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Kat

koosli@outside.ofa.dog

Joined 11 months, 4 weeks ago

aka @koosli@aus.social. I'm almost exclusively reading horror fiction, truly the greatest of genres.

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2024 Reading Goal

Success! Kat has read 26 of 20 books.

Leave the World Behind (Hardcover, 2020, Ecco) 3 stars

Amanda and Clay head out to a remote corner of Long Island expecting a vacation: …

Travel Scrabble, Death?

2 stars

I think we're at the point where US writers are just having a lacklustre wank and idly fantasising about the end of the world. Leave The World Behind sets itself up for some interpersonal drama mixed with race and class politics but then doesn't do much with it. It's mundane, what appears to be a deliberate choice, and with the barest of efforts concludes that society is a myth and having faith in institutions is naïve. So you better go fend for yourselves, kiddies.

I suppose in this sense this book is very much of its time, at least if you're from the US. So bored with being "the leader of the free world" or whatever nonsense and can't be stuffed trying anymore. May as well participate in (and let's be real, cause) an apocalyptic war?

Time to avoid US authors and eschatological themes for a while I reckon!

Nothing But Blackened Teeth (Hardcover, 2021, Tor Nightfire) 4 stars

Cassandra Khaw's Nothing But Blackened Teeth is a gorgeously creepy haunted house tale, steeped in …

Teeth

4 stars

I like Cassandra Khaw. Their other book I read was a little bit fantasy in terms of world-building but this one gives us characters inhabiting the same world we do. It's an intensely visual book, which is often an approach I struggle to connect with, but it this case it really worked for me. The visuals are all about the mansion, its contents and the motifs on its surfaces. The horror is folkloric, the story pretty simple but played out effectively. Khaw writes so well, poetic and deliberate. I'd love to read a full length novel of theirs at some point.