#immersion because it is constantly reminding you this is happening in a fictional fantasy world

[eosofspades]

my hottest writing take is that if your character writing is good enough i literally do not care about how detailed or significant the worldbuilding is. the reason tiktok trope-list books suck isn't inherently because they lack worldbuilding it's because the character writing is bad

[alexsfictionaddiction]

Alex Recommends: November Books

I’m delighted to report that November has been a quiet, chilled month. That’s exactly what I’ve needed before the hecticness that will be December. I’ve had plenty of work to do recently but in terms of travel and social occasions, it has been thin on the ground and I’ve fully embraced that!

The cold is setting in here and I’ve been cosying up with Christmas films and TV shows. This is my favourite time of year and I’m determined to make the most of it by indulging in all my favourite things. I’m very happy to have got most of my Christmas shopping done already, so I do feel that I can fully relax properly and enjoy the season now.

November was the month that I somehow managed to reach the 200 books read mark for 2021. I’ve never read that much in a single year (and there’s still a month to go!) but I am really proud of myself. I’ve read an amazing variety of genres and cultures too, so I’m hoping this is something I’ll be able to continue into 2022. I’ve been approved for many 2022 releases that sound amazing, so I can’t wait to start reviewing them for you!

Here are five books that I’ve enjoyed this month that I think you will too. Stock up on these fantastic stories and give your loved ones the best gifts you possibly can this Christmas -books!

-Love, Alex x

FICTION: We Are Not Like Them by Christine Pride and Jo Piazza.

Riley and Jen have been best friends since they were children. Now as adults, Riley is a single Black woman and successful broadcaster on a national TV network while Jen is finally pregnant after years of trying. When Jen’s husband Kevin, a white police officer, is involved in the shooting of an unarmed Black boy, their friendship is thrown into turmoil. This immersive novel about race and how it affects everyone completely gripped me in its clutches and refused to let go. With themes of systemic racism, white privilege and motherhood, it’s a story of a very strong and loving but flawed friendship. It’s both highly emotional and fantastically hopeful. A must-read for our time!

LITERARY FICTION: Oh William! by Elizabeth Strout.

The third book in the Amgash series sees Lucy Barton reunite with her ex-husband William, as he investigates the case of a half-sister that he never knew he had. Lucy Barton is a very flawed but relatable and wise character. The book oozes empathy and simplicity while celebrating the complexities and joys of human relationships. It’s a simple story with themes of mental health, motherhood and miscarriage decorated with a warm humour and a beautiful, everlasting friendship.

MIDDLE-GRADE: The Chime Seekers by Ross Montgomery.

Yanni hates his new house and his baby sister Ari but when an evil faerie replaces her with a changeling, Yanni knows that he has to get her back. With the help of his fantasy-loving cousin Amy, he must journey to the faerie realm of Hallow Fall to embark on an epic quest to save his sister and the faeries from the tyranny of a nefarious overlord. The intricate world-building in this fairytale with strong Rumplestiltskin vibes is amazing. There is a fantastic variety of mythical creatures and an adventure with genuine high stakes. I was fully absorbed in the magic of Hallow Fall and was constantly championing the lovely friendships. A gorgeous winter, middle-grade fantasy read!

YA: How We Fall Apart by Katie Zhao.

When Nancy’s best friend Jamie goes missing before being found dead, shockwaves ripple through their elite high school. Then a mystery online presence named ‘The Proctor’ begins posting secrets and inside information about the people around Jamie. Rumours start to circulate that Nancy and her friends Krystal, Alexander and Akil might have had something to do with Jamie’s death, so they have to uncover what really happened before everything comes crashing down around them. This is a really gripping YA thriller with a completely unguessable resolution because everyone seems to be a suspect. It explores issues of class amongst Asian families, which reminded me of Crazy Rich Asians, but that’s really where the similarities end. There is a student/teacher relationship which is very easy to hate and adds to the drama of what’s going on. A perfect winter read for Karen M. McManus fans.

THRILLER: The Last House On Needless Street by Catriona Ward.

A young girl went missing years ago and her sister thinks she has finally found the man responsible. She can finally get revenge. In an ordinary house on an ordinary street, this man is living an existence that very few people know anything about at all. There are things buried in the woods by Needless Street but they’re probably not what you think they are. A lot of people have talked about this book in recent months and it’s a given now that this book is very strange and unsettling. I didn’t really grasp what was really happening for the first half of the book but things gradually began to make sense. It’s a very clever novel with themes of loneliness, trauma, abuse and only realising the impact of these things in later life. I understand why some readers wouldn’t like the way that the truth of this story is used but I very much appreciated it for the excellence of the characters and overall uneasy feeling that meant I couldn’t put it down.

