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well here we are at the end of things. as much as i like liveblogging my thoughts, it's also a principle of mine to reserve final judgment until i actually finish a book. so now i think i can safely say that the primary reason why exquisite corpse fails is because andrew compton is such a wet fart of a character.

what i feel like andrew is supposed to be is a sort of catalyzing agent for the book. he is supposed to be the reason that the balance tips and the undoing of the other three major characters happens. of the cast he's the only "foreign element" that enters new orleans, everybody else is a sort of local fixture that people Know, and they also have a kind of cagey on-the-brink-of-exploding tension with each other that just needs One Thing to happen to make it go to shit. andrew is the One Thing. hypothetically.

for reasons i cannot conceive of, he does not in any way interact with any other major character until we are more than 140 pages through this 240 page book. the development of his psychosexual romantic obsession with the other gay necrophile serial killer of the novel is then speedrun in the same chapter they meet, smash cut to the next morning and now we are basically at the end point of the toxic codependency. like hello. hello???? you want me to be invested in this now??

this also kills the progression of serial killer #2, jay's, arc, which ngl in concept i find very interesting. he can only love a corpse--as much as he wants to keep his lovers with him, once he develops an attachment to them, he must kill them. it's practically compulsion. cannibalism, consumption, then becomes the only way he sees he can preserve them ("their meat becomes my meat"). this is until he becomes infatuated with tran, the third main character, and is genuinely conflicted about whether or not he wants to keep him alive. should he be "preserved" by letting him go free, by jay intentionally stopping his pursuit of him and letting their lives diverge? or should he be "preserved" through consumption? hypothetically andrew is the weight that tips the scales in favor of consumption as their mutual codependency grows and jay chooses him over tran. except remember, andrew and jay's relationship has been speedrun, which means that jay's inner conflict about tran has also been speedrun, which means andrew points to tran and says "we're going to kill and eat him jay" and then they immediately begin planning to do that like fuuuuuckkkk dude. god forbid i be invested.

tran is the sort of character who you know is doomed from the start so i wasn't expecting him to get out of the book alive because of the type of story he's in. his personal plot starts by being kicked out of the family home in a sort of mutual "you can't fire me i quit" sort of way, he can't fall back on his long-time boyfriend for support because of a recent breakup, all of his other friendships have atrophied over the years, and his plan A is hoping to exploit jay's obvious attraction to him to crash at his place. the second we meet tran we know he is going to die. but the leadup to that is condensed, like every other pivotal moment in this book, so we do not get the kind of watching-a-train-crash-in-slow-motion suspense that would have made this a more satisfying read. and on a note that's just kind of like, personally sad to me, tran gets p much nothing in terms of an arc. it's not even that it's purposely cut short because of his murder it just feels absent. he is the object of obsession for two separate men, both of which project their own unfulfilled desires and fantasies for how they believe he can bring meaning to their lives, how they can be "saved" by enacting those desires onto him or him accepting their affection, and that just feels like the kind of thing that is begging for some kind of narrative counterpart in tran's arc and there is just a very conspicuous absence. man.

speaking of conspicuous absence, luke, i haven't talked about luke yet. he is main character #4, tran's long-term toxic ex bf, and i hate him in the way that we tend to hate characters that are the type of annoying you feel like you could encounter irl. that part's definitely an intentional character flaw but he still annoys me metatextually too. he is in a similar boat to jay in that conceptually there are things about his arc that i want to like but it just gets so squashed into the last third of the book. he is stuck in the genuinely shitty situation of being a gay man with HIV in the mid-90s, but he simultaneously wallows in his self-destructive habits and bitterly lashes out at everyone in his life. at his core he wants to tear apart the world he believes tore him apart, bring everyone down with him regardless of the cost to himself. when he finally admits that, he then overcompensates and pivots to repairing things with tran--there's the projection i mentioned before, "if i reconcile with him, then our relationship will save me," etc. unironically i love that. he's just trading one form of selfishness for another while thinking he's moving forward, and we as the audience know it's going to crash and burn because we also know that tran is going to die.

but remember we're in the speedrun now so all of this is happening in the last like forty pages of the book so we don't get any time to breathe here because we really needed like twenty pages of andrew fucking around in pubs killing people an entire ocean away back in the first half of the book. him and luke get a confrontation at the end because they are the two who make it out alive. on one level i find this interesting--both of them have had the object of their obsession killed by the other (jay for andrew and tran for luke) and they both have to live with it now. you've staked all your feelings on another person and they've been ripped away. their killer is in front of you but you can't bring yourself to take their life. now both of you walk away knowing that the other one is still out in the world. we don't talk about any of that though. andrew is monologuing about how actually, luke is just like him, and he could have been his equal if he wasn't too pussy to start serial killing, actually. where is this coming from, and why are we focusing on it instead of the objectively more interesting similarities between them instead. i don't know, the book is over now. missed opportunities and frustrating pacing choices: the novel. two and a half out of five.

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[MiNNA@minna_kitsuneko]

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Santa Lucia by John Bauer, 1913.

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dog, thrice drawn

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Swallowed by the fog

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Orazio Riminaldi (1586–1631)

Icarus, detail

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i don't know when this webbed site is going to learn that bitterly demanding that people reblog your art is just going to make them more anxious about interacting with your stuff in general

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The Green Knight

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i do find it amusing that looking at the promo materials it seems like everyone has gotten very slight design tweaks except for stocking. can't improve on perfection

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I'm gonna start pissing and shitting everywhere once the psg season 2 comes out PLEASE LET IT BE FUCKING GOOD!! 😭🥹

im manifesting a banger. we waited fourteen years for this cmon trigger pull through

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