lucymonster | Entries tagged with fandom: horror

(Behold! A cute new ghost librarian icon for spooky reading specifically. I've uploaded some new horror movie themed icons, too. Gotta get the most out of my paid account.)

Seventeen-year-old Jade Daniels is a half-Blackfeet girl living with her abusive father in a small lakeside town in Idaho. Alienated and lonely, she retreats into slasher movies, fantasising vividly about a real-life slasher villain someday appearing to tear up the town she hates. But then a community of uberwealthy developers and media moguls move into a new luxury settlement in the national park across the lake, bringing with them a daughter Jade's age who turns out to be the perfect embodiment of the slasher genre's Final Girl archetype; bodies start washing up, killed in mysterious ways, and Jade becomes convinced that her fantasy is at last coming true.

This is - oh, man. I LOVED this book. Jones does not for one second allow the fact that he is a middle-aged man to interfere with the overwhelmingly authentic troubled-teenage-girlness of Jade as a protagonist. I know this girl. I'm friends with this girl. I literally went to school with this girl, or at least, a few different girls who add up to her. Her viewpoint is blinkered by all the petty adolescent foibles you'd expect as well as the much darker stuff, and it's a big source of poignancy that we as adult readers can see the very different version of events being experienced by the few adults who care about Jade and are trying to help her, but she cannot see it at all. She remains fervently committed to the world she has constructed for herself in a way only kids of this almost-worldly, I-know-it-all-now age can be - which makes it all the more impactful when she and the adults both turn out to be completely right, in ways that should be fundamentally incompatible but somehow aren't.

So, yeah. The character work and overall handling of narrative themes in this novel are among the best I've read in ages. I am therefore all the more inclined to nitpick its structural flaws, because (to reduce things to a simplified Goodreads rating system) I really badly wanted this to be a five-star book but could only in good faith award it four. Which still puts it well inside my "heartily recommend" bracket by any measure! If you haven't read it but think you might like to, please add my name to the list of people who've recced it to you and stop reading here. What follows will be both spoiler-riddled and comparatively far less important than the book's strengths.

( Major spoilers under the cut )

On the other hand, I don't know it's just because I acclimated myself to Jones' prose last year with The Only Good Indians, but I found this an easier, more aesthetically pleasing read. And the cover design is gorgeous in this very simple, distilled way that breezily outperforms many more elaborate confections. If I ever spot a copy of this book secondhand, I'm snapping it up because it will look lovely on my shelf, and also because I know it's one I'm going to want to read again down the line. I just love Jade so much.

Contrapoints has released a new video essay! It's about Saw! Much shorter than her usual, but filled with all the same tongue-in-cheek cleverness and philosophising and wild tangents and running jokes. And, of course, costume porn. For this video she has messed up her hair and makeup and wrapped herself in barbed wire, and guys, it is doing things to me. I knew I admired Contrapoints but I didn't know I was hot for Contrapoints. Turns out I very much am hot for Contrapoints, at least when she does herself up like she's just escaped a Saw trap. Damn.

Anyway, watching this was a kind of DIY exposure therapy for me, lol. The Saw franchise is pretty much the reason I spent all these years thinking of myself as Not A Horror Person. I'd been really enjoying my forays into the genre in my mid/late teens, until my then-gf and I decided to host an overnight Saw marathon for all our other edgelord friends. I think I actually quite liked the first one. But we kept going (this was the late 2000s, there were already five or six of them by this point), and we were tipping into the early hours of the morning when I'm prone to feeling queasy anyway, and I was very tired and probably a bit drunk, and I remember falling into this awful half-doze where I could still hear all the screams and gory squelches coming from the TV set. At one point I came fully awake to a conveyor belt full of rotting pig carcasses getting splattered all over everything for some reason? It was the exact kind of gross that I like least in the world, and my sleep-soggy brain was not equipped to handle it. But of course I was a teenage edgelord surrounded by all her edgelord friends, so I still did not stop watching. But from then on, when I thought of horror movies, I thought of that night, and the association made the whole genre feel nauseating.

(I want to be strictly fair to Saw here: my mental health deck was also stacked against it. Around the same time period, for unrelated reasons, my needle phobia really kicked into overdrive and my vasovagal response was expanding to trigger on all sorts of other unpredictable forms of gore; since it was so hard to guess which sights of blood would be harmless and which would set off a fainting spell, I became really avoidant of violent movies in general.)

I'm definitely not at a point in my horror (re)discovery journey yet where I want to rewatch Saw. Maybe someday I'll be desensitised enough, or maybe I will always be a bit too squeamish. But watching a gorgeous woman draped in elaborate barbed wire jewellery talk about Saw is much more in my wheelhouse. Also she has made me want to watch a bunch of Quentin Tarantino movies, which is not specifically what I expected from a video titled "Saw", but this is Contrapoints so there's always some kind of massive tangent you could never have guessed from the title that ends up swallowing half the runtime. And that's why we love her.

The Silence of the Lambs (1991): Okay, so, this an actual masterpiece and I can 100% see why it's on all those "best films of all time" lists. I loved it, but it's so good that saying I loved it feels kind of superfluous; as a work of art it is just so far above the liking or disliking of one barely film-literate nerd with a Dreamwidth blog. But I'm going to review it anyway because there's a good chance it's going to end up being my favourite piece of media I've consumed this year and maybe even one of my favourite pieces of all time. GUYS. THIS FILM.

The heroine is Clarice Starling, a bright and ambitious FBI trainee who becomes involved in the hunt for Buffalo Bill, a serial killer who skins his victims. Clarice is sent to interview Dr. Hannibal Lecter, a genius psychiatrist and convicted serial killer whom the FBI believe may be able to help them identify Buffalo Bill. I love that in a film where the whole plot revolves around catching and stopping a guy who is on the loose literally skinning people, the most terrifying character is one who spends most of his screentime locked safely in a prison cell. Lecter had the most chilling presence of any villain I've ever seen. He also had this intense, darkly playful, weirdly chivalrous interest in Clarice that appealed to me in ways I'm not sure I'm willing to examine too closely. ~~(Known villainfucker horny for new villain, news at 11.)~~ The acting was absolutely brilliant all around; the cinematography was beautiful in this grim, grounded way; the score was haunting; the climactic scene almost stopped my heart.

It was also - this is going to sound like very weak praise in comparison to all my gushing, but I'll say it anyway - a lot less transphobic than I thought it might be, given the whole concept of "crazed man denied gender reassignment surgery goes on a murder rampage so that he can wear the skin of his female victims". I know there's been criticism and controversy around this film (and I'm speaking as a cis viewer, so grain of salt and all that) but the filmmakers were very explicit, in the language of their time, that Buffalo Bill was a profoundly disturbed individual whose pathology had nothing to do with an LGBT identity. I also on a more personal level really appreciated the handling of (cis) gender issues, which I know has also been controversial: there was no "teachable" feminist moment, it's true, but the misogyny and pervasive sexual menace Clarice experienced as a female law enforcement officer was vividly present on screen in a way that was impossible to mistake for endorsement, and Clarice herself is an amazingly well-rounded character, competent and fallible and brave and scared and utterly human. I loved how the film demanded we identify with her and forced us to sit with her in those uncomfortable moments, for which, as in real life, there was no clear-cut or simple redress.

Re-Animator (1985): A brilliant but antisocial medical student has developed a serum that can reanimate the dead, and ropes his normie roommate into his batshit experiments, with fatal consequences for their reputations and also, potentially, their actual lives. This one was just straight-up fun! It features a zombie doctor carrying his own severed head around in a surgical tray full of donor blood to keep it alive, and from that one detail I think anyone should be able to make up their minds whether or not the film will be to their taste. I thought it was hilarious, and some really great homoerotic tension between the weird serum inventor and the normie roommate. I had hoped to be able to join

snickfic in her fannish enthusiasm for them, but sadly didn't quite get there (neither of them has the overlong hair or angstbucket backstory that my fannish motor primarily runs on). But I really enjoyed the film and can see myself watching it again on a night when I just want to have a good time.

