Unquiet
Things

A Sensitive Plant in a garden grew,
And the young winds fed it with silver dew,
And it opened its fan-like leaves to the light.
And closed them beneath the kisses of Night.

And the Spring arose on the garden fair,
Like the Spirit of Love felt everywhere;
And each flower and herb on Earth’s dark breast
Rose from the dreams of its wintry rest.

But none ever trembled and panted with bliss
In the garden, the field, or the wilderness,
Like a doe in the noontide with love’s sweet want,
As the companionless Sensitive Plant.

I first stumbled upon Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “The Sensitive Plant,” a lilting fairytale-poem with gorgeous, distinctive artwork by Golden Age illustrator Charles Robinson, when I was randomly searching for imagery from Robinson that I hadn’t seen before. I had just submitted my final edits to The Art of Fantasy (pub date September 7, 2023!) and I was feeling a bit bereft, the way you feel after a major project that has until that point, possessed all of your time and energy. A sort of “what now?” malaise.

Entranced by the lush, blooming, melancholic loveliness of the full-color plates, I lost a whole evening learning about this little book of “ephemeral beauty and the aspiration to follow dreams when the reality of the senses fails.”  (Peppin, Brigid & Micklethwait, Lucy, “Book Illustrators of the Twentieth Century,” p. 265).

It follows the observance of a beautiful, boundless garden full of aromatic roses and narcissus, snowdrops and violet, jasmine and hyacinth–and, of course, the titular Sensitive Plant– all flowering joyously in concert under the airy, exquisite hand of a nameless caregiver. Alas, the gentle gardener dies, and winter descends upon the fair Eden; the poem then becomes an ode to death and decay, and it’s a bit of a bummer from that point on.

On the subject of that anonymous Sensitive Plant: a spell cast upon me by the idea of this book, I found an inexpensive copy (sadly, it’s missing three plates), and I descended upon it as soon as it arrived. In the preface, the literary critic Edmund Gosse speculates as to what sort of specimen it might be, having all manner of contradictory qualities. Apparently, he reached out to an old friend and Oxford professor to shed some light on the subject. The gentleman hilariously noted, “… the botany of poets is a source of deep anxiety to botanists,” and Gosse goes on to say, “Shelley’s flower-lore is no exception.” For what it’s worth, scholars and readers conjecture that this psychic little plant may be mimosa pudica.

I only paid $50 for my copy, which seems like a steal given its fabulous condition and despite the fact that it’s missing some imagery. I’ve seen it being sold for upwards of $900, though!

The Sensitive Plant has also been illustrated by playwright and illustrator Laurence Houseman in an eerie, intricate Art Nouveau style, which can be seen in this blog post. Below, however, you will find more of Charles Robinson’s accompanying imagery to The Sensitive Plant.

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Lemon Blossom from TRNP is a wholly unexpected and immediate love for me, perhaps bordering on violent obsession. I’ve been fixated on the idea of it ever since sundaysmells mentioned it in her Instagram stories. I sought out a sample, and now there is no going back.I have a lemon tree and a lime tree, and I’ve spent most of my life in FL, surrounded by orange groves. Not literally, of course. I have pretty much always lived in the suburbs, but my point is that I’m keenly familiar with the deeply musky, honeyed, powdered sweetness of citrus blossoms…and this perfume is not even close to that. Which is fine. I’ve sniffed dozens of blossoming citrus fruit tree interpretations, and while so many of them are perfectly lovely, they are more or less all the same. This one, however, is a remarkably unconventional lemon blossom. It’s a heavy-metal music video glamazon duo of the brightest, zestiest lemon and most pungently incendiary, zingiest ginger in matching, metallic-threaded glinting-golden bodysuits, crowns of tresses teased to the heavens with sharp, acrid, patchouli-spiked hairspray and festooned with snowy, fragrant gardenias, and twinning extravagantly climactic guitar solos in a wild tangle of richly floral, fragrant yellow jasmine. This is an intense, sensational, bombastically glamorous lemon, and I have never smelled anything quite like it.

Lady Reading Poetry from Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab is a fragrance inspired by Ishibashi Kazunori’s elegant oil painting. One of the things that I love about BPAL is that so many of their perfumes are based upon works of art–they even have a painting of the month scent, every month. And as someone for whom fragrance translates to visuals in my mind’s eye, I love this. Of course, my mind is a wily and uncooperative creature, and the inspiration for a perfume is not always the imagery that’s conjured on the canvas of my brain, but in this instance, it is spot on. With notes of whispery, tea-stained pages, dusty vanilla reminiscent of tatted lace doilies, satiny creamy sandalwood, and lilac’s pale, wistful floral, this is scent is a charmingly melancholic delicacy, strange and sad and full of longing.

Cartier’s Baiser Volé is a fragrance that I don’t have much to say about, but I do quite like it. This is a linen-y lily with some crisp, leafy green elements and a citrusy clean softness that reminds me of perfumery’s approximation of a bamboo note. It smells of a simulated freshness and synthetic florals, and I don’t mean that in a bad way. More like a 1995 hack the planet Acid Burn Angelina Jolie with a punk Vulcan haircut listening to Kruder & Dorfmeister kind of way. Like it began as something experimental and avant-garde, and then it was pared down to a no-frills, next-to-nothing version of itself–a singular lily–which, in turn, feels kind of edgy and pioneering for its complete lack of bells and whistles. It’s sleek and minimalist in that mid-90s techno sort of way, but also feels like someone you thought was too cool for school and super interesting but when you scratch the surface, there is nothing else going on. Just that one Orbital song, over and over and over.

Espirit d’Amour from Blocki is a fragrance that immediately transported me to childhood in a very specific way. The absolute relief and subsequent elation that school was out for the year. It smells like mornings that are dewy and warm, summer flowers that are just opening to the light of the sun. It smells like spending a weekend early in June with my grandmother, helping her fold a rickety wicker basket of freshly washed and dried bedlinens and towels, bubble baths in the evening with the windows open to the breeze and the call of nightbirds, and flannel nightgowns, and sweet dreams. As an adult, these feelings are even more precious because I recognize them and can put a name to them; Esprit d’Amour is a gently uplifting citrus blossom, delicate lily-lavender laundry musk perfume of freedom from fear, a loosening of that constant knot of dread filling your belly; it feels like a summoning of a safe place for a super nervous kid who grew up to be an enormously anxious adult.

Skylar Vanilla Sky smells like some creative team somewhere thought they should make Mugler’s Angel but for babies. Someone on legal raised their hand and said, “babies are too young for this; they’re boring and can’t handle their shit.” But then the sales team was like, “hey, shut up, this is happening.” The end product was ultimately that apricot-caramel-patchouli Angel blueprint but heavily watered down with Bath and Body Works’ discontinued Rice Flower and Shea body spray. The result is something profoundly and offputtingly creamy that smells like you accidentally mixed up your coconut hand cream with your vanilla pudding cup, slathering the wrong one and slurping the wronger one. Save your money, discerning babies. This stuff is pretty gross.

Fantôme Duende is a craggy, forested floral with entangled elements of tree sap, jagged rocky hills, and purple flowers. It calls to mind Backworld’s song, “The Devil’s Plaything“: As in a ruin where violets grow / In moss-covered fields / On cold marble stone… But it also makes me think of Mikey Bustos’ “Filipino Mythical Creatures Rap.” These, you will surely note, are two very different songs.

Accento Overdose from Xerjoff is a green, fruity floral: notes of vibrant, tropical pineapple and something apple-y, but not, maybe more like the delicate floral crispness of Asian pear, with underpinnings of soft, musky jasmine and blowsy late summer rose, elevated by balsamic pine and the aromatic sharpness of eucalyptus. It’s a fragrance with a distinctive personality, something I immediately recognize as a diva, lots of glamour, a real insistent “look at me!” vibe–but this one, she’s a real feisty, fiendish wicked queen. She’s Llanview’s legendary femme-fatale, Dorian Lord, whose list of crimes on soap central dot com is extensive and kind of hilarious. Accento Overdose evokes One Life To Live’s best, bitchiest, most iconic villain, but I’ll stop there because this is a $335 fragrance, and I’m not trying to convince anyone–least of all myself–that they need it. And yes, that is also a baby-faced Nathan Fillion in the photo that I linked to.

On the less expensive end, Death and Floral’s Famous Blue Raincoat offers a scent description of “old typewriter, weathered blue fabric, and static,” but what I smell is crushed violet pastilles, misted and mixed with honeyed, mineralic Gewürztraminer to create a runny pastel paste, which a dreaming artist paints onto a neoprene shower curtain, the image channeled by punk-poet voices from beyond. It is abstract art/spirit art/automatic writing rendered in bygone materials by a contemporary hand. It’s weird as hell but also strangely lovely, and I’m a little obsessed with it.

I began the month of February with a lemon fragrance, and with Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab’s Honeycomb, Lemon, and Sugar Cane, I guess I am ending the month with a lemon fragrance as well. I’m feeling lazy, and instead of writing here about it after the fact, I will direct you to a little video I made about the scent a few days ago. TLDR; if you like these, you will adore this fragrance.

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I first saw the art of Ed Emshwiller–though I didn’t know it was Ed Emshwiller–on the cover of William Hope Hodgson’s The House On The Borderland, a book described by a friend and kindred lover of weird writing as “a found manuscript, swine creatures and the swift passing of the universe…is the narrator sane or not?”

As a matter of fact, if you are keen to compile a list of strange stories and terrifying tales, see their list of suggestions in this oldie-but-goodie blog post.

I don’t know if I loved the book, but I was absolutely obsessed with the cover art. And I don’t know what your idea of fun looks like, but for me, I derive fantastic enjoyment in trying to figure out who creates the art that I love–whether that takes the form of hunting down the source of annoying uncredited artwork on Instagram or Facebook, or, in this case, tracking down the artist responsible for decade’s old marvelously lurid cover. But honestly, I don’t think there was much detective work involved here. I just did a browser search for “house on the borderland cover artist,” and it was maybe the fourth search result. Super easy! Barely an inconvenience! It also led me to this cover by Alan Aldridge for the book, which is a lot of silly fun, too.

An astonishingly prolific and relatively successful artist, Ed Emshwiller (1925-1990) painted over 400 illustrations for the covers of sci-fi magazines, including Galaxy, Infinity, and Astounding Science Fiction, as well as many novels by the likes of Philip K. Dick, Leigh Brackett, and Samuel R. Delany.  Apparently, some months his art counted for a third of all those included in the pulpy science fiction publications.

Not just a colorful renderer of menacing brain-controlling alien monsters, secret agent spacemen exploring the cosmos, and chic, futuristic goddesses from other dimensions–his works spanned abstract expressionist painting, commercial illustration, avant-garde film, video and computer art, and collaborations with dancers, choreographers, and composers.

You can see find an extensive listing of his covers at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database, which is the resource I used to match the images I found below, to their respective book titles or or magazines.

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If you read a book and write a review for it and share that review on the internet, but then those websites with your reviews close down or rebrand, and your work disappears… did it even happen?

This is something I’ve been struggling with for a while, and being a stubborn so-n-so, I have tediously scraped archive.org for my past work and have managed to compile over 100 book reviews – almost 25K worth of writing! See below for an absolutely massive collection of book reviews, originally posted between 2016-2020. They’re all out of order, chronologically, and I wouldn’t suggest you read this straight through, anyway. It’s a lot. There’s not a human person on Earth with that kind of attention span! Maybe just bookmark it to peruse at your leisure when you need a random recommendation. Maybe skim through and pick out a few things for your Goodreads list. Maybe you find a review that you vehemently disagree with and leave me a comment telling me so!

Do with this as you will!

Darkly: Blackness and America’s Gothic Soul by Leila Taylor Darkly was an illuminating, insightful read that gave me pause with every sentence. Part personal memoir, part cultural critique, part valuable history lesson, Taylor meditates on the Black experience and gothic culture through a collection of observations on music, film, art, philosophy, architecture, decay, and violence– and through these observations invites us to more closely analyze and question the aesthetics of those dark things we hold dear.

Something that struck me, in particular, is where Taylor asserts that: “goth is above all privileging the imagination over reason, choosing the fanciful over the pragmatic, forgoing restraint for excess,” and she further comments on the privilege of this frivolity and how this ostentatiousness is typically seen as a sentiment only for white people. That Blacks must be ever vigilant (due to the very justified paranoia that they can’t afford distraction) and therefore there’s this sense of gravitas or this sense of pride that they’re supposed to keep up and aren’t allowed strangeness or bizarreness. In this interview she brings up the phrase that gets tossed around, “What kind of White nonsense is that?” and further posits the often unasked question, that ”how is it that white people are allowed nonsense, but somehow Black people are not?”

The Woman In Cabin 10 by Ruth Ware. Eh. It’s a mystery-thriller from Ruth Ware. A journalist goes on a bespoke, luxury cruise, thinks she hears someone being thrown overboard in the next cabin and investigates the incident after being told there was no one actually staying in that cabin. You either like this sort of thing, or you don’t. I don’t think Ware’s efforts are necessary staples of the genre, but they are pretty fun whodunits, why-dunits, and maybe-even-youdunits. Like…I’d pay full price for them at an airport bookshop, but I’d leave it on my seat for the next passenger because I don’t see the need to make it a permanent addition to my bookshelf.

I think what I exceptionally don’t love are her characters, which typically seem to be people with messy lives that are in some fashion or another, either slowly or spectacularly, going to shit. Which hey, that could be any of us. I can’t be too judgy, I guess. But these individuals are annoyingly reckless and irresponsible (or at least they seem so to me, but I can be a little stodgy sometimes, and also maybe I see something in them that makes me feel very uncomfortable about how carelessly I behaved in my twenties) and there’s something …disagreeable about them that makes me not very sympathetic to whatever corpse-ridden mess they find themselves in.  However. I’m on my library’s waitlist for the new title from this author so what do I know, anyway?

The Witch Elm by Tana French If Ruth Ware is the “eh it’s ok” of the psychological crime thriller authors, then I would venture to say that Tana French is one of the luminaries of the genre. What I enjoy most, I think, about French’s stories, is that neither the plots nor the perspectives/point of view take a predictable course, the characters don’t know each other or themselves very well, and even the detectives can’t necessarily be trusted. In The Witch Elm, Toby is a carefree, #blessed sort who doesn’t have to try very hard at anything and things just generally turn out okay for him with no effort on his part. Until…they don’t turn out very okay at all, after a home break-in, during which he is beaten to within an inch of his life. Struggling to recover from his injuries with the realization that he might never be quite the same again, he and his inexplicably rock-solid girlfriend move into his family’s ancestral home to care for his dying uncle Hugo. During an extended-family visit, a skull is discovered in the trunk of an elm tree in the garden and as the mystery deepens over the course of the investigation, Toby begins to consider the possibility that his past may not be exactly the way he remembers it.

The girlfriend was so weirdly loyal that I was halfway expecting/hoping for her to have somehow orchestrated the whole home invasion incident AND have been responsible for the decades-old murder, but that’s just my imagination running away with me, and I guess thank goodness no one is counting on me to solve any crime. I enjoyed the heck out of this story, and it’s interesting to note that the plot is inspired by a real-life tragic and grisly unsolved crime.

Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia I am not sure what I can say about this highly-acclaimed book that hasn’t been said. I mean it’s on everyone’s “best of 2020” lists for a very good reason. In 1950’s Mexico, a well-to-do young woman travels to an isolated estate to investigate her cousin’s frantic claims that her new husband is trying to kill her. A glamorous heroine who is tough, smart, and funny; the creeping decay and dread of an ancestral home in which resides some truly detestable and disgusting characters, disturbing dreams, ghosts that walk through walls, and a wonderfully interesting and super gross twist on the mechanics of the familiar haunted house trope. What’s not to like?

Ghost Summer by Tananarive Due In a similar “most likely to have all the things I like” vein, these engaging short stories by Tananarive Due tick every box for what I want in a summer read. (I think I read this in September, so that still counts, as far as I am concerned!)  A vast spectrum of supernatural business, characters that I care about, masterful writing that is emotive and nuanced but not super dense or difficult. It’s got everything!

Dark Archives by Megan Rosenbloom Medical historian and biblio-adventurer Megan Rosenbloom’s investigation of books bound in human skin doesn’t just reveal details about the anthropodermic books, or the collectors who greedily hoarded them, or the craftspeople who created them; she passionately and humanely explores the people these books used to be. Along the way we learn of gentleman doctors in their mahogany-shelved libraries, flaunting strange collections; the gruesome and clandestine theatrics of midnight corpse-thieving grave robbers, midwives to royalty, 19th-century highwaymen in their final hours, poets and paupers, murderers and scientists–but as full as this book is of characters, Dark Archives provides an emotional examination that renders these pages, and I am quoting from The LA Times here, “…surprisingly intersectional, touching on gender, race, socioeconomics, and the Western medical establishment’s colonialist mindset.”

Come for the weird books facts, stay for the unexpected and powerful human questions. Additional questions, I might add, you can find answers for in our recent interview with the author!

Malorie by Josh Malerman. A Bird Box sequel exists. I read it. It was fine. Fast-paced, intense. It felt like it was missing something that I couldn’t quite put my finger on (maybe an extra 50 pages?) Maybe a bit rushed, sort a “direct to video” vibe. Also, like it was literally written for the screen. I finished it in the span of an afternoon, so I can’t say it didn’t keep my interest, but there are probably more interesting entries on this list. See directly below.

Bunny by Bunny Awad  The less I say about this one, the better. It’s wild. One of the most imaginative things I have ever read. Dark and funny and wicked and perfect, and the setting is one with which I’ve developed a fair bit of a fixation. I have a peculiar fondness for characters deeply involved in high-level educational pursuits, especially in niche or obscure areas of study. I think it’s because I lived at home and worked crazy-stupid hours at a fast food restaurant while I attended community college classes–most of which I only showed up for half of the time because I have immense anxiety when it comes to classroom settings.