[hvilested]

Yes, you can cure Maladaptive Daydreaming

Two years ago when I joined this community, I think I was more dead than alive. I've been waging quite a brutal war with maladaptive dreaming and the array of issues that underlie it ever since then and I'm on my way out of this prison. I wanted to do something for you guys so here is a little essay with insights on MD and what you can do to understand better and finally tame this beast. Hopefully, someone will find it useful.

The split and the life between two worlds

Do you think the vague feeling of being split in two and existing between two worlds but belonging to none is exclusive to maladaptive daydreamers?

“If you try to have a conversation with me, I can’t bring myself to listen to you. I pretend to listen and you really think I do but my mind is somewhere else, thinking about it. Every time I try to stop doing it, I genuinely feel as if a part of me has been torn off and a deep sense of personal loss ensues. I feel as if I’m not here but I’m not there either and I can’t shake off this feeling of being split in two.”

This is what a recovering heroin addict once told me. Heroin addict. But it’s also what a regular maladaptive daydreamer could have told you, isn’t it?

Maladaptive daydreaming is, among other things, a typical psychological addiction. Most of the negative issues associated with maladaptive daydreaming come from the fact that it is an addictive coping mechanism and not some unique disorder with specific symptoms just recently discovered. You have heard million times that addictions are encoded in the primitive part of the brain associated with survival – which means that if you don’t get your fix right now, you feel more dead than alive and you need your drug of choice to bring you back to life. Your brain is sending a false message to you – it is issuing an urge that is blown out of proportion, compelling you to constantly indulge in daydreams and making you think that if you don’t, the world will end and you will lose a part of yourself. Drugs usually invade your sense of self – they fuse with it and by giving up the drug, you feel as though you are giving up a dear part of yourself.

Addiction is addiction but different types of drugs and addictive behaviors tell you different things about their users. So what does fantasy reveal about you? MD is like a guardian angel that tries to protect you too much and eventually causes more harm than good. But it’s still your guardian angel that tried lifting a burden off your brittle shoulders. It’s destructive in its own way but it was originally born to protect you from something. To realize and accept what you are trying to run away from is your first step towards recovery. Maybe it’s depression, maybe it’s low self-esteem and loneliness or it’s anxiety or PTSD.

Fall of the self

Maladaptive daydreaming isn’t the act of random mind-wandering – it’s a highly immersive mental activity, where all attention is gathered and directed towards happenings of the fantasy. This would be parallel to a so-called flow state, which is characterized by immersing intensely in an activity to the point of losing the sense of self. Which means, whatever happens in fantasy, happens, but not to you. It is a selfless experience, never integrated into what you call yourself, into sense of identity, into what makes you you. It exists as a detached, ecstatic, fleeting moment that slips through the fingers the moment you try to make sense out of it and process it as your own experience. You witness traces of happiness but the happiness is never yours.

Fantasy is an egoless state of mind where we are not ourselves. And by temporarily cutting ties from your own ego, the conscious identity, you’re also cutting ties from all insecurities you have ever had, from all the problems that are currently bothering you and this is why daydreams feel so damn good. Everything bad is just cut off from your perception. The part of your brain that defines your sense of self, along with all the negative things and mental illnesses attached to it, is turned off.

As you venture into this egoless place that is MD, you make up imaginary people you sometimes end up loving dearly or even fall in love with or you conjure imaginary places you’re desperately drawn to, and then suddenly – you wake up from your dream and you’re violently pulled back to reality and to being yourself. And this is where the problem arises: all those things you’ve done in your dreamworld and all those made up people you’ve come to love have nothing – absolutely nothing – to do with real YOU. They are not attached to your conscious sense of self. All those dreams and false memories you made – you made them in an egoless state of mind. And it’s this that makes you feel split. It’s not the fact that you’re physically apart from the content of your fantasies. It is the fact that your subconscious feelings, fantasies and desires do not connect to your sense of self. Even if everything you’ve been daydreaming about came true, you’d still feel like garbage, empty and miserable. If your imaginary friend came to life to make you less lonely, you’d still be lonely – because MD isn’t about made up friends or lovers or getting a new life. It’s about you not wanting to be you. Everything else is irrelevant.

