#bluestockingcouture

oooh i have been meaning to check steve aylett out, i had never heard of him until a recent episode of backlisted covered another of his books! that concept sounds perfect (and more my thing than the book they covered on the podcast).

and gwyneth jones is a name i have vaguely heard of but never knew where to start with! thank you for this rec, that sounds v v fun.

10. What was your favorite new release of the year?

A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik or Piranesi by Susanna Clarke. The latter is here partly because I had been waiting for it for such a long time; I’m letting my experience of it settle for a little before trying to characterize my response to it overall.

17. Did any books surprise you with how good they were?

The Raven Tower by Ann Leckie and The Binding by Bridget Collins were both so good, but this has to go to A Deadly Education because I finished it and immediately read it again.

22. What’s the longest book you read?

Hey, welcome back! 

Indeed, we have Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis (PLROA). It’s the most recent book. We’re expecting at least one more installment after this one, no date has been given yet. 

@bluestockingcouture — Ok I can’t phrase this very well, but tumblr won’t let me tag them, so I made a link to my reblog of their post in which they share that they wrote a 1,800 word review of PLROA that quotes Rousseau, so you might want to check that out on goodreads. (spoiler cut is there)

Here’s another by Kirkus Reviews 2016-10-19. (spoilers in full view)

To be honest, near the end of PLROA I had to put it down bc it was about to launch into a monologue from a new character who I don’t really feel much affection for, and so I still haven’t finished it, but I am thoroughly spoiled as to what happens bc I love being spoiled. 

There were many moments where I smiled bc it reminded me of the way the characters behaved in earlier books, there’s some development as to their current status, there’s some great little moments between them, and I think it’s worth reading for those gems.

I’ve always been able to read VC and cherry pick the things that I like (a good chunk of dialogue here or there, or something that seems to give more clarification to the established world/characters, etc.) and I have a flexible headcanon, so I can accept or not accept things based on the fanfic I’m reading, too, depending on what canon it relies on. 

Having said that, PLROA feels very much like what would happen if one novel you were working on needed life support and you added your much more popular character(s) into it as a means of rescuing it. 

“I was working on a novel called Born for Atlantis, and I just couldn’t get it to work. I thought, “What if I could somehow combine this with Lestat and the vampires?” And it was like, everything worked. Something happens to me when I write from Lestat’s point of view. There’s no question about it. By the time I was done, it felt inevitable, like it always had been…. It was a rare experience.”

^Anne Rice, Entertainment Weekly (August 5, 2016) [X] I’m glad that she shared that with us, because it explains why she brought these things together. Even if she hadn’t admitted as such, I think we would have been able to piece that together. 

Some things are good on their own, some ideas can be brought together and the result is wonderful alchemy! But I think in this case, it felt like someone had dumped a river of ketchup on an icecream sundae. PLROA might count as what the fandom used to lovingly call the Vampire Crackicles.

Back then, we could have a good time, even when canon was wild. We could make fun of Lestat being a huge baby about his foot size in Blood Canticle:

Seldom did I see my feet in black socks. I knew almost nothing personally about my feet. They looked rather small for the twenty-first century. Bad luck. But six feet was still a good height.

Or, also in Blood Canticle, Lestat fixated by ice cubes:

…the sparkle in the ice cubes, the Miracle of the Ice Cubes.

^Our old familiar canon Rice Caps! Why can’t these things be funny anymore?

Or are the wacky things in PLROA too wacky to even find endearing? We do tentatively joke about PLROA, but not as robustly as we did over those older Vampire Crackicles. Maybe in a few years we’ll be more vocal about it, bc there will be even crazier canon. Lestat goes to Mars! Lestat ages backwards like Benjamin Button! Lestat accidentally destroys Alaska! 

That's the very opposite of a problem. :) I've been yearning for velvet recently myself, as often happens when the weather is very cold. It's such a comforting fabric.

Oh, thank you! Both the Bowles and the Townsend Warner have been on my to-read list for a while! I’ve been reading more contemporary stuff lately, but maybe it’s time to bump them up. 

Such a gorgeous dress! You look stunning. :)

kyrosion replied to your photoset “[Image description: two photos of a woman standing outdoors in front...”

I almost bought this dress but then I decided to "be" "responsible" and now I am full of regret! You look so good!

Hey! Book reccs! Always a good topic.

It’s tough for me to answer bc I think it depends on every individual reader’s sense of humor,… even within “humorous/ dark tone as VC” there is a range*. So I can’t say definitively that these reccs are in line with what you’re looking for necessarily, but you can use this list as a starting point.

*Lestat dancing w/ Claudia’s mom’s corpse: Some ppl find this moment dark and hilarious and other ppl think it’s just disgusting, so… there is a range. Personally I find it pretty amusing.

