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Finished both the Gutenberg ebook and the Audible drama! The latter is pretty abridged, but still great fun, and the cast are fantastic. Listen with headphones though, because there are some pretty sensuous sapphic groans and moans from Carmilla in particular. I liked the story, it was decently spooky and I liked the climactic image of the coffin filled with blood - yuck! Very neat stuff.
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Oct 10, 2022 09:04
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I really should read that Calvino. I skimmed it in secondary school but never actually got into it.
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Nov 6, 2022 10:03
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New year sounds like the perfect time for taking a fresh look at ourselves and those around us. That's why I recommend Carl Wilson, Let's Talk about Love: Why Other People Have Such Bad Taste .
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Dec 14, 2022 18:00
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All Tomorrows or Steppenwolf would both be cool ways to start the year!
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Dec 27, 2022 08:47
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Three months of daily updates that start "Hey what up fam, me and my boy out here in the Sierra Morena"
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Aug 17, 2023 08:11
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BOO! It's the poll for October's horror-themed BOTM! A wide range of different genres and themes to choose from. Vote early and vote often, tell all your friends, let's pick a great one for next month!
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Sep 25, 2023 04:26
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The votes are in, and our BOTM for October will be... Camp Damascus, by Chuck Tingle! What happens when an enigmatic writer known for bizarre short-form gay pornography becomes a cult sensation? Rising from obscurity through outrageously strange butt-centric erotica, Tingle's idiosyncratic style and boundless positivity have led to (among other things) two podcasts, a controversial Hugo Award nomination, and even an FMV adventure game (that sadly never materialised).  For Chuck Tingle, this newfound fame was a chance to turn his hand to exploring the darker sides of sexuality, and the kind of people who seek to suppress it. After two entries in his Harriet Porber series (which combines trans liberation with dinosaurs to spite everyone's least favourite wizard-book lady) and a horror novella, Straight, about the violence of heterosexuality. Now, in his latest novel, Tingle plies his talents to a story set in the grim and all-too-real world of Christian fundamentalism. quote:From beloved internet icon Chuck Tingle, Camp Damascus is a searing and earnest horror debut about the demons the queer community faces in America, the price of keeping secrets, and finding the courage to burn it all down. quote:Rose Darling is about to graduate from high school. She’s a little older than some of the other kids, because she’s part of a fundamentalist church called The Kingdom of The Pine that has its younger members do a few dedicated years of service work scattered across their teens. Rose loves being a member of the Kingdom. She knows a Bible verse for every occasion, she knows that the only real superhero is Jesus, and she knows that the Kingdom’s Camp Damascus, the “most effective ex-gay ministry on the planet” has a 100% success rate. Camp Damascus is available from bookshops, in audiobook form (read by Mara Wilson), and is almost certainly at your local library. Read As Thou Wilt, share your thoughts here, and remember: Love Is Real!!! EDIT: Yeah go and do this also VVVVVVVVVVV Gertrude Perkins fucked around with this message at 05:42 on Oct 2, 2023 |
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Oct 1, 2023 21:15
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So I'm halfway through and I'm very impressed. I knew Tingle had skills but it really is impressive how this is unmistakably him and yet the setting and the tone are so different. And yet they're not completely different - so many of his stupid porn stories were about people's repressed longings manifesting as strange and supernatural beings, so why not turn that into an earnest exploration of the ways evangelical bigotry enforces that repression? Featuring some really nasty parenting stuff that so far has not failed to make my skin crawl. I want to pace myself but I also want to finish it tomorrow, you know?
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Oct 7, 2023 09:08
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So I finished CD a few days ago and have been digesting my thoughts before posting this. First impressions were extremely good - it's clear Tingle is coming from a place of deep and desperate empathy for victims of evangelism and that small-town oppression that can envelop a person's entire life. The scares were properly scary, the mystery unravelled at a pace that I found really satisfying. And the whole sequence with the demons and the car crash and the fire was really gripping. And the last time she sees her mother, who gives her an out, despite having been complicit in her indoctrination...that hit pretty hard. And then she escapes! And she meets Luke! Who seems pretty cool! And things from that point are a little too easy for me, a little too revenge-empowerment-fantasy. The horrible secrets at the heart of the camp, the lab and everything, that's all properly grisly and skin-crawling. But by the third act I didn't feel like the characters were at risk of failing. So even though the ending was really fun, it didn't give me the kind of catharsis that I'd expected. But then, I was lucky enough not to be raised particularly religious, and to not be treated badly by my family for my queerness. So there are parts of the story and the traumas Tingle depicts that just aren't going to resonate with me the same way.
