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Drive-by horror fanvid rec: Bloody Creature Poster Girl
Mar. 25th, 2026 10:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lucymonster[VID] Bloody Creature Poster Girl by
lucymonster[VID] Bloody Creature Poster Girl by
Today, I...
Mar. 22nd, 2026 06:52 pmraptureofthemoonWent for breakfast with Matt.
Did a mile and a half walk around the reservoir after breakfast.
Built a flower shop in Minecraft.
Did a mile and a half walk around the reservoir after breakfast.
Built a flower shop in Minecraft.
Got the first coat of Ocean Abyss on the walls and ceiling of the bathroom. Tried out the handmade stencil - it didn't do so hot. But I think it's a matter of not using the roller, since this stencil is flimsier than one you might buy and a roller is really going to smush paint underneath. So, a larger stencil brush is in my future. I also had the idea to stencil on pieces of wood (perhaps stained and then dry brushed to look worn) which could then be hung on the wall, which will save me both physical exertion and sanity and give the nautical theme I'm going for a bit more depth.
The first set of giclee prints (of the Edmund Fitzgerald) I ordered are all framed and ready to be hung. And I'm eyeballing a few others (the Lusitania, the Endurance stuck in ice, maybe a couple of Romantic takes on shipwrecks; I was wanting to go for depictions of real ships that sank, but...there are a few pieces calling my name.)
And I made dinner (a creamy chicken, rice, broccoli and sun dried tomato skillet). Well, dinner for tomorrow. Tonight I ate leftover ricotta and spinach stuffed shells that I made yesterday.
I don't know where this burst of energy came from, but I'll take it because I needed to make progress on the bathroom update.
My IT band is giving me little reminders that I'm still dealing with inflammation (exacerbated by contorting myself into a pretzel to paint behind the toilet), but so long as it's not aching tomorrow, I'm in the clear. And the glute...is doing good. The knot I'd been feeling prior to PT remains gone so I think I've done some basic restructuring on the tendons.
This is a reminder to myself that I need to at least do a few of the isometric exercises this evening.
And the question that remains is: will I have the energy to do the second (and hopefully final) coat of paint on the bathroom tomorrow and do it well?
Scary zombies, romantic zombies, and a romance novella with no zombies at all
Mar. 17th, 2026 09:41 pmlucymonster[REC] (2007): This is Spanish found footage horror about a zombie virus outbreak in an apartment complex, filmed by a TV reporting duo who get trapped in there while accompanying first responders for a workplace documentary feature. On the whole I thought it was well executed. The lead reporter went off the deep end and into "We have to film every second of this!!! We have to show them what's really happening!!!!!" territory faster than I thought was entirely convincing, but I was happy to write it off in-universe as her way of coping so that I could kick back and enjoy the grisly terror that ensued.
There are elements of the film that I have to imagine would have been more shocking pre-COVID. Locked inside your apartment building, you say? Prevented by police from seeking basic medical care and supplies, you say? Hazmat-suited biosafety officials roaming outside the window, you say? Well, we've all been there! But the zombies themselves were very scary, and the end scene with ( spoilers ) had me breathless.
Warm Bodies (2013): A zombie on the hunt for brains meets a girl out scavenging for medical supplies to take back to her walled city, and instead of falling to it, falls in love. The zombie (known only as R, since he can't remember his name or anything about his past life) saves her life (though only after eating her boyfriend) and decides he's going to help her: first by taking her home with him to shelter in the abandoned airport where he and the rest of the horde eke out their shuffling, groaning, flesh-hungry existence; then by escorting her back to the human settlement in safety. But connecting with her has set off some mysterious process inside him, and suddenly he and the other zombies all start to show signs of humanity again.
This was SO CUTE. I loved everything about R's point of view: his shrugging awkwardness, the warm-hearty-meal pleasure of eating brains, his craving for anything that made him feel alive, the things he was self-conscious about (don't stare, she'll think you're a weirdo!) vs the things he wasn't (being a horrific animated corpse - that's just his normal). There's nothing deep or complex going on in this movie at all, but it delivered exactly what I hoped for: the aesthetic trappings of a horror flick, the fluffy joy of a romcom, and the winking sense of humour of a genre-savvy story with no ambition to be anything other than fun.
Two Can Play by Ali Hazelwood: Now this is the Ali Hazelwood story (singular) I’m here for! Our love interest is a very tall, hung, professionally successful STEM genius (a video game designer, this time) and a staunch feminist ally; so staunch, in fact, that he has spent years marinating miserably in his secret love for the heroine rather than run even the faintest trace of a risk that she might, if she were to squint at his actions in the worst possible faith, feel sexually harassed by his approach. Thanks to the fastidious avoidance by which he has overcompensated for his attraction, the heroine has been convinced he hates her - right up until a forced proximity scenario (a mandatory work retreat, this time) exposes our love interest’s true feelings for the heroine and causes her to fall in love with him, too. Delicious.
