Unquiet
Things

An addition to my monthly reviews of new or new-to-me perfumes is that I will be sharing a fragrance that I included in my monthly marinade that I’ve been particularly reaching for throughout the month. In case you’re new to the idea of my “monthly marinade,” it’s a practice wherein I’ll grab a handful of neglected bottles from the back of my cupboard and arrange them nicely on a tray every month, so I am more likely to reach for them and wear them!

This month is Spell 125 from Papillon Artisan Perfumesis a scent entwined and imbued with deep magic, history, and ancient mystery. If I understand correctly, it is a fragrance inspired by the Egyptian Book of the Dead, and the ritual and ceremony pertaining to the weighing the deceased’s heart against a feather, wherein if one passes this trial, they reach the eternal paradise of the Field of Reeds. If not, well then too bad, I guess. They probably get eaten by a monster or something. Shoulda behaved better, not taken milk from the mouths of babes or festival loaves from the gods and whatnot. I believe this is meant to be a very atmospheric scent, and while it is, I don’t know that I’m getting what the perfumer intended from it. But who’s to say whether that’s a good or bad thing if one enjoys the result? From Spell 125, I get a strange vanilla salt that’s somehow sweet and savory, bright and dusky, earthy and airy at once, evoking both terrestrial concerns and something lighter and loftier. A sweetly green herbaceous melange conjures imagery of cool aromatic, woodsy marjoram incense, an offering to household gods (I can envision clearly the canvas painting by John William Waterhouse) lit for the afternoon, the smoke cleaning and clearing the domestic spaces, and left to smolder and disperse with the windows open, on a cloudless day in early autumn. This is a fragrance which conjures the loveliest peace of mind and sense of well-being, and although I don’t yet know otherwise, I’ll hazard a guess and say it’s splendid to experience such a thing while you’re still above ground.

…and here are all of the new things I smelled in March!

Nopalera Dulce de Cuerpo smells like the night sky over water, which sounds like nothing but is actually everything, a balmy darkness that has cooled just enough, where you find yourself tilting your head back and registering, not for the first time and not without a small interior lurch, how vast and indifferent all of it is. There’s something agave-bright and boozy in here, a kind of milky agave-adjacent liqueur that has a celebrity’s name attached to it, something that comes in a bottle shaped like a ruffled stiletto or a lacy skull, that you wouldn’t seek out but that works perfectly in this moment because this whole moment is a little outside your life. You walked past the lurid neon dregs of a party a half mile down the beach to get here. You’re wearing a sample of a fragrance you wouldn’t normally reach for. The drink in your hand was whatever they were featuring at the bar. None of it is quite yours, and all of it is exactly right, somehow, for this time and space, a little bit outside time and space. Underneath, the fragrance is vanilla and resin and something softly earthy and powdery, but it’s all filtered through the mist of the night tide, through salt and dark water and the musk of warm air that has been swirling over the ocean. Thoughts arrive and pass by like clouds over the moon. The sky, enormous. You, small and warm and human, all of your human grievances and desires and sadness and mania and wonder, which is fine, which is everything, which is all there is. Which is all you get.

Meo Fuscuni Last Season smells like what lives a bit deeper underneath the forest floor, the private teeming dark where mycelium threads wind through soil and small creatures conduct their business and pleasure and what-have-you under stones. Turn over a log, and there is a damp organic exhale, a little sneezy-shocking, a little sweet, something that was quietly happening without you and will resume the moment you put the log back. There is almost a campfire quality to it, not fire exactly, not the flame or the heat, but rather the ash settling back into earth, smoke absorbed into whorled bark and cool moss, and the soft bodies of things. This is the world Rien Poortvliet painted with such weird, goodnatured curious devotion, gnome lore, the integration of decay and domesticity, a hearth fragrant with leaf rot and good dark earth, a home where the worms are neighbors and the beetles are confidants and the mold on the rafters has been there longer than anyone can remember and belongs there, it practically holds the place together! This particular gnome has a tender heart and a melancholy streak and knows all the words to all the Cavetown and Haley Heynderickx songs and probably writes poetry about the smell of rain in autumn, the tremulous silhouette of a lone, dandelion on a late summer evening.

Poesie The Astral Library collection…

Always Time for Tea Beatrix Potter by way of folk art — a gingham potholder, a pot of something plum dark and berry-stained sitting on top of it, the arrangement a little crooked and entirely loved. Bramble and black tea deeply overbrewed, rambunctious and purple, the berry bleeding into the cloth, into the warmth. A wolf in a housedress who has made her peace with the housedress and also with being a wolf, surrounded by the good clutter of a life fully lived, none of it matching.

Bookish Warm vanilla between old dry leather, softened just enough by something sweetly human, a breath, a margin note, the soft powdery dark of a thought had once and never retrieved. Something that was alive in another century and left its mark between the pages. The library that is also a labyrinth that is also a storied digestive system, paper as skin, marginalia as scar tissue, every life ever lived inside it still faintly present, still warm, still giving off the slow elegiac sweetness of things that have been deeply, thoroughly read.

Library Ghost A marshmallow that exists the way the TARDIS exists mid-arrival, flickering in and out of solidity, present and then not, sweet and then just the memory of sweet. Whatever warmth it had was used up in trying to be seen; what remains is powdery and faintly mineral, cool as a waxen moon melting at the edges, the sugared impression of something soft that may or may not still be there if you turn around quickly enough. Still going about its business. Still almost there.

Myself Invisible Cool green and soapy-powdery in the way violets are soapy-powdery, which is the way the inside of a great aunt’s compact is soapy-powdery, which is the way a pressed flower found in a book you didn’t know you owned is soapy-powdery, but the green underneath is damp and dark, ferns through floorboards, moss reclaiming carved stone. A handful of violets held by something just out of view, a door in a hedge, the back of a wardrobe that is just coats and cold and someone else’s life pressed into wool, not Narnia, just the dark and the waiting and the green coming up through everything anyway, patient as a blackbird’s shadow frozen in the morning’s snow.

