What I'm trying to say is, I hate performative and pretentious depth so much. And it's always white authors, especially in the Gothic/dark academia genres. Whatever had to be said has already been said around the late 90s-early 2000s by actually inventive writers, and now white authors are just milking the contemporary fandom fascination with ships like Loustat and Hannigram (that are actually well written and complex in their respective works), stripping them of their essence completely, diluting them to empty hollows like "toxic queerness" and "the intimacy of violence" and "cannibalism as a metaphor for all-consuming desire" with a splash of Catholic imagery and witchcraft and tarot and smut and poetry that is losely marketed as something like "a bloody sumptuous feast of hedonism and queer desire".
It's not even disaffected in a halfhearted way like Donna Tartt, no, every axis of (supposed) oppression milked by these books is 100% serious and self-absorbed. You got the completely unironic Anne Rice and Sylvia Plath and Oscar Wilde worshippers and the tired, FLACCID endless poems about pomegranates and dog metaphors and knives and stigmata like stop stop stop REINVENT RETHINK BE ORIGINAL it's so overdone it's dead it sounds like regurgitated tumblr metaphors it's accumulating flies just stop!!!!!
No wonder we get those tweets fifteen times a day about how "x line sounds like it would be from the Bible but it's actually from tumblr"– followed by a line/quotation that actually sounds exactly like it's from tumblr. STOP overdoing the metaphor to the point of insincerity!!! stop turning once-novel things into edgy marketable words about bloody girlhood and erotic desire and religious passion!!!
And to take a break from negativity, here are a few books I really, really enjoyed that handled a mix of grimdark, gothic, horror and/or queer themes with originality and substance:
**The Wicked and the Willing by Lianyu Tan: a historical sapphic romance set in 1920s Singapore that examines the "Carmilla" vampire motif from a postcolonial lens.
**House of Hunger by Alexis Henderson: a very short, very eerie sapphic gothic romance (?) story, examining race, class and gender discourses through the allegories of vampirism and a centuries-old hunger.
Mexican Gothic by Silva Moreno Garcia: a historical gothic horror story about a 1950s Mexican heiress who discovers the hideous history underlying the family estate of an aristocrat English family; this is a genuinely disturbing but also great work of postcolonial horror (heavy eugenics storyline be warned).
**Providence Girls by Morgan Dante: a Lovecraftian retelling of two women in 1950s New England who discover love while battling the horrors both monstrous, cosmic as well as societal. genuinely beautiful, disturbing and a wonderful exploration of grief in horror.
**Walking Practice by Dolki Min: a shapeshifting alien stranded on earth lures victims via dating apps and seduces people of both genders before killing and consuming them. translated from Korean and a disturbing, funny (but also tragic) and dark satire about trans bodies, queerness in 21st century South Korea, violence and alienation. PLEASE read this.
Tender is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica: in an alternate history where ethical cannibalism has been legalized globally, and humans are bred as livestock, a narrator grapples with ethics when he rescues a live female "specimen" from his meat factory. super disturbing, satire of the author's experience under the Argentinian dictatorship.
**Chlorine by Jade Song: a Chinese-American girl in 1990s USA grapples with sapphic crushes, adolescence, trauma, racism and her immigrant identity while taking part in competitive swimming and dreaming of mermaids. absolute fever dream masterpiece of a debut novel combining teenage queer sexuality and body horror, with a narrative that challenges norms of beauty and gender a lá Julia Ducournau films.
(?) Bunny by Mona Awad: psychedelic, colorful, pop neon horror satire about an all-female MFA creative writing cohort at an elite arts college, and the lengths they go through to achieve their literary success, as observed by the outsider loner girl. this was such a direct, targeted and brutal parody of dark academia/ femcel unhinged women books lmfao??? but also witty and disturbing without sounding condescending.
**= explicit LGBTQ rep. there is a question mark before Bunny because it has– neither explicit rep nor queerbait– but a secret third thing, schrödinger's representation.
Also first person to write "let people have fun" should donate 30 dollars to my kofi promptly
