Posting from the Benthos

Femdermo

stand up in my holy terrain (femNandor/femGuillermo, E) Guillermo serves as a disciple at a temple the goddess Nandor the Relentless and has her prayers answered.

velvet dream on an iron fist (femNandor/femGuillermo, M) Nandor ponders the beginning of her and Guillermo’s relationship.

Nandor and Guillermo-centric 

drape you on tomorrow’s plate (Gen, T) Nandor goes on a date with one of his meals, and Guillermo has feelings about it.

follow me home (Gen, T) Early in his familarhood, Guillermo brings home a meal for Nandor, and Nandor returns the favor. (It’s more of a snack, really.)

such strenuous living, i just don’t understand (Gen, T) Guillermo works as an employee at the New York Vampire Sanctuary.

Basidiocarp, Mycelium (Gen, M) Guillermo is haunted by ghosts. Horror.

Other Characters and Ships

fire burn and cauldron bubble (Lilith/Nadja, E) Lilith invites Nadja to the Halloween party for the covens in the try-state area, as the guest of honor

come in from the edge (and let the good times roll) (Karen, Gen, T) Karen escapes the massacre at Celeste’s and has a fateful run-in.

she had a chassis like an pjs (a skull necklace like a high priestess) (Nadja/Laszlo/Jenna, Nadja/Jenna, E) Nadja decides to give Jenna a hands-on (or straps-on, so to speak) tutorial before her first orgy.

so ambitious for a juvenile (Nadja/Laszlo/Oswald Hendryks Cornelius, M) A crossover with Roald Dahl’s novel My Uncle Oswald and a companion piece to it’s been the ruin of many a poor boy. An entry from the diaries of Oswald Hendryks Cornelius, recounting his encounter with a rather amorous and supernatural couple.

Bootlicker (Nadja/the Guide, E) Nadja makes the Guide carry out her duties in an unconventional manner.

The Sluts by Dennis Cooper (7/2) - for all I hear about books imitating (I read a lot of book reviews and bookskeets and bookstagrams and such) the lingo and feel of the internet, it's amazing how this book from 2004 nailed the feeling of reading an obscure internet forum.

Love Junkie by Robert Plunket (7/4) - read mostly in one sitting while lying in a hammock. Hilarious but also felt like balancing on the edge of disaster the entire time (I have trouble with secondhand embarrassment in fiction). Plunket does an excellent job of writing from the POV of oblivious and self-deluding people.

The Summer Book by Tove Jansson (7/6) - one of those books that came highly recommended for reading during summer, which is fair and true. Jansson's steady grasp of the behavior and thought processes of a six-year-old girl and an eighty (?) year-old woman made me want to pick up her other works on the strength of the characterisation alone.

Dave Barry's Book of Bad Songs by Dave Barry (7/6) - so this was a reread, I think, because I hadn't read this since I was twelve at the oldest. Anyway, Dave Barry's ability to construct a joke is still excellent. Also, I feel like the schlockiness of 70s mainstream pop culture is often forgotten. So many slow, sentimental songs that did not survive in the pop culture strata.

Gretel and the Great War by Adam Erlich Sachs (7/10) - well-written, interesting insight into Vienna between the wars, manages to slowly build out the cast of intersecting characters while building the ominous social tension undergirding society at the time. But also to be entirely honest, I don't think I'm going to reread this.

Cult Classic by Sloane Crosley (7/12) - I enjoyed Crosley's humor essays back in high school, so her first (?) novel had been vaguely on my radar. I'm trying to write up a summary of my feelings on this book six months later and cannot remember what happened in this book, which is probably not a good sign. It sure is a novel about dating and sex for heterosexual women in their thirties in NYC in Modern Times. Which I don't mind. It just isn't spectacular.

Seduction and Betrayal by Elizabeth Hardwick (7/26) - I really enjoy reading literary analysis, often of literature I haven't even read, which probably diminishes the value of reading the literary analysis in the first place, but oh well. Hardwick is an excellent writer and analyst and I intend to pick up more of her work when I get the chance.

A Green Equinox by Elizabeth Mavor (7/27) - another banger republication by McNally Editions. A woman who runs an antique bookstore in an English village falls in lust with . The language is luscious and it feels like the plot resists the expected trajectory of a modern novel in a way that feels, idk, fresh? Original? Even though it was written in the late 1970s. I have a lot of thoughts on "people complaining about books these days" but also on "books published nowadays" that I've never bothered to write down because it makes me feel like I spend too much time online reading discourse, but it feels good to read a book that's good, y'know?

The Odd Woman and the City by Vivian Gornich (8/14) - interesting meditation on being an older single woman and the particular appeal of city living and anonymity, unfolding like a book-length meditation.

*Grocery List by Bora Chung (8/28) - technically just one short story published in a miniature edition. (haunting)

Astral Season, Beastly Season by Tahi Saihate (9/7) - the first part of this book is from the POV of a high school boy obsessed with an idol. Fine. But the second part is from the POV of one of the girls who was in his class, set a couple years later, and it basically cuts into pieces the one-dimensional book this would have been otherwise, which is great.

