The sensible thing would be to spend December hawking my own books on social media, as that’s what you’re supposed to do during this annual consumer frenzy. But I’ve spent the month creating a gift guide for other authors’ work instead. That just feels more in the spirit of the season and nicer for my brain overall, to be honest. So here is a bookish December gift guide, except it’s books I love by authors I adore!
If you need gift ideas for collectors of strange facts and stranger passions, for readers who want their beauty served with darkness, their scholarship seasoned with the supernatural. For friends who see magic in the margins and find wisdom in the weird, and follow mystery wherever it leads! Well, maybe you will find something here for them…
Worlds Beyond Time by Adam Rowe a stunning gallery-in-a-book celebrating 1970s sci-fi art in all its trippy, hyperrealistic, cosmically awe-inspiring glory. Skeletons (and dolphins!) in spacesuits, cities sealed under geodesic domes, emperors dressed like otherworldly Popes, lonely astronauts whose helmet reflections contain entire alien landscapes—all the dazzling weirdness that made this era of genre illustration so wonderfully bizarre and unforgettable.
Essential for retrofuturistic dreamers, anyone who’s ever stared at a vintage paperback cover and felt their synapses light up with starfire, lasers, and demented glee.
Little Hidden Doors by Naomi Sangrealguides us through a luminous sanctuary for exploring the mysteries of our sleeping minds. Sangreal, a psychotherapist and intuitive guide, weaves Jungian psychology with creative prompts (writing, collage, meditation) making complex concepts like shadow work and anima integration accessible without losing their depth. Her approach treats nightmares as messengers rather than threats, offers practical guidance on lucid dreaming, and frames paying attention to our dreams as a radical act, a rejection of wake-centricity, a subversive reclamation of the nocturnal. The artwork throughout is gorgeous and serves as inspiration for your own visual dreamwork. My copy is heavily annotated, margins filled with insights, and it’s become one of my most frequently recommended books.
Essential for anyone ready to move beyond transcription into actual dreamwork, for people building intentional practices around their inner lives, and for those seeking what emerges when you start opening those hidden doors.
Salt Is for Curing by Sonya Vatomsky, a book I have purchased and given away more times than I can count. When I first read this collection, it took all that I had not to devour it in one greedy instant. I feared that to do so, to ingest all of these potent magics 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.
Sonya writes about folklore and the body, curses and cures, salt and blood. Poetry that reads like spells. Essential for readers who seek the ritual in the repast, who recognize the grimoire in a constellation of scars and the deep bear growl of the belly, that memory and personal folklore isn’t precious, it’s raw and bleeding, a sandwich of wounds seasoned with tears and duck fat and ticklish sprigs of tragic forest herbs; that the mouth is where curses live alongside prayers, that to eat is to invoke and to speak is to consume, swallow your tongue or spit it out.
What does any of that mean? I don’t even know. My word salad tribute to a dear friend, an incredible writer, and a beautiful weirdo poet without peer.
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. This book is deeply 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.
Essential for death-positive weirdos, librarians with morbid curiosities, anyone who’s ever wondered about bodily consent across centuries, readers who want their macabre served with ethics and empathy, and those who’ve ever wondered what should happen to their own skin after they’re done with it.
Lapidarium: The Secret Lives of Stones by Hettie Judah Have you ever gazed into a stone and wondered as to the stories it stores? The powers it possesses? Hettie Judah explores the hidden history of these lithic marvels in Lapidarium, from their role in ancient cultures to their modern-day influences and uses. An absolute feast for the senses, the book itself feels like a collector’s treasure, a hoarded wunderkammer of mythic and mysterious curiosities.
Sixty stones, each with imaginative descriptions and wild stories. The Meat-Shaped Stone of Taiwan (banded jasper that resembles braised pork belly). Pele’s Hair (golden strands of volcanic glass spun by volcanic gasses). Angel-appointed wife swaps in alchemist John Dee’s smoky quartz cairngorm. The TikTok moldavite craze. From emerald moons to fossilized feces, from violent lunar origin stories to simple earthen pigments—Hettie writes with humor, compassion, and wit (I cackled out loud more times than I can count).
Essential for anyone who hoarded gemstones in Splendor like a greedy dragon, for people who made a beeline to the mineral rooms at natural history museums, for readers who want their geology served with soap opera drama and alchemical WTFery, and for those who need a weird rock fact to lodge in their brain like a wayward pebble in their shoe to guide their energies for the day.
Witch Hunt: A Traveler’s Guide to the Power and Persecution of the Witch by Kristen Sollée. A hybrid travel guide and memoir that dips into historical fiction, this book reflects research gleaned from travels to seven countries, forty-five cities, towns, and villages. Kristen, a second-generation witch, explores the fraught and fascinating history of these haunting figures from the past and uncovers how the archetype of the witch has been reclaimed as a symbol of power.
We learn of the trauma and tragedy baked into the history of these places, but also how they’ve resurrected and reclaimed this archetype for commerce, community, and activism. Her descriptions of the locations and spaces she spends time in bubble with intensely curious spirit, wicked sharp observations, and expansive, imaginative storytelling—with an eye toward both the sensitivity crucial to conversations about these archetypes and the actual people involved in these histories, all balanced with an irrepressible sense of humor and appreciation for the absurd. Kristen is indisputably at the height of both her writerly and witchly powers.
Essential for witches seeking their lineage, for travelers who want their history alive with magic and fury, for readers who understand that reclaiming dangerous archetypes is its own form of spellwork, and for anyone who’s ever wondered how persecution becomes liberation becomes tourist attraction becomes revolution.
The Magical Writing Grimoire by Lisa Marie Basile is part guided journaling practice, part interactive magical grimoire. It explores writing as a transformative tool for magic, manifestation, and ritual. Lisa Marie Basile approaches writing as both occult practice and craft, half channeling from something electric and cosmic, half chiseling that raw transmission into shape through years of training and intentional work.
