#proofrock

[luthorcorp1313]

I finished The Angel of Indian Lake recently and there were so many feelings. I was originally just going to say a couple of things and it got away from me so I just did it this way. If you want to read my rambling, cool, if not, long story short: Stephen Graham Jones is fucking awesome, Jade Daniels is 100% my Final Girl of all final girls, and the Indian Lake Trilogy is such a good read on so many levels so everyone should read it.

There is an amazing amount of depth and heart to it that you just don't usually see in horror fiction and on top of that, the trilogy starts out as a total love letter to 80s slashers and final girls, with the real surprise being the protagonist, half-Blackfeet and full outcast Jade Daniels, the rebel girl who is always in trouble for something and has memorized everything about every slasher film (up to that point) while praying for a real slasher to hit her town of Proofrock, Idaho, but be careful what you wish for, right? Love her!! Lots of subplot about the colonization and takeover of Native lands, as SGJ is a Native American writer and that figures into his work. So much depth. Anyway, did I say this was the short version??? Just read the books! 😂🔪🖤🫀🩸

[marypsue]

Also I haven't actually read Don't Fear The Reaper yet, so if that's the exact direction the Indian Lake Trilogy is actually going in canon I will a) stare at the ceiling for a bit and b) be intensely grateful that an author I trust as much as Stephen Graham Jones is writing it so I don't have to.

[ninja-muse]

At last, a month where I feel like I read enough! The trick, clearly, was to pick up graphic novels and other very short things. Will this trend continue in November? Almost certainly not.

Followers might have seen my review for The Dollmakers by Lynn Buchanan last week but that's not actually my top read of the month. That honour goes to Jane Austen's Bookshelf by Rebecca Romney, which I got as an ARC from work, told myself I wouldn't read just yet, then promptly picked up after The Dollmakers and all but burned through. It's about the female authors we know Austen read and why they were bestsellers in their day but are barely known now, with all sorts of publishing and book industry history thrown in, along with a dose of memoir. Needless to say, I was the target audience and I've added a good handful of classics to my TBR. (It's out in February, in case you're interested.)

The rest of my top reads are there for just being solidly good. The Disappearing Spoon gave me all the fun science history I wanted. The Angel of Indian Lake gave me a good horror trilogy ending. The Tropic of Serpents gave me more Lady Trent adventures. And so on. I only really had two misses: The Aeronaut's Windlass, which felt very by-the-books epic fantasy without pushing boundaries, and Wordhunter, which I'm actively recommending people don't read. It was utterly average and kind of trying too hard to be edgy, and then it needlessly introduced sexual violence against women and children and handled both badly. How a book that lets a pedophile off with a warning got published in 2024, I will never understand.

In happier news, my book haul! Two books this month: Sorcery and Small Magics, sent by the publisher, and another volume of The Unwritten, meaning I only need to find one and I've got the full run. Hurray! (If you ever spot Vol. 9, folks, lemme know.)

All that reading means that I haven't done much writing. I need to get back to that, but at least I know what was blocking me and am working to rectify the situation. I am, however, starting to get seriously envious of authors who were able to write during the pandemic and are now getting those novels published. I stopped writing entirely for a year and a half, for various reasons, and now I feel like I've fallen behind.

Someday I might return to the Not-Quite-Urban Fantasy but I'm still too raw to handle the edits even now.

Oh, the worlds of might-have-been!

And now I've gone and left this on a down note. There'll be more positivity next month, I promise. In the meantime, here’s my list of everything I read this month, in the rough order of how glad I was to have read them.

Jane Austen’s Bookshelf - Rebecca Romney

A rare book dealer explores the literary histories of Austen’s favourite female authors, and how they didn’t make the English canon the way Austen did. Out in February.

8/10

reading copy

The Disappearing Spoon - Sam Kean

An entertaining history of chemistry, atomic physics, and the elements of the periodic table.

8/10

library ebook

The Tropic of Serpents - Marie Brennan

Isabella Camherst travels south to Bayembe to study savannah dragons, but finds herself caught in politics and sent on a mission to the swamp of Mouleen.

7.5/10

African-coded secondary characters, 🏳️‍🌈 secondary character (asexual)

library book

The Dollmakers - Lynn Buchanan

When Shean of Pearl receives, and refuses, an artisan dollmaker license, she sets off for a remote village to prove she and her dolls have what it takes to be guards against the Shod. If this means luring the monsters in, so be it.

7.5/10

reading copy

The Angel of Indian Lake - Stephen Graham Jones

Jade Daniels, now Proofrock’s history teacher, has put slasher cycles behind her. Except it’s looking like another one’s started anyway.

