been making this Thai coconut shrimp soup at least once a week for the past four months.

❇ I perfected my roast potatoes this year. I’m not a potato fan unless they are mashed into oblivion or have all their inherent potato-iness fried out of them, but even I can admit these are pretty okay.

❇ We’re already big fans of Çılbır, or Turkish eggs, so I was interested when I saw people talking about “Turkish pasta,” or basically a lazy or deconstructed version of a Turkish dumpling dish called Manti. We’ve been making it with Impossible Meat, which is what we had on hand to work with, but I can’t wait to try it out with lamb.

❇ I made A LOT of these two-ingredient bagels this year.

❇ Two YouTube channels for culinary inspiration: we love watching Beryl attempt to make dishes from different cultures around the world, and I also really enjoy Nushi Kitchen Life’s gentle, inspired Japanese meals.

❇ When Ývan broke his foot this summer, our schedule got a bit disrupted. The Korean grocery store is in a weirdly situated spot where the traffic makes me nervous, so I started ordering what I needed online instead. Sayweee is an Asian grocery delivery service that has amazingly fresh stuff and a really wonderful variety of basically everything you can want. I’m sharing a referral link where if you sign up for it through me, you get $10 or something like that.

BEAUTY RITUALS

❇ This year, I’m using two things that probably work the same, but I love them both and alternate between them; I’m From Mugwort Essence & ONE THING CICA Toner

❇ I really like this bright green nail polish and I use this gel-effect top coat with it.

❇ I tried two new lip masks this year, one from Fenty and this manuka honey one. The Fenty one is heavier and stickier, and this one is more…slippy. If you know what I mean? I prefer slippy over sticky.

❇ I’ve gravitated away from crazy lip colors over the past few years and mainly just stick with Black Honey but I love this beetle-winged Medusae lip sheer from Rituel de Fille.

❇ This very silly headband and wristband set that’s actually ridiculously useful for washing your face and stopping the water from dripping all over you.

❇ This sun and stars claw clip from Winona Irene that’s giving 90’s celestial decor and pyramid catalog.

❇ This summer, I gave into my love of Elizabeth W’s Té scent and purchased one of every product that they put it in.

❇ Every year, I sing the praises of the foot soak. Light candles, scent your tub, scrub your tooties, and put on the softest socks afterward. It’s a good time.

❇ I sampled a lot of perfumes this year! Some standouts are:

– Stora Skuggan Hexensalbe smells like the Sleep No More witch’s rave (review)

– Diptyque Tempo is a patchouli that has walked the halls of Hill House (review)

– 4160 Tuesdays Complicated Shadows is a perfume for the insomniac hours of a late-night stroll through your hometown (review)

– Naomi Goodsir Nuit de Bakelite is summer flooded storm drains and the fetid promise whispered by a monster in the dark (review)

– Neil Morris Dark Season is the dramatic tenebrism of all those old, spooky gothic novels and musty 19th-century weird fiction. (review)

– Mihan Aromatics Mikado Bark is a hobbit’s goblincore hauntological playlist (review)

– Eauso Vert Fruto Oscuro is a goth California Raisin (review)

– Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab Darling, Darling smells like the tender caresses of a succubus who is feeding you a handful of Smarties. (review found here)

– Arcana Wildcraft On the Wing is the broken-winged beating of the hollow heart, the devastating language of wounds, the darkness that embraces everything. (review)

– Filigree & Shadow Pieces of My Heart like standing at the threshold of revelation, where the raw, messy horrors of being human crystallize into a single, breathtaking moment of grace. (review)

DIGITAL DISTRACTIONS

❇ Poetic Puppets on Instagram is all muppet imagery juxtaposed with poetry, and it is beautiful and melancholic and funny and perfect.

❇ Sylvanian Drama on TikTok. OMG. Just…just go look at it. I don’t want to spoil it for you

❇ Here is a quartet of newsletters whose arrival in my inbox I always look forward to…!

