Oof. Only three books this month, which feels rough. This was a rough month as a whole, and that definitely did have an impact on my reading and just how much I wanted to do anything in general.
Maeve Fly by CJ Leede
Horror (subgenres: erotic(?), psychopath/serial killer/torture/slasher-y) (background f/m) - ebook novel
2.5/5
As a teenager, Maeve ran away to Hollywood, seeking out a grandmother she'd never met. In her grandmother—retired Hollywood royalty of the silver screen—Maeve finds an unexpected kindred spirit. Her grandmother recognizes that Maeve is, like her, a predator among ordinary humanity, though she warns her that she must keep that predatory instinct firmly leashed, lest she be found out. Maeve loves Hollywood and LA as a whole, adoring the artifice and artificiality, the desperation of so many of its inhabitants. She loves very few other things: her job as the "Nordic Princess" in a carefully-unnamed destination theme park, her grandmother, her coworker and friend Kate, the weird erotic and misanthropic literature that she tries to find reflections of herself in, Halloween.
Maeve's carefully curated and controlled life begins to fall apart, with her grandmother falling into a coma she'll never wake from, and Kate beginning to leave her behind as her career as an actress takes off. Kate's brother, hockey player Gideon, moves to town and seems to believe that he understands Maeve on some deeper level... though she's certain that with the exception of her grandmother, there is no one out there who could.
My thoughts, some spoilers, and pretty significant content warnings:
I'm going to be clear that my rating is largely a mismatch of taste. I like a lot of horror genres, but torture porn is one of the few that I just don't care for. No shade, and if you are a fan of it, then this book is probably going to appeal a lot more. If that's your jam, I recommend this one! Because yeah, content warning for some eventually very graphic descriptions of torturing people, sometimes to death. Much of the torture also has a sexual element to it. The book itself I think was well written, and enjoyable from the "be in the head of a terrible person" perspective, it just turned out to be very much not for me.
(I saw some other discussion of this book call it "part slasher-romance" but I mostly disagree; slasher vs. torture porn are, to me, pretty distinct from each other, and this falls more firmly in the latter category, even if both are under the "serial killer/psychopathic killer" umbrella. If you specifically like slasher-romance, this might scratch that itch, but I wouldn't say it is that. Maeve's relationship with Gideon is highly relevant to the story, but is also very much a subplot.)
Maeve is clearly pretty psychopathic from the start, and this is very much a negative character arc, so she very deliberately gets worse. I don't dislike that, and it's the obvious throughline for a theme of the book (and one that Maeve expresses for herself): that women aren't allowed to be monsters the same way men are in fiction. For female characters there's often a question of what happened to make them "like that," or to have pushed them to that point, where male characters can just be monsters. This isn't fourth-wall breaking, but I feel like just sort of cozies up to that fourth wall, when Maeve deliberately styles herself after and takes inspiration from monsters in fiction, (ultimately channeling American Psycho.) She is the example of that thing she wishes she could find: a female character (written by a female author) who is monstrous not because of some secret trauma or tragedy, but because she just is, and because she actively chooses to embrace it.
I wouldn't say that I ever fully liked Maeve, but I don't think she's intended to be liked. She certainly wouldn't want to be! She was at least interesting, even if it was often in a "ah, so you're just horrible!" way. Other times she was... maybe a bit tedious, if only because she was a little too much like some "yeah, I'm into the really dark stuff, no one else gets it" sort-of "guy in your MFA" subtypes that I've met, haha. Of course, Maeve makes sure to earn her "no, I'm genuinely a monster" cred in a way I hope none of those dudes I've spoken to did, lol.
There are times where she is still sympathetic in her loneliness or her strange brand of protectiveness over the few people she cares for. There are other times where the book goes out of its way to make sure she isn't too sympathetic. (Like... one of her hobbies is targeting people online in order to ruin their lives, often by outing them as having abhorrent views. But even as she's revealing a woman's desire to join the KKK to keep non-whites out of her neighborhood, Maeve remarks that she really doesn't care that the woman is racist; she wants to ruin her because she's self-righteous in a way that Maeve hates. It is made clear this is not a vigilante "channeling my dark impulses to do harm to bad people" situation or anything.)
The book goes to excellent and often darkly funny lengths to never mention anything too directly Disney-related, while still making it completely and inescapably clear that Maeve is an Elsa face-character.