7.5/10

Blackfoot protagonist, 🏳️‍🌈 protagonist (sapphic), Black secondary characters

warning: blood, gore, death, murder

reading copy

Reluctant Immortals - Gwendolyn Kiste

Lucy Westrena and Bee Rochester are trying to get through the days in 1967 LA when their exes return in San Fransisco.

7/10

🏳️‍🌈 secondary characters (sapphic), Jamaican-British secondary character

warning: abusive relationships

reading copy

Bury Your Gays - Chuck Tingle

After Misha refuses to kill off his queer leads for the season finale, he finds himself stalked by horror villains he created.

7/10

🏳️‍🌈 protagonist (gay), 🏳️‍🌈 secondary characters (bi, aroace), 🏳️‍🌈 author

warning: death, murder, torture, homophobia, child abuse

library book

Ms. Marvel, Vol. 7 - G. Willow Wilson with Mirka Andolfo (Illustrator), Takeshi Miyazawa (Illustrator)

Kamala Khan faces two difficult foes: gerrymandering and a sentient computer virus.

6.5/10

Pakistani-American protagonist, Muslim protagonist, Pakistani-American secondary characters, Muslim secondary characters, 🏳️‍🌈 secondary character (sapphic), Black secondary character, secondary character with limb damage and a cane, Muslim author

warning: outing

off my TBR

Paladin’s Grace - T. Kingfisher

Stephen is a paladin whose god has died. Grace is a perfumer trying to keep her past buried. Witnesses to a failed assassination, they now must work together to navigate a world of intrigue, poisoners, and zealots. It’s a good thing they like each other.

6.5/10

off my TBR/ebook

Plain Jane and the Mermaid - Vera Brosgol

When Jane’s potential fiancé is kidnapped by a mermaid, she descends into the depths to rescue him even though she can never hope to compete with true waifish beauty.

7.5/10

warning: body shaming

library book

Sorcery and Small Magics - Maiga Doocy

Leovander Loveage and Sebastian Grimm get along like oil and water—which makes it all the worse when Leo's hit with an illegal curse and they must work together to break it.

6.8/10

🏳️‍🌈 protagonist (achillean), 🏳️‍🌈 secondary character (achillean), 🏳️‍🌈 minor character (ungendered), minor character with dark skin, minor character who uses a cane

gifted by publisher

Dictionary of Fine Distinctions - Eli Bernstein

Illuminating and illustrated definitions of commonly confused words.

7/10

library book

Days at the Morisaki Bookshop - Satoshi Yagisawa

When Takako finds herself adrift in life, she accepts a room in her estranged uncle’s bookshop.

7/10

Japanese cast, Japanese author

library book

Wordhunter - Stella Sands

A spiky forensic linguistics student is tapped by her local PD to help find a kidnapped teen, but that brings up a missing person’s case from her own past. Too close, too soon.

2/10

Black secondary character

warning: drug use, alcohol abuse, rape and an odd attitude towards its aftermath, pedophiles given a pass

library book

Picture books

All the Books - Hayley Rocco

Piper loves books so much she takes her whole collection everywhere, but when her wagons tip over in the rain she discovers … the library!

9/10

DNF

The Aeronaut’s Windlass - Jim Butcher

The cold war between Spires Albion and Aurora is heating up, and something uncanny is showing itself. Caught in it all are Captain Grimm, late of the Predator, a handful of trainee guards, and a prince of cats.

library ebook

Currently reading

The Price of the Stars - Debra Doyle and James D. MacDonald

When Beka’s politician mother is assassinated, her father gives her his warship in exchange for her tracking the assassins down. But when someone has it in for your family, sometimes one must take drastic measures.

off my TBR

The Empress Letters - Linda Rogers

A mother in the 1920s writes her life story in a series of letters to the daughter she’s searching for in China.

🇨🇦, Chinese secondary characters

warning: fetal remains, anti-Chinese racism

off my TBR

Music from the Earliest Notations to the Sixteenth Century - Richard Taruskin A history of early written European music, in its social and political contexts.

