A surreal novella about a woman who quits her job, moves in way too close to her inlaws, becomes isolated, sees a weird animal, and falls into a hole.

I'll be honest: I'm not sure what to make of this one, and my grasp on how it all holds together is loose. But I found unexpected parallels to western Gothic literature--a bride returns to her husband's ancestral home, is cut off from the outside world, learns unsettling things about her husband's family, feels crazy--that I thought were really interesting.

I was reminded of this book while watching a May Leitz video recently and decided to read it because, well, I've been in the frame of mind to consume a bunch of videos describing the worst things of all time, so yeah, this seemed thematically appropriate.

It was... fine, I guess? I have a lot of thoughts, but I backspaced them to oblivion because they felt mean in the context of the afterword revealing how personal and therapeutic the book was for Keisling.

I'll just say that this didn't do it for me.

Just Grady Hendrix turning my most primal irrational fear into an ooky spooky short story. Of course I enjoyed it.

I'm already a Hailey Piper fan and already expected to like this, but I think it might be my favorite of her books that I've read so far. It's just about the perfect Halloween book, the inciting incident a prank gone wrong that leads a group of teens to confront a local legend come to life: a cannibalistic murderer who targets kids. Nostalgic and gross with '80s slasher vibes, a queer girl protagonist, and a lot to say about the way older generations treat younger ones. I would have polished this off in one sitting if life hadn't interfered.

I was hesitant to read this book, not because I hadn't heard good things about it, but precisely the opposite: everyone I've heard talk about this book has raved, and I am curmudgeonly about hype. Plus, this fits squarely in the romantasy genre, and it's straight, and since coming out I just don't really want to read straight romances, sorry.

But. I've also been craving cozy reads with spooky-adjacent vibes, and this just sounded so much that that I decided to give it a try on audio for my commute and see if I bounced off of it.

Surprisingly, I didn't bounce off of it. I can see reasons why someone would--if you don't want twee little magical kids, steer clear--but I didn't. I thought the overall story was a good balance of cuteness and angst, I liked the grumpy/sunshine dynamic, I liked the characters (especially the grouchy librarian I could project myself onto), and I liked that there were queer supporting characters (although one could argue that one of them reads like a caricature of an older gay man). Really comforting escapism with enough conflict to fuel the plot and make me listen intently to find out how they were going to get out of the bonkers mess they got themselves into.

For the first half, Murder in G Major was shaping up to be a great, atmospheric mystery for October. A rainy Irish setting, villagers who know everyone's business, a fish-out-of-water heroine, and a ghost? Sounds like a fun cozy, right?

Unfortunately, the second half annoyed me with its ableism

Spoiler

which is integral to the resolution of the mystery

, as well as the setup for a love triangle. (I'm not fond of love triangles because they always take up far too much time and distract from more interesting plot elements. I don't want to hear about two mediocre-sounding men, I want to solve murders!)

Despite the cliffhanger, I won't be continuing the series.

An interesting exploration of why horror movies scare us. Nesseth draws on neuroscience, psychology, and her evident love of the horror genre to break down scares and explain how they work and the impact they have on the viewers' brains. I greatly appreciated her willingness to point out gaps in research and instances when conclusions are not generalizable due to bias, small sample size, or lack of diversity in experimental groups. And I was delighted to discover that this is a surprise (to me, at least) queer book!

Warning for spoilers of the horror movies she discusses, I guess, but most of the ones where she reveals specific scares are older films like Alien or The Exorcist III, which I feel like the target demographic of this book will have already seen?

This is an unpopular opinion, so let me say first that I get the concept of this book and think that the desire to draw more attention to missing and murdered girls and women, in the hope of their cases being solved and their families finding closure, is a valid and honorable one. However, the poems themselves are just not that good.

I finished rereading Dracula! And I even kind of kept up with Dracula Daily for, um, half of it? Before getting behind and then so caught up that I just finished the book early?

Despite the hype The Book of the Most Precious Substance received in the little book community I'm a part of, I was less than enthusiastic about reading it for a long time, because I thought, "Surely that means jizz, right?" And I was unsure of my capacity for reading a book all about people collecting jizz.

But I loved Sara Gran's demonic possession book Come Closer, and I'm reading all sorts of things I might have been squeamish about at other times of my life, and the audiobook is only 8.5 hours, so I figured why not. Let's read the magical jizz book.

Well, to my surprise, it's actually the magical squirt book. And it's also quite good.

Or at least, I thought it was quite good. It is chock full of weird, rich people doing weird, rich people sex things, which appealed to the sensibilities that led me to read Story of O and Venus in Furs a handful of years ago. There is also a sort of heightened sensuality permeating the text that often takes the form of descriptions of food, and although I think it serves to illustrate the overall voluptuousness that the narrator's life takes on, I can see why some readers got tired of hearing about all the fancy meals our intrepid booksellers were eating in between fucks.

But I don't know, I just got really sucked into it. All of the characters have something wrong with them, some disappointment or loss or greed that creates an emptiness in them that they are compelled to fill, and so they make bad decisions that are fascinating to read about. Lily is somehow relatable while also being completely unrelatable, moving through a world of money and power that is completely foreign to me, but her practical concerns about things like medical bills ground her.

And ugh, she should have just stayed with the lesbian BDSM witches!!

Overall a quietly creepy, Faustian read, erotic but not terribly sexy, good for people who like books about books.