Since my sudden mania for film shows no signs of slowing, I've created a Letterboxd account. I don't really plan to use it for much besides tracking what I've watched and what I plan to watch, but add me if you're a user and I'll heart your reviews when I see them. :)

Anyway it has been A Week and I've been too tired by the end of each day to do ANYTHING other than vegetate in front of the TV, and specifically to vegetate in front of something scary and tense enough to prevent my otherwise inevitable zoning-out. The upside of which is yay, more horror movies!

Hell House LLC (2015): A documentary crew investigates a haunted house attraction that went gruesomely wrong on its opening night, leading to more than a dozen fatalities under baffling circumstances which the authorities have hushed up. When

snickfic recced this movie to me, I said I would not watch it because clowns gross me out. But the haunted house + found footage conceit was calling to me enough that I decided I could probably handle the clowns - and hey, I was right! This is not especially clowny clown horror by my highly arbitrary personal standards that mostly boil down to "there are no gross clown smiles" and "there are no even grosser clown laughs". Maybe this is a gateway for me? Maybe someday I'll be sufficiently desensitised to clowns that I can catch up to the rest of the world and watch It? Whatever the case, I had fun with this movie. I admired the filmmakers' decision to leave so many questions unanswered and I think that uncertainty is scarier than any explicit answers they could have devised. (For that reason, I'm going to go right on ahead and ignore the fact that there are sequels. Not EVERYTHING has to be a franchise, damn. The movie stands alone just fine.)

On a minor note, I REALLY liked the piano-and-violin piece in the soundtrack. Beautifully simple, beautifully discordant.

Carrie (1976): I am once again standing in awe of the incredibly broad palate of flavours that get lumped together under the "horror" label. This movie is not a scare so much as an anguished distillation of the cruelties of high school. Carrie suffers horrific religious abuse at home and extreme bullying at school; after falling victim to a very public and sadistic "prank" during senior prom, she unleashes her budding telekinetic powers on the watching crowd with murderous results. But her rampage is - well, not an afterthought per se, but it happens right at the end of the film in a dizzying blitz; the vast majority of the screentime (and the most visceral source of horror, for me at least) is the long, slow lead-up to the prank, as tension mounts between the glow-up narrative Carrie thinks she's living and the humiliation we know she's about to suffer.

I am not enough of a Film Buff(TM) to comment on the weird split-screen thing they were doing during the climax, or whatever the fuck was happening at the start with that borderline pornographic locker room shower scene. Both of them threw me out a bit but neither was enough of a hiccup to spoil what was otherwise a really gripping story.

The Old Dark House (1932): I watched this because it stars Boris Karloff, and while it may not be one of his most iconic roles, it was the one my library happened to have on offer at the moment I found myself thinking, 'Hey, I should watch some Boris Karloff!' So on those qualifications, I bring you this old-school spooky cult classic about two small groups of travellers who are forced by a violent storm to go begging for shelter at an isolated old house in the Welsh countryside, whose eccentric inhabitants turn out to be harbouring a deadly family secret. Karloff's physical acting is impressive: his character, Morgan the butler, is completely mute but has an immense screen presence (literally as well as metaphorically) despite the lack of dialogue. He's a hulking mass of danger whose sullen subservience turns to violent, lust-addled malice when he drinks, as of course he does on the stormy night in question. There's also a romance between a feckless WWI vet and a chorus girl who is only technically not the sugar baby of one of the other houseguests, which aside from being endearing in its own right was a lot more risqué than I expected of a movie from the 30s. Evidently the "pre-Code" label is more than just a historical technicality!

My movie-watching roll has slowed a little, but I've still watched a few things over the last couple of weeks. One I hated so much that I'm not even going to mention it here because I want to let the memory fade (probably nothing anyone else will have deep feelings about, just this Scandinavian horror flick my library streaming app happened to be promoting that hit some squicks I didn't know I had). The other three are below!

The Craft (1996): Well, we can add this to the list of things I'm glad I didn't get into back in high school. It would have been my whole personality for, like, a semester at least. I would have been even more insufferable than I was during my Buffy phase. New girl Sarah falls in with a clique of three witchy misfits who, empowered by her natural gift for the occult, start using magic to solve their problems in increasingly dangerous ways. This film is an utter delight. Extremely nineties, extremely teen angst (but in a fond, earnest way), too campy to be truly scary but with a really fun and satisfying horror aesthetic. I have so many feelings about those poor downtrodden, miserable girls who tasted power for the first time and went mad with it. There was also some very tempting hateshippy tension between Sarah and Nancy, the coven's leader. I had a feeling if I looked this up on AO3 it would prove to be one of those comparatively rare fandoms where F/F dominates, and I was right; there is nearly as much F/F as all other categories combined. (On the other hand, there are only 125 fics total, which feels very unfair. Filing it away in my mind as a Yuletide option for later this year.)

Ringu (1998): Ring fan mutuals, I'm so sorry, I have failed you. :( I think probably this one was just too similar to its remake for me to enjoy watching them this close together. There were parts I liked better in this older version - especially the close-ups on the dead faces instead of those annoying barely-visible flashes the 2002 version does, and the fact that the little boy seems happier and better-adjusted in this one - but the suspense wasn't there and the production was less glossy, and I ended up getting interrupted in the middle of the well-digging-out scene and haven't bothered to go back. I might try again in a few years once my memories have faded?

Wake Up Dead Man (2025): When cultish Catholic priest/culture warrior Monsignor Wicks is murdered, suspicion naturally falls on Father Jud, the recently assigned assistant priest who has made no secret of his opposition to Wicks' vicious preaching style. The brainwashed congregation all turn on him, but Detective Benoit Blanc is convinced of Father Jud's innocence and enlists his help to expose the true murderer.

I think this might be my favourite Benoit Blanc movie to date. It's not as clever as Knives Out or as funny as Glass Onion, but it has so much heart and soul and kindness to it, even and especially when its tongue is planted firmly in its cheek. It is neither pro- nor anti-Catholicism; Wicks is a vile character who embodies the bigoted, exploitative, self-aggrandising side of the Church, while Jud embodies the earnest love, faith and self-forgetfulness of the Church as it should be. Not to be weird about an imaginary Catholic priest but Jud is also kind of hot, in a vaguely Adam Driver-ish way that's mostly ears and angles. I enjoyed his screen presence a lot.

Video essay

First of all, on my last post about Australian horror movies,

rhoda_rants linked me to this great video essay about Australian horror, which I did not know had a reputation overseas as being notably brutal even for the genre. Well worth a watch! I'm still chewing on the contents and deciding how much I agree with them (for instance, my emotional reaction to Wolf Creek was quite different from the essayist's, see below) but in particular I thought the analysis of colonialism as a major (albeit unexamined) presence in the Australian concept of an inherently dangerous and inhospitable Outback was spot on. I think deep down we all know damn well that this continent was not made to support a population of pale-skinned agrarians, and I'm very interested now to track down the cited anthology of Aboriginal horror shorts that portray the land not as a threat but as a source of comfort in the face of imported danger.

Feature films

Wolf Creek (2005): Two young British tourists and an Aussie bloke they've taken up with experience car troubles while roadtripping through the far remote Australian Outback, and accept help from a charming older man who turns out to be a sadistic serial killer. This is a film that excels at its objective, and its objective is something I do not really vibe with and don't care to experience again. It was just...brutal. Brutal and cruel and bleak in a way that felt far too grounded and believable to be fun. There's no mercy for the victims at all, no real moments of relief or triumph, no room for hope to grow. Mick, the killer, is not your cartoonish slasher villain in a silly mask. He's normal and lovable in a way that from an Australian perspective feels almost sacred - an embodiment of the tough, friendly, irreverent outback Aussie spirit in an era where most of us now live in cities. (He's not an over-the-top Crocodile Dundee type, either. I have a grandfather and some uncles out in WA who are just like Mick, minus the penchant for rape and murder.) It was also unnerving to see Cassandra Magrath in the role of one of the victims; I know her as the beloved daughter character in the extremely tonally different show SeaChange. This film was not really much more gory than The Texas Chain Saw Massacre but the violence felt far more shocking and unpleasant. Thanks, I hate it! The directors did great, though.