The Penguin Complete Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle Victorian detective stories

disabled POV character (limb injury), occasional Indian secondary characters

warning: racism, colonialism

Monthly total: 14 + 1 Yearly total: 106 Queer books: 3 Authors of colour: 2 Books by women: 9 Authors outside the binary: 0 Canadian authors: 0 Classics: 0 Off the TBR shelves: 3 Books hauled: 2 ARCs acquired: 3 ARCs unhauled: 4 DNFs: 1

January February March April May June July August September

[haveyoureadthispoll]

Jade Daniels is an angry, half-Indian outcast with an abusive father, an absent mother, and an entire town that wants nothing to do with her. She lives in her own world, a world in which protection comes from an unusual source: horror movies…especially the ones where a masked killer seeks revenge on a world that wronged them. And Jade narrates the quirky history of Proofrock as if it is one of those movies. But when blood actually starts to spill into the waters of Indian Lake, she pulls us into her dizzying, encyclopedic mind of blood and masked murderers, and predicts exactly how the plot will unfold. Yet, even as Jade drags us into her dark fever dream, a surprising and intimate portrait emerges… a portrait of the scared and traumatized little girl beneath the Jason Voorhees mask: angry, yes, but also a girl who easily cries, fiercely loves, and desperately wants a home. A girl whose feelings are too big for her body.

[mylifeinfiction]

The Angel of Indian Lake by Stephen Graham Jones

Scars proved you lived.

I admittedly have a pretty serious love/hate relationship with Jade Daniels. Her papers throughout My Heart Is a Chainsaw really tested my patience, and her immaturity throughout the events of that book seemed a bit too much. But the person she begins to grow into by the end of Chainsaw and throughout the events of the all-around masterpiece that is the middle book of this trilogy, Don't Fear the Reaper , is so interesting and complete that I couldn't help but fall in love with Jade Daniels and every blood-soaked thing for which she stands.

"...the cool thing about trilogies is you get to use every last part of the buffalo."

Stephen Graham Jones's The Angel of Indian Lake isn't quite the all-around horror masterpiece that Reaper is, but it is a wholly worthy final chapter in The Indian Lake Trilogy, or: The Savage History of Proofrock, Idaho. Throughout the trilogy, we've seen Jade Daniels go from immature, delusional slasher fantasist, to begrudgingly badass final girl, to hesitant horror historian. Best to call it the The Violent Coming-of-Age of a Reluctantly Willing Final Girl. It's an authentically compelling character arc that relishes the romance of the final girl without ever shying away from the traumatic weight of the role and the cyclical nature of violence throughout the history America.

She's right. In the rock/paper/scissors of horror, chainsaw always wins. Cops and guns don't work against slashers, trucks and fire are big fat fails, but a chainsaw? If you've got a chainsaw, you're pretty damn golden.

The Angel of Indian Lake ties the trilogy together so beautifully, so viciously, that even its flaws are fascinating. SGJ makes the risky decision to close out Jade's story by throwing us headfirst into her mind, writing Angel in an (often stream-of-conscious) first-person narrative. Jade's mind is a chaotic, damaged landscape that can often create pacing issues due to her unfocused, rambling narration, but it also gives us a deeper look into the root of these horrific events, bringing the many disjointed storylines together in a brutally bloody, emotionally exhausting and thematically cathartic manner.

And the plotting itself is even more risky, bringing together every last piece of this epic horror saga in a batshit crazy onslaught of slaughter. But thankfully, SGJ's vision is complete, and he conducts these exceedingly insane displays of slasher carnage in a way that only ever enriches the overarching themes; and more than makes up for the lulls between. The climactic massacre is so dam wild, and I loved every bizarre, messy minute of it. Jade and those she loves are seriously put through the wringer, here, but it all comes together for such a fitting, bittersweet ending that brings Jade to exactly where she needs to be.

Despite those pacing issues and some moments of feeling completely lost among all those players and plot-points, SGJ sticks the landing, delivering a third installment that does indeed "mash that pedal to the floor until it gets stuck", and thankfully never loses traction.

It's supposed to mean Proofrock's slasher days are over.

8/10

-Timothy Patrick Boyer.

[semper-legens]

56. My Heart Is A Chainsaw, by Stephen Graham Jones

Owned?: No, library Page count: 439 My summary: Jade is not a troubled teen. Sure, she loves playing macabre pranks on her classmates, doesn't have any friends, and sees life through the lens of slasher movies - but with the life she's been given, who can blame her? The only Native girl in her little rural community, living with a deadbeat dad and a world that hates her, Jade has every disadvantage in life and nowhere to go. But when the signs line up that a real-life slasher is coming to Proofrock, suddenly Jade's life has a deeper meaning. She knows what this is. She's ready. And she's going to make sure that the right story plays out. My rating: 4/5 My commentary:

I kept picking this book up and putting it down and picking it up and putting it down, not sure if I wanted to read it. There was, in fact, one thing that ultimately clinched it for me - the author. I read The Only Good Indians a while back and fell in love with its dark outlook, its complex politics, and the deep trauma that oozes from every page. This looked to be similar in style and tone, a dark urban fantasy with a killer on the loose, and only one girl who can stop it. But she's all kinds of fucked up and nobody wants to listen to her, of course. That's the way these things go. So how did the story pan out? Deeply engaging, strange, lyrical, and bloody as one might expect from a slasher tale. I enjoyed it, though it was by no means an easy read.