I wish I could take this as a sign that Ali is returning to my preferred form after the great big bundle of Not My Thing that was her last full length novel, Problematic Summer Romance. Alas, this novella actually predates that; it has only just hit shelves in print, but it was released as an Audible exclusive back in 2024, and I ignored its existence until now because fuck Audible exclusives. So while I’m always holding out hope for more rehashes of this exact story, I dare not hope too highly. Ali’s next release could still end up being another "hot for big brother's friend" age gap kinkathon. Or another omegaverse. Maybe it’ll be age gap big brother's friend omegaverse! To whatever god/s or higher powers you acknowledge, please pray for me that it not be so.
There are elements of the film that I have to imagine would have been more shocking pre-COVID. Locked inside your apartment building, you say? Prevented by police from seeking basic medical care and supplies, you say? Hazmat-suited biosafety officials roaming outside the window, you say? Well, we've all been there! But the zombies themselves were very scary, and the end scene with ( spoilers ) had me breathless.
Warm Bodies (2013): A zombie on the hunt for brains meets a girl out scavenging for medical supplies to take back to her walled city, and instead of falling to it, falls in love. The zombie (known only as R, since he can't remember his name or anything about his past life) saves her life (though only after eating her boyfriend) and decides he's going to help her: first by taking her home with him to shelter in the abandoned airport where he and the rest of the horde eke out their shuffling, groaning, flesh-hungry existence; then by escorting her back to the human settlement in safety. But connecting with her has set off some mysterious process inside him, and suddenly he and the other zombies all start to show signs of humanity again.
This was SO CUTE. I loved everything about R's point of view: his shrugging awkwardness, the warm-hearty-meal pleasure of eating brains, his craving for anything that made him feel alive, the things he was self-conscious about (don't stare, she'll think you're a weirdo!) vs the things he wasn't (being a horrific animated corpse - that's just his normal). There's nothing deep or complex going on in this movie at all, but it delivered exactly what I hoped for: the aesthetic trappings of a horror flick, the fluffy joy of a romcom, and the winking sense of humour of a genre-savvy story with no ambition to be anything other than fun.
Two Can Play by Ali Hazelwood: Now this is the Ali Hazelwood story (singular) I’m here for! Our love interest is a very tall, hung, professionally successful STEM genius (a video game designer, this time) and a staunch feminist ally; so staunch, in fact, that he has spent years marinating miserably in his secret love for the heroine rather than run even the faintest trace of a risk that she might, if she were to squint at his actions in the worst possible faith, feel sexually harassed by his approach. Thanks to the fastidious avoidance by which he has overcompensated for his attraction, the heroine has been convinced he hates her - right up until a forced proximity scenario (a mandatory work retreat, this time) exposes our love interest’s true feelings for the heroine and causes her to fall in love with him, too. Delicious.
I wish I could take this as a sign that Ali is returning to my preferred form after the great big bundle of Not My Thing that was her last full length novel, Problematic Summer Romance. Alas, this novella actually predates that; it has only just hit shelves in print, but it was released as an Audible exclusive back in 2024, and I ignored its existence until now because fuck Audible exclusives. So while I’m always holding out hope for more rehashes of this exact story, I dare not hope too highly. Ali’s next release could still end up being another "hot for big brother's friend" age gap kinkathon. Or another omegaverse. Maybe it’ll be age gap big brother's friend omegaverse! To whatever god/s or higher powers you acknowledge, please pray for me that it not be so.
Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere
Mar. 16th, 2026 02:10 pmlucymonsterSo, just about everyone I know irl has been talking about this new Louis Theroux documentary in which he interviews manosphere influencers and tries to figure out what makes them tick.
I found it a worthwhile but frustrating watch. Frustrating not because of anything Theroux does - he is courteous and perceptive throughout, and imo strikes a very good balance between his moral obligation to challenge toxic rhetoric and his pragmatic need to be non-threatening so his subjects will keep talking - but frustrating because the whole topic is just so wretched, and because, as with all far right movements, there really is no mutual good-faith conversation to be had. The men who are profiting off the manosphere aren't interested in good faith. As this documentary exposes, they're barely even interested in their own professed ideology. The only thing they care about is making money, and they've learnt through experience that saying vile shit gets them attention they can cash in on. So it doesn't matter how much blatant bullshit you catch them out on. Bullshit is controversy, and controversy is attention, and attention is profit. Heads they win, tails you lose.
