A rounded up 3.5 stars.

I loved Gene Ha's work in DC whenever I saw it, so I picked Mae when I saw it in the library (apparently it actually began as a Kickstarter project). Our titular character rediscovers Abbie, her long-lost sister, a supposed runaway, after a seven year separation. With Abbie comes firestorm of weird happenings, a steampunk universe and lots of nerdy genre-savvy conversation. There's a quite a bit of fantasy-speak thrown at you as soon as Abbie and Mae move through the Gate - they land in the world of Cimrteren near the Free City of Krunỳřves, looking for the Zemetřasi responsible for kidnapping their father, meeting a talking ring-tailed cat who is not one of the Mňoukové. The context brings you along well enough, but I definitely fell into my usual trap of seeing any of these words and pronouncing them "aksjlajksdajsdalkj" in my head.

All the aside, the character design of the wild and varied inhabitants of the steampunk world is amazing. Robots, regular humans, many different kinds of animal humanoids; you name it, Ha has probably tried to incorporate it.

Favorite panel:



Favorite variant cover by Philip Tan:

Sometimes you cannot separate an author from his works, especially if the author is as unapologetically sexist as Gilmour. I read the transcript of his interview that was "taken out of context"; he is straight up back-pedaling.

4.5 stars, really. The best plays are the ones about absolutely dysfunctional people and how they attempt to relate to one another. Letts has a stellar way of putting it all together.

Chris Smith comes up with a fool-proof plan to have his mother killed for her insurance money, recruiting Killer Joe, a detective and occasional hitman, to do so. He ropes his father Ansel into agreeing to it, while his younger sister Dottie is the supposed beneficiary of the policy. They attempt to keep her ignorant of the scheme. Accordingly, things refuse to go to plan.

"DOTTIE: My momma tried to kill me when I was real little. She put a pillow over my face and tried to stop me from breathing, 'cause she cared more about herself than her little baby, and she didn't love me like a mother loves a little baby. And she thought she'd done it, and she was happy, 'cause then she didn't have to worry about me eating her food, and sleeping in her bed, and growing up to be the part of her that was cut out and grown into a better thing than she had been, had ever been. 'Cause that would mean the best part of her was me. But she hadn't done it, she didn't give me back to Him, she only made me sick, made me not be for a while; but then I was and she was sad that I was, and that I always would be."

That was the first conversation Dottie and Joe have. It just knocked me around a bit; that phrasing. I had to put this away for a hot minute and come back hours later. But when I did come back, Dottie was still amazing (and played by Sarah Paulson in the 1998 run, which Letts also seemed to be very excited by, if the (!) after her name is any indication) and then this happened:

JOE: (He hands one of the photographs to Ansel.)

Is that your dick?

So you know, exceptional.

I am going to squeeze your balls so hard your eyes will pop out.

It would be quite shocking, but it had a nice ring to it. Actually, it was her favorite one.

Review to come.

3.5 stars.

I think I should have started with Gaitskill's fiction first. It was a pleasant surprise to find she had reviewed Natsuo Kirino's Out, which I enjoyed quite a bit. Her positive essay on the novel barely touched on anything that caught me about it - it's interesting to see what is important to different readers.

For the POPSUGAR challenge "author with the same first or last name as you". It was a more effort than I thought it would be to find a title for this one! Not because my first name is uncommon by any means, but it seemed like such a cop-out to just blindly point at any one of dozen contemporary romance novels and go (and no power on Earth was going to make me read Katie Pavlich's drek). So I tirelessly trawled through three whole pages of results before finding something appealing: Katie Kitamura's The Longshot.

Since falling ass over tea kettle for ice hockey, sports writing and fiction has been on my radar a lot more often. This novel is about the three days that lead up to an MMA rematch between our lead character Cal and the legendary Rivera, with Cal's trainer Riley as guide through their fraught history.

The dialogue in this is such hetero dude speak. Simple structures, varying emotional tone even if the words are the same over and over. A lot of things said between the lines because the characters can't seem to bring themselves to say it aloud.

Riley scouted Cal out of high school wrestling, trained him and his rise was meteoric - until it wasn't. A typical sports story - this rematch with a champion fighter is a redemption of sorts. There's fear, doubt and worry all leading up to the final culmination of the fight, which is left fairly ambiguous.

Cal doesn't win,

which almost seemed so obvious that I thought Kitamura was going to do the obvious just to fuck with us, but Cal also

may or may not live through the beating he put himself through just not to be a KO. Regardless of which of if he lives or dies, he'll definitely never fight professionally again.

Chosen for a 2018's POPSUGAR's reading challenge: "a book written by a woman using a male pseudonym". Barnard is, of course, Louisa May Alcott. If I remember correctly, it is this sort of fiction that she had always wanted to be writing. "The "moral pap for the young" style of Little Women and its sequels was something she was good at, but didn't particularly care one way or another for it. Alcott was steered to write didactic children's fiction with the assurance that if she did, her aspiring author father would also receive a publishing contract.

Regardless, if you've read Little Women, this its amoral, cynical cousin. There's a family involved and that's where the similarities end. I have a big ol' literature boner for morally grey, manipulative characters - it's a flaw of mine that I have come to accept. Miss Jean Muir is a Top Bitch and really could work as a high level spy - she's got the acting, the disguise, the ability to achieve emotional rapport with an audience very, very well.

"Are you one of those fair deceivers?"

"You are complimentary," laughed the girl. "I am a witch, and one day my disguise will drop away and you will see me as I am: old, ugly, bad and lost. Beware of me in time. I've warned you. Now love me at your peril."

So I'm kind of in love with Checchetto's art here. Frank looks like Naked Snake and Matt is gorgeous and the backgrounds are fantastic. I might have to pick up his run of Punisher just to see more of it.