(Warning for mention of suicide, sexual assault and abuse, child molestation and incest under the cut.)

Jade is the main character and the main draw of this novel. A lot is riding on her as a protagonist, and I'm glad to say that she very much carries the narrative by being a deeply interesting character. Jade starts out bruised, wounded, latching onto her slasher-movie ideas of how the world works and fitting everything into that framework. She becomes fixated on Letha, a new and rich girl at school moving into the newly-built community of Terra Nova, because she is convinced Letha will be the 'Final Girl'. It's to the point where she reads really strongly as being autistic, with a hyperfocus that overrides everything. At various points, she wonders if going to the police about her concerns is worth it - she knows Letha needs to have certain experiences to set her up as Final Girl, and the police are useless in slasher movies anyway. Everything she does, she brings back to slashers. Interspersed throughout the chapters are essays she wrote to her beloved History teacher about slashers in lieu of homework, bringing her interest into the school subject. She's flawed, of course. Mentally ill, aware of her own strangeness, wrapped up in her own head, and hopelessly avoidant. But all of those flaws just make her a stronger character, and a very engaging one to boot.

This book is, largely, about trauma - both the specific trauma experienced by the main character and a more generalised trauma specific to Indigenous people throughout the US. (The characters universally use 'Indian' to describe Jade and her father, but I'm a white English person, so I'm going to use 'Indigenous' and 'Native'.) Jade is a very troubled kid. It's teased early on that something might have happened with her father - she hates him, and partially wants her life to be a slasher movie so that he dies. Letha suspects her father molested her, which she refutes; this turns out to be the case towards the end of the book, however. Jones' afterword to the book mentions that Jade as a character didn't start to solidify to him until after he read an article about a Native girl who killed herself after being abused by her father, and how widespread an issue that was in Native communities.

Jade herself starts the book with a suicide attempt, and throughout displays a lack of care towards her own life that is at the very least passively suicidal, if not actively trying to get herself killed. She's in denial, she's fixated on slasher movies both as a coping mechanism and as a refuge. Applying their framework to her life is how she rationalises and copes with the world around her. There's an underlying tension in earlier parts of the book as to whether there actually is a slasher killer on the streets of Proofrock or if Jade is drawing conclusions where there are none, wanting to protect girls from their fathers in a show of misplaced revenge. A lot of the more obviously slasher-y things we see only happen when Jade is alone, bringing into question her narration. That, plus the hazy, stream of consciousness first person voice really brings a dark and uncertain tone to the whole book.

And, of course, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention how race and Indigeneity plays into the entire affair. Does Jade fixate on Letha because she's Black, the only other girl of colour in school? But more than that, race underpins everything. The lake the bulk of the action centres around is called Indian Lake, and one of the first signs a slasher is in town is the mass-killing of elk nearby, a motif that also appears in The Only Good Indians. Hell, the rich people building a new settlement in town call their home Terra Nova, literally 'New World'. And the slasher? A ghost, it turns out - a little Native girl whose mother was killed, who herself died in a cruel prank, and whose spirit cannot sink beneath the waters of Indian Lake because she is a 'heathen' in the eyes of the Church. It all comes back to the poisoning of Native land and Native lives by the settlers who would claim it as their own - no accident, then, that Jade is the only one who sees the truth. Trauma both personal and intergenerational, and all circling around Jade. Poor kid. But such a compelling character, and I'm so glad I finally picked this up and read it. It's harrowing, but it's a really good read.

Next up, from one horrible thing to another, as we take a look at a boy who drew Auschwitz.

[lucifers-horror-harem]

charlotte idk if you've heard about this book before or not but you GOTTA check out "my heart is a chainsaw" its about a girl, jade, whos obsessed with slasher films, and she lives in a place called proofrock where there was a massacre 50 years ago and now someone is starting to kill again, its the start of a trilogy iirc and its so fucking good its got so many horror references 🔪🩸

Omg I'm so sorry I forgot to respond to this when I saw it. But I actually do know of this series!! I bought the first book but haven't sat down to read it yet cause I've been a tad bad at reading in general. (I don't think I've read OR listened to a book since like summer last year) So I'm going to try to do some more reading this summer and it's on my list to read!!! I've actually read one of the author's other books though, The Only Good Indians and that one was soooooooo fucking good so I'm excited to check this series out!