(There are some duplicates on this list, sorry about that, but I wanted to list them by recc’er.) (And I added ** next to those that @gothiccharmschool​ just recc’d in two recent posts which I will reblog momentarily for you.)

In no special order:

(Okay this is the first one bc it IS special, and the closest to the humor of VC I’ve seen in awhile) This is a mockumentary/movie but it sneaks onto the top of the list bc it is just SO good, courtesy of @theamazingdrunk for reminding me in a comment on an older rec post:​ WHAT WE DO IN THE SHADOWS

**Salem’s Lot - Stephen King, personally, I find several Stephen King books to be darkly humorous, this one is a good one. I find humor in the Shining and Firestarter, too, but less so. 

Vittorio - don’t forget Vittorio. Not sure if you read this one. It’s also by Anne Rice and technically not a VC book, he has a different origin story and is not part of the VC vampire group.

Some short stories - @soyonscruels​ posted: those who dream only by night: the gothic short stories rec list - Not full-length books but still, short stories are good! There are 20 short stories listed, writers include @neil-gaiman​, Roald Dahl, Oscar Wilde, Edgar Allan Poe, each of whom I’ve found to have some level of humor along w/ dark tones.

More E. A. Poe is offered up here, from @keep-calm-and-heta-oni​, which includes little capsules about each.

@consultingcupcake​ said: “I really love the Cirque du Freak series, and **Lost Souls by Poppy Z Brite. Both have teenage protagonists

@fantasticfelicityfox​ said: The Historian is very good

@stitcheskitty​ said: Sookie Stackhouse novels

Movie and book (and a few anime) Recommendations here.

@riverofwhispers said: Carmilla is goodAnita Blake and Sookie Stackhouse books, but only the early ones. the Rachel Morgan series but again starts out good gets weird later and it’s not about vampires so much as there are vampires in it.

@bluestockingcouture said: ‘The Angel’s Cut’, sequel to ‘The Vintner’s Luck’, is very atmospheric and well worth reading. Not quite as moving and intense, but there are some excellent new characters.

@sanguinivora said: Also, as to voice: IWTV opens in the late 1700’s/early 1800’s. Don’t know about either a southern American or French hinterlands-with-a-gloss-of-Parisian dialect, but for the grammar and vocabulary, one cannot go too far wrong looking to the novels of Jane Austen and Patrick O'Brian.

@dragontrainerdaenerys said: I just read Fevre Dream, George R.R Martin’s own vampire novel, and while I didn’t liked much his vampire mythology the main characters are charming! Besides, it’s set on the late 18XX and goes on the Mississipi River, so it has similar scenarios to IWTV!

@baroquebat said: Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust, while futuristic, has a loooot of lovely gothic set pieces in the anime movie, plus its just gorgeous and has the rare treat of having a dhampir lead!

@annabellioncourt’s Recs, and these are mostly her descriptions, too, compiled from other recc posts:

The Bloody Chamber And Other Stories - Angela Carter

Carmilla - Bunch of adaptations of this.

A Taste of Blood Wine -  Freda Warrinton, for romance and decadence.

**Blood Opera Sequence (or “Trilogy”?) -  Tanith Lee’s vampire series was out when Lestat was playing rockstar

Historian - Elizabeth Kostova, for its worldliness

**Fevre Dream (yes its spelled fevre) by George R. R. Martin (yes, its THAT Martin, and his take on vampires is Very Good.)

Sunshine by Robin McKinley

**The Delicate Dependency by Michael Talbot, also for romance and decadence. (the recently-published edition from Valancourt Books has a foreword by @gothiccharmschool!)

The Hunger by Whitley Scriber

**Dracula - Bram Stoker, for its stereotype-setting content

Lord Ruthven - Byronic vampire, Lestat doesn’t catch the irony of John Polidori’s mockery of the foppish, arrogant, and well…Lord-Byron-y vampire

>>>>Moar recs from @annabellioncourt​ under Spooky Book Recommendations

>>>>Moar recs from @gothiccharmschool: here, here, and in her #vampire books and #vampire novels tags. 

>>>>My #VC adjacent recs tag

Anyone is welcome to reblog/comment on this with other VC-adjacent book recs! 

Evening!

8. Favorite queer fiction book(s).

If queer fiction just means books that feature queer characters, I'm gonna go with Gideon the Ninth. I can't really think of a book that feels like a "queer fiction" genre book.

45. What book(s) would you sell your soul to get a TV or movie adaptation of?

Would it be cheating to say mine (you know, the unpublished and semi-abandoned one)? 😆

But to answer more seriously... It's a tough question and I think 'sell my soul' would be extreme, but looking at The Shelves for things that haven't already been adapted, I think The City We Became would make a great TV show, if they had enough budget for The Horrors.

50. What kind of book have you never read but always hope to find at some point in the future?