All The Hearts You Eat by Hailey Piper

Just a note. I never want to assume that my reach on something as temporal and fickle as instagram is in any way purposeful as I feel that gives meta far too much credit. That being said, my reach is WAY down for all content. I think it’s possible they are still reading posting reels to stories as ‘unoriginal’ content but they swore they stopped doing that in like 2021? So it has to be just my content, right? But as more and more people leave ig, this might be the only way to continue doing the kind of content I want. Not that anyone reads anyone’s blog anymore, but.

I think this is the first time I’ve routed any of my content here in something like 2 years or so. It used to just be, some lit agents threaten to ‘check’ so I should have SOMETHING here. But blogs always made me feel I had to do the kind of review writing I am tbh not that great at. I’m more like: did I like book? What were the vibes? Oh look over there. I must purchase more medieval rabbit art. But I’m going to really make an effort to try and write how I write and feel how I feel or whatever. Lots of feels here. Almost too many. I am still crying over the last chapter and like, my mascara is only waterproof, you know?

I have recycled that joke several times now. Here is the review.

CW: transphobia, parental abuse and neglect, homophobic slurs, gender dysphoria, disordered eating 

Tldr: The theme i found most compelling is when people become effigy, the ways in which our humanity can be erased to serve an agenda, and how much harm we inflict on ourselves in pursuit of revenge – far more than we do on those who have harmed us…

As always with Hailey Piper’s stories, I am left with a sense we can all be better, we can all do better for each other, that love matters and is worth fighting for.

Every thought ever version (with so much spoilers)!!

…I couldn’t help thinking not only of the my favorite coastal vampire aesthetic (no, I didn’t miss the ‘damn vampires’ nod, or ‘be one of us’ even the idea of a head vampire)… but also, Bobby’s speech at laura Palmer’s funeral, a prophecy he ends up perpetuating as he was not immune to letting the idea of someone replace the person or make them less human (this has maybe been on my mind because a tp rewarch was already sounding really comforting, and then, well)…

Also, just with all the discourse around the new Nosfaratu, which i have ordered the bluray of, this is already a much more interesting & nuanced exploration of sacrifice and agency within the narrative structure of  the traditional vampire’s thrall

Truthfully, I’ve been too burnt out and scared to be angry, to grieve, or to hope there will still be a future the last few months. This is the first time I’ve been able to full-on ugly cry in what feels like years, so… thanks for… that… I guess

I mean I’m trying to disassociate over here but sure I’ll have all the feels

Transmuted by Eve Harms

High stakes, fast paced and over way too soon, author Eve Harms has created a brilliantly messed up queer body horror which is still far more enjoyable than you think you’re in for considering the truly tragic setup.

All the characters (but especially Isa with her plushie obsession and relatably terrible family) are engaging enough you would follow them anywhere or at least, I would. I think even if that were less true, the journey is so brilliantly unhinged, I still would want to go along for this insanely gory ride.

Everyone has liked someone so much, they let it totally screw up their normally sound judgement and it gives readers a really believable reason to continue to invest in the story and characters.

I want it to be a series or at least I want to see more stories with the same characters. More, please!

I realize this still says book closet and there are movies …I was trying to post more in depth essays about my non-horror movie picks for letterboxd but for now, let’s say it doesn’t seem to be working out as my long form essays are still umm … kind of a work in progress? And I have a different book setup now so … my book blog is also a word in progress at the moment.

Queen of Teeth by Hailey Piper

So I really love this book. <3<3<3

… I don’t want to say it’s an easy read as in – you can read it without any effort. But I was in a reading slump over the summer and the book was a very hyperfocus experience so I could just sit down and get through the whole story in an afternoon. There aren’t a lot of frills here and the stakes are raised very quickly. The characters are real and likable but in situations where easy choices aren’t possible.

Plus, I am fascinated with chimeras – those stories where someone finds out they don’t share any DNA with their own children? Not being related to yourself is super weird. And it’s a great metaphor for feeling alienated from your body – the dissociative state felt by everyone in medical situations but which is worse for persons who are already marginalized.

 I also felt – but maybe this is just me – such an affinity for the concept of having an inner voice telling you what it needs as I think many of us just ignore all those cues. And personally, I would like to have an inner voice that is at least somewhat invested in my well being and doesn’t just yell at me for procrastinating and not trying hard enough at life.

I also wanted to add that if there’s ever a graphic novel version, I will buy it immediately.

Shelter for the Damned by Mike Thorn

A friend once described a cigarette as ‘five minutes you don’t have to worry about anything.’