[brightbeautifulthings]

The Angel of Indian Lake by Stephen Graham Jones

"I used to be all about the final girl standing on top of a pile of the dead at the end of the movie, her face dripping blood, her chest heaving, her eyes fierce. Now I'm all about holding the door of the slasher-proof shelter open, so everybody can duck in, ride this out."

Year Read: 2024

Rating: 4/5

Thoughts: I put this off for a bit because I wasn't ready for the trilogy to be over, and I'm pretty emotional about this horrific, blood-drenched, heartfelt series as a whole--which honestly tells you a lot about me and it. Fans of the first two books will find plenty to love about it, and the character development for Jade throughout the series is really good. I adore her as a main character and a final girl. She's the beating, bloody heart of these books, and I'm excited that she'll live on in slasher history for girls to look up to and see themselves in and celebrate alongside Laurie Strode and Sidney Prescott as peak examples for the genre. There's a lot of her trying to manage her own trauma in this book, which typically isn't something we get to see a lot of in horror. While I felt the narrative was tighter in Don't Fear the Reaper, this one falls back into some of the habits of My Heart Is a Chainsaw, where it sometimes feels like we get a bit lost in her internal monologue at the expense of what's happening. It feels intentional--the very real consequences of a trauma spiral--but as a spectator it's occasionally frustrating.

It's up there with the first two books as far as gore and body count, and I enjoy the fact that no matter how much I know I'm in a slasher, I'm still surprised when the violence explodes out of nowhere from the least expected directions. Jones has a talent for dreaming up horrific mass death scenes, usually not once but several times in a book. The killers are a little all over the place in this one, no looming specter of Dark Mill South to ground the book, but I think it works. It dips into some seriously dark territory at one point, but I like the way it's all pulled together by the end, the lore of previous books coming back to shape this one. While Don't Fear the Reaper is still my favorite (weird, right? way to go all Catching Fire with it), I enjoyed the series a lot overall and will be glad to return to Jade and Proofrock in future rereads. I received a free e-ARC through NetGalley from the publishers at Saga Press.

[clonerightsagenda]

#recently read 4/2023

Don't Fear the Reaper by Stephen Graham Jones. Jade Jennifer Daniels is back in Proofrock, just as a serial killer escapes from his prison convoy in the middle of a snowstorm.

Nothing But the Rain by Naomi Salman. A novella about an old woman trapped in a town where the touch of rainwater wipes your most recent memories away.

Goodbye, Vitamin by Rachel Khong. Ruth moves back in with her parents to help take care of her father with dementia. Sweet, funny, and sad.

What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez by Claire Jiménez. Twelve years after their sister vanished, Jess and Nina spot a woman who looks like her on a reality tv show and plan to track her down.

Ghost Season by Fatin Abbas. A collection of locals and Americans working together in an NGO compound are caught up in Sudan's worsening civil war.

[meret118]

On the surface is a story of murder in small-town America. But beneath is its beating heart: a biting critique of American colonialism, Indigenous displacement, and gentrification, and a heartbreaking portrait of a broken young girl who uses horror movies to cope with the horror of her own life.

Jade Daniels is an angry, half-Indian outcast with an abusive father, an absent mother, and an entire town that wants nothing to do with her. She lives in her own world, a world in which protection comes from an unusual source: horror movies...especially the ones where a masked killer seeks revenge on a world that wronged them. And Jade narrates the quirky history of Proofrock as if it is one of those movies. But when blood actually starts to spill into the waters of Indian Lake, she pulls us into her dizzying, encyclopedic mind of blood and masked murderers, and predicts exactly how the plot will unfold.

[requitals-arc]

@jupiter3 ( kitsey. )

she toys with the sleeves of her jacket a little. can barely look up. she keeps trying to exile this part of herself, the one that says horror is her holy scripture, jennifer-not-jade, all of it. it’s been more than four years now—and still, the words spill out.

“you were good. in lilac, i mean. i’m usually more of a giallo kind of person, but.”

(but. she gets all of it. sometimes you’ve got to show everything, so people stop talking about proofrock and the lake and the everything, the dirty everything about it.)

[marypsue]

For a variety of reasons, I probably won't write this out in any more finished a form than this. But it's been living in my mind rent-free for a year or more, so I finally had to just bite the bullet and see what it wanted to be. So. Have a summary for a fic I'll never write.

