Black Flamed Candle Books 🕯️📚’s Reviews > Our New Gods > Status Update

‘It could be me. Why should it not be me? Perhaps to accept this role, was to accept the task of love. Love. I had found love.”

“I shuddered and tried to ignore it. It was all behind me now. But it was no use. I couldn’t stop myself from combing through the events of the last couple of days. James had been lying to me. He withheld the truth about the gun. Had anything changed? Was it a betrayal? If he had done wrong, it was because he had been wronged, I told myself.’

“I couldn’t deny that snarling below all this, was what felt to be the true thing, and it was waiting for me. I caught a whiff of this thing, its rancid breath, for the thing was a monstrous mouth with ragged teeth…I didn’t belong to myself. It didn’t matter what I believed. I was being pulled towards the mouth; the darkness of its mottled throat was inevitable.”

“I had always known, somehow, that everyone’s lives would build ideas that would fracture and shift without warning. How could one build a life if nothing was reliable? Finding even just one thing that wouldn’t slip away, this had always seemed impossible. But then…James. Love. I had found love.“

“Everything will work out if we just let things be.”
“I don’t think we can…”Like let things be. People are restless. We act. The whole operation of being human is defined by the mechanics of action, you know?”
‘He doesn’t like me, I thought. He doesn’t like me because he knows me. He sees the true me.’

“If I didn’t have James, then I had nothing”. So self-deprecating and co-dependent.

Why does everything feel so manipulative with James. The push/pull toxic situationship vibes. Never knowing where you stand. Random love bombing and I love you’s, when he can sense Ash pulling away, questioning what was their reality. Booth not needing the gun for reasons Ash so desperately projected and wanted to be real. An excuse, a reason to reclaim James as his.

Isn’t it so strange how Harry, James’ dad, had a moment of seemingly genuine sincerity and in Ash’s and our minds, we have a moment of hesitancy, to question James, a seed of doubt. Like the unknown space between what really happened before Ash found out about what James did to Raf. Was it self defence? Both narrators are somewhat unreliable. It’s hard to tell what is true within blurred lines.

I hate the pedestal Ash puts James on. I hate how self-deprecating Ash is, always less than.

Also i feel it’s worth mentioning the overlap of stereotype where it’s accusatory of being gay /sexuality and causation because of trauma. Oof I hate that.