Leslie > Recent Status Updates

The semester is done and I finally have time read for fun!

I can have a little Halloween reading, as a treat.

I’m moving in two days and slowly coming to the realization that I can’t take all my books and I Hate It


(It turns out the ‘I need it for class’ excuse only works a certain number of times before people start wondering why you need all 27 volumes of Fullmetal Alchemist for your Composition and Rhetoric degree)

This collection of essays is split into 2 parts- the first covers the different aspects and history of the ways in which systemic racism and police brutality impact BIPOC (policing and immigration, the policing of pregnant women, the ways different attempts to reform the police have failed). Just starting the second now, so we’ll see where we go from here.

One of the thing this book makes me think about, as someone who studies media, is how we engage justly and productively with media about the police from here on out. And I don’t just mean the blatant copaganda of shows like Law and Order, but also shows like Brooklyn 99 or written media.

Girls Without Their Faces On: ⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2
Sometimes I just have trouble engaging with Laird Barron’s work- this was one of them.

Dr. 999: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2: Told in the form of the product description and reviews of the titular Dr. 999’s eldritch conditioner (as in the stuff you put on your hair after shampoo), this short story rates as one of the best of the bunch on sheer creativity alone.

For Our Skin, a Daughter: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Horror lesbians overcome racism and maybe also death?

Houdini:The Egyptian Paradigm: ⭐️⭐️⭐️
The last days of Harry Houdini, famous magician, escape artist and skeptic, is haunted by something a little stranger than the ghosts of spiritualism. Lovecraft shows up and talks about the fear of the unknown, which for him was basically any immigrant so

The One About Maggie: ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Interesting conception of the space between life and death.

Breakwater: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Now that’s the kind of prep that lets you survive a horror story. Or gives you a fighting chance anyway, because the ending is a friggin cliffhanger!

Red Stars/ White Snow/ Black Metal: ⭐️⭐️
Why is it that the worst story in a collection is always one of the longest? This story is definitely the closest to classic Lovecraft, in that its both nonsensical (but not in the fun way) and overwritten.

Shadowmachine: ⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2
Almost, but not quite. Maybe a novella would provide enough space to flesh out the characters and world more successfully?