Horror

A month of magic and dispair: March 2023 Reading log

Book Review, Books, Fantasy, Horror, Literary Fiction, Queer Literature, Speculative Fiction
Photo credits: Neil Rolph

Lucy by the Sea by Elizabeth Strout

“What is it like to be you? I need to say: This is the question that has made me a writer; always that deep desire to know what it feels like to be a different person.”

Elizabeth Strout

When I used to work in a bookshop, Elizabeth Strout was an author that many of my University friends came for. They’d get every book Strout published, telling me how much they adored her writing. I remember shelving those same books. The covers didn’t seem particularly attractive. When I read the blurbs I wasn’t especially inspired either. Once we got a review copy of Olive, Again and instead of reading it I gave it to one of these friends, who was very, very happy.

Fast forward to March 2023 – I saw Lucy by the Sea in the library. I picked the book just to try and see but very much doubted it was going to be my thing. Where to start? Strout is one of those authors that manage to imbue a certain hypnotic quality to their writing that traps you, no matter how interested you really are in the characters or the plot. She’s similar to Haruki Murakami and Sally Rooney in that regard. Especially to Sally Rooney, even though she writes about a demographic that’s in their sixties and seventies, rather than late twenties and thirties (I suspect Rooney’s characters may grow with her as she keeps writing them, though?)

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A fair share of horrors: February 2023 reading log

Book Review, Books, Horror, Literary Fiction
Photo credits: Jacques Peltre

Women Talking by Miriam Toews

“No, Ernie, says Agata, there’s no plot, we’re only women talking.”

Miriam Toews

I’m currently working on a novel that features a religious community, so a writer friend of mine recommended I read this book. She told me it was based on the real case of a Mennonite community in which women of all ages were raped in their sleep by some men from the same community who were using an animal anaesthetic to render them unconscious. Their complaints were dismissed by the elders – who went as far as to suggest the women were being attacked by demons – until the truth was revealed.

Toews’ novel focuses on the aftermath of these traumatic events. A group of women meet at a barn to discuss what they are going to do next. The options are to stay and forgive the men, to stay and fight back, or to leave the community. The story is narrated by August, the only man allowed in the barn with these women, who’s taking the minutes of the meeting because none of the women knows how to read or write.

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On Nope and horror movies

Films, Horror
Hollywood Boulevard, where we watched Nope

I went to watch Nope at the end of August this year. I’ve never watched a film by Jordan Peele before but I’d heard great things about them. This was also the second movie I watched in the cinema since the pandemic started (I watched Dune in October 2021 and it was a glorious experience, mostly because I hadn’t been in the cinema for so long, also, the cinematography and the music of that movie are a true work of art… the story… well, let’s discuss that another day).

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