OK it wasn't a record breaking reading month like June was, but I came pretty dang close. I read 12 books total, not counting the 3 I DNFd, which, if you know me, is a really surprising thing because I almost NEVER DNF... and here I did it three times in ONE MONTH!
Check out what I read below to see which ones I tossed to the side and which ones I read to the end:
Skin by Kathe Koja
My copy of Skin is signed by Kathe and is a hardcover from 1993, complete with a coupon for a free copy of her novel Bad Brains or Cipher on the inner back flap of the dust jacket. Ahhhh the good ole nineties!
I've been a big fan of Kathe's writing for years, falling head over heels for the lush prose of Under the Poppy, and enjoying everything I've read of hers since. Within these pages, you'll enter a world of sculpting, dance, performance art, cutting, scarring, body modifications, toxic relationships, poisonous friendships, bisexuality, and obsession, written in a uniquely striking and brutally original style that only Kathe can pull off.
Hang on to your bootstraps as she takes you deep into a dark and seedy, and immensely fucked up, art scene unlike any you may have experienced or read about before.
This sat unread on my shelf for waaaay too long and I'm kind of sad I didn't pick it up sooner because I loved it so much. It's all kinds of fucked up yet it has so much heart. And Oly was the perfect person through which to tell the story.
The concept is absolutely horrifying - birthing children with intentional deformities to secure a family legacy, encouraging 'norms' to become amputees - but Dunn masterfully humanizes all of it... and we're helpless in her hands, a willing accomplice, standing by with cotton candy sugar sticky on our lips and fingers, watching the show with eyes wide and mouths ajar.
Perversely hypnotizing, incredibly atmospheric, hauntingly entertaining.
What's your favorite carny novel?
Roustabout by Michelle Chalfoun
Riding the carnival high after finishing Geek Love, I thought I'd pull this one down off my shelf. I've owned it for a while but haven't felt the urge to read it until now.
While I read it in one day, I wasn't super blown away by it. We meet Matty, a young girl who was abandoned at the age of 5 by her mother when she leaves her traveling circus husband. Pa begins to look after her, showing her how to do odd jobs around the tents, but he also sexually abuses her for years. That is, until she gets a little older and another circus worker named Jay takes her under his protection, and basically does the same. Matty doesn't understand that what's happening to her is wrong, and believes she is in love with Jay, and that what they have is a normal relationship.
Over the years, she watches as her circus family abandon wives and children on the roadside, hook up and break up, and countless other horrors without batting an eye. But Jay's territorial behaviors slowly begin to wear her down and she starts to realize what's good for the goose is not good for the gander, and she finally begins to show some backbone.
It's a solid read if you are looking for a book about mental and physical abuse and toxic relationships. Me personally, I was hoping to get more of a peek into circus life. I know the author spent some time working as a roustabout herself, so maybe that's really all there is to it? Nasty gross men taking advantage of innocent naive women every chance they get, "claiming" them, and everyone else just turning a blind eye?
Dark, bleak, cruel and upsetting on multiple levels, but also a sort of stirring and emotionally tender read.
Are there any themes or plot devices that bother you when you're reading? For me it's cheating/infidelity, sexual abuse, and animal cruelty/unnecessary animal deaths... all of which make an appearance here.
Haunt Sweet Home by Sarah Pinkser
I've read a few of Sarah's titles and really enjoyed them all so far. This one was a fun, fast, and quirky read about a twenty something named Mara who takes an entry level overnight production assistant job on her cousin's haunted house reality tv show.
Taking the position gives her full behind-the-scenes access to what's real and what's not on these types of ghost haunting spin offs, and helps her to continue to avoid the bigger decisions she's been putting off, like what to do with the rest of her life. Even Jo, the mysterious floater girl who starts shadowing Mara out of the blue, makes digs about her lack of direction and passion.
Mara takes an immediate liking to Jo until, on a long weekend from work, she invites her to tag along to a family get together and Jo fits in with her extended family better than she does. Is it her imagination or does Jo do everything just a little better than she can? And is she losing it or does Jo even LOOK a little like her?