Each chapter contains writing prompts woven with magical ritual and tools: working with crystals, spell incantation, candle alchemy, moon phases, bibliomancy, shadow work, automatic writing. You’ll learn to create a personal grimoire of self-rituals and intentions, to write letters to your deepest self without censorship or judgment, to use water and rest as sacred recharge, to resist the linear when intuition calls for scattered poem-spells hidden in purses and tucked on altars. Lisa understands that the grand ritual is returning to sacred moments again and again, that process-oriented magic, the long game of healing old traumas and identifying patterns, leads to massive shifts in joy, health, and abundance. That through writing, we can reclaim our pain, take ownership of our stories, and understand that the word itself is eternal and a wand we’ve been carrying all along.
Essential for writers who sense there’s magic in the marks they make, for those who need to hear that the voice blooms at its own pace, for those who want permission to show up wholly themselves with all the conundrums and strangeness of the human condition, and for anyone who understands that writing is communication with something deeper than readership—with the self, with mystery, with whatever lives at the bottom of the well.
Death’s Garden, Revisited: Personal Relationships with Cemeteries edited by Loren Rhoads.A gathering of tapophilic musings from all walks of life—genealogists and geocachers, travelers and tour guides, academics and amateur sleuths explore the culture, zeitgeist, landscape, philosophy, and history of cemeteries, as well as the stories of the people, both infamous and obscure, buried there.
Told from thrillingly diverse voices spanning the globe from Iceland to Argentina, from Portland to Prague, these writings illustrate one author’s observation that “once we escape from the bony grip of mortality, we find common ground.” We read stories of joy and mirth: first dates, weddings, reunions, ghost tours. We also read of sadness and rage and things vile and unconscionable: vandalism, desecration, racism, revolutions, murders. We read over and over of the peace to be found at the end of all things. That despite their eerie and unsettling associations with ghosts and the supernatural, despite being thought of as bleak, gloomy places, the taboo nature of their existence—well, as one writer declares, “That’s not scary, it’s family.”
I read this book at a snail’s pace, one essay a day, and I think that might be the best way to take in these stories. Reading about death is intense and heavy—grave subject matter, if you’ll pardon the pun. I found myself either delicately weepy or hiccuping with unexpected sobs after quite a few of them. It’s a profoundly affecting, powerfully beautiful collection.
Essential for cemetery wanderers seeking solitude, for anyone who’s ever felt more at peace among gravestones than crowds, for readers who understand that cemeteries are spaces outside of time where the living and the dead find common ground, and for those who know that the quietest places on earth hold the loudest truths about love, memory, and our own fragile, brief lives.
Weird Liza’s Colorama: Vol. 001: Fantastical Creatures, Beasts and Other Nonsense by Liza Rein. Here’s a thing about me: coloring books usually trigger my anxiety. It feels too high stakes somehow, even though I’m literally just filling in lines someone else drew. But something about the weird whimsy and gentle fever dream phantasmagoria of these creatures—I mean, the title has “nonsense” right in the name—put me at ease straight away. “We’re all strange and silly friends here,” they seemed to burble and clack at me, “come on in!”
Twenty trippy hand-illustrated pages of delightful fancy and furry friends, feeling dark, weird, bizarre, or abstract, and this coloring book will not judge. Two hours disappeared while I watched TV and spilled my anxieties onto the page, letting them mingle with the ink, and before I knew it I had a streaky purple bird-wizard conjuring up shadows. My fingers stained in a kaleidoscope of hues, breathing in the quiet hum of something that feels a lot like creativity. A wacky alchemical act transforming unease into art.
Essential for anyone whose hands need a rest from their usual craft, for people who find standard coloring books too precious and need permission to be weird, for readers who can’t just sit and watch TV without doing something with their hands, and for those ready to exorcise the anxiety demons in a wonderland of nonsense.
Murder Ballads: Illustrated Lyrics & Loreby Katy Horan. Ever since I first heard Ceoltoiri’s haunting version of “The Cruel Sister” on their Women of Ireland CD 25 years ago, I’ve been haunted by that moment when “the harp began to play alone”—those goosebumps still chill me every single time. Katy Horan’s Murder Ballads feels like the perfect companion to that long fascination. She brings together beautifully unsettling illustrations with meticulous research into twenty traditional murder ballads and their real-world origins. She doesn’t just retell these dark stories but excavates their histories, tracing how some songs evolved from actual murders while others spring from pure folklore and mythic tradition.
Her approach is both scholarly and sensitive, restoring humanity to victims often reduced to cautionary tales while examining the genre’s troubling roots in patriarchal violence and white supremacy. Each ballad entry includes recommended recordings, making this as much a gateway into the music as it is a cultural study. Horan’s art has a strange, folkloric beauty: darkly whimsical but never twee, weaving folk tradition and rustic charm alongside a gothic sensibility touched by shadow and mystery. A quality of illuminated manuscripts crossed with old Appalachian almanacs and herbalist guides.
Essential for anyone who’s ever gotten goosebumps from a murder ballad, for readers drawn to the darker threads of folk tradition, for those who want their music history served with cultural critique and gorgeous art, and for anyone who understands how real tragedy and timeless myth both become song.
Visual Alchemy: A Witch’s Guide to Sigils, Art & Magic by Laura Tempest Zakroff. Since the dawn of human creativity, magic and art have been deeply, powerfully intertwined. But somewhere in the midst of that conversation sits me—and others like me, I’m sure—excited by this idea, sensing that we have both art and magic in our souls, but not having the faintest idea how to unlock this potential, how to even begin to “do the thing.” “Arting” when you’re not an “artist” is a terrifying prospect!
Laura expands on her signature sigil witchery method, guiding us through exercises and practices to move past our fears and trust our intuition. We explore and grow and create meaning and magic from the shapes and symbols and patterns we find within, weaving these elements together, imbuing them with intent, creating something wholly, uniquely ours alone. Everything around us has a pattern. We find layers of meaning encoded in how shapes and symbols dance forth from our hands. Through art, we are communicating with the divine as much as we are discovering ourselves.
