Aerin > Recent Status Updates

So far this is giving me Angel Down vibes. A different time, a different hell on earth, but roughly the same location (rural France), and the sudden appearance of a similarly mysterious and possibly divine being.

I’ve been wanting to check out Whiteley’s work for awhile now. So far this is intriguingly strange.

Giving this one a second attempt; I’m still struggling to connect with it. It might be the book itself, since there are a number of plot threads and none of them have built much momentum. But it might also be me, and my life being too stressful and distracting to appreciate this kind of writing right now.

Is “Reddit horror” its own genre yet? Because that’s what this feels like. SCP, backrooms, slenderman type vibes. Which is a bit disappointing coming from a work in translation; I always hope for something that feels less familiar.

Also, that stuff just isn’t scary. I don’t hate it, it’s fine, but I’m over it. New and interesting horror tropes when?

A poor man’s The English Patient.

It is not the pain in a woman’s crying that is the point; no, it is finality of the acceptance of a wrong. So it was, is now, and must ever be, say those closed oozing eyes, the rocking body, the grief. Grief—yes, an act of mourning; that’s it. Some enemy has been faced, has been tackled, but a battle has been lost, all the chips are down, everything is spent, nothing is left, nothing can be expected…

This is part Parable of the Sower and part House of Leaves, but the experience of reading it is nothing like either one. The prose is sharp, crystalline. I have no idea what Lessing is trying to do. I’m pretty sure the two main characters are actually the same person.

Everybody played a part in this conspiracy that nothing much was happening—or that it was happening, but one day things would go into reverse and hey, presto! back we would be in the good old days. Which, though? That was a matter of temperament: if you have nothing, you are free to choose among dreams and fantasies.

Doris Lessing is just so. Fucking. Good. This book is deeply bizarre and at the same time feels like the truest thing I’ve read in ages.

I have literally sobbed my way through the first 25 pages of this book so you know, I’m doing great. Just fine. Why do you ask.

Unwanted gifts can carry just as much emotional charge as those that are loved; perhaps more so. An unused present invades our space and gives us feelings of resentment, yet it can be strangely hard to give away… [It feels] lowering to open a cupboard and see something you never really wanted but which you are reluctant to dispose of lest the giver’s imagined feelings be hurt.

“The Marvelous Brass Chessplaying Automaton” is the first Wolfe story I fell in love with. It made my head explode the first time I read it; it does more in 20 pages than many novels do with hundreds. Been chasing that high ever since.

The true story lies
among the other stories,

a mess of colours, like jumbled clothing
thrown off or away

like hearts on marble, like syllables, like
butchers’ discards.

The true story is vicious
and multiple and untrue

after all. Why do you
need it? Don’t ever

ask for the true story.

“The Packerhaus Method” is my favorite so far. Wolfe is so good at drip-feeding you details so that the sense of horror breaks over you in fits and terrifying starts as the story unfolds.

It reminds me a bit of the kinds of shenanigans he pulls in Peace (though in Peace the effect is stranger, subtler and more ambiguous).

100 pages further in and this is growing on me. It’s very readable, and it seems to be aiming for something of a “Murderbot wakes up in a Becky Chambers novel” vibe. Beach read SF for sure.

I’m not sure I’ll stick with this one; I’ve barely begun and just keep tripping over typos. If no one cared enough to copyedit the text, why should I care enough to read it?

I’ve just taken to calling this book Worse Murderbot in my head.

Giving this one a second chance, reading it with my eyes this time. The audiobook narrator’s performance gave the sexual relationship between the human and the robot a deeply gross groomer/child vibe that I REALLY hope is not actually in the text. But I’m ready to nope the fuck out if I’m wrong.

(Sigh) I’m back to yelling at this book. The authors are now claiming that “true” SF isn’t metaphorical; if it has zombies those are real zombies, and any deeper readings are secondary and probably hallucinated by the reader.

And sure, that’s sometimes true. But—and call me a bad dumb SF reader I guess—if the zombies aren’t actually ABOUT something it’s probably not a very interesting book.

“Sightings at Twin Mounds” was fun. Wolfe’s take on an X-File.

I get so viscerally annoyed every time SF authors start whining about “mainstream” authors publishing SF novels through “mainstream” publishers, appealing to “mainstream” readers. Wahhh, they’re not part of our CLUB, they’re not part of our CONVERSATION, it’s not REAL science fiction! Yes it fucking is, and it appeals to wider audiences often because it’s GOOD. Die mad about it, I guess.

I dislike both Walton’s and Palmer’s SF, buuuut I am still hopeful they might have something worthwhile to add to the metaconversation? Maybe?

I stumbled on this book at the library and I’m so glad I picked it up—it’s full of wide-ranging, deeply researched, and thrillingly bizarre information on a topic that affects multiple aspects of daily life but that I’d somehow never thought much about.

”Sizzling Saturn, we’ve got a lunatic robot on our hands!”

They just don’t write SF like they used to.

One of those “this would be so good if it was good” books.

Cruising toward a 2 star rating at this point.

I have to reread the whole series every time a new installment comes out - because I enjoy them very much, yes, but also because I can never remember what the hell happens in any of them.

This one hits very close to home. Manguso conveys the slow-motion self-immolation of giving everything of yourself to trying to make a marriage - a family - work, while your partner is busy unveiling ever deeper layers of apathy, selfishness, entitlement, cruelty, and ultimately betrayal.

All the lies you tell yourself, because how. How could you let yourself get trapped in this situation?

The world would be a better place if more authors took an honest look at the premise they’ve cooked up for their next novel, and instead of stretching and padding and overwriting the thing in order to fill 400 pages, simply asked themselves: “would this work better as a short story?”

So many aspects of this book are ADJACENT to being good. It wouldn’t be such an aggravating reading experience if it wasn’t almost, ALMOST there. Maybe in the second half? It’ll get its shit together…?

100 pages in, and at least 90 of those pages should have been cut. The prose is repetitive and ugly, but the bigger problems are structural. I cannot STAND attempts to build tension based solely on: characters being stupid, the author being coy about revealing things the characters already know, and/or contrived plot delays that would never happen in real life. I am having PTSD flashbacks to reading Connie Willis.