My failure to properly fulfill what I guess has been beaten into my brain as a sort of “All-American scholastic obligation” has led to a deep sense of shame about my lack of credentials* but has over time cultivated a deep and abiding fascination with the whole university experience– especially the weird sort of bubble that students who live on campus, who do not have to work to support themselves, and who are consumed with their research and studies, seem to exist in. Anyway, I did say I wasn’t going to divulge much about this book, and I did not! I mostly talked about myself! A bunch of Goodreads reviewers apparently thought it was too weird and it broke their poor, dumb brains, but if you revel in stories that elicit gleeful hisses of “whaaaaat the fuuuuuuck?!” then I am certain you will enjoy the bizarre delights of this wonderfully demented little gem.

*Which is not to say I am regretful about my lack of education in this context; I 100% do not wish to be saddled with decades of student debt, but I’ll admit to a certain insecurity about my lowly associates degree that took me the better part of ten years to obtain.

Where The Wild Ladies Are by Aoko Matsuda The stories in this collection are loosely based on traditional Japanese tales of yokai, the ghosts and monsters that figure prominently in the country’s folklore. At turns clever, tender, and empowering, and brimming with strange wonders coexisting with mundane, everyday scenarios, Where The Wild Ladies Are is a lighthearted and whimsical-bordering-on-absurdist exploration of these classic stories and the supernatural beings that cavort amongst them, through a contemporary, feminist lens.

Spectral Evidence by Trista Edwards I haven’t read much in the way of poetry recently…or any poetry in these last ten or eleven months at all, come to think of it. And if there was any year that we needed a breath of the poetic and sublime to transcend this timeline, even for the space of a moment or two–it is now.

I received this volume of poems and illustrations a few months ago, and I am working my way through the collection, each line aquiver with a predestined sadness, the tragedy of an unavoidable outcome that you’re determined to see through. These poems evoke the foreknowledge of the moment when everything changes, but how you keep marching toward it, and somehow even returning to it. To look backward on your innocence and forward toward your annihilation. How you can’t have it both ways, except when you can.

The Book of Horror: The Anatomy of Fear on Film by Matt Glasby Though I’m a life-long fiend for all things horror, my love for the genre does tend to wax and wane. Sometimes I become a bit unplugged, only to dive back in with a voracious ferocity that’s probably a bit alarming from an outsider’s perspective. Matt Glasby’s The Book of Horror: The Anatomy of Fear on Film, and has marvelously rekindled my love for all things horrid, haunting, and harrowing. Glasby examines some of the most frightening films created and explores with us what it is exactly, that makes them so scary. Which sounds like it might be a dry, scholarly affair, but it’s not even a bit! The analysis is tightly written, wryly humorous, and exceptionally insightful, and, coupled with the spare elegance of the striking black and white artwork—I’m utterly immersed and enthralled and I haven’t been able to put it down.

Foe by Ian Reid I can’t even believe that I read another book by this author. I was SO MAD when I finished I’m Thinking Of Ending Things,  I wanted to throw it into the sea. But I am a fool and also a bit of a masochist, and when I saw that Reid had published a new title, I thought “why not?” This time, though, I went into it prepared, knowing that nothing is quite what it seems and that things may get twisty…

Junior and his wife, Hen live a sedate, solitary life on their farm, far from others. Just the two of them and their chickens. We learn that keeping livestock has been banned; through this and a few other subtle details, we realize that some things have happened and that the world Junior and Hen are living in is a little bit different than the one we inhabit.

A stranger unexpectedly shows up at their doorstep one evening to inform them that Junior has been selected to travel far away; in fact, he may be going into space to begin the installation of a new settlement. Hen does not seem especially unsettled or surprised by this shocking news. But this is not all. We later learn that to reduce the trauma of having an absent spouse, Hen will be provided with a replacement–someone who, while not exactly Junior, will be nearly indistinguishable from him–to keep her company, while he is away.

I went into this story knowing that I need to pay attention to what’s NOT being said, but also, to take exactly what is being said very, very literally. I don’t know if these tactics spoiled my feelings about the ending or not because I figured out exactly where the story was going long before it got there. Regardless, this is a riveting, immersive read and a tense, intrusive, and not entirely comfortable exploration of the intricacies of relationships and human nature/human consciousness. Again, I can’t believe I am even saying this… but I am insisting that you absolutely must read Foe.

What the Eyes Don’t See: A Story of Crisis, Resistance, and Hope in an American City by Mona Hanna-Attisha is an account of the Flint water crisis by is the relentless physician who stood up to those in power in order to address a gross environmental injustice and save the city she loved. Dr. Hanna-Attisha writes compellingly, compassionately, and with such an intensity, that you feel like you’re there in the trenches with her, just trying to get somebody, anybody, to pay attention to her urgent findings of the elevated levels of lead in her tiny patients’ bloodstreams…

Alongside What The Eyes Don’t See, I read Floating Gold: A Natural (and Unnatural) History of Ambergris by Christopher Kemp, and this, too, is a wonderfully gripping, engaging book–but in a very different way. Flint’s inhabitants, especially the children, need lead-free water for all kinds of important health and developmental reasons; that is a book about water, the vital role that it plays in our lives, and the unconscionable negligence on the part of the government to keep it safe. Floating Gold, however, follows one man’s obsessions and adventures concerning ambergris, a kind of disgusting substance that is basically impacted dung, forcefully expelled from a sperm whale and used at one time to flavor rich people’s food or as a component in posh fragrances. Ambergris is an astoundingly expensive ingredient, sometimes costing more per ounce than gold, and an element in certain luxury items for people who, I imagine, would never have to worry about lead in their water. That’s probably a sweeping generalization, but in comparing these two books–both about stuff happening in water, both fascinating and informative, yet in the end so very different–it’s a conclusion that I couldn’t ignore.

Adrift: A True Story of Love, Loss, and Survival at Sea by Tami Oldham Ashcraft I guess the inadvertent theme for this month was “water”? I saw the trailer for this film maybe half a dozen times earlier this year, and although my interest was slightly piqued by this story of love and loss and survival at sea, ultimately, I knew it was nothing I would ever sit and watch in a theatre. I probably wouldn’t even watch it if it was on Netflix and I didn’t have to leave the house.  Movies like this (romance? adventure?) are generally not my cuppa. When I found out it was based on a book (originally titled Red Sky In Mourning), ah–well, that’s a different story, so to speak. It’s weird, but I’m totally okay with spending two days reading what I wouldn’t even consider spending two hours watching. Tami, an adventurous young woman and experienced sailor, meets and falls in love with Richard, an equally spirited, thrill-seeking guy. They set out from Tahiti to deliver a yacht to San Diego, and two weeks into their journey they find themselves in the midst of a catastrophic hurricane, during which Tami is knocked out while down below deck, and Richard is swept overboard. From there on it’s a 41-day day of survival, in a crippled boat, out in the middle of the Pacific ocean. With a whole bunch of flashback scenes to spice things up, because being stranded alone doesn’t actually make for exciting reading, I guess. Now, the movie trailer would have you believe certain things that you immediately find out are not true at all, if you are reading the story in the book. That’s all I’m going to say about that, because maybe you want to read this or watch the film, and I don’t want to spoil it entirely.  I feel like an asshole after reading the glowing reviews; I can’t deny the author’s vast courage and resourcefulness, but I’m a picky reader, and something about the author’s tone and the way she told the story just…annoyed me. I think this book could have benefitted from a ghostwriter.

How to Be a Good Creature: A Memoir in Thirteen Animals Sy Montgomery Sy Montgomery is a naturalist and author with a great passion for animals and the world around us, whose words and voice and tone, unlike Tami Oldham Ashcraft above, I quite enjoy. I suppose that’s a little unfair; Tami Oldham Ashcraft was a sailor with a tremendous story to tell, but who, as far as I know, is not actually a writer; conversely, making words say things to connect with people is how Sy Montgomery earns a living. I guess she had better be good at it!  In How To Be A Good Creature, she reflects upon thirteen animals, both of the commonplace and exotic variety, who affected her life in profound and surprising ways. It’s a very charming book, and while not exactly revelatory in the information it puts forth regarding the various creatures, it’s written very personally with a lot of heart, there are some lovely illustrations, and overall, it’s just a wonderfully sweet book. I do think this would be a perfect hexmas holiday gift for that dear animal-lover on your list.

Calypso by David Sedaris I discovered David Sedaris from the BPAL forums at just precisely the right time in my life. I was newly released from a two-week stay at, well, I don’t know what they call it in New Jersey– but in Florida, where I grew up, we always referred to it as the 1400 ward…or, I suppose, it is better known as “Behavioral Services”. Over a decade later, I still haven’t decided how I feel about calling it my reason for being there a “suicide attempt”, although from a certain perspective…or any perspective, really…I am not sure what else you could call it. At any rate, I was home again. And just as sad, and lonely, and miserable as before I left. The one thing getting me through the joyless gloom of my days were online interactions with my friends on the one forum on the internet that I felt most comfortable frequenting. I would often lose myself in various random threads on this online space for weird perfume oil enthusiasts , and in doing so, I found solace in various recommendations of the titles that some of these similarly bookish folks were currently reading. I checked out a few David Sedaris books from the library, and quite all at once, a great love–instant and utterly electrifying–was born. On so many levels I identified with his absurd stories of his deeply fucked up family and his bitter, clever, eccentric humor, and I can’t deny that laughing until I thought I might pee myself felt loads better than crying until I was hoarse and wishing I were dead. Calypso, his latest offering, is more of that same perverse intimacy and sardonic wit and biting observations (some so stark and cruel that you feel guilty for laughing, but you can’t help yourself), as he reflects on aging and mortality…and feeding tumors to turtles.

Angels of Music by Kim Newman. Kim Newman (Anno Dracula, etc.) is an author who I’ve been meaning to read for years now, but never got around to it until Angels of Music was thrust upon me by a well-meaning friend at a holiday party last month.  Newman writes a heady brew of horror, crime, fantasy noir, and this title in particular combines a measure of each of these fantastical elements–imagine if you will, a Victorian Charlie’s Angels, as masterminded by The Phantom of the Opera. Written serial-style, the book comprises five separate adventures with a revolving door of familiar faces as the titular Angels–we spend time with such noted characters as Lady Snowblood, Eliza Doolittle, and Irene Adler as the Phantom’s team of elite female agents who repeatedly save Paris from diabolical masterminds. If it sounds ridiculous, well, it is, just a little. But you’ll be having too much fun with it to care.

Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution by Laurie Penny I am somewhat ashamed to say I have never been keen on reading non-fiction. Books are a means of escape for me, and I don’t fancy an escape to real-world problems, thank you very much. But I’m realizing more and more that our current social and political climate does not call for once-upon-a-times and fairy tales, and so I intend to fortify my knowledge and educate myself accordingly. Unspeakable Things is an excellent place to start: intensely personal and somewhat autobiographical, Penny writes unapologetically on gender and power and love and feminism in vivid, witty, com/passionate language; a cry for awareness, a challenge, and a call to arms, Unspeakable Things is a powerfully vital manifesto, and though not always a comfortable read, it should prove to be not too painful for non-fiction phobes.

The Hunger by Alma Katsu, a thrillingly creepy supernatural re-telling of that Donner Party business, peopled with vividly imagined characters, gripping, chaotic drama, and a gorgeously ghastly atmosphere of pervasive fear. And now I’m pretty sure that now you can’t convince me that this author’s vision of those terrible events aren’t exactly how it did happen those many years ago.

Experimental Film, by Gemma Files my friend Sonya mentioned this book some time ago, and I knew right away it was something I’d enjoy…and I did! A deeply strange but excellent story, a sort of pseudo-documentary, rich in history and myth and weird technical details, about a mystery many decades old and how it begins to seep into the life of the woman obsessed with it.

Final Girls by Riley Sager this was trashy vacation reading, hinging on that old “final girls” chestnut–you know, the girl who survived the brutal massacre, the grisly killing, the violent murders &etc., and which picks back up in the happily ever after, when these women, who have suffered these different experiences and have been trying to live out their lives normally, meet up and seem to be targeted again by a mysterious killer.  It was a fun read for a while and then it began to annoy and anger me, probably because it shifted from dumb fun to just…stupid foolishness. I’ve never seen a protagonist make so many poor choices in the course of a story!  Also it felt like some sort of weird cautionary tale about too much xanax– which, as someone who is too highly strung for xanax to have any effect on…I really just can’t take that seriously.

The Silent Companions by Laura Purcell Haunted, isolated mansions; unreliable, possibly unstable narrators; terrifying works of art that may or may not be possessed by evil spirits; paranoid villagers; secret diaries; creepy children–this book ticked all of my weirdo boxes, and I have to tell you, provided some of the most tense, edge-of-my-seat reading in recent years.

Kabiyo: The Supernatural Cats Of Japan by Zack Davisson. I adored Davisson’s previous book, Yurei: The Japanese Ghost, an exploration of the various ghosts found in Japanese culture, conveyed via warm, relatable anecdotes, deep research, and translations of many centuries’ worth of Japanese ghost stories. It was a pleasure to read, and felt like sitting for coffee with an old friend who had the most wonderful tales to tell. Kabiyo: The Supernatural Cats Of Japan, while just as fascinatingly informative and even more sumptuously illustrated, seemed dry in comparison and lacking in that lovely warmth that so captivated me previously. A worthwhile read for the data and the sublimely absurd imagery, but of the two, I’d recommend Yurei over Kabiyo.

The Terror by Dan Simmons I started watching this nautical horror period piece about a legendary arctic expedition on AMC, and was immediately hooked, but was hesitant to read the actual book because the only other thing I’d read by Dan Simmons–Carrion Comfort–was pretty gross and left a bad taste in my mouth. Also because The Terror is approximately one million pages long. This is not to say I’m intimidated by a hefty tome, but I’ve got stacks and stacks of neglected reading materials, so I’m always a little hesitant to commit to a title whose heft could effectively bludgeon to death a circus strong man. I was additionally a little concerned that I’d be assaulted with all sorts of dry information about ships and sails and jibs and hulls and whatnot, and eh, I don’t need to know all that, do I? Don’t bore me with details! Well, I needn’t have worried; there were loads of details, but somehow they were all fascinating; perhaps because this was a masterfully crafted tale, and each piece of it seemed equally as important as the other. The descriptions of the character’s perceptions of the unknowable geography of the region where they’ve become trapped reminds me of many things that I love about my favorite Algernon Blackwood tales, the terror of being alone and out of your depth in a vast and unknown landscape, how alien, dangerous and even malevolent nature can seem when you’re out in the middle of it and floundering. There is monster in this story, but I feel that it takes a back seat to the monstrous acts of cruelty which emerge amongst members of the crew, and even to the fiendishly brutal terrain itself. Now that I’ve finished the book, I am even more excited to revisit the program and see where it goes.

Little by Edward Carey When Goodreads first recommended this title to me, I thought, “haven’t I already read this book?” But I was getting Little by Edward Carey confused with Little, Big by John Crowley, which I read several years ago and which I enjoyed much more. These stories aren’t terribly similar, though, so maybe you should just read them both and take them on their own merits and then decide for yourself. Little is one of those books that I am glad I didn’t know much about beforehand. It follows the life of young Marie (“Little”, as she comes to be called) a small, pinched and peculiar-looking orphan, who comes to be the ward of an equally odd and eccentric wax maker. The story chronicles their life together in Revolutionary Paris as Marie makes her way through a life that is never easy, and quite frequently pretty awful. Perhaps as soon as you read these sentences, you’ll hone in on a telling detail, and begin to build a picture for yourself of the trajectory of this story and who Marie is meant to be, but somehow–maybe because I am a dummy–it didn’t even dawn on me where things were headed. Reading about characters who can’t ever seem to catch a break is not the sort of story I can comfortably classify as “enjoyable”, and yet, I do think I enjoyed the book overall. (I still think I liked “Little, Big” better though!)

Becoming by Michelle Obama I didn’t finish this title, but not because it wasn’t excellent. This is mainly due to the fact that I was like, number eight hundred on the list at our local library of people waiting for our amazing former FLOTUS’s book, and I was only allotted two weeks to read it. This was a title that I definitely could not return late, as I didn’t want to delay someone else’s enjoyment of it! I’ll be honest with you, I was weepy before I even got all the way through the introduction. Just to know that I was alive and on this planet at the same time as this tremendously strong, beautiful woman and her equally incredible husband, is an extraordinary feeling–and even now it excites and inspires me. I loved this book for the opportunity to learn much, much more about Michelle Obama: her childhood and family life, her college years and early career before she met her husband; her fierce intelligence and her wonderful sense of humor; her compassion and drive to do more and better for her daughters, her community, and the world at large; her strength and resilience, and even her quirks and flaws and shortcomings. She writes in the loveliest, friendliest conversational tone; you almost feel like are are both sharing space in the same room as she is sharing her life story directly with you. I desperately wish that I could have finished the book; I just kept telling myself, “…just make it to the part where Barack Obama becomes President!” and I did. And then I cried some more before sliding it through the library’s after-hours drop-off box.

The King Of Elfland’s Daughter by Lord Dunsany is one of the five specific books I was designated to read from my 2019 reading challenge. It was a bit of a slog. The kingdom of Erl is lacking in magic. The king sends his son, the prince, to Elfland to procure the Elf King’s daughter as a bride, and to then bring magic into the lands of men. The Prince kidnaps the Princess, marries her, and they produce a son. Despite the fact that he was tasked with finding a mythical, magical wife, and that’s exactly what he got, he soon grows exasperated and embarrassed that his enchanted elfin bride can’t get used to the ways of men, or act normal like all the other boring human peasant-muggles in their backwater little town. The Prince gets huffy and impatient with his wife on several occasions because of her inability to acclimate and in trying to shame and control her, just generally plays the part of the mediocre, privileged, white male that he truly is. The princess, sensing that her husband might be an utter moron who doesn’t actually even know what he wants, leaves both him and their son behind, and runs back home to Elfland and her father. The Prince then spends the rest of the story wandering the countryside, searching for the border to Elfland so that he can get her back. UGH. This was a tiresome story, and it took me 5 years to read it. However, if you can stick it out, the last twenty pages or so are totally worth it, when the awesome witch Ziroonderel tells off a bunch of doddering old farts and marvelous magics starts to creep into the land, whether anyone wants it there or not.