Maybe you don’t remember, or are starting to forget in adulthood, how very much there was to worry about as a kid, but Shelter for the Damned will bring it all rushing back. A word of caution, though: this isn’t your dad’s horror nostalgia trip. Mark, Adam, and Scott find a place away from the constant questions and problems of adults where they can smoke cigarettes and have those five minutes … only, turns out there’s a horrible price for this respite. Finding out what will alter the reader.

One thing the book understands very well are how the most innocuous childhood memories can twist into a terrifying shape. Adults have forgotten – or are too consumed by their adult lives to think about – these horrors, except maybe, very, very, late at night. Thorn’s work invokes both childhood fears and those late-night moments when existential dread sinks its teeth into you as an adult and suddenly, you remember how helpless you still are.

The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters

There is a very crucial interpretation I took from The Little Stranger which I will hint at but not reveal. I am going to try and write less ‘everything that happened in the book and in my life and adjacent to my life while I was reading it’ reviews and more proper ones.

There is a lot about one’s perspective as an outsider and the outsider’s interpretation of ownership. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately as I’ve decided I am going to pursue what I want without any trace of guilt and not care much what gets in my way.

Similarly, Dr. Faraday, the protagonist of the story, imagines that ownership and the status ownership would grant him is more important than anything else. I have read haunted house novels where the house possesses people with their want of it—not just ownership but belonging and can think of no other novel where that fierce, destructive need for having a place in the world so drives the novel other than The Haunting of Hill House.

Only here, the purpose of that need is a little clearer. You are meant to read this as an examination of the cost of class systems but there is also a very subtle treatment of what it is to be female and be expected to want a very specific set of options. Though I would argue class is more important here, as when the protagonist is denied what he wants and becomes not so altruistic, after all, and begins to fight dirty, you sense the reason his methods are thwarted is because he is of a lower class than Caroline.

Throughout the novel, Dr. Faraday refuses to believe in a supernatural explanation and this rejection seems less and less rational as the book goes on to a very specific purpose. Without giving anything a way, I will note it’s interesting how you view him less as a rational male and more as someone who doesn’t wish to confront a force which really could deny his entrance into Hundreds Hall. If the house is haunted, he may have to face relinquishing his claim.

Someone complained about the title being somewhat misleading and all I will say in response to that (again because of spoilers) is I think Little Stranger is meant as the wanting of a child which, like the protagonist, cares only about the object of that desire. As the book wears on, Dr. Faraday’s pretenses of caring about anyone (even Caroline) fall away and we see him for what he really is and that’s far scarier than any specter.

Though I will also mention that, like all well-crafted tales, you are told what is to come in the first few pages. The first few pages reveal exactly what need for possession is at the heart of Dr. Faraday’s character and how he never really outgrows the childish destructiveness that doesn’t care who he hurts as long as he can have what he longs for.

Gothic Trope Revival in Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

            I’m not as familiar with the Gothic novels from the fifties and sixties as I am with the late sixties and seventies. Gothic novels of the sixties and seventies often conform to white feminism narratives of the time in that, it takes a liberated woman out of their element and places them somewhere less secure (often meaning: non-white) so the stakes are raised a bit, often before they realize it’s a lot safer to just go back to Ohio and get married. Yet, they managed to be subversive in creating an outlet addressing needs for passion, independence, and adventure women had which were not often addressed by other aspects of pop culture at the time.   

            Mexican Gothic fits in seamlessly with the more aesthetic aspects of the few earlier Gothic novels I have read. The woman in these novels must be independent, as the locale would scare away the less intrepid. She must be curious to a fault and unwilling to give up once a mystery presents itself. Often, the story is built around the idea of a woman being lured somewhere by her unconventionality. Here, there is a much more practical reason the somewhat frivolous Noemí must leave the comforts of her life of wealth and leisure in Mexico City—to go to the small village where her cousin has married a once-wealthy man who nevertheless owns a large (but decaying) family estate and discover if she truly is sick with tuberculosis or undergoing some type of breakdown.

            Though that she goes at her father’s behest in itself demonstrates a very real problem the protagonist is somewhat in denial of though I think we are meant to view her attitude as ‘I have to get along in a society I don’t always agree with’ which is very relatable—especially now. Though initially, she does not wish to go, she gives in partly to buy herself a bit more freedom. Otherwise, her father might insist she actually settle down with one of her suitors. Instead, he will allow her to change her major to her latest passion—anthropology—as well as transfer to a more prestigious university.

            The trope of flighty socialite is interesting because the stakes are simply much higher for Noemí despite her social standing. It is implied throughout the narrative that she is under some amount of pressure to choose something—if not necessarily a man than at least a course of study. Her father is depicted as reasonable—he doesn’t wish for his daughter to be forced into a marriage she doesn’t want, yet his understanding does not come without obligations.

