The work this book most reminded me of wasn’t actually a book; despite having no similarities in characters or plot, the FEELING it left me with was exactly like the movie It Follows. I was done reading this and had the same queasy wrongness that I did after watching the dissonant film about a sexually transmitted haunting. Sweet Lamb of Heaven follows a woman who begins having auditory hallucinations at the birth of her daughter and the group of fellow sufferers in the hotel where […]
The implacable horror of isolation
There are books that speak to you. Books that reach down into the core of your inner being to play the delicate chords of your heart strings. Books that stay with you, becoming a passenger for life, indelibly connecting you to a particular place and time, like some kind of existential anchor of permanence in a sea of change. Moby Dick is one such book, for me. That book haunts me. It’s the girl I had a crush on in high school but was too afraid […]
Killer Queen
I honest to the heavens thought I’d reviewed this one. The short version is: True crime fans/Murderinos will probably enjoy this one. I’m not sure anyone else will; the subject matter is pretty grim and the person in question warped like HH Holmes. Lizzie Borden may have killed her father and stepmother with an axe, but Belle Gunness killed a hell of a lot more, including her own children.
You’ve really got a hold on me
As I have mentioned before, fairy tales were my jam when I was younger. I also love some good remixes — musical or cultural — and humor, so things like Texts from Jane Eyre were absolutely delightful to me. When I heard that Daniel Mallory Ortberg was putting out a book of retold fairy tails (as Mallory Ortberg), I immediately put in a pre-order. In my haste and my assumptions based on the humor of Ortberg’s other work, having missed the “Children’s Stories Made Horrific” […]