Through Dangers Untold Carnation bright and clove-sharp, almost brash with it, dragonblood resinous and red underneath, smoke and old earth and something that has been burning a long time. Bold and a little sunburned, the smell of someone who rides toward things rather than away, who has a sword and knows the name of every horse she has ever loved.

Yet to be Written Cold air with something abstract and sweet underneath that keeps not quite becoming itself, smoke from a fire not yet lit, an unfilled space that is also somehow full — a small sharp thing, a comic-tragic sting in the tail of sentiment. A future that was promised and hasn’t arrived, which is different from a future that was never promised at all. A door that was supposed to open. The inside of a chestnut before it opens. November as a feeling, a lifestyle, a graveyard where the ground hasn’t yet been broken.

Hilde Soliani Golosissimo A massive cocoa-dusted angel food cake, the kind of cake that served as a ballgown skirt for the cheap plastic doll jammed down the center of it (do they still do those kind of cakes for little girls birthdays? I loved them so much ) whose layers are stuffed with thick-almost-chewy chocolate mousse, aggressively strides up to you, slaps you in the face, breathlessly makes out with you, and steals your wallet. (Luckily for my wallet I had a 15% coupon for scentsplit.)

Eris Parfums Mother’s Milk

Sharon Doubiago wrote, “My mother is a poem I’ll never be able to write, though everything I write is a poem to my mother.”

Elaine gave me this: the love of beautiful things and gorgeous scents, the obsessive appreciation for art and baubles, and because we never spent time together obsessing over these things, I often feel like every perfume review I write is another poem for her. Mother’s Milk is the kind of fragrance I would have brought to her. Challenging and charming, like she was.

Milk bread soaked in rosewater, shokupan-soft and faintly floral. Something salty and slightly sour underneath, skin and dust on a windowsill in afternoon light. The rose absorbed into the milk, bready and close, and a vanilla that’s less sweet than earthy and buttery, sebaceous almost, warm and not exactly feral, but rather a soft purr. A muffled softness with an unresolved, swift bright electric thing reaching through it, grasping something, anything, everything, and never having it. Elaine is in that elusive thing.

Elaine was a depressive, manic, recovering alcoholic, twenty years sober when she died, an animal hoarder, a woman who somehow held down a job and paid rent (I will forever scratch my head at this, because she just never seemed like an “adult” to me), and charmed everyone she met while remaining a complete mystery to me. People were drawn to her. I was traumatized by her craziness and chaos. But I loved her and all the mystery of her, and I am haunted by the question of why she was the way she was, which I will never get to ask her now.

This perfume smells nothing like her, but she’s everywhere in it.

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The Apparition Phase by Will Maclean Tim and Abi are thirteen-year-old twins obsessed with the supernatural, they’re “Too obtuse, too weird, too clever by half. We didn’t care. We had each other.” That line alone sums up everything about them, the kind of precocious insularity that would alienate most people, but for them it’s enough to have one person who gets it, who speaks the same language, who wants to spend hours in the attic discussing hauntings and folklore and the macabre. When they fake a ghost photograph to scare an unpopular girl at school, they set in motion something neither of them could control. Abi disappears. Years later, Tim finds himself pulled into a paranormal investigation at a decaying country house called Yarlings, surrounded by people chasing ghosts, chasing proof, chasing answers that might not exist. But what captured me most was Maclean’s writing. He moves through the 1970s with phrases like “Like the vanished Neanderthals, we knew our forebears largely by their wall art” and “Seven souls, their little human essences glowing dimly in a grey wash of static, like distress beacons, broadcasting their vulnerability.” He can describe concrete gnomes “pushing wheelbarrows into nowhere” and make it ominous. He asks the question that haunts the whole book: “Is it more terrifying to believe somewhere is haunted, or to believe that nowhere is?” This is the book I have been actively chasing with every single word on every single page of every single story I have ever read. The one that nails that ache of loss and absence, the feeling of something you recognize but can’t quite claim. Maclean took feelings I never had from a time I never lived through and made them mine, made them nostalgic, made me think this was the best book of its kind I’d ever read when in fact it’s the book I’ve always been wanting to find. The writing is so good it makes the past feel like your past, even when it isn’t.

Bed Rot Baby by Wendy Dalrymple Reading this felt like meeting a new friend who’s as weird and fucked up as you are, and realizing your weird matches their weird in a way that feels like a threat and a promise. Baby is a mess; she’s broke, she’s a shoplifter, she’s selling feet pictures, she’s a sugar baby who’s not even good at it and doesn’t really care to try, she’s rotting in bed literally and metaphorically after a bad breakup. And Wendy Dalrymple writes her with a glorious specificity and dark humor that makes her feel completely real, and completely relatable. A mysterious woman assaults Baby in a parking lot, and she begins to literally rot, her body decaying in grotesque, inexplicable ways. Baby has to hunt down her attacker to understand what’s happening to her and find a way to stop it, all while her roommate Elaine watches her disintegrate and everything else in her life, her sugar daddy, her shoplifting hustle, her attempts to stay afloat, falls apart around her. When her body starts to decay, when she’s losing fingernails and toes and pieces of herself, she doesn’t stop being a person you understand. The body horror is gross and visceral and specific—she describes a bisected person as resembling a “flayed hot dog,” and I will never get over this, it is a thing of beauty. The way Dalrymple writes Baby is a hoot, absurd and specific and dark. True story. When I was a teenager, my mother was Baker-Acted. Twice. When my sisters and I overheard popular girls at school talking about how their mothers took them shopping for Bongo jeans at the mall over the weekend, we would smirk at each other and say, “Oh yeah, well MY MOM got Baker-Acted this weekend!” One, I feel like Wendy Dalrymple probably gets pitch-black humor as a coping mechanism/survival strategy. I recognize this humor. I know this humor. And two, I know that the Bongo jeans reference really dates me. Read via Netgalley

