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shadows of self
there were some days now between me finishing shadows of self and writing this review, on top of that the deeper i'm into a specific series, the more difficult it gets for me to not repeat myself, so this will be a short one.
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negative space
the setting of negative space is bleak: a slowly decaying town in new hampshire, a suicide epidemic, disaffected teens, a hallucinogenic drug that may or may not have actual supernatural components to it. the book follows three teens in rapidly switching first-person POVs, jill, ahmir and lu, charting the trajectories of their own lives as well as how these intersect with tyler, the fourth major character of negative space, whose point of view we are never privy to.
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serious weakness
i've been rotating this book in my mind for days now (technically i only finished it yesterday, but i've been actively seeking out other people's thoughts on it for a bit now and reflecting on it). where to even start? probably: if you ever want to read this, check the content warnings here and here. there's one very graphic rape scene here on top of a lot of torture, violence and further sexual assault.
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what feasts at night
what feasts at night is a sequel to what moves the dead, which is a loose retelling of poe's the fall of the house of usher, keeping the gothic horror and basic premise, but going wild on everything else from protagonist to resolution. the protagonist is alex easton, a retired non-binary soldier from the fictional eastern-ish european country of gallacia. what moves the dead initially endeared me a lot with its handling of (gender) identity, going so far as establishing a peculiar but very interesting ruleset of personal pronouns in the ruritanian language which intersects well with easton's personal identity. where dead was a re-telling of a classic gothic horror short story, night has a wholly original plot, although it does heavily feature folkloristic horror, specifically the concept of a moroi from romanian folklore (which shares some similarities with a nachtmahr).
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girl flesh
girl flesh describes itself as an extreme horror story about love. i suppose that this is an accurate one-sentence description of its mission statement and it mostly succeeds at being just that, despite being massively frustrating to me.
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