#porpentine

[canmom]

new @xrafstar VN just dropped!!!!

i did a little playtesting of this and i can tell you it is extremely squishy. lovely art, great writing, 10/10 i never knew zoroastrianism is so yaoi

[xrafstar]

💜 TORTURE WORKS 💜

⭐ disgusting short story collection

⭐ cover by Vich

out now on paperback

[stinkybreath]

hello

do you trust me to recommend you some books

I read ~170 this year and here’s reviews of my top ten, written for fb and crossposted under the cut in case you’re interested

1: Camp Concentration by Thomas Disch

-I know it’s not obvious from the way I conduct myself here, but I have a very large vocabulary. I was a kid who read the dictionary and also any thesaurus I had access to. So, that said, consider how much it means to me personally that this book taught me 30-50 new words. This isn’t a huge part of the reason I loved this book, but it is a very impressive fact about it that I think will grab the attention of people who might otherwise not read it. This book changed the way I read, the way I think about literature, and the way I evaluate what I have previously read. It’s offensive to me that I lived 30 years as an avid reader and culture sponge without hearing about this book. I cannot recommend it enough. I give it top spot on this list for a very good reason. I’d like to avoid spoiling any of the plot because while I called the twist easily, discovery of each point was so delightful that I want you to have that same experience.

2: Cockatiel x Chameleon by Bavitz

-You all have plenty of experience with me recommending works of fiction published online in formats that deter most readers. This is a normal Najwa activity. I know how it sounds and I know, therefore, that this plea will go more or less unheard, but I BEG you. Look past the fact this was published on AO3. This is one of the most remarkable books I’ve read, period. I mentioned in my worst of how much it bothers me that most writers can’t plausibly write about the internet. This book is the FUCKING ZENITH of writing about being online. It is the absolute peak and I will be shocked if I ever encounter another work that overtakes it. This is a book about people who are so strange they are barely human, but in ways that will be instantly familiar, intimately true, to those of us who grew up on the internet. There is violence and abuse and love and beauty and Chatroulette. There is art and gore and exploration of identity and apocalypse. There is fucking POSTING.

3: Serious Weakness by Porpentine

-Charity Heartscape Porpentine is one of our greatest living authors, opinions of snide Twitter users notwithstanding. I am an evangelist for her Twine game poetry because it is so singular and so affecting. Even a decade on, I can play through Their Angelical Understanding and feel freshly stabbed in the gut. Imagine the thrill I felt when she posted about her completed novel. I would (strongly) recommend this even to people who (somehow) bounced off her games, because her prose style is very distinct from the voice those are in (yet still recognizable). This is an incredibly violent, sick, stomach-turning, difficult, ugly, terrifying book. It’s also ultimately asking the reader a question about love and compassion. If you are sensitive to any trigger in written word about any violent action one person can do to another, skip this book, but if you feel like you have the strength, give her the nine bucks or whatever that she’s asking and devour it like I did. A hook for you: our protagonist has a chance meeting with an embodiment of pain. What follows includes torture, gender, climate disaster, and Columbine. Gorgeous. This book almost convinced me to start doing video essays so I could explain to people the incredible factors at play in it.

4: Negative Space by BR Yeager

-I have been trying to read this book for free for so long that I broke my streak and paid actual money for it. It was one of the better purchases I made all year. Thanks to finally reading some Stephen King this year I now have the requisite foundation to see how heavily his style inspired Yeager in this book, but I would die on the hill defending my position that Yeager does King better than King ever did. There is evil seeping out between the lines of this book. Have you ever had a nightmare that made you feel doomed the entire next day? Have you ever felt you were trapped in your shitty, dying home town? Have you ever been seduced by the excitement of activities that you know might actually kill you? Have you ever woken up in the middle of the night and looked at your own dark reflection? Go back to the deepest point of your teenage depression here.

5: We Who Are About to by Joanna Russ

-One of the shortest entries on this list and so one of the easiest sells, but it is just as full of meaning as any other that made the cut. There is so much implied and unsaid about this protagonist. She feels whole, like this is the last chunk of chapters in a series centered on her, but she represents something universal. She is one member of a group from a crash-landed spaceship, a group small enough in numbers that there’s no way for humanity to last on this planet more than one more generation. Any attempts to do even that are so plainly cruel and self-deluding that she wants no part of them, but the others with her don’t see it the same way. Her story is womanhood under patriarchy, it is life and death, it is self-determination. Brutal. I read this at the airport and cried in public.

6: Carrie by Stephen King

-As much as I hate to say it, I gotta hand it to Uncle Steve (or really to Tabitha). This book very nearly justifies the rest of his career on its own. I thought had picked up most of it from cultural osmosis, but there was a truly shocking depth that I couldn’t have found without experiencing it firsthand. Maybe it’s funny to use this word here, but this book is humanist and compassionate and sincere in a way that King never finds again, particularly with the women he writes. Carrie is so vivid that I felt a protective instinct for her throughout the book even though I knew she was about to discover her own power. She reflects parts of me about as well as Lindqvist did in Little Star, which is the work of art that is THE most personal to me. A classic for a fucking reason.