What I will say is that their "victory" is one of the most hollow things I've ever witnessed in my life. These influencers are spending their whole lives pumping iron, prowling the streets for "content", and making the shallowest possible small talk with parasocially overinvested strangers. Young men whose lives supposedly revolve around all the hot sex they're getting (that YOU could get too, if only you stopped making excuses for yourself and invested all the savings from your after-school McDonalds job in this crypto scam they're flogging!) are hosting pool parties for crowds of OnlyFans models just to sit in a corner glued to their phones, too busy keeping up with the tepid memes being spammed by teenage boys in their livestream chats to notice all the near-naked women flaunting tits and ass right in their faces. They brag about the freedom of not having to attend a nine-to-five job, but instead of answering to a traditional boss, they're instead beholden to fickle social media algorithms and the whims of attention-span-challenged audiences who require ever more extreme behaviour to keep them engaged. Like, fuck. I'd take a regular human manager any day of the week.
I will also say that the contrast between all these puffed-up, roided-out, hypermasculine peacocks and the polite, scrawny, middle-aged British man interviewing them was really something to behold. It was fragile overcompensation vs authentic self-confidence blown up to an almost cartoonish degree. I particularly enjoyed the little tongue-in-cheek sting at the end where Theroux, having been good-naturedly "humiliated" on the boxing arcade machine earlier in the documentary, got in one last make-up swing on his own that earned a far more impressive score. It was a very sly way of saying "See, I could hold my own in you guys' macho dick-waving contests if I wanted to! I just don't want to, because why the fuck would I?" and I love him for it.
I also love him for the compassion he was able to maintain towards the men he talked to, even and especially when they wanted to make it all into some him-vs-them fight for survival. Manosphere influencers are some of social media's lowest-hanging fruit in terms of hateability. Looking at the bright-eyed little boys they used to be and reflecting, with an open heart, on what went wrong in their lives to make a life of vapid and viciously competitive materialism look like something to aspire to is much less emotionally satisfying than fuming over their outrageous behaviour. But at some point I guess we just have to reflect anyway, because a whole new generation of bright-eyed little boys are being drawn in by this content before they've developed the critical thinking skills to resist it. Seeing that part - seeing crowds of boys whose voices had barely dropped yet flock to these jerks on the street - was more upsetting by far than anything the jerks themselves have ever said. Theroux didn't offer a solution and I sure as shit don't have one either, but at least making the effort to step outside the cycle of outrage seems as good a place as any to start.
I found it a worthwhile but frustrating watch. Frustrating not because of anything Theroux does - he is courteous and perceptive throughout, and imo strikes a very good balance between his moral obligation to challenge toxic rhetoric and his pragmatic need to be non-threatening so his subjects will keep talking - but frustrating because the whole topic is just so wretched, and because, as with all far right movements, there really is no mutual good-faith conversation to be had. The men who are profiting off the manosphere aren't interested in good faith. As this documentary exposes, they're barely even interested in their own professed ideology. The only thing they care about is making money, and they've learnt through experience that saying vile shit gets them attention they can cash in on. So it doesn't matter how much blatant bullshit you catch them out on. Bullshit is controversy, and controversy is attention, and attention is profit. Heads they win, tails you lose.
What I will say is that their "victory" is one of the most hollow things I've ever witnessed in my life. These influencers are spending their whole lives pumping iron, prowling the streets for "content", and making the shallowest possible small talk with parasocially overinvested strangers. Young men whose lives supposedly revolve around all the hot sex they're getting (that YOU could get too, if only you stopped making excuses for yourself and invested all the savings from your after-school McDonalds job in this crypto scam they're flogging!) are hosting pool parties for crowds of OnlyFans models just to sit in a corner glued to their phones, too busy keeping up with the tepid memes being spammed by teenage boys in their livestream chats to notice all the near-naked women flaunting tits and ass right in their faces. They brag about the freedom of not having to attend a nine-to-five job, but instead of answering to a traditional boss, they're instead beholden to fickle social media algorithms and the whims of attention-span-challenged audiences who require ever more extreme behaviour to keep them engaged. Like, fuck. I'd take a regular human manager any day of the week.
I will also say that the contrast between all these puffed-up, roided-out, hypermasculine peacocks and the polite, scrawny, middle-aged British man interviewing them was really something to behold. It was fragile overcompensation vs authentic self-confidence blown up to an almost cartoonish degree. I particularly enjoyed the little tongue-in-cheek sting at the end where Theroux, having been good-naturedly "humiliated" on the boxing arcade machine earlier in the documentary, got in one last make-up swing on his own that earned a far more impressive score. It was a very sly way of saying "See, I could hold my own in you guys' macho dick-waving contests if I wanted to! I just don't want to, because why the fuck would I?" and I love him for it.