While not heavy on the horror, its definitely got some fun paranormal and ghosty stuff going on. A little cheeky, a lot of heart, and a really enjoyable afternoon read! If it's not hit your radar yet, you really should check it out!
Pocketknife Kitty by Shannon Riley
Holy gross, batman. I read it in one sitting because I was certain if I put it down, I wouldn't be able to stomach picking it back up again.
A revenge curse, that became more than the creator had initially anticipated, is passed from person to person through sex, like a super infectious chain letter (where my Gen Xers at?!). To undo what was done to you, you must do it to someone else, and FAST. You are running out of time, biatches!
The body horror in this one was so nasty I almost vomited in my mouth. I promise you won't look at sex the same after this one.
I wanted to like this as much I loved How Much of These Hills is Gold, but sadly I did not. I knew it was going to be highly food focused, but geesh... how many pages can a girl read about rare ingredients and food preparation and people eating the food and everyone's table manners as they eat the food and talk politics and position themselves to be considered 'apice' in the employers eyes?
Stunningly written but incredibly slow moving, Land of Milk and Honey is a book about climate change, false utopia and deception, privilege and power, and the lengths people will go to in order to survive.
What Dreams May Come by Richard Matheson
This book was just meh for me. It started off kind of cool and reminded me of a book I read and loved called Death of an Ordinary Man by Glen Duncan, which you should check out if you haven't read it yet, but that feeling rubbed off rather quickly and then it just felt subtly preachy in a Mitch Albom kind of way.
It's a fairly easy read, the kind I refer to as brain candy because it doesn't require very much from us as a reader, so I'm sure my brain thanks me for it. But it was just so sadly obsessive, and I couldn't help feeling annoyed most of the time.
I've never seen the movie, and honestly, I don't think I ever will after this. I also think this may be the last Matheson I read. I LOVED I Am Legend, but I tried a story collection of his awhile back and couldn't really get into it. Sooo...
Q: Do you often find yourself let down when you read books now that you bought when you were much younger?
Pink Slime by Fernanda Trias
"The beginning is never the beginning. What we often mistake for the beginning is just the moment we realize something has changed."
Our narrator's world is in the middle of a strange and ongoing eco-collapse. The ocean spews forth dead fish. Divers are sent into its depths and determine the cause is a toxic algae, and within weeks they are dead from a new incurable illness that causes their skin to literally slough off. Birds disappear. The locals are panicked. Fresh food becomes scarce and a new factory is designed to stretch what animal meat there is as far as it can by grinding it into a thick pink paste. Alarms begin going off to warn pedestrians to hoof it inside before the red winds arrive, carrying with it traces of poisonous algae. The only relief they receive is from the thick fog that settles over everything in between winds.
Instead of fleeing, our narrator sticks it out and continues to care for a young boy who suffers from a medical condition that causes him to have an insatiable hunger, while also visiting her ex-husband at The Clinic who has been diagnosed with a chronic version of the infectious illness, and navigating her messy relationship with her stubborn mother.
Oh my gosh you guys. This is so beautifully written. The story skillfully moves the reader through the fear and frustration and devastation of the climate crisis, while toggling back to the subtle moments that our narrator experienced, the ones that would usher in these unbelievable changes, armed now with the knowledge of how pivotal those moments would be in the coming days and weeks. Kind of like how you don't know the last time you're seeing someone is the last time you'll ever see them...
It's full of dread and bad decisions, even when the desire is to do the right thing, and it closes as it opened, with no clear beginning or ending in sight.
And reader, I am totally ok with that.
Tentaclehead by Rick Claypool
Good lord. Isn't this the most bizarre little 'children's book for adults' you've ever read?! It's absurdist. It's violent. It's sick and twisted. It's demented.
It reads a bit like Danger Slater's earlier work, with a splash of Joshua Mohr's Farsickness. And it reminds me of some of the weird shit that premiered on Adult Swim back in the really early aughts.