You by Caroline Kepnes When my sister messaged me to share that she was watching a certain show on netflix and she wanted me to watch it as well, so that we could hate all of the horrible characters together…of course I was on board in an instant, as hating awful people with someone you love is one of life’s great bonding experiences. I inhaled it, despite the fact that her request came with trigger warnings and content warnings: it was a show about a psychotic/sociopathic (??) stalker, and she was worried that because of some past issues and trauma I have dealt with, it might not be a great watch for my overall mental health. Which…it was not at all, by any means, healthy for me to watch, but hating on these awful characters was so much fun that it completely trumped caring for my emotional well-being, and I watched it anyway.

(The main character, by the way, is played by Penn Badgley–Dan from Gossip Girl–the setting is somewhere in NYC, and the characters are all frivolous and ridiculous, so the whole time I watched, I just kept expecting smug voiceover narration from Kristen Bell in her Gossip Girl voice, along with extravagant, utterly luxurious brunch spreads.)

I soon realized that this dumb show was based on a book, and so of course, I had to subject myself to even more if it. I read it in the course of an afternoon, and it was equally as trashy and silly as the show. The plot, for me, was a little scary because while it sounds like this stalker is really over the top and goes to a lot of trouble regarding the object of his obsession (hacking her email and social media accounts, breaking into her home, pretending to be someone else online so that he can get information on her from her friends, etc.) and it sounds like these are really outlandish things that are a lot of work, and who has that kind of time, right? No one really does that, right? I’m here to tell you, I know one person who did. And they did it to me. So if you think this is happening to you–don’t worry if you sound crazy or paranoid. People actually do this crazy, fucked-up shit. Sometimes, in my darkest, loneliest moments, I worry that it still may be happening, even now. But…I still devoured this stupid book anyhow. Aside from the fact that sometimes it’s lovely to lose your afternoon to stupid enjoyment, I am at the point in my life where I don’t want to ignore the things that scare me. I know this was a work of fiction, but maybe it’s smarter to know your enemy, than to stick your head under the sand and pretend this stuff doesn’t happen.

Some spooky horror stuff: The Siren And The Specter by Jonathan Janz was a lurid, layered haunted house/ghost story, and that particular flavor of sleazy and deranged reading that used to titillate the heck out of me when I was about eleven years old. I would stock up on the cheap horror paperbacks with the craziest covers from the local used bookstore, stories that aroused feelings of both repulsion and obsession that I’ve never since recaptured until reading this book;  Kill Creek by Scott Thomas is another haunted house tale, one in which a handful of modern masters of the horror genre are invited to stay for an evening for some sort of internet publicity stunt, and the usual sort of thing ensues. That’s a really lame review; I don’t actually remember it all that well, but I mention it because I hear Showtime is picking it up, so if you’re into this sort of thing, you may want to give it a read before it airs! I devoured In The House In The Dark Of The Woods by Laird Hunt over the course of an afternoon from a flight back from NYC; this witchy woodland fever dream of a tale, set in colonial New England, is utterly immersive and twisty and strange, and I loved every moment of it. And if you like twisty and strange, When I Arrived At The Castle by Emily Carroll is a deliciously eerie, magnificently illustrated, Gothic horror fairy tale nightmare-poem with the twisty and strange dialed waaay up.

We Sold Our Souls by Grady Hendrix I wish I could have read Grady Hendrix’s We Sold Our Souls when I was 15 and heavy metal was the only thing my weird, lonely heart understood. But time doesn’t work like that, so here I am now, reading a horror-enveloped love-letter to heavy metal music at 42 years of age, and damn if it didn’t throb & thrum my heart in the same thunderous, fearsome ways. I’m a little biased, I suppose. I have loved just about everything Grady Hendrix has ever written; and while know I can always count on him for ridiculous hilarity (even and especially when it comes to horror), what I was not expecting was something so incredibly heartfelt. The story: decades after her rock-n-roll band was on the cusp of their “the big break”, main character Kris Pulaski is barely scraping by, toiling away at her dismal hotel job, and definitely not playing her heart out with the music she loves anymore. What happened that night, that strange distressing night so long ago, when the band was teetering on the brink of greatness? What pervasive evil has insinuated itself into the lives of her former bandmates and is pursuing her to the brink of madness? We Sold Our Souls is a thrilling extravaganza celebrating the enormous power of music, as well as a bleak reckoning with the consequences of “selling out”…and possibly losing your soul in the process.

Meddling Kids by Edward Cantero A tongue-in-cheek horror-comedy mixture of Lovecraftian cosmic horror and Scooby Dooian hijinx, this was a quick, silly read that I couldn’t totally find myself immersed in because I had a real problem with the author’s specific use of similes and metaphors.  Which, I KNOW, I can’t pick on someone else’s writing (or editor, I guess) when I am not exactly sure that I even know the difference between the two, but I found the author’s use of wink-wink nudge-nudge pop culture-y type comparisons and analogies awfully irritating and gross, and every time I encountered one it took me just a little bit more out of a story that I might have otherwise enjoyed. Or maybe not, and here’s my second issue with the book. This story is full of references; it’s definitely meant for the horror geek who delights in their knowledge, but whereas the heavy metal mentions and allusions in We Sold Our Souls just felt…right…all this bludgeoning me over the head with teen detective references and genre nostalgia sort of felt like the neckbeardy masturbatory nonsense of Ready Player One. OK–maybe not THAT bad (I really loathed Ready Player One) but it was getting close to that sort of twaddle. And yet, all of my unkind complaints aside, it was sort of a fun story along the lines of “the old team coming together to solve one last mystery!” and all of the twists and turns along the way. So, I guess I don’t …totally…not recommend it?

The People In The Castle: Selected Strange Stories by Joan Aiken –I have been meaning to read this Joan Aiken collection since June of 2016, when I had allotted it, among others, for my summer reading stack. Of course in 2016 I was still catching up on my 2014 reading, so it stands to reason that I’m just now getting around to inhaling this marvelous book of tales. It’s got an intro from Kelly Link, whose brilliant, peculiar writings I love all too well, and if that doesn’t sell you right off the bat, I will tell you that when I read the first story in The People In The Castle, I thought, “ah, so then, this is sort of a cross between Roald Dahl and Leonora Carrington!”  In further exploration, however, I found that Aiken’s imaginings are not the sometimes frustratingly surreal flights of fancy that Carrington composed but rather earthier, more practical things. More realistic? No, I would not say that at all, and thank goodness! There are ghost puppies and exotic magics and infernal orchestras galore–but they are experienced by people very much like you and I, living out their lives–people with families, with work situations, people with hopes and dreams, and minute, daily dramas. There’s a subtle but really wonderful humor present in these stories, which prompted the Roald Dahl comparison, but where I think his stories sometimes have awful and unhappy (but kinda funny) things happening to people (and granted, they are sometimes awful and unhappy people) there is a tinge of something sly and dark in his narratives that I don’t find at all in the selections I have read by Aiken. Instead, the tone seems to me one of bright, lively, and benevolence, and coupled with that enchanting thread of dream logic that runs throughout these stories, sometimes glinting brightly, sometimes so faint that it’s but a winking phantom gleam–it is likely these are gentle, magical romps that you could read to children.  Except, in several of these vignettes, I will admit, I felt that there was something going on that I didn’t quite understand…something of some importance that lay just beyond my grasp. That, too, is part of their charm, and who better than a child to perceive this and yet still be totally okay with it? Sometimes not everything makes sense. And most times, that’s where the magic lies.

The Vanishing Princess by Jenny Diski After reading this book of delirious interludes I’ve begun to think of Jenny Diski as Joan Aiken’s spiky, sexy, cynical cousin; Diski’s stories are not the gentle, magical romps from Aiken’s magical realist bag of tricks, but rather feel like more adult enchantments, strange pleasures and dreams, denied or deferred, or which at the very least frequently don’t manifest as hoped or planned. Short Dark Oracles by Sara Levine is a wonderfully clever collection of playful, self-aware, and charmingly awkward story/fables. The Only Harmless Great Thing by Brooke Bolander isa heart-wrenching alternative history of devastating rage, radioactivity, and elephant song, is a compact story that is by no means a quick or easily forgotten read. And The Taiga Syndrome by Cristina River Garza follows an ex-detective’s feverish, poetic quest to find a woman who has run away from her husband to the forbidding boreal forests of the taiga, and who may or may not want to be found.

The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning: How to Free Yourself and Your Family from a Lifetime of Clutter by Margareta Magnusson. Because I am a contrarian (and also because I had zero interest in organizing or de-cluttering) I have been ignoring Marie Kondo and her KonMari madness for years. I like my stuff, thank you very much, and I really have no wish to get rid of it. (“Likes her stuff, and does not like change”– I will give you one guess as to my sun sign!) I recall, though, when this book was released a few years back, I was vaguely intrigued …by the name, at the very least. If I had to choose between the two, which is a tad unfair because I haven’t read the KonMari one, I would point you instead to this 80-something year old woman’s infinitely practical and wonderfully charming thoughts on a sensible way to deal with your possessions as you approach your later years. Less about “sparking joy” than it is, “do I really want my family to have to take care of this shit while they are grieving after my passing?” I related to and internalized her ideas immediately. After having dealt with the deaths of my mother and my grandparents, I have more experience than I would like with cleaning up the messy remnants of someone’s life, while at the same time, having to reconcile myself to the fact that they are no longer around to ask, “hey, what do you want me to do with this stuff?” Knowing what I know know, having gone through that process myself–I would never do that to someone. It’s too much to ask, don’t you think? Read this book. Get your shit together. And then get rid of it.

Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal by Mary Roach. I am super late to the writings and ruminations of Mary Roach and I am cursing myself for wasting so much time. She writes in that murky intersection of the disgusting, the taboo, and the intensely fascinating, and sheds her unique light on what she uncovers there. I’m just going to say it: Mary Roach is the kind of writer I aspire to be, or at least I would, if I wished to put any real effort into my writing and I wasn’t so afraid of failure. Her boundless curiosity, sly humor, shrewd understanding of her subject matter, along with the clever, cunning language she employs in conveying the information she has uprooted, has endeared her to me in a way that I am not certain that any other author ever has. If there is a question to be asked, no matter how weird, or gross, or unthinkable–she is going to dive in and get an answer for it. I have a keen admiration for journalists and writers, who, when interviewing a subject, can simultaneously digest the answers provided by the subjects of their queries, and race to make connections with these responses and from them to extrapolate parallel lines of intriguing query–and in doing so, suss out further explanations and implications and answers that you might not have even expected (or wanted!) For example, from Gulp, a book exploring our bodies’ mechanism of eating, digestion, and elimination, how can you not admire this exchange between Roach and Betty Corson? Corson is a Beano staff member who shared with Roach a few details on the kind of people who called the Beano Hotline– for various problems of a gassy and flatulent nature–and which led to the following exchange:

“Why not just avoid legumes? Some people can’t, said Corson. I challenged her to provide a single instance of a human being forced to eat beans. She came back with “refried-bean tasters.” They exist and they have called the hotline. Can you imagine?”

Refried bean tasters! They exist! Of the numerous tidbits of information contained in this book, like so many pieces of corn that pass through your digestive system to wind up…well…you know where…this bean info is actually one of the least disgusting you’ll learn about, but oh, man. Stick around for the rest of the journey. It’s a wild ride.

I Am Behind You by John Ajvide Lindqvist I am not sure if I should call this horror, or mystery, or what, but I Am Behind You is a surreal, thrilling story that begins on a perplexing and preposterous morning as campers in their caravans awaken to realize, with sinking stomachs and mounting terror, that where they awoke is not quite the same place as where they fell asleep. Packed with uncanny atmosphere, high tension, and characters haunted by more than just their current circumstances, I Am Behind You shows us a place where nightmares are real, events have no explanation, and places no longer exist. What does one do in such a disturbing situation? That’s where the idea gets interesting, while we inhabit each character’s perspective as they struggle with their eerie predicament. If you like a straight-forward, clear-cut ending, you may find this a frustrating read, but apparently this is the first in a trilogy, so perhaps more answers are forthcoming!

Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi if you enjoy stories like Pachinko, an epic, sprawling saga about Korean immigrants living in Japan between 1910 and now, then I think it is safe to say you will enjoy Homegoing as well. A breathtaking, emotional, multi-generational tale of a family split between Africa and America, this is a story rich and throbbing with both compassion and misery, and characters who desperately, fiercely live and love in the fleeting glimpses we see of them, in these chapter-long vignettes where time and history, politics, history, and gender interplay. A tale that plays out over many lifetimes and is o doubt is inspired in part, by the question asked by one of the book’s 20th century descendants:

“You must always ask yourself, whose story am I missing? Whose voice was suppressed so that this voice could come forth? Once you have figured that out, you must find that story, too.”

Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi Victim or villain? Truth or tall-tale? It is never completely one or the other. “Isn’t life a blend of things that are plausible and others that are hard to believe?” muses Mahmoud, a journalist caught up in a story he cannot reconcile in his wildest imaginings, and yet one in which he is living every day. Frankenstein in Baghdad, a modern, satirical adaptation of Mary Shelley’s gothic classic, is a novel of contradictions and gray areas and what it means to be human (or not-quite-human) living in this contradictory world and navigating these gray, uncertain spaces. One of the book blurbs mentions “the terrible logic of violence and vengeance” and this perfectly encapsulates the unrelenting everyday horrors of a rubble-strewn city in the midst of war, as well as the monstrous creation borne of that violence, now stalking its midnight streets and a exacting brutal revenge.

Washington Black by Esi Edugyan Young George Washington Black, “Wash,” a slave on a Barbados sugar plantation, is taken somewhat under the wing of a new master’s eccentric brother, Christopher. A tragedy occurs, one for which Wash will surely be blamed, and both he and Christopher (or, “Titch”, as his family calls him), escape via Titch’s experimental hot-air balloon contraption. Thus begins a series of world-spanning journeys for a pair whose paths and fates would seem linked at this point, but for Wash, the endeavors are tinged with confusion, desolation, and despair, as he comes to realize that Titch, the only person he has left in this world, would appear to be trying to escape from him. Wash, sometimes doomed and despondent, sometimes emboldened and blazing with spirit, continues to endure, to strive, to propel himself forward–whether as part of forging a future life for himself, or to find Titch again, and demand the answers that plague him, from the past that shaped and formed him–maybe both.  I couldn’t put this book down. It was agonizingly beautiful and soul-crushing and exhilarating. It was exhausting. I can’t recommend it enough.

Giant Days Volume 9 If you’re not already reading about the university adventures of chums Esther, Susan, and Daisy, then I envy you immensely the experience of discovering these delightful characters and their adventures as they navigate friendship and love and responsibility, while trying to pass their college courses, find housing and jobs, and figure how who they are and what they want their lives to be.

It’s difficult for me to talk about Giant Days without getting all choked up and emotional–these characters are the labor of love of John Allison, the artist who created Scary Go Round, the first web comic I was to ever discover, back in 2003 or so, and whose works as they grew and changed and evolved, are actually only web comics I still read. Described as “postmodern Brit horror”, Scary Go Round follows the hapless denizens of Tackleford, a fictional British town beset by all manner of supernatural activity including, but not limited to: zombies, space owls, the devil, and portals to other dimensions. Though Scary Go Round ended in 2009 [note: it periodically picks back up again!] a few of Allison’s beloved characters moved on to Bad Machinery, which picks up in Tackleford 3 years later. The focus is on an entirely new cast of sleuthing schoolchildren attending Griswald’s Grammar School, whose well-intentioned energies may cause more problems than the mysteries they solve – but they throw themselves into it all with much vigor and aplomb.

It is from these stories that Esther, Susan, and Daisy emerge, and I am only telling you all of this because you have so much to look forward to reading, between the ongoing Giant Days series, and the previous two web comics! Marked by clever, peculiar dialogue, absurdist humor, dotty characters (and delightful fashions), Giant Days is so much fun, and I want you to come back to me right here and tell me how much you love it, after you get started.

Re-reading some haunted house books! The Haunting Of Hill House by Shirley Jackson was an imperative re-read and a palette cleanser after my experience with the Netflix series. I did not love the show for many reasons but most of which because all of Jackson’s elegant, powerful symbolism was reduced to “easter egg” status. I won’t spoil it for anyone who loved it, or who hasn’t yet seen it, so that’s enough of that. And if I am going to read of Hill House, then of course I must re-read Richard Matheson’s pulpy, lurid Hell House for comparison.

At first glance, they are somewhat similar–a small group of people, mostly strangers to each other, congregate for research purposes in houses known for their haunted histories. But Jackson and Matheson’s treatments of this spooky trope are so very different, and I really urge you to read them side by side for the differences in tone and language, the whos and whys of the characters and how they interact and relate to each other (or not), and to see how each story evolves and diverges.  Interesting to note, if you are not already aware: Richard Matheson is also the author of I Am Legend, What Dreams May Come, A Stir Of Echoes, and the Twilight Zone episode “Nightmare At 20,000 Feet”.

666 by Jay Anson and The Manse by Lisa Cantrell were two used finds that I picked up while visiting Phantasm Comics in New Hope, PA. Lured in by their ridiculous covers, I devoured both on the flight home; In 666, our main characters, a married couple, arrive home from vacation to find that a new house has somewhat mysteriously appeared more or less across the street from their own home. We learn from vague visions and various forays into the house that this structure is evil because it was built from various pieces of diabolical or horrific materials throughout history? (i.e. pieces of torture devices, stones from notorious dungeous, nails from the cross Jesus was all got up on, etc.) I’m probably oversimplifying, and this is already a dumb book to begin with. Anyway, this house reappears and disappears over the years after inciting its inhabitants to dreadful violence. Somehow the devil is involved. The devil is a realtor? Or a house flipper? I don’t know. One amazon reviewer enthuses, “Every christian should read this book”. OKAY THEN!

In The Manse, some self-important small town JCs (junior chamber of commerce members) decorate a local historical space–an old house owned by two doddering spinsters tucked away in a local ALF– every year for Halloween and make enough money from their haunted house doings to keep the old place afloat for another year. But! The house is apparently situated over a portal to hell and feeds on the fear generated by these annual Halloween shenanigans, and by its 13th year, its saved enough fear-bucks to do something big. But…what exactly? I am not sure. Hell’s grand opening, with lots of samples, like a Saturday afternoon at Costco, maybe? I feel like these vintage paperbacks are always sketchy on the details of whatever the titular Big Bad is actually trying to accomplish. The Manse, much like 666, is awfully silly, but the cover art of a demonic jack-o-lantern intensely nomming on a cobwebby banister is actually pretty great.