I also love him for the compassion he was able to maintain towards the men he talked to, even and especially when they wanted to make it all into some him-vs-them fight for survival. Manosphere influencers are some of social media's lowest-hanging fruit in terms of hateability. Looking at the bright-eyed little boys they used to be and reflecting, with an open heart, on what went wrong in their lives to make a life of vapid and viciously competitive materialism look like something to aspire to is much less emotionally satisfying than fuming over their outrageous behaviour. But at some point I guess we just have to reflect anyway, because a whole new generation of bright-eyed little boys are being drawn in by this content before they've developed the critical thinking skills to resist it. Seeing that part - seeing crowds of boys whose voices had barely dropped yet flock to these jerks on the street - was more upsetting by far than anything the jerks themselves have ever said. Theroux didn't offer a solution and I sure as shit don't have one either, but at least making the effort to step outside the cycle of outrage seems as good a place as any to start.
Just shovelling horror movies into my mouth like popcorn at this point
Mar. 15th, 2026 07:47 pmlucymonsterMe when I catch my kids' cold: 🙁🤧
Me when my husband doesn't catch our kids' cold, meaning I get to spend like half the weekend watching horror movies in bed while he takes over the heavy-duty parenting: 😈😈😈😈😈
Get Out (2017): HOLY SHIT WOW OKAY. WOW. I confess to being surprised back in 2017 when the whole world suddenly started saying that Jordan Peele, who I knew only as one of the two guys who made silly skits about hats, was actually a huge horror genius. I get it now. This was absolutely terrifying, but in a way that feels very different from any of the other horror I've been binging over this last couple of months. It has all the cleverness and humour you'd expect from a career comedian turned wunderkind of elevated horror, coupled with villains who are straight-up bloodcurdling in their fetishistic admiration of Blackness and cold disregard for real Black lives.
Chris is a young Black photographer on a trip out of town to meet his white girlfriend's family for the first time. They present as stereotypical white Liberals: wealthy but self-effacing, welcoming but awkward, proud of their self-avowed colourblindness but incapable of meeting an actual Black person without being deeply weird about race. And of course, all those smiles and good intentions turn out to be a deliberate front: the Armitage family has a secret, incredibly sinister plot to acquire and exploit Black bodies, and Chris finds himself ensnared in it before he has time to realise his unease is a gut response to something much darker than a few fumbling microaggressions. This film blew my mind. It was scary, it was funny, it was FUN, and underneath all that it was an extremely clear-sighted callout of a kind of covert racism that almost a full decade later still often seems to get a pass.
The Conjuring (2013): I loved this! It's a straightforward haunted house/demonic possession type story - family moves into creaky old country house, bad supernatural things happen, demonologists come to the rescue with a terrifying climactic exorcism scene - but every part of it is executed to spooky perfection. It's aesthetically beautiful (of the several posters/covers, this one best captures the ~vibe imo), has a cast of likeable characters I was cheering for the whole time, and manages to sustain an immaculate atmosphere of paranormal suspense livened up with just a small handful of well-timed jumpscares. No complaints. Prime material for a semi-regular Halloween rewatch.
I've always found stories involving professional exorcists, paranormal investigators etc. oddly comforting, no matter how scary they try to be. I know I should be alarmed by the idea that the supernatural not only exists but is sufficiently widespread to have spawned a viable career path, but it's just so nice to think that if you're ever in a situation where traditional law enforcement fails you, there's some stake-wielding hero or beautiful clairvoyant or quietly powerful magic shop owner out there who will put their own life on the line to help you. It's even nicer in stories where the rules of Christian folklore apply, and you can cling to a crucifix or a bottle of holy water for protection during your hero's brief but unavoidable offscreen time. The Christians do very much have to be Catholic, though. This is theologically disappointing but aesthetically essential. Imagine if you were in one of these movies, cowering in some dark, haunted corner as you wait for your exorcist to arrive, and then in walks some Protestant fresh from his drab conference-hall worship centre wearing his clerical collar with jeans. Dude doesn't even know Latin, probably. He and the demon are going to have to communicate through Google Translate.
Paranormal Activity (2007): Katie has been experiencing terrors in the dead of night since she was eight years old. Her shitty boyfriend Micah, finding out about them after they move in together, decides to "help" her by treating the whole thing as a sleuthing game and antagonising the demon attached to her while filming the whole thing. This is some seriously stripped back horror: something like half the runtime is just footage of the couple sleeping, while the other half is an increasingly weary Katie begging Micah not to film her, all happening inside the same few rooms of a neat, modern, unremarkable suburban American house. And it is SCARY. It had me on tenterhooks the whole time, heart leaping into my throat with every footstep noise or flicker of shadow. The final shot almost had me out of my seat.
Unlike The Conjuring, there are no comforting demonologists to save the day here; they exist, but they're, like, super busy and can't help you. I think that part might actually have been even scarier than the demon.
A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984): A group of teens start having vivid nightmares about the same disfigured man with knives on his fingers; if he kills them in their dreams, they die in real life. Now, this one I definitely did watch back in high school! Almost none of it actually jogged my memory, though, besides the Freddy costume itself and the scene where he slits his abdomen to reveal all those maggots. Man, though, what a fun slasher. I'd forgotten how funny Freddy is, the way he does his murders like they're playful capers - and then how scary it is at the end, when he loses his temper at being bested by Nancy and that playfulness turns to unbridled rage.