– In New Bands for Old Heads, Gabbie shares new music for the sensibilities of people who stopped listening to new music in the nineties and early 2000s.

– In the 70s Sci-Fi Art newsletter, Adam Rowe shares incredible imagery and chatty, cheeky commentary about wild, weird world of retro science fiction art.

– J. Simpson’s Hauntology Now covers all the spooky books and movies and peculiar sounds and sentiments that people like us (whatever that means to you, you’re probably right) are interested in.

– Lady Whistlethreads is a gossipy scandal sheet of all the drama that’s happening on the writer/author side of social media. It’s not something you read to feel smarter; it’s a grab-your-popcorn thing.

PRACTICAL MAGIC & PRECIOUS THINGS

❇ It is ridiculous how happy this little flickering nightlight makes me!

❇ I used to keep a water bottle at my desk, but in my (probably perimenopausal middle age), I am peeing ALL THE TIME, so I am hydrating slightly less. Now, I keep a cute little carafe in the kitchen and grab a drink whenever I walk by it. Also, is my pee WETTER than it used to be? So much weird shit they do not tell you about getting older.

❇ Sometimes, Ývan has late-night D&D sessions, and after he broke his foot, I got into the habit of keeping the light on for him after I’d gone to bed. I didn’t want him lurching around in the dark, possibly breaking the other foot. My gorgeous mulberry silk Altar + Orb eye mask got a lot of use this summer and autumn!

❇ Thanks to Roses & Rue’s exquisite taste and keen eye for hauntingly beautiful antiques, this year brought an especially marvelous collection of treasures, each piece whispering its own cryptic tale while gracing my walls, adorning my vanity, and housing my most precious things

❇ Rebecca Chaperon’s artwork transports me to crystalline realms where playful spirits dance with shadows; her pieces are portals to kaleidoscopic dreamscapes, and I was lucky enough to commission a bite-sized version of one of her works for my Patreon (while the full-sized original graces my wall.)

❇ Alyssa Thorne’s midnight floriography speaks directly to my flower-loving heart – her lustrous blooms and kindred glooms capture both shadow and illumination in every exposure, each print a tenebrous twilight garden that I’ve slowly collected to create my own personal gallery of beautiful darkness.

❇ Open Sea Design Co.’s exquisitely moody stationery has kept me organized in the most darkly beautiful way possible – their witchy notepads, occult-inspired planners, and Victorian-themed notecards transform mundane to-do lists and correspondence into acts of everyday magic.

CINEMATIC SPELLS

Most of my intentional movie-watching takes place during October when I undertake my annual ritual of 31 Days of Horror, a month-long immersion into shadows and spooky stories that serves as my personal ceremony for ushering in the darker half of the year. Here are some standouts that left their mark:

❇ Oddity haunted me with its tale of a blind medium who arrives at her murdered twin’s former home with a screaming wooden mannequin in tow – a slow-burning Irish horror that masterfully builds dread through isolation, betrayal, and one extremely unsettling piece of folk art.

❇ In She Will, the mesmerizing Alice Krige embodies an aging film star who finds dark redemption at a Scottish healing center built upon witch’s ashes – a brooding folk horror that transforms trauma into supernatural power through misty woods and Clint Mansell’s ethereal score

❇ Abigail turned out to be exactly the kind of gleefully gory vampire romp I’d hoped for – what begins as a crime heist (starring Matthew Crawley and Gus Fring kidnapping a tiny dancer!) spirals into delicious chaos when their smol captive reveals her true nature, trading her ballet slippers for glittery sneakers perfect for a night of stylish carnage.

WORD WITCHERY

❇ Two collections of quietly unsettling stories captured my imagination this year: Kathryn Harlan’s Fruiting Bodies, where mushrooms bloom on human flesh and childhood fears take strange new shapes, and Mystery Lights by Lena Valencia, whose economical prose illuminates eerie vignettes of the American Southwest where cave tours go wrong and desert retreats harbor sinister undercurrents.