Paradise Rot by Jenny Hval  Norwegian multidisciplinary artist Jenny Hval has written a surreal debut novel full of gross words that you may have issues with if you can’t handle moist ooze, bubbles of spit, sticky crotches, or other goo-soaked situations or similes. If you’re all good with mucus, rot and pus, blood, spores, and urine, well, then. You’re in for a treat. In Paradise Rot we follow Jo, an overseas student studying in a foreign country, anxious and adrift in her new surroundings. After a week’s worth of fruitless and frustrating searching for housing, she answers an ad for a roommate for what we find out is actually a converted warehouse with a strange inhabitant, who has been living there alone. “In a house with no walls, shared with a woman who has no boundaries,” Jo experiences a soporific, psychedelic sexual awakening as her surroundings decay and fall apart around her.

Hungry Ghosts by Anthony Bourdain I, sadly, became more a fan of Anthony Bourdain posthumously, and it really began, if I am being honest, when I learned that he had cooked up this illustrated collection of eerie food tales steeped in Japanese folklore and legend. The book opens with the story of a Russian oligarch who, in the middle of his dinner party, invites the chefs working in his kitchen to play a version of 100 candles, or Hyakumonogatari Kaidankai, a Japanese Edo-period parlour game in which brave samurai would try to one-up each other with terrifying tales of ghosts, demons, and unspeakable beings. In this version, however, it is the chefs who share these dark and gruesome tales about food and hunger, with each story taking inspiration from the many horrors found in Japanese mythology. “ Generally speaking, I always want more from these types of anthologies than they are able to deliver, but this one was a lot of fun, and more successful than most. Recommended if you liked Zac Davisson’s Yurei: The Japanese Ghost.

Junji Ito’s Frankenstein I’m not sure how much I really need to try and sell you on this one. If you like Junji Ito, then you know you need his grotesquely illustrated Frankenstein for your collection. And if you dig Mary Shelly’s gothic classic, Frankenstein, then you probably want to see this bizarre Japanese illustrator’s take on the beloved tale. Bonus: Frankenstein only takes up half of this hefty tome–the other half features the many misadventures of Oshikiri, a high school student who lives in a decaying mansion connected to a haunted, parallel world. Oh, you’ve not heard of my favorite illustrator, Junji Ito? Have a read of “The Enigma of Amigara Fault“, a story which I think is pretty representative of the tales he likes to tPostell, rife with themes of body horror, obsession, helplessness, and mystery– and  I guarantee you’ll be able to gauge for yourself right away if his work is something you’ll enjoy. Also, Junji Ito, can you pretty please illustrate an edition of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray ? I haven’t read it yet, and yours is the version with which I wish to initiate myself! (Don’t give me a hard time! I’ll read it one day! It’s on the list.)

Bad Gateway by Simon Hanselmann Ooooof. When you strip away the spiteful laughter and the uncomfortable chuckles of the previous Megg & Mogg books (one of which, Megahex, I have written about previously–don’t get me wrong, I adored it, and I laughed at that one, too) you’re left with the bare bones of depression and mental illness and addiction and self-harm and a bleak, unblinking gaze at your trauma and terrible behaviors. Where do you go once you’ve hit the bottom of the bottom? If anyone could fall further, it’s this gang, and yet, I am hopeful that is not the case. CW: everything.

A Hawk In The Woods by Carrie Laben Recommended as a “best of 2019….so far” by Jack over at Bad Books For Bad People, A Hawk In The Woods was described as a “Lovecraftian sister road trip,” and OK, yes please–sign me up! Abby and Martha are twins from a weird family with weird powers and are desperately headed to the family cabin after Abby breaks Martha out of prison. Are Abby’s reasons for rescuing her sister entirely unselfish? Absolutely not. As we follow the trajectory of their journey, the timelines slips from past to present and we get a glimpse of the reasons they each wound up where they did in life, and where that path will ultimately lead them. There was so much about this story to love: the sister’s relationship, the creepy family backstory, the powers that the twins possess (Abby uses people’s energies to bend those individuals to her will, and Martha can fold time) and the only complaint I have sort of spoils an important aspect of the story, so I’ll keep mum on that point. Just…pay attention to who the characters are, and what you think you know about them. Things can get a little confusing.

The Poison Thread by Laura Purcell. I won this book in a GoodReads giveaway! I swear I get emails from GoodReads every other day about how this, that, or the other book on my to-read list is now available and they are giving away 50 copies of it, or something like that. And honestly, you won’t catch me entering a lot of random internet giveaways, but it just seems like sooner or later between the frequency of them and the amount of stuff they give away, you are going to win something from GoodReads– so why not? Seriously, just enter them every chance you get; you’re bound to luck out at some point. The Poison Thread (aka The Corset; I am not sure why they changed the title) is the second book I have read by Laura Purcell and I was so very excited about it because I thoroughly enjoyed the first I’d read by her, The Silent Companions, a book which genuinely freaked me out . In The Poison Thread, the narrative is split between two women in Victorian England; Dorothea, a wealthy heiress, and Ruth, an impoverished seamstress imprisoned for the murder of her mistress. After the death of her mother, who contracted a bit of religious mania before her slightly suspect passing, Dorothea, or “Dotty” begins visiting women in prison, among other acts of charity– and I’m not quite sure if it’s to honor her late mother’s legacy or an excuse to practice her newfound fascination with phrenology. This seems an odd, throwaway theme in the greater scheme of this tale–I think you could swap in and substitute any faddish psychoanalytical nonsense from the era and it probably would not have made much difference to the story. Dotty becomes singularly obsessed with Ruth, who believes she has killed via transference of her malice and rage through the power of needlework. This is perhaps more “gothic suspense” than “gothic ghost story”, although that thread of the supernatural does lurk throughout, even it if may only be in Ruth’s mind. But it’s an utterly riveting and twisty novel and I’ve been recommending it to everyone I know. If you’ve read neither The Silent Companions nor The Poison Thread, grab them both as we head into September and I assure you that they will make incredible early autumn reads.

The Collected Schizophrenias by Esmé Weijun Wang is a book that I started earlier in the spring and finished in May and I’m still not certain how to even begin to tackle the material. I feel funny saying that I “enjoyed” a book that personally chronicles a woman’s exhausting experience with psychosis and a perpetually shifting reality, but in truth, I did tremendously enjoy it. Or, rather, it feels more human to say I enjoyed learning more about what it is to live with schizophrenia, a diagnosis that has always both intrigued and terrified me in equal measure, I suppose, because of the streak of mental illness that runs through my own family.  Intimate, candid, and immediately compelling, these vivid, tangled essays provided perspectives into both chronic and mental illness and insights that were surprising, terrifying, but also wonderfully illuminating, sometimes even quite empowering.

I spent two weeks in the psych ward immediately following a suicide attempt when I was 28 years old; my memories of that time are a collection of amorphous moments of cloudy despair alternating with slices of razor-sharp fury and crystalline focus. I was not experiencing a psychotic break; I wasn’t hallucinating, my reality wasn’t (exactly) fracturing–my experience was not even close to that of the author’s, but I wasn’t myself while I was there. I had a very hard time finding my way back. In the course of these writings, the author shared some things that helped her when she felt herself starting to slip, and I feel that had I access to such ideas, they might also have helped me. When she starts to feel the onset of what she describes as a sort of psychic detachment,  “episodes that preclude psychosis, or even mild psychosis–the episodes in which I must tread carefully to keep myself where I am,” she implements small, symbolic systems of defense or spiritual safeguards that have a connection to the “sacred arts”. The solace granted by these practices is not through the beliefs accompanying them, but rather the actions they recommend. “To say this prayer–burn this candle–perform this ritual–create this salt or honey jar–is to have something to do when it seems nothing can be done.” If the delusions come to call, she has a ribbon she will tie around her ankle: “If I must live with a slippery mind,” she muses as the last essay concludes, “I want to know how to tether it, too.”

The Word Pretty by Elisa Gabbert. I like books in which people spend time thinking about things; especially when it’s the writers themselves thinking about things, and even more so when those things being pondered are related to their craft. They are the kinds of conversations and connections and observations that I’d like to share with people, if I weren’t so self-conscious about sharing (or having an opinion or talking to people at all…) and so instead I read about these internal conversations in the form of brilliantly inquisitive and obsessive essays, written by other people. Even on the subjects and anecdotes I related to or connected with, though, it was on the level, I felt, of a lower life form. Elisa Gabbert writes like the accomplished, sophisticated interesting-in-all-ways person that I wish I was, and I felt like I was an amoeba trying to relate to some sort of higher being, complete with halo and wings. Even if I thought I was relating exactly to a particular thought, was I really? Would I even know, middling mediocre hack that I am? The more I read, the more unsure of myself I grew…and yet, I could not stop reading. Elisa Gabbert, I am sure that you are a very nice person and it was not your intent that I feel this way. I loved this book, even though I did not love the way I felt about myself when I read it.

Mouthful of Birds by Samanta Schweblin is apparently “far too bewildering” for one reviewer on Amazon and if that’s not your thing, then you may want to skip this slim book of surreal, unsettling stories. To be fair to the stories, though, I think this reviewer might have had a very low tolerance for the bizarre. There are no happy endings (and very few happy beginnings or middles) and really, several stories don’t even quite have a proper ending, happy or otherwise– rather just an abrupt stopping point or a vague notion that the story may continue forever, whether or not we are still present and reading. Many of the tales are dark and violent, brutal and heartbreaking, but the one I loved was not particularly shocking or tragic. It involved the theme of familial bonds: one adult brother’s bemused and at times perplexed recounting of another brother’s depression, in the midst of a family that seems to be thriving and in which everyone else appears to be hunky-dory. I don’t think I’m remembering it exactly as I read it, but at one point, in a brief and sudden flash, the successful brother, at a family barbecue full of mirth and merriment, experiences an unexpected moment of (was it sadness? anxiety? maybe more of a nothingness? A nothingness that might last forever? I can’t recall) but I remember feeling… vindicated, and a bit vindictive, when my first thought was “so then…now you know how it feels.” I’m neither a masterful enough reader nor writer to say if that was a bit of subtlety on the part of the author, or if she aggressively smacked us over the head with the notion, but I felt what I felt, and I loved that profound punctuation in what was otherwise one of the more reserved, not particularly ambitious feeling stories in the collection. It elevated it somehow, to something extraordinary.

Crazy Rich Asians by Kevin Kwan. Sometimes I like to read trashy books. And when there are obscenely rich people in the story, spending their money in stupidly extravagant ways, that is the maybe best kind of trash. It’s particularly good for in-flight reading. I usually leave these books in the lodgings I stayed at, for someone else’s trashy enjoyment. You can find my copy of Crazy Rich Asians in the bar of The Rosemary hotel in L.A.

Mongrels by Stephen Graham Jones  I first read Stephen Graham Jones (Mapping The Interior) in September of 2017–again, during a hurricane! It’s become a bit of a tradition, I guess. I was under the impression at the time that he was a new author and that was his debut novel, but I couldn’t have been more wrong; he’s a very prolific writer and has been at it for quite a while now. Mongrels is a surreal werewolf coming-of-age tale; it’s violent and beautiful and brimming with odd moments of absurdity and heartbreaking tenderness and tragedy. It is one of my top ten…no, make that one of my top five favorite books of all time.

In The Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado. In seeing initial reviews about the brilliant structuring of this vulnerable, spellbinding memoir of abuse, I grew wary, worrying that it might in some way be above my intellectual paygrade. And though it is framed through the analysis of popular horror tropes and footnoted with scholarly snippets regarding folk & fairytale motifs, I needn’t have worried–trauma transcends literary conventions.

I read In The Dream House compulsively; that is to say I dreaded every single word of it, but I inhaled them heedlessly and headlong, not unlike watching a scary movie through the shadowed, in-between slants of our joined fingers as we hold our trembling hands before our eyes. In the story of someone else’s hindsight we re-experience our own humiliations and hurts, our own abuse and trauma, and that too I dreaded. But I craved it, as well. Sometimes I doubt what happened to me, and I seek out these types of memoirs. I want to see my trauma appear large as life in someone else’s story. In a painful grip, or a hateful word, a whispered threat. An unwanted touch, a violation of self that transcends the physical act to such an extent that you almost feel you need to scrub your very soul of it.

I don’t want these things to have happened to someone else. Never ever, not in a million years. But when confronted with someone else’s story, I encounter mine, and I am glad that I am not alone. I don’t want to look. I can’t look away. In the Dream House is a book you dare not look away from.

The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa. Is it possible to both fall in love with a book and want to pretend that you never read it? That it had never been written? That the idea never even existed in the author’s mind? That line of thought is somewhat in keeping, I suppose, with the premise of this quiet, surrealist dystopian drama: on an unnamed island, things and objects are disappearing. The characters wake up one day, and, for example, fruit has disappeared. I don’t think the fruit literally disappears, but rather the idea of fruit. When a disappearance happens, and the villagers become aware of it, they just take all the fruit and dump it in the river. By the end of the day, fruit has ceased to be, even in their memory. The Memory Police ceaselessly monitor the inhabitants of the island and ensure that what has disappeared remains forgotten.

A feeling of dread is pervasive throughout the entirety of the novel, and yet it never seems tense–the islanders seem resigned to the disappearances in a frustratingly apathetic, good-natured, “oh well!” sort of way. There are those among them, though, who don’t forget. It is through their dismay and anxiety regarding the disappearances (what happens when, say, body parts start disappearing?) and fear of the Memory Police (who arrest non-compliant citizens in the middle of the night, and no one knows what happens to these friends and neighbors) that we experience these concerns. We can’t rely on the protagonist for this–she’s too passive for reflection or much in the way of active resistance, even as her career is brought to a close by the disappearance of books (she was a novelist), even as her own limbs begin to disappear. The Memory Police presents such an upsetting concept that I cannot contemplate it overlong. Not that of state control–which ok, that’s pretty bad, I get that– but of the absence of memory. Words like “terrifying”, or “haunting”, or “sad”, just don’t cut it. This book is upsetting. I wish I hadn’t read it. But oh my god, how glad I am that I can’t forget it.

Frankisstein by Jeanette Winterson was a wildly inventive, wonderfully clever, deeply philosophical gem that I am going to be pondering for a very long time, and though it’s a few weeks too early to make any “best-of” declarations (and I’ve got loads more reading to do before December 31st) I think it is safe to say that Frankisstein is going to be near the top of that list. The parallel, temporally fluid stories of both Mary Shelley, dreaming up and penning the tale of her infamous monster, and Ry, a young transgender doctor in modern Britain, who meets and falls in love with Victor Stein, a professor and professional TED talker on the future of AI–and I’ll say no more. I think this is a book you best dive into knowing little, forming your own musings and reflections. I will add, though, this: at some point in the story, Victor softly asks of Ry “…have we met before?” And with that, I experienced the most spendidly delicious shiver, the echoes of which I can still feel when I think on it now.

Body Horror: Capitalism, Fear, Misogyny, Jokes by Anne Elizabeth Moore. It sounds a little childish to call someone a “great thinker” (I used to call my grandmother a “good cooker,” for example. When I was five. ) but these essays on the “gore of contemporary American culture and politics” in relation to the female experience are surely written by someone of capable great–no, make that brilliant–thought. She draws fascinating parallels and somehow ends up connecting concepts such as Standard Time and the time that the unwell need as opposed to the healthy; the choice not to bear children, the cultural imperative to reproduce, and the gendered imbalance of intellectual property rights, and the plight of Cambodian garment workers, a heartrending piece of writing that requires no connection to anything else at all.

I loved how Moore’s writing lends to meandering ruminations–nothing so difficult to follow as “stream of consciousness,” but there’s also nothing at all resembling a rigid structure framing these words. They’re more a disciplined ramble, perhaps with some surprising jumps that she makes in terms of logic and connections, but they are not in the least unbelievable. Moore is an excellent guide through her thoughts, disparate as they may appear at first, and you can see how to got to where she went with each topic. Body Horror was full of uncomfortable, painful ideas and truths, but was it was also powerfully edifying and felt vital and fierce.

Ration by Cody T Luff Full disclosure: Ration was sent to me as a review copy. I don’t regularly receive review copies of things, but I love that someone came across a story or an author that I might be into and was keen to send it my way. That level of thoughtfulness in these kinds of sometimes rote-feeling PR endeavors means a great deal to me, and so one might be forgiven for being under the impression that because of this I was predisposed to think highly of the book, but truly–I had no expectations! Expectations or no, I was incredibly impressed. Described as a “women-led Dystopian piece about surviving in a hunger-regulated society” Ration was a tense, gut-twistingly visceral tale that was heavy and harrowing, and emotionally difficult to read (in the way that The Handmaid’s Tale is heavy and hard to read) but at the same time, thoroughly compelling. I could imagine Ration as a gripping miniseries–the characters and their interactions really were that wonderfully and terribly, vivid–and I could have spent a great deal more time in their bleak, ravaged world. I look forward to reading more by Cody T. Luff and I expect that Ration is going to be on several “best of” lists for the year. It certainly will be on mine.

Fake Like Me by Barbara Bourland A thriller set in the art world and a “love letter to the labour of artmaking,” Fake Like Me was a fantastic read that I tore through in one day and a story that hit so many of my sweet spots. I am a super boring person with a 9-5(ish) job because I crave security and stability and routine–but I am intensely fascinated with artistic creatives who live bohemian, unconventional, vagabond lifestyles. I would like to do this! But I am shy and squirrelly and don’t want to have crazy artist parties and I also like a steady income! Fake Like Me combines a thrillingly immersive examination of the lives and deaths of a handful of intertwined fictional artists, along with something that Sonya has mentioned before here in Stacked at Haute Macabre–their preferred genre of books is “non-fictiony fiction,” where the author “went down some kind of research hole that utterly fascinated them but, because they are a fiction writer and not, say, a journalist, turned their up-all-night discoveries into a story.” If any of this sounds like a good time to you, I think you’re going to love the arty insights and perspectives found in Fake Like Me. Also, don’t be put off by the name, which makes it sounds like it’s going to be a really fluffy read. It’s not.