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Oct 15, 2023 03:16
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Pounded In The Butt By Christian Deathcore Jams
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Oct 16, 2023 00:22
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I do now want to read the rest of his longer-form writing - I hear the Harriet Porber, Trans Wizard books are actually pretty fun beyond the premise. More Chuck on the horizon is very exciting.
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Oct 26, 2023 04:08
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Thank you for letting me run our Halloween spookbook! I will try and get a copy of this month's because I really bloody like LeGuin but haven't read Rocannon's World yet.
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Nov 2, 2023 07:47
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 I'm halfway through Mammoth, by Chris Flynn, one of my TBBSS books. It's interesting and also kind of annoying - will post my full thoughts once I've finished it.
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Jan 14, 2024 22:44
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This month I read Mammoth, by Chris Flynn. This was a Secret Santa gift from the lovely NTRabbit, who assured me it was "weird Astralian fiction", and it is exactly that. The premise won me over to begin with: the spirit of a mammoth skeleton tells the story of his life and "fossilife" to an assortment of other museum pieces as they wait to be sold at auction. Thirteen thousand years of storytelling? In 256 pages, that's ambitious. But of course it's actually thick snippets of life and fossilife, mostly from the mammoth, but also from his companions. I don't think Flynn quite delivers on the promise of the premise (say that five times fast), but there are some great parts to this. I enjoyed the mammoth (Mammut)'s life story, his community and culture, and the skirmishes and rivalries with the incipient Clovis culture of hominids. The mammoth's narrative style is melancholic and occasionally florid, which seems to fit the idea of an immense, ancient, wise species. The voices of the other characters are less enjoyable, unfortunately. There's a Tyrannosaurus bataar, whose impatience and pop culture references get old quickly, despite his pleasant, enthusiastic carnivore mindset. His own story is fun, and then he serves mostly to interrupt the main narrative from Mammut. And others who appear later are even more thinly sketched: an ancient penguin, what might be Hapshetsut, and a pterodactyl. They might have more going on but beyond introductions and a sense of mutual respect/tolerance they end up crowding things. An occasionally bickering chorus that serve as joke delivery mechanisms in what becomes a sadly unfunny book. It's a shame, as the story constantly hits little traffic jams of "There's no way you could have known that!" which get tiresome fast. Mammut's story itself starts again with his being unearthed in 18th-Century America, and follows two pairs of unlikely heroes: the first, sons and amateur archaeologists intent on bringing the mammoth skeleton to France to demonstrate the young nation's prowess and rich history; the second, an Irish brother and sister who want to use the stolen bones to sell and support the nationalist cause against the British. The aforementioned interruptions mean that even the more interesting passages keep stopping and starting in ways that took me right out of the experience. Twice I left the book just sitting for a week before delving back in, a very slow experience. Again, there are some really good moments, like an encounter with Georges Cuvier or a disastrous trail into the American West, but none of it was allowed to grab me. The tone, as a result, is strange. There are so many moments of sadness, hopelessness, determination in the face of failure. Humanity en masse is portrayed as cruel, stupid, ignorant, callous, selfish, which are all fine of course, but it takes on a level of sarcastic resignation...until the end. The last parts of the book, the end of Mammut's story and an intercession by the author himself, are properly good, interesting, bizarre and hopeful in ways that the rest of the novel fails to be. I was left puzzled as to why Flynn would sabotage the rest of the book with so many irritating moments and failed comedy. Maybe it was to add levity to a series of sad narratives that end in violence and destruction, or maybe it was to give the sincerity of the ending more weight by contrast. I wish this book had let me enjoy it more. I feel disappointed, but also I know a lot of people who might totally love it. So maybe if it becomes BOTM everyone else will like it, and I will be the fool.
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Jan 30, 2024 09:05
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Orlando is great, folks, read it read it read it
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Feb 1, 2024 22:50
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| # ¿ May 9, 2024 10:32 |
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What a good book! Great choice, voters!
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Mar 2, 2024 09:22
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