In other words, you’re not addicted to your fictional characters or your imaginary love or to a fantasy about being a famous singer or writer. You’re addicted to not being you. You’re addicted to this erratic state of consciousness that is MD – regardless of its content – that provides a temporal relief.

I’m not saying that you don’t genuinely care about the content of your daydreams (quite the opposite, more on that soon) – what I am saying is that it’s not your love towards whatever is the content of your fantasies that creates this ugly feeling of being split between two worlds. One thing I can assure you (and this comes from my own experience) is that the moment you feel comfortable being you, those two worlds will reconcile, they will merge into one, and you’ll finally feel at peace with yourself.

Will a part of you be taken away as you give up your daydreams?

Maybe the saddest question I have ever asked myself was ‘how much of myself will I lose when I give up the only thing that makes me happy?’ Here’s a glimmer of hope: you’re not supposed to give them up. To give up the feelings you experience in your daydreams is self-mutilation. As strange or silly as they are, they still represent a censored part of your subconscious; maybe they are an epitome of your loneliness or your sadness. They are a testament to how hard you’re struggling and how hard you’re trying not to be dead – and to give this up is a crime towards yourself. Maladaptive Daydreaming isn’t just about wishful thinking and getting your wounds licked. It is that one place where your life flame stillburns while you may be dead in all other planes of existence. That’s enough to know that this MD thing isn’t all that entirely wrong. Maybe your real life is all emptiness and void but what you do in your daydreams – you do it with passion. And that’s enough to know that you are still capable of loving and caring about something just like other people. So passion exists and don’t you dare ever doubt that. It exists in a wrong place but it exists nonetheless. What you have to do is find a way to redirect those emotions from daydreams to reality and, as stated before, this causally happens once you’re finally you. All the positive emotions from your daydreams will flow back into you and you’ll feel as though these two worlds between which you have lived for so long have at last coalesced into one.

So what you want to do is focus on healing the self. It’s a tough one but there’s no quick fix here. Now comes the irony which you’ve been waiting for: in order to heal yourself, you need to let go of your daydreams. But didn’t I just say that you aren’t supposed to give them up, you ask? Don’t give up the passion, don’t give up the love you have for the content of your daydreaming, don’t give up the feelings – because they are all, real or not, a reminder that you’re alive. What you do have to give up is the false sense of comfort your daydreams give you. Try giving up all those countless hours you spend stuck in your own head pacing back and forth because you’d rather be there than here. Try giving up the temporal fix when you feel miserable. If someone angers you, don’t impulsively lock yourself in your room and act out a revenge in your head; go kick a sofa or something, lash out at something external.

You have to wean yourself off of this strange dissociative painkiller that’s fantasy, then let yourself feel all the pain with every ounce of your being, let all the negative emotions resurface, let them swallow you alive, don’t resist, don’t run away, accept them, let them ravage you, and somewhere along this process, a part of the you will be reborn. Something will awake. Not all of you, maybe just a small part but that’s enough to gather what’s left of your strength and continue the struggle. If you feel the urge to daydream, this is okay – as long as it doesn’t censor the pain which you shouldn’t run away from anymore, it’s fine to give in and indulge for a while if you feel like you have to. Don’t ignore temptations, this sparks the fire of addiction even more. It’s a well known pattern: if you fight the urge to engage in an addictive behavior, it makes it stronger. If you acknowledge it, analyze it, this is what breaks the cycle of addiction. In other words, the imperative is not to block the pain and negative feelings. If a sudden sense of self-disgust or low self-esteem suddenly hits you, welcome it. Welcome it, analyze it, let it consume you, and you will realize it is just a false message your brain is sending to you because that’s what brains of depressed people do, after all. The more you let yourself feel and process the negative feelings without censorship, the more will the urge to daydream weaken and the less you will run away.

Who are you really?

Depression usually enters people’s lives like a tempest – yesterday you were an optimistic person enjoying simple pleasures of life and today you feel like a suicidal or apathetic piece of shit, and this is how it is for most people. Depression that underlies MD, however, takes a different route. It enters your life stealthily, slowly, so slowly you don’t even notice it, then it gradually robs you of emotions, ambitions, memories, motivation, identity, empathy, and you end up thinking: “I don’t remember a time when I wasn’tmiserable,” or “these bad feelings must be a part of my personality, they have always been here“. Because of this, most of us fail to realize where depression (or anxiety or any other kind of chronic mental illness) ends and where we begin. So if this illness isn’t you, then who are you?