Me when my husband doesn't catch our kids' cold, meaning I get to spend like half the weekend watching horror movies in bed while he takes over the heavy-duty parenting: 😈😈😈😈😈
Get Out (2017): HOLY SHIT WOW OKAY. WOW. I confess to being surprised back in 2017 when the whole world suddenly started saying that Jordan Peele, who I knew only as one of the two guys who made silly skits about hats, was actually a huge horror genius. I get it now. This was absolutely terrifying, but in a way that feels very different from any of the other horror I've been binging over this last couple of months. It has all the cleverness and humour you'd expect from a career comedian turned wunderkind of elevated horror, coupled with villains who are straight-up bloodcurdling in their fetishistic admiration of Blackness and cold disregard for real Black lives.
Chris is a young Black photographer on a trip out of town to meet his white girlfriend's family for the first time. They present as stereotypical white Liberals: wealthy but self-effacing, welcoming but awkward, proud of their self-avowed colourblindness but incapable of meeting an actual Black person without being deeply weird about race. And of course, all those smiles and good intentions turn out to be a deliberate front: the Armitage family has a secret, incredibly sinister plot to acquire and exploit Black bodies, and Chris finds himself ensnared in it before he has time to realise his unease is a gut response to something much darker than a few fumbling microaggressions. This film blew my mind. It was scary, it was funny, it was FUN, and underneath all that it was an extremely clear-sighted callout of a kind of covert racism that almost a full decade later still often seems to get a pass.
The Conjuring (2013): I loved this! It's a straightforward haunted house/demonic possession type story - family moves into creaky old country house, bad supernatural things happen, demonologists come to the rescue with a terrifying climactic exorcism scene - but every part of it is executed to spooky perfection. It's aesthetically beautiful (of the several posters/covers, this one best captures the ~vibe imo), has a cast of likeable characters I was cheering for the whole time, and manages to sustain an immaculate atmosphere of paranormal suspense livened up with just a small handful of well-timed jumpscares. No complaints. Prime material for a semi-regular Halloween rewatch.
I've always found stories involving professional exorcists, paranormal investigators etc. oddly comforting, no matter how scary they try to be. I know I should be alarmed by the idea that the supernatural not only exists but is sufficiently widespread to have spawned a viable career path, but it's just so nice to think that if you're ever in a situation where traditional law enforcement fails you, there's some stake-wielding hero or beautiful clairvoyant or quietly powerful magic shop owner out there who will put their own life on the line to help you. It's even nicer in stories where the rules of Christian folklore apply, and you can cling to a crucifix or a bottle of holy water for protection during your hero's brief but unavoidable offscreen time. The Christians do very much have to be Catholic, though. This is theologically disappointing but aesthetically essential. Imagine if you were in one of these movies, cowering in some dark, haunted corner as you wait for your exorcist to arrive, and then in walks some Protestant fresh from his drab conference-hall worship centre wearing his clerical collar with jeans. Dude doesn't even know Latin, probably. He and the demon are going to have to communicate through Google Translate.
Paranormal Activity (2007): Katie has been experiencing terrors in the dead of night since she was eight years old. Her shitty boyfriend Micah, finding out about them after they move in together, decides to "help" her by treating the whole thing as a sleuthing game and antagonising the demon attached to her while filming the whole thing. This is some seriously stripped back horror: something like half the runtime is just footage of the couple sleeping, while the other half is an increasingly weary Katie begging Micah not to film her, all happening inside the same few rooms of a neat, modern, unremarkable suburban American house. And it is SCARY. It had me on tenterhooks the whole time, heart leaping into my throat with every footstep noise or flicker of shadow. The final shot almost had me out of my seat.
Unlike The Conjuring, there are no comforting demonologists to save the day here; they exist, but they're, like, super busy and can't help you. I think that part might actually have been even scarier than the demon.
A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984): A group of teens start having vivid nightmares about the same disfigured man with knives on his fingers; if he kills them in their dreams, they die in real life. Now, this one I definitely did watch back in high school! Almost none of it actually jogged my memory, though, besides the Freddy costume itself and the scene where he slits his abdomen to reveal all those maggots. Man, though, what a fun slasher. I'd forgotten how funny Freddy is, the way he does his murders like they're playful capers - and then how scary it is at the end, when he loses his temper at being bested by Nancy and that playfulness turns to unbridled rage.
My Heart Is a Chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones
Mar. 15th, 2026 10:09 amlucymonster(Behold! A cute new ghost librarian icon for spooky reading specifically. I've uploaded some new horror movie themed icons, too. Gotta get the most out of my paid account.)