Essential for anyone who senses they have art and magic in their souls but doesn’t know how to begin, and for those ready to discover that the doing itself is the thing, the work, the spell.
Symbolorum: The Secret Wisdom of Emblems by Mandy Aftel. Giant hands reach from the sky to pluck flowers while spiders spin their webs and frogs have spa days. Lions gambol past village churches and platters heap with abundant fruit. Dragons contemplate their visage in mirrors. Camels recline in repose. Snakes eat their own tails. Swans do a funny little wiggling dance! Each small, round engraving contains an entire world mid-story, frozen in some strange dramatic moment, accompanied by a Latin motto that reveals timeless wisdom drawn from Aesop, Ovid, medieval bestiaries, and a worldview in which human lives are tangled with plants, animals, the moon, and the stars.
Natural perfumer Mandy Aftel spent decades reading antique books of botanical illustrations and aromatic lore, discovering not just recipes for perfume but an older vision of the natural world threaded with magic and mystery. When she encountered Joachim Camerarius’s Symbolorum et Emblematum from the 1590s, she recognized something extraordinary: a cosmos where nature was animate and instructive, where every creature held wisdom, where everything spoke in symbols. She acquired an original 1654 edition, translated the Latin texts, selected 100 emblems to illuminate with watercolor, and wove her own insights through Camerarius’s meditations on existence.
Emblems share tarot’s symbolic language, speaking not to your rational mind but to your intuitive and emotional self, pairing image, motto, and meditation to convey timeless wisdom about how to navigate life. Knowledge that moves through the body as much as the intellect. Open to a page at random every morning, let the image and its wisdom guide your day. Today, a hairy leg descends from the heavens to tromp on something that kinda looks like a bunch of garlic bulbs, PULCHRIOR ATRITA RESURGO—I rise again more beautiful for being crushed. Well then. Maybe being ground down isn’t the end of things? Maybe this bruising is exactly where the blooming happens? Bibliomantic wisdom for the day!
Essential for anyone hungry for a less rational understanding of the natural world, for readers drawn to uncover ancient wisdom where everything in the cosmos connects, for those who love old books and tarot and understand that symbols engage us in seeking beyond linear reason, and for anyone who recognizes the transformative power held in these curious circular images.
Magic Maker: The Enchanted Path to Creativity by Pam Grossman explores creativity and magic as inseparable forces: spellcasting and invocation, divination and spirit communication, all in service of making whatever it is you’re meant to make. A song, a novel, a path through this strange world.
She writes about preparatory rituals and consciousness-shifting, about anointment and adornment and alter egos, about the tingly sensation of being “activated” when Big Inspiration strikes. About how chaos must shimmer behind the veil of order—the way the back of embroidered work is a riot of tangled threads and knots, what I call “the nightmare side” of any pristine creative surface. Her references range from Remedios Varo to Orville Peck, from Chelsea Wolfe to Beyoncé to Prince, from David Lynch talking about catching big fish in the depths to André Breton insisting that all art is magical in its genesis. She describes ekphrasis as speaking out about a piece of art and adding your own embellishments through unique interpretation, which made me sit up and think: that’s exactly how I write about art. Magic, she says, is an intentional means of collaborating with Creative Force to transform a state of being, and creativity is the truest expression of our magic. They’re the ouroboros eating its tail, the lemniscate looping forever—two sides of the same sparkling coin, flipped and spinning through infinite possibility.
I haven’t finished this book yet. Normally I would wait until the end before writing about anything, and there was that familiar pull to rush through it, to consume it all at once so I could discuss it properly and give you the full picture. But I wanted to include it in this gift guide while it’s still timely, and I think it’s actually more helpful to write about a book like this in stages because it is teeming with insight and revelations. There’s so much here to absorb and sit with. I can always come back and write more later. But I prefer to experience Pam’s books parceled out more slowly, letting each idea land and resonate before moving to the next, giving them space to breathe and bloom and burrow their way through my wriggly brain noodles, setting off sparks and lighting up pathways and making unexpected connections.
I’ve been in awe of Pam’s work for what feels like forever now; she’s been a continual source of inspiration, and what she does thrills me to the deepest gloops of my marrow. We’ve known each other online for nearly twenty years, fellow travelers on similar creative wavelengths, sharing the same fascination with where art and magic collide. Her words have this particular power to bewitch and transport, to ensorcell you completely, leaving you utterly immersed and somehow changed. I trust her to take me places both wondrous and magical.
Essential for anyone who’s ever felt that tingle beneath their skin when inspiration strikes, for those who understand that getting out of your own way means making space for something grander to move through you, for anyone who wants to see their tangled nightmare-side threads as proof of magic working rather than evidence of mess, and for those ready to remember that making and magic have always been the same shimmering, infinite thing.
If you enjoy posts like these or if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have shared, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?
My second book, The Art of Darkness, now has a German-language edition: Die Kunst Des DUNKLEN.
Wow. That title goes so hard. And it looks like they changed the cover art to now feature John Singer Sargent’s masterpiece, TAKE THESE SNAKES MOTHERFUCKER!
Ok, but for real, it’s “Orestes Pursued by the Furies,” and it certainly makes for an intense initial impression!
When you stand before one of Chie Yoshii‘s paintings, you might notice the technical mastery first—that jewel-like luminosity built up through countless translucent glazes on wood panel, each layer deepening the richness until gold leaf seems to glow beneath skin, until fabric appears soft enough to touch. Every thread is visible, every feather meticulously rendered. It’s a technique inherited from the Flemish masters, requiring patience and precision. The attentiveness to the process is such that you could almost smell the fragrance of the painting (and if her art were perfume, I think it might have notes of whipped orange blossom honey, pomegranate flower smoke, and petitgrain, neroli’s bitter, greener cousin, sweet and dark and verdant all at once.)
