saint_eleanor's Reviews (295)

This is definitely worth the hype. The characters are so intense and the writing is so so good. You really start to feel for all of them and like be angry at them etc. You also start to see like how far people are willing to go to impress eachother/ maintain their social standing and financial status. A really good look at humanity and banality and violence and all that jazz. My only qualm is the

ending, bc what the heck like I just wanted more closure or something. Like yes it was really crazy but it wasn't crazy enough for the book to be setting up for that for so long yk.

And also I loved the scary ass magical realism undertones (the "deer" they kept seeing that they thought was Dionysus.)

This was super fun and very classical sci-fi horror vibes but the racist undertones were a bit much for me, even though I know that the whole book is kind of a metaphor for

God and humanity and race issues etc

.

def lots of fun, didn't make a ton of sense and is almost more like a theoretical exercise. Brain food forsure

This was okay, i really liked the story actually and i can see how important it was at the time, but i kind of wish that it was longer or shorter/more concise? I like the themes of the übermensch, absurdism, and ultimate freedom from society’s norms/morals, but i think he could have gone even further with that. It reminded me a lot of Tayeb Salih’s Season of migration to the North, which i felt similarly about bc they deal with characters who kind of sit back and watch their peers assault women and kill people. I think the only reason i find these types of books to be irritating is bc the main characters are often like praised by people who are into Nietzche but all I’m seeing when I’m reading it is a man who is enabling/creating violence towards women and marginalized people and who is too spineless to have an opinion about it. Thats not really the book’s fault though, i feel like they are missing the point of the story.  I also have an issue with the existentialism theme, bc it gets him off the hook for any guilt about the murder bc he embraces true nihilism. I think thats BS personally but again i think that’s the point— that nihilism is actually quite dangerous. Idk!!

This was fine, i can tell that for the time it was probably really riveting and interesting. I really liked the plot and i loved the actual horror elements but i just wished it had been longer and I also wish the writing style was less boorish but again, it was written in the 19th century. Reminded me of the movie 'Lair of the white worm' for some reason. 

This was super interesting but it was a little bit confusing because the narrator changed like every 5 seconds (it was told POV of mushrooms and lightening bolts at one point!) 
I loved the storytelling and the myths and how matter-of-factly magical it was it was extremely poetic and lovely

Eeby creeby!!

slay

This was so delicious, the stories are so strange and disturbing and creative i actually cannot even believe a human being wrote them. its a love letter to weirdos but especially weird women. 
My favorites were Pyret, Jagannath, Some Letters for Ove Lindström, Who is Arvid Pekon? , Brita’s Holiday Village Reindeer Mountain, Cloudberry Jam, Aunts (which is almost all of them).