Murder Bimbo by Rebecca Novack Murder Bimbo wants you to know she’s capable of great love and connection, that she matters, that you won’t forget her. She’s a sex worker in her early thirties who gets tangled up in a plot to assassinate a right-wing politician, and she tells the story three different ways—to a podcaster, to her ex-girlfriend, to herself—reshaping it each time to be the version that makes her look best. The thing is, every version circles back to the same person: her. Her needs, her desires, her desperation to be seen as someone worth remembering. Novack structures the book around this circular logic, each retelling revealing a little more about how she actually thinks. It’s a fun ride watching someone reshape their story depending on who’s listening, each version tailored to land exactly right with that particular person. Don’t we all catch ourselves doing this? Minus the political intrigue, maybe. She’s not trying to deceive so much as she’s constantly negotiating who she needs to be in order to matter. The repetition of the three tellings drags in places, but you understand why she’s doing it—each version is a performance, and the only audience that really matters is the one in front of her at that moment. Read via Netgalley

Accumulationby Aimee PokwatkaTenn is a filmmaker-turned-housewife who moved into her dream house for her husband’s new job, except the dream seems like kind of a fucked up nightmare from day one. A faucet that won’t turn off. A doll that appears in every room. A human tooth in the floorboards. Her children start acting strange, looping through the same destructive behaviors over and over. Her husband, Ward, is absent most of the time, consumed by work, but it feels like he’s actually trying, caught between a demanding job and a family falling apart in a house that might actually be haunted or might be haunting them through his wife. I loved Tenn; her inner voice is sharp, it’s real and grounded. Even as things are spiralling out of control, even when she doubts herself and her reality, she remains basically herself. She thinks, she questions, she grieves what she’s lost—her career, her sense of self, the person she thought she’d be. The house gets weirder and weirder, but Tenn never stops being a person, a real person, moving through it. Pokwatka does this thing where the characters get caught in loops, doing the same things over and over. You turn the page and read almost the same sentence again, and you think, did I accidentally reread something over again? It’s confusing, and it throws you off, and it happens a few times, and it gets you every time. It could have been annoying, but it was, in fact, pretty freaky. The ending reveal comes, and it’s an interesting spin, but it ultimately lands in a sentimental space, the Lifetime movie resolution, that feels a bit safe when it could have felt darker, more tragic somehow. But who cares? This was a great read! Read via Netgalley. Publishing May 5, 2026

Best Offer Wins by Marisa Kashino Margo Miyake and her husband Ian have lost eleven bidding wars in the Washington, DC suburbs housing market, and it’s destroying her. She’s obsessed with one specific house—the perfect house, in the perfect neighborhood, the one that’s supposed to fix everything! When she gets a tip that it’s coming on the market, she decides she’ll do whatever it takes to get it before anyone else. And I mean whatever. Stalking, trespassing, manipulation, blackmail—Margo, like a honey badger, doesn’t give a shit. What makes this book a hoot is that you’re rooting for her the entire time, even as she spirals into complete derangement. She’s relentless, uncompromising, willing to do anything without guilt or hesitation. Her desperation is mortifying to behold for the reader, but Margo is absolutely shameless, and Kashino writes her with such dark humor and relish that you can’t look away. Margo becomes increasingly, irrepressibly unhinged, her tactics more insane, and somehow it’s funny. The housing market satire is sharp, but what really makes this book work is Margo herself, a character with no off switch, no surrender. She is utterly unfuckwithable. Who cares about the ending? Getting there was a blast.

The Vacancy in Room 10 by Seraphina Nova Glass Cass manages the Sycamores, a dumpy, run-down motel converted into apartments, blackmailing cheating men to supplement her rent after her boyfriend dumped her for someone younger. Anna moves into her dead husband’s studio at the same building complex in the wake of a distressing phone call wherein he confesses to murder and is soon found dead afterward—and Anna is, of course, grieving and confused and wants to figure out what happened. Cass is attempting to bury her secrets, Anna is attempting to dig up secrets, and although this at first puts them at odds, the mystery draws them to each other and toward something like genuine friendship anyway. I also loved the slow reveal of these residents, people who at first seem a bit trashy and obnoxious, as genuinely good, decent human people. But I feel like the story plays it safer than it could have. I kept waiting for it to get messier, darker, willing to actually spiral instead of managing the darkness so carefully.

The Last Ferry Out by Andrea Bartz Abby travels to the remote, hurricane-battered island where her fiancée Eszter died, convinced it wasn’t an accident. (Eszter always carried her EpiPen. Where was it? Hm!) The setting is the best thing here, moody and atmospheric, the kind of place that used to be a big deal and isn’t anymore, and Bartz wrings quite a bit unease out of the isolation. The expat community Abby infiltrates is uniformly suspicious in that low-grade, hard-to-pin-down way that’s either careful misdirection or just everyone being vaguely weird, and I couldn’t always tell which. The pacing is slow, Abby isn’t interesting enough to compensate for that, and the alternating timeline fleshing out her relationship with Eszter left me more confused about them than invested.  The twist/resolution is kinda underwhelming.

Nowhere Burning by Catriona Ward Suffering from starvation and abuse under their guardian, Cousin, Riley and her frail younger brother Oliver run away in the dead of night, seeking refuge at Nowhere—a burnt-out ranch in the Rocky Mountains where feral runaway children have supposedly made a home. When they arrive, they find other children living there, bound by their own hierarchy and rules. But nothing about the place is sanctuary. Ward scatters the story across multiple timelines that feel like they’re happening simultaneously. An architect who worked for movie star Leaf Winham (Nowhere’s former owner) before the fire that destroyed it. A documentarian chasing the legend of Nowhere. Riley and Oliver navigating the situation at the burnt ranch. The history of the apple farm where it all started. The overlapping timelines and disoriented chronology could have scattered the narrative, but Ward uses that fragmentation deliberately, with each timeline illuminating the others. I’m not sure I came away knowing what was real at Nowhere, which part of the experience was ghosts or hallucinations, or something else that Riley was experiencing…and I am not sure Riley knew, either. The stories converged brilliantly and the ending was the sort of devastating that was also inevitable, and would have felt untrue to the story had it happened any other way. It wouldn’t be Catriona Ward if it weren’t some heady combination of bewildering, broken and brutal. Read via Netgalley

