Sam > Recent Status Updates

Storywise I'm really enjoying this book (communist trans girls kicking nazi vampire ass is just fun!), but it unfortunately suffers from being a paperback in trade size, over 550 pages long and nearly impossible to hold comfortably. Was finally able to dig back into it the past few days and should hopefully be able to finish it next week, cause I do really enjoy it.

This book blurb really wasn't lying when it named this as a tribute to New French Extreme cinema. Not that I expected it to be a tame read with that gnarly (and awesome) cover. It's so gross (honorific!).

Maybe I'm Too much of a fan of weird queer erotica (and not enough of a fan of ghosts/undead), but so far only Nicks Walker's piece "lipophilic, malleable solids near ambient temperatures" was a stand out piece to me. It is a really great one though <3. Fingers crossed for some more weirdness.

Review to come, but this was a really lovely collection of transgender and queer cosmic horror and Weird Lit! A worthy follow up to the first and a delectable treat for any enjoyer of trans horror.

The fragmented stream-of-consciousness writing style employed here is so fun and the audio narrator makes it all sound so lyrical, but this is definitely a book you need to sit down with and allow yourself to be drawn into the flow. I am enjoying it, but maybe I need to get back to it when I have a bit more free time so I can listen to it in bigger chunks.

I'm a big fan of the use of a biased narrator encountering human societies different from his own here. I love that he judges the humans on Scythia for their backwards views on marriage and queerness, while at the same time not being aware of how his very narrow definitions of gender from his own homeplanet reads to me as a trans reader. Makes the worldbuilding really fun to puzzle out.

Unfortunately did not manage to finish this while my library copy was available, so I'm back in the multiple month wait time. However, the book is great and if I don't manage to get another copy sooner, a reread won't hurt at all.
I really love the atmosphere, the grossness of the body horror, the power of art and the terror of the wealthy and powerful at anything that dares to wriggle out of their grasp.