Nick Perzacki > Recent Status Updates

I’m thankful that I’m around a quarter of the way through this story and the pacing doesn’t feel like it’s dragging nearly as much as I expected. The slow discovery of the markings in the rocks, then the fossils, and eventually the full bodies of the apparent Elder Ones keeps ramping up the mystery, while small things like the bodies’ off putting biology and the dogs hating them bring up the spookiness.

Kind of funny how Angela Davis’ foreword is a third the length but three times more poignant and impactful than Lennox Hinds’. I love how Anatta Shakur writes, and immediately am so impressed by her tenacity and refusal to be a victim despite being shot three times, held in captivity, interrogated, tortured, and wrongfully accused of murder and assault. She was clearly an absolute badass.

Just a casual trip down to Antarctica with 50 guys, 50 dogs, 5 airplanes, and 2 boats. You know, keeping it lowkey and such.
First chapter in and I’m enjoying the way he describes Antarctica as a setting, it feels massive, ancient, and dead. I also love when his characters are lowkey blinded by hubris and end up discovering a horror through that, and it seems like that’s precisely the direction this is headed

I enjoyed the Whispers in the Witch House quite a bit. I liked the usage of architecture as the driving force of the main character’s madness, that witchcraft is just super duper advanced mathematics, and the crazy trippy dreams - it felt like something out of a nightmare on elm street movie at times. The Brown Jenkin was kinda a wild inclusion though, it lowkey made me giggle every time it was mentioned.

Shadow over Innsmouth kinda pisses me off, because the first three sections suffer from some of Lovecraft’s absolute worst pacing and most uninteresting narration. But then the fourth and fifth sections are so good and legitimately scary at times that it feels like a completely different story. This nearly 60-pg story should have been at most half of the length and would have been one of my favorites

The Haunter in the Dark was a pretty cool and interesting story - I like the church vibes and I liked the way he described the shining trapezohedron as granting ever-expansive knowledge, feels like a bit of meditation on faith and religion. The Thing on the Doorstep lowkey feels like his buddy got married then iced him out so he needed to get something off his chest, but I liked the concept and execution quite a bit

Never thought a glowing cloud of mist could be so freaky, but The Colour Out of Space wound up being one of the best stories in this collection. I think the fact that there wasn’t even any semblance of a form to grasp made it much scarier than some of the monsters Lovecraft has thought up - what are you supposed to do if a sentient fart from an asteroid disintegrates everything living in its vicinity?

I don’t disagree that Lenin was quite a bit of an asshole a lot of the time, but there’s a weird amount of blame and shame thrown on him in the chapter on Armand. By all accounts given she seems like she was really important to him, both personally and professionally, and the feeling was very much mutual, but nearly every page was angled as her being forced against her will do things for him.

This may be my new favorite - I’m not certain if the somewhat predictable nature of some of the reveals is intentional, but for me it felt like it just added to the horror. The layers of mysteries are creepy and I love the hubris of Wilmarth, because basically the whole story was just me screaming at him “HOW CAN YOU NOT SEE THE SIGNS YOU IDIOT” and watching him naively waltz straight into a nightmare.

When was somebody going to tell me that Engels was in a throuple??

Honestly I thought the Dunwich Horror was fine, with some cool moments, but the last line recontextualizing the whole second half of the story makes me enjoy it much more in retrospect. I think that’s been one of Lovecraft’s biggest strengths throughout this book - even if I don’t love a story, his endings are usually one of the best parts for me and often subsequently raise my enjoyment of the story.

Kind of a bummer that The Call of Cthulhu contains some of Lovecraft’s most chilling lines in the book so far, with probably my favorite overall narrative with all the creepy reveals and fantastic imagery. It’s a bummer cause this is also probably the story in this book with the most blatant xenophobia (at least so far), which was kind of distracting at times in the first two parts.

The Silver Key lowkey felt like Lovecraft’s philosophy lecture, which I genuinely enjoyed; i liked his pontifications on dreams, and though not really scary the ending was sufficiently unsettling to leave me satisfied. The Music of Erich Zann was my favorite story so far, it was the first one i felt I could really get sucked into the scene, and because of that it was the first to feel genuinely scary for me.

