bookpost feb-mar-mid-april-25
12/02: im actually writing this in feb. let's see if it's published in early march
22/04 HI. adding original publishing dates too, might go back and edit the previous poast's to include these. i read less without a commute
it lasts forever and then it's over, by anne de marcken
2024. what if zombies was people
Read in February. Wanky, sparse novella(*) on humanity and mortality and a search for meaning after a zombie apocalypse, from a zombie perspective. A ship of Theseus of the body. I had an okay time, but I don't think it truly hit for me.
The undead perspective on the body and self and needs and memory (and. gender?) was fine enough, but it lost me when it started getting into the love the protagonist missed. Not to bring up Time War 2 posts in a row, but something about this like... directionless longing combined with a short-sentenced pretension is very annoying to me. Like if the subject of this longing is ill-defined. In TW it was because the writing was bad and they forgot to include characterisation, and here it is because the recipient is forgotten and it's, you know, a dreamlike search for what remnants of her live within the protagonist. So it's more acceptable and intentional here, but I also don't particularly feel any... romance? from it. It doesn't have anything to tell me about love or relationships. If anything, combined with the rest of it, I get a kind of dire Other Half-ness from the relationship here. Ahh I am incomplete and inhuman without you etc etc. We <3 unhealthy relationship dynamics critiquing relationship-based societal pressures in this house and all but there's... something off... I can't quite place it.
Also, the general surrealism was appreciated but the crow's dialogue pulled me out. I think you can do surrealist search for meaning without doing random word association because I don't like it.
(*it was really short. her website calls it a novel. it was 77 pages on my e-reader. I just don't think that's true.)
parallel hells, by leon craig
2022. queer gothic horror short story collection
It's fine. I didn't write a lot of notes about it again. I remember the first story - a transient holiday tense not-romance where the other character is hiding the fact he's like in thrall to a beautiful vampire or something. Good talking around things, company for the sake of company. There was a story about a mansion house party where someone's magically transed and it does a cute 2-column formatting trick to tell a simultaneous story. There was a really direly pointed metaphor about the way cishet mothers pass down expectations of grandchildren by like, a mother passing a bewitched snake bracelet that never comes off to her daughter, who is able to shed it and pass it on to her siblings because she is gay and therefore the snake understands she will never be able to continue the line.
Horror is a lit genre that has a lot of short stories so it's not exactly unexpected but i found myself bumping up against the length a lot. I wanna luxuriate in the atmosphere a bit more, soak up the dread. I suppose I'm not really scared by what ifs, and while I like horror and it's ability to critique there also isn't a huge avenue for conceptual depth when you start condensing it. What if a thing was fucked up? Check out this visual metaphor. Here's today's victim!
I think if I'm going to read any more queer horror short stories they're going to have to be queerer and bloodier.
swordspoint, by ellen kushner
1987. gay regency fantasy-like. apparently the genre is 'fantasy of manners'
Read in March. i need to waterboard alec myself. hes always doing shit and i need him to stop doing it.
sterling karat gold, by isabel waidner
2021. queer london surrealism
Read in April. Y'know, didn't expect to actually like this as much as I did. Flipped through it at the bookstore once and was taken aback by the prose. Bit, er, avant-garde, but I put it on the library holds anyway. Short. Difficult to describe... it's very openly, classically surrealist, time-travelling spaceships and frog judges. It's about class and queerness and bureaucracy and state corruption and whatnot, and it's also about national and local identity without being reductive or stereotyping. It's not unwelcoming, but it's also extremely specific in its geography. It's a book in Camden that spends a lot of time detailing the area, making sure you know exactly what block of flats down which road served by which bus route and tube station with what chippy nearby - and it also uses real people in its narrative? Not something I've actually come across in lit lately. They're all dead in it but it's got this thing about projection and convincing yourself you need closure from public figures. It feels right for surrealism, but I can't figure out why. Putting things (real people) where they shouldn't(?) be is absurd and forces a strange perspective, I guess.
It uses this extreme focus and distance very intentionally. It's all kicked off by a hate crime - a violent gay bashing - conveyed through a very assured and sustained bullfight metaphor, which is never lifted during the book's entirety. To be brought in so close that I know I've been on the tarmac this happened on, only to be pulled back by this narrative distance...
There is a second, more disturbing bullfight in it, and the way it primes you for taking it seriously is impressive. There's little silliness about it. You just buy in.
I'm thinking a lot about the point where it suggests the surrealism is all delusional. The trial is between Sterling, the protagonist and bullfight victim on defense, and Nimo, the perp, on attack. Defamation, self-defense, damages, etc. The prosecution tries to get Sterling's friends to admit that their perspective is unreliable to have their defense dismissed - do they inhabit a fantasy world? And they struggle to answer no.
Shortly after, this prosecutor-cop is implausibly found in Sterling's closet domming the claimant. The life-ruining frog-judge wants to join in on the drag show. The oft-questionable assertion that homophobic violence is committed by closeted queer people is I think offset by the breadth on display. By the grief, by the chapter on Justin Fashanu's suicide, by the detailed understanding of state violence and alienation, how lived experiences are diminished, by the unflinching coda. It's not used as a quick out, an easy explanation for the idiot circus. A quote: "We depend on incongruities and irregularities in the official narrative, so-called 'spaceship moments,' to confirm what we already know, namely that we're alive in a substandard fiction that doesn't add up."
Reducing it to like, Kafka's The Trial but gay and poor and British does it a disservice, despite being a pretty good summary. It's really hard to pin down, but it all comes together in a fascinating whole.
I've just put a hold on their 2023 work, Corey Fah Does Social Mobility. It'll be here soon, and I hear it's better. I should also read more Kafka, though.
DNF:
praiseworthy, by alexis wright
2023. aus aboriginal litfic
Started in April. Couldn't get past the first 15 pages or so. Beautiful, lyrical prose quality, but it all slid straight off me. I'll give it another shot some other time.
STILL Unfinished:
titus groan, by mervyn peake
1946. yes it's still going
Fucking Christ. It's no slog, I like it and still think of it even between month-long breaks, but it's just so dense that I can only read like 10 pages at a time.