I liked the twist at the end, and the way Maeve sets herself up for it, but won't spoil it.
Perfectly decent book, but wasn't my thing. by Chuck Tingle
Horror (subgenres: queer, religious/cult/demonic) (background f/f) - physical novel
3.5/5
Rose is a perfectly happy and ordinary member of the Christian
cult church Kingdom of the Pine, a denomination that all but owns the town of Neverton, Montana. The church's main claim to fame is Camp Damascus, a gay conversion camp that boasts a 100% success rate. Rose is devout, happy, and content living with her loving parents. Then strange things begin to happen: she sees a strange humanoid figure lurking in the shadows, she vomits up masses of flies, and she experiences glimpses of memories that could never have happened. Her parents and her church-approved therapist seem only mildly concerned, implying that any of these circumstances may have been brought on by her own failings of faith. As the mystery figure haunting her escalates to violence against her and others around her, Rose begins to identify gaps in her own memories, and becomes increasingly certain that there is something deeply sinister going on.
My thoughts, mild spoilers:
This one is right between a 3.5 and a 4 for me. I did enjoy it, but I didn't love it the way I'd hoped to. I went with the 3.5 because I felt like it had a stronger start than finish.
I did really like the early parts, where the hints of weirdness were starting. I wouldn't say that the end was disappointing per se, and parts of it certainly delivered well on the premise, but I just couldn't quite connect with all of it. There were a few aspects of the ending that I didn't feel fully explained what they were meant to. (Okay, we have this [spoiler] substance to induce memory loss... but that memory loss in practice seems more targeted than seems plausible. Okay, [spoiler] explains why the whole 'puking flies' thing happened, but also... does it explain that, really? There's enough extra-dimensional weirdness to handwave the bits that still feel off, but I don't want to handwave!) This wasn't like... Lost levels of "excellent creepy setup, zero payoff" or anything, but the setup felt stronger than the explanation.
I enjoyed Rose's perspective, and how very attached to her devout upbringing she was at the start - lots of Bible verses and instinctive "what would the church want me to do?" thoughts, which was certainly different than I'm used to reading. Watching doubt creep in (consistent with the ways in which she was already a very curious and analytical person) was a good arc, as is later realizing just why she may have had those "instinctive" thoughts in the first place.
But as the book went on, it felt like the perspective on religion was a little too... tepid? I'm not sure why exactly it felt that way, because it's not like I disagree with any of it, really. But her friend Saul comes down on the side of wanting to maintain his Christian faith, just in a way that feels more affirming and loving. Willow is an unspecified type of witch. Rose initially takes a pretty staunchly atheistic position, but almost immediately decides that that would be swinging too far the opposite direction from the coercive religion she's disconnecting from, and that she should settle somewhere in the middle, that she still "should" have some amount of faith. On the one hand, I get it: the book isn't trying to say that all Christianity or all religion is a bad thing! It's specifically about the damaging, abusive attitudes of a fundamentalist and extreme version, so it's good to make it textually clear that there are alternatives even within religion. But... on the other, it just ended up feeling meh.
I did enjoy the specifics of how the cult was operating, and what decisions they'd justified for themselves.
I pictured Pachid, Rose's demon, as the Pale Lady from "The Dream" from Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark the whole time (except wearing a polo shirt), which is really neither here nor there, but it was a strong image.
And I loved the creepiness of the demons wearing polo shirts with nametags. The whole "this demonic horror is simply an employee" vibes were great.
There were a couple writing quirks that weren't my favorite. It felt like an attempt to avoid overuse of pronouns, but Rose frequently referred to her parents in her thoughts by their first names (which felt weird, and didn't seem to be a narrative choice to show distance or anything, as she did so even when she felt very close to her parents), and she repeatedly referred to Saul as "my friend" in her narration in a way that felt weird, too. These may just be character quirks, or deliberate emphasis on what these characters are to her, but it felt unnatural to me.
I feel like the ideal medium for this story would have been like... a SyFy original movie, but it would have been a really good one. by Seanan McGuire
Book 8 of
Wayward ChildrenFantasy - physical novella
5/5
The first and most important thing that Antsy loses as a child is her father. After, her mother remarries, to a man Antsy cannot force herself to like. When he proves that her mistrust was extremely justified, she runs away, eventually arriving at a mysterious junk shop. There she meets an older woman named Vineta, and a talking magpie named Hudson. They explain that the store is a nexus world, a place connected to all manner of other worlds by way of the magical Doors, which Antsy is able to easily open to explore. Theirs is a kingdom of lost things, providing a safe place for them until they can be found again. Antsy settles in to work in this new place... but something seems wrong about the time that passes, as if there's a secret that Antsy has been kept from knowing.