❇ Psychedelica Satanica by Sybil Oxblood-Pope Pope was a delightfully deranged surprise – a B-movie horror romp in book form that follows two sisters dabbling in dark magic, featuring the scene-stealing Vinegar Bill (a wonderfully snarky demon-goat) and enough absurdist humor to balance out the infernal menace.

❇ Marina Yuszczuk’s Thirst weaves together two haunting tales – a vampire seeking refuge in 19th century Buenos Aires and a modern woman facing her mother’s mortality – through prose as lush and Gothic as du Maurier’s, creating an exquisite meditation on immortality, desire, and the shadows between life and death.

❇ Josh Malerman’s Incidents Around the House plunged me back into the overwhelming uncertainty of childhood through the story of a young girl and the thing in her closet that wants “inside her heart” – a masterfully sustained exercise in mounting dread that had me holding my breath and weeping with terror as I turned each page. (That’s not an exaggeration, this book scared me so bad it made me cry!)

❇ Susan Barker’s Old Soul spins an intricate web from an Osaka airport encounter into a centuries-spanning hunt for an immortal collector of photographs whose passage through time leaves broken lives and inexplicable losses – a patient, elegant horror story that gathers its power through accumulated testimonies of grief and predation. (This is a review for an advanced copy, the book publishes in January 2025)

❇ Elizabeth Sulis Kim’s anthology Spiritus Mundi explores how writers channel creativity through mystical means – from scrying to tarot reading, featuring standouts like Pam Grossman’s phenomenal “Invocation to Iris” and creating its own kind of magic by sparking uncanny synchronicities during my reading experience.

❇ The Sphinx and the Milky Way reveals Charles Burchfield’s intimate observations of nature’s hidden frequencies – from singing sunflowers to humming telephone wires – through journal entries that pulse with the same mystical vitality as his watercolors, offering a glimpse into the mind of an artist who saw magic thrumming beneath the surface of everyday life.

SONIC ACCOMPANIMENT

❇ Two albums dominated my listening this year: Chelsea Wolfe’s She Reaches Out To She Reaches Out To She, a darkwave journey of industrial storms and gothic shadows, and Pom Pom Squad’s Mirror Starts Moving Without Me, which transforms similar themes of identity and self-reflection into sharp-edged pop – both artists wrestling with different versions of themselves through distinctly different sonic landscapes.

❇ A trio of singles cast their spell in heavy rotation this year – Haley Heynderickx’s “Gemini,“ London Grammar’s “Into Gold,” and Suki Waterhouse’s “Supersad” – each one a different facet of metamorphosis, where past selves whisper to future ones and sorrow transmutes into strange new shapes.

And there we have it – another year’s worth of treasures, trials, and transformations catalogued for posterity. As always, these lists feel simultaneously too long and not long enough; there are surely things I’ve forgotten, discoveries that slipped through the cracks of memory, or favorites that didn’t quite make it onto the page.

I’d love to hear what caught your eye this year – what objects of beauty or utility found their way into your life? What stories kept you up at night, what songs became the soundtrack to your days? Share your own needful things in the comments below.

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 know I said I was done with the navel-gazing for the year, but I was obviously mistaken. This may be the final installment in what has admittedly been a rather self-indulgent series of origin stories – explorations of the fascinations and fixations that have shaped who I am, from my love of horror to my magpie attraction to shiny things. And it seems fitting to write about my love of the kitchen and culinary experimentation as the year draws to a close; with the chilly weather and the dark nights, it’s really the coziest time of the year to be thinking about it… and aside from that, it was someone’s question about where my love of cooking came from that sparked and shaped this whole series to begin with!

