Dobes Zone

       I realized, to my slight shame, that I never finished writing this review for The Island of Dr. Moreau, a book that I read months ago for the first ever assignment for the book club I'm running. So far we've also read Watership Down , Under the Skin, The Lives of the Monster Dogs, and now Cycle of the Werewolf! I'll have to write my reviews for the other books as well, but one step at a time I suppose.     I'd read a fair bit of H. G. Wells as a kid, being a huge sci-fi fiend and also a precocious early reader that got into a lot of heavier adult books while my peers were still on middle grade or YA books. I'd dug into War of the Worlds and The Time Machine but somehow had missed The Island of Doctor Moreau the first time around. If you've seen any of the movie adaptations, you might be lulled into the idea that you already know the story, but the book offers a lot more complexity and nuance than a lot of film adaptations are able to accommodate...

 Recently I finished reading Baise-Moi, the controversial French novel by author Virginie Despentes (who also co-directed the film adaptation which was initially banned in France!) for the other book club I'm in. I hadn't seen the film yet and was unsure of how I'd respond to the book given its reputation- but as heavy as it gets, there's something grimly humorous and very cathartic about it. It is also, without a doubt, an incredibly feminist novel, which makes the experience very different. --- Just a heads up, my review involves discussions of rape and sexual violence, though not in graphic detail. The book is pretty intense!     Two women end up going on a rampage of murder and theft after life pushes them to a breaking point. The story follows each woman up to said breaking point and to their chance encounter, wherein they find each other to be kindred spirits. Both girls are from poor working class neighborhoods and are deeply interested in filth and self indul...

      I'm dusting the cobwebs off my blog, realizing that I had a couple unfinished book reviews waiting for me, I still have a couple on the backburner and yet here I am working on a new review. I'd previously reread A Clockwork Orange and also read Phantom of the Opera as well as The Island of Doctor Moreau for the first time. For the book club I'm running myself, we just wrapped up Watership Down by Richard Adams. This was a reread for me and also was a childhood favorite. It's the kind of book that a kid with a certain type of brain gets sucked into. Admittedly Watership Down was an obsession for me for a while. I read this wonderful illustrated edition of Watership Down which includes paintings by Aldo Galli in glossy inserts. Good stuff.       Revisiting as an adult, I can really appreciate why this particular book has had such staying power. Along with being just a fantastic and epic tale, Watership Down is also impeccably researched both f...

       It seems that this year has been a good time to catch up on classics. A few months back I dipped into two classics for two different book clubs, the first being Phantom of the Opera.        The Phantom of the Opera is a story I'm well familiar with from both various movie adaptations and it's long-staying effects on popular culture. Surprisingly, I'd never actually read the book despite plowing through other gothic and horror classics like Dracula and Frankenstein as a kid. What I didn't expect and found myself pleasantly surprised by is how exciting and funny this book actually is.     The format of the story is one I'm fond of, it's presented as a historical work, a piecing together of different accounts, news, letters and papers that answer the question of a mysterious disappearance at the Paris Opera House. Both impeccably researched about its setting and having lot of details grounding it in the Paris, it works well as a...

     I read The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek for the fab book club hosted by Annie Rose of the podcast Girls Guts Giallo and it was definitely one of the more challenging books. Stylistically, the text is quite dense and layered, flowing from one metaphor to another and shifting seamlessly between perspectives of omniscient narrator and different characters. Structurally it takes a very different approach to story-telling, though the events are all quite linear and easy to follow. Aside from its dense and descriptive nature, I actually found the actual content of the book more challenging than the style, which is used to intensify the emotional experience of the text.     Erika Kohut is a talented pianist in Vienna who never made it big in her field. Instead she teaches piano for a living and has a repressed and very controlled homelife with her domineering mother. The relationship between mother and mid-30s daughter is a very toxic and codependent one...