Friday the 13th (1980): Well, this was a happy accident! I was absolutely sure this was one of the few horror movies I'd already watched back in my teens, and so I didn't bother to look up a plot synopsis before watching. If I had, then I would probably have been put off by the reveal of ( spoilers ) But:
1) I apparently had the film mixed up with Nightmare on Elm Street, which is the one I actually did watch in high school (I think I also watched Halloween, but I won't be 100% sure until I rewatch it).
2) The execution was campy enough that the upsetting-to-me themes didn't bother me at all in this case, and in fact made for a really great twist that deepened what until then seemed like a rather bland "everybody dies for no good reason" type slasher.

I don't have much more to say about this one, which is at least partly because I watched it with Husband and Close Friend who when put together are unstoppable chatterboxes during movies, and the vibe was more fun group hangout than serious media analysis. But it was fun! And I think I'll watch more of them, maybe next month when the salient date comes around again thanks to February being a round 28 days this year.

DNF: Black Water (2007): I got bored about halfway through this and gave up. I thought I would like it because it's all about a croc attack, and I am all about croc attacks in other contexts - I gobble up documentaries about terrifying wildlife and have had some great times during feeding hour at various national reptile parks. But by the time a solid half hour had elapsed of these three comically underprepared dickheads being stuck up a mangrove tree with no crocodile in sight, I just didn't care anymore. They probably got eaten eventually. Oh, well.

In lieu of a serious review, I'm just going to treat you guys (if you haven't already seen it) to a wildly popular crocodile-related Australian meme. Here's how one of our most famously nutty politicians responded when approached on the subject of same-sex marriage:

Watch on YouTube

Horror shorts

Finally, a couple of horror shorts I watched recently. I don't have much to say about these, but they were fun, and I thought I'd link them in case others of you guys have also seen them/might be interested:

Connect 4 by RDCworld1: I knew these guys for their entertaining merging of Black "hood" culture with weeb/gamer geekery, but apparently now they do horror shorts as well! Connect 4 is a little paranormal snippet with a streak of gallows humour; I enjoyed it a lot.

2am: The Smiling Man by Michael Evans: The physical acting in this! Super, super scary body language. Also great editing. Loved it.

It feels strangely awkward watching movies about people who talk and behave like me! I know I’m not alone in that; Australian cultural cringe is a well studied phenomenon, and we don't exactly have a local equivalent of Hollywood churning out all-Aussie blockbusters on a regular schedule. When I think of Australian cinema, I think of boring arts grant dramas that no one wants to watch and culturally hyperspecific comedy that we don't want anyone else to watch lest the world know us for the bunch of dags we really are. Fun, tropey genre films are supposed to be about Special Fake Movie People with accents I've never heard in person and manners that are upside down from mine.

And yet, as I'm learning through my local library's streaming service, there's some really good Australian horror out there. I couldn't tell you exactly where to find these overseas, but at least some of them appear to have had international releases, so for all I know, they're on Netflix for you guys. I'd be so thrilled to hear what people without my cultural biases think. :D

The Tunnel (2011): This is a mockumentary about a news crew who fall foul of a mysterious subterranean killer while investigating a lead related to Sydney's network of abandoned train tunnels. The tunnels are real, and I vaguely remember hearing spooky rumours about them during the early 2010s, which I'm now thinking may have been part of a guerrilla marketing campaign for this film, lol. Anyway, this one scared the everloving shit out of me. The vibes are fantastic, the mockumentary gimmick is executed flawlessly, and most of all everything was just so familiar. I used to get everywhere I ever needed to go on those exact Sydney trains. The characters are completely normal, relatable Aussies of the kind you could meet everyday on the street. The actual plot is a bit thin but I was happy to overlook the silly bits because it was just such a damn enjoyable viewing experience. And the monster was SO FUCKING CREEPY. Pick this one if you like mockumentaries and/or wish to know more about ya girl from dreamwidth's old commute.

Relic (2020): A mother and daughter drive out to a small town in rural Victoria to check on grandma, whose neighbours haven't seen her in days. She is missing when they arrive, but reappears in the house days later, unwilling or unable to explain where she's been. Her stately country house is covered in what looks like black mould and there's a terrible black bruise on her chest. This is a heartwrenching film about the grief of losing an elderly parent to dementia, and also a fantastic haunted house story full of dark family secrets, unanswered questions and unexplained paranormal phenomena. The creaky old house and the damp, miserable evergreen forest surrounding it threw me back to the days of visiting my own grandparents. It really does capture the highly specific atmosphere of a certain kind of well-off but precipitously ageing rural town in southeastern Australia; I swear I could almost taste the air. For whatever it's worth, the Russo brothers are credited as executive producers; I don't know much about movie production and have honestly never been sure what kind of role an executive producer plays, but hey, those were two names I recognised. Take or leave the name recognition, though - I loved this movie either way.

Talk To Me (2022): A group of South Australian teens acquire an embalmed hand that lets them summon dead souls to temporarily possess them. But one of their séance parties goes too far, and a malevolent spirit decides it doesn't want to leave. This is a mix of paranormal and psychological horror that's as much about grief (the protagonist lost her mother to a very obvious suicide that her dad won’t admit to her was suicide) as about bloodthirsty ghosts. I am not sure why reviewers chose to bill a movie this thoroughly depressing as "fun" - it was fun at the start, sure, but by the end it had descended to a truly tragic place. I liked it a lot! But it definitely belongs on the downer end of the mood spectrum.

You'll Never Find Me (2023): In an isolated trailer park in the middle of the night, a young woman knocks on an older man's door to beg shelter from a violent thunderstorm. The woman is desperate, drenched, and seems unable to get her story straight about how she got there or where she came from; the man is withdrawn and antisocial and was drinking alone before the woman arrived. They both seem frightened of each other. Something about the situation is unmistakably off, but what it is exactly, the film plays close to its chest for the first exquisitely slow hour. This is a quiet, cagey movie that ratchets up the tension through unnerving not-quite-normal dialogue and uncomfortable just-barely-off-centre close-ups so that when things finally start going overtly wrong at around the hour mark, it feels almost like a relief - pain is easier to bear than the anticipation of it. I don't often enjoy trippy, "what the fuck is happening here" type stories and I REALLY don't often enjoy stories that end in the particular kind of twist this one used, but in this case I was absolutely sold on everything. Brilliant movie. Raised my blood pressure so high I had to flop on the couch and just breathe for like half an hour afterwards. No notes.

In chronological release order today.

Nosferatu (1922): I enjoyed this enormously! I think it might be the oldest film I've ever watched, so this was a fascinating look back at a modern art form in its infancy but also a genuinely rewarding piece of art on its own merits. Of all the Dracula adaptations I've seen, this one felt like it distilled the story down to its purest essence. It was incredibly clean, evocative storytelling; I didn't think it was possible for such an old version of such a familiar story to scare me, but some of those scenes of the advancing count with his spidery fingers and dead, staring eyes were genuinely chilling. Also, it is downright criminal that greatcoats for men are no longer in style. All men should wear greatcoats, all the time. And high-rise trousers, and cavalry boots, and those gorgeous floofy shirts and cravats. Loneliness epidemic, my arse. 'Dating is so hard for men these days', my arse. Put on a fucking greatcoat and watch the ladies all clamour to pass their dance cards under your nose.

The Ritual (2017): In honour of their friend who was killed in a burglary gone wrong, four ageing British uni mates go on a hike in the Swedish wilderness for which they are all utterly unprepared. But the comedy of errors turns deadly when they stray along a woodland "shortcut" and find themselves being stalked by some malevolent, godlike force that dwells among the trees. This had a really great atmosphere, stunning visuals, and a cast of forgettable idiots who I could 100% believe would make every single one of the stupid decisions that led to their demise. There was a moderately compelling emotional through-line about the guilt complex of the Main Forgettable Idiot (I have genuinely already forgotten his name) who was present at the burglary but froze up in fear instead of defending his friend. But mostly I was in it for the gorgeous, spooky tour of a Scandinavian forest, livened up every now and then by a disembowelment (tastefully depicted, as these things go!).