If that sounds like your cup of tea... give it a read. It's short and it's got illustrations!
Skull Slime Tentacle Witch War by Rick Claypool
The novelette Tentaclehead was weird and bizarre and fun in a really cheeky way and its length definitely worked in its favor. Skull Slime Tentacle Witch War is a whole lot of the same, only there's soooo many more pages... and the weirdness, which was kind of fun at first, kept getting weirder and weirder and I felt my brain turning to mush and my eyes starting to roll in their sockets.
I just couldn't see myself reading about a soda bottle baby who gushed brown liquid out of their mouth, nose, and eye holes or about a skullhead who vomited pink foam that dissolved anything it touched or about Tentaclehead's obsession with a store mannequin and his own suicidal thoughts or about a slimy goo thing that argued with itself over what to eat for another 200 pages.
But you never know. It might be the perfect summer read for you! And what a cover, huh?!
Private Rites by Julia Armfield
Our Wives Under the Sea will forever remain an untouchable debut for me and nothing Julia can write will surpass it. Of this I am positive.
Though that's not to say Private Rites, grief fiction at the end of the world, was a bad sophomore novel. In it, three sisters deal with the death of their father and their strangely awkward relationship with one another while an endless rain continues to eat away at everything around them.
The twisted familial dynamics and soggy landscapes carry echoes of OWUtS, where water continues to be the central driving force. While I wouldn't necessarily agree with those who are calling it brilliant or blistering, it was quite beautifully written and the deliciously unexpected ending that kind of came out of nowhere continues to live inside my brain....
The Book of Elsewhere by Keanu Reeves and China Mieville
I listened to this on audio for about an hour and a half and I'm thinking this is not the best way to read this book. I understand nothing. And I wanted to... soooo badly.
I know it's based on an alternate version of Reeves' comic series BRZRKR, and I've never read it and it looks like something I wouldn't pick up so, you know, this wasn't a real surprise.
Supplication by Nour Abi-Nakhoul
#bookstagrammademedoit and they did me dirty. I saw so many people reading this over the last handful of months and it sounded so intriguing that I went on a mad hunt for it and when I finally found a copy, I shot it up to the top of my TBR...
I like weird books, but this was just waaaay too weird.
(gives #bookstagram the side eye)
The Annual Migration of Clouds by Premee Mohamed
But not Reid. She remains hyper aware of her parasite and worries endlessly about what it's doing to her and her mother. Especially when she becomes the recipient of an acceptance letter to the esteemed Howse University, an elite school rumored to be nestled in a dome that is run by rich folk and may even have access to some of the old technology that once existed.
Torn between escaping the only life she's known in the hopes of discovering something better, and abandoning her aging mother and her best friend Henryk, Reid struggles with conflicting feelings of doubt, fear, and excitement and begins to push herself in ways both her, and her Cad, are uncomfortable with.
At its heart, it's a story of survival, devastation, community, and hope. I especially loved how well it meshed elements of cli-fi, sci-fi, and fungal fiction into one cohesive and horrific world.
We Speak Through the Mountain by Premee Mohamed
In the follow up to the cli-fi, sci-fi, fungal fiction novella The Annual Migration of Clouds, we follow Reid as she makes her way towards Howse University. The trip was especially grueling but one she initially believes was worth it. She's in awe of just how different, and technologically advanced, things are there. And though it's the first time she's truly felt like an outsider, she doesn't let that stop her from being her naturally curious and exploratory self.
And the curiosity certainly pays off. Reid quickly learns that the rumors weren't far off the mark when she uncovers why it is that no one ever seems to return from this place. Rather than accept things as they are in this strange new utopia, Reid challenges her fellow students to look deeper, to question everything, to refuse to take things at face value.
We Speak Through the Mountain explores the power of inquisitiveness, what it means to have knowledge without the ability or willingness to share it, and the influence one can have over many. Hope and light continue to push against the fear and darkness...
This one ended on a much cliffier cliffhanger, so I fully anticipate at least one more book in the series before this post apocalyptic world is done with us!