...

Jennifer Daniels is dead.

Well. Presumed dead. She's been missing for seven years. The manhunt's been over for six. Nobody really believes that Jennifer could have survived the fire and flood that nearly wiped out the little town of Proofrock, Idaho. Or if they do, they're not saying anything.

So Jennifer Daniels is dead by the time Jade Loomis, homeless, penniless, and a little burn-scarred, ends up stranded, unable to scrape together enough for a bus ticket or hitch any more rides, halfway through Indiana.

While flipping through ancient microfiche in the library basement, trying to avoid the suffocating heat of summer, Jade starts to realise that maybe it's no coincidence that she's stuck here in Hawkins. The town seems placid (as Lake Placid) on the surface, but it's got a history as full of myth and murder as Proofrock. Or maybe even more. Local legend comes complete with killer chemical spills from secret government experiments, demon-haunted mass murderers with gruesome calling cards, and a mall-destroying disaster from the eighties straight out of Stephen King, that's still whispered about having secretly been some kind of Satanic ritual sacrifice.

If there was ever a place in Middle America where a slasher - another slasher - was going to rise from the dead, Hawkins is it. And Jade already has a couple of solid theories about just who it might be. She just has to study up on the lore, locate and train the final girl, and then disappear into the background like mysterious wandering mentors tend to do, before anybody starts asking too many questions.

But it's hard to pinpoint who's going to be the final girl, when you're a grown-ass adult and technically a wanted woman and so can't really get within five hundred feet of the local high school. And the more Jade digs, the more questions she unearths. People in Hawkins seem...almost unusually dedicated to making sure that the past stays in the past. And Jade can't be certain, but she's pretty sure she's being followed.

Maybe most concerning of all, though, she's starting to think the abandoned boathouse where she's been crashing might actually be haunted.

The visitations Jade's getting, along with the wall of silence from every resident over the age of forty and her own research, are starting to make her doubt everything she thinks she knows about the town's lore. And maybe more importantly, making her reconsider her theory about just who - or what - exactly is rising here in Hawkins. And why.

After all, what kind of name for a slasher even is Eddie?

[ninja-muse]

I completely abandoned any pretense about reaching my yearly reading goal this December, but I did manage to read one TBR book per month and read 50 of the books I wanted to in 2022, so I’m counting the year as a win. And I got close to the goal, anyway, at least if you include the picture books. (I do not like to include the picture books.) This month also included surprise highlights, surprise disappointments, and not one, but two, history books, which I feel like I never do.

December also, obviously, included a book haul. I got a couple books I asked for for Christmas, a couple books that came from the “give everyone an essay about my tastes” wishlists, and The Atlas Six, which arrived at work too damaged to sell but is still perfectly readable and it had been recommended by a friend…. The highlight is Weirdos of the Universe Unite!, however. I read this at least three times as a kid, via the public library, and I’m pretty sure we can credit my love of urban fantasy to it. That one’s actually part of my birthday haul, but the postal system got in the way. Very excited to (hopefully) reread it in 2023!

The Mummy! - Jane C. Webb Louden A plan to resurrect a mummy somehow upends the monarchy and everyone’s love lives. Melodramatic satire on a grand scale. - Egyptian secondary character

Beneath Another Sky - Norman Davies A world tour of countries subsumed by the colonial West and the ways they’re rebuilding after. - diverse nations and peoples covered - warning: colonial mindsets 1491 - Charles C. Mann An examination of what is known about pre-contact life in the Americas, versus what has often been taught and believed. - Indigenous subject matter - warning: racists, genocide

The Great Believers - Rebecca Makkai Yale is trying for a bequest to his gallery while navigating a relationship and watching his friends die of AIDS. Thirty years later, Fiona is searching for her daughter and reckoning with how Yale’s friend-group has affected her life. - largely 🏳️‍🌈 cast, Jewish protagonist, Jewish secondary character, Black secondary character - warning: deaths from AIDS, period-typical homophobia, including apathy and hate crimes

Books and Libraries - Andrew Scrimgeour, ed. A collection of poetry dedicated to the love of books.