Thanks to that curious commenter’s question, I’ve found myself increasingly drawn to examining these threads of identity over the past year, these passions that make me uniquely me. Perhaps it’s the looming approach of my fiftieth year that spurs this relentless self-documentation, this need to understand and chronicle the specific alchemy that created this particular human consciousness. Or …perhaps I’m just really self-absorbed?

I spend a lot of time thinking about how incredibly narcissistic it is to write so extensively about oneself. To document every quirk and peculiarity, to chart the etymology of personal obsessions, to treat one’s own development like some fascinating case study worthy of extensive analysis. It’s the kind of thing that keeps me awake at night sometimes – this constant need to examine, to understand, to put into words the how and why of becoming myself. The very existence of this blog, really, is an exercise in sustained narcissism. Who am I to think my thoughts about perfume or jewelry or cooking are worth preserving? What hubris leads me to believe my personal evolution merits documentation? And yet here I am, year after year, continuing to write these missives into the void.

As I edge closer to that half-century mark, I find myself thinking often about all the humans who have existed before me and all those who will come after. We share so many commonalities, so many universal experiences and emotions – and yet each of us is uniquely ourselves in ways that will never be replicated. One day, I will cease to exist. Will anyone remember that I was here? Will it matter that I spent countless hours pondering perfume and cooking and horror stories? Perhaps not. And yet something in me insists that it does matter, that leaving some record of this particular consciousness, this specific combination of passions and proclivities, serves some purpose I can’t quite articulate but feel deeply in my bones.

For someone who spends their leisure time consuming ghost stories, fictional horror podcasts, and gruesome Reddit /no sleep threads, who decorates their home with oddities and memento mori, who gravitates toward the darkest corners of imagined experience – it might seem strange that my greatest joy comes from making the coziest, most life-affirming things. Warm loaves of bread fresh from the oven, bubbling pots of soup that steam up the windows, crocks of tangy homemade pickles lined up on shelves. But perhaps it’s not so strange after all. The same anxiety that draws me to horror – that need to process fear through stories – dissolves completely in the kitchen. I’m still the person who approaches most of life with the hesitant caution of a medieval food taster at a suspicious monarch’s table. But put me in front of a stove and suddenly I have the unearned confidence of a mediocre white man explaining your own profession to you.

This pocket of fearlessness started in my grandmother’s kitchen. Mawga never set out to teach me anything formally – there were no stern lectures about technique, no rigid rules about measuring, no scolding over messes or mistakes. Instead, I was just allowed to exist in her space while she cooked. I’d hover by her elbow as she stirred pots of chicken and dumplings, breathing in the steam and warmth, or sit cross-legged on the linoleum while she rolled out pie crusts, the air heavy with flour and possibility. Sometimes I’d help, sometimes I’d just watch, but always I was absorbing the rhythms of how she moved through her kitchen, calm and sure.

Those lessons in confidence followed me into my twenties, even when everything else felt uncertain. In high school, with my mother’s specific brand of alcohol and mental illness-fueled chaos, everything was tumultuous and fraught. I comforted myself with a lot of grilled cheese sandwiches. In my early twenties, I shared an apartment with a flaky musician while trying to navigate community college (it took me ten years to get my associate degree; classrooms make me very anxious.) Money was tight – my fast food job barely kept the lights on – but I became surprisingly good at transforming leftovers from family dinners at my grandparents’ into completely different meals, and an impressive number of hamburgers and fries would mysteriously make their way home from my shifts, becoming the foundation for whatever inspiration struck. When you’ve successfully turned three-day-old fast food into something not only edible but actually satisfying, you start to trust your instincts in the kitchen.

My thirties brought a different kind of solitude. Living away from family, trapped in a toxic relationship with someone who was rarely there, the kitchen became both my refuge and my laboratory. My then-boyfriend’s picky palate and nasty temper could have made me timid, could have crushed that confidence I’d developed. Instead, in the long hours alone, I threw myself into increasingly ambitious projects. I made butter from scratch just to see if I could. I spent days perfecting homemade udon noodles, testing and adjusting until the texture was just right. Each successful experiment was a quiet rebellion, an unshackling from the cage I’d found myself in, a reminder that in the kitchen, at least, I answered to no one but myself.