Oddity (2024): I'm struggling to describe the plot of this movie without either giving away major spoilers or just making it sound very silly. I don't want to make it sound silly at all. It has its moments of levity, but it also does a really good job of blending paranormal horror with a far more grounded and mundane human evil; I really enjoyed it. It's an Irish horror film about a woman with psychic abilities investigating the murder of her sister. It's a modern setting but with a rich, old-timey atmosphere, full of quaint antique shops and centuries-old converted houses (the main filming location was the old stables at Bantry House, a real 1730s heritage location in County Cork, Ireland) and the claustrophobic halls of an old forensic hospital. There are some great hauntings and supernatural scares but there are also just so many vibes. And the ending left me with a genuine smile on my face, which is not what I was expecting from a movie this dark.

The Ring (2002) was a reckless stretching of my "no child-related horror" boundary that fortunately did not backfire, mostly because I spoiled myself very thoroughly for the entire plot of the movie before watching a single minute. But with ample forewarning for the bad bits, not only did it not backfire but I actually enjoyed it more than I can remember enjoying a movie in years. This is phenomenally sad and scary paranormal horror about a cursed VHS tape that kills you seven days after you watch it, and a journalist fighting to solve the mystery of the tape before she and her young son succumb to its murderous power. Aesthetically it was exquisite: everything is wretchedly grey and rainy and minimalist, but somehow never dull. The visual horror was like the distilled essence of what the word "horror" means inside my head. The suspense and fear were great, but really the heart of this story is about motherhood, and the beautiful, terrible power mothers have to save or destroy their children.

( Spoilers )

I haven't decided yet if I will watch the sequel, but I almost definitely will watch the original Japanese film that spawned this adaptation.

Hit Man (2023): Philosophy teacher Gary loves his cats, his pot plants, his job, and birdwatching. He is amicably divorced from his ex-wife, who left him because she found him too steady and yearned for a more passionate lover. Good with tech, he works part time for the New Orleans police in a surveillance van attached to undercover missions. One day, the undercover cop he works with gets pulled off duty right before a planned sting, and Gary reluctantly takes over his role as a fake "hit man" whom their would-be murderer target is attempting to hire. He surprises everyone (himself included) by putting on such a stellar performance that he's asked to become the team's permanent undercover guy. He falls into a highly successful routine: drawing on his longstanding interest in human psychology, he researches his targets and creates a tailored persona to cater to each individual's fantasy of what a mythical hit man should be. But when Gary catches feelings for one of his intended targets - Madison, a beautiful housewife who in desperation to escape is considering having her abusive husband killed - his professionalism starts to slip, and his immersion in the tough, suave persona he designed for her starts to escape the bounds of his mission in ways that change his life forever.

This was fun! I don't have a huge amount to say beyond that. It was fun, gleefully silly, and well acted on Gary/Glen Powell's side. (Madison was played by Adria Arjona from Andor, and I can't tell if she genuinely can't act or has just been typecast as a flat, misogyny-tinged "sexy vulnerable girlfriend" whose roles give her nothing to work with.) They took the John Wick approach of making the victims such repulsive humans that you don't feel bad when they bite it. (Note, that is this film's only overlap with John Wick. Despite the title, it is not a murderfest!) It didn't have much by way of substance but was a very enjoyable way to pass two hours.

Crazy Rich Asians (2018) was also fun and also has not inspired me with many deep thoughts. Chinese-American economics professor Rachel Chu accompanies her boyfriend Nick Young on a trip home to Singapore to meet his family, about whom he has thus far in their relationship told her nothing. It turns out that the Young family are Singapore's foremost developers and property owners, a family of obscenely wealthy celebrities; Nick is the presumed heir to the family business and fortune, and his relatives are not impressed by his choice to involve himself with an Americanised nobody. Romcom tropes and high-stakes familial (melo)drama ensue.

Parts of the film felt like a travel ad for Singapore. One very gratuitous hawker centre scene in particular made me ravenous for Singaporean street food; there is also much ooh-ing and aah-ing over the city's architecture, and lavish displays of traditional culture in the family matriarch's mansion. The portrayal of the Young family's wealth played hopscotch along the border between lifestyle porn and existential horror; it's honestly kind of ghastly how rich they are. Like, unthinkably rich. Like, suck-all-the-joy-out-of-life rich. There's a very sad subplot where ( spoilers ) After all the luxury, I also really enjoyed the final scene where ( more spoilers ) Michelle Yeoh was also amazing as the disapproving mother - plot-wise she is firmly the antagonist striving to keep the happy couple apart, but she brought so much heart and nuance to the role that I was honestly half-cheering for her even as I hoped that Nick and Rachel would work things out.

I haven't watched a horror movie since my slasher phase all the way back in high school. Now I've just watched two in as many evenings. Not sure what's come over me but I'm having fun!

The Blair Witch Project was really, really scary. :D It's about three young filmmakers who get lost in the woods while filming a documentary about a monster of local folklore called the Blair Witch. They go missing and are never seen alive again; the film is ostensibly pieced together from the recently discovered footage they recorded during the ordeal. Everything about it just worked. I loved the shaky handcam, the found footage styling, and the choice to keep the lurking, stalking menace 100% offscreen. I kept expecting jumpscares - we were blundering around in pitch dark wilderness, the setting was practically made for jumpscares - but they never came and the resulting suspense without any catharsis was somehow so much scarier.

Aside from the...you know, horror part...there's something strangely nostalgic about watching movies like this where the premise depends so heavily on a pre-internet technological environment. Obviously I'm not saying you can't get lost in the woods anymore, but the specific trappings here - the characters being so isolated with no way to call for help or for anyone to track their location, filming in low quality with dismal night vision, entirely reliant for navigation on a paper map that can so easily get lost - feel dated in a way that cast me right back to my 90s childhood. If my appetite for horror continues, I'll have to watch some much newer movies next to find out what we're all scared of in the era of GPS and sprawling 5G coverage.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was also extremely scary. Five young adults run out of fuel while on a van roadtrip through rural Texas; seeking help from the locals, they stumble into the hands of a family of deranged cannibals who set about killing them, sometimes with a chainsaw but more often with (false advertising!) a simple hammer.

This film had none of the subtlety of Blair Witch, but it also wasn't the tasteless, mindless splatterfest I'd osmosed it to be (possibly relevant disclaimer: my osmosis dates from primary school, courtesy of my parents and their seething disapproval when they found out that several of my friends had been allowed to watch it). The onscreen blood and gore were actually very muted, with most of the viscera obscured by camera angles or placed offscreen entirely. It was unhinged and suspenseful and intentionally, powerfully gross but just honestly not that gory. I think the single most horrifying moment for me was seeing Pam thrown onto the cattle hook, and we never even saw the puncture, just the look on her face. The production values weren't high but by God, the directors made the most of what they had. The stench of the abbatoir, the taste of that horrible "barbecue", the drip of putrescent corpses and the relentless, baking heat all somehow leapt right off the page. I spent the whole ninety minutes feeling as much queasy and unsettled as frightened.

New year, new reading icon! It may or not be my permanent choice - all my icons are due for a refresh, and there are so many to choose from, it's overwhelming.

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson: Man, I hate it when a certified Good Book(TM) that my friends all love and recommend doesn't land with me. This was fine! Enjoyable, even! I think if it had come less hyped - if I hadn't seen it blurbed all over the place as the definitive haunted house novel - then I'd probably have come away more impressed. I did enjoy the descriptions of the "vile" house, especially the carved children's faces whose gaze met on that malevolent cold spot. I wish (personal preference wish, not objective criticism wish) there had been more supernatural horror and less "is Eleanor just losing it" horror. The moments where the house's malevolence shone through - the stomps and banging in the night, the scrabbling fingers at the door - were the most electrifying parts of the novel for me, but there weren't very many of them. I liked the relationship between Eleanor and Theodora but I found that the fever-dream quality of the narration numbed a lot of its emotional impact.

IDK. For me this one is all like, no love; I just didn't find it as scary as I wanted to. It's going on the "good read, don't regret it, don't need to own a copy, probably won't revisit" shelf in my mind.