The World We Make - N.K. Jemisin The boroughs of New York thought they’d fought their biggest battle, but then a populist politician comes to town. - ensemble cast containing Black, Indigenous, Indian, Latina, and 🏳️‍🌈 protagonists, Black author, #ownvoices for Blackness

Don't Fear the Reaper - Stephen Graham Jones Jade Jennifer Daniels returns to Proofrock the week a serial killer escapes in a blizzard. Out in February. - Blackfoot protagonist, Indigenous secondary characters, Black secondary character, disabled secondary characters, Blackfoot author, #ownvoices for Blackfoot representation - warning: death, gore, animal death

Grumpy New Year - Katrina Moore with Xindi Yan (illustrator) Daisy’s going to China to visit her Yeh-Yeh for Lunar New Year! Daisy should have slept—but she didn’t. - Chinese cast

The Golden Spoon - Jessa Maxwell Six contestants, two hosts, one world-famous baking show. And a body. Out in March. - ensemble cast containing Black, Latina, neurodivergent, and 🏳️‍🌈 characters

Reread:

The Jolly Christmas Postman - Allan Ahlberg with Janet Ahlberg (illustrator) A postman delivers Christmas mail to the fairy tale and nursery rhyme residents of his village.

Currently reading:

A Killing In Costumes - Zac Bissonnette Jay and Cindy just got an offer that might save their movie memorabilia business. Unfortunately, their competitor has turned up dead and that might sink everything. - 🏳️‍🌈 protagonists

The Penguin Complete Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle Victorian detective stories - major disabled character
 - warning: colonialism, racism


Stats


Monthly total: 9
 Yearly total: 145 + 2
 Queer books: 1
 Authors of colour: 2
 Books by women: 5
 Canadian authors: 0
 Off the TBR shelves: 2
 DNFs: 0

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[haveyoureadthispoll]

Jade returns to the rural lake town of Proofrock the same day as convicted Indigenous serial killer Dark Mill South escapes into town to complete his revenge killings, in this riveting sequel to My Heart Is a Chainsaw from New York Times bestselling author Stephen Graham Jones. Four years after her tumultuous senior year, Jade Daniels is released from prison right before Christmas when her conviction is overturned. But life beyond bars takes a dangerous turn as soon as she returns to Proofrock. Convicted Serial Killer, Dark Mill South, seeking revenge for thirty-eight Dakota men hanged in 1862, escapes from his prison transfer due to a blizzard, just outside of Proofrock, Idaho. Dark Mill South’s Reunion Tour began on December 12th, 2019, a Thursday. Thirty-six hours and twenty bodies later, on Friday the 13th, it would be over.

[mylifeinfiction]

Don’t Fear the Reaper by Stephen Graham Jones

Jade the fighter. Jade the survivor. Jade the final girl.

Now that's more like it. This is the slasher book I was hoping for from the get-go; the slasher book My Heart Is a Chainsaw had all the potential to be through-and-through, yet didn't become until the last minute. With Don't Fear the Reaper, though, Stephen Graham Jones gives us that glorious slasher promise from page one, and rarely lets up throughout that fantastically violent, messy finale. And best yet, he never does so by sacrificing who Jade Daniels is, or the world she's living in. Jade is - throughout most of this book - a completely different character, but never in any way that SGJ betrays her. Instead, she's different because he allowed her to grow through her experiences and the traumas she lived through in the first book and the four years separating it from this one. If My Heart Is a Chainsaw made Jade Daniels a final girl, then Don't Fear the Reaper proves she deserves the title. Her final girl status is no fluke, no glorified embellishment, it's who Jade Daniels is down to her very core. And rather than excitedly running into what that title bestows with naive excitement, as she did in Chainsaw, Reaper finds her begrudgingly accepting it despite wanting to put the horrors of this world - the horrors of this life - behind her for good. Unfortunately for her, with the amount left unresolved at the end of this book, one's led to believe (hope) that's not happening anytime soon, and Jade's time as a final girl is going to culminate in gloriously gory fashion come time for the final installment in The Indian Lake Trilogy.

The major negative aspect of the book would have to be the history teacher and his subplot, especially the direction it takes in the end. I'm sure it'll be utilized in an interesting/effective manner in the final book, but unlike some of the other teases throughout this book, it just feels too awkward and unresolved for its own good, here. There may be more, but none significant enough to gripe about when the positives are so abundant. Other than Jade's magnificent character work, we get a concise slasher set-up this time around; the storm-of-the-century, an escaped serial killer, a town's blood-soaked black sheep returned. All of the action takes place over ~36 hours, and each of the plot's beats throughout serve SGJ's slasher goodness. And thankfully, the supporting characters don't only serve to drive Jade's final girl destiny forward (though they definitely do that as well), but are given great scenes of their own to shine apart from Jade's spotlight, and also work to bring some emotional and thematic heft to this otherwise straight-forward narrative. Unlike the first book's horror theses that ended each chapter, we get a different type of school paper - ones that serve the story more than just on a purely thematic level. Instead of just being overlong slasher-theory (eventually serving merely as slasher fan-service), they provide backstory and fill out some of the occasionally vague aspects of the core story.