Now, I find myself in a kitchen filled with laughter and appreciation, sharing my culinary adventures with someone who approaches each experimental dish with genuine enthusiasm. Yvan compliments everything I make, even my failures. He’s allowed me to edge him out of the kitchen for the most part, but he has actually taken over Christmas cookie duty – not because my cookies aren’t good, but because baking demands a precision that I can’t seem to submit to. I simply can’t be confined by exact measurements. Don’t stifle me, recipe! This works beautifully for soups and sauces, less so for baked goods and pastries that rely on proper chemistry.

The contrast kind of amazes me sometimes. The same person who lies awake rehearsing minor social interactions, who needs to gather courage just to make a phone call, who has a panic attack at the mere thought of making a left-hand turn – that person will confidently modify treasured family recipes without a second thought. For big family dinners, I’ll attempt entirely new dishes for the first time. I’ll cheerfully ignore precise measurements in baking recipes, because come on–I know what’s best, I do!

This kitchen confidence has become such a fundamental part of who I am that I sometimes forget how remarkable it is – this one space where anxiety’s grip loosens, where uncertainty doesn’t feel threatening. It’s a gift from Mawga, really, though she never explicitly set out to give it to me. By creating a space where I could simply be, where mistakes were just part of the process, and perfection wasn’t the goal, she helped shape a part of me that knows how to move through the world without fear.

As I write this final piece for the year, I have two loaves of sourdough doing their slow rise in the refrigerator. I couldn’t tell you exactly how they will turn out. They’ll do whatever they want to do, and it will be okay. I trust that whatever emerges from the oven will be, if not perfect, at least interesting. And really, isn’t that the best way to end a year? Not with rigid expectations but with the courage to try something new, the confidence to accept whatever results, and the comfort of knowing that in your own kitchen, you are exactly who you need to be.

And perhaps understanding exactly who you are and how you came to be that person sometimes requires writing neurotically detailed 5,000-word blog posts examining your curio cabinet of compulsions and preoccupations! Look forward to more of those in 2025!

All photos in this post are by me, of food I have made.

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 often find myself writing these long, meandering posts on social media – you know, the kind where someone in the comments invariably responds with “ma’am, this is a Wendy’s” (or at least my brain does, after I stop and read the train wreck I’ve just posted to Facebook or whatever) and then halfway through I remember: oh right, I literally have a blog for exactly this sort of rambling introspection. You’d think after maintaining a blog for over a decade, I’d remember that’s where these thoughts belong. But no, sometimes they just spill out wherever I happen to be typing.

Like yesterday, when I posted this:

As someone constantly riddled with low-grade, persistent, and utterly nebulous anxiety, it can be hard to tell when you’re having a good day. I go about my life – writing blog posts, working full-time, cooking dinner, maintaining relationships, doing all the regular human things – and underneath it all, there’s always this dull roar of existential dread. Just constant enough to fade into the background, just loud enough to never quite forget it’s there. And sometimes I think how lovely it would be to just… fall apart. To let everything go to shit and fester in my own misery. But I can’t. Maybe it’s being the eldest child, maybe it’s generational repression, maybe it’s just how I’m wired – but I keep going. I keep functioning. Not because I’m especially resilient or brave, but because I literally don’t know how to stop.

Today was one of those days when I got to wear all of my favorite clothes, layered simultaneously. Living in Florida means these precious few cold days are especially welcome – I spend the entire month of July (the worst month for existential dread) dreaming about cardigans and turtlenecks. It might sound trivial to someone else, but those who know, know. It’s a balm that feels like both safety and joy – I guess we call these glimmers now, these tiny moments when the world feels a little more manageable. When I can finally envelop myself in the warmth and textures of this cocoon I’ve been craving, something shifts ever so slightly.