Dead Astronauts by Jeff VanderMeer was a fractured, fragmented, timeshifting story of dissolving, surreal, decidedly-non-linear layers that I hesitate to even call a “story”. If you are familiar with VanderMeer’s writing, up the strangeness and beauty and WTF factors by ten or twenty or one hundred, and that’s Dead Astronauts for you. It was brutal and heart-rending and utterly confounding, and it eluded me at every turn. At no point did I get a clear sense of what was happening to whom or how or where or why, But. I also left every page that I turned damp with my tears. Something inside me understood something about these allies and their journey and their pain, and when it ended, I wept quietly for a few minutes, thinking, “but…I didn’t want this to end.”

Stephen King Project update: I have read The Dead Zone by Stephen King, which, if I am being honest, I had actually thought it was a collection of short stories before I checked it out of the library. A guy gets a few head injuries, goes into a four-year coma, and wakes up with premonitory psychic abilities. This book felt like old-school Stephen King to me, because I guess it is super old Stephen King thoughts and insights and stories. When I contrast it against something like The Outsider, which is much more recent, well…The Outsider feels like it was written for television. Some sort of essential Stephen King weirdness just…isn’t there. I am almost tempted to say there’s something simplistic and Dean Koontzian about it (sorry Dean Koontz fans, I am not amongst your ranks.) I don’t want to say it feels “dumbed down” because I don’t know that I’d ever considered Stephen King’s writing particularly nuanced! I mean…nuance and complexity… that’s not why we all fell in love with him when we were eleven years old, right? I don’t know if it’s the stories themselves, or the way the stories are told, but there was something missing for me. I’d love to hear some of your thoughts on this, my fellow Stephen King fan-friends. If you haven’t read The Outsider, maybe take a pass and watch the series instead, which is moodier, gloomier, more beguiling and much better than it has any right to be. Oh, and I also read Gwendy’s Button Box which I think was kind of fun and probably way more appropriate eleven-year-old-us, even though we wouldn’t have appreciated why until we became the old farts we are now.

A River Of Stars, Yosano Akiko. This is my go-to, treasured book of beloved poetry. I tell anyone that if they really want to know my heart, my secret heart, full of hopes and fears and loves and longings that I can never hope to properly express, then you must read these tanka and long-form poems by Yosano Akiko, a goddess of poetry and the embodiment of early-twentieth-century Japanese romanticism and feminism.

And now you must ask
whether I’ve written new songs.
I am the mythic
koto with twenty-five strings,
but without a bridge for sound.

Salt Is For Curing, Sonya Vatomsky. I loved this book before I loved its author, our very own Sonya Vatomsky. But like, only a few days before I loved them, because it was a head-over-heels affair with both book and human that all happened very fast, and now I can’t imagine my life without either! In reading Salt Is For Curing, it took all that I had not to devour this uncanny collection of spooky delights in one greedy instant. I feared that to do so, to ingest all of these potent magics– a fanciful combination of myths, metaphorical recipes, and cheeky spellwork– at once, would give me a terribly heartsick sort of heartburn and yet leave me with the very worst sort of emptiness, knowing there is no more to be had. I drew it out for as long as I could stand, and I unexpectedly found myself gorgeously stuffed full. But knowing both Sonya– and their writings– is to have a heart filled to the brim with weird magics 24/7. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Sometimes A Wild God, Tom Hirons & Rima Stime. This small, unassuming booklet, brimming with beautifully potent imagery, was a surprise gift from a friend, and a really quite marvelous collaboration which flung open doors of wonder deep within my heart, doors that had been closed firmly shut for such a very long time. I’ll say no more. I wish for you to be surprised, too.

The Song Of Achilles by Madeline Miller. I didn’t think I could possibly love this mythic story more than Madeline Miller’s gorgeous retelling of the sorceress Circe’s tale…but I don’t mind being wrong. In The Song Of Achilles, the awkward and exiled Patroclus develops a hesitant friendship with the achingly beautiful Achilles, the glory-fated half-mortal prince. Miller’s heart-rendingly gorgeous account of their somewhat mismatched but intensely passionate companionship just utterly rips you in two, because you already know where their story is headed, and it’s nowhere good. Oooof. 10/10 tortured princes; I would read this story a thousand times over again, and cry myself sick, each and every time.

China Rich Girlfriend by Kevin Kwan. The second in the Crazy Rich Asians trilogy, this book was pure, dumb escapism. I love reading about unimaginably rich people spending their money in staggeringly stupid ways and the inanities and absurdities that ensue. This is especially good stuff if you enjoy haute couture-designer label-name dropping + head-to-toe outfit descriptions as part of that foolishness. Which I do!

Why We Can’t Sleep: Women’s New Midlife Crisis by Ada Calhoun. This book about Gen X existential angst was a real bummer, but there were so many relatable bits, not the least of which is that it’s always comforting, I guess, to read about people’s thoughts on my so-called disaffected and directionless generation–and yet, we’re the generation of women that was raised “have it all.” Calhoun has conducted over 200 interviews for the book and looks into data such as housing costs, HR trends, credit card debt averages, and divorce data and finds that most of us are exhausted, terrified about money, under-employed, and overwhelmed.

Some of the conversation in the book makes me feel like an outsider, looking in: I am not and have never been married, I do not have children, and I am not struggling to get ahead in a corporate career. I am not experiencing the same difficulties that these groups of people experience, although there are some similarities and overlap. In spite of that, there were some insights that deeply resonated with me. The author posits that we have been raised to believe that if we don’t care about everything, we are squandering opportunity, and this leads to a lot of pressure and potentially a lot of shame. We take basically good ideas and turn them into something with which to self-flagellate. (OMG do I relate to this.) She also discusses how we were set up to be in denial about what we go through as women; in entering the workplace fighting to be equal, we have had to quell what makes us different and how that affects us on such a level that we can’t even talk about it. And these silent anxieties? They are exacerbated by what we see on the internet, and we can’t look away. She notes that nothing seems to stimulate the economy like women feeling bad about themselves. She doesn’t remember our mothers looking like a million bucks when they were 40, so what the hell are we making ourselves nuts for?

I don’t think there are any real solutions offered within these pages, though. And while I am not sure that you’ll feel better after having read this book, I guarantee that you will feel seen.

Keepsakes, a series of short horror stories/comics about the strange and horrifying artifacts found by two siblings their late father’s creepy basement was something I read early this year (though I think I Kickstarted it last year) and which is exactly the sort of thing that is right up my alley. I fell in love with horror comics when I was six or seven years old, and discovered an old stash of Creepy magazines belonging to one of my super weird uncles. This sparked in me that bizarre and conflicted feeling of fascination/repulsion that is the hallmark of so many of my obsessions and enthusiasms, to this very day! Keepsakes, written by G.A. Alexander, is actually the creation of our dear Sonya’s husband, and I’m too shy to tell him how much I enjoyed it– so I am hoping that he will stumble upon my review here, and know this to be true.

The art and stories within the lurid pages of Keepsakes took me right back to that moment in time, frozen indelibly in my memory because it is just that formative for me: sitting cross-legged on my uncle’s dusty childhood bedroom floor, idly playing with monstrous rubber toy dinosaurs, when I questingly reached into what I thought was another toybox… and discovered within something else, altogether. My grandmother–my father’s mother–was an odd bird and kept her son’s rooms in the same state they grew up in, long after they moved out. Toys and everything! But what I found in that box, in those brittle, crinkly pages, were neither toys nor typical remnants of childhood playtime. Wracked with shivers and shakes which mystifyingly morphed into chills and thrills, I wrapped myself in a musty afghan, crawled into a corner with my back facing the wall (naturally, so that I could see anything that might have tried to creep up behind me) and utterly devoured scores of Creepy magazines that rainy, eerie afternoon. Keepsakes conjured in me those same shivers and thrills, that same sense of I can’t look/TELL ME MORE!

Many years later, I confessed this story to that particular uncle. To this day, every time we see each other, he presents me with an old Creepy magazine.

The Gunslinger by Stephen King I knew going into this one that it was not going to be my cup of tea, and I mostly wasn’t wrong, but I will admit that after a certain point I was drawn in despite myself.

Roland Deschain, last of the gunslingers, is following the enigmatic, malevolent Man In Black across a brutal desert. There are some bloody and terrible skirmishes and a small companion is met along the way. If I don’t seem all that jazzed in my description, I guess that’s because I never really got drawn into the story, or felt much of anything for the characters moving along in it.
The world in which this pursuit takes place seems very different from our own, and yet there seem to be some strange similarities…and I think that’s what I found most compelling. I want to learn more about the stage upon which this story plays out.

Everyone who seems to love this series of books goes on and on about the world-building, so I feel like there must be…something there? I’m hopeful that I will find out, as I have made it my mandate to read all of Stephen King’s books, so I’d be reading the next in the series whether I wanted to or not.

Real Queer America: LGBT Stories from Red States by Samantha Allen GLAAD Award-winning journalist, Samantha Allen, embarks on a road trip across America–her motto, “something gay every day”–to chronicle the unique experience of being queer in conservative communities. A memoir that is part travelogue and part recent history of queer America, Allen makes pit stops at drag shows, political rallies, and hubs of queer life across the heartland, and she introduces us to scores of extraordinary LGBT people working for change.

If I have a critique, it’s that she does spend some time attacking liberal coastal enclaves, those places that we might typically consider queer oases–San Francisco, New York City, etc.– as being too big, too expensive, too crowded, etc…and listen, I get it. I don’t really love those places either, for the same reasons. But something about hearing it over and over in the context of this book rubbed me the wrong way. But that is a very tiny complaint. I listened to Real Queer America on audiobook, as read by the author, and hearing in her thoughts and observations in Allen’s own warm, endearing voice added another wonderful dimension to what was already a profoundly insightful, informative, and moving series of essays.

Light Magic For Dark Times by Lisa Marie Basile It has been a very long time since I have read a book like this. I read books about witchcraft and witches quite frequently. Spellwork and ritual is often a focus of the fiction I consume. But a practical guide of spellcraft and magical rituals for the purpose of performing, myself? I haven’t had anything like this in my possession, since…gosh. Maybe since I was sixteen years old, and at the risk of sounding dismissive (sorry!) I don’t a recollection of those books or authors presenting me with anything particularly smart or compelling. As a teenager… would I have even recognized it if they did? I don’t mean to make generalizations, but teenagers now seem loads smarter than they did back when I was that age. Or maybe I was just a dumb teenager.

At any rate, I think it’s unfair to review a book by talking about what it’s not. I don’t feel comfortable making comparisons like that, but I did want to give some background as to the last time I held in my hands a spellbook. Lisa Marie Basile’s Light Magic For Dark Times surprised me on every level. It’s relatable and sincere and compassionate, and as a terribly self-conscious person, I love that Lisa Marie’s book never makes me feel cheesy for reading it. It elevates beautiful sentiments in practical ways, it tackles ugliness in a welcoming, accepting manner, and it feels like sage, loving, advice from the depths of a wise, vibrant heart.

I am particularly appreciative that she delves into practices for confronting feelings of grief, rituals for trauma, meditations for getting one’s self comfortable with the idea of death; none of these things are fun to think about but they are so important to contemplate, to meet with, and to work through. There are also spells of celebration and creation, of self-love and of shadow work. This is such a beautiful little book of magical exercises for times of darkness and of light, and even the strange, liminal, grey areas in between. I am grateful that this book exists as a resource and I am certain that I will find myself reaching for it over and over again as I experience these shades and shadows, these light and dark times, in my own life.

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde Hoo boy. How embarrassing to admit that until I was 43 years old, I had never read Oscar Wilde’s classic work The Picture of Dorian Gray! I received my copy of the book from a friend who has taught the book in the past, and so I was extremely privileged to find his notes and observations bookmarked over the course of the story. Of course, this makes it very difficult not to parrot his sentiments at you now, and so I will refrain from doing so, save to note this: “…his novel is one of pleasurable language, a triumph of aesthetics over literary realism.” AND HOW. I am pretty sure that Wilde wrote this story solely so that he could spend two chapters alone waxing ecstatic about embroidery and gemstones.

I think most folks know the plot and the themes involved, so I won’t give a synopsis, but I am left with a few questions. Dorian Gray is referenced by someone (I can’t recall which character) as being “bad as bad.” And yet we don’t seem privy to much in the way of his horrid exploits. I suppose if we fill in the blanks we’ll come up with what is personally most abhorrent to us, a “bad as bad” scenario that Wilde left up to the minds of the readers to concoct. I am also dreadfully curious as to what Gray is holding over Allen Campbell’s head; what did Gray’s corrupt influence incite Campbell to have done, or take part in, could be used as blackmail in that later scene? Details, man! Again, I suppose there is some elegance in the mystery of these things, but prefer them spelled out for me.

I suppose this is less a “review”, and more a “reaction” to the book, but there you go–my thoughts, such as they are. I thoroughly enjoyed both the story and the prose, but this is one that I think I will be turning over in my mind for many years to come, marveling at its myriad charms like the “broken rainbow of the milky opal” amongst Dorian Gray’s dazzling collection. But at this point if you were to ask me what this tale was all about, I could probably only shrug and reply, “eh, vanity problems, I guess? “

As an afterthought, it struck me that Dorian Gray could have used “A Red Rose Ritual For Aging Acceptance” from LisaMarie Basile’s Light Magic For Dark Times, mentioned above.

Night Film by Marisha Pessl  (Unfinished) I am listening to this on audiobook while taking my nightly constitutional. I hate exercising, but I don’t mind walking –and calling it a “constitutional” sounds fancier to my ears instead of, say, a “slog through Florida late summer night soup.”  Night Film is sort of like a detective-noir murder mystery-thriller, tinged with hints of cults and black magic and horror elements. The main character gets annoying with his frequent commentary, mostly centered around an ex-wife, about how unknowable and difficult women are–which is strange because this book is written by a woman. Or maybe her portrayal of this male character is some kind of commentary in and of itself. Anyway, a major focus of the book is a reclusive horror filmmaker whose works are so dark and violent they have been banned from theatres and about whom his fans and the general public speculate wildly. I can’t help but envision this director as Dario Argento; Sonya, who previously read this book, imagines it’s David Lynch. I’d be curious if any of you all have read it, and whose face it is that you are superimposing on the mysterious Stanislas Cordova.

Bright-sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America by Barbara Ehrenreich  I was complaining to a friend about all of this “good vibes only” and “living my best life!” malarkey that I see all over Instagram, and after having vented on my own blog, he recommended Bright-sided to me. I have not yet finished it, and it’s not quite what I expected, but it’s supremely informative from a historical standpoint and for filling in the general bad-attitude layperson about a how the concepts of a positive attitude and relentless optimism got its foothold as a marginal nineteenth-century healing technique and really dug its claws in as a dominant, almost mandatory, cultural attitude.

Letters, Dreams, and Other Writings by Remedios Varo ( If you require a book of surreal snippets & silliness and other enchanting nonsense; the sort of writing you might reach for to give your eyes and your brain a break from say, larger intense novels, or lots of dry research, this strange, slight tome is just the thing to keep on hand. Utterly brimming with outlandish and imaginative writings, you’ll find dream vignettes, correspondence to strangers, demented recipes, and pseudoscientific satire gleefully sprinkled throughout. Remedios Varo was a wily, magical hoot and this little book is a treasure.

Sooner or Later Everything Falls Into the Sea by Sarah Pinsker A few friends read this before I got around to it, and at the time I felt so left out of their awestruck conversations revolving around these innovative, imaginative stories, it was starting to rub me a little raw. I wanted in on the Sarah Pinsker magic, too! And when it finally happened, wow. It’s been a few months since I finished the collection, but even now, attempting to pin down a favorite (I do have a clear favorite—“Remembery Day”) I am flooded with rememberies of all the best snippets from these tales. The narwhal car, the clockwork grandma, the dynamics of friendship and tiny murder homes, the mystery at the Sarah Pinsker multiverse Con! I don’t think I’ve given much away with that weird slurry of words I just typed out, but if they don’t pique your interest, I just don’t know what will. Read this book and join us in the Sarah Pinsker 4ever Fan Club.

In A Dark, Dark Wood by Ruth Ware I don’t know what my problem is. I always refer to books like this with such an air of dismissiveness. That’s a dick move. They’re really popular and there’s a good reason for that–they’re female-centric thrillers which are a little twisty, a little dark, and super compelling and unputdownable. I think I like to think of myself as swanning around and reading inscrutable poetry all day but the truth of the matter is I’m reading books like this and dropping Cheeto crumbs into them just like everyone else. In this one, our reclusive (and probably unreliable) narrator is invited for a weekend away to an English countryside home by an old friend she hasn’t spoken to in years. Secrets and suspense abound, and even though I have only read two Ruth Ware offerings, I can see how the house itself is frequently a large, looming character with a life and personality of its own. I’ve learned to lean into these stories and accept that I might actually love them; there is such a tinge of the gothic to them, and in their day, gothic stories, or “horrid novels” were pretty crazy and considered trashy, too–and literary history has never been able to decide whether they’re any good. Just embrace it, Sarah. You’re no good, horrid trash. Wheee!

The Deep by Alma Katsu Like the last offering I enjoyed by Alma Katsu (The Hunger, above) The Deep is another historical reimagining, which in this instance centers around the voyages of two legendary ships, The Titanic and the Britannic, and their doomed maiden and last voyages, respectively. Recounted in alternating, interwoven timelines, the tale incorporates real-life millionaires embroiled in personal and spiritual drama, with one of the most iconic tragedies in human history–alongside ghostly elements, Irish mythology, ill-fated romance, and once again our old friend, the unreliable narrator, haunted by memories and possible madness.

My Sister The Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite Slasher, satire and sisterhood tangle and twist together in this taut tale where Korede is a nurse who is used to the sight of blood and cleaning up the stuff, which is great, because her sister Ayoola can’t (won’t?) stop stabbing her boyfriends to death. My favorite part is how lonely, put-upon Korede spills her woes concerning her sister’s murderous activities to a long-term comatose patient…who eventually wakes up.