Chie Yoshii, Perfume
But then your attention and your appreciation shifts the longer your gaze lingers upon the canvas. A woman with a lion cub pressed against her cheek gazes downward. A fox perches on an armored shoulder, both human and animal staring forward with identical intensity. A unicorn leans its head on a woman’s shoulder in water so blue it seems to glow. You begin to realize these seem less like portraits of dominion or allegory, more like moments of profound communion.
Chie Yoshii, The Sign
Chie Yoshii, Hemera
This quality—this sense of communion between human and animal—drew me to include Yoshii’s work in The Art of Fantasy, alongside other contemporary artists who explore the spaces between human and animal, real and imagined. In my caption for her painting Hemera, I wrote: “The artist often features animal companions in her works, from the mundane and many-legged to the fantastical winged and scaled variety, and whose appearance suggests companionship and camaraderie rather than danger or menace, or, on the other end of the spectrum, mere pet ownership.”
Chie Yoshii, Sacred Realm
Chie Yoshii, The Dream
“Painting for me is ‘participation mystique,'” Yoshii has explained. “It is not about reality, but about the fantasies aroused by its effects. They are viscerally conceived and more tangible than reality.”
Participation mystique describes a state where the boundary between self and other becomes porous, where one participates mystically in the life of another being. Beautiful and unsettling, this dissolution of separateness, an experience of depth and power. Perhaps you cannot rush into such a state. Perhaps it requires the same quality of patience and presence that Yoshii brings to her panels, building up color through repeated application of thin glazes, each layer a small act of faith that the accumulated whole will eventually reveal what needs to be seen. What develops between her figures, woman and wolf, woman and owl, woman and lion cub, is a secret language of history between two beings, spoken without words, understood without translation.
Chie Yoshii, Guardian of the Forest
A deep sense of reverence permeates Yoshii’s work, visible in every corner of her compositions. She paints with exquisite exactitude. A butterfly hovering at the edge of the frame receives the same meticulous attention as the face at its center. A cluster of berries is rendered with the same care as a crown. Every petal, every strand of hair, every individual feather—nothing is disposable, nothing hurried. This isn’t technical skill alone, though the skill is undeniable. It’s a quality of respect for the work itself, for the time it takes, for each element that comprises the whole. You can feel it when you stand before these paintings: you’re in the presence of work made with deep care.
Chie Yoshii, White Dragon
Chie Yoshi, Flora
Yellow butterflies scatter across compositions, landing on bare skin, hovering near feathered companions, perpetually transforming between one form and another. A woman submerged in brilliant blue water shares that water with a white unicorn, surrounded by tall grasses and white lilies, each blade of grass, each lily petal given its due. Dense dark foliage creates sanctuary around them. A celestial creature stands on a tree branch surrounded by cascading purple wisteria, her light blue wings spread wide, her peacock-patterned tail feathers transitioning from blue to green in elaborate eye-marked plumage—each eye-spot on each feather carefully observed and rendered. She appears entirely at home in her hybrid nature, neither fully human nor fully bird but both at once.
A woman rests in flowing white, and on her hands sits a small winged creature with a jewel-encrusted collar, part mammal, part fantasy. Red drapery and pink roses glow behind them, each fold of fabric, each rose petal attended to. Her expression is utterly peaceful, her breathing synchronized with this strange companion.
Chie Yoshii, Memento Mori
Chie Yoshii, The Arbiter
Chie Yoshii, Incubus
The women gaze downward or close their eyes entirely, turned inward to some shared interior space. Large ornate antlers curve upward from serene faces, adorned with blue and purple flowers woven through their branches, clusters of bright red berries, white lilies blooming where throat meets collarbone. The antlers, traditionally the stag’s, the hunter’s trophy, become a framework for flowers, the boundary between human skull and animal bone no longer fixed or certain.
Chie Yoshii, The Bluebird
Chie Yoshii, Mask
“I stare at the darkness in my mind and images slowly float up,” Yoshii has said of her process. The concept or interpretation comes later, sometimes only after the painting is finished. You cannot force the unconscious to yield its images on demand. You can only create the conditions: the patience, the stillness, the quality of attention…and wait for what surfaces. She channels myths, allowing archetypal forms to surface from what Jung called the collective unconscious.
Just as bees know instinctively how to dance, she suggests, we all carry within us inherited images, patterns imprinted in the substrate of human consciousness long before we learned to articulate them in language. Jung wrote that mythology is filled with symbols that echo archetypes in our minds because it was itself inspired by those archetypes. We inherit these images, patterns, and forms that surface across cultures and centuries because they speak to something fundamental in human psychology. Her paintings exist in these resonant frequencies, moments between souls.
Chie Yoshii, Sphinx
Chie Yoshii, Salvation
An entity sits enthroned on dark swirling clouds, crowned with elaborate headdresses swirling in invisible winds, pouring golden grains endlessly from her hands while geese circle through a moody sky. The extravagant contrasts between near-black shadow and luminous flesh create theatrical drama, but Yoshii’s figures emerge from darkness into light, existing comfortably in both. Jung wrote that everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in conscious life, the blacker and denser it becomes. In Yoshii’s work, the shadows receive as much careful attention as the light, both necessary, both honored.
Chie Yoshii, DreamsChie Yoshii, Dreams (interior)
This year saw the publication ofDreams, Yoshii’s first major monograph—200 pages collecting over a decade of paintings alongside essays, enlarged details, and text in both English and Japanese. It’s the kind of book you want to touch, to turn pages slowly, to return to again and again. The kind of object that deserves a place on your winter solstice wish list, though fair warning: once you bring it home, you may find yourself reluctant to wrap it for anyone else.
And perhaps that’s the point! To return, to sit with these images, to let them work on you slowly. The women in Yoshii’s paintings exist without explanation, crowned and adorned, accompanied and embraced. The more time you spend with them, the more you notice: another flower hidden in shadow, the way an animal’s gaze mirrors its human companion’s, the quiet revelations that accumulate in the luminous space between their closed eyes and resting heads, between the darkness behind them and the light that illuminates their faces. There, we might glimpse our own reflection, animal and human both, inseparable.
