#I looked up Ruthnum's biography and think he's cis but I could be wrong! Helpmeet does some fascinating things with gender in any case

[mumblingsage]

The nights are falling earlier, spoopy season approaches and I am reading horror novels!

Anyway, add Naben Ruthnum's Helpmeet to the pile beside Alien for "Pregnancy and other body autonomy metaphor so solid I'm pleasantly surprised this was written/directed by a cis man" and also to the pile with Queen of Teeth for "I guess I like body horror after all? At least when it's romantic?"

And I should also get a pile going for...well it'd be kind of a spoiler but it turns out to be another favorite horror trope of mine. Let's say, as vaguely as possible, "polite monsters."

Of course body autonomy is an issue of importance to all genders, and on that note Norman Partridge's Dark Harvest is another solid short novel/novella that I want to describe as "Shirley Jackson's 'The Lottery' but probably as a metaphor about the Vietnam War, also with way more Halloween candy flavoring." Got me crying at the end, so I'll forgive that some of the logistics of how this town operates weren't as developed as I'd want (it'd be nitpicky to list them but at I did consciously have to go "Okay I'm see we're following the Rule of Cool/Emotionally Resonant here and I'll run with it") and frankly that the ending felt like a relief but also a cop-out from where I thought things were going (in a way that developing some of the logistics of how the town was run would have moderated, though I suppose there would also be a risk of turning a chapter or two into a more explicit treatise on the book's themes: what "this town goes to hell" looks like is very different for a man in power than for anyone else).