Sam M > Recent Status Updates

i can’t believe i’m actually nearly done! wow! icannot tell you how much joy i took in learning about richilieu’s tuberculosis and exploding hemorrhoids:
“It was with the taste of excrement in his mouth that the arbiter of Europe’s destinies gave up the ghost.”


outside of that, it mainly focused on sister jeanne’s pathetic display of her traveling circus of gullible fools (ie surin and his buddy)

of course when i decide to power through the last 100 or so pages is when i get sick… frick my Huguenot life, right fellas?

ch9 was another interesting followup to grandier’s death. i didn’t expect the book to keep going for so long after his death but it does make a lot of sense. i loved how this chapter focused on poking holes in jeanne’s behavior/claims by simply recounting what happened. good stuff!

fr could not stop reading (ch8)…. wow.

“Although Beherit had been duly constrained, for some odd reason he had failed to tell the truth.”

eloquently tragic and disheartening, ch8 is mainly about m. grandier’s final time as prisoner before execution, including the execution itself. absolutely horrible, brutal stuff. the way this psycho-religiosity spreads while constantly contradicting itself is terrifying.

in the previous chapters, besides a few parenthetical snarky comments here and there, huxley presents everything very matter of factly, “this is what happened”. in ch7, he changes it up and spends the whole chapter criticizing the decisions of the good fathers and the jeanne’s convent. its great!! i prefer when he starts talking about how stupid they are, it’s honestly really funny.

okayy i’m into this!! it’s snappy, darkly funny, and breezy. feels like a simplified and hyperfocused william s burroughs story. excited to see how it plays out

laymon throws csa after csa and constant ridiculous mindless sexist comments but ch16 is exactly why i stay through the terrible dogshit!!! i love the description of the windowless brick house, pitch black interior with blue lightbulbs and the sleeping “beast”(?)

NOT excusing the other stuff, but moments like that do feel genuinely tense so… good job!

so. so?

“But if they were rude to the Cardinal . . . Well, see what was happening to M. Grandier”
ch6 is one of the more engaging chapters—not saying that the others weren’t, but ch6 is all about the possessions and exorcisms as well as grandiers imprisonment and torture. it’s detailed, sarcastic, and dark. my favorite bit is the part where laubardemont approved the document saying he’s a cuck!

honestly, it’s kind of funny that between this and ‘the devils of loudun’, THIS is the one that’s more upsetting. the genuinely scary bits are great! but there’s way too many chapters dedicated to roy and his fucked up road trip with joni. we don’t need to know that roy dressed her, it was implied! and anything further is just fucked! if i wasnt a completionist i’d honestly drop this.

pretty short chapter about jud’s prep and stakeout at the beast house. not clicking with laymon’s writing for the most part, especially his jk rowling-ass “euphrates d. kenyata”, a tyranical african emperor.

the scary bits are vivid and cool, but this was written by someone who hates women and minorities!

laymon’s dialogue is… not good. like at all lol. but his prose, specifically in the horror-focused scenes, is pretty great at times. it’s a shame the antagonist is easily the worst person ever, seemingly no motives besides pure evil and controlling. maggie’s story of the beast coming up the stairs was skin-crawling, loved it

ch5 was mainly about witchcraft and the skepticism + persecution of people who practice witchcraft. really great chapter, educating but also some great bits.
“Hedging their bets, they worshipped God by day and the devil at night.”
just a small bit of huxley’s sardonic criticism towards christianity
“For us, Radical Evil has ceased to be something metaphysical and has become political or economic.”
real asf.

ngl i was incredibly high reading ch 5
so only a vague recollection! sandy gonna get into some unfortunately fucked up shit

a MASSIVE improvement over chapter three. jud and larry are two nightmare and trauma riddled men, i really loved hearing them talk about the beast house. it was genuinely pretty spooky hearing about tommy.

wow… my last update mentioned my caution towards the nature of this book (specifically regarding underage girls) and i immediately read a whole chapter dedicated to having a bath with a child. shocking? yes. necessary? fuck no. and i’m not sure this is a one-off for ‘the cellar’…

after watching clifton holmes’ adaptation of laymon’s ‘in the dark’, i really wanted to check out laymon’s work since i’ve not heard of him before.

so far, i’m pretty into it. the foggy ditch scene in ch1 was very silent hill-ish, and i liked the brief gore in the prologue, but i’m definitely worried about how edgy it’s gonna be. oh well!

(just finished ch4)

the first three chapters are essentially nothing but context in comparison to this chapter. it starts with jeanne’s bckgrnd and halfway through is when the exorcism takes place. this was a really interesting and genuinely tragic chapter, it took me a while to get through for some reason but it’s where the real meat of the recounting really reveals itself

also! it’s great how in one moment, a man can be screaming about his dismembered, floating phallus and the next moment a widow has a surreal reunion with her late husband and BOTH moments perfectly capture the emotion

“Are memories real?”
“Of course,” she said.
“Then so am I.”

it’s been a while since a book genuinely made me lose track of the time… looked up and i breezed through 66 pages without even realizing!

not only is sodergren exceptional at keeping this interconnected feeling of grief and sorrow flowing between the village people but the way he writes about the gore is… yuck (pos)

arthur’s scene was harrowing but tommy’s was just holy fucking shit… guts x the blob fr!

i’m surprised at how effectively heartbreaking this is from so early on. muriel’s depressed musings about her life as it comes crumbling down is painful in a very real way, and the overall state of there only being five people left in the village as it gets torn down is devastating.

also the dialogue is amazing so far, very touching and funny!

“I was always partial to a spot of foolishness”

i wanted a lighter read to break up ‘the devils of loudun’ since it’s amazing but oh so much work for me to understand huxley lol.

‘the haar’ starts strong, with a grandma who i can only imagine as a scottish mrs. brown. i love old people telling parasitic “entrepeneurs” off, the gun/broom bit was perfect. already i think sodergren does a great job at making the grandma feel so real but also so strong!

i love huxley’s tangents!
they are always semi-related but still feel just far enough out there to feel pleasantly unpredictable.
the segment about armelle nicolas was really interesting (“Then God permitted her conscious self to enter the central chamber of the soul”) but my favorite line of the chapter was easily “infinity in a grain of sand and eternity in a flower.” it’s honestly beautiful!

ch2 was amazing— a wonderful, messy breakdown of grandier’s intimate life. ch3 is a lot more brainy, contrasting surin and grandier and their differing goals (body v. spirit). huxley’s pretty bitchy in a really funny way (“After a quiet wedding, Philippe settled down to serve her sentence—forty years of loveless marriage.”ch2)
the philosphical talk in the beginning section of ch3 melted my brain though…

yuta is so cute! i was worried for that boy… favorite part was the part where they explain kids draw the ideas of the words

since eiv eseen the devils (ken russell) multiple times its weird seein ghoe much of a piece of shit grandier wa, specificlaly his grooming of phillippe

nearly done w chapter 1! it spends a lot of time detailing the major players around urbain grandier and his usual routine, clearly setting the foundation for all the shiiiiot that happens. it was really interesting reading about how he treated richelieu as well as the fact that grandier and trincant were besties

wow! finished chapter one, i love the indepth analysis of the sentence structure of raku’s posts as well as the paper size difference + meaning behind the drawings. so far the style reminds me of the more analytical aspects of hideaki anno or kiyoshi kurosawa’s work (or even like akira kurosawa’s ‘high and low’)