Dark Is When The Devil Comes by Daisy Pearce Hazel returns to her small English hometown after a divorce, planning to house-sit for her parents and reconnect with her estranged sister Cathy – however, a chance encounter with a dangerous stranger derails those plans. When Hazel doesn’t show for their meeting, Cathy begins searching, eventually teaming up with Hazel’s childhood friend Suzie along the way. The fog-drenched countryside and its accompanying creepy folklore add just the right amount of atmosphere, but the extra disturbing bits relate to the ghostly (?) body horror (?) element tied to Hazel’s past, which seems to have resurfaced in ways that blur the line between reality and Hazel’s deteriorating mental state. I never quite understood the kidnapper’s motives or how he initially targeted Hazel, which left me feeling like I’d missed something important. What I did love, though, was watching Cathy (former mean girl, still sharp-edged) and Suzie (perpetual good girl) forced to work together, their tentative friendship forming as they navigate the search. I’m not sure everything came together for me in a way that left me satisfied at the end, but I had a good enough time with the story along the way. Read via Netgalley. Publishing April 28, 2026

Cruelty Free by by Caroline Glenn Former star Lila Devlin returns to Hollywood a decade after her daughter’s kidnapping, determined to reinvent herself with a skincare brand and move forward. The story opens with a clever mixed-media structure, interviews, excerpts, internet posts, that captures how the press and true crime obsessives have picked her life apart, gossiped about it, profited from it. Then she kills someone, and the book pivots into revenge, with her devoted publicist Sylvie becoming her partner in the bloodbath. It’s a fun ride watching them systematically work through the people who made money off Lila’s suffering, but then there’s a moment where she brutally kills a dog, and the pointlessness and cruelty of it made me thoroughly, actually murderous, whereas the rest of the book had been a good time. I still don’t know whether that was meant to be the tipping point when we stop rooting for Lila and start wanting her downfall, or if it was just shocking and gratuitous. Sylvie’s devotion feels real enough, and her derangement tracks from beginning to end, but Lila’s shift from grieving mother trying to move forward to serial killer feels unmoored. The setup suggests she’s come to some kind of peace, found a way to rebuild, and then the book just sort of…decides that’s not the story. By the end, I was unsure what the book was actually trying to be, and I’m not entirely convinced it knew either. Read via Netgalley

Anatomy of a Scandal by Sarah Vaughan I picked this up by accident, confused it with Notes on a Scandal, but I read it anyway. James Whitehouse, a Junior Minister, is accused of raping Olivia, a parliamentary researcher he’s been having an affair with. His wife Sophie believes he’s innocent and stands by him. Kate, the prosecutor, is certain he’s guilty—and she has reasons of her own for wanting to win this case. Everyone went to Oxford together, and there’s something about what happened back then that connects to what’s happening now. It was fine. Well-constructed, competent courtroom drama. But it’s well-trod territory; a powerful man, a gross accusation, the wife who stands by him, the lawyer with her own agenda, seeking justice for her own reasons. It held my attention while I was reading it, but I haven’t thought about it since.

Body Count by Codie Crowley Sundae was a child when she and her mother fled her abusive father and ended up at a motel in Wildwood, where a monster in the pool offered her three wishes in exchange for a price she couldn’t yet comprehend (and that also he conveniently forgot to mention.) Years later, she returns to Wildwood for prom weekend and meets Lia, a musician playing a show at the motel where she and her cheerleader friends are staying. They have amazing chemistry, and a connection that could actually be beautiful. But Sundae is exhausting to spend time with. Not because of who she is as a person; she’s got confidence and swagger, and I respect that, there’s something appealing about that. The problem is Crowley keeps filling her mouth with language that’s so stupidly, aggressively trendy it sounds dumb coming out of her. To be fair to Sundae, it would sound dumb coming out of anyone. Every time there was space for something real to happen between her and Lia, the dialogue would pull me out of it completely. I wanted to care about them. Instead, I found myself irritated by the way Sundae talks. If I were Lia’s friend, I might be furtively shaking my head and sternly whispering at her every chance I got, GIRL NO. The monster is even worse. I never understood what he actually wanted or why he was doing any of this. The book doesn’t explain his logic or his motivation in any way that makes any damn sense. He shows up demanding payment, he kills people, but, like…why? Crowley clearly has a vision for this. There’s fun in the chaos and the gore and the campy beach-town dread, but I found myself frequently closing the book out of sheer exhaustion and embarrassment. The humor was so cringy that it kept taking me out of every moment that could have mattered. The dialogue kept pulling me out. The villain kept pulling me out. I kept waiting for something to truly pull me back in, but it never did. Read via Netgalley. Publishing May 5, 2026

Peach Pit: Sixteen Stories of Unsavory Women, Molly Llewellyn (Editor) Do you like stories about women who give zero fucks about being likable? Ok, well, likeable is the least of the fucks these women don’t give. This anthology collects sixteen tales featuring con artists, murderers, revenge-seekers, and women ruled by ambition, grief, spite, or rage, with contributions from contemporary weird fiction superstars like Chana Porter, Sarah Rose Etter, Alison Rumfitt, Aliya Whiteley, and Lauren Groff. I enjoyed this overall, with a lot of great stories offering cathartic fun alongside some that were just okay. My favorites were “Fuckboy Museum” (a middle-aged Black woman exacting revenge on mediocre men from dating sites) and “Aquafina” (beautifully written, left me wanting more, questioning what I was reading the entire time). The collection succeeds in giving us complicated, messy women across a genuinely diverse range of experiences – Black, brown, trans, disabled women from different backgrounds, not just the usual white upper-middle-class antiheroes. Some stories leaned literary, others into magical realism or horror, and the standouts balanced out my lesser favorites, making what seemed to me a pretty fantastic collection.