Into The Water by Paula Hawkins Turns out that this was the summer of murder mysteries, and here’s one more from the author who also wrote The Girl On The Train. Women in the small British town of Beckford have been drowning since 1679, and Into The Water opens with one more dead body in the murk–Danielle Abbott, a writer and photographer who was working on a coffee-table book about the spot the people of Beckford call the Drowning Pool. I actually really liked this story, even though lots of reviewers weren’t terribly impressed. One of the characters in the book itself actually sums it up brilliantly: “Seriously….how is anyone supposed to keep track of all the bodies around here? It’s like Midsomer Murders, only with accidents and suicides and grotesque historical misogynistic drownings instead of people falling into the slurry or bashing each other over the head.”

Beloved by Toni Morrison I initially read Beloved, Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize-winning work in 11th grade, and though I believe that young people of high-school age are absolutely capable of grasping serious, weighty material, and all kinds of complex concepts and notions…I also believe that sometimes you just don’t “get” stuff until you’re older. Or at least I think it is fair to say… there are a lot of things you miss.

Inspired by the life of Margaret Garner, who escaped slavery in Kentucky in late January 1856 by crossing the Ohio River to Ohio, a free state, where captured, she killed her child rather than have her taken back into slavery, Beloved takes this hideously horrific scenario and explores what happens when pain and anguished ghosts from the past assume human form and haunt the present from the earthly side of the veil. It is a brutal story, brilliantly written, and while never “scary” per se, it will both horrify you and give you profound chills. And yet…it has the most beautiful, hopeful ending scene I have ever encountered. I think they should make you sign some sort of contract if you’ve read this in high school. That you’ll vow to read this at least once a decade for the entirety of your existence until you too, depart from this plane.

Why Art? by Eleanor Davis A graphic novel manifesto/guidebook on the power of art and its function in society, Eleanor Davis’ offering is…not at all what I thought I was getting in for. The first part, an instructive treatise on how to categorize art, to include things like size, color, function, etc.–okay. Got it. Playful and insightful and predictable–not in a bad way, but just…sort of what I expected, I guess?

And then, there’s the second part. What WAS that?

It is incredible is what it was. It somehow became a fairytale-esque philosophical parable that I found myself in the middle of before I even realized what the author was doing, and once there, I was utterly captivated. I had gone into this small book expecting something a bit dry and static, and what I got was witty and weirdly action-packed, and just, well… weird. I adored Why Art, and now I am seeking out everything Eleanor Davis has ever had her hands in.

Rich People Problems by Kevin Kwan This book is as preposterous as romantic comedy gets but it was honestly the best of the series. I mean…I get that it’s supposed to be satire, but Kwan is too good at it, there’s such a fan-boy gawker-type lens through which the lavish escapades of these Southeast Asian multibillionaires are revealed, I almost can’t believe he’s poking fun at it. But I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t a great deal of fun and a superb escapist read. In the third installment of the Crazy Rich Asians series, there’s less of a focus on the two previous main characters (Rachel and Nick) who I honestly couldn’t stand. But not enough of a spotlight on Kitty Pong, gold-digging former soap actress of questionable origins, who managed to marry her way into the Singapore elite. Kitty is fabulous!! and I want a whole book about centered on her extravagant, petulant nonsense. Has anyone else read this trilogy? Let’s dish in the comments.

Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead by by Olga Tokarczuk. Imagine your most eccentric retirement-aged astrology-enthusiast, PETA-supporting, conspiracy-theorist neighbor. You never know what odd belief she’ll express, what strange tales will emerge from her lips, what peculiar perspectives she possesses. Imagine this woman wrote an entire book. About a mess of neighborhood murders. That were being committed by animals!

Are You Sleeping by Kathleen Barber is a perfect example of a book I’m not recalling very well. The main character’s father was murdered when she was a child. It was a seemingly cut-and-dry case, and a teenage neighbor was convicted of the crime. Her mother, already somewhat unbalanced, goes nuts and runs off to join a cult. Her relationship with her twin, with whom she was once very close, deteriorates. As an adult, she has attempted to construct a life for herself that doesn’t involve her past–in fact, she hasn’t told her boyfriend about any of it, her father’s death or even the fact that she has a twin. She soon learns that an opportunistic podcaster has dredged it all up and has based her new show on the decades-old murder, because she thinks something doesn’t quite add up. Things begin to both fall apart and come together. It was an ok book? I raced through it within 24 hours and must have really liked it, but now I couldn’t really tell you why it was so great.

The Silence Of Ghosts by Jonathan Ayecliffe. I became obsessed with this author a few years ago when I saw a passage from one of his ghost stories quoted in a book of Simon Marsden’s eerie black and white photography. His stories, if recall, were ghostly and on the lurid side, which is just how I like them. The Silence Of Ghosts seemed a bit prim in comparison. Told in diary format, it chronicles the story of a young man who loses his leg in the war and is sent to a crumbling old family estate in the countryside to recover from his wounds. He is kept company by his sweet younger sister, a partially deaf (and wholly doomed) creature, and his new nursemaid Rose…as well as a house full of malicious ghosts. A stilted romance flourishes despite stiff upper lips, the sister contracts a strange sickness, and dark family secrets are finally revealed. I couldn’t help but think they were secrets that didn’t make a whole lot of sense.

I’m Thinking Of Ending Things by Iain Reid. This book made me very angry and makes considerably less sense than The Silence Of Ghosts. I am recommending it solely because I feel like I can’t be angry alone and I would like you to be angry too. A woman is in a car with her boyfriend, and they are driving to meet his parents. The meeting is bizarre. Both during the car ride and dinner with the parents there is a great deal of internal narrative detailing how they met and how she’s thinking of breaking things off, in addition to her reflections upon some weird things that have been happening to her lately. The interactions are unnerving, the tension is relentless, and a feeling of impending doom is nearly unbearable…but eventually it devolves into a confused jumble of WTFery. A lot of reviewers laud this book as being brilliant, but I will confess that when I finished it, I kind of wanted to throw it into the sea.

House Of McQueen by Valerie Wallace. Poetry full of beautiful cunning by an exquisite wordsmith, who has taken her inspiration from the late, fabulous Alexander McQueen. Cheeky and twisted, graceful and savage, full of opulence and swagger, these are poems that you can visualize stalking the runway–all dark edged beauty, irreverent silken flourishes, and dazzling brilliance.

Gothic Tales Of Haunted Love: A Comics Anthology by Hope Nicholson. I was beyond excited for this book when I heard of its launch on Kickstarter, with talk of ” fragments of lovers torn apart, ghostly revenge, and horrific deeds”…but somehow, I’m truly regretful to share, most of these stories really didn’t quite meet my expectations and rather missed the mark for me.  If this endeavor had been marketed more like The Other Side (a graphic novel anthology of queer paranormal romance) it would have been perfect–and don’t mistake me, I love that the characters in Gothic Tales Of Haunted Love were a diverse spread of all sorts of people and cultures and eras–but I feel like maybe they were really playing fast and loose with what makes a gothic tale a Gothic Tale. Which makes me sound like a rigid traditionalist who doesn’t appreciate deviations from genre “rules” or riffs on a theme. Maybe I don’t like “modern reimaginings” of things? Maybe I’m just super picky? A few tales actually were perfect. Absolutely spot on. A few were meandering, and one or two were just seemed too abstract to work for this concept, at all. I feel terrible that it wasn’t for me, because I’m know it was a passion project with a lot of heart and talent that went into it. Sorry to be a bummer on this one!

The Beauty by Aliyah Whitely   There are no more women left. They all died from some weird fungal disease and now the remaining men of this particular settlement sit around campfires at night listening to Nate, our protagonist, spin tales of how wonderful the women were. It’s always great to be appreciated too late, right? Something peculiar begins happening on the graves where the remaining women were buried, and then it takes off from there in what is ultimately a brilliantly orchestrated deconstruction of gender roles. I don’t mean to spoil anything for anyone, but I have to share that this book grossed me out like nothing ever has. I love my mama friends and their wee ones, but I am not the maternal sort and I can’t even deal with the body horrors of pregnancy–which this book has taken to a whole new and disturbing level.

Unbury Carol by Josh Malerman. Having read Malerman’s super freaky and very excellent Bird Box, had high hopes for this one, even though it didn’t initially sound like a winner. Carol Evers has an eerie condition; she dies a lot. But she’s not actually dead, it’s more like a two day long coma-nap, during which time her pulse slows, her skin cools, and if you didn’t know any better, you’d think “well, that’s that!” and you’d throw her in a coffin and be done with it. Only two people know of her condition–her best friend, who, coincidentally, just died, and her husband, who it turns out, is kind of a turd. Well, there is one other person who knows about Carol’s strange sleeping sickness: an outlaw she once loved, but who left her because he was a big baby who couldn’t deal with the somber responsibility of loving a dame like Carol. Carol dies yet again, and her husband, tired of living in his wife’s shadow, puts into motion his plan to bury her alive (which he’s apparently been sitting on for a while). Word travels back to the outlaw living on the outskirts of where ever, and he decides that it’s time to do his duty by the woman he still loves and hits the trail to save her. All this wild west stuff was really off-putting at first, but it’s more the weird west than the wild west. An alternate place on a different timeline. I’m not sure how, but somehow that made the setting more palatable for me. I really liked Unbury Carol, but I had a few problems with it. There’s plenty of talk about how “beloved” Carol was in the town and their community, but other than Malerman telling us that over and over, I am not certain that I actually saw any evidence of it in the story, which is always a little annoying. And with all these dudes either trying to murder Carol or save her, it would seem that this is a story in which Carol has very little agency–which isn’t exactly true–but I would have like to have seen much, much more from Carol, who had the potential to be an immensely intriguing and complex character.

Greetings from Utopia Park: Surviving a Transcendent Childhood by Claire Hoffman. It took me a long time to realize this, and even longer to admit, but I love memoirs about fucked-up families. In the 1980s and 1990s, after her alcoholic father runs off to California and leaves his family with less than $50, the author’s mother whisked both Claire and her brother away to Iowa for peace and enlightenment at Maharishi’s national headquarters for Heaven on Earth. This isolated meditation community is where Claire Hoffman grew up, and while…not a great deal happened there other than lots of gullible folks being scammed out of their money (no world peace was achieved, none of these fanatical meditators actually ever levitated, or “flew”), I found it a vivid, fascinating glimpse into a weird childhood. I read Greetings from Utopia Park for a book club, and the other person in the club (there’s only two of us! it’s a super perfect first foray into book clubs for me) felt like nothing really happened and that the book was “one, long, sad, sigh”. She’s right in that it might seem a little …restrained? If you’re expecting a juicy, unbridled, scandalous “tell-all”, well that’s not what this is, and I think if it were all of those things, maybe I wouldn’t have found it so relatable. I’m not sure how I wasn’t a child who grew up in such a community. My mother was a similar sort of dreamer, and I can’t help but thinking if conditions were right…if she knew how to drive, or if she had met the right weirdos at the right time in her life…that could have been my sisters and I, mediating and eating tofu and living in some sort of crazy utopian trailer park. This reads like the book I would have written if my circumstances were only slightly different.

The Rules Of Magic by Alice Hoffman I have been reading Alice Hoffman since I was 16 or 17 years old, and a co-worker recommended her to me. My first job was a part-time affair, and involved hamburgers and french fries and terrible, greasy, red uniforms. I was “bottom bun”: I squeezed ketchup and mustard in concentric circles onto lukewarm meat patties, and topped each bullseye with precisely three dill pickle slices and a soggy circle of red onion. I then passed my creation on to K., who had the coveted “top bun” position, and would crown my topless sandwich with lettuce, tomato and a dome shaped, glossy brown hamburger bun. K. seemed to me at the time very old, though in retrospect she must have been only in her 50s or so, and, I thought, terribly out of place. I was a teenager, it was my job to have a terrible job. K. was or had been an English teacher, so what the heck was she doing there? (I later found out her husband had been diagnosed with an unnamed disease, and I felt awful for belittling what must have been an extra job to pay for his treatments.) We often talked of books and what we were currently reading. “I think you’d quite like Alice Hoffman,” she offered one afternoon during the lunch rush, shouting to be heard over the hissing crackle of the speakers and a customer’s complicated order. “Really beautiful character studies and lots of magical realism!” I had absolutely no idea what she meant by any of that, but I dutifully found a copy of Turtle Moon at a used bookstore, and caught up at once in the surprisingly beautiful prose, I breathlessly devoured it within 24 hours. And so ever after it has always been with Alice Hoffman’s books, at least until I found myself thinking in recent years, “oh, another new Alice Hoffman title? Let me guess? There’s two sisters, one is maybe dark, the other, no doubt, light. There’s gonna be some mundane sort of magic. Something about birds or beetles or butter. There’s a curse, oh, right,  you’re not allowed to fall in love. Sigh. That old chestnut again.” And so too it was with The Rules Of Magic. It’s all there. All familiar, all versions of stories I nearly know by heart after all of these years.  And yet, I found my jaded heart opening to these characters again and again, and as their new story unfolded, my cynicism lifted and I was once again rapt and dazzled, hopeful and heartbroken and swept up in their wondrous worlds of magic and birdsong and cursed love. I realize I haven’t told you anything about this new book, but I think, if you’re a fan of Alice Hoffman’s writings, it doesn’t matter. We have learned by now we’ll go where ever she takes us, and fall in love over and over again, every single time.  (Also, this is a prequel to Practical Magic and really, do I need to tell you anything else??)

The Royal Art of Poison: Filthy Palaces, Fatal Cosmetics, Deadly Medicine, and Murder Most Foul by Eleanor Herman.This was our inaugural selection for a group that a friend and I started over on Good Reads, “Nonfiction For The Senses“– a “virtual book club to indulge in non-fiction books about all things relating to the senses, mostly focusing on the history, lore and science around them, as well as books celebrating obsessions with anything like perfumes, potions, intriguing sounds, textiles and textures, and delicious foods. ” And what a marvelous book to kick things off with! The Royal Art of Poison was absolutely fantastic and rife with fascinating facts and revolting revelations. In this book we examine the deaths of royal personages throughout history and examine the question–was it poison? Or was it just their excessive use of arsenic-based cosmetics, maybe a latent case of tuberculosis, or ghosts in their blood or something? Revealed with a tone of wry wit and gossipy relish, Herman shares with us how folks lived in ye olden days, including the usage of garbagey nonsense medicines, the general lack of knowledge regarding sickness and disease, and the appallingly unhygienic living conditions –“unsanitary” is really an understatement in the extreme. Take a look, for example, at the chapter regarding the palace of Versailles and be glad that all your lazy partner does is miss the toilet a little when he pees. At least he uses a toilet. Hell, at least he pees in the bathroom! Another thing I found kind of hilarious was the lengths to which the monarchy and persons of  prominent social standing would go to in order to avoid being poisoned (which is really eye-opening to how shitty a king they must have known they were and how much they deserved poisoning!) But even if their poison sniffing courtiers or the waving of their magical unicorn horns saved them, chances were they’d die from poorly cooked food, diseases and filthy living conditions, medications and cosmetics containing poisons, or doctors using excessive bleeding, purging, and other treatments, anyway. What a time to be alive!

The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness by Sy Montgomery. I thought this was a remarkably special book for its enthusiasm on the subject of these beautiful, curious, and yes, oftentimes dangerous creatures, as well as the bounty of information it provided–so I was quite honestly surprised to see that a lot of reviewers thought that it wasn’t “sciency” enough, or that the facts seemed a little thin. (Granted, I read this book not knowing much about octopuses except that have eight arms… so any information at all was news to me.) This is a highly personal account wherein Montgomery shares her journey of studying octopuses, and the sense of wonder and delight she derives from interacting with, and “getting to know” these strange, sentient cephalopods. I suspect there’s probably a great deal of conjecture on the part of the author, though, when it comes to attributing characteristics such as “joy” or “affection” to what might amount to captive beasts of no small amount of intelligence merely responding to a bit of stimulation in an otherwise boring environment. We do, however, see octopuses push people away, pull them closer, tease people, lash out, weaken, die, expand and thrive. Octopuses change shape, change color, express pleasure and loneliness and longing. Do octopuses have a soul? In this regard, it’s an inconclusive read. Who can say? At the very least, as far as I am concerned, they’re off the menu on my future sushi dates.

Philosophy, Pussycats, and Porn by Stoya . I have some thoughts about this series of essays and blog posts from writer, actor, and pornographer Stoya– a personality and human, whom I deeply admire (at least when it comes to her work and writings. I have never met her, and do not know her personally.) However, I’m not sure I can convey my thoughts articulately and in a way that I feel that this book deserves. On one hand, it’s an intensely intimate look at someone’s reflections and ruminations, musings and meditations… and not in any sort of cleaned-up-and-sanitized-for-public-consumption kind of way, either. Several of these essays are close to what I consider stream-of-consciousness writing, in the sense that someone who is trying to work something out for themselves, internally, might scribble down nebulous notions and obscure observations, so that when they see these ideas begin to coalesce in black and white, in front of their eyes, they can say, “aha! That’s what it all means!” Stoya writes on issues regarding pornography, sex work, and sex education as they relate to privacy, censorship, and the media etc., and it’s a fascinating glimpse into a thought process from someone who is deeply involved in these issues and really knows what she’s talking about. On the other hand, some of these writings are almost too intimate, too personal–almost as if they were plucked from a diary and a larger narrative, to now stand alone on a page; secret slices of life, raw, rough, unfinished, and very much out of context for a reader who is on the outside, with a very limited view for which to look in. These are the stories wherein perhaps a first name is mentioned…maybe a friend, a lover, a coworker… and we see a small interaction between Stoya and this individual–a coffee and a smoke, a heady fling, a reconciliation–and I wonder…am I supposed to know who these people are? Does it matter? Why was this specific moment in time, with this specific person, given mention? In her other essays, in which we are allowed to see the inner workings of Stoya debating with herself and sussing out answers on the aforementioned various issues, these shared writings feel like a privilege, almost a peek behind the veil. However, the more personal anecdotes and reminiscences make me feel like a peeping tom, and not in a titillating way, but it’s a rather uncomfortable, left-out feeling, like, “why am I being allowed to witness this?”