 Kindred by Octavia E Butler is an incredibly heavy book and perhaps the one that the author is best known for. It's the kind of book that definitely is important while being unpleasant, gripping and utterly terrifying. If you want to read sci-fi/fantasy that's socially relevant, it's something I'd consider essential reading. Not my own copy, just the first edition cover which I like better than the edition from the library. Laughing at the Harlan Ellison quote though, cruel yes, sensual? No.       In Kindred, Dana, a black woman living in 1976, finds herself spontaneously traveling back through time to rescue a white boy from drowning in the river, and then again to save the boy from a fire he'd started in his room. On this second visit she pieces together that this boy is her ancestor and he is somehow calling her to him in times of danger. Dana has to protect Rufus, her ancestor, in order to assure that her own family and existence is preserved. Most horrifyi...

      It's been a while since I wrote a review, mostly because life has been busy with other (significantly positive!) things. As before, this is reading done with the Girls Guts Giallo book club, which is one of the many benefits subscribers get from the patreon page.      Now, I probably won't be shocking anyone with a review where I say that I liked The Hellbound Heart and think it's very good- it's Clive Barker and his work rules- but I do think that it's worth talking about since more people are likely familiar with Hellraiser and its subsequent franchise than the novella that spawned it. My copy of The Hellbound Heart. Had to splurge for the good book cover.     Barker's writing is both luscious and evocative while being highly consumable, a style that is blunt but artful, descriptive without being stuffy. It's exactly the kind of writing you easily devour in an evening or two, which I did. It's fun how even the descriptions of g...

       Octavia E Butler really is one of those authors whose work is impossible to put down once you pick it up. I read Fledgling as part of my book club (a special benefit for those supporting the excellent Girls Guts Giallo Patreon ) and it was almost impossible to not zoom through the book in a couple evenings. World building and exposition in sci fi and fantasy stories can really be make or break with how they're handled, and even quite skilled authors can lose me a little when they get lost in the reeds dumping a ton of info about the politics, culture, etc about a fictional world or people. A lot of the brilliance of Fledgling is how effortlessly Butler leads us into the world of vampires and making things like their customs, their biology (and even court proceedings) unfold in a way that's natural and riveting for the reader. Her style is sharp, precise and highly digestible while dealing with difficult concepts that have multiple interconnecting layers. ...

       My choice to read Swordspoint by Ellen Kushner started with my desire to re-read The Fall of the Kings, a book that I happened to pick up randomly at a book outlet when I was maybe 12 or 13. At this same outlet I'd also picked up Katie Waitman's The Merro Tree as well as The Essential Bordertown: A Traveler's Guide to the Edge of Faerie- a collection of short stories about the human world and the elfin world connecting. At this age I was totally rabid for anything SF/F and often brought home huge hauls of books from library book sales, where you could fill a bag for a couple dollars on the final days of the sale. It should probably surprise no one that a lot of my experiences with these books were formative and were some of my earliest experiences with queerness. Generally I was reading books that were only aimed at adults for the most part since I didn't really *do* YA except when I was quite little- barring some obvious furry bait choices like Redwall. The F...

       I should start this review by mentioning that I would never even have heard of Andrei Codrescu's Blood Countess if not for the Girls Guts Giallo book club. If you support the podcast on patreon , you get access to curated weekly movie screenings, a fun discord server, and a book club! I've never been a part of a book club before and having one hosted by and joined by smart, funny, insightful queer folks has been an invaluable experience. If you like subversive film, kink and queer horror you'll love Annie's podcast and the inclusive community she's building. I've learned so much about weird and beautiful works and a lot about theory from listening and participating in her spaces. I'm not being paid to promote this, it's just something that's been meaningful and a source of joy for me, especially when the broader online conversation about art tends to be really reductive, skittish about sex and taboo, and moralistic to a degree that creators ge...

     Mild spoilers ahead. More focused on themes than plot beats or infodumps about the characters though.        It's been too long since I've written a book review and I wanted to get in depth about an interesting book from a contemporary author. Manhunt by Gretchen Felker-Martin is a book that takes on the tired trope of "what if only women survived an apocalyptic event" and revitalizes it with a transgender perspective. Considering that there were recent attempts to make a TV series out of Y The Last Man , a story which trots out this premise about "biological" sex that's been fucking tired since the 70s, it feels very necessary to have a trans take on the subject. I find too with a lot of SF/F (which is often adjacent or overlapping with horror) that a lot has absolutely regressed in the contemporary despite claiming some very by-the-numbers elements of progressiveness.      And I should note, regarding the 70's, James Tiptree Jr...