Always love a Paolo Freire shoutout, my goat my king. Very cool he was heavily inspired by Krupskaya, as I read her quotes it was clear where he built from her which made this chapter extra fun.

I liked Pickman’s Model - it was effectively creepy and mysterious, and, as with most of the stories so far, had a wonderfully disturbing reveal to close it out. In the Vault was fine for me, it did well to establish the trapped feeling in a creepy setting, but overall I didn’t get too much from it.

Read the first 3 stories; I don’t know if I was just really sleepy while reading but apparently the first two were about cannibals, and I somehow fully missed that. The rats in the walls was creepy enough without me catching onto the cannibalism, but third one, the Outsider, I really liked - very creepy lonesome vibes and a pretty cool reveal at the end.

Nothing makes me feel like more of a dumb dumb than reading about Krupskaya just casually teaching herself several languages in the different countries she was in while in exile with Lenin - she was such a badass

If I ever reach a point in my life where I’m eating sardine sandwiches to soothe my mental anguish please just put me out of my misery, good god

No idea how I made it this far without knowing Nadezhda Krupskaya (Lenin’s wife) was a goated socialist educator, she seems sick.

Unfortunately, Kollontai has not grown on me - I just don’t think she was particularly self-aware or critical about her pretty clear petit bourgeois standpoint. She had a lot of sympathy for workers, and was extremely passionate about the emancipation of women and freedom of sexuality for all of society, but her ultimate aims were frequently limited by this standpoint.

Despite some genuinely very funny moments, Ballad of the Sad Cafe read to me ultimately as a haunting tale of the tragic things people are capable of doing and enduring in the name of love. I liked the running motif of collective unconscious decisions/understandings within a community. Also includes some great sections expressing the feelings of alienation under capitalism, extra heightened here in broke-ass rural US

No disrespect to Alexandra Kollontai, but her perspective feels very petit bourgeois in its foundation. She clearly has a deep empathy for the proletarian women, but I don’t think her arguments were quite as revolutionary as she presented them - i.e., I don’t think her arguments actually point beyond capitalism, at least in her earlier career, I’ll have to see what the rest of her chapter has to say

I don’t have much in common with Marvin Macy, other than I too carry “forbidden marijuana weed to tempt those who are discouraged and drawn toward death.” Hilariously brutal how he got completely baited by Amelia, and pretty funny that it appears she’s making the exact same mistake in the name of love that he made but with Cousin Lymon, by constantly gifting him her shit to appease him when she upsets him.

This interview Pavlichenko did was wild:
Q: Is that your parade uniform or your everyday uniform?
A: We have no time for parades at the moment.
Q: But the uniform makes you look fat. Or don’t you mind?
A: I am proud to wear the uniform of the legendary Red Army… I wish you could experience a bombing raid. Honestly, you would immediately forget about the cut of your outfit.
Plus telling big tobacco to fuck off

Love Amelia and Lymon and the surrounding cast of characters.
“A most mediocre person can be the object of a love which is wild, extravagant, and beautiful as the poison lilies of the swamp… The value and quality of any love is determined solely by the lover himself. It is for this reason that most of us would rather love than be loved… For the lover is forever trying to strip bare his beloved.”

Title drop! Also, Billy telling a crowd of people that he’s going to die that day but then also telling them not to worry and that he wants to die is pretty funny

Lowkey hilarious that the universe ends someday when a Tralfamadorian is testing rocket fuel. Also, now that I’m so Dune-pilled, I can’t help but thinking no offense to the Tralfamadorians, but Leto II would absolutely hate their worldview of “we see all of eternity and we can’t do anything about the bad (i.e., we can’t change) so we just ignore it forever and stare at the beautiful”

Lyudmila Pavlichenko, “the sniperess”, over the course of about 3 years during WWII killed a Nazi every 3-4 days by my math. That is absolutely fucking ludicrous.

This is such a wildly fun and creative story - I am recognizing so many other science fiction stories that I love which clearly took at least some inspiration from this which has been really cool to notice. It’s also just been consistently funny and the time slipping narrative device constantly keeps me on my toes, so I’m just tearing through this one.

Don’t mind me - just over here reading my *socialist* *feminist* *literature*