If you enjoy posts like these or if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have shared, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?
Thanks for giving me this poster over a decade ago, Pam!
Heretic Parfum kindly sent me their A Very Gorey Holiday collection, aromatic spritzes for your space evoking the somber pageantry and whimsical gloom of this beloved artist’s work. Here are some of my initial thoughts on this ominous quartet of room sprays, and yes, I actually did just happen to have this framed Gashlycrumb Tinies poster tucked away in the corner for years, just waiting for its moment to shine!
O Tannen Baum: A skeletal whisper of winter forests, brittle fir needles mummified with age, spiced clove dust, spectral resins eerily whistling on the wind.
The Evil Garden: Candy-sweet florals grown under bell-domed glass, sugared petals and crushed green stems, confectionary chaos cultivated in a Victorian conservatory.
The Haunted Tea Cosy: Sharp, tart citrus flesh, bitter peel and tannic black tea possessed by a poltergeist, soft stone fruit tossed dementedly at your head during afternoon service, pulpy bonks.
Fruitcake: An invisible man at the party taking up impossible space, scuffed leather jacket creaking and crackling, sharp brandy drunk sloppy, straight from the bottle, candied citrus peel and scorched nutmeg smoke clinging to his swaggering, unseen form.
If you enjoy posts like these or if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have shared, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?
Noir Kei Ninomiya’s Spring 2026 collection opened with Japanese poet Aoyagi Natsumi’s voice reciting the names of sea creatures, but what emerged on the runway looked less like anything from the ocean and more like someone’s childhood bedroom ceiling come to life : goth Syfy channel creatures wearing the cosmos.
Star-shaped metal frameworks sprouted from bodies in geometric sprawls, crusted with crystals and glittering elements that looked like Ninomiya had raided several glamorous aunties’ jewelry boxes, plucked out all the most aggressively bling and sparkly bits, and used them to bedazzle the night sky.
Tulle dresses exploded into impossible three-dimensional structures – one resembling a tutu crossed with a full-body loofah – while sharp blazers and crystalline pentagram bralettes anchored the more sculptural experiments. Harnesses extended into sprawling wire halos, and dresses grew pointed, silvery tinsel-esque extensions that swayed and bobbed with movement.
Shinji Konishi’s molded headpieces looked like they’d been constructed by alien insects, wasp nests made from something inorganic and vaguely sinister, bulbous forms painted in midnight hues with surfaces that suggested secretion rather than craft. The Jimmy Choo collaboration brought loafers studded with star-shaped grommets which seemed oddly practical footwear for otherwise celestial beings!
The designer said he wanted something playful, “like childhood, the first drawing,” and you can see that impulse in garments as modular systems where fabric and metal build wardrobes for a dimension where midnight skies walk around on two legs and the stars from a pulpy Ed Emshwiller comic book cover illustration have developed their own sartorial obsessions, complete with Lookbook.nu accounts and everything.
If you enjoy posts like these or if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have shared, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?
Santa Maria Novella Quercia I know I talk a lot about grey overcast skies and thunderstorms and fog and mist and loving the glooms, but even I can appreciate an objectively beautiful day. Quercia is that day…clear clear air, clean clear water, when people say fresh air or water is sweet, this is what they mean, a sharp lucidity you can taste. Something green but not heavy, not dense forest green, lighter than that, the pale spring green of new growth and tender stems crushed underfoot releasing their watery juice. A cloudless, cool spring morning that makes you genuinely think “I am glad to be alive,” the kind of day that feels like a gift you didn’t ask for but accepted anyway. Dappled light pooling through ancient oak branches, the tree itself barely present except as shadow, as the reason for this filtered sun, this meadow existing in its patient protection. Lying in the grass eye-level with buttercups and bluebells, yellow and blue blooming heads, their petals hold that papery, delicate sweetness, barely-there floral, more like the idea of flowers than their actual heavy perfume. They’re good-natured about being trampled. They know they’ll be growing on your grave one day, gentle and insistent, reclaiming everything with the same cheerful persistence. For five hundred years, the oak has stood watching smaller things bloom and fade and bloom again, and you’re just another small thing, bright and brief and beautiful. Studio Ghibli sunlight, that glowing animation warmth where death exists but doesn’t overshadow, where graves get flowers and flowers get walked over, and it’s all the same turning wheel, all the same dappled afternoon. The shadow is there – hence the coolness, the morbid turn – but that’s the way of things. Just keep enjoying the flowers while you can. (Many thanks to my dear Flan for bringing this back from her recent travels for me!)
Air & Weather Paris, 5 A.M. Gourmand, but make it runway, through a filter of sheer delectation. You could bite into it theoretically, but you wouldn’t; it’s the expansive, exultant feeling right before you laugh with unexpected joy at something beautiful. Amber laminated like a croissant, all those folded layers, but impossibly light, airy where it should be heavy and resinous. Hollow chambers of golden fluff, bird bones that shouldn’t be able to support flight but do. Plumage structured in tiers, soft but strange to the touch, not quite what you expect when you reach for them. Phoebe Buffay as amber confection as a trilling Bjorkian lullaby swan dress. Wearing something ridiculously elegant and beautiful and warmly nourishing all at once. Playful spectacle of soft golden resin folded over and over into itself, sweet baked warmth and downy impossible lightness, earnest and gorgeous and committed to the charm of taking pleasure seriously without being serious.
