ELSEWHERE

if I fought Paul Tassi on a battlefield he would write an article the next day comparing it to the Iron Banner PvP event in Destiny

It's humid and gross outside + I tweaked my knee yesterday then had to climb up and down a bunch of rickety stairs at a crime scene, so I decided in lieu of proper running/strength-training today I'd just knock out some errands and chores. I walked to the library and back (dropped off Forest of a Thousand Lanterns and renewed another book I had borrowed at the same time because my recent bout of low spell slots goofed me), then got some groceries (some stuff for meal prep cuz I'm trying to do better about nutrition, gross), then did laundry and vacuumed. I'm gonna attempt to meal prep maybe tomorrow morning or the morning after, but we'll see how that goes. Honestly, some of my revulsion towards food prep lately has been heat-related; when it's stuffy and hot in my apartment, the last fucking thing I wanna do is fire up the stove and turn my entire galley kitchen into a furnace. In any case, I'm gonna try to make a batch of breakfast burritos to keep in the freezer and also some pumpkin chicken curry to have w/ rice and veggies.

I still have to put laundry away, so let me do that and then finish getting ready for work.

ohhhhhh I'm mad about this book and gonna rant about it the millisecond I sit at my desk tomorrow

erikavonkaiser wrote: ↑Wed Sep 06, 2023 10:26 pm

ohhhhhh I'm mad about this book and gonna rant about it the millisecond I sit at my desk tomorrow

Montana Gothic by Dirck Van Sickle
One star, fuck this book

OKAY SO

I feel the need to start off by saying why I picked up this book, which is that I'm trying to make some effort to read a little more in my own genre, which is fantasy western. There aren't a lot of fantasy westerns out there, so the overlap becomes gothic westerns/weird westerns/etc., which I'm fine with! This one I got off a Goodreads list and I picked it up because it was highly rated (4.18 stars with 34 ratings, which is a low sample pool but still!) and the pitch sounded good:

Right?? Sounds kinda neat, like a gothic western adventure???

IT'S ABOUT NECROPHILIA

it's fucking goddamn adigb;oasgrhg

Spoilers, I guess, but: the "mortician who discovers love after death" is fucking a corpse. And, like, if that situation had been a short story, I actually wouldn't have been mad at it? It starts off with him down on his luck, failed out of being a doctor, going to this backwater town to become their mortician after the last one died. Shenanigans happen and he finds out that the reason everyone is being so cold towards him is that his predecessor was a necrophiliac, which they discovered after a grieving mother opened a coffin and noticed her daughter's corpse had some, uh, stuff going on. So the mortician works to build his reputation back up and falls in love with a young woman, who later gets pneumonia, and the final arc is him nursing her back to health using some of his failed doctor skills. She asks for a kiss and they make love and then you realize that she actually died from the pneumonia and he's, you know. Doing the thing.

If that had been one complete little short story, I would still find it squicky but like, okay! It's a gothic story, squicky stuff happens, it's a good little contained tale of men not able to fucking contain themselves, I guess. But it CONTINUES with that same character, on the run after people realized he was also a necrophiliac (those poor people are never going to trust a mortician ever again), except now he's taking out his lust issues on sheep. So now we're covering bestiality, and apart from abusing the poor sheep in that way he also kills them afterward horrifically to make it look like wolves/coyotes got to them. I'm actually not entirely sure why he felt compelled to do that, because at this point I felt frustrated and tricked and stopped reading. Why would I want to know about this man? Why would I ever care what happens to him?

I don't expect formal trigger warnings but man not even the reviews mention anything! They're all like oh wow what a compelling gothic tale of tragedy and agoiphadsfgoh IT'S CORPSE-FUCKING AND SHEEP-FUCKING, Y'ALL, IT AIN'T THAT METAPHORICAL AND INTERESTING

#books2023

I guess I should also say I don't think those things should never be written about, but I certainly do not want to read about them and extra certainly do not want to follow along with a main character who partakes in them, and fuck you for playfully going "a mortician finds love after death" and meaning it in the most literal sense

anyways if my genre competition is that then I guess uhhh I at least have something new to bring to the party when I finish my book

Man, I feel like they shouldn't be coy about that one, I would also like to know what I was getting into up front there

mek wrote: ↑Thu Sep 07, 2023 8:47 pm

Man, I feel like they shouldn't be coy about that one, I would also like to know what I was getting into up front there

I'm still in awe of the reviews

Closer to 4 stars, this novel has some intriguing characters - some familiar to the western genre, and some remarkably original. Despite the creepy cover it is not a horror novel, but it's also not a stereotypical western. "Gothic" is a suitable descriptor. It is well-written, and yet at times the prose was too dreamy, too meandering, and too sleep-inducing. There is a dream-like quality to the whole book, though, so in that sense it works. All in all, an enjoyable out-of-print read worthy of hunting down for its uniqueness if nothing else.

how do you say all that and not mention the necrophilia and bestiality

Feeling a lot better, in general, this week!

I got most of my routines back in order, am eating actual food, keeping up with my daily exercise, etc. It's frustrating because I know those things make me feel better, but I also don't have the energy to do them when I'm danger low spell slots, so it ends up putting me into kind of a loop that can be hard to break. If you don't have the energy to take care of yourself, then you're not taken care of, which makes it harder to get any of that energy back and stop the cycle. Does that make sense? I don't know if that makes sense, but I was definitely stuck in that loop and had to finally break it by basically spending an entire weekend doing nothing but aggressively resting. (Which carries its own baggage, because then I'm "wasting" time off. Ugh!)

Anyways, I'm glad I'm on the upswing. I'mma sneak in a little bit of Baldur's Gate 3 while I finish my coffeedrank, then go about today's routines.

Friday equivalent!

Tomorrow is mine and Sophie's anniversary and I had planned on driving up to Milwaukee early in the morning to surprise her but there is a mixture of seasonal change flu stuff/COVID going around my office super hard, like half the office is out sick, and I'm feeling a bit sniffly so I decided to just wait it out. I'd feel awful if I brought her a bunch of germs right before she starts her new job, and anyways we have time planned later this month. So my big romantic gesture was ruined a bit, but that's okay, I think we're gonna spend some long distance time maybe starting a multiplayer Baldur's Gate campaign together or otherwise hanging out. Should be fun!

Okay lemme go grab some last minute groceries real quick (I am out of milk, RIP) annnnnd actually I guess that's the main thing I have to take care of this morning. Should probably go on a run, too.