2025
From the Midnight Archives: Slumberhouse Norne – a cult favorite that’s nearly impossible to find these days. In this post for paid members, I share alternatives that might scratch the same itch, and why I think some of them actually do it better.
I talk about winter’s chilly dreams of sun-dappled forest paths, tart winter berries and Yuletide cemetery strolls, arboreal crystalline orb visions, witchy speakeasies in midnight woods, even a holodeck simulation shortcut.
This is what paid membership gets you: deep dives into how fragrances connect and evolve, how one scent leads to others, how sometimes the thing that showed you what you wanted isn’t the thing you end up keeping. With a paid membership, you get access to the full Midnight Stinks Archives: years of reviews, musings, and fragrance philosophy spanning rare indies, niche darlings, and mainstream favorites you’ve been sleeping on. Or that I’ve been sleeping on! Monthly marinades where I pull overlooked bottles from my cabinet and find unexpected connections. Perfume reviews that read more like atmospheric prose than product descriptions, because I’m more interested in what a scent evokes than what it’s “supposed” to smell like.
Join me for smoke and silk, resin and ruins, moss and myrrh, vanilla and velvet…olfactory reveries, aromatic meditations, perfumed darkness that feels like coming home (if your home is an abandoned chateau full of glamorous vampires or a lighthouse keeper’s cottage colonized by spores and mutating under the moon, or the cabin in the woods where you definitely will speak aloud the words from the flesh-bound book).