Best of all, though... we get violence. While Chainsaw had an epic, overwhelmingly brutal finale and an abundance of fantastic horror-centric ideas throughout, its action felt seriously lacking in its middle ~200 pages. Reaper doesn't have that problem, delivering effective doses of the good shit throughout. And while there may not be anything here quite as epic and all-out batshit crazy as the Lake Witch Massacre, the end of Dark Mill South's time in Proofrock - especially that amazing video store scene that kicks it all off - is insanely enjoyable in its exhausting brute-force and vicious unpredictability.

9/10

-Timothy Patrick Boyer.

[kinetic-elaboration]

September 13: Jade/Letha/Banner (1?)

Indian Lake Trilogy, canon-complaint through Reaper with one obvious difference. I really wanted to write a threesome, is the thing. But that's not what this is.

~780 words, 30 minutes

*

This time, when Jade's released from prison, it's Banner who picks her up outside the gates and then insists on taking her home. He means his home but says it like it's hers too, which is of course a lie. She puts up a fight about it that's more than token resistance but not much. He answers like he's tired and maybe a little bored, like he'll break soon just to get her to shut up, except that he doesn't stop answering, doesn't stop, doesn't stop, doesn't stop, until they're back in Proofrock again, and then she lapses into silence and pretends this isn't letting him win.

In his new truck that looks a lot like the old one, except the headlights aren't smashed in and the color's a bright alarm red instead of black, he takes her down Main Street, silent, watching her out of the corner of his eye. She can feel it. Maybe after tangoing with two killers—hell, more than two, but two massacres, two horror shows—she's just got an extra sense for a pair of eyes trying to drill into the side of her skull, with the same intensity of an actual bone-shattering power tool. Or maybe it's just him. Some sort of bond they’ve got or something.

"Are you a real deputy now?" she asks, to make conversation when they roll on past the dollar store.

"I'm the whole damn department," he answers. Then: "Me and Meg."

It's not snowing this time but it's not spring either: the second week of February, frigid blue-cold with a knife-like wind and that same old snow perma-frosted to the ground. When that wind picks up it blows snowflakes wafting over the crystalline, clear snow mounds, the ones that were probably sparkling in this morning's sun. Now it's early dusk and only bruises of purple shadow shade on down the sides of them.

The Tompkins house looks like it always did on the outside, must have been transformed on the inside, because the decor is all Mondragon. Like they've split the property right down the middle. He maintains the outside; she transforms the in. Most of the rooms are dark, feel like they're shrouded. Jade makes out the details of the front hallway, the living room, the kitchen as she glimpses it through a doorway. The living room's the easiest because they linger there a while and because one of the lights is actually on, sending out ever-fading circles of concentric yellow-white. A girl—Gal, must be, because she looks about the right age and somewhat familiar—is sitting at the edge of the couch, in the brightest part of the spotlight, holding Adrienne asleep in her arms.

She turns her head around halfway, half-upside down, doesn't move otherwise, exchanges information with Banner in low tones while Jade stands awkwardly in the worst light and tries to take the place in.

There's got to be some kind of metaphor here, about where the light touches and where it does not.

She tries to center it, herself, tries to find the start of this thread. First dials back to last December and then even further, further. Goes too far and comes back and then wavers and settles on the exact, precise, specific moment when she first saw Letha: the girls’ bathroom, Henderson High, senior year. When she knew the most important piece of the narrative puzzle was clicking right into place. There's a skip in the tape here. A bug, where the audio cuts and the video stripes over with static—maybe it's more like a DVD with a scratch on it and it just repeat and repeats and repeats. The bathroom stall door swinging open and Letha stepping through.

And again.

And again.

And again.

The only thing Jade had really wanted to know, what she'd kept on harping about to her lawyer, since she was going back to prison and there wasn't any way around that, was is Letha okay?

Fast forward the tape through all the gory parts—you've seen them all anyway, the fake stuff and the real, and the blood and guts aren't the core of the story anymore, never were—and what you've got is this. Jade, orphaned, untethered in the middle of a not-quite-familiar living room, her hands deep in the pockets of the coat she hasn't taken off. The living room isn't home but there are other living rooms, other houses, that are farther still from the ideal. She's gotten her second get out of jail free card. There aren't any left. Letha is somewhere upstairs, out of the hospital, home, and Banner says she's been waiting impatiently just to see Jade again.