Arcana Wildcraft Black Death There’s a particular kind of gothic imagery that Black Death calls to mind: baroque church architecture in shadow, where stone angels tucked into dusty alcoves have awakened hungry, wings once outspread in reverence now twist inward in sacrilege, enfolding flesh in the dark. A century’s worth of prayer-stained marble suddenly weeping blood; an inverse of holiness; the stony flame of the frozen heart. Black Death is cold where it should be warm. Clove should read as warming spice but here it’s numbing, that sharp eugenol prickling before the needle’s sting, tingles cold and strange. The smoky haze of offerings burnt to forbidden names. Sweetness emerging from the dry smoke and numbing spice, out of place, a lure you know better than to follow but follow anyway. Temptation heavy and inescapable, smooth and terrible in its certainty, the sweetness of something you were always going to do. Desolation and eerie stillness, the chilled moment of being found by what you’ve forever been circling. This is what it smells like to stop praying for the shadows to spare you and call them closer instead. Fear and desire meeting in the same alcove, two faces of one shadow. The darkness was coming regardless – might as well open the door to it yourself.
Hellenist À l’Ombre d’Artémis The wild goddess of the hunt peeling citrus in a mossy starlit clearing, an unlit Baies candle wafting blackcurrant and dewy rose from her pocket. In another pocket (cargo pants, lots of pockets): crushed mint, pale green sparks, cold mineral facets. Retinal ghosts when you close your eyes after staring at something bright. The quality of light more than light itself. Green stems snapped, leaf sap on fingertips. Petals pressed between glass slides. Forest floor dampness clinging to knees. Atmospheric, solitary. Citrus as quartz as starshine, crystalline and remote. Grains of light-fall suspended. Psychic gossamer, sour afterimage. Florals at dawn, night’s lingering chill. The moon in your mouth, its clear eye sees all.
Epichron Nightchild When I first sampled Nightchild months ago, I thought it smelled like an epic ballad by a Finnish heavy metal band, all Nightwish operatic drama and intensity, soaring vocals over crushing walls of reverb and distortion, cathedral-sized forests rendered in smoke and electric guitars, everything amplified and enormous. After purchasing a full bottle, I realize it’s something equally intense, but different: not operatic shrieking but guttural chanting, throat-singing incantation, Heilung summoning spirits in a clearing. Green-earth-smoke, tangled and inseparable. Coniferous sap weeping, clinging in translucent filaments. Forest floor moss, rooty, dark, and creeping, peeled away in damp handfuls, exposing Xenolithic scars. Loamy sweetness and soil, minerals apothecary-bitter. Cedar knife-edge, incense cutting sharp, clean and cold. Herbs twisted and wrung, citrus peel, crushed pine needles, and black pepper ground fresh. Less actual smoke than the drama suggests, more breathing near where smoke was, its ghost hanging in frigid air. A ritual performed for an audience of one. Maybe you’re dreaming—the clearing, the figures circling, the intranslatable incantations carved on gold, the owl cries, the wolf howls, the gods laugh like thunder, that kind of thing. Dry ice fog rolling low across the stage floor, backlit for maximum atmosphere and vibes. Hazy incense shrouding stark forest, ancient spells you mouth without understanding, throat-singing layered with crystalline chant, the ceremony private and enormous simultaneously. You’re watching from inside the dream, close enough to smell the vapor, far enough to know it’s performance. The ancient forest rendered, amplified, made devotional, and only for you.
Brown Sugar Babe Wildcard (BR540 dupe) Wild Card smells posh, polished nonchalance, elegance carrying a slight edge. The dryness of unlit cigarettes, tobacco-adjacent without being tobacco. Something golden and floral threaded through, warmed with spice, woods that feel cosmopolitan rather than earthy. Smart, savvy, confident, plugged-in – an It-girl who knows everyone, goes everywhere, looks expensive doing it. No interior life to speak of, but she doesn’t need one. A pack of Gitanes tucked in a Parisian model’s handbag alongside a perfect lipstick, a vintage Hermès wallet soft with age, a dog-eared French paperback, loose euro coins, and keys to an impossibly chic old apartment. (I don’t know if it smells anything like BR540; I had a little sample ages ago, but it didn’t leave much of an impression. Probably a little too sweet, though. No matter how much or how little Wildcard resembles that scent, it is by far a better purchase.) Over on Patreon this month, I share a favorite layering combination involving this scent!
If you enjoy posts like these or if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have shared, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?
A few days ago, I wrote about realizing I need to talk about my books more. Since then, I’ve been spiraling through strategy conversations, brand consultations, and existential dread about what it means to shift from “person who writes about lots of things and also has some books” to “author who writes about lots of things.”
And here’s my real fear, the one keeping me up at night, that’s super scary to admit: What if the pivot pisses you off?
Many of you have been here since the beginning, or at least since before the books. You followed Unquiet Things because I write about perfume and obscure art and horror films and whatever other weird rabbit hole I’ve tumbled down at the moment. You found me through Skeletor Is Love, or Coilhouse, or Dirge or Haute Macabre, or Rue Morgue or that time I helped track down the Wrinkle in Time cover artist. Maybe you’re here for the perfume reviews and couldn’t care less about art books. Maybe you followed me on Tumblr in 2011 and never even knew I did any of these other things, let alone that I wrote books.
This little ecosystem has always been eclectic and sprawling because I’m eclectic and sprawling. I have too many interests to devote myself to becoming a guru in any single one. I like knitting and cooking and tarot art and weird fashion and Japanese stationery and a thousand other things, and I don’t want to pick just one to be “my brand.”
But I did write four books. They’re some of the most meaningful work of my life. And when my day job eventually ends (it will), I need those books to sell well enough to matter.
So how do I make the books more central without abandoning everything that brought you here in the first place?
Look, I know this is all very “watching me work through my shit in real time.” I know I’m being an extremely whiny baby about having to talk about my own work. Most authors probably don’t air their marketing anxieties on their professional websites…but this has never been a professional website, has it? This is where I work through things. I’m deeply annoying and deeply uncool, but that’s the deal here. I put it out there, what I’m pondering, what I’m worried about, what I’m trying to figure out. Writing my thoughts helps me organize them, find connections, work toward solutions. And sharing them is, as cheesy as it sounds, when the magic happens, because you weigh in with your own thoughts and perspectives. Which is very awesome and very helpful.
