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oh this scene with the lambs made my stomach turn lmao

i cannot lie this has me enthralled. also really really loved this line: "on top of this he does not wish to solicit, with his reading, a visit from her [the witch] -- the dark drip of her into his sleeping eye."

okay i am LOVING this so far. something about the combination of its slow, almost dreamy pacing and the distance inherent in arnault's POV is really working to kind of emphasize just how old he is and the span of time they've been living in this theater. idk if that makes sense but i'm vibing so hard with it. obsessed with every little glimpse we've gotten so far of bèatrice-- what did she do!!

i get the impression this will be a rather slow and ponderous read, which is fine imo. i am quite enjoying the atmosphere so far. extremely curious what is going on with this witch-- what has she done here?

alright. skipped the first story bc i simply could not deal w how often i was being forced to read the n word on the page. lovecraft wtf is wrong with you. a couple of these i read in 'the dream cycle' collection, so i've skipped those as well. mostly these have just been unfortunately very boring, many of them featuring thinly veiled eugenics & phrenology that i simply do not have the patience for.

happy halloween month. couldn't make it one full story into this before we dropped the hard r n word talking about his self-insert's cat. depending on how the rest of today goes reading this i may just move onto something else lmao

two bangers in a row so far-- enge's morlock piece is just such a fantastic piece in the classical sense, inspired in equal parts i think by moorcock and dunsany and more traditional mythology. LOVED this one, and all its strange worlds and creatures. the second piece, 'stolen by moonlight, betrothed by sun' was just so lovely??? ngl i got a bit choked up by the ending lmao

it's been so much longer since the last time i read one of these than i realized??? anyway this felt like the perfect bridge between the last few days of september before i start my october spooky month reading

man once we lean into the horror this RULES. not 100% sure how i feel about the pacing - we learn the truth so early - but unless we do something rly fucking stupid so much of this is how we deal with those revelations it should be fine. a couple quotes i rly enjoyed: "this was the work of a prophet. to venture inside a mind unbound by space and time, and to see." & "a god is all-powerful." "no. a god is sacrifice."

just finished part 1 which seems like a good place to update. i confess some of the reveals in this came much earlier than i would have expected, although having both a functioning brain and having read the synopsis on the book jacket i could already see the basic shape of them. we'll see how this feels in the long run-- for now i'm still leaning positive. we just have to keep it this weird & i'll still enjoy it

really enjoying this now that we are out of the early set up stages. not to say that those were bad, bc they were not, but the meat of this is really good and i do kind of wish we'd gotten there a wee bit faster. love the horror of these demons from beyond (or outside?) the reaches of space very much. i do kind of want to ask the author if they read lumley's necroscope series a lot growing up (not negative)

fingers crossed this one is as fun as it sounded

a little more modern in tone than i would typically enjoy but i think it works for this premise. having fun so far!

okay. i will be finishing this today come hell or high water because i am rapidly growing increasingly bored with it. this should have been a horror novel

i think it'd like this more if it were a horror novel but i am enjoying this much more than i anticipated. fascinated by how the page formatting impacts the way the narration is received; i'll talk about that more in depth in my final review. i will say though that i have copied several pages over into my media journal because i thought they were so beautiful or interesting, so. that's a good sign i think

let's see what all this fuss is about

"there is a level below all humanity where those cursed with being human always find themselves"

we are doing some EXTREMELY fun stuff with this

delighted so far by how offputting this is. not the writing itself - that is gorgeous - but in the creatures & the weirdness we've invented here. love the filthlings in their small monstrosity. love the gland of mercy (feels a bit like act i of 'hurled headlong flaming'). LOVE the oracle, which feeds off the marrow of bones steeped in sin-confession and sings horrors to itself when exposed to new pieces of the world

fun & weird so far!

obsessed w this chapter ending: "i felt something deep down in me, something dark like jazz when it reminds you that death is waiting. 'death,' the saxophone rasps. but, really, i didn't care."

"i could tell that he didn't have the fear or contempt that most white people showed when they dealt with me. ... mr. todd carter was so rich that he didn't even consider me in human terms. he could tell me anything. i could have been a prized dog that he knelt to and hugged when he felt low. it was the worst kind of racism. the fact that he didn't even recognize our difference" OOF

enjoying this so far!

i'll post an updated review of this in the morning but i've already stayed up later than i should have in my determination to finish this before bed tonight lol

i am really enjoying this process but my god it takes so much longer to read a book when you're annotating & taking notes as you go

picking this back up again today for book club this weekend-- not gonna bother adjusting the &age but just know i am attempting to start from the beginning again bc it's been like 9 months since i last read this & i have no fucking clue what's going on

sickos dot jpeg

this is gonna be an in-between book-- she has a series of youtube videos designed as companion pieces to this book that featured one on analyzing tarot through critical theory that i enjoyed so much it genuinely changed the way i read tarot, and so i thought it only made sense to check this book out

part of why i wanted to pick this up is bc i've been neglecting my talks-about-media journal and i wanted to read something i'd WANT to journal about. let me tell you, i have Thoughts about this series lmao. i've filled up 7 pages already and i'm less than 20% through this book. anyway i love this series very much. reading through it with a more critical eye has proven very fun for me