Molka by Monika Kim Molka scandals in Korea are real. Hidden cameras in bathrooms, intimate videos spread without consent, women’s privacy invaded and weaponized while the men who perpetrate these crimes often face minimal consequences. Monika Kim takes this horrifying reality and builds a novel around it, moving between Dahye’s naive perspective and her coworker Junyoung’s depravity that we are treated to right out of the gate. We watch him degrade his mother, obsess over the women in his office, install cameras in their bathrooms. We know exactly what kind of predator he is long before Dahye realizes the threat he poses. Dahye herself is caught in a relationship with Hyukjoon, a wealthy heir who records her without consent and then abandons her when the video surfaces online. She’s left alone to manage the fallout while her dead sister’s ghost lingers on the margins of her life. I was enraged and infuriated through most if not all of this book; not at Kim for her writing or her choices as an author. But rather angry at the men on the page and at the systems that protect them, and the ways women are left to survive what men have done to them. The pacing stumbles just a bit in the middle, and the revenge is not nearly as bloody and ferocious as I would like in the end. I’m still sitting with it, unsure where I land on whether the restraint serves the story or undermines it. But I enjoy this author’s ideas, and I am always thrilled to read more from her. Read via Netgalley. Publishing April 28, 2026.

Headlights by C.J. Leede Daniel is an FBI agent burnt out and pulled back into a serial killer case in Denver, where people are blacking out and waking up on the highway wearing victims’ skin, a strand of hair tied around their tongues. The book starts tight and creepy, but halfway through it becomes cosmic and metaphysical, and it never finds its footing afterward. The romance between Daniel and victim/suspect Hannah develops too soon, too fast, too intensely (and doesn’t really earn or deserve that intensity), and the sex scenes feel …not exactly shoehorned in, but just…why? Instead of deepening my connection to these characters, I was pulled out of their momentum entirely. By the second half, there are too many threads, all the supernatural mythology, cult shenanigans, procedural mystery, grief processing; it was a bit of a tangled mess instead of weaving into something cohesive. It’s clear this is a love letter to Stephen King and The Shining, to Colorado, to loss and mourning, and there are genuine moments where, through Leed’s cinematic, visceral prose, that devotion -pardon the pun – shines through. And I will say I absolutely loved Tillman, Daniel’s police partner, who appears to be a laid-back stoner type, seemingly zoned out half the time, but he’s actually paying close attention, smart and observant, catching details Daniel misses while he’s too caught up in his own head. But the book reaches for too much and loses the thriller momentum from the opening. I want to love all of this author’s offerings, but. It just wasn’t the book for me. Read via Netgalley. Publishing June 9, 2026.

Doll Parts by Penny Zang Nikki and Sadie attend Loch Raven, an all-girls college outside Baltimore, where Nikki becomes obsessed with the Sylvia Club—a campus legend surrounding the deaths of Plath-obsessed students. Nikki digs into their stories, follows the threads, becomes convinced there’s something more sinister happening than what the college will admit. And then something unspeakable happens. An accident, but not an accident—something that binds them together and destroys them at once. Twenty years later, Nikki is dead, and Sadie finds herself pregnant by Nikki’s widower, living in her preserved house, sensing Nikki everywhere. This is a book about that specific era—grunge, Courtney Love blaring from car speakers, college girls in black dresses holding seances, melodrama as a way of understanding the world. “I hated it in the way I hated everything I also loved.” That’s the feeling running through it, the way Nikki and Sadie knew each other completely and then couldn’t speak to each other at all. “Happy memories were the worst kind.” That’s what it costs to lose someone who was your whole world. Zang’s writing captures all of it, the darkness, the closeness, the specific ache of that time in your life. I loved this book.

Watching Evil Dead: Unearthing The Radiant Artist Within by Josh Malerman Josh Malerman spends an entire book asking a question that has been plaguing him: What does an author deserve? He’s just published Bird Box, the success is beginning, and he’s wrestling with what that means, what he’s owed for the work. Over one night with his girlfriend Allison and two friends, they gather to watch Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead—a movie Allison has never seen—and as they drink and smoke and watch, getting sillier and more philosophical under the heady fog of it all, Malerman circles this question again and again, moving toward an answer that unfolds gradually: the artist deserves the work itself. Not the money that follows, not the film deals or the accolades or the recognition from strangers. The victory isn’t the dotted line or the sales figures. The victory is the completion of the thing, the knowledge that you’ve said what you needed to say, that you’ve expressed yourself fully and without compromise, that the words are exactly as they needed to be. That’s what an artist deserves—not what comes after, but the act itself. A book written like this is inherently self-indulgent. You’re reading his night, his thoughts, his obsession with one question. You’re a captive audience to his voice. This isn’t a tightly structured, traditional memoir with writing advice wrapped in narrative. It’s Malerman thinking out loud, circling back, getting drunk and stoned and philosophical with his wife. The book is messy and digressive, and sometimes it felt excessive, but if anyone gets to do this…it’s a writer, right? You can’t convince me a writer can’t/shouldn’t be self-absorbed on their own pages. Did I love the experience of reading this? Not really. But I liked the overall message, and I respect the author who does it like this, which is to say, however the hell they want to. Read via Netgalley

The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer Robin Wall Kimmerer uses the serviceberry tree—a tree that produces abundant fruit for birds, bears, and humans without asking for anything in return—as a meditation on gift economies versus market economies. The essay explores how Indigenous worldviews understand resources not as commodities to be owned and hoarded, but as gifts that create relationships and demand reciprocity. Gratitude and generosity become the currency, and wealth is measured not by what you accumulate but by what you give away. It’s short, really just an extended essay, but it works. Kimmerer doesn’t pretend gift economies can replace our current system entirely, but she argues for them to coexist with it. In public libraries, in Little Free Libraries, in neighbors sharing tomatoes from their gardens. The whole thing hinges on a simple shift: if you see the serviceberry’s fruit as a gift instead of a resource, your relationship to it changes. She writes that assigning a market value to a gift destroys it. You can’t sell manna without spiritual jeopardy. It’s aspirational, maybe naive, but sitting with it feels good anyway. Because in a gift economy, wealth comes from what you give and the relationships you build. Joy is what you get from that. And as she writes somewhat cheekily (but I am 100% here for it), the ones who have more joy win.