So here’s what I’m thinking:
I don’t need to stop writing about perfume or art or any of the other things that interest me. I don’t need to turn this blog into a book promotion machine. What I need is to make the connections more explicit between all these interests and the books. The books aren’t separate from what I do here. They’re not some side project I did once. They’re the concentrated, curated form of everything I share here in smaller doses—the deepest expression of all these obsessions I’m constantly writing about.
The person who loves my perfume reviews might not realize there are 175+ artworks in The Art of the Occult exploring the exact same mysterious, symbolic thinking I respond to in fragrance: alchemists and mystics, Tarot readers and occult practitioners, all working with the visual language of transformation and hidden meaning. The person who followed me for Skeletor might not know I literally wrote the book on artists obsessed with darkness and the macabre: Victorian mourning culture, Gothic painters rendering beautiful terror, contemporary artists making work from their demons. The sci-fi art mystery nerds might not have connected that The Art of Fantasy is packed with visual worldbuilding across centuries: medieval illuminators dreaming impossible creatures, Symbolists painting myth as truth, modern artists constructing entire universes through paint and brush and canvas.
And the fourth book (not yet officially announced!, this is just me hinting and winking!) is all about artists who pursue mystery itself. Artists who document the inexplicable not to solve it, but to honor it. Spirit photographers capturing the impossible. Medieval painters depicting angels like personal acquaintances. Contemporary artists exploring parallel dimensions and threshold spaces, and that old chestnut, “liminal space.” David Lynch died while I was working on it, and the timing felt weirdly, sadlariously perfect—the master of the unexplainable vanishing just as I’m wrestling with how to write about mystery without trying to explain it away.
And now I’m gearing up to do it all over again, promote a new book, talk about it endlessly, make people care, while trying not to neglect the three books that came before or the space I’ve built here or the people I’ve invited into it over twenty years. Writing about embracing uncertainty while being profoundly uncertain about how to do any of this right.
You’re already here for the aesthetic. The books are just… more of it. Deeper dives. Curated collections of exactly the kind of art and artists I’m always sharing pieces of.
I’m not pivoting away from you. I’m trying to make sure you know the books exist as resources for the things you already love about what I do here. I’m trying to be more intentional about weaving the books into what I already write about. Not “BUY MY BOOKS” in flashing lights, but simple connections, making those threads visible instead of assuming you’ll just… figure it out on your own. I’m trying to build on the long game I’ve been playing all along—where the perfume enthusiasts, the Skeletor fans, the mystery nerds all eventually find their way to the books through whatever tentacle of interest brought them here. Because I value the community we’ve built here over 20+ years. Because I’m betting that most of you who love the blog would also love the books if you knew they existed and understood they’re made of the same stuff.
I don’t have it figured out! But I am working on it! I’m sitting with the discomfort of not knowing exactly how to do this without it feeling weird or false or like I’m betraying the eclecticism that makes this space what it is. Maybe some of you have thoughts. Maybe you’ve been wondering why I don’t talk about my books more. Maybe you forgot I even wrote them (no judgment, truly, I’m crap at marketing myself, which is the point of all of this whole monologue!). Maybe you have ideas I haven’t thought of. Maybe you’re navigating something similar in your own creative work.
But …maybe that’s where I always seem to do my best work anyway? In the not-knowing, in the questions without clear answers, in the mystery of what comes next? Hm.
If you enjoy posts like these or if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have shared, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?
I am feeling a little self-conscious about everything I wrote yesterday (although I really appreciate everyone’s comments! It’s both weirdly depressing and heartening to know there’s so many of us in that same boat) but anyhow, I thought I’d share some other stuff real quick so that won’t be the most recent post on this blog for people to see. Silly, I know. But it will make me feel better!
We took a little trip to Asheville this past weekend. My sister was doing a Friendsgiving type thing, and though we hadn’t initially planned on going anywhere for the holiday, plans changed! One thing about me and travel is that I get weirdly excited when I see the stores in our fridge dwindling, and I get to think up creative (though sometimes bizarre) uses for our remaining meals so that we eat everything up and nothing goes bad while we are gone. There were a lot of strange curries on the table before we hit the road! Kidney bean and cabbage curry sounds a little off-putting (and farty), but it worked!
I packed us some snacks in the form of tuna onigiri, roasted Japanese sweet potatoes, hard-boiled eggs, and apples because I was trying to ensure that we didn’t eat too much junky stuff while we we traveling. Plus, I have an inner snob who thinks “…am I …BETTER than everyone??” when I eat an apple instead of gas station food. I’m not proud of that. But it’s true.
We stayed in an adorable cottage at the top of a terrifyingly twisty driveway with instructions from the hosts to not leave food in the car with the car doors unlocked…because the local bears have figured out how to open the car doors!
We didn’t really have time to do much of anything, but we were able to spend some time at the Arboretum and find more Thomas Dambo trolls (we saw them on Vashon Island late this past summer, too!) We also sped through the beautiful bonsai garden, and even typing that out feels like a crime. But we really only had about an hour at our disposal, and we had to be brisk and efficient about it!
One thing that was paramount was taking a moment to drop by the Dripolator and get a T-shirt. I’m not much for logos and such, but theirs is so cool, and I’ve been obsessed with the idea of grabbing a t-shirt from them for years. But anytime we are in the area, I always forget. Not this time, though!
I arrived home to a beauteous package! I know it’s a whole six months away, but I needed the floweriest frock for my evening with Florence (and also an audience of several thousand, I guess, but I like to pretend she’s just singing to me.) I will pair it with beads and a velvet choker and my stompiest of boots.
I sobbed to “What the Water Gave Me” when I turned 40, watching her whirl and careen madly across the stage. I plan on screaming this time a decade later, loud enough to break time backwards and forwards, loud enough for every version of myself there ever was to hear.
What am I screaming about? Everything, nothing? Maybe just the fact that I got a really pretty dress?
