2025-12-24 (last edited 2026-06-09)
Doing my best to give first impressions for media I engage with. These are fairly unrefined. There will be no unwarned major spoilers here, but there might be minor ones that I judge won’t change the experience of the media.
The concept is fascinating: can a house be designed haunted? Can the architect, too in love with himself and with money, use what is traditionally a symbol of the demise of the rich and powerful for himself and build a house forever his? Rose House is a house, and it is the house’s AI, everywhere in the house; the locals think Rose House haunts the house. It was the last design of Basit Deniau, architect, the last, the greatest, and his tomb. The first five pages of the book will tell you this better than I: Dr. Selene Gisil, Deniau’s former top student and current bitter archivist, will tell you this–Dr. Selene Gisil, who is the only person allowed into Rose House. Unfortunately, these five pages are the best of the book. Afterwards, we meet the other two POV characters: detectives Maritza Smith and Oliver Torres of the local police precinct. Oliver’s story is pointless to the book. It’s a police procedural where the cop knows that he’s inhabiting a parody of noir cop stories; it’s entertaining, but detracts from the book. Maritza is a useful character to have around, but she is dull, her head uninteresting compared to Selene and Rose House. Also, her story requires us to dismiss the horrors of American policing, horrors which in the near future of ROSE/HOUSE seem diminished in the Mojave backwater it takes place in, but horrors which the near future seems unlikely to dispel in reality, and which are more haunting than all the world’s houses put together. We have the cops because there’s been a murder at Rose House. I suppose that’s what the book’s plot is about.
Selene is interesting for she too is haunted. She tried to break from Deniau and his art, but he made her his archivist when he died. Her story is appropriate for a haunted house. In a good haunting someone haunts themselves, driven out of their mind by their mind externalized. ROSE/HOUSE is really Selene’s story, though Martine doesn’t seem to believe that. She makes a lot of writing choices I find bizarre, like the POVs, and also the fake suspense some authors like putting into their stories, where the author tells us that the character knows something, but cuts away from them learning it so we don’t find out. This is cheap.
Regardless, while I don’t think it’s very good, I’m happy I read ROSE/HOUSE. It doesn’t commit the most egregious sin, which is to be boring. Plus, I got to read Martine describing architecture, which she has a wonderful and idiosyncratic way of doing. I think I would read anything she writes, though.
Recommended for: Arkady Martine fans.
A short little science fiction book set on far future earth. The main plot regards the warning of the aging scientific advisor Antiquity that the sun is dying, and the politics that play out from it. Antiquity is old, her health is failing, her brilliance and reputation no longer sufficient to be taken seriously–I enjoyed her as a protagonist, even though I think that the book’s portrayal of the scientific process is hopelessly inaccurate, and that Antiquity, like every other character, is paper-thin, and not rendered enough to be meaningful.
The real main plot is the lesbian love triangle between Antiquity’s three pupils, themselves leaders in their fields (zoology, engineering, and photography). The science fiction is a backdrop, and care has not been put into ensuring that it makes any sense. Tropes are carelessly piled together, the book opens with an infodump of the history of future earth. Nothing serious is taken seriously.
As for the lesbians: because the characters have no depth, the romance isn’t particularly compelling and is carried by the sheer horniness of its three participants, who are constantly fucking. Sorry–making love. Zeta Base is strangely cagey about its sex; honestly, I think it would have been better were it erotica. Because it isn’t very good. The prose is bad, the characters, plot, and world without substance. The middle third dragged; I found myself wishing that this already short book was shorter, and debating dropping it. Alguire not believing in subtext or coherence is fun, but it can only go so far. I’m glad I stuck with it though because of the ending, which is ambiguous, sudden, and reads true to the way that society often interferes with queer relationships.
A final note: every named character in this book is a woman, except for the villain, and I wish Alguire had the gumption to make him one too.
Recommended for: I don’t think I can recommend this one, but if you want to read it from my description, do!
Dorian Gray, a beautiful, rich, young homosexual in Victorian England wishes that his portrait would age in his place and becomes an asshole with no regard for others. It’s well done–Wilde can certainly write–but I found it uninteresting. The story is easily relevant today, substituting for Dorian another rich man, perhaps a tech new money type, but the problem with these people is that their lives are boring, their questions of whether to disregard the humanity of others while having their every material need met farcical, and their relations with themselves and others hollow and craven. If anything, Dorian Gray reminds me that none of these fucks are new.
The most interesting part of the novel is its relationship with art. Wilde had a lot of thoughts, and put some of them in the preface, but to understand them I would need to know more about how the Victorians thought of art, and the particular ways in which Wilde was controversial (other than being gay). There’s something in Dorian Gray about the titular picture, and its painter, Basil Hallward, that I haven’t quite understood. If I ever reread this book, I’d want to figure that out.