Horror Movie by Paul Tremblay: This one very much did scare me! Decades ago, the narrator starred as the monster in a horror movie that went tragically wrong during filming and was never released, but that achieved cult favourite status after the script and a handful of scenes got posted online. Today, Hollywood is clamouring to reboot the film, stirring up the memory of old horrors in the process.

The narrator was (intentionally) not a very charismatic personality and it took me a couple of chapters to get into the flow of things, but I enjoyed the slow-building dread and the trickle of reveals about what really happened on set. ( Heavy spoilers! )

Happy Place by Emily Henry: Harriet and Wyn broke off their engagement months ago because they wanted to live in different states and couldn't see a way around it, but their mutual friend group is having one last special-occasion reunion so they have to pretend they're still together. The trouble is, they're not over each other. 400 pages of nostalgic pining ensue. It's genre romance, so you guys already know how it ends.

You know how sometimes you'll read a book and be like, 'This has some interesting themes that the author has clearly put a lot of thought into!' And then you read another book by the same author and you're like 'Oh, maybe these are actually the only thing this author thinks about?' If you and the author happen to be on the same wavelength, that can be a good thing. But if you're not...yeah, this just wasn't for me. I already read one Emily Henry book about a couple who value their personal goals and careers over their relationship and who are ready to walk away from each other until they serendipitously discover a solution that lets them have everything they want with no compromise; I didn't really need another. I also just didn't think this version of the story was as well executed as Book Lovers. It was too long. Scenes that had the potential to be fun and/or poignant - everyone doing weed gummies together, the heroine practising her pottery hobby, the best friends all reminiscing about their university flatshare - dragged on and on for what felt like forever. The conflict behind the breakup could have been easily resolved at the outset with communication and a small amount of mutual flexibility, but the narrative is anti-compromise to a surprisingly strident degree. I can't tell whether the whole "we're soulmates who can't/won't be together because of ~our careers~" thing is a values statement or a just scenario the author finds iddy enough to be worth doing twice, but either way, it's not one that particularly tugs my personal heartstrings. It probably doesn't help that I listened to the novel as an audiobook, and the narrator insisted on pronouncing every. single. line. with this breathy, wistful, wow-so-profound intonation that was wearing thin by the end the first chapter. Still, I liked it enough to keep listening to the end, and that's not nothing. I nope out of audiobooks even more freely than regular books, but this one had enough charm and chemistry to keep me going despite being bored half the time and not actually liking or agreeing with the premise. I guess there's a reason Emily Henry writes nothing but bestsellers.

Look at me, reading things in a timely fashion!

Snake-Eater by T. Kingfisher was a very compelling, immersive read that I...don't know how I feel about? I enjoyed it a lot as I was reading it and I have all the respect in the world for the consciously and intentionally batshit choices Kingfisher made within it, but, well, it was batshit. Not my preferred kind of batshit, either, and not a kind that the first half of the novel led me to expect. I was there just vibing so hard with the stark desert atmosphere and building sense of supernatural horror, when suddenly, we learnt that the malevolent force of evil pursuing the heroine was ( SPOILERS ) and that the mysterious Catholic priest helping her was ( MORE SPOILERS ). I had been hoping for something very different, something more anchored in fear and dread and the oppressive vastness of the desert, and it all felt like a bit of a letdown.

On the other hand, I did really like the badass elderly lady character who took up as the heroine's snarky magical guardian (I have now read two T. Kingfisher novels, and both of them prominently featured a badass elderly lady character who took up as the heroine's magical guardian; is this a theme with her or a weird Two Nickels situation?) and I'm always going to cheer for any author who says "fuck it" to marketability and just follows their bliss. Get it, T. Kingfisher! ( SPOILER ) that ( SPOILER )!

Slow Gods by Claire North was...how do I put this? A worthwhile slog. I'm very glad I read it and would heartily recommend it to other space opera fans. But it took a full 50% of the book before I started enjoying it enough to want to sit down and read more than a few chapters at a time, and even then, it never reached the propulsive levels I always hope for in a work of this type. It's fundamentally a story of ideas, not of characters; of large-scale ethical conversations, not ordinary human emotions. I was never once tempted to DNF but it also lacked any element that would have helped me personally invest in the narrative.

Mawukana na-Vdnaze is born on one of the lower social rungs of a hypercapitalist dystopian society, in a setting where human civilisation has expanded throughout the galaxy but faster-than-light travel is too dangerous to be attempted without very good reason. Exceeding the speed of light requires entering arcspace, a dimension of darkness that sometimes swallows whole ships and invariably, within a few flights, destroys the mind of every pilot who navigates through it. Maw is conscripted as a pilot and dies on his first flight, along with everyone else on board. But he is brought back, an "imperfect copy of himself", a mostly human body in which the unknowable consciousness embodied in arcspace can dwell to sate its curiosity about the world. He doesn't age, can't be killed in a way that lasts, and - most crucially for the plot - can pilot through arcspace as often as he likes, sustaining no psychological damage and never losing any passengers or cargo to the dark. Thus he becomes a valuable chess piece for more sophisticated players to move around the board of a massive interplanetary cold war aggravated by equally massive environmental catastrophe.

Good sci-fi is always about something real, and this book is about so many things. It's about the climate crisis and the evils of unchecked capitalism, about western imperialism and the war in Ukraine, about gender and neurodiversity and seemingly every possible issue of personal identity. It balances these themes well, but that is still a LOT of themes, and without much in the way of a more concrete anchor. I think the main point of disconnect for me is that I didn't care even a tiny bit about the book's central relationship. I liked Maw a lot as a protagonist but didn't like his love interest and was unconvinced by their short yet supposedly life-changing fling, and without that buy-in, Maw's whole character arc just fell a tiny bit flat. I feel like I'm going to be picking pieces of the book's worldbuilding and philosophical ideas from between my teeth for ages, but on an emotional level it has already passed through me like water and left little behind. Very strange experience. But since I've ended up giving more space to critiques than praise - always easy to do - let me just say again that I'm very impressed with this book, think that overall it succeeds in its large scope, and am really glad I took the time to read it. Also, the tinges of cosmic horror are wonderfully creepy.

The upside of being stupidly busy is that, somewhat counterintuitively, I end up getting lots more reading done; I'm too tired by the end of the day to socialise or catch up on chores or pursue any of my usual hobbies, so I might as well curl up with a book till lights-out time. In the past week and a bit I've wolfed down several books based on Dreamwidth chatter and really enjoyed all of them! Thoughts below.

Piranesi by Susanna Clark: I've been meaning to read this ever since that time earlier this year when we were all making book lists, and virtually everyone seemed to be including it on theirs. The description - guy lives in magical house full of ocean, wanders around discovering endless rooms - did not sound especially gripping to me. But oh, the execution! I think this is a book that, by the necessity of avoiding spoilers, it's really almost impossible to pitch in terms of its actual plot. Cleverer readers than me have tried, and I'm not going to poorly duplicate their efforts here. But I will just say that the experience of reading it was exquisite. The prose was beautiful in its simplicity: I could taste the brine, hear the waves, see the towering marble. The protagonist was a rare example of childlike innocence done in a way that's genuinely touching, never twee. The mystery of the house was gripping, the sense of building tension was deliciously awful, and the bittersweet ending tore a hole in my heart that's still aching days later.

The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones: This is literary horror about a group of Blackfeet men haunted by the murderous spirit of a pregnant elk who they killed on a hunt many years ago. A better description is here via

pauraque; their review convinced me to give it a try, and I'm glad I did. I had to work for it. SGJ's prose is assertive and heavily sylised in the way that I always seem to stumble over in litfic written by men (which, admittedly, isn't often; I don't know if Rough Tough Manly Man Words are endemic to the whole genre or just to the books whose concepts I find interesting enough to reach for). It took me time to get into the flow of it and for the first few chapters I thought I would probably DNF. The pacing also sags in the middle; the first and final acts are electrifying, but in between them is a long stretch of meandering reflection on cultural identity and generational trauma that rather bleeds away the tension. I actually really like the idea of two horrors intertwining - the white-hot shock of being pursued by a vengeful supernatural entity, versus the numbing daily violence of systemic racism - but the balance between the two was off. I wish that section had been tightened up a bit.