– I am still watching Alien Earth, albeit very slowly. I think I like it, but I’d love to know the general opinion of the show. Did people love it? Were they mad about it? I don’t really care for how the alien actually kinda looks like a person in an ill-fitting alien suit. It somehow looks too human to me?
…okay, so I guess that’s it. Like I said, just a few tidbits!
If you enjoy posts like these or if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have shared, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?
I had a conversation recently with a marketing and brand strategist whose work I genuinely admire. I reached out because I’ve been watching authors and creators in my orbit work with her, and the results are absolutely freaking gorgeous. Thoughtful, strategic, and clearly effective. I came to the conversation thinking I knew what I needed help with, but I left feeling deeply unsettled.
My main takeaway, at least initially, was that the problem was me. That I was getting in my own way. That my resistance to certain language and frameworks—”content creator,” “personal brand,” “monetizing my platform”—was holding me back from turning what I do into a sustainable income. That if I wanted people to take me seriously, to move beyond “hobby” into “career,” I needed to start thinking differently about all of it.
It freaked me out. A lot!!!
But after a day of sitting with the discomfort, I realized the problem wasn’t me, and it wasn’t her either. The problem was that I muddied the conversation by bringing up everything I do….my books, my perfume writing, my Patreon, my blog, my day job that won’t last forever…and accidentally framed it all as a question about comprehensive monetization when what I actually needed was much more specific.
Here’s what I should have said from the beginning: I need my books to sell better.
Not “I need to monetize everything I create.” Not “I need to build multiple revenue streams.” Not “I need to charge brands for perfume reviews.” I need the books—three published in my Art in the Margins series, with a fourth on the way—to reach more people. I need the audience I’ve spent over twenty years cultivating to understand that these books are where my work lives most fully. And when my day job eventually ends, I need book sales to be a meaningful part of my income. That’s it. That’s the actual problem.
But I guess that’s where things get complicated. When you go looking for help with visibility and sales, you often get handed a complete toolkit: personal branding, content strategy, monetization frameworks, influence-building tactics. And embedded in that toolkit is a false choice:
Either you stay small, keep it as a “hobby,” remain invisible and unsuccessful—or you embrace the full apparatus of modern creator culture. Monetize everything. Think of yourself as a brand. Turn every piece of writing, every bit of expertise, every fragment of your creative practice into a potential revenue stream.
Those feel like the only two options. But they’re not, right?! That can’t be it!
I write about perfume for my Patreon, Midnight Stinks. My patrons get the deeply personal reviews, the first glimpses, the sneak peeks before I share things with the rest of the world. They also get scented notecards from me every month. It’s intimate, reciprocal, and appropriately monetized for what it is—a creative practice I want to sustain without compromising its nature.
What I don’t want to do is charge brands $5,000 for a sponsored post where I say something smells “like, so bomb” and call it a day. I see influencers do this, and that’s a completely legitimate business model for people building that kind of platform. But it has nothing to do with the kind of writing I do or want to do. Turning my perfume writing into billable brand partnerships would fundamentally change what it is—and I don’t want that. When the consultant suggested exploring that revenue stream, she wasn’t wrong. For someone building an influencer business around fragrance, that’s exactly the right advice. But I’m not building that business. I’m a writer who happens to write about perfume as part of a broader creative ecosystem.
So here’s what I’m actually trying to solve: How do I make sure the audience I’ve cultivated over 20+ years—people who follow Unquiet Things for the art, the horror, the perfume, the darkly beautiful cultural ephemera—understands that my books are the primary work? How do I reach new people who would love these books but don’t know they exist? This isn’t about becoming a brand or monetizing everything. It’s about making the books more visible within the world I’ve already built, in ways that feel authentic to that world.
The consultant asked good questions. She gave thoughtful, professional advice based on what she heard from me. The disconnect happened because I came in talking about sustainability and multiple income streams, which naturally sounds like “I need to diversify and monetize my creative output.” But what I actually meant was: “My day job is temporary, and when it ends, I need my books to be selling well enough to matter. Everything else can stay exactly as it is.” Those are very different problems requiring very different solutions.
The conversation was valuable, though, because it forced me to articulate what I actually need…and just as importantly, what I don’t need. I don’t need to hustle in ways that feel gross. I don’t need to perform a version of myself that isn’t true. I don’t need to turn every creative practice into a revenue stream.
I need to talk about my books more. I need to make it clearer that they’re The Thing. I need to build better pathways between all the things I share and the books that come from the same place.
I’m going to work through the materials the consultant sent me. I’m going to talk to other authors who’ve worked with her. And I’m going to stay open to the possibility that there’s a way to work together that serves what I actually need: not the comprehensive brand-building package, but the specific question of book visibility.
But I’m also realizing something else: maybe one of my mistakes was framing this as a branding problem in the first place. Maybe what I actually need isn’t a marketing/brand consultant (or at least, not only a marketing consultant.) Maybe I need to be talking more with other writers and creators who are doing similar work. People who got similar speeches about selling more and turning everything into income, and who struggled with whether to listen. People who create beautiful work around their books and somehow manage to keep them central without losing the expansiveness that makes their work interesting. People who are navigating this same tension between wanting their work to reach people and refusing to perform a version of success that feels hollow.
Maybe we should be having regular conversations (working calls, even! GASP!) where we bolster each other, share what’s actually working (not what the marketing industrial complex says should work), and remind each other that we’re allowed to do this our own way.
Because here’s what I know: I am an author! I have written three books with another on the way! And dangit, you’re going to be hearing a lot more about them! Not because I’ve embraced “being a brand” or overcome my stubbornness or learned to monetize everything. But because these books deserve to be read, and I deserve to claim the work I’ve already done.
I just need to figure out how to do that in a way that doesn’t make me feel like I’m performing someone else’s version of success. And maybe (probably?) I need to do that in conversation with other people who are asking the same questions.
If you enjoy posts like these or if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have shared, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?