Finally, I have to remark on Wilde’s satires of English society. I know him primarily for his (very good) play The Importance of Being Earnest, in which his characters constantly speak in witticisms. In Dorian Gray, the font of Wilde’s wit is Lord Henry Wotton, who we also know to be a provocateur, a guy who just says shit, and who is a sort of mentor to Dorian. The things Henry says are nonsense, often rather objectionable nonsense, and don’t work as satire because we have to understand them as objectionable. He’s a silly and tiresome wit, and while I think Wilde portrays him well as such, he bored me–I much prefer Wilde’s approach to humor in Earnest.
Also: while Wilde is only passively misogynistic in this novel, he goes out of his way to be antisemitic.
Recommended for: anyone who wants to read a gothic novel about art, rich assholes, or late Victorian decadence.
I don’t normally put short-form stuff on here, but I’m making an exception because of how good this one is. It deals with modifying one’s body, and the autonomy to do so–and when the rich and powerful decide that only they can do so, and only to meet their own standards of beauty. The story is also very visceral (in the sense of meat, gore, crunch crunch) and horny (gay, evil) and more than a little trans. Describing a short story without giving anything away is difficult, especially since short fiction is so much about mood and tone, so you should just read it (Strange Horizons).
Recommended for: people who like weird and fucked up queer speculative fiction. it might even be you!
This book is bad. The poor writing distracts from the lack of substance. I read it on a plane, and it did its job, but I wish I had read something else.
I’m told this book is gothic horror, disturbing, but mostly it seems relatable. This is my second Jackson novel, after The Haunting of Hill House (which I really like!), and while that book read to me as about, among other things, repressed lesbianism, this one is much more straightforwardly about neurodivergence. The narrator is Mary Katherine Blackwood, an autistic eighteen-year-old girl who lives with her sister and uncle in a secluded house. The novel flirts with mystery, but foreshadows much of it from the opening paragraph; if anything, the contrast between what the book has already said and what I as a reader understand is coming is part of the “horror” of the book. Most of the horror is ableism, though, and to a lesser extent patriarchy. The book, to me, is mostly about how Mary Katherine reacts to people denying her and her family agency, and to people carelessly or maliciously interfering with how her world works. It is, as I said, relatable, but I can understand why neurotypicals would find it disturbing.
Recommended for: fans of gothic fiction, honestly anyone it’s good and not very long
Addendum. There is a lot more I can say about this book. I want to note how good the first chapter is, how it places me directly into Merricat’s head, and how well it establishes her as a relatable figure. I was just reading a review where it talks about how excellently the first chapter establishes Merricat as strange, almost emotionless, instead describing things with extreme and often random detail—I couldn’t agree less; I find the narration to capture such a familiar and understandable person. I won’t go into more detail about Merricat because I don’t want to give spoilers. I think I could benefit a lot from rereads, as there are still things I don’t get in the book. Constance, for one, and in particular her reaction to Charles. Also, the role of class in the book, and the relationship between the Blackwoods and the villagers.
London Jewish dyke Rainbow Rosenbloom gets posessed by a dybbuk fulfilling a centuries-old curse on her bloodline. Demons, in this world, are part of an extraplanar capitalist hell; Kokos, our dybbuk, works for Mephistco, in a department specializing in curses. The book is a comedy about being a dyke and a Jew and also about 90s corporate hell. It’s told in first person by Kokos. Featuring: a dyke, a dybbuk, an angry lesbian, and an emotionally mature straight woman. I really enjoyed the silliness of it. The ending made it: the book committed to both silliness and respecting its characters. Warning for some casual biphobia throughout.
Recommended for: queers, Jews, and friends.
I had a lot of thoughts a month ago when I read this and didn’t write them down. In brief: the premise and mood is interesting, but the book didn’t deliver. Haunted girls and outcast queers in a gothic horror in the Inland Empire is a great setting, but it didn’t do what I think gothic horror ought to. It had far too many points of view to tell deep stories about most of them, having various chapters devoted to the point of view of minor characters. One of three main PoV characters is a cop, and I don’t think his eyes add anything to the story. He sucks. He thinks he doesn’t. Everyone else knows he does, and his actions demonstrate that he’s a violent piece of shit. His point of view felt gratuitous. The action sequences at the end I found overly cinematic; they broke the mood. I’m also not a fan of how the villain is just a guy but is meant to represent cycles of colonial violence.
Recommended for: honestly not sure.
Note: I had the flu when writing this and I’m not editing it. Apologies for incoherencies.
October Daye is an Urban Fantasy mainstay. It fits a particular niche: the main character is a woman who isn’t defined by men, most of the supporting characters are women, and it’s about found family. It’s very “schlock,” a bit episodic, and steeped in urban fantasy tropes. That includes a central straight romance, which isn’t my thing, and I’m not a huge fan of how brooding the love interest is, but whatever.
I read the first 17 books sometime last year in a big binge. It’s definitely the most urban fantasy I’ve read. It’s fun. The writing is alright. The world is based on fairy tales, so it’s kind of horrifying. THat makes for fun characters too, like the sea witch (I’m a sucker for cool grandma who is always the most powerful person in the room).