Maybe it’s the gentle pressure of layers, like a wearable weighted blanket, or the way each piece of clothing becomes another small boundary between my skin and everything else. It’s not about modesty or protection from the cold – it’s about creating space between myself and the world, building a soft fortress of fabric that helps me feel more anchored in my own body. I don’t know why I’m always searching for another layer to add, another soft barrier to wrap myself in, but I do know that on days like this, when I can finally dress the way my body craves, something inside me settles just a little bit.

The anxiety doesn’t go away – it never really does. It’s more like turning down the volume on a radio that’s been playing static in the background of your life for so long that you’ve almost forgotten it’s there. Almost, but not quite. Because even when you’ve learned to function around it and built all these little coping mechanisms and comfort rituals, you’re still aware of its presence, humming away beneath everything else. Not debilitating, not stopping you from living your life or doing your work or maintaining relationships – just there, a constant companion you’ve learned to work alongside.

This pattern of normalizing discomfort isn’t new – I wrote about it years ago when I realized I’d spent decades believing I didn’t deserve basic conveniences or comforts. It was about learning to pack snacks for long car rides or keep painkillers in my bag instead of just suffering through headaches. Just like these layers of clothes I’ve always wrapped myself in, these were all ways of coping that I didn’t even recognize as coping. The shape of the adaptations varies, but the core remains: that deep-seated belief that my discomfort isn’t quite real enough to address. I’ve never been diagnosed or medicated – not out of principle, but because every time I’ve tried to describe this constant background hum to a doctor, I find myself automatically downplaying it, making it sound manageable, bearable. Maybe it’s shame, maybe it’s habit, maybe it’s just what happens when you spend so much time trying to convince yourself that everyone probably feels this way, that it’s not really a problem if you’ve learned to function around it.

It’s strange how adaptation becomes second nature. Building elaborate systems of scaffolding around a shaky foundation becomes normal. The layers of clothing aren’t a solution – they’re just another way of existing alongside something that never quite goes away. Sometimes adapting to discomfort feels easier than figuring out why you needed all these layers in the first place.

And because I know someone will completely bypass all of this emotional excavation and existential pondering to demand “WHERE GET CLOTHES???” – yes, I’ll list the items below. Though, I have to laugh at that particular brand of comment that barrels past all the vulnerability straight to the shopping links. (To be fair, I’m also absolutely that person who will read someone’s gutting personal essay and think, “I feel you deeply in my soul… also where did you get those boots?” At least some of us have the grace or self-awareness or whatever to acknowledge both the emotional weight AND our fashion priorities.)

Anyway: Buggyboy cardigan from WeCrowingHens // linen dress from linenfairytales // tissue turtleneck from J. Crew // high waisted black leggings from Hue // Antique chatelaine charm necklace & shield from Caron Power Jewelry  // gold ring from Victoria Sterling Antiques // Black Dr. Martens Chelsea boots

I suppose I should mention what prompted this particular spiral: a Patreon subscriber canceled their subscription. This isn’t the first time it’s happened and if I continue to maintain it, it won’t be the last. But what they didn’t tell me about running a Patreon is how I’d spiral with rejection and self-loathing everytime someone cancels their subscription. People’s financial circumstances (and interests) change! The economy sucks! A thousand other things unrelated to me or my writing! BUT HEAR ME OUT what if I should just crawl into a hole and give up on everything forever???

By the way, there is a free-level of membership on my Patreon, and I just shared a winter fragrance round-up over there yesterday!

So I mean, obviously, I won’t give up on everything forever. Eldest daughter and all that – the perfectionism, the compulsive need to keep it together, the deeply ingrained belief that falling apart isn’t an option because someone has to stay functional, someone has to keep up appearances, keep the plates spinning, someone has to make sure dinner looks Instagram-worthy even when everything else is crumbling. Might as well be me.

If you enjoy posts like these or if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have written, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?

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