There's some reasonably high impact gore, most of it directed at animals, but even as a squeamish softie I agree with pauraque that it felt necessary and effective. No children are killed or permanently harmed. (I include that mild spoiler because without it I'd have quit the book.) My few gripes not withstanding, this was a chewy, thought-provoking read with a pleasantly scary atmosphere and a villain who I genuinely loved and cared for so much despite all the killing.

Katabasis by RF Kuang: A confession: I had written off this author based entirely on internet hearsay until

troisoiseaux convinced me to give her a chance. I think possibly there's a benefit to arriving late on the scene of any new cultural phenomenon. The readers who've heard Kuang built up as a genius have had the understandable hype-backlash response; I've had time to digest their backlash, come in with greatly lowered expectations, and rediscover the hype for myself in a more organic way than those who were fed the promise of Groundbreaking Literature. Katabasis is not groundbreaking anything. It's an indulgent piece of pop academia in a similar vein to The Good Place, where deep scholarly questions of philosophy and religion (and also, in this case, logic and maths) are deliberately given the most superficial treatment possible for the sake of entertainment. It's a witty, quick-for-its-length romp of a story about two PhD students of magic journeying through Hell to rescue the soul of their abusive former advisor so they can graduate. Like the SGJ book it sagged in the middle; the first and last few levels of Hell were delightfully imaginative (I especially liked the sinners sentenced to work on their dissertations for eternity, never passing or receiving any feedback that could help them pass) but the middle couple were so perfunctory and unimaginative that I genuinely think Kuang must have just run out of ideas for satirical hellscapes. But the rest of the book was enough fun to be worth enduring that lull. I loved the magic system in all its dry, pedantic detail, and I loved the idea that magic could be real and end up occupying much the same space in our culture as linguistics or advanced mathematics: theoretically impressive and prestigious, but in practice an academic circlejerk whose real world applications are barely understood by anyone outside the bubble.

A lot of the online discourse I've seen about this book has centred on ( spoilers, and my thoughts thereon )

( More slight spoilers, cw: abuse )

So this wasn't a life-changing read and I'm not rushing out to buy myself a permanent copy, but I did thoroughly enjoy the experience, enough to then also pick up:

Yellowface by RF Kuang: When Athena, a young literary darling of Chinese descent, dies in a freakish mishap, her white friend June - also a novelist, though massively less successful - steals her latest manuscript and passes it off as her own. The manuscript in question? A deeply sensitive, passionately angry, very much Own Voices oriented story about the WWI Chinese Labour Corps. June reworks the story to include a bunch of noble white allies, remakes her authorial persona to be racially ambiguous, and launches herself towards literary stardom with all the reckless confidence of Icarus charging headlong at the sun.

( More thoughts )

I've just finished reading The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley, and am now faced with the self-distrustful task of reviewing a book I utterly adored but to which most of the other people whose opinions I respect seem to have had mixed or negative responses.

Let's be honest at the outset this is an extremely maximalist piece of fiction, and I can understand why not everyone would be on board! It's an unabashed Frankenstein creation: part self-insert RPF romance inspired by the author's binge-watch of The Terror during covid lockdowns, part semi-autobiographical musings on empire and identity and cultural assimilation under the shadow of the protagonist’s Cambodian heritage. The former on its own I suspect I'd have found cloying, the latter drearily navel-gazey, but in combination I thought they very successfully moderated each other's excesses and created something that was both meaningful and genuinely fun to read. This unlikely potion is brewed inside a cauldron of time-travel shenanigans and sinister bureaucratic machinations ending in a reveal about the climate crisis and our global future that I won't spoil but that made for a great open ending, equal parts harrowing and hopeful. So yeah, this is absolutely about Bradley wanting to bang blorbo from her history books (and I love that for her) but she's used her horniness to open up a bunch of other, deeper conversations at the same time. It's my very favourite kind of fanfic in tradpub form. The prose absolutely sparkles with oblique metaphors and vivid-but-never-purple imagery, and there are multiple passages I ended up pausing to copy out into my notebook - something I rarely bother to do - just because I thought the language was so charmingly apt.

Also Obama of all people likes it too, so yay for not being completely alone in the fannish lunchroom here. Come sit with me, Obama! Let's squee together!

Anyway, I should probably, uh, include an actual summary of the book I'm flailing so self-consciously about, right? An unnamed civil servant whose mother survived the Khmer Rouge gets recruited for a top-secret government time travel project that has experimentally retrieved a handful of historical figures from just before their moment of death and brought them to the present. She is assigned to live in a house with Lieutenant Graham Gore (1809-?1848) of the doomed Franklin expedition and help acclimate him to modern life. Culture clashes are fumbled through, manly Victorian naval officer emotions are sexily repressed, and they gradually fall in love while the narrator warns us with increasingly ominous asides that their story is going to end badly. The time travel worldbuilding goes exactly as deep as I ever want time travel worldbuilding to go, which is to say that the book opens with a cheerful "time travel exists, no it doesn't make sense, don't worry about it" then proceeds to lead by example and not worry about it. The fish-out-of-water humour is modulated by a keen awareness that people have always been people and that "educated in a different era of technological advancement" does not mean even slightly less smart. THE END TWIST BLEW MY TINY MIND.

I just love it. Love love love love love it. And in a rare happy coincidence, on the same day I returned my borrowed copy to the library, I peeked in on a secondhand bookshop and found a very reasonably priced copy right there waiting for me! So now it's on proud display on my genre fiction shelf, its fuchsia spine neatly - and with great thematic honesty - dividing my "serious" grey-hued sci-fis from my Barbie-pink romance novels. It's definitely one I want to keep my own copy of for leisurely rereading.

-

So, having devoured that tasty bit of Terror RPF, I decided to go ahead and actually watch AMC's The Terror (2018). I assume everyone here is aware of the show at this point, but so we're all on the same page: semi-historical telling of Franklin's lost expedition, mixed with some supernatural horror in the form of a monster that's slowly picking off the stranded explorers. I was afraid it would be too scary for me, but actually I would have liked it to be scarier; for such a bleak story, the fear and suspense turned out to be surprisingly muted. But it was very atmospheric, and the characters were so good. We had buttoned-up 19th century military officers with strict codes of honour and etiquette, in both "irresistibly competent" and "puffed-up posh nitwit" incarnations; complicated, nuanced class tensions between them and the common soldiers they commanded; bonds of love and loyalty, bonds of necessity, bonds frayed to breaking point by paranoia and desperation. We had an Inuk woman struggling to fill her late father's shoes as shaman to the monster. A small handful of Brits who saw her, and a far larger handful who saw only lurid stereotypes about "savages". No one quite got everything right (well, except Goodsir, for whom the "cinnamon roll" meme was practically invented) but pretty much everyone was doing their best in circumstances for which it's quite simply impossible to prepare.

The Terror is one of those fandoms where I've heard people gripe about the dearth of eye candy, but this is an absurd and easily disprovable falsehood because guys, Captain James Fitzjames played by Tobias Menzies is in it? Like, get a grip?? He is INSANELY hot??? I mean look at him:

( behold )

He's also incredibly brave and noble and competent, with a tortured backstory and some immensely satisfying character progression. If my government ever calls on me to move in with a member of the Terror cast in the interests of national security - you know, as governments are wont to do - I pick this guy. He's my favourite. His death (not a spoiler, they all die, that's a matter of historical record and the whole point of the show) was heartbreaking in the best, most honourable way.

On the other hand...fuck Hickey, man. Fuck him so hard and not in a fun way. I'm usually such a villainfucker but I hate this guy with his relentless stupid smirks and his manipulations and his schemes. His death (again, not a spoiler) was the only moment of his screentime that I genuinely enjoyed. So I guess props to this show for delivering a bad guy that even I couldn't make excuses for? But he was so cartoonish. The smirking. Fuck off and get your arse flogged again, Hickey.

