octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

I have to admit: when I picked this up and started reading, one of the first things I had to do was go on Wikipedia and look up who the Mennonites were. Anabaptists, it said, and I had to look that up too. Yeah. My religious knowledge is pretty sparse. Honestly, though, I didn't need to know a lot to be able to follow along here. Shortly after her grandmother's funeral, Wendy discovers that her grandfather might have been trans. Being trans herself, this sets her to reinterpret their relationship in the light of their shared religious upbringing... an upbringing that Wendy is very lapsed from.

I gathered that much from the blurb, and while it's a focus of the book, it's not the whole of it. There's sex work and suicide and alcoholism, and parts of it are pretty grim. Leavening the misery is Wendy's relationship with her dad Ben, which is positive and loving and supportive. That was my favourite part of this, I think, but a close second has to be the pacing, which was very finely judged and kept me reading well after midnight last night because it was all zipping along so smoothly. I seem to have read a lot of slower-paced books recently, so this was a welcome change. 

Now that I've finished this, it's safe to say that I'm done with reading Lovecraft for a while. No doubt in a year or two I'll try him again, but a little of him goes a long way as far as I'm concerned. On the whole, I preferred the stories collected here to those collected in the first volume, but some of them were still not great. The best of them is "Pickman's Model," which I've read many times before and liked, but on the whole... the things that appear to scare Lovecraft do not raise a whole lot of chills for me. The more cosmic horror he trends, the less I care.

Of this particular edition: most of the footnotes were helpful and illuminating, and I enjoyed the short opening essay. As with the previous volume in the series, though, there is inexplicably no table of contents. 

Otherwise, I read and reviewed the stories included here separately so don't feel much need to go over them again. No penguins this time, unfortunately, but there were bats instead, and it's not like the penguins were made as much of as I would have liked anyway. Which I suppose can also be said for the bats... 

Honestly, a lot of the poetry here is... not wonderful. Some of it's downright painful to read, although in fairness a lot of that, I think, is due to the age of the collection. The poems were written in the late 1890s and early 1910s, and they are very formal and very mannered - not that appealing to modern tastes. I will say that, despite the verse itself, the essential humanism of the author comes through very clearly: the title poem, in particular, is close to fifteen pages of ranting about the hypocrisy of the United States denying to other countries the freedom it won for itself, and other poems slate the destruction of poor people's homes to benefit the rich, the disdain of a young woman for an old guy who's creeping on her, and (in a series of Arthurian poems) the disloyal indifference of some of the so-called heroes. A fan of Tristan and Gawain, Mr. Adams is not.

Even so, I would have been hard pressed to sit through some of the Boston recitations of this poetry... except for one. There's one poem, by far the best of the collection, where Adams drops his tendency to flowery sentiment and in twelve short lines absolutely rips into the writer Thomas Carlyle for being an awful husband to his late wife Jane. It's almost worth reading pages full of "Of Love the minstrel sang, and drew / an easy finger o'er the strings" for that short piece of scornful bitchery. 

I enjoyed this, but not as much as the first. The horror and the generational trauma is as sharply observed as it was in the first book, and Jones is always a compelling writer. It's the slasher of it all that prevents me from liking it more. As I said in my review of the previous volume: much as I love horror, slashers are my least favourite iteration. By the end here, with the bodies and the melodrama and the elk, I'd stopped feeling horrified and had just started grimly waiting for the next violent detail. Elements kept piling up and piling up, and while I can appreciate this as the genuinely effective and knowledgeable reflection of slasher films that it is, by the end it was all a bit overstuffed for me, I think. 

Not the best of this series, I think. It's just my impression - which may not be accurate, as I read the Smithsonian Backyard books at distant intervals - but this seems rather less informative than usual. The bulk of the picture book seems to be the squirrel being chased by a cat who is in turn chased by a neighbour's dog. It's all very active, but it lacks the natural detail I've come to expect from the series. The illustrations, though, are gorgeous as always, even if I rather suspect that the cat was the favoured subject of the illustrator!