House of Women by Sophie Goldstein  is a starkly beautiful graphic novel, and a loose adaptation of the 1947 film Black Narcissus, a psychological drama about the emotional tensions of jealousy and lust within a convent of nuns in an isolated valley in the Himalayas. Except that House of Women takes place in the much more foreign environs of what is ostensibly another planet (?) and the “nuns” are attempting to convert the local alien populace. As with most of these stories, it goes about as well as one might expect.

Circe by Madeline Miller. As someone who spent ages 8-10 obsessed with Greek mythology and constantly daydreamed about what life was like amongst the Olympians both major and minor, as well as the thrilling exploits, intrigues, and adventures of their progeny, I was super excited about Circe when I first heard of the book’s publication… and it took until I was two chapters in to realize that I was not, in fact, reading a story about Cassandra. Not sure how I got them mixed up. Whoops! At any rate, it was a happy mistake, as I would much rather have read an imaginative retelling about the solitary island-dwelling sorceress who turned pervy, plundering sailors into pigs than the seeress cursed to utter prophecies which were true but which no one believed, (and which I’d already read in a book titled Firebrand, by Marion Zimmer Bradley. Also, I don’t know about you, but even years later, I am still reeling with regard to hearing the brutal, vicious accounts of abuse that MZB’s daughter suffered at her hands. It’s heartbreaking. It’s always devastating to learn that your hero is, in fact, a monster, isn’t it? Ugh.) At any rate…Circe. Born of the Titan Helios and Oceanid, Perse, Circe is a lonely, willful nymph whose reinterpreted story in the hands of Madeline Miller is a breathtaking, compelling tale, and one of the loveliest things I have read in a very long time.

North American Lake Monsters by Nathan Ballingrud. I am making a concerted effort to pay more attention to the books languishing on my shelves which I’d bought for the purpose of “summer reading” several summers ago (and subsequent summers, since). So far I am working on purchases from 2015. Shameful! But better late than never! North American Lake Monsters is a collection of short stories the likes of which I am not quite sure I’ve encountered before. There are monsters in some these stories; sometimes the monsters are monsters and sometimes they are just flawed and horrible people. Sometimes, even if there is a monster, it’s just a weird, rotting carcass that has washed up from the lake, but you’re an ex-con whose family is falling apart and you just don’t have time to deal with that kind of thing. Sometimes you’re a kid who has a vampire living under your house who has promised to turn you into an undead bloodsucker, if you keep your promise to invite him into your home. Maybe you’re a drunk and destitute, with no home at all, haunted by the ghost of your hurricane-ravaged city. Or perhaps you’re just an ignorant kid, with a strangely terrible home life, and running with the wrong crowd. These stories are bleak, full of more ruin than redemption, and oftentimes ending before you’ve gotten the sense that they’d even begun. I found this an oddly hypnotic read, which I hesitate to call “enjoyable”, due, I suppose to just the very nature of the stories, but that I found pleasure in reading, nonetheless.

Not That Bad: Dispatches From Rape Culture edited by Roxane Gay — Not That Bad offers a harrowing, haunting gathering of essays from a diverse range of contributors; the title, a reference to the widespread minimization of sexual abuse and rape culture in a world that is shamefully warped. “I taught myself to be grateful I survived even if survival did not look like much,” writes Gay in the introduction, with regard to her gang rape at age 12. I’ve read almost everything Roxane Gay has written, and yet this anthology she has edited, which contains only an introduction with her own writing, seems like the penultimate Roxane Gay book. The violence and trauma she sustained as a girl threads its way into everything she writes, and this volume of essays from women and men who have experienced sexual assaults, seems like the moment that her career has been leading up from the beginning: the collecting and sharing of these stories by those who have endured a similar trauma. This was an inexpressibly painful read–each and every story, whether or not you can relate to the author’s specific experience, or if a particular writer’s voice or writing style appeals to you, or not–is a gut-wrenching expression of grief and betrayal and survival. I can’t say this is a “good” book, in the common parlance of what might constitute such a thing. But I do know that it is a necessary book. And even if Roxane Gay compiled hundreds more stories, thousands, there still wouldn’t be enough books to collect the pain and rage that those of us who have survived these experiences feel, every day of our lives. But this book is a good start.

My Year Of Rest And Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh –It sounds trite, but I haven’t quite been the same after reading My Year Of Rest and Relaxation…and not in a good way. The main character, a thin, pretty, privileged white woman, has decided that life is just too much–she doesn’t want to do anything, feel anything, be anything–and she comes to the conclusion that the best way to deal with things is to medicate herself into a year long nap. With the help of a hilariously awful psychiatrist and a crazy amount of prescription drugs, she more or less manages to do just this. Moshfegh’s characters are terrifically gross and awful (but sometimes in ways that you shamefacedly identify with–if you have ever wiped a booger on a wall or worn crusty underwear for a week, you know what I mean.) They don’t treat themselves well and they don’t treat the people around them very well, either. After finishing this book I found myself feeling lethargic and apathetic and thinking of hibernation with a great deal of yearning. That could be the nasty appeal of this book, or end-of-summer ennui, or maybe a little bit of both.

Dead Girls: Essays On Surviving An American Obsession by Alice Bolin –This book was much more, and much less than I thought it was going to be. Probably because I bought it as soon I saw Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties) tweet about it, and I hadn’t even read the blurbs or description for the book before I Amazon-Primed it. I really thought it was going to be a whole book dissecting and analyzing television shows like True Detective and Twin Peaks ; the dead girl trope and how it is a tableau for predominately men to work out their own issues. And while that was only one chapter in Dead Girls, this book of personal essays tying moments from the author’s own life and experiences into savvy, insightful examinations of books, movies, and songs where women are both troubled and troubling presences was surprisingly more than I bargained for. I could be saying that because in every chapter Bolin references at least four to five books that struck me as “need to reads”; it could be the much-broader-than-expected range of pop cultural criticism it offered; and it very well could be that I am more appreciative than ever when authors write from a place of personal experience, and which Bolin does adeptly, with intelligence, humor, and heart. Also: Ginger Snaps gets a mention, and as we all know, that is the greatest werewolf movie ever made, so I probably would have given this 5 stars for this reason alone.

Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn –I read this book in the span of three hours. I don’t think I need to tell you about it. If you’re not reading the book or have already read it, you are probably watching the show. (As am I. I am not enjoying it, but I can’t stop.) I find Gillian Flynn’s work awfully compelling and I hate myself for it. I hate myself for hating myself for it. Flynn writes about complicated women—women who have feelings of anger, aggression, and desire. She addresses this in an interview I read recently, how people suggest that she is not a feminist if she writes about women doing bad things. If she writes about unlikable, villainous women. She pushes back at this notion.  Why are women writers obligated to have all their female characters be virtuous? Why can’t women be villains, too?

Toil & Trouble by Mairghread Scott and illustrated by Kelly Matthews and Nichole Matthews  –After having attended Sleep No More I opined that perhaps I should have made revisiting the story of Macbeth more of a priority before the experience. My friend suggested to me that I should read Toil & Trouble, an exquisitely illustrated re-telling of the tragedy from the witches point of view, instead. We learn of the three weird sisters–Riata, Cait, and Smertae– former mortals who have accepted enormous power and responsibility to protect and defend their Scottish homeland through the ages, and the desperate, diabolical measures they’ll take to ensure this. The notion that the witches are actually the ones working behind the scenes to actively influence the events of the narrative was a perspective that I appreciated the opportunity to have read, and oddly enough, had never given any thought to, until now.

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I am back on my cake-a-month nonsense! This time around, I am baking exclusively from Yossy Arefi’s Snacking Cakes. A recipe from this book–though I didn’t know it was from this book– was recommended to me last year: the powdered donut cake, and so far, that one, plus the espresso chocolate chip cake, above, as well as the All The Spices Cake with Vanilla Bean Glaze that I made in January, have all been winners.

I have become delightfully obsessed with Lauren Rad’s elegant sock designs, and the oatmeal-colored Cromulent socks are the second pattern I have knit up! The first pair were the plummy Tiramisu socks, which I photographed blocking on what I later realized was an inadvertent altar to Arachne! You can’t see all of the spider art on this purple wall, but in addition to the spider cauldron embroidery, there is a whole wall to the right, just out of the frame, with 5 or 6 spider-centric artworks! Now that I’ve realized this, I need to make a more intentional little space here for my knits to stretch and shape themselves in a more sacred, symbolic way (but still lowkey because I am lazily ritual-averse!)

We are to the time of year where, even though I know it is only 50 degrees out, I am just freezing cold all the time. So I wear layers upon layers of clothing. I thought I might share a few of my current over-layers that I’m piling on right now.

–this gorgeous embroidered robe from Seventies Soul
–hoodie from Camille Chew
–cocoon cardigan from Jennie Kayne (try and find it on a re-sale site, though)
–lightweight pima cotton cardi from Universal Standard
–this perfect goth muppet cardigan from Sophie Reaptress
–oversized cultist hoodie from Ovate

I am currently wrapped up in Silvia Moreno Garcia’s Silver Nitrate, which is scratching my itch for characters who are deeply immersed in some sort of obsession (film or art, usually) and then there’s a connected occult or supernatural element. If you enjoyed Gemma File’s Experimental Film or Archive 81 on Netflix, you might dig Silver Nitrate.

I have also just finished an audiobook version of Jennette McCurdy’s I’m Glad My Mom Died and Josh Winning’s Burn the Negative, one being a nonfiction memoir about a former child star, and the other, a book of horror fiction about the present-day gruesome murders surrounding a former child star. I read these both at the same time without really knowing what either was about, and there were some interesting and surprising parallels. I love it when this happens, and it happens far more frequently than you might think! What was the last instance you experienced of this type of book selection synchronicity?

…and in terms of goals, I have now read 25/200 books for the year!

Time to marinate! Every month I’m selecting a quartet of fragrances from my collection cabinet and giving them a primo spot on my vanity so I can clearly see them vying for my attention! This month’s lineup includes:

—Diptique Fleur de Peau  (Sarah Waters sapphic Victorian ghost lovers)
—Frederic Malle Synthetic Jungle  (rubbery raincoat verdant jungle painting Stendahl Syndrome weirdness)
—Nobile 1942 Malia  (a Belladonna of sadness standup comedy special scored by Grimes)
—Kiehl’s Musk  (the world’s skankiest, nastiest musk, or at least a contender for the title)

And finally, I am revisiting what was probably my favorite album of 2016, the darkly euphoric electronica of HÆLOS’ Full Circle. I don’t write many album reviews here on the blog, but I was moved to write about this one; it made me feel WAYS. If a whole album feels too much to dive into, start with “Dust.”

“There is a surreal stretch at the end of an evening of good times that have carried on perhaps an album’s length or a bottle too long. A half-lit, fuzzy spell between two and three in the morning where … You’re in the cramped backseat of a car, cocktail-fevered forehead resting against the cool glass of the passenger side window, your reflection too dark to see. The palm trees are towering overhead–mesmerizing, celestial giants as far away as the distant planets–and the glimmering streetlights are stars that stretch and fade to the edges of your vision like you’re jumping into hyperspace. You want to laugh at the absurdity of the imagery, but all of a sudden, and from out of nowhere, this late night is on the other side of too late. This beautiful, astronomical onslaught is too much; it’s triggering memories more terrestrial and summoning that nostalgic, aching void that’s perpetually lurking at the edges of your experience.

I overheard a conversation recently in which it was mentioned that oftentimes one forgets that words ending in “-algia” indicate some sort of pain. So while we frequently refer to nostalgia in terms of sentimental longing or wistful affection, we cannot deny the twist of the heart that accompanies it, the grief and distress that tinges it. The pain that gives definition to these wispy, amorphous moments, this euphoria we summon and cling to for far too long on evenings like this.”

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POV: you visit my home when I’ve just woken up, and we chat about our goals for the new year. We both have bedhead and no makeup and I’m still wearing my pajamas–maybe you are, too!

But in all seriousness. I’m not trying to have a wildly popular channel and lots of subscribers; I just want to be a little more consistent with making videos. I hate calling this stuff content. I am not a content creator. I’m just sharing snippets of my life! I love to watch lifestyle videos and “what I do in a day” videos…but I don’t see a lot of people in my Gen X age bracket, who don’t have children, who are maybe a little off-kilter. So I thought I might be the weird I wish to see in the world!

Making videos is time-consuming, and it’s a little fraught, not because I don’t like talking to the camera (I love it, believe it or not, even if I sometimes sound like a ding dong) but because what I don’t love is my face. However! What I dislike more than my actual face is wearing a faceful of makeup. I hate makeup and I hate the time and energy it consumes to fool around with it. And in all honesty, that’s what keeps me from making these videos more often…because applying makeup and worrying about the results is just so damn nerve-wracking. So you know what? I thought, “fuck it” and I didn’t bother. I’ve said it before, but this is the only face I’ve got, and I think all ten of you who watch my videos do not give a single crap about how my face looks.

And you’re the people I’m chatting with today ❤

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What do you call it when you are being critical of the way that someone talks to you? I don’t mean tone-policing, I am pretty sure that this is not that.  I don’t ever want to tell someone they are having conversations or sharing information “the wrong way,” but at the same time, let me tell you about one of my biggest pet peeves.

Let’s say you’re on social media, and you’ve just shared a post about a book you’ve read, a movie you’ve watched, or x/y/z thing you’ve tried or experienced. And then you get someone chiming in the comments to say, “YOU SHOULD TRY BLAH BLAH BLAH.” First of all, who asked you? Ugh, don’t be so annoying! But if you are gonna be that guy, I promise you that there is a better way to do it.

Or…maybe you have actually asked for recommendations, and are expecting comments wherein people will be sharing these kinds of opinions.

But either way (although especially if you have not asked), there is a more palatable way to deliver that information. And then there is, as I mentioned above, “YOU SHOULD/NEED TO/MUST TRY BLAH BLAH BLAH.”

To me, initiating your suggestion like that reads as awfully presumptuous. As if you think I haven’t heard of or already tried whatever blah blah blah thing that you’re suggesting. And that irritates me. It insults me. Maybe I am overreacting? Maybe I think too highly of myself? I don’t know.

Here’s what I do know. When I am offering a suggestion or recommendation, this is what I will do. (And I do this because I’m working with the idea that everyone is, to some degree, as peevish as I am. And I don’t want to irritate or insult anyone!)

If a friend over on Facebook says, for example, “I just read MOTHERTHING by Ainslie Hogarth, and I love it–can you guys recommend some similar stuff that I might love?”

My response will be something along the lines of: “I don’t know if you’ve read Mothered by Zoje Stage or The Push by Ashley Audrain yet, but if you love the domestic horror/monstrous mom/motherhood trauma of MOTHERTHING,  I think you will dig these two books. I’d love to know what you think of them!”

In this example I address right off the bat that maybe they are, in fact, familiar with what I am suggesting to them. I’m not throwing something in their face as if I think there’s no possibility that they have ever heard of these things! I mean–you can understand why that approach might annoy someone, right? As if they could never?? So thank god for me, offering up my pearls of wisdom?
I never want to come off like that.

Or let’s just say that your Facebook friend didn’t ask a question at all. They wrote a post about how they were excited to try a new food. They say “I last week I tried cottage cheese for the first time and I loved it.” And they were not asking for anyone’s opinion on that revelation but you think if you don’t share your experience with that food, you will literally die.

So you say “COTTAGE CHEESE IS SO GROSS THE ONLY WAY I CAN EAT IT IS WITH PINEAPPLE YOU SHOULD TRY IT.” First off, and again, no one asked you. But if you have to say something, why not try something like, “You mentioned that you are new to the world of cottage cheese; if you’re looking for different options and don’t mind a little sweetness, you might want to try it with pineapple–that’s my favorite way to eat it!”

I’m not saying that you have to handle things the way I do. I’m not saying that if your conversations don’t sound like mine, then you’re doing it wrong.

I’m just suggesting that –if you have concerns about looking like an asshole online– you might want to take a look at how you are offering up suggestions.

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It’s been awhile since I’ve reflected upon the stinkers and duds that I’ve encountered, and everyone knows it’s much more fun to read about the gross things that people hate rather than the beautiful things they love. So here are five gross, awful perfumes that I’ve have the misfortune of smelling in the past few years. I’ll include links because one person’s trash could possibly be another person’s trashy disgusting treasure–and just because I hated these, it doesn’t mean that you will.

Marc Jacob’s Decadence: “this is a very bad time.”

Imagine you won a contest run by your local radio station, you know, the one with the obnoxious sexist pig morning show duo, generically called something like “Big Dude Bro and the Little Vermin.” Yeah, so you–lucky you!–entered this contest where the prize was the privilege of getting to spend the night in a local spot purported to be haunted. Great, right?! Well, turns out it’s just a sketchy vape shop and the “ghost” is like, how someone saw Jesus’s face in a baked potato or something. And that actually happened next door in the crusty diner. The moment you walk in the door you are assaulted by the sickening aroma of maple syrup vape juice, a cloying waft from an empty rum raisin ice cream container crawling with many-legged insects, and the dusty fumes of your meanest ancestor’s cherry pipe tobacco. Was it a haunting, or was it Marc Jacobs Decadence? You conclude that while you did not experience anything in the slightest bit supernatural, this vile combination of notes will certainly haunt you for the rest of your days.

Givenchy L’Interdit: “I’m too old for this shit”

Givenchy L’Interdit is…oof. It makes my hips ache, and my knees creak. It makes me feel like a fucking fossil. This is a candied fruity floral, like crushed shards of every flavor Jolly Rancher forming the vague shape of a flower, but I think anyone who smells it will agree it is no flower found in nature. Do you know who smelled it and loved it, and thought it was “bomb” and “fire” and “literally everything,” though? A quartet of college girls who robbed a fast-food restaurant and stole a car to fund their spring break plans and who then got bailed out of jail by a skeezy clown of a drug dealer/rapper/arms dealer who looks just like James Franco. I’m pretty sure they are all about this bikini bacchanalia neon candy Harmony Korine girls gone wild hedonist hell of a scent, and man, they can have it. I’m too old for this shit.