Seventeen-year-old Jade Daniels is a half-Blackfeet girl living with her abusive father in a small lakeside town in Idaho. Alienated and lonely, she retreats into slasher movies, fantasising vividly about a real-life slasher villain someday appearing to tear up the town she hates. But then a community of uberwealthy developers and media moguls move into a new luxury settlement in the national park across the lake, bringing with them a daughter Jade's age who turns out to be the perfect embodiment of the slasher genre's Final Girl archetype; bodies start washing up, killed in mysterious ways, and Jade becomes convinced that her fantasy is at last coming true.
This is - oh, man. I LOVED this book. Jones does not for one second allow the fact that he is a middle-aged man to interfere with the overwhelmingly authentic troubled-teenage-girlness of Jade as a protagonist. I know this girl. I'm friends with this girl. I literally went to school with this girl, or at least, a few different girls who add up to her. Her viewpoint is blinkered by all the petty adolescent foibles you'd expect as well as the much darker stuff, and it's a big source of poignancy that we as adult readers can see the very different version of events being experienced by the few adults who care about Jade and are trying to help her, but she cannot see it at all. She remains fervently committed to the world she has constructed for herself in a way only kids of this almost-worldly, I-know-it-all-now age can be - which makes it all the more impactful when she and the adults both turn out to be completely right, in ways that should be fundamentally incompatible but somehow aren't.
So, yeah. The character work and overall handling of narrative themes in this novel are among the best I've read in ages. I am therefore all the more inclined to nitpick its structural flaws, because (to reduce things to a simplified Goodreads rating system) I really badly wanted this to be a five-star book but could only in good faith award it four. Which still puts it well inside my "heartily recommend" bracket by any measure! If you haven't read it but think you might like to, please add my name to the list of people who've recced it to you and stop reading here. What follows will be both spoiler-riddled and comparatively far less important than the book's strengths.
( Major spoilers under the cut )
On the other hand, I don't know it's just because I acclimated myself to Jones' prose last year with The Only Good Indians, but I found this an easier, more aesthetically pleasing read. And the cover design is gorgeous in this very simple, distilled way that breezily outperforms many more elaborate confections. If I ever spot a copy of this book secondhand, I'm snapping it up because it will look lovely on my shelf, and also because I know it's one I'm going to want to read again down the line. I just love Jade so much.
Seventeen-year-old Jade Daniels is a half-Blackfeet girl living with her abusive father in a small lakeside town in Idaho. Alienated and lonely, she retreats into slasher movies, fantasising vividly about a real-life slasher villain someday appearing to tear up the town she hates. But then a community of uberwealthy developers and media moguls move into a new luxury settlement in the national park across the lake, bringing with them a daughter Jade's age who turns out to be the perfect embodiment of the slasher genre's Final Girl archetype; bodies start washing up, killed in mysterious ways, and Jade becomes convinced that her fantasy is at last coming true.
This is - oh, man. I LOVED this book. Jones does not for one second allow the fact that he is a middle-aged man to interfere with the overwhelmingly authentic troubled-teenage-girlness of Jade as a protagonist. I know this girl. I'm friends with this girl. I literally went to school with this girl, or at least, a few different girls who add up to her. Her viewpoint is blinkered by all the petty adolescent foibles you'd expect as well as the much darker stuff, and it's a big source of poignancy that we as adult readers can see the very different version of events being experienced by the few adults who care about Jade and are trying to help her, but she cannot see it at all. She remains fervently committed to the world she has constructed for herself in a way only kids of this almost-worldly, I-know-it-all-now age can be - which makes it all the more impactful when she and the adults both turn out to be completely right, in ways that should be fundamentally incompatible but somehow aren't.
So, yeah. The character work and overall handling of narrative themes in this novel are among the best I've read in ages. I am therefore all the more inclined to nitpick its structural flaws, because (to reduce things to a simplified Goodreads rating system) I really badly wanted this to be a five-star book but could only in good faith award it four. Which still puts it well inside my "heartily recommend" bracket by any measure! If you haven't read it but think you might like to, please add my name to the list of people who've recced it to you and stop reading here. What follows will be both spoiler-riddled and comparatively far less important than the book's strengths.
( Major spoilers under the cut )
On the other hand, I don't know it's just because I acclimated myself to Jones' prose last year with The Only Good Indians, but I found this an easier, more aesthetically pleasing read. And the cover design is gorgeous in this very simple, distilled way that breezily outperforms many more elaborate confections. If I ever spot a copy of this book secondhand, I'm snapping it up because it will look lovely on my shelf, and also because I know it's one I'm going to want to read again down the line. I just love Jade so much.