I've followed the Twitter account that was the genesis of this book for years, and it's consistently had me cackling until I lost breath at some of the monstrosities presented. The book's not quite as funny... mostly, I think, because it deprives us of the recipes (apart from a handful tucked away in the back) and some of the funniest things about the original are those awful recipes. That being said, this is still a funny read, although it's mostly photographs of culinary terrors. It does, however, include the funniest, most horrific dish I ever saw on the Twitter account: the seafood mousse in the shape of a fish, with tomato eyes and a piped-on smile. It's both glorious and horrendous, and for the life of me I cannot picture the circumstances in which anyone, ever, would soberly serve this up at a dinner party.

Imagine having it set before you as a guest. What would you even do? I can't imagine, and my mum used to make hedgehogs out of cheese cubes and small onions on toothpicks that were stuck into oranges. They actually weren't bad, but they cannot compare to that grinning fish. Not in a million years. 

Back in 2020 I was a university writer in residence in Palmerston North, and in my little Arts Centre flat, in the middle of a city that was deserted due to pandemic lockdown, I was next to a church. In fact, from my top floor bedroom I could see the church tower looming directly over, and more than once I lay awake at night, imagining monsters clambering down it and eyeing me up for supper. Unlike Mr. Blake in "The Haunter of the Dark," however, I did not break in and ransack the place for supernatural oddities. Perhaps if he'd had better manners he wouldn't be dead. 

Still, the first half of "Haunter" was satisfyingly disturbing, as the aura of evil surrounding its particular church percolated through the text. Then it went full-on cosmic horror and I stopped taking it seriously. If imagined monsters staring down into my bedroom don't cause me to lose sleep then you cannot expect the same, slouching in and from another galaxy, to do better. It's just not scary. I'm sorry, H.P., but it isn't. 

I found myself really enjoying this, which is always a surprise with Lovecraft. Consistently, the stories of his that I most admire are the ones that are most stripped back, with a strong central focus that isn't muddled by too many horrific elements piled on top of each other to the detriment of all. Here, the possession of a young man by his wife (or by his wife's father) is a slow, seeping threat that's all the more credible for the everyday trappings of the characters.

It's a really effective body-swapping piece, and I seriously considered giving it four stars. There's one aspect of it, though, that lets the story down somewhat, and that's the treatment of gender. I think it's fair to say that Lovecraft doesn't have a great deal of interest in writing women, but when a mind goes back and forth between a male and a female body... there should be some exploration of how this affects identity, surely? Lovecraft also seems to have very little interest in depicting sexuality in any meaningful way, and that particular choice necessarily, and somewhat frustratingly, limits the narrative here. I can't help but wonder what a more modern writer might have done with a man who takes over his daughter's body, and then uses that body to marry another man in order to possess that body as well. It does seem like an opportunity wasted... 

I haven't logged this story before today, but over the years I've read it many times. It's in a horror anthology that I've had for decades, and it's always been one of the highlights of that book for me... a Lovecraft story that I enjoy unreservedly. The focus is solid, the prose is - for Lovecraft - restrained, and it's uncluttered in nearly every respect. It's no secret that I find Lovecraft's storytelling to be both overwrought and overburdened, but in this he's got the balance right. The effect, for me, is horror and not hysteria. I have vanishingly little patience for his particular brand of hysteria, but the narrator of "Pickman's Model" is so solidly reliable in his telling that the disturbing nature of what he relates is effectively emphasised. 

It's the best thing of his I've read, and by some margin. 

One of the better stories I've read from Lovecraft! The twist at the end is obvious a mile off, and I spent most of this quite short story waiting for the narrator to put it all together (he never did). The lack of surprise doesn't take away from my enjoyment in seeing it all unfold, however, and it's surprising how effective Lovecraft can be when he dials back on all that purple prose and introduces a bit of actual concision into his writing. I mean, it's not an outstanding story, but it does rise to competence. Which is a backhanded compliment, I know, but he's long dead so he won't care.