Let me make a digression here. MD is usually born when you can’t express yourself properly because you’re anxious, depressed or sometimes simply shy or lonely. Mental illnesses are like lenses which distort your perception. Everything you see appears more tragic, senseless or uglier than it really is. And your both eyes are infected with these lenses. But here your subconscious decides to play a trick on your mental illness and tells you: ‘well, if your both eyes are infected and make things appear worse than they really are, then why don’t you just close them?’ You do and this is the beginning of the addiction to fantasy. You stop paying attention to the outside world and you turn it inwards and use your mind’s eye to create things inside you: your daydreams. This mind’s eye, which is fantasy, cannot get infected with depression and this is why MD is a safe haven. Depression doesn’t reach there. What your subconscious forgets to tell you before it’s too late is that if you close those two eyes used for perceiving outer world, for things outside of yourself, you’ll be completely cut off from reality. But none of this is your fault – this is a war between mental illness, the attacker, and your subconscious, which is your protector, and you are their battlefield. You don’t have a single choice, they are the ones who decide – you only observe. So if you ever blamed yourself for being too weak to make a decision to cease this addiction, stop it. It’s wasn’t your fault.

Back to my question, who are you then?

The daydream version of you isn’t the true you but it’s not a fake one either. It’s a highly filtered product of your subconscious that tried to protect you. Then we have this other real-life you imbued with low self-esteem and negative thoughts that seem to go on a loop forever. Well, that’s certainly not your true self either. Heck, if it’s any comfort for you, the daydream you is far closer to the true you than this real-life depressed version of yourself will ever be.

Can you remember the time when you didn’t have MD? Can you remember your sense of identity when you were a child free of MD? Try conjuring up all those times when you knew how to live in the present. It doesn’t matter if you were 6 years old the last time you were here. Just try to pinpoint all those moments and try to remember the feeling of being in the now. Here’s one pretty handy trick you can use. I always joke that music is a drug that takes you on a trip down a memory lane. It’s like an emotional psychedelic. It transports you emotionally back in time, to another place, another reality, to wherever you wish. It helps people with Alzheimer’s remember who they are and regain a sense of identity for a short while. Maladaptive daydreamers often use music to help them imagine an alternate setting – but what if you used music to transport yourself to the past when you had neither depression nor anxiety or MD or whatever is bothering you? If you can remember a forgotten song which you used to listen as a child who at the time hadn’t had MD yet, listen to it again, try to remember who you were, and if the song is meaningful to you, the old you and your sense of self, which you used to have back then, will come back to you for those few minutes while the song plays. You’ll feel the warmth of finally being you. You won’t quite be in the present – you’ll be in the past, but it’s your real past, it’s your true self. Try to capture this feeling and then try to reenact it. It’ll strengthen your identity in the long run.

I’ll give another example on what set me free from my own MD for a short while. You all know what fight or flight mode is. What you also probably know is that most people with PTSD or chronic anxiety are stuck in a constant state of fight or flight. Spending too much time in this state eventually leads to a burnout and is a sure ticket to depression since you go from fight and flight into freeze mode where all your functions are off and you feel like an emotionless zombie. You don’t care, you don’t live, you don’t get angry or sad or happy, you only exist on autopilot. In order to feel normal and alive again, you usually need a fix so strong which will set your body back on fire. Someone or something has to attack you so fiercely in order for you to rethink your existence and regain your instincts and the will to fight back. This is what happened to me. When one of my daydreams violently crumbled some time ago, I got so ridiculously pissed off that for the first time after several years spent in freeze mode, I felt genuinely alive. I was me. The anger acted like a stimulant and the state lasted for 15 minutes until the anger wore off. But hell, during those 15 minutes, I was me. I was so mad but I was also indescribably happy. I could feel. I could let go. I was defeated but I also won. The thirst, the cravings, the split, this strange nostalgia for my daydreams all dissolved. But instead of just disappearing, every positive feeling that was limited to the daydream world only, such as sense of purpose, motivation and normal self-esteem, flew back into me. I didn’t lose a single part of me – quite the opposite – I regained back that detached part of my soul that existed only in daydreams. What took for me to awake was extreme anger, being defeated, my world crumbing to pieces. The moment I genuinely accepted that my dream world crushed, the moment I let go of all attachments holding me back for years, I was reborn. The anger, which is a natural stimulant, made something in me click. But note: this feeling of finally being alive and the desire to fight back woke up in me once my daydreams were in danger, not me. It’s because we’re so displaced, because fantasy is where we had hidden the core of our souls.

