I'm going to test write Killer!Apricity for now. I don't know for how long but at least til Halloween nears.

I am going to put other threads I have on hold until I start writing Survivor!Apricity again. This will help me stay focused because I wanna try out new things with this character. You're free to reblog ongoing threads but I'll not answer them until after the event.

Seven book covers in seven days

Killer Verse - Harold Schechter and Kurt Brown, ed.

In brief: A collection of poems about murders and murderers.

Thoughts: There are a lot of really good poems in this, but don’t do what I did and read it cover to cover. It gets heavy fast, when you do that. It weighs on a body.

This is a lot like short story collections for me, in that some poems hit harder than others and some just fell flat, but I liked the variety and the diversity of the perspectives and types of poem and most of the poems I didn’t like (or didn’t get) I could still appreciate the technique of. There are condemnations of and meditations on death and murder galore, as well as explorations of the states of minds of killers, which were probably the darkest bits for me. That and the descriptions of the acts.

Particular favourites include “Fall River Historical Museum”, “Naked City”, “The Good Shepherd: Atlanta, 1981“, “Whitechapel Nights”, “On the Turning Up of Unidentified Black Female Corpses”, “Wi’-Gi’E”, “Crime Club”, and pretty much all the murder ballads.

If you have morbid tastes like I do, and you occasionally find yourself in the mood to read about death, true crime, and serial killers, I certainly rec this. It’s a strong collection with something for everyone, as long as their taste runs dark. Definitely not a collection for everyone, though!

Warnings: Death, murder, gore, dead bodies, sex crimes, abuse, slavery, entitled white men, racism. One poem that hints at a coming lynching. Poems from the POVs of killers. Covers Matthew Shepard, Ed Gein, Jeffrey Dahmer, Richard Speck, Susan Smith, the Atlanta, GA child murders of 1981, the Virginia Polytechnic shootings of 2007, and the Athens, GA shooting of 2009. Some poems unfriendly to trans and gay people. (Ask and I can give titles and page numbers.)

The appearance has changed a bit. The eyes are capable of glowing white as moonlight without the girl being zoned out. Now, she can trigger her powers without forgetting it afterwards. Her skin does not turn dark all over her body but a few black spots and freckles on her face and across her hands and fingers show the fogs' madness growing within her.

My muse is an orphan. Send “adoption” to adopt them!

Nerves don’t usually affect him like this, but Billy finds he’s sweating, and he can’t help fidgeting. He wipes his palms on his shorts and moves to another seat, preferring the cool plastic to the one that feels damp and slick already. His heel drums on the floor and he keeps looking to the door. It’s only been twenty minutes, but they said that this might be it, someone wanted to take him home and keep him.

Either someone was making a big mistake, or the carers were playing a mean prank on him. He’s heard of that before, he’d seen a younger boy come back to the dorm room in floods of tears because he’d had to wait two hours and then been scolded for loitering where he wasn’t supposed to be. He’d had nightmares for weeks afterwards, he’d yelled out in the night until Billy slipped in beside him and told him what would happen if he kept being so noisy. Now he muffles it with a pillow.

Billy is about to try climbing out the window to see if he can catch a glimpse of anything going on when the door clicks open. He jumps to his feet, hands neatly at his sides and gives his best smile, the same one he wore in family portraits before the tragedy. The man is not what he was expecting, but the smile doesn’t falter.