But yeah, I really enjoyed this show. I don't see myself writing fic for it but I definitely see myself reading some. If anyone happens to have any recs on hand for fic that lovingly tongue-bathes Captain Fitzjames - I'll take literal or metaphorical tongue-bathing! - please do send them my way.

The Luminous Dead by Caitlin Starling is lesbian sci-fi survival horror about a climber, Gyre, who falsifies her credentials to secure a suspiciously well-paid cave exploration job. She ends up being sent down completely on her own, with her handler Em supervising her from the surface via a link to her high-tech suit. The suit is designed to meet all her survival needs while completely locking in all heat, sound, smells and other signs of life, since a known major risk of caving on Gyre's planet is attracting the notice of giant rock-eating worms called Tunnelers. She is enclosed in the suit 24/7, unable to touch her own skin or feel air on her face; her digestive tract has had to be surgically modified so that, for the approximately month-long duration of the mission, all her meals will be injected straight into her stomach from one port in the suit and the waste extracted automatically from another.

Alone in the dark, Gyre quickly learns that she's far from the first to attempt this cave - Em has been sending down dozens of cavers, none of whom have made it to the objective and a horrific number of whom have died in the attempt. Em is dangerously obsessed with the mission and willing to use any means at her disposal - manipulating Gyre's perception of reality through the suit controls, remotely administering drugs, blackmailing Gyre over the fake credentials - to force Gyre to continue. Trapped together by the mission and with no one else to talk to, a toxic, paranoid, codependent romance starts to blossom between Em and Gyre. Meanwhile, it's becoming increasingly clear that something is badly wrong down in the cave, but Gyre can't tell whether it's malicious sabotage, paranormal activity or her own sanity giving out on her due to stress and isolation. All she knows is that terrifying accidents keep happening and that with each one, her chances of surviving the mission are dropping lower and lower.

I loved this. The highest-impact horror came from the sheer claustrophobia, both inside the cave and inside the suit; it was so intense that if I read for too long in one go I started feeling physically squeezed. Both characters were fantastic, and I loved how the necessary minimalism of the premise forced me deep inside their heads, in much the same way they were forced inside each others. The unhealthy romantic chemistry really worked for me. If I have one complaint, it's that the amount of technical detail about caving sometimes got too much. For someone whose entire knowledge of climbing as a pastime has been conferred across maybe half a dozen bouldering gym visits in my life, there were places where the descriptions of Gyre's gear and techniques, and the specific kinds of climbing obstacles she faced, got kind of confusing. But I think to a point that was unavoidable, given the close third POV and the fact that Gyre has virtually nothing else to focus on besides those details, that her survival depends on getting them all exactly correct. Once I got into the swing of the novel I found that if I found my mind starting to wander on a technical passage, it was fine to just skim it instead of trying to absorb every detail; I may not understand the specifics of what Gyre was up to at a given point with her lines and anchors and camming devices, but the implications would generally become crystal clear within another paragraph or so.

We Live Here Now by Sarah Pinborough is a Gothic-flavoured paranormal thriller about a troubled het couple, Emily and Freddie, who move to a spooky old house in the English countryside. Emily immediately detects something horrible and supernatural going on within the house, but Freddie is skeptical; and in addition to clashing over whether or not their new home is haunted, they've both got their hands full keeping secrets from each other about their past potentially marriage-ending misdeeds. I don't want to say too much about the plot of this, because all the pleasure is in the suspense; unlike The Luminous Dead, which luxuriates in atmospheric creepiness, We Live Here Now clips along at a pace that prioritises action and takes a fairly impressionistic approach to its Gothic setting. But I will say that it's compulsively readable, pleasantly scary throughout, and that the final twist was a lot of fun. These characters are really not likeable, at all, and the whole thing manages to sit in a very relaxing place where I don't exactly want either of them to come to harm but I'm also not about to cry if they do. They're just kind of shitty people who don't deserve to be living in a supernatural horror story because no one deserves that, but they've very much brought the more mundane disintegration of their lives upon themselves. (Especially Freddie. Emily has her redeeming features but Freddie just straight up belongs in the fucking trash, sorry not sorry.)

This is the second novel I've read by this author and I liked it enormously better than the first. Behind Her Eyes hit some of the same notes - unlikeable, unprincipled characters being boiled alive in the soup of their own secrets seem to be Pinborough's thing, and her command of pacing is rock solid - but the shock! twist! ending annoyed the snot out of me. While trying once more to avoid spoilers, let's just say that Behind Her Eyes genre-hops in a way that felt to me like cheating. We Live Here Now is thankfully more upfront about and true to its genre, and starting from a place of properly calibrated expectations made for a much more enjoyable reading experience. It's not a must-read, but if you enjoy fast-paced thrillers and spooky haunted(?) houses, it's well worth the time.

Starling House by Alix E. Harrow is a Southern gothic novel about an orphaned young woman from a cursed coal town who takes a job at a mysterious local mansion to support her teenage brother, and winds up facing the forces of darkness and the immense weight of the town's past sins while falling in love with the House's surly, reclusive owner.

I absolutely loved this. It has the most likably flawed cast of characters I've read in ages, including the House itself, which very much has its own personality and agency within the story. The treatment of race, gender and sexuality is thoughtful and nuanced. The atmosphere is beautifully derelict and creepy. The prose was lovely, very visual, with just a few pleasingly unsettling little splashes of gore. The fantastical elements are flawlessly interwoven with industrialised modern reality, and the romance...oh my god, the romance. The YEARNING. Eden and Arthur are both desperately lonely and convinced they can't have each other. Eden often compares Arthur to Heathcliff, but to me he's far more of a Rochester - kinder, more moral, and ultimately far more attractive. (Listen. I'm a fake Gothic romance fan and actually don't like Wuthering Heights very much.) If the two of them didn't get an ending I liked, I was going to riot and probably write a million words of fix-it fanfic. As it is, I can close the final page with the satisfaction of having had all my needs met. I borrowed a copy from the library but am going to have to buy my own because I definitely want this on my shelf and available for rereading!

Not Another Love Song by Julie Soto is reskinned Reylo fanfic. I hadn't actually heard of this one before, but I happened to spot it on a shelf at the library and immediately knew what I was looking at from a combination of cover art + blurb by Ali Hazelwood. How could I resist? In this one, ~~Rey~~ Gwen and ~~Kylo~~ Xander are musical prodigies on violin and cello respectively. They both play for the same pops orchestra, but their careers are in very different places: Xander is a rockstar who fronts his own band, while Gwen scrapes by supplementing her orchestra pay with wedding gigs. She happens to play a wedding at which he is a member of the bridal party; he's immediately attracted and expresses it by pulling her metaphorical pigtails; she thinks he hates her and resolves to hate him back. Contrivances of the standard romance novel sort force them together anyway. They fall in love. He fingers her while she sight-reads on the cello. (We're to understand that cello and violin are interchangable instruments when you're as prodigious a prodigy as Gwen or Xander.)

This was such a frustrating read, because it came so close to being something I could really savour. To be honest I don't really see what the main characters have to do with Rey and Kylo - Gwen is a meek little thing with no self-confidence, while Xander is a transparently decent, reasonable person whom Gwen mistakes for genuine bad news because he...um, runs late a lot, and wears Ray-Bans - but that's par for the course with my experience of Reylo fandom, and it still has a broody guy with floppy dark hair and a grovelling obsession with the heroine, so I'm willing to set aside my Star Wars baggage and meet the novel where it's at. I did really enjoy the premise. (I have some biases here: I'm the non-musician from a musical family, so the set dressings tapped into a deep wellspring of childhood emotion, but I have no skin in the game to be annoyed by the wild inaccuracies.) But the pacing was broken in a way that sucked all the joy out of actually reading it. We meandered our way through the set-up at an idle pace, then took the climax and resolution at a flat-out sprint that made next to nothing of all that groundwork. It felt like such a waste. From the author's note, I take it that this book was Soto's first attempt at making the jump from AO3 to pro-pub, and got rejected and rewritten a lot before she eventually had better luck getting her foot in the door with a different work entirely; I think that rocky history shows. This is not a fic that was quite ready to become a novel.