In the long run, you’re destroying neither the daydream you nor the positive feelings that come with it, you’re not giving anything up – you’re just transferring it to reality, to where it should be. But for this change to occur, before you can be reborn and whole again, you have to self-destruct, you have to let go.

[bakechochin]

Book Reviews - Anno Dracula 1899 and Other Stories

Anno Dracula 1899 and Other Stories – Kim Newman - Bloody hell, collections of short stories vex me; I like the feeling of accomplishment after finishing a story, and that feeling is undermined somewhat with the knowledge that yeah you’ve finished one story, but you’ve still got twelve more to get through before you can tick this book off your list -> However these are short stories written by Kim Newman, and I remember really liking the world in ‘Anno Dracula’ and the concepts within it, and so I was willing to give this collection a shot (although the real clincher was again the pretty cover – Newman you crafty bastard) - I’m having flashbacks to writing the review for ‘City of Saints and Madmen’ now because I haven’t a clue as to how to start this; I guess I’ll say what everyone already knows, that Newman is great at world building and he’s clearly really fucking well versed in his areas of expertise, which shine in these stories (but we’ll get back to that later; for now, let’s go over the stories in the collection) - ‘Famous Monsters’, whilst irritating me at first because it was the very first story in the collection and already they’d wasted the martian they’d so eagerly boasted about on the front cover far too soon, was otherwise quite an enjoyable and short read with its alternate history of film featuring disgusting martians - ‘A Drug on the Market’ was an easy enough read but I couldn’t help feeling was a bit of a waste of time – the idea of the Hyde formula becoming readily available to a city seems like a cool idea (I especially liked how Newman had built on the formula to make its effects more varied) but there could have been way more done with this concept than this story provides, and I thought that it ended a bit too abruptly and anticlimactically - The beginning of ‘Illimitable Power’ turned me away at first because it was namedropping all these no doubt very famous people in the film industry who I knew fuck all about, but fortunately for you Newman I’m quite fond of Poe and so was willing to give this one a shot -> I ended up really liking this story; I took it to be a pisstake on how the same films get made over and over again by making the story about film directors cursed to do just that (but then the story spirals further into hilarity), and also because I found the image of people haunted in their dreams by a disgruntled ghost Poe to be fucking hilarious - This was followed up by ‘Just Like Eddy’, another fucking great story; whilst the last Poe one was funny, this one was really fucking interesting, adapting the doppelganger concept of Poe’s own ‘William Wilson’ to apply to Poe’s own life, explaining Poe’s drunken dissolute behaviour as, in reality, being perpetuated by an alternate Poe (and seeing as I’m interested in Poe’s unorthodox life, it was really interesting to see how Newman explained it all within the framework of Poe having a doppelganger) - ‘Amerikanski Dead at the Moscow Morgue’ is indeed a Russia-set zombie apocalypse scenario, but other than that it wasn’t the most engaging story, and fucked if I can remember any of the characters – there are however a few neat ideas here and there to make zombies more interesting, there are a couple great gore segments, and I appreciated any time anyone mentioned Rasputin - To be honest there wasn’t really much to ‘The Chill Clutch of the Unseen’; there’s a bit at the end that says the story is a tribute to the works of Charles L Grant, and that’s all well and good but I read this without knowing who Grant was, and from that perspective I didn’t get too much out of the story save a fucking cool old and weary interpretation of the Invisible Man and a few cool monster descriptions - ‘One-Hit Wanda’ was boring and nothing got resolved but at least was gratifyingly short - ‘Is There Anybody There?’ was actually really fucking cool in concept, following a clash between old-timey séances and modern-day technology, and had a very satisfying ending (though at times the fact that this story was written in 2001 is made kind of obvious by the outdated tech lingo used) - ‘The Intervention’ was a legitimately unsettling story, helped in part by its ambiguity, but since the ambiguity continues throughout the story and there’s no revelation at the end, there’s no real payoff and the ending seemed unsatisfying - ‘The Pale Spirit People’ was initially cool in that it contrasted what we expect from Native American life/traditions with a narrator who quietly disregards and doesn’t truck with these traditions, but it kind of treads the same path as ‘Is There Anybody There?’ by splurging together mysticism with modern society -> Don’t get me wrong, I like this idea, and it’s executed here in just as enjoyable and funny a manner as in ‘Is There Anyone There?’, and I especially liked the descriptions of everyday life now through the eyes of a narrator who sees such things as obscene and supernatural, but I couldn’t help wish that these stories focused on actual supernatural elements as opposed to everyday parts of modern society masquerading as supernatural elements – it kind of reminded me of one scene in Abercrombie’s ‘Shattered Sea’ books, wherein a character’s ‘magical artefact’ turns out to in fact just be a fucking gun - ‘Coastal City’ was fucking great; it’s all over the place because it’s dealing with unorthodox and difficult-to-explain time abnormalities that scrambled my brain something fierce, but there’s more dumb overpowered comic book superheroes than you can shake a stick at and the world it presents is equal parts unsophisticated and fascinating - ‘Completist Heaven’ was conceptually pretty sweet and absolutely ridiculous, which pretty much sums up the whole story really; I realised at the beginning of the story that the setup of endless TV channels of horror film shlock was some serious self-insert fan-fiction, but as I was reading I didn’t really mind, and though 99% of the references were lost on me it was an easy enough read - Finally we have ‘Yokai Town: Anno Dracula 1899’, which was a story with three competing themes; the history of Japan, which I give no shits about, Japanese yokai and weird fucked up Japanese folklore, which I’m already an avid fan of, and continuing the Anno Dracula storyline, which kind of dropped me right in the shit since out of the four books currently published in that series I have read one, so whilst reading it I fully expected to be assaulted from two angles, both by my ignorance regarding Japanese history and my lack of understanding of where exactly we are and what exactly has happened up to this point in the Anno Dracula canon -> However whilst I was expecting this story to throw me in the deep end, as it turns out it held me by the hand and guided me through what was what in the Anno Dracula storyline, and now I’m quite tempted to give the series another shot (or at the very least read the soon-to-be-published story in the series that this book is a precursor to) -> What’s more, this story provided me with some of my favourite stuff in the anthology; Genevieve continues to be a great fucking character, I was very happy indeed to finally read a story that adapted some of my favourite yokai (and as mentioned above, if I was to trust any author to adapt and innovate folklore monsters, it’d be Newman), the yokai actually seem like realistic entities (even though yokai are all so fucking stupid), and I loved how Newman managed to contrive an example of the sparkly Twilight vampire in this story, which really made me laugh - There were a few stories that I skipped in this collection; ‘Red Jacks Wild’ was intended as a sequel/spiritual successor of a pre-existing story that I haven’t read and can’t be arsed to find, ‘The Snow Sculptures of Xanadu’ I think is about/inspired by/constantly referencing ‘Citizen Kane’ which I know fuck all about and do not wish to learn about, ‘Ubermensch!’ (no I’m not adding the umlaut because fuck you) was set in the aftermath of WW3 and was full of historical references I didn’t have a hope of understanding so I gave up on it three pages in, and ‘Sarah Minds the Dog’ and ‘Frankenstein on Ice’ were scripts, which I don’t find immersive and can’t be arsed to plod through -> I don’t have a reason why I didn’t read ‘Un Etrange Aventure de Richard Blane’, I just couldn’t be arsed - A general problem I have with these stories is that they often seem too real; though they include fantasy elements, they are definitively set in reality, and there are times where Newman’s knowledge of history and old timey movies and whatnot (and my lack of such knowledge) can make me feel like a right thicko whilst reading the stories and plodding through all the references - Newman’s reimaginings of classic monsters are always infinitely more interesting than the stories that the monsters are in, so in some stories there’s the Kraken problem of feeling like I have to force myself to read on simply to get to the cool shit - Also a good chunk of the stories take the form of an old jaded something-or-other regaling their life story in their old and jaded way, going on about how they wish life could have gone differently, which got a wee bit repetitive - One minor issue that I have is with the ordering of the stories; I don’t think that putting the two Poe stories right next to each other was a good idea, because although they were first published ten years apart from one another they tread the exact same steps and make the exact same references/allusions to the source material, and this is made especially obvious when you read one right after the other - 6.5/10

I have a load of other book reviews on my blog, check that shit out.