My brief thoughts, minor content warning:
This book does come with a content warning up front, because Antsy, who is a child, is repeatedly targeted and gaslit by an adult would-be abuser, who ultimately does threaten her with non-graphic, but clearly implied future sexual abuse. None of this comes to pass, because she escapes before it can.
I really enjoyed this one. It was an extremely quick read. (These are all fairly short novellas, but this one seemed to go particularly fast.)
While it's been hinted at previously, it's interesting to see more information about the Doors between worlds, and the fact that they have some form of will and sentience, and it's ambiguous what their motives and purpose may be.
This world itself is a fun one, and I particularly love it being the world from which all magpies originate.
Fun cameo from Jack and Jill, when Antsy ends up briefly in The Moors, though she is directed to retreat before they can interact with her.
Antsy's story is another tragedy, made worse because so little of what happens to her is her fault. I hope that we get to stick with her as a character long enough for things to work out for her (though that's far from a guarantee, I know!)I am currently in the middle of four books:
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Dead Silence (my current main read)
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Buchanan House (still my side read)
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Duma Key (with Alex)
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Installment Immortality (with Taylor)
I also finally got a
LibraryThing account set up! I looked at it based on
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olivermoss's recommendation, as I was looking for something to keep track of books read and such, but really didn't want to use Goodreads. (In part because they're Amazon-owned, but also people can also be real weird about stuff on there at times. People can and will be weird anywhere, but Goodreads drama can be a lot, lol.) Storygraph is a popular alternative, and I know I did set up a login on there, but it didn't seem to mesh well with how I actually wanted to use it.
LibraryThing definitely works for what I want to use it for! It's been easy to find and get books added, easy to rate them, easy to edit any other information about them, easy to tag them in whatever way makes sense for me... so it's currently working really well for me.
The UI looks very simple in a lot of ways, but is very robust. It's intended to be usable as a catalog for libraries as well as individuals. I really like how easily customizable it is. I can easily edit the publication date if the one it pulled isn't the correct one for the edition I have (a problem I think caused by how Amazon does their listings, where hardcover/paperback/ebook/audiobook are all part of the same listing, despite having different pub dates, and Amazon is one of the easiest places to pull book info from.) I can edit the title field to standardize the way it includes series information (since that's not completely standardized in what it defaults to.) If it defaults to a cover I don't like/the wrong edition for a book, I can check the site to find alternate covers that have been uploaded, or could provide my own. (But you also don't HAVE to do any of that.)
I also appreciate how easy it is to sort the way it's displayed. I wanted the dates for when I read each book to show up, so I was able to add that as a column to my default view and then sort the whole library based on those dates. There's also a lot of information that isn't relevant to me (the dimensions of the book, some extremely specific cataloging or publishing info, etc.) and it's extremely easy to ignore all of the stuff I don't find important, haha.
The only annoyance I've really found is that reordering collections doesn't seem to be working (as it hasn't worked on three different devices/OSs and two different browsers). [When in doubt, check the forum! Other people have had the same issue, but there's a page that serves as a workaround, so I was able to do that.] The "pulling the wrong edition's publication date" or "inconsistent series title/number formatting" are mildly annoying, but so trivially easy to fix that it's a non-issue.
I went back as far as 2022 to list the books I've read, up through everything I have in progress. (I don't plan to include anything farther back than that, though I was considering at least adding in the earlier books in various series in... but most series will
eventually get reread, so I can probably just wait for that, ha.) I also feel bad not including a lot of favorite books... but again, they're on the TBR list as rereads, so they'll get there eventually.
I haven't yet put the rest of my TBR in, and am trying to decide if I want to do that, or if I want to keep it as a record only of the things I
have read. I'm torn! Wanting to track the TBR is part of what I wanted a site like this to do, and limiting how many things you could mark as officially "to be read" was part of what I didn't like about some sites. However... I also don't know that I want to completely overwhelm my library with books I haven't yet read and likely won't get to for a few years. I will likely compromise and maybe add in the next five or so books that I plan to read, to keep it a bit more manageable.
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