            Though there are few reminders of the situation even a wealthy, educated Latinx woman of the times would still face—that women could not vote at this time in Mexico is one of them—you never forget how women are still considered property. Though the situation where Noemí is held captive appears fantastic yet is not too far outside the realm of possibility. It poses the question of what a less reasonable man but one still allowed to make choices for you might do if all they care about is your body’s compliance but not you as an individual.

            In an interesting reversal, the wealthy family is imported, Dracula-like, along with servants and even soil into the protagonist’s world and this is used very effectively both as a familiar trope and a way to address white colonialist attitudes as the family also imports their repellent (but far too prevalent even now) views on breeding and superiority: ‘She no longer wondered if Howard Doyle had a pair of calipers; now she wondered how many he kept,’ Noemí speculates at one point. Another reversal is how the love interest is sweet but somewhat passive, and in need of rescue, even the story’s conclusion makes you more certain of Noemí—that she will not submit to a passionless life—than you are that he will really choose to live in opposition of his family’s harmful white supremacist ideology without her there to remind him: ‘You have a damn choice.’

Review for Cynthia Robinson’s Birds of Wonder

Cynthia Robinson’s Birds of Wonder is never what it promises to be. Usually, I would relate a lot of the plot (which I definitely had strong feelings about) to much personal oversharing in a much longer review here on my blog and make sure people know they are reading the super spoilers review.

However, in this rare circumstance, I am using a single completely non-spoilers review. So, this is going to be a much shorter recommendation rather than anything in depth.

I feel readers need to go into this one without knowing anything other than it starts, as many things in our collective culture often do, with a very beautiful, young, dead girl and the usual suspects you usually try and blame in order to tie up something gruesome as neatly as possible are brought out, lulling us into feelings of complacency and security in knowing we have seen this before.

Only, there’s nothing neat or simple about the characters in Birds of Wonder. In fact, our assumptions about human nature are used against us here – just like the characters have been badly damaged in ways which blind them to the truth and it’s this fatal flaw which drives the narrative.

Fans of more literary mystery novelists like Tana French will enjoy that this isn’t a quick solve and reading about the very human characters.

dead family

My parents were going crazy trying to find my brother’s ‘wishes’ like we didn’t just keep him in a box (and in several film canisters I carry around with me sometimes when I’m feeling particularly bad) for the rest of her life, probably the rest of his life, and maybe even the rest of my life, on a shelf in the background of my stupid instagram videos like, there is my brother, my mother, my father and my cat I neglected at my parent’s like the terrible human monster I am. And I walk in and find it right on his desktop. In the center of his desktop, on a document labeled final instructions. I guess my parents thought sudden, hysterical blindness is a really good excuse to force your twenty year old daughter to have such a bullshit cinematic moment. (In case anyone cares: he wanted to be scattered at all the ends of the island. We have two dead end roads running north and south along the coast. We also have a road that goes east up to Harriet Hunt Lake. Mine would be the same if it had been me. And the beach, down the hill from our house.)

After the Burial is also this like…place I could go. For a while. And it made me think about my family for the first time in a long time. Without immediately ordering myself to stop thinking about that because it could accidentally lead to feelings. Or without reminding myself well, they’re dead, so. At the same time, I felt really good about how we were for that short time. My dad wasn’t even being a dick to me about my latest boyfriend because we all knew my brother was going to die. We used to go on these drives to the end of the island and back. And in a way, I wondered if those words were for me. Like, that he’ll be here only here is here, so I can’t leave. Even if I wanted to or even if I suddenly had the ability to. I hold onto the ashes anyway. I can’t let them go. It’s stupid. But I’m too literary (not like quality of writing literary but just that I do write and have written and read things and watched movies) to think it would make any difference. Like, a big cathartic letting go. There really is so little of him left anyway. No one remembers anymore. Just me. But After the Burial of Dog Stanley made me feel ok about remembering them even though the family and experiences described through the beautiful words and artwork are completely different from me and my family.

But there’s a similarity, always, in missing someone. A quality of absence and the hyper-real presence of memory, I tried to convey, clumsily in my own writing. Even if no one ever sees it, my best efforts and the better person I used to be with them, when we were all together and sort of okay, is preserved. It’s a wonderful book and I wish this blog reached more than five people because everyone has lost someone and maybe it could help them remember, too.