Sing Backwards And Weep: A Memoir by Mark Lanegan Mark Lanegan’s voice sounded like two stones rubbing together, like gargoyles fucking. It was one of the most beautiful sounds in rock music, and I loved listening to it—he was a gorgeous, devastating musician. But. Jesus Christ. I finished this book, and I felt like I needed an exorcism. This memoir is vicious and visceral and harrowing. Lanegan walks you through his addiction, his violence, his cruelty with a kind of unflinching honesty that’s almost admirable except for what it reveals. He was selfish and cruel and nihilistic. He hated his own band while they were carrying him. He was contemptuous of people he deemed beneath him. He was angry in ways that addiction shaped but didn’t excuse. He performed toughness like a sacred duty, and underneath it was just a guy who was genuinely difficult and self-destructive. Edgy in the way that edginess always is—cruelty dressed up as honesty, aggression justified as self-defense, meanness rebranded as truth-telling. But I don’t know if any of this is true, not really. He could be performing the worst version of himself for the page. He could be so ashamed that he’s exaggerating his own cruelty. Or it could be exactly how bad it was, filtered through the memory of someone who was high for most of it. You can’t trust his account of his own life, which means you can’t condemn him and you can’t forgive him either. The book becomes relentless in the final chapters. Just more and more punitive reading. It’s just degradation, deterioration, scraping by with no relief. Then a few pages of rehab, Layne Staley dies, and it’s over. That abruptness is brutal in its own way. It mirrors the despair of what we’ve just read. Does any of this change the way I feel when I put one of his albums on now? I don’t know. I guess time will tell. But what I do know is that for the rest of my life, I will be cackling at the things he said about Liam Gallagher. “All I knew was that in my 31 years on Earth, I had never encountered anyone with a larger head or tinier balls.”

Hilma af Klint: A Biography by Julia Voss A radical, resolute, and utterly tireless creator, who spent a lifetime engaging with the fundamental questions of human existence, Hilma af Klint broke with academic tradition to produce abstract paintings decades before Kandinsky, Mondrian, or Malevich claimed to have invented abstraction. Her work was driven by theosophy, by spiritualism, by her conviction that she was receiving commissions from higher planes of existence through seances and meditation. When she couldn’t find a place to show her work, she wrote to Rudolf Steiner asking if she should just burn it all. Very Scorpio. Julia Voss learned Swedish to write this biography. That tremendous dedication shows up on every page of this book; the research is extraordinary, meticulous, and comprehensive. And yes, it’s dry. The book doesn’t sing the way you might hope. But perhaps that’s the cost of doing this work properly. Voss gives you everything she found, and what emerges is a portrait of a woman who was utterly committed to her vision, to her spirituality, to her art, even when the world had no use for any of it. We create for likes, for validation, constantly checking if anyone cares. Hilma created because she was compelled to, trusted that what she was doing meant something, that the meaning was in the making itself. We’re still trying to catch up to what she already understood.

Audition Katie Kitamura An actress, unnamed, meets a young man for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant. He claims she is his mother. She tells him that’s impossible. They seem to leave it at that. Or do they? She is in rehearsals for a play, struggling to find her way into a role; one transitional scene in particular that keeps eluding her, a bridge between two very different versions of the same character. The book has the same problem, or maybe the same project: two halves that don’t reconcile, a gap Kitamura never explains and doesn’t try to. In the second half, he is her son, having just moved back home with her and her husband, and that lunch feels like it happened in a different life, or maybe even a different book, entirely. I went back a few pages more than once, trying to get my footing, and eventually just let go, which I think is the only way to experience this. The prose has this quality of making ordinary observations feel faintly ominous, Lynch by way of Levin, an atmosphere of domestic unease that builds with breathless surreality. I kept underlining sentences not exactly because they moved anything forward, or because they were pithy zingers, but because they felt uncannily true. “I had a natural inclination to press my face against the glass, to peer at the mystery of other people, but I also had an instinct for self-preservation.” That’s the narrator, but it could just as easily describe the experience of reading the book.

Die, My Love by Ariana Harwicz is narrated by a woman in the French countryside who is coming apart,  postpartum psychosis, or something that was already there before the baby arrived and simply metastasized, the book never clarifies. She fantasizes about violence, she shoots the family dog, she hides in the woods with her infant while search parties look for them.  Harwicz never lets up on the disjointed-bordering-on-incoherent intensity for a single page. I guess it must be said that I came to read this book because the film trailer was arresting, and I was intrigued when I found out it was based on a novel (though I have at this point not yet seen the film.) The problem, for me, was that I couldn’t find my way into the main character. Not because she does terrible things, but because her specific unraveling felt so remote from anything in my own experience that I ended up watching it from a considerable distance the whole time, unable to close the gap. I can recognize that it’s a remarkable piece of writing, or so a lot of people say, but I just never stopped feeling like an observer.

The Country Will Bring Us No Peace by Matthieu Simard Simon and Marie leave the city for a rural village after the death of their young daughter, hoping a quieter life and another baby will heal their struggling marriage. The village is weirdlyhostile in ways nobody will quite explain: the locals will sell you things and invite you places but make clear you are not welcome, there’s an abandoned playground everyone warns you away from, a mute girl wandering the streets, and an antenna looming over everything that gets blamed for the town’s slow collapse without anyone elaborating on why. The book tells you almost immediately that Simon and Marie are going to be “the murder-suicide couple,” and then you spend the rest of it watching them move toward that anyway, in a village where the birds have stopped singing, in the house Marie’s cello sits untouched in its case. It is relentlessly grim. The novel alternates between their two perspectives, and having both of them gave me something to orient myself around, even if neither of them were particularly reliable narrators of their own lives or each other’s.  The story was carried almost entirely on vibes and dread, and I can’t entirely tell you why I liked it but I did. I read this back to back with Die My Love, which shares some of the same DNA — rural isolation, relentless grimness, a relationship coming apart at the seams. But where Die My Love locked me inside a single consciousness so fractured I could never quite find my footing, The Country Will Bring Us No Peace gave me two people, two perspectives, one terrible trajectory, and somehow that was just enough of a handhold.