Madame Bovary
Mar. 14th, 2026 09:12 amlucymonsterIn the early part of the nineteenth century, Emma, a farmer's daughter from a tiny rural French village, consents to marry Charles Bovary, a cheerfully mediocre country doctor who fell in love with her while treating her father's broken leg. Emma has grown up an avid reader of romances and sentimental poetry; her head is full of passionate, idyllic expectations to which the humble realities of her life as Madame Bovary fail utterly to measure up. She sinks into a deep depression, spends profligately to assuage her existential boredom, and embarks on a series of adulterous affairs as she nurses an ever-deepening contempt for her adoring but unexciting husband.
I enormously enjoyed almost all of this book. I say "almost" because the ending was not enjoyable at all, but I admire and respect and agree with the way everything concluded even if it didn't exactly spark joy. Honestly, if there is such a thing as a perfect novel, this one might just be that; every part of it is executed smoothly, effectively and with magnificent literary flare.
I cannot overstate the loveliness of Flaubert's prose. I read it in English (the 1886 Eleanor Marx-Aveling version, specifically) but even in translation it was impossible not to appreciate how clean and finely tuned the use of language is. There's a cinematic quality to everything, a vivid precision, that fills each scene to bursting with evocative imagery but never once tips over into excess. The writing is also unflaggingly witty and wry, but in an understated way, not harsh or cynical; Madame Bovary receives no quarter for her terrible decisions but I also never felt like Flaubert lacked compassion for her.
On the contrary, her downfall arises from the most painfully human emotional state: she takes for granted what she has, and exaggerates the value of what she doesn't. The life Emma Bovary was born to was one of comfortable ordinariness: she is secure but not wealthy, clever but not brilliant, loved warmly and unconditionally but without passion. But her peaceful life is worthless to her, and the idea of happiness being derived from within never even seems to occur to her. She craves drama, romance, specialness, and feels hard done by when life fails to deliver it to her. She attributes her feelings of emptiness and dissatisfaction to some inadequacy of her life circumstances: if she only possessed XYZ trappings of wealth, or if only a suitably passionate lover arrived to sweep her off her feet, all her misery would evaporate and she'd finally experience true happiness. And when the expensive goods and the torrid affairs fail to make her happy, instead of realising the fundamental flaw in her philosophy, she doubles down harder and keeps chasing that next, bigger, stronger hit that will surely satisfy her hunger at last.
Flaubert is extremely funny about the disconnect between Madame Bovary's pretensions and her material life circumstances. I want to quote the whole several pages in which a lover's impassioned declarations to her are interwoven with the proceedings of a local agricultural fair going on outside the window of their love-nest, but I'll satisfy myself with this short excerpt:
The whole book is in this tone, more or less. It's utterly delightful.
I enormously enjoyed almost all of this book. I say "almost" because the ending was not enjoyable at all, but I admire and respect and agree with the way everything concluded even if it didn't exactly spark joy. Honestly, if there is such a thing as a perfect novel, this one might just be that; every part of it is executed smoothly, effectively and with magnificent literary flare.
I cannot overstate the loveliness of Flaubert's prose. I read it in English (the 1886 Eleanor Marx-Aveling version, specifically) but even in translation it was impossible not to appreciate how clean and finely tuned the use of language is. There's a cinematic quality to everything, a vivid precision, that fills each scene to bursting with evocative imagery but never once tips over into excess. The writing is also unflaggingly witty and wry, but in an understated way, not harsh or cynical; Madame Bovary receives no quarter for her terrible decisions but I also never felt like Flaubert lacked compassion for her.
On the contrary, her downfall arises from the most painfully human emotional state: she takes for granted what she has, and exaggerates the value of what she doesn't. The life Emma Bovary was born to was one of comfortable ordinariness: she is secure but not wealthy, clever but not brilliant, loved warmly and unconditionally but without passion. But her peaceful life is worthless to her, and the idea of happiness being derived from within never even seems to occur to her. She craves drama, romance, specialness, and feels hard done by when life fails to deliver it to her. She attributes her feelings of emptiness and dissatisfaction to some inadequacy of her life circumstances: if she only possessed XYZ trappings of wealth, or if only a suitably passionate lover arrived to sweep her off her feet, all her misery would evaporate and she'd finally experience true happiness. And when the expensive goods and the torrid affairs fail to make her happy, instead of realising the fundamental flaw in her philosophy, she doubles down harder and keeps chasing that next, bigger, stronger hit that will surely satisfy her hunger at last.
Flaubert is extremely funny about the disconnect between Madame Bovary's pretensions and her material life circumstances. I want to quote the whole several pages in which a lover's impassioned declarations to her are interwoven with the proceedings of a local agricultural fair going on outside the window of their love-nest, but I'll satisfy myself with this short excerpt:
'Thus we,' he said, 'why did we come to know one another? What chance willed it? It was because across the infinite, like two streams that flow but to unite, our special bents of mind had driven us towards each other.'
And he seized her hand; she did not withdraw it.
'For good farming generally!' cried the president.