These three books have absolutely nothing to do with each other except that I read them all recently and want to share. Brace yourself for whiplash, maybe?

Bloom by Delilah S. Dawson is a dark f/f novella. Fresh from a bad breakup, lit professor Ro meets a beautiful woman named Ash at a farmer’s market. Ash’s life is a cottagecore fantasy: old-fashioned, frugal, everything handmade and homegrown and Instagram-perfect despite the fact that she doesn’t own a phone. Ro falls head over heels at first sight. But Ash is also strange and prickly, with strict boundaries and a fierce need for privacy, and things take a bad turn when Ro violates both.

This was a gripping story full of lush descriptions of delicious food and wholesome country life, compelling characterisation, and a command of pacing that made it feel like a delightful, idyllic country romp until I realised that a sense of oppressive horror had crept up without my noticing. It was also, in the end, much too dark for my personal taste. More hardened horror aficionados may enjoy it as is -

fiachairecht,

snickfic, I thought of you guys - but I was hoping for a particular kind or reprieve that didn’t come, and the last couple of chapters ended up veering into deep squick territory for me. Still, if I could tear them out and rewrite my own ending then I think it would be one of my favourite things I’ve read this year so far.

Mistress of Life and Death by Susan J. Eischeid is a biography of Maria Mandl, head overseer of the Auschwitz women’s camp. Eischeid is a musician and academic specialising in the music of the Holocaust, who first took an interest in Mandl because of her founding of the Auschwitz women’s orchestra; but Mandl’s life and career are overall poorly documented, so it took twenty years to research and write this book, drawing from an amazing breadth of sources to flesh out a story many historians would have deemed untellable.

It is, as I’m sure no one needs telling, an absolutely brutal read. There are some ways in which Mandl strikes me as a better example of the underlying spirit of fascism than your Hitlers or Himmlers or Mengeles: she was an ordinary woman from an unimportant village with no particular interest in politics, who joined the camp system because it was a well paid job in a difficult economy. Experiencing power for the first time in her life, she quickly took a shine to it and embraced the state-sanctioned opportunity to take out all her own petty grievances on her prisoners in ever more gruesome ways. She had moments of kindness and (rather more) moments of truly diabolical creativity as a torturer, but by far the majority of her day-to-day conduct seems to have been driven by her own pedestrian desire to feel important and to live comfortably, enabled by lazy acceptance of the dehumanising rhetoric in circulation among her colleagues. The results were horrific and an awful testimony to just how easily small, "normal" people can become genocidal monsters.

I will note that the structure of the book is slightly strange: it's split into tiny, mostly two- or three-page chapters, presented in a way that I'd probably call "snackable" if it were about literally anything besides the fucking Holocaust. I'd have preferred a less disjointed narrative, especially given the gravity of its subject matter - but I don't think I can hold that too much against the book, because it is in every other respect a truly excellent piece of Holocaust research and one that is unfortunately, heartbreakingly relevant to our current moment.

Strategy Strikes Back: How Star Wars Explains Modern Military Conflict ed. Max Brooks, John Amble, ML Cavanaugh, Jaym Gates is just SO MUCH FUN, if your idea of fun includes taking dumb sci-fi worldbuilding far more seriously than it was ever designed for. It's a delightful and educational essay collection that uses examples from Star Wars to explore different aspects of modern US military strategy. The contributors are a mix of military personnel and sci-fi writers, and its subject matter ranges from sweeping doctrinal overviews to thinly veiled analyses of specific real-world conflicts (in one essay, Endor is Afghanistan and the Ewoks are an exploited local people to whom interplanetary jihad sounds increasingly appealing). This is a library find that I feel like I need to invest in my own copy of, because it's going to be useful not just for Star Wars fanfic but for any other writing I might ever do that involves military conflict.

In the throes of a bad breakup, troubled twentysomething Lennon has her suicide attempt interrupted by a mysterious phone call inviting her to an admissions interview for a college she has never heard of. Located on a magically concealed campus in the US Deep South, Drayton College teaches its handpicked students the art of persuasion, or the ability to psychically manipulate reality. Within a short time of accepting her offer, Lennon discovers all of the following:

Her power is specialer than everyone else's.
Her adviser, Dante, is super hot.
Magic is almost as dangerous to use as it is to have used against you.
Something deeply sinister is going on with the school, and no one wants her to know the truth about it.

I want to start by saying I genuinely enjoyed reading this book - I mean, it's basically Hogwarts for grownups with gothic vibes, understated horror, and a problematic central romance. There's plenty to enjoy! But it was also frustrating because the flaws were, unfortunately, many and major. I could see and appreciate the book that it wanted to be, but there's a bit of a gulf between that and the book that it actually is.

The single biggest problem is that Lennon is a YA protagonist in a book that's very much not YA. At the start of the book we're given a whole pile of information about her immediate backstory and told what her main character traits are supposed to be, but the backstory is minimally relevant and the character traits are barely apparent in her actual on-screen behaviour. She's bland. Blank slate-ish. Weirdly passive. Other characters are drawn to her for no obvious reason and become deeply attached with little encouragement. The plot mostly just sort of happens to her, and when she does make use of her agency, her motives don't always make a lot of sense.

The second biggest issue is the heavy reliance on coincidences and contrivances to keep the story moving along. The worldbuilding is fun but shallow, and often felt governed by the needs of the plot. None of the supporting characters seem particularly involved in their own lives; they kind of just orbit Lennon, existing only when and how she requires them to. (Here's one non-spoilery example: the school empties out over Christmas break, but when a major incident brings Lennon back to campus early, her friends turn out to have abandoned their own holiday plans for flimsy reasons and are waiting in the dorm to rejoin her adventures.) Multiple cast members become involved in the secret happenings at Drayton in ways that don't make sense and are literally never explained, just so that Lennon can have her big moment of shock and betrayal when she learns what they've been up to. Likewise, there are major plot developments that get dropped as soon as Lennon's done emotionally reacting to them, never to be resolved.

I was also disappointed by the way Lennon's struggle with corruption was handled. This is more a personal taste thing and less a critique of the author's writing skill, but I don't have a lot of patience for stories that sell themselves on a promise of the hero being tempted by the dark side, only to make sure that every dark thing they actually do has a simple reason behind it that absolves them of anything hard to forgive. It's something I come up against quite a lot in my preferred corners of fandom, too, so there's obviously plenty of audience for stories that embrace the aesthetics of evil while side-stepping its ugly realities. I'm just always hoping for something a bit thornier, and it's even more frustrating when a story so particularly rich in opportunities for moral quandary takes the easy way out. This is a book where the system of magic revolves around forcing your will onto others; where students are explicitly groomed for future positions of power, where they can manipulate global events in the interests of the school's donors; where Drayton's whole history is poisoned by a deep, insidious racism to which 'don't worry, our Black heroes one-up the current administration in the end' is only the most partial of antidotes. I don't know. There were a lot of tantalising hints of a genuinely dark and challenging story here, but they didn't amount to much.

I don't know. I feel like I'm ripping this book into far smaller shreds than I actually mean to. Like I said at the start, I enjoyed it. I think if anything it suffers worse for that: if the good parts were less good I'd have moved on without thinking much about the weaknesses, but because there are so many things I really like about it, the flaws are that much more annoying.

teach me the art of war

Entries tagged with fandom: horror

Navigation

My Heart Is a Chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones

New Contrapoints video about the Saw franchise :D

Movies. Guess what genre.

You guys will be shocked but I've been watching some more horror

Some nineties horror and the new Knives Out

More horror! Can't stop won't stop!

Horror movies, Australian edition

More horror movies

Some movies

A couple of classic horror movies

Reading post

New releases for once

Reading post: recs-from-DW-friends edition

On Wednesdays we wear Franklin's lost Arctic expedition

Spooky scary reading post

A book that made me swoon and a book that didn't

A very eclectic reading post

Book review: An Academy for Liars by Alexis Henderson

Profile

March 2026

Syndicate

Most Popular Tags

Page Summary

Active Entries

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags