Sick day 🖤

This book “worked” for me on just about every level. There‘s a psychopath kid ghost (who texts!!), spectral children kids giggling and playing patty-cake in alleys. The horror is real and gory. The MC is brittle and dealing with mortality, and there is a development I did not see coming. #childhorror

Waiting at the mall #childhorror reading. I‘m a shopping widower. 🛍️

Why so brutal

Wyndham ensures the narrative is distanced from the events of the story: Much of this story about pregnancy and child-rearing is discussed almost entirely by men, & significant events take place off page. That, coupled with a main character being a philosopher, ought to make this dull. It can be “talky” and dry, but it is intellectually compelling. It was a natural choice for this year‘s #childhorror theme, though perhaps more sci fi than horror.

I fagged through the Park again and again, long after I was quite knocked up.

🌲🫃🌲

This book sent me to Reddit to learn about salad cream. Culinary travel through literature!

A thoroughly contemporary homage to Rosemary‘s Baby with a slowly spun out story of creeping dread and claustrophobia. Fantastic twist on classic horror stories. #childhorror

Pretty wildly uneven. The parents are so bland and self-absorbed I cldn‘t tell if they were intentionally satirical or not (Suzette‘s personality is Crohn‘s Disease, Alex is hot Swede Daddy) and there‘s no grip on Hanna‘s voice, who sometimes possesses an adult‘s intelligence, other times is astoundingly dumb. The plot varies between frustrating and fun, & I think the true #childhorror here is the potential regret of having a kid, psycho or not.

For our Christmas #childhorror selection, we read this extremely dark and pessimistic story about how parental “love” for their offspring can basically result in the genocide of humanity. In 340 pages, DiLouie covers a month and a half in a small town in the midst of a global phenomenon. This focus and the time he takes with the story makes it strong, and while it isn‘t always narratively satisfying, it is really effective: horrifying and moving.

The original member of our horror book club had a baby, so in her honor we are dedicating a year to #childhorror. We officially started in Dec. with Sealed, which, as @Reggie said, is a book that could convince you not to get pregnant.

The everyday anxiety when early pregnant is exacerbated by isolation, loneliness, oh, and the looming threat of a skin sealing epidemic.

How do you have enough hope to reproduce on a polluted, dying planet?

Currently reading. 🌱🌿🌳

 @Howardsimmons gave this to me for St Jordi‘s Day and I am astounded by how good this is, how much it is changing my perspective on life, and how much this intertsects with my love of a contemporary novel, Mrs. Dalloway.

Fantastic. 6 bleak, heartbreaking, funny, loving, beautifully illustrated sad clown stories.

Gin‘s proverbial clarity, like a prism of clear glass, refracts a rainbow of historical color.

What a trip! Found while browsing the gorgeous Saint Louis Central Library.

My friend practically threw this book at me and I am SO GRATEFUL! This is a gem of indie horror fiction and I want to read everything else Sodergren has written.

An elderly Scottish lady refuses to leave her home, even as her village is razed by an American billionaire to build a resort. One day, she finds a gelatinous creature on the shore and everything changes.

It made me feel things. I was enraged, moved, disgusted, and entertained.

Boy, if I were the type to look up every word and reference I don‘t understand while reading this book (“the first Proustian zombie novel” —Slate) and then practice using them, my vocab would be 🔥

🧐

Throwback to 2019, another year STL got a ton of snow. Also, sartorially fits with today‘s snowed in morning reading!

“The elms bent to one another, like giants who were whispering secrets, and after a few seconds of such repose, fell into a violent flurry, tossing their wild arms about, as if their late confidences were really too wicked for their peace of mind.”

No lie, this description made me lol. “Really too wicked!” Gossipy elms.

Fanfuckingtastic, as Fats would say.

Goldman wrote the Princess Bride, Butch Cassidy etc, Marathon Man, as well as the screenplays for All the President‘s Men and Misery and so much more. Clearly, he was a talented SOB. Magic hooked me from the get go and it was easy to tear through it on my two snow days. It follows the crack up of a young magician on the cusp of success. Perfect dialogue, compellingly told. I also love the movie.

Staying cozy and reading on this cold, snowy day. 🍵

(Hopefully no poison)

Cheezits, this is a grim, bleak story. 100 boys set out on a walk that only ends when all but one are ☠️. Somehow, it‘s worse than you imagine. It‘s a purposeless Vietnam era dance-a-thon inspired by Jackson‘s “Lottery.” You like the Hunger Games but find it too uplifting? Craving a novel abt totalitarianism in America?! You‘ll love The Long Walk!

I appreciated the queerness of the MC; the layers of attraction, shame, and emotional bonding.

But aside from the demon in her head, and her frequent nightmares, and her excessive drinking, and her insomnia, she was happy and productive.

Trick or treat! 🎃

The number of men that came up to me last night saying: “Carly Beth!” Not “Goosebumps!” not “The Haunted Mask!” but her actual name! Warmed my 🖤 heart.

🥀 She remembered the day they met, and the way he had looked at her, and how it had filled her with a mad ecstasy, which in retrospect had been a nervous breakdown.

😆

Discarded by my library last year. This seemed like a good time to read it 🎃

It‘s Southern Gothic, with a stalking italicized POV killer and preoccupation with MC‘s theatrical mother. The writing is strange poetry shot through with humor, like here: “She developed a taste for her own misery, though she did not exclude her sister‘s. She was a lover of bitter chocolates.” 🍫

Not even 40 pages in, but glad I picked it up.

The language & snowy atmosphere of this weird & ambitious sci fi novel immediately grabbed me. The voice is so exciting and unique, the set up bleak and Gothic, complete w/a cast of unsavory noblepeople. Like Mexican Gothic, it‘s a contemporary ex. of the genre‘s enduring relevance.

I wld‘ve loved to waller in the mood of the 1st 1/3, but it takes a turn that is less interesting both philosophically and narratively. Towards the end, it dragged.

A team of scientists and Navy crew descend a thousand feet below the surface of the South Pacific to investigate a spacecraft. 🌊 ⭕️

It‘s got dread, psychological tension, giant sea monsters, and a touch of existential horror. But what most fascinated me were the complex racial and gender dynamics at play, which made me feel I needed a comprehensive critical knowledge of the 1980s to understand. It‘s a suspenseful and twisty story.

Old Cape Cod overrun by killer cockroaches. 🪳

The author leans into the story with such gusto you can‘t help but be swept along. It is gross and gory and cheesy: I loved it. If you want a horror story to read this October, I recommend this. It‘s a brutal and trashy delight.

Props to audiobook narrator Brittany Pressley! She really does a convincing job with the often inane writing and personalizes each voice. The interactions in this book are often hilariously stilted, as when sexy big-eared Stu flirts with the MC and she responds with the non sequitur “Pee-yew, what is that smell?” Every conversation with her mom is fraught with surprising wellsprings of rage. It‘s a messy book, but Pressley sells it.

A movie—any movie, even one that fails—is a conversation with the viewer who chooses to engage. This movie will communicate emotional truths that can only be communicated by the language of film and horror. If we do it right, the movie will speak to us now as it would‘ve 30 years ago, and as it will 30 years from now, if any of us are still around, projecting movies onto the walls of ruined buildings.

Caught this pic of my husband reading while in line at the Telluride Horror Show this weekend. When we weren‘t watching fantastic horror shorts or features, we were reading horror novels! I am finally reading Cabin at the End of the World.

The pitch: It‘s phantom of the opera but instead of a chorus girl at the Paris opera house she‘s a cashier at Muffin Mania.

On free cart at library. Yes, please!

Shakespeare in the Park last night! Couldn‘t have asked for a better evening.

Picked this up last w/end while visiting lighthouses w/my Mom along Lake MI. We met the author while she was volunteering at the 1860 Light Station.

Death‘s Door is narrated by the wind, water, and rocks that make up a treacherous passage between Lake MI and Green Bay and related 5 stories of people who dared to cross it. The illustrations are gorgeous and evocative, the stories raise a mix of excitement, fear, empathy, and wonder. 🌊

For so long I thought this was a novel of “lingerie horror,” which I figured was a term I just hadn‘t heard but could figure out what it meant.

No, that word is LINGERING. Which, yes, accurate. This book stuck with me while reading and after finishing. It‘s the kind of thing I usually avoid, the bleak horror I don‘t want to experience, a book that left me crying in bed in the fetal position.

It‘s not a fun read. It‘s powerful.

Absolutely love this terrifying cover by Trevor Henderson.

Just started reading this for our book club (great preface!).

AKA my 20s

Ok, so Percival Everett‘s James may be the BEST book I will read this year, but McDowell‘s Katie could be my favorite. It has everything I could want in an entertainment: melodrama, romance, gore, humor, revenge. There‘s a boarding house of young women that reminds me of Stage Door, a Pride&Prejudice style romance, and of course, the psycho psychic Katie, terrifying in her brutality, stupidity, and love of blunt force trauma. Loved it. 🔨 🩸 💰

Just when Philo‘s plight was becoming unbearable, McDowell really introduces us to the Slapes and damn if I don‘t like them (or at least, reading about them!). They may be dumb as bricks (I love the way he writes their dialogue) and mean, but there‘s something endearing about their love of theater and unambitious pleasures.

“Hasn‘t the sense of a creeping baby” is a phrase I want to work into conversation.

In her big, neglected house in Carstairs, she had entered a period of musing and drinking, of what looked to everybody else like a slow decline, but to her seemed, after all, sadly pleasurable, like a convalescence.

Men are very finite in the interest they take in things, and if a fellow creature were to rise from his grave to-morrow, he would be speedily forgotten, and have to resort to the variety stage if he wanted to make resurrection pay.

And in that moment he saw her, really saw her as she now was. Her empty eyes were suddenly afire, and her panting was hot and noxious on his face and neck, and her lips, those full pouting lips he‘d always loved so, were thinned to translucence over the multitude of teeth behind them. It was a mockery of her, a Gahan Wilson portrait of his beloved. And it was going to kill him.

Reading Nightblood along with a friend. I only brought vampire books on vacation. 🧛🏻‍♂️ 🦇 ⚰️