Review of short horror collection Darkest Hours by Mike Thorn

It’s been a really really long time since I’ve blogged because out of all the things I spend hours writing and am in no way comphensated for (when someone tells me to contribute something somewhere for exposure, not that anyone ever has, but if they ever did, I would probably wonder where I would fit that in amongst all the other instances where I am, in theory, already doing that) my wordpress blog always seems the least conseqeuntial. Probably because I had one a long ass time ago and it seemed like a complete waste of my efforts. I know some ways to make it less that now, but my brain is still locked onto ‘this is an utter waste of time so whenever I’m busier, this is always the ball I chuck maliciously at a window and then run away, laughing.’

So anyway, after recovering my password and being informed I already entered in too many incorrect passwords even after setting up a new password, I can finally paste the entireity of my review for Mike Thorn’s Darkest Hours, reminding anyone who actually follows this blog (watch everyone roll their eyes and quickly look away when I put a photo of the physical copy of his book which I ordered because it is that awesome on ig and tell people to check out my blog. Check out her blog! What is this, 2004? Boo! upload some more videos)! To which I reply, I wasn’t aware this was a video site I was risking copyright infringement fines in order to impress people on. Should that have been inside the parenthesis? I can never tell. Reminding them! That’s what I was orignianlly doing. Just that this contains more detailed write up’s of the stories I really, really, really liked and may be considered spoilers by some, so be warned.

My mom and I took my aunt to one of our better hippie cafes – or really, our only one, way back in the mid 90’s and she claimed there was a hair in her hippie sandwich. And while one might speculate, ‘how could she tell amidst all those sprouts’ she immediately went into the tiny hippie bathroom to vomit and spent the rest of the day in a hypochondriac sulk. I didn’t have quite that reaction to the story which opens Mike Thorn’s Darkest Hour. But close.

Mictian Diabolus was like the best film festival trash – think Exeter, which I love and watch at least once a year – only this is a lot scarier. (I think I’m the only ones who likes Exeter.) Whoever says surviving the thing is worse clearly has never been flayed or been to a flaying. But it’s still not fun and the narrative seems to really get that. You feel really bad for these poor, dumb characters.

Mired is the funniest yet would probably be funnier if I weren’t basically an uneducated dummy. But the gist of it still works for anyone who worries they are only scanning the words on the page in front of them because that’s how we’re trained in college (I did sort of go to college) and wonders how much more improved their lives would be if they could truly absorb knowledge in a meaningful way. Stupid humans.

The Auteur is my favorite. Sadly, there was only one video rental store here which could actually afford to hire employees, and let’s just say I…didn’t know the right people. Still, I relate to scouring youtube for lists of no budget, SOV horror looking for…something. I was never exactly sure what. Now I know. This could act as a deterrent, except…I kinda want it? Which is, imo, why the best horror works so well.

Choo-choo is one of the ‘oh-shit-that-one’ stories. (When I looked back over the titles to refresh my memory. I read these over a very long summer. Anyway, the ones where I was like, ‘oh shit. That story.) What I really love about a lot of the stories is that kids doing really dumb shit in a low budget movie on Netflix. (Or when Netflix used to have those, anyway. Remember that…remember the like, 2011’s of streaming?) But also, it’s terrifying. But older cell phones kind of scare me and that’s what I was picturing? Who else ever needed to call you on those? 1. Your mom, informing you your brother has died. 2. Your doctor, informing you of some new and horrifying venereal disease. 3. A childhood friend who died the night things went too far! That’s it. Now, at least half the time, it’s the ghost of the dead person who owned the phone before you did.

Long Man was a great nod to found internet horror. I’m still so sad Channel Zero didn’t make it. What is wrong with everyone; that show was fucking awesome. Anyway, it also reminded me how everyone has a shadowy other-place from childhood where you’re not sure if any of it happened. (Mine is my aunt Marilyn’s house in Coeur d’ Alene, Idaho, but that’s not a story for here.) In this story, you find out what happens when that place follows you out of childhood and is the second story I had the ‘oh, shit’ reaction to.

Sabbatical is a much better and less dog murdering (I’m more of a cat than a dog person myself but what in the actual fuck) version of Whisperer in the Darkness.

Satanic Panic is for anyone who was that kid harassed by cops for being gothy on a deserted road late at night (fuck u, officer Walker) but Remembering Absence is a wonderful closer that understands what I think might actually happen to some of us, but also deals with how it is to be left behind by someone we love.

And is everyone this refreshingly gender neutral in Canada? It must be nice.

Oh, I always forget about Fear and Grace. I love that story but I narrowly escaped from and was romantically involved with a lot of sociopaths so I kind of willfully (willingly? Both)? blocked it out. It’s really terrifying though, and is a reminder about a certain kind of predatory magnetism that simeltanously makes someone charismatic to the masses and also a horrifying monster one on one.