The First Wives Club by Olivia Goldsmith (9/28) - I had not seen the movie and only knew of the plot by pop-culture osmosis. One of the main characters goes through a midlife lesbian awakening! Nobody told me this. The story was also much more thoughtful than I had expected, though I had classified it with Scruples as a "book to read at the beach", which probably accounted for the dissonance.

It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over by Anna de Marcken (10/01) - tried to recommend this to my mom, only for her to tune me out when I told her the main character is a zombie. But it's an excellent exploration of memory and the sense of self and what it would be like to be a zombie, what it would mean for your consciousness to go on as your body decays.

The New Seoul Park Jelly Massacre by Yeeun Cho (10/11) - good idea for gooey body horror, okay execution. Prose was unexciting.

Trustee from the Toolroom* by Nevile Shute (10/22) - subject of the 200th episode of Backlisted, listened to as an audiobook because the plot and prose seemed straightforward enough to keep track of in audio format. (I am not good at paying attention to audiobooks.) It was a very fun adventure novel, competently written. I say competently written because Shute obviously put a lot of emphasis on ensuring his writing was clear and direct (and yet it was never boring or dry), to the extent that I was able to grasp the basic engineering concepts that the plot hinged on.

The Strange World of Willie Seabrook by Marjorie Worthington (11/16) - the publisher uses a lurid passage from this memoir as the back cover blurb, which disguises that it is one of very few lurid passages actually present in the book, as Worthington really didn't want to write about, much less participate in, Seabrook's sadistic sexual practices. So the actual highlight of the book is Worthington's travel experiences and her insight into the 1920's world of the Left Bank.

The Princess of 72nd Street by Elaine Kraf (11/16) - good, but took me forever to get through because I couldn't focus and the narration was nonlinear and stream-of-consciousness, which is normally something I really like! But again, I was trying to read it during a time when I really couldn't focus. Also, this book is a better "unhinged woman" novel than most of the ones published in the 2020s that I have read, and it was originally published in 1972.

The Necrophiliac by Gabrielle Wittkop (11/20) - I read Murder Most Serene back in 2021? 2022? and enjoyed Wittkop's lush, elaborate prose. Like Angela Carter, imo.

Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day* by Winifred Watson (11/23) - as read by Frances McDormand. Very fun and cute. The pleasure of this book is narratively simple, but I enjoyed the growing friendship between Delysia LaFosse and Miss Pettigrew (and also, of course, how Miss Pettigrew thought Miss LaFosse was the most beautiful, charming woman she had ever seen, so on and etc.)

Motherthing by Ainslie Hogart (11/24) - I thought the ending was a little disappointing, though it was thematic fitting. I have a lot of thoughts, again, on the concept of the "unhinged woman" novel genre, and how naming it as a genre has resulted in a lot of these novels being functionally not very interesting or fun, but also I think that's something that happens with most publishing trends.

The Ha-Ha by Jennifer Dawson (11/29) - It was really interesting to read the afterward and the author's later opinions on this work; she seemed to regret putting less emphasis on the symptoms of mental illness the protagonist experienced, which was something I thought was also maybe done with too light a hand. Though I also had trouble getting immersed in this book, which may have been part of it.

Gentlemen Prefer Blonds and But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes by Anita Loos (12/1) - surprisingly subtle and layered in its satire and narration, a great portrait of the 1920s flapper culture. Absolutely a fun read. The version I had had the original illustrations, which imo were very 1920s in style and I enjoyed.

Hav by Jan Morris (12/13) - a fascinating travelogue, cataloguing a journey to a tiny Mediterranean country that does not, in fact exist. I haven't read a lot of travel writing, so I can't account for Jan Morris's fealty to the conventions of the genre, but on its own its wonderfully mysterious and vaguely ominous. My edition included the follow-up, which Morris wrote in 2004, which does take away from the killer last line of the original novel, but was another interesting allegorical take on travel in the post-9/11 world.

Jim Henson: The Art, the Magic, the Imagination by Christopher Finch (12/21) - I'm not 100% sure I should count this, since it's a coffee table book, but I'm doing so anyway. Provides a lot of insight into Jim Henson's history and the origin of the muppets. Also includes Frank Oz's thoughts on Miss Piggy's backstory, which imo is worth the price of admission.

Patience by John Coates (12/22) - again more books republished by Persephone books, meant to be read while in a not-ideal reading situation (sitting in a hospital waiting room). Catholic mother of three young children has sex with a man who is not her husband, has first orgasm ever, and every other character and the narrative is horrified that her husband failed to sexually please her and she divorces him and lives happily ever after. Great stuff.

Killing Stella by Marlen Haushofer (12/23) - read in one sitting, understandably, as it's one of those very short novellas that leaves you devastated. It's a fantastic example of letting the plot unfold through stream-of-consciousness reflection and self-justification, by a woman trapped by society but also her own complacence, and the tragedy that occurs because of of that acquiescence

Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons (12/30) - 'tis the season to sit around my mom's place and not read anything that requires intense concentration, so a reread of an old favorite it was. It still amazes me that a parody of the "rural English misery" genre holds up as a comedy on its own merits far past the genre's heyday.