But coming back after some months has really put into focus how fucked up this series is. Silver and Lead is pretty typical for October Daye; it’s a lot like every other one of these, so I’m going to talk about the world of October Daye.
October Daye takes place in the modern world except there are fae and changelings alongside humans. Humans don’t know about Faerie. Changelings—people with both fae and human ancestors—are an underclass in Faerie. Fae have magic; changelings have less magic. Toby Daye, our main character, is a changeling, and much of the series is about her navgiating Faerie.
Faerie is an awful place. The magic of a fae or changeling depends on what fae “races” they are, measured by blood, by descent from a Firstborn (a blood child of Oberon, Titania, and Maeve, who are esentially gods). This is introduced slowly over the course of the first few books, making it feel normal. It’s also a really fucked up premise: scientific racism that is true. The books do not explore how fucked up this is.
Also, Faerie is run by the feudal system. These books have queens and lords and dukes galore. This feudal system doesn’t recognize the personhood of changelings, an endless source of plot. Toby does not like the feudal system, but participates in it. She is a knight in service to a lord. She’s unconventional, and often looked down on as a changeling, but she is part of the system of Faerie. She is no rebel.
Thematically, October Daye is centered around reckoning with abusive family dynamics and making a found family. This is especially brought out by Faerie not understanding consent. Magic applied to another is a violation. There is plenty of that, and physical violence too, a world built on etiquette and violation. The sea witch is the epitome of this: she is bound by an ancient curse which compels much of her behavior, turning her into the monster under the bed but also a dick. Yet she is kind, and many of the characters forge genuine familial relationships with her. The found family is fucked up, but it’s better than the blood family.
My biggest critique of October Daye is that it does not take on any of the structures that caused the abuse in the first place. McGuire is not sparing. She understands that abusive family members are often well-intentioned, and that familial relationships are too complex to be reduced to “they’re abusive.” (I am using the word abuse as an umbrella term here, because I think it fits, not because the text relies on it). The October Daye books are aware that the structure of Faerie is behind much of the abuse and trauma its denizens face. But neither Toby, nor any of the other characters, make serious attempts to change this structure, nor really believe that it’s possible to change it. There are neither revolutionaries nor reformers. There are only “bad” nobles and “good” nobles.
In our world, liberation is possible. But it is unclear if it is in Faerie. How much is determined by blood? By Oberon? Are the woes of Faerie caused only by ancient curses and the families of gods or by natural law also? I fear that McGuire is writing the latter. And that makes me deeply uncomfortable, because of the many anti-liberatory political projects in our world that are predicated on convicing people that opppression is scientific or natural reality.
Recommended for: people who read the first 18 books.
A book about trans lives. The main characters are a pair of t4t painters and their son, who is writing about their lives. One of the painters was a revolutionary, but this book isn’t about revolution, or the titular regicide, or politics, really. It’s about these three people. The book is ostensibly set in the far future, but this is set dressing; it’s really literary fiction about today. There’s something in the timefulness of it that reminds me of Tamsyn Muir’s The Locked Tomb; interestingly, they have the same editor.
Notes from a Regicide feels like a story trans people tell each other. I don’t know how a cis person would understand the book. I can’t point to what it is, but there’s something to Etoine and Zaffre (the painters) that feels inescapably real, their story resonating off the queers in my life even as the conditions of their lives are so different. I’m not sure if anything else I’ve read has had this effect.
I’m not sure what to make of the book. I should read more trans fiction.
Recommended for: the queers.
A critique of representation and a satire of literary culture and publishing in the United States. What I most appreciated about it is that every time I started developing a political critique of something in the movie, it later turned out that this was intentional, and someone would make a similar critique of the main character. He’s an interesting fellow. I similarly appreciate the ambiguity of the ending. The film doesn’t present solutions.
The movie is bitterly self aware and it presents this awareness to its watchers. It mocks Black fiction pandering to suburban white people. There’s something darkly, perversely amusing about being white and watching this movie in the suburbs, on recommendation from my mother, who herself was recommended it by her (white) friends.
Recommended for: fans of satire.
It’s really good, as expected. Very funny and well put-together. The “main character” boxer-turned-priest Jud Duplenticy is a goldmine in the setting of a conservative church. The Knives Out movies do a great job of adapting the detective story to the modern day, and Benoit Blanc is as wonderful to watch as always. I appreciate the theme of showing grace to people even when they don’t deserve it.
Still, I think this movie might actually be my least favorite of the three Knives Out movies. I would have to rewatch Glass Onion to be sure (the first movie is definitely my favorite). The whodunnit in Wake Up Dead Man fell flat for me and lacked depth, and unlike Glass Onion, this wasn’t the point. There are also cinematographic choices that took me out of the film, mostly in the first act: the internet video type stills of Lee’s books and Cy’s YouTube, the church destruction montage, and parts of Wicks’s sermons. Also Chimney Rock is not a believable New York town.
Recommended for: fans of detective fiction.