ominousspectre's reviews
247 reviews

How did I know it had happened? Because of its absence now, because I still felt the loss of it, but I didn't know how to convey that to Borne then, because he had never lost anything. Not back then. He just kept accumulating, sampling, tasting. He kept gaining parts of the world, while I kept losing them.

Ugh, I love you, Jeffrey. Not everything he does is perfect of course, as no one is, but everything he does is in earnest.

It is so wild how a dystopian biotech novel can also be about the complicated nature of motherhood. My brain is teeming with Thoughts™

Rich kids are fucking crazy, dude

There are only two plots. You know them well: a person goes on a journey and a stranger comes into town.

Well I did not expect this one to make me cry a little!

5.0 for House of the Dead

What are we here for? We are not alive though we are living and we are not in our graves though we are dead.

Dostoevsky often makes me feel existential or disturbed, but this is the first time he's made me cry. 

3.5 for The Gambler

This one was good it just did nothing for me

D: <--- my reaction to that ending

Well I haven't had a good dose of sci-fi existentialism since I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream or watching Visitor to a Museum. I'll probably think about this for the rest of my life.

A wildly inventive tale of the power of indoctrination, all tied up into a mystery that you cannot see coming. There were a few eye rolling bits, but I love this story so much that I don't care!

I seem to have found myself in a rut with my book choices lately lol

So, I REALLY liked her world building. I knew I would, it's Octavia Butler for gods' sakes, but she really brought some novel lore to the vampire genre. I've put some more of her sci fi on my tbr as I think I'll enjoy it better. This one was odd because if I hadn't looked to see that this was her last published novel, I would've assumed it was her first.

She was exploring a lot of issues of agency/possession, racism, and relationships, but it felt like we never really dug into them fully. Racism went the deepest, but even then it felt like nothing was gained from it being there, it's just there.

The character of Wright was REALLY hard for me to read through. He is such an unlikeable, whiny little piss baby. And he brings me to my biggest struggle with the book, and why it's not a higher rating from me.

Shori's age situation. Not an uncommon critique. I understand that she's a vampire and they age slower, but she's at an age where it's okay to have sex from her people's perspective. I understand that feeding on humans comes with a sexual component, and I don't mind that on its own. 

But at the end of the day, she's in an 11 year old's body, and she's still considered a child by vampire standards. Mix in all of the sex along with Wright's possessiveness and his clear underlying racism/homophobia that's hinted at multiple times, and it all just made me feel gross. And dude clearly wanted to sleep with her before the whole biting part.

I was waiting for the ball to drop where she would come to this understanding about him, and it would tie all these themes together, but the story never does. We're just meant to accept and find him endearing even. It was very confusing.

I love some sexy vampire polyamory, but I couldn't enjoy any of it or explore the dynamics because it all just made me want to scrub my skin off. Is this what she wanted? Am I completely misunderstanding? And every time we kiss I swear I can fly? OCTAVIA

Prose: purple

Themes: heavy handed

I very much wanted to like this. If you showed the blurb to any of my friends, they'd immediately be like oh! This is so on brand for you, almost to a way that's borderline spooky. However, I hated the execution of this.

It's unfortunate because this is a very personal story to her as one side of her family is Jewish Ukrainian. She helps run the Lore podcast. Clearly she's done her research. There are good pieces in here (I loved the line from the villain that said, "I am not a what, I'm a when). But overall, I have a lot of issues with it.

The Longshadow man isn't even really an allegory for bigotry/white supremacy, because he just walks up to people and says alt right talking points at them for a few minutes until they commit a hate crime. I'm not kidding. It's very on the nose. Though the pipeline moves fast, it doesn't work THAT fast, so those scenes felt disingenuous.

What irked me the most was Baba Yaga reimagined as a Jewish Ukrainian in 1919. Nothing inherently wrong with that, I love folklore retellings or generally inspired things. But the connection of Baba Yaga basically stops at the name. She's just a woman who is sort of made fun of in town and given that nickname, and she then

experiences horrible violence very common of the Jewish experience during that time period. No explanation needed.

Nothing inherently wrong with that either, but otherwise, there's no tie in to any of the actual themes of Baba Yaga the original myth. I was expecting some sort of reclamation of the name and how she's a social outcast, a villain arc, SOMETHING, but there's nothing there.

I would've even accepted if we didn't know her name from the start, and it was revealed as the story went on as a sort of OH! That's why they inherited the chicken leg house! But as with the rest of the themes, it must be heavy handed. 

As a less serious aside: crazy how Isaac is a tit for tat self insert character I would've written in middle school. Not even kidding, younger me feels so called out. It's honestly very funny

"When the whole world hurts, you bite it, don't you?"

This book was very close to be in the 4 stars and above, as I loved the whole first half and enjoyed his colloquial writing style. The general theme of this book regarding loss of culture paired with the mistreatment of nature scratches a very specific itch for me.

What kept it from a higher rating is the addition of some characters in the second half that felt very flat, and the last 50 pages read really goofy for me. I can never take an otherworldly entity antagonist seriously once they start trying to be all I'm scary in a quirky 'I'm craaazzzyy' way. 

like girl you are a reincarnated elk hell bent on revenge, how on earth do you know how to play basketball?

Reading academic text from 1944 is always a weird mental exercise because you have to:

1. Take certain assumptions with a grain of salt and look into newer works to glean where corrections have been made
2. Eyebrow raise when they say certain things that are absolutely out of pocket

However, it's interesting to see where a lot of research regarding Sumerian myth started. I find Sumer in general really fascinating. The creation myth in particular really intrigued me, this idea of a primeval sea from which earth and heaven arose.

I did snort at the myth where Ninmah creates "six types of humans" and the author says one is 'sexless, perhaps an eunuch?' I'll be looking at newer translations promptly 

Quick, fun, ominous little read. I especially liked the story about the threatening cereal box bear that forces you to eat cereal lol

Favorites:
- Gnoshlox
- The bear one (doesn't have a typable title)
- First - this one hits a particularly relatable and existential note for me
- To Know You're Alive