Hollow Inside by Asako Otani Hirai is 38, working a boring office job, living with her colleague Suganuma who’s 42. The fact that she lives with another woman—even platonically—is treated as deeply aberrant by her coworkers, something that needs explaining or justifying. She has an aversion to men that the book acknowledges but never explores. She feels hollow, like she’s supposed to want certain things but doesn’t. The writing has that particular Japanese quality of emotional distance, observing rather than diving in, which works sometimes but here it keeps you at arm’s length from actually understanding her. It’s a quick read, and there are interesting threads (the strangeness of her situation, her queerness that goes unnamed, the weight of societal expectations) but the book just skims the surface of all of it. It could have been something, but we never quite get there to know what. Read via Netgalley. Publishing June 2, 2026.

The Fox and the Devil by Kiersten White When a mysterious, impossibly beautiful woman kills Anneke’s father and leaves coy letters in her wake, Anneke becomes obsessed with hunting her across Europe, assembling a team of detectives to track a string of murders that may or may not be connected to something far worse than a serial killer. And when I say far worse, I mean exponentially more boring. Anneke tells us repeatedly how brilliant she is while doing almost nothing brilliant, mostly just sitting around thinking about this gorgeous, haunting killer while her team actually solves the case. There’s nothing wrong with the writing, really, but this story and its characters and plot (and I guess literally everything else about it) did nothing for me, and come to think of it, I didn’t enjoy a single second of it. Why a whole three stars, then? Because I can’t thoroughly articulate all the ways I didn’t like it, and so maybe that’s on me. Read via Netgalley

The Wax Child by Olga Ravn The Wax Child is narrated by a wax doll created by Christenze Kruckow, a Danish noblewoman accused of witchcraft in the early 1600s. Buried in the soil, somehow all-seeing, the doll pieces together her account from animals and objects and god knows what else, which is an nteresting conceit, strange and eerily poetic. The doll herself is fascinating. The women she’s observing, much less so;  they never quite cohered into people I could grasp onto in any meaningful way. The narrative is disjointed and confusing in ways I couldn’t always attribute to the doll’s unreliable sourcing versus just the structure of the thing. I love the idea of surreal, formally adventurous historical fiction, but I don’t always love it in practice, and this was one of those times.

The Secret Attic by Chelsea Conradt Addison and Luke return to his hometown to clean out his late mother’s massive estate, a woman who never liked Addison and made that clear from day one. The house is a hoarder’s nightmare, rooms packed with years and years of accumulated, inexplicable junk. But as Addison digs through the boxes, she finds something crazier than nutty clutter: a hidden attic filled with dolls labeled with people’s names, dolls made with human hair, dolls that seem connected to a string of accidents around town. Creepy dolls are fine and well if they’re your freaky hobby! But these aren’t Addison’s dolls. They’re her dead mother-in-law’s dolls, and they’re tied to real people, real accidents, real trauma. Luke grows increasingly hostile and evasive, gaslighting her about what she’s finding, lying about what he knows. I feel like the premise itself is actually pretty cool, the house shifting with the weight of its secrets, the crows dropping mysterious tokens at her feet, but none of it, not a single part of it works. The book buries itself in Addison’s endless internal monologue about how much she loves Luke while he’s being cruel to her. She spends so much time in various parts of the house and the attic, opening box after box after box, and the author finds new ways to describe them all, which is impressive in a technical sense but mind-numbing in practice. Slippers in Addison’s size show up—why? We never find out. The crows are eerie, but the book never explains why they care, what they want, or what they’re actually doing there beyond being atmospheric. By the end you’re sitting with questions the book never bothers to answer and an abrupt twist that doesn’t justify any of the buildup. It had potential. It just never committed to anything. Also, honestly, Addison lost any reliability as a narrator the moment she mentioned her cute jean jacket. Forget it about ghosts existing or not; I refuse to believe in the existence of a jean jacket that is not 100% hideous. Read via Netgalley. Publishing June 2, 2026

Pizza Girl by Jean Kyoung Frazier Pizza Girl is an eighteen-year-old Korean-American delivery driver in suburban Los Angeles, pregnant, grieving her alcoholic father, unmoored and adrift, and really hasn’t quite managed to develop much of a personality yet. When she becomes fixated on Jenny, a desperate housewife who orders pickled pizzas for her son every week, it makes a certain kind of sense. Jenny is something to look at, something to organize your thoughts around, a manic-pixie-dream-cougar onto whom Jane projects everything she can’t articulate about her own life. What Jenny’s actual problem is remains somewhat opaque, which is either the point or a missed opportunity, I’m still not sure. But the experience of being inside the sad sack oddball mess of Jane’s head, that’s what the book is really selling, and it delivers on that.

My Husband’s Wife by Alice Feeney Eden Fox comes home from a run to find her key doesn’t fit her house, her husband doesn’t recognize her, and a woman who looks exactly like her is living there as his wife. Six months earlier, Birdy inherited Spyglass, a house in Hope Falls, and discovered a clinic that can predict your death date. These two stories collide, and apparently everyone’s been lying about everything the whole time. The mystery doesn’t work. It’s just reveal after reveal with no setup, no logic, nothing to suggest how any of these people figured anything out. You can’t read it back and see the clues because there aren’t any. It’s all arbitrary information being dumped on you. But the bigger problem is the prose. Every page is stuffed with clichés. “Something ugly can sometimes be turned into something beautiful.” “Some people leave a mark on your life, others leave a stain.” “Feelings are like visitors, they come and they go.” It’s exhausting. Feeney stops the story constantly to hand you a platitude, like you need her to tell you what to feel. I got this, Alice! You don’t have to spout greeting card schmaltziness at me! By the end, I was so angry I wanted to scream.