Etat Libre d’Orange You Or Someone Like You: “Smells like white lady meltdown captured on YouTube”

ELdO You Or Someone Like You is the screechy confrontational performance art of a person having a freaky public meltdown, a full-out adult tantrum, taking place midafternoon in a popular coffee chain or a ubiquitous lingerie store in the mall, and which is probably being recorded by spectators for millions of future views on YouTube even as the melodrama is unfolding. It’s the synthetic aroma of an indoor public space filled with too many people breathing at once and poorly circulated air, the awkward musk of distressed and embarrassed onlookers, the cool mineralic concrete of silent complicity, the acrid, antiseptic arrogance of entitlement, and the tang of weaponized tears and performative victimhood of someone who felt personally attacked by Victoria’s Secret’s return policy regarding thong panties or the fact that Starbucks was out of oat milk for their ridiculous latte order. You or Someone like you is the fragrance of someone making a massively upsetting stink in front of a crowd and feeling absolutely no shame or remorse because they have a right to everything, they deserve everything merely because they exist.

Thierry Mugler Angel Nova: “money better invested in therapy”

This is a very horny perfume. But a sort of sad, lonely, horniness. It’s the drunk middle-aged lady at a concert or local gig, or festival, stumble-dancing alone. (I am middle-aged now, but in my memory, every incarnation of this woman always seems older than I will ever be.) It smells like what both partners might wear when they pack for their hedonism cruise in a last-ditch effort to save their relationship, and they’re on the prowl for their unicorn. It’s a bit desperate and hopeless, like that last radiant burst of manic energy that you put into a thing that’s doomed to fail, so what the hell, and why not. As to the actual fragrance, it’s a sticky stain on your sheets that, if you dare get close enough to sniff, smells of overripe raspberries, lychee syrup drizzled shaved ice, and a sickly sweet cola drink spiked with patchouli bitters. Instead of spending your money on Angel Nova, I think it wise for you invest in an extra session with your therapist.

Montale Cafe Intense: “I’ll never forgive you, Mary Lesa Howell”

I first sampled Montale’s Cafe Intense years ago when I was initially getting into fragrance and perfumes. I guess I was feeling a little nostalgic for that sample a kind MUA-er sent me way back when! My recollection was that it was meant to be a coffee-forward scent, but…it is not. My partner observed that it smells like a teenage girl who typically wore a lot of candied, sugary scents and who wanted to level up with fancy florals and didn’t quite hit the mark. She tried, I guess, was his conclusion. My thoughts are more specific. This is a cloying fruity-floral that smells exactly like Rose Jam from LUSH, which I bitterly loathe because that smells just like those gaggy sweet Jolly Ranchers hard candies that all the popular kids were always eating in 6th grade. This, in turn makes me think of the MOST popular girl; we’ll call her Mary Lesa Howell–because that is, in fact her actual name–who broke off and ATE part of my sugar crystal science project that year. I hate science projects, and I have never forgiven Mary Lesa Howell, and this awful perfume can go straight to hell.

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Roja Dove Apex: when you live in a pineapple under the sea, but you’ve converted it to a Harley Davidson showroom.

We’re encountering a rose who is not just a protagonist in a horror film but perhaps the film–a cursed film–itself. And not some schlocky nonsense that’s all jump scares and genre cliches; we’re talking the last spine-tingling, pants-shittingly terrifying film you saw and that you’ve begun to have ghastly nightmares about which are starting to eerily echo and reverberate through your waking hours. Court of Ravens by 4160 Tuesdays is, in short, and on paper, an incensey rose chypre–but rumors are the incense component is the boiling blood of a mad cultist mixed with strange and stinging otherworldly herbs; the rose grew sickly and sinister on the unmarked grave of a hanged murderer, and the chypre, well, it’s the usual materials of oakmoss and balsamic elements, but pounded to an oozing paste on an ancient black altar with a secret number of drops from a cracked, cloudy bottle, and I don’t know what’s in that esoteric essence, but it smells shockingly of acrid fright-sweat, bitter adrenaline, and is underscored by a host of sharp, burning pheromones. So, you have probably reached the conclusion that I must love this, and you’re right, and I’m glad you guys can read between the lines.

I am testing BDK’s Ambre Safrano and thinking of a collection of contemporary poetry that I’ve been reading. I’m making this connection because it’s really bad poetry. And I am now 0/2 with the samples that I have tried from BDK Parfums. Now I realize both poetry and perfume and all forms of art are intensely subjective, and what’s considered “bad” in terms of any of it can have a lot to do with personal preference. Ambre Saffano is meant to take us on a faraway olfactory journey, but I think they’ve vastly overestimated the distance this scent has the capability of encompassing because the places that it shows us seem pretty limited.. It goes as far as your laptop screen or the phone, a few inches from your face, as it’s the olfactory equivalent of fanfiction without a single measure of spice, none of the characters have any chemistry, and the writing is weirdly overwrought for a story with absolutely no plot, and then you take that uninspired mess and run it through some sort of poetry generator, and you end up a word salad that somehow manages to be nonsensical and boring and not only are you not enjoying it, it’s actually giving you a bit of a headache. And if I haven’t told you anything about what it actually smells like, that’s because I truly do not know. But imagine a bowl of plastic fruit. A facsimile of fruit, of something sweet and seasonal and juicy that once existed somewhere, but the person who molded this fruit maybe has never even seen this fruit. Imagine you melted down to a slurry those waxy, musty plastic apples and grapes and bananas and dumped in a Costco-sized bag of Truvia, and attempted to make cotton candy with it. And then, for some ungodly reason, you wrote a poem about it. Ok, this review is all over the place, and you’re probably walking away from it dumber than when you started. If it’s any consolation, I am too.

Filigree and Shadow’s The Purest Blue is all sandalwood; sandalwood can feel so lofty sometimes, like it’s speaking some sort of angelic language that you can’t quite parse; it’s over your head. But this is sandalwood that feels nicely tethered, as if there’s a terrestrial translator working on my behalf to decode those epiphanies. What’s even better is that this earthy element, he and I are real kindred spirits, and through his filter, those celestial sandalwood messages get peppered with the slightest bit of salty impish musk, and in his own words, it turns out the angels are insisting “bitch, you need an exorcist.” Tell Me About The Forest (You Once Called Home)is fir and spruce and juniper and is an immediate love. You know I have a huge fondness for fairy-tale forest fragrances, but so many of them are sticky, a fairy forest syrup that you measure a bar spoon into for some sort of Hansel and Gretel cocktail. This doesn’t have that treacly quality; it’s…dryer? Maybe a bit bitter. I feel like it’s a bit of a hermit-ascetic with an acerbic wit and a love of irony. It reminds me of dense, darkened thickets in the midnight woodland art of Tin Can Forest.

I don’t know with certainty that The people you love become ghosts inside you from Death and Floral and is inspired by Robert Montgomery’s poetic conceptual artworks, but much like this particular installation, this perfume is a translucent, tender, neon poem of light and loss and longing. The Death and Floral site doesn’t really list specifics with regard to the notes, just an evocative combination of adjectives revolving around musks, florals, and a “cold vanilla”. Not being a perfumer and not caring to learn anything about it, I can only guess as to what that means. In this case, it conjures a spectral vanilla shrouded in wintergreen morning veils and draped in shimmering shadowed musky, powdery violet dewdrop memento mori jewels. I don’t know if this is wintergreen, maybe it’s birch or sarsparilla, but I recognize something in the family of mentholated musty medicinal miasma, and typically I don’t care for these notes. You could say that in fact, I actively hate them. But I strangely love the deeply unsettling haunted house cold spots drop in temperature that it lends to this already melancholic scent, and I’ve found myself unexpectedly craving it when I’m not wearing it, and when it is on my wrists, I cannot stop sniffing them.

Destrier from House of Matriarch is perhaps the first leather scent I have ever not just tolerated but actually liked. I’m not sure if I’m even a leather fan, but I appreciate that this one just goes so hard. It is not putting on airs, and it’s not in disguise (unlike leather-clad Spongebob Squarepants, above); there is no mistaking it. AND it’s a rather 360° immersive scent experience as well as absolutely immediate, with no lead-in or preamble. Imagine you are an overachieving LARPer, and you took three years of leatherworking classes so that you could make the perfect leather coin pouch to hang from your belt for this intensely anticipated festival you’ve been dying to attend. Even though it’s a tiny piece of a larger, more intricate costume, you want every detail absolutely perfect, from the tanning to the stitching to the embossing. You’ve spent so much time on this accessory that you’re smelling those tanning agents, those fats and oils and chemicals and musks, even in your dreams now. And in waking life, too, even after the event, you are one with that leather coin purse, and you carry it with you everywhere you go. At this point in time, it is stuffed with cedar chips, sweet grasses, and soft moss…because you spent all your coins on those expensive classes and leatherworking tools.

Is Penhaligon’s Babylon meant to evoke Babylon, the den of iniquity and pinnacle of sin? Or perhaps that groovy Satanic prostitute, arrayed in purple and scarlet, decked with pearls and precious stones, with her golden cup spilling with abominations and filthiness? I’m not sure this softly-spiced, velvet-wooded fragrance is as outrageous or dramatic as all of that. Imagine that golden cup, surely sensationalized to pique public indignation, was instead some sort of humble, unassuming vessel, a bowl of roughly carved but fragrant sandalwood, filled with a milky liquid, redolent of honeyed saffron, the aromatic, earthy warmth of nutmeg and coriander’s peppery-aniseed camphor, and delicately resinous, subtly smoky vanilla. If you’re a fan of Dior’s Hypnotic Poison, but don’t love that obnoxious root beer note, I think you’d find Babylon a more tasteful option. I do enjoy this scent immensely, but I’d still like to smell a more vivid and exuberant perfumed interpretation of this apocalyptic beauty.

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Over on TikTok today, I gave a brief, updated tour of my perfume cabinet for 2023. And now that I’ve said that, I am thinking maybe I need to do a longer one for my much-neglected YouTube channel–what do you think?

This little show and tell was at the request of someone who left a comment on one of my previous TikTok videos, but even so, in recent years, I’ve become a little self-conscious about showing off my collection. I know it’s a lot (and believe it or not, that’s not the part I’m worried about being judged for.) I don’t mind saying ‘BEHOLD MY STUFF,” but I never want it to come off as ‘BEHOLD ALL OF THE THINGS I HAVE THAT YOU DO NOT HAVE.” I never want to make someone feel bad about themselves or less-than.

Please keep in mind this is nearly 20 years’ worth of collecting perfumes. I know that when you are new to a passion or enthusiasm, it’s tempting to want to keep up with everything that reviewers or influences are talking about, and it’s easy to spend a lot —way too much—money in doing so. You don’t have to build a collection overnight. You certainly don’t have to build a collection that looks like this. Lord knows, I sure don’t need this many perfumes. But I love to sniff and ponder beautiful, evocative things, and even if I’ve already got something beautiful, maybe even many beautiful somethings, I’m always on the hunt for that holy grail of beauty. It is a strange and wonderful and horrible craving that I can never seem to satisfy.

At any rate, I just suppose this is a little disclaimer and just pre-emptively answering a few frequently (un) asked questions. Because most of you are too polite, but you have perhaps wondered these things. Although I know there are people out there who have twice as many, three times as many, fragrances on their shelves as mine, I am aware that even this is a ridiculous amount of perfumes, and you really don’t need anything even close to this number. I’d love to say that these were all PR or gifted and that I didn’t spend my own money on them…but honestly, except for some of the indie scents from niche-interest creators that I am friendly with, none of them were free, or even discounted. I’m not that kind of writer/reviewer. I’m not on any brand’s radars. I’m just someone who enjoys writing about perfume and does it joyfully and generously even though I am in no way getting paid for it– and as a matter of fact, this enthusiasm has cost me more money than I would ever be comfortable confessing to. But. I do have a full-time job that I have had for almost 20 years now. I am married to someone who has a full-time job. So we are a two-income household…with no children, no car payments, and no student loans. We saved up for this house and between that and the sale of our old home, it is paid for in full– so we don’t even have a mortgage. I don’t go out to restaurants, I don’t travel, and I don’t spend a lot of money anywhere else. So, sure. I am almost stupidly privileged to have the play money to afford an obsession.

Well. Maybe that’s not entirely true. I do have a Patreon where I write about perfume, and the wonderful supporters of that endeavor are giving me money every month. So I am sort of getting paid to write about perfume, I guess? But maybe not in the traditional way of things.

This shadowy photo above was the extent of my collection in 2011 when I wrote about my ten favorite scents for the bloodmilk blog. It’s a little embarrassing to admit that these are still my best-loved fragrances…and yet I have kept acquiring more bottles. What if there’s something still out there that I have not experienced? What if there’s a favorite yet to be found? I don’t dare stop looking! I had to go searching through my Tumblr to find this photo again. Can you believe I still update that thing? I do! I’m stubborn. I’ll be on Tumblr til I die, probably. If you’re curious as to what I was into in March of 2011, have a peek, hee hee!

And is my all-time favorite scent still the cool meditative forest temple dream of CdG Kyoto? (Yes.)

But I also have some new favorites!

The Holy Mountain (this is the old formula from Apoteker Tepe) If you are in the market for a smoky fragrance that smells like maybe the smoke cleared after a super-beardy wizard threw a mystical resin into a fire to conjure an ancient dragon lord or something, but the dragon flew away and the wizard has gone to bed and the fire has burned down so that only the embers are smoldering and the deeply scented, resinous smoke has seeped into all the old wooden beams in the top-most tower room where all the magical shit is locked up…well, The Holy Mountain may be the scent for you.

Stroopwafel from Scent Trunk is a gorgeous gourmand that balances what could potentially be intensely heavy and cloying with something that still feels light and airy, and effortlessly cozy. It feels perfect for what can be a really intense time of year when you’re pulled in every direction, you’re spread too thin, and there’s never enough time. The holidays can be physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually draining, and the last thing you want to do is top all that off with a fragrance that leans too far into any of that mess. Stroopwafel is a scent that feels nostalgic to a point, but in the way that books and dreams are nostalgic, unsullied by what goes on in your real life, and even then, it’s saved by various other elements before it can get its hooks into you and become something maudlin or suffocatingly sentimental. This is not to say I don’t connect with this scent, because I do! But in a way that feels like it’s a treasure just for me. Like being wrapped up in something special that I don’t have to share and in it, creating memories of moments that are solely my own. Nostalgia happening now, rose-tinting the present as I am living it. It opens as the rich, fragrant gooey chewy treat it’s named for, that buttery bourbon caramel syrup center and brown sugar deliciousness of that sort of not-baked-all-the-way-through waffled cookie sandwiching it. But alongside all that cozy, sweet warmth, there’s a breath of something cool and breezy, this side of piney marjoram, that side of woodsy cedar, that makes itself known. It’s the emotional equivalent of waking up too warm in bed at night and slipping your toes from beneath your quilt to give them a little chill. Or perhaps baking up a storm in a humid kitchen on a wintry day and cracking the window open to let in a frigid gust of air. In the end, a lovely vanilla musk rounds out the fragrance. At this point, and until you can no longer detect it on your skin, it smells like the sweater you spent all day wearing in that cookie kitchen, but with a light dusting of snow after you left it on top of the woodpile overnight.

Fort and Manle Confessions of a Garden Gnome I don’t believe this earnest little gnome’s secret to be particularly incendiary, but it does present some specific imagery. Shirking garden tasks to sneak into a woodland affair he’s heard rumors about, and, expecting an opulent ball, he washes behind his loamy soil-caked ears and spritzes on his little limbs a soft herbal cologne with notes of violet leaf and strange citrus. What he finds upon arrival is a fairy ring rave; intoxicated pixies and sprites flirting and frolicking across pepper moss, under disco balls reflecting the birch and cedar trees… and the guilty face of the gnome who doesn’t know how to dance.

Chapel Factory’s Heresy is the sharp green metallic floral of violet leaf, mingled with cool aromatic cedar, lofty sandalwood, and the smoked leather notes of vetiver; elements which alchemize into the austere elegance and kindred glooms of a dry, peppery violet incense. If you like the dark ambiance and nocturnal aesthetic of dungeon synth coupled with spectral visionary Simon Marsden’s black and white photographs of haunted ruins and moonlit abbeys, this is a transportive scent that will spirit you away to those eerie, ominous realms.

Oud Wood from Tom Ford is a ghostly, glacial coniferous rosewood sandalwood melange of chilly, bitter, peppery woods. It is a tiny, sinister statue of a scent in an empty room where the temperature drops suddenly, with no explanation. The perfumed version of a little gremlin that appears in a haunting tale; one that skitters in the corners of your vision when the eye is focused elsewhere and inches eerily to your pillow when you’re at the knife’s edge of wakefulness and dream.

Madar from Poesie Milky, custardy pudding delicately spiced with cardamom’s weirdness and melancholic orange blossom water and kooky sugared pistachios, and damn if this isn’t a low-key melodramatic goth rice pudding on its way to a Cure concert.

November in the Temperate Deciduous Forest from For Strange Women is the aroma of a mushroom queen surveying their loamy domain on a cool, rainy morning. A soft green fern tickles your gills as your mycelial threads in turn wave at the worms moving through the rich earth beneath you; the ground mist rises through the dense forest canopy as cool trickles of rainwater drip off the oak and beech and fir trees to dampen the velvet, verdant moss carpeting a cropping of stones nearby. Your reverie is interrupted by the scent of expensive leather hiking boots on the breeze, crunching leaf detritus, and tiny woodland creatures beneath its self-important tread. You smell the smoke and steam and artisanal resins and tannins of a gourmet flask of tea, and before you can let out a little spore-filled, mushroomy warning, you hear a shrill, nasally human female voice chirp HEY Y’ALL WELCOME BACK TO MY YOUTUBE CHANNEL. Oh no, you despair, it’s the slow-living mushroom forager YouTube influencers. You sincerely hope they pass you over for your poisonous cousins.

So I guess I will wrap up this tour by letting you know that if you have any questions about my collection, my habits or preferences or anything related to something me + perfume, let me know, and I will round all of those up and address then in an upcoming YouTube video!

If you are curious about all of the perfume reviews I have ever written, you can find them over at fragrantica (which is not a great site and I am trying not to be there), so you can also find all of my reviews on parfumo. Curious about BPAL reviews? I have a PDF with loads and loads of them! It hasn’t been updated since I created it in 2020, but I’ll get around to it sooner or later…

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