Status Updates From The Beauty

Onto the second story! Significantly less weird (so far)

🍄SPOILERS🍄




I had a feeling this was going in an mpreg direction… I cannot believe I was actually correct.

This is really NOT what I was expecting.

I love mushrooms but I don’t love them that much

Peace, Pipe: This one is a radical departure from the tone of the first story, but I really like it. It does a great job of asking us to consider human supremacy and what it means to speak with and understand others without becoming preachy or losing focus on the actual character. A really good sci-fi short story!

The Beauty, Part 4: The fact that Nate still ends up accepting Bee after everything is what makes this story so powerfully haunting to me. Because no matter what he writes, I cannot help but refuse to believe that the Beauty can be anything but evil, that their love is not real love. And the fact that the narrator of this story cannot see that makes the whole thing even more ugly and eerie

The Beauty, Part Three: Didn't go to sleep because I was up reading this. Brutal, haunting, better horror than I've read in years thank you Aliya Whiteley

The Beauty, Part 2: This is giving Octavia Butler's Bloodchild in the BEST way. And the eerieness of these young men fitting into their deceased women's clothes....the Beauty taking over all the tasks so the men get weak...the old guard vs. the new - this whole thing is FASCINATING gender commentary. A really stunning example of what fiction can do

The Beauty, Part One: A boy talking about women despite barely knowing any, in a text written by a woman, is FASCINATING. I've never felt objectification this...sympathetic? It's a really eerie idea wrapped up in an already very eerie/creepy story setup, I'm already really enjoying this one