Fear is wonderfully realized in this queer and fantastical southern gothic tale. Internalized misogyny, homophobia—especially around power dynamics and (sexual) empowerment—unresolved trauma, and general apotheosis of coming into your own in post-secondary education.

Andrew is forced into a painful reckoning when his best friend ostensibly commits suicide and he is gifted, or rather pushed, into his life. He inherits everything. Friends, money… the lingering supernatural remnant of Eddie. Essentially a new life birthed from the death of who he thought he was on the back of a murder that dredges up old trauma.

Occupying a liminal sexual identity while grief riddled, Andrew tries to discern the circumstances of his friends death as he is pulled into an unfamiliar, quintessentially sexually charged university/college scene Eddie was embedded in, and may have gotten him killed.

The supernatural components being linked and intersectional to Andrew’s identity and queer themes worked incredibly well. It’s evocative, slightly melodramatic and dark in tone and subject matter, and themes, as you’d expect from southern gothic. The investigative components are well paced, paralleling Andrew’s internal dimensions. Felt respectful of heavy subject matter. Really liked the ending. Very solid, better than I expected.

An intelligent and nuanced depiction of a woman who, when she discovers her roots, somewhat literally—as she is consumed by the wanting to consume earth itself, the byproduct of which is visions that seem to reveal the fate of women who continue to go missing in and around the sums in which she lives. The gift immediately puts her into an out-group as her secret gets out. Finding herself straddling new found agency and danger, as some people desperately seek her gift for Justice and peace of victims while encountering others that think the very thing that gives her, and through her, other victims agency, is the reason she herself should be made to similarly “disappear”.

It’s also one of the most vivid and humane rendering of a young woman refusing to conform to gender roles and prescribed socialization, or to stay in “her lane” social grouping-wise. The parallels between coming-of-age impoverished and coming into her power coupled with the femicide being highlighted are incredibly apt and gripping because this is unlike anything I’ve read before. It’s short, packs a punch, unapologetic, and does exactly what it sets out to do.

It’s difficult to talk about this without spoiling the innovative and most compelling aspects of the book. In vague terms, it’s very hard to sell people on it. It’s about a guy—Tommy Taylor—who is son of a man who wrote a massively popular set of fiction books for children and young adults that parallels Harry Potter in some ways. His dad has since vanished, abandoning him, and the world for many years. Tommy’s only source of income is showing up at cons where there is still some cache in the assumption that the character in the books were based on him as a child as well.

Only, we enter his life precisely when that fact may not actually be the case. A culture war ensues when a woman announces that the baby his father used was allegedly the son of a Romanian housekeeper, and on paper, Tommy doesn’t exist at all. The public has become so entrenched and enamoured with the franchise that this becomes the story everyone has in their heads. All people talk about and all people care about. Sound familiar?

It’s far more interesting than just that though. The start of the story is slightly interesting but doesn’t feel like it has anywhere to go because this isn’t tropey. It’s about a trope. But no one could predict what vehicle or road this setup was for.

In broad terms, it’s about story itself. At an instinctual and primordial level, what creatures humanity uses story for, and who controls it and for what purpose. The agency behind a story in the general intellect and the ethical consumption and creation of it—and by extension, art—and the power of the public consciousness or Anthropocene unconscious. It literalizes story itself in some ways. And by giving it a physicality and substance that can be interacted with and manipulated, it allows for a meta story about story, as well as enabling a more myopic narrative about characters navigating these literalized concepts.

It is whole unique, though takes some time to get into, and to-date still unlike anything I’ve read. One of my favourite comics of all time, and by the end of this book, 10 issues in total, I think most readers should have an appetite for what’s to come. It’s an absolute blast to re-read this now, knowing more about literature and post-modernism and where this all goes. You should be so lucky. Truly.

A story about a woman stuck repeating destructive patterns she witnesses growing up. Never really understanding the concepts she claims to yearn for most, and so always believing the wrong things will nourish her. It’s pretty brutal. But honest and dark.

I saw this billed as kind of darkly funny too, to balance things out, but that aspect never worked for me, and I actually became a little bit bored as soon as I understood what her flaw was and the spiral occurring. All that is rest is to watch. Loved the prose and the concept. Just lacked investment.

https://medium.com/springboard-thought/apartment-exposing-a-generational-male-human-condition-be39dbde2559

“Sometimes the only way to start over in life is to burn down the house.”