'Just now, for example, when I went to your house-'
'To Monsieur Bizat of Quincampoix-'
'Did I know I should accompany you?'
'Seventy francs.'
'A hundred times I wished to go; and I followed you - I remained.'
'Manures!'
'And I shall remain tonight, tomorrow, all other days, all my life!'
'To Monsieur Caron of Argueil, a gold medal!'
The whole book is in this tone, more or less. It's utterly delightful.
New Contrapoints video about the Saw franchise :D
Mar. 13th, 2026 07:24 amlucymonsterContrapoints has released a new video essay! It's about Saw! Much shorter than her usual, but filled with all the same tongue-in-cheek cleverness and philosophising and wild tangents and running jokes. And, of course, costume porn. For this video she has messed up her hair and makeup and wrapped herself in barbed wire, and guys, it is doing things to me. I knew I admired Contrapoints but I didn't know I was hot for Contrapoints. Turns out I very much am hot for Contrapoints, at least when she does herself up like she's just escaped a Saw trap. Damn.
Anyway, watching this was a kind of DIY exposure therapy for me, lol. The Saw franchise is pretty much the reason I spent all these years thinking of myself as Not A Horror Person. I'd been really enjoying my forays into the genre in my mid/late teens, until my then-gf and I decided to host an overnight Saw marathon for all our other edgelord friends. I think I actually quite liked the first one. But we kept going (this was the late 2000s, there were already five or six of them by this point), and we were tipping into the early hours of the morning when I'm prone to feeling queasy anyway, and I was very tired and probably a bit drunk, and I remember falling into this awful half-doze where I could still hear all the screams and gory squelches coming from the TV set. At one point I came fully awake to a conveyor belt full of rotting pig carcasses getting splattered all over everything for some reason? It was the exact kind of gross that I like least in the world, and my sleep-soggy brain was not equipped to handle it. But of course I was a teenage edgelord surrounded by all her edgelord friends, so I still did not stop watching. But from then on, when I thought of horror movies, I thought of that night, and the association made the whole genre feel nauseating.
(I want to be strictly fair to Saw here: my mental health deck was also stacked against it. Around the same time period, for unrelated reasons, my needle phobia really kicked into overdrive and my vasovagal response was expanding to trigger on all sorts of other unpredictable forms of gore; since it was so hard to guess which sights of blood would be harmless and which would set off a fainting spell, I became really avoidant of violent movies in general.)
I'm definitely not at a point in my horror (re)discovery journey yet where I want to rewatch Saw. Maybe someday I'll be desensitised enough, or maybe I will always be a bit too squeamish. But watching a gorgeous woman draped in elaborate barbed wire jewellery talk about Saw is much more in my wheelhouse. Also she has made me want to watch a bunch of Quentin Tarantino movies, which is not specifically what I expected from a video titled "Saw", but this is Contrapoints so there's always some kind of massive tangent you could never have guessed from the title that ends up swallowing half the runtime. And that's why we love her.
Anyway, watching this was a kind of DIY exposure therapy for me, lol. The Saw franchise is pretty much the reason I spent all these years thinking of myself as Not A Horror Person. I'd been really enjoying my forays into the genre in my mid/late teens, until my then-gf and I decided to host an overnight Saw marathon for all our other edgelord friends. I think I actually quite liked the first one. But we kept going (this was the late 2000s, there were already five or six of them by this point), and we were tipping into the early hours of the morning when I'm prone to feeling queasy anyway, and I was very tired and probably a bit drunk, and I remember falling into this awful half-doze where I could still hear all the screams and gory squelches coming from the TV set. At one point I came fully awake to a conveyor belt full of rotting pig carcasses getting splattered all over everything for some reason? It was the exact kind of gross that I like least in the world, and my sleep-soggy brain was not equipped to handle it. But of course I was a teenage edgelord surrounded by all her edgelord friends, so I still did not stop watching. But from then on, when I thought of horror movies, I thought of that night, and the association made the whole genre feel nauseating.
(I want to be strictly fair to Saw here: my mental health deck was also stacked against it. Around the same time period, for unrelated reasons, my needle phobia really kicked into overdrive and my vasovagal response was expanding to trigger on all sorts of other unpredictable forms of gore; since it was so hard to guess which sights of blood would be harmless and which would set off a fainting spell, I became really avoidant of violent movies in general.)
I'm definitely not at a point in my horror (re)discovery journey yet where I want to rewatch Saw. Maybe someday I'll be desensitised enough, or maybe I will always be a bit too squeamish. But watching a gorgeous woman draped in elaborate barbed wire jewellery talk about Saw is much more in my wheelhouse. Also she has made me want to watch a bunch of Quentin Tarantino movies, which is not specifically what I expected from a video titled "Saw", but this is Contrapoints so there's always some kind of massive tangent you could never have guessed from the title that ends up swallowing half the runtime. And that's why we love her.