7: The Doloriad by Missouri Williams

-This year, lots of the books that I read had strange echoes of each other. In this, I can pick out shades of Carrie, of Camp Concentration, of We Who Are About To, and even of Serious Weakness. Rarely if ever are these references by each author, but it has enriched my experience by having unofficial interlocking intertexts for all of them. This book has been very divisive with reviewers, and I understand why, because it is cruel and the prose is extremely stylistic. This is somewhat experimental and fully literary and sincerely philosophical. I get it. Not for everyone. But it was for me. A clan of inbreds at the end of the world with their eyes on their scapegoat, nonverbal and disabled Dolores. It shocked me and it challenged me and I loved it.

8: The Ice Cream Man and Other Stories by Sam Pink

-These short stories did the exact opposite of the thing that pissed me off about The Florida Project. These are about people who are varying degrees of sympathetic but the same degree of desperately, penny-scrapingly working poor. The easy pull quote is “unflinching,” because it turns an eye on very ugly parts of real life for so many of us. I think people who grew up middle class will find some voyeuristic, prurient pleasure in these stories, but they’re not written for you. They’re written for us, the people who have lived this way.

I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman 9

-I don’t need to tell you how great this book is, because the whole of booktok has told you this all year. Instead, what I will say is that it is much stranger and less tidy than you’re imagining when you hear the blurb. It’s a short read and it is one of the few times I haven’t regretted following booktok’s advice.

Only Lovers Left Alive by Dave Wallis 10

-This barely squeaked onto this year’s best of, because I started it before 2022 ended and finished it early in the new year. As I read it, especially in the first 20% of the book, I was confused as to how it ended up on my TBR. But toward the end, and throughout the year as I’ve continued to think about it, I understand more instinctively than intellectually that this is a remarkable work. A short synopsis: in the 80s in the UK, there is an epidemic of suicide, but only by adults. The teens left behind forge their own path.

[osteogeneses]

what the fuck porpentine liked my post???? my favourite author porpentine?????? insane.

[crowns-of-violets-and-roses]

Black Skirt holds the lit cigarette an inch from Girl Detective’s skin. “If you let me burn you three times, I’ll tell you where the tiaras of Delatrice are buried.” “Pain is the price of revelation,” Girl Detective observes grimly.

I didn't mention it in the previous post as it didn't really fit but I expect this story summarized as "what if Nancy Drew were sadder stranger and gayer" is likely to be of interest to many of my followers

[silkshriek]

(the shape you make when your bones are closest to the surface, porpentine charity heartscape)

[museum-of-screens]

their angelical understanding (2013) 

Creator(s): Porpentine Charity Heartscape

Type: Twine

Language: [EN] 

Status: Available

(Content Warning listed on the game page)

[the-sneep-snoop]

these r the sigils i made / with those we love alive

my favourite of porpentine’s games so far. very introspective, intuitive, dreamlike, surreal, mind altering. highly recommend

[translitsupplement]

In todays mail: the new Porpentine book

[your-cyberqueen]

[kinkyrius]

Low Kill Shelter is very good, need more stuff like this, trans authors just have the knack I think.

[xrafstar]

Serious Weakness paperback ⭐ 625 pages of twink bodily fluids ⭐ 2 bonus stories ⭐ revised, polished, "Deluxe Boyspatter Edition" ⭐ soaked in beautiful toxic cover art by @sloaneshutup

digital copies on itchio/kindle have been updated to the final edition thank you ❤️‍🩹

[everycorner]

Trianon 10 minutes before his face is smashed in, if we're being honest

[alexanderpearce]

had a great time cosplaying god‘s most kidnappable autist

[xenostalgic]

really good review

"Why Have You Not Yet Gone to War" seemed to me not just metaphorically dreamlike but to maybe be literally a transcribed dream. but like, okay, you have the old man and the gorilla, opposite "beings of totality", the embodiments of nonviolence and wisdom vs unreasoned destructive violence, and the intentional, sophisticated violence of the knife gang is neither of these. but that makes it composite and vulnerable, such that men and violence can be separated... idk, this one felt uniquely unwelcoming to me also, a standout for how much it felt like there might just not be anything to get. but I liked it much better on a second read, so I'm hopeful that in returning to it again later something will click.

one story that really struck me that wasn't mentioned here was the penultimate story, "Living Fucking Creatures", about a mech/tank crew fighting what seems like a horribly asymmetric war—the bug tank stomps around shooting and squishing people who seem to have very limited means to fight back. it was originally published only a few months after "The Maximum Softness Capable of Being Exerted by All Machinery" and I had read them both before, but here LFC felt like a bridge between "Maximum Softness" and the rest of the collection, bringing it closer thematically to the flavor of misery in the subjectivity of "The Body Crushes the Soul" or "Game Where You're Forced to Kill Everyone on Your Squad." not one of my favorites but interesting in how it sat relative to the rest.

The title of Porpentine’s new collection (which brings together stories from across their analog writing career) is a study in ambiguity: Torture Works. There are a lot of things that could mean—a plant that manufactures torture; a declaration that torture will do just fine, as theme, as subject matter; or, most shockingly of all, Porpentine could be quoting Dick Cheney, in the ultimate heresy for a liberal of the War on Terror era: declaring that torture works, as a practical matter, that Gitmo gets results.

I believe that each of these is a workable interpretation, for the title of a collection which spans a career stretching from the very birth of 2010s social justice culture, into a high, punishing aestheticist immoralism which does not stop at any political or ethical boundaries, and in fact willfully transgresses them, in search of beautiful suffering.