Simultaneously evoking the conventional while being unconventional itself, Apartment has an uncanny knack of casting you into the role of the unnamed narrator-protagonist.

They — He — You? — are a somewhat middling, but still budding, writer in an MFA program at Columbia University. Here we meet Billy. Broke but charismatic; naturally gifted, the embodiment of small-town, kind of jock, writer. The polar opposite of our narrator, who is middle class, shy and introverted, highly educated, and already possessing some experience in the form of copy editing.
The narrator also possesses arguably the most coveted thing in New York: the rent-controlled apartment. In the hours of the MFA program, an easy camaraderie is struck between the two and a sort of natural, symbiotic relationship emerges; morphing throughout the novel.

They move in and the following time becomes the defining period of our narrator's life.
Like all good literary fiction, Apartment is about many things.

It also sticks with you long after you’re finished. An almost unspooling occurs upon reflection; a time bomb of secondary, slow revelations that make it apparent that it's smarter than you’d expected.

“…this was all we collectively had, we knew no protest songs, had little to protest — and I felt a swelling in my chest, a surge of joy flowering out through my limbs; there is nothing like crooning in a group to a chorus to communicate to yourselves and the world that you are young and drunk and unhindered by responsibility, that the future stretches out endlessly before you like a California highway.”

For one, it is quintessential for the male generation, I think. Taking place in 1996, at the start, if you recollect the 90s boy/man you know or are, this feels spot on. It is an era and generation that, I think, really brought forth the discussion on toxic masculinity and performing gender.
Two ways of performing the male gender are embodied in these two roommates — naturally resulting in a tense, dramatic, powder keg type situation. You also manage to get the “college experience” with just the two main characters and their interactions.

One, easy to like; a manly man, a Hemmingway figure that gets the girls and though of meager means, still collects what a guy is supposed to want with little to no effort.

“to be on the fringes of an already marginalized subculture is simply lonely.”

The other, not performing their gender — even with middle-class wealth on their side — is an exercise in futility (for the most part).

The narrator, however, is also the more intersectional archetype as well. When Billy does not Hemmingway, he too takes on the characteristics displayed by the narrator.

Inevitably, as all roommate situations tend to go, tragedy occurs. But in this modern-day story, it is multifaceted: it is found in the plot unfolding, in the gender roles being performed, and by each specific archetype of masculinity.

With extraordinary brevity, the modern man is put on trial.

“but hearing Seger’s lyrics, rather than identifying with someone else’s expression of similar feelings, as art was supposed to do for its audience, I thought that there was a different quality to mine, it was singular and peculiar and grotesque, a lonely flavor of loneliness.”

While a definitive verdict of this metaphorical trial is not readily apparent (it would be sorry had it tried such a feat, I think), and it is left up to the occupant of the narrator to take what they can from it — what is apparent in no uncertain terms is that it is endlessly hard to find what truly nourishes us in this society we have erected. Especially if we are not the standard that society demands. Western values are at odds with the concept.

Some of the components to be navigated: privilege, wealth, sexuality, gender performance, “raw” or “natural” ability, beauty, intelligence, are all one size fits all.

Navigating to some semblance of how we ourselves design our success and happiness is always a personal task that no component of the system we interact with manages to help with.
Certainly, the human condition doesn’t either.

In such a system, for some individuals, freedom might look like straying or altogether removing oneself from the game they are told to play. And, as a survival mechanism in the process of growing up, perhaps our minds try to help us cope with this by altering our memories.
Would we remember our past in the manner we do, had we created a way of life that did not constantly dig, grind, or maim us?

“Remember this, I commanded myself again, though I knew that this memory — like all of them — would lose an essential and truthful quality over the years. The notion that we repress or redact significant chunks of the past strikes me as a dramatic contrivance for storytellers more than a realistic psychological phenomenon; but that we alter or retrospection in subtle ways, to airbrush out unpalatable blemishes here and there, much as we sweep detritus in our present consciousness under the carpet: that seems quite natural.”

Not my thing, I guess. Found incredibly tedious and a bit pretentious. A good exercise to flex your prose on, if the reader is invested in the concept.

Pretty incredible. Well written, and as with the authors other work, about something important that feels so well rooted into the main plot and the characters you can’t help but confirm the conclusion. Like a well written article with facts and citations and multiple view points, only it’s well realized and complex people that makes its case this time.