Nesting by Roisín O’Donnell Leaving an abusive relationship is impossibly hard, especially when you’ve been ground down intimately and deliberately, your autonomy stripped away so gradually you can’t pinpoint when you stopped being a person anymore. Ciara knows this. She’s already tried to leave Ryan once and been sucked back in. But this time, something snaps, and she drives away with her daughters and a handful of cash, into a Dublin housing crisis that offers nothing but a hotel room and the daily humiliation of proving she’s desperate enough to deserve help. Ciara goes hungry so her daughters can eat, attempts to decorate their tiny hotel room, trying to build some kind of home in a space that’s meant to be temporary. All of it shadowed by the fear that she’s destroying their childhood, that she’s made everything worse. She stays anyway, even when every system, every doubt, every manipulative text from Ryan makes going back seem like the easier, safer choice. And in that hotel, in that degradation, she finds other women, and her daughters find other kids, and somehow that becomes enough to hold onto. Reading it made my heart race, my vision blur at the edges, I was literally panicking most of the way through this book. I was glad to have read it but even gladder to finish it.

Paper Cut by Rachel Taff Lucy Golden killed someone getting out of a California cult when she was sixteen, and that murder became her entire identity for the next twenty years. She’s spent those two decades managing her own mythology while the spotlight won’t stop burning, dealing with hecklers at book signings and trolls online, a stalker, and a narcissistic artist mother who’s still somehow managing to overshadow her. The book moves between Lucy’s memoir—the official story she’s been selling—and her actual life now, and the gap between those two things is where the meat of the story lives. A documentarian shows up wanting to “set the record straight,” which is rich because Lucy’s already been rewriting it, and capping it off with a 10-year anniversary edition to boot. The cult stuff is gross, as cult stuff usually is, the family dynamics are messy, and watching her navigate all of it while a podcast and a film and the internet itself are all trying to reshape her story—it’s smart and savvy about how trauma gets packaged and sold, how true crime has turned people’s worst moments into content, and Lucy’s caught right in the middle of it all, complicit and aware and unable or unwilling to stop any of it. Read via Netgalley

The Keeper by Tana French I know these books don’t get the same love as French’s Dublin Murder Squad novels, but I’m realizing I actually really love this series despite (or maybe because of?) how slow it is. This is the third book following Cal Hooper in Ardnakelty, and by now we know him, Lena, Trey, and the village itself so intimately that the stakes feel much higher when things start going wrong. When Rachel Holohan (about to be engaged to Eugene Moynihan, son of the local big shot) goes missing and is found dead in the river, the community fractures along loyalty lines. The Moynihan family, especially patriarch Tommy, is clearly up to something, and as Cal digs into Rachel’s death while trying to maintain his hard-won place in the community, he and Lena and Trey uncover a scheme that threatens the entire village. I think I love this town and its convoluted feuds and gossipy old farts at the pub, and honestly I can’t separate my feelings about the characters from my feelings about Ardnakelty and the way it shapes everyone who lives there. The first half moves at a snail’s pace while French luxuriates in atmosphere and scene-setting, but the second half pays off when everything erupts and the tension becomes unbearable, and I find the whole thing weird and intriguing and scary and satisfying, all at once. Read via Netgalley. Publishing March 31, 2026.

Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil by V.E. Schwab In 1532, María grows up stifled in Santo Domingo de la Calzada, a girl who knows her own mind but is trapped by circumstance between being a prize or a pawn. When a beautiful stranger offers her escape, she vows to have no regrets. In 1827 London, Charlotte’s idyllic life on her family’s estate ends after a moment of forbidden intimacy sees her shipped away to her aunt’s house to be cloistered and prepared for her own coming out. When a mysterious widow offers her freedom, Charlotte is swept away—though the cost proves steeper than imagined. In 2019 Boston, Alice moves across the world to become someone new, but an out-of-character one-night stand results in strange and terrible consequences and sends her hunting for answers and revenge. Schwab braids these three stories across centuries, watching what these women become when immortality amplifies what was already there. María arrives hungry and calculating, willing to destroy even those who showed her kindness. Charlotte tells herself a story of deep sensitivity that her choices contradict. Soft, gentle Alice, fueled by grief and rage, reveals sharper edges and a harder heart. What happens to each of them under immortality is different. María’s hunger calcifies. Charlotte’s complicity deepens with every choice. Alice is still fighting against it. But the ending rushed past what should have been its reckoning. The final confrontation needed room to breathe, space for us to feel the full weight of what these women have become.

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Somewhere, there is a mythic, lachrymose storybook from another world, and machumaYu is its illustrator and caretaker, both. They tend their inhabitants the way one tends a terrarium of singular, precious creatures: with patience, with devotion, with a face pressed to the glass, cataloguing every ceremony, every migration, every small and serious life within.

Inside, the cast goes about its business with complete solemnity: foxes and goats and wolves deep in their appointed tasks — a gloomier, more arcane Busytown, every creature with a purpose, every purpose shrouded in mystery — small cloaked figures gathering around volcanoes and caged lions, children sealed inside glass flasks, animal-headed scholars presiding over books and globes and celestial instruments.

I was deep in the “Imagery And Inspiration Of The Elements” chapter of The Art of the Occult when machumaYu’s work found me, the way certain things on Tumblr have always had an uncanny instinct for finding exactly the right person at exactly the right moment.

A curious blue dog-girl hybrid sealed inside a glass flask, guarded by a winged, scaled creature and a watchful cloud, disembodied figures drifting through sky above a medieval castle, each wearing a different head , tree, sun, flame. I knew immediately I was looking at just one mythology among many in someone’s expansive, fully inhabited, weird, weird world.

machumaYu’s inhabitants do not know they are being watched, or if they do, they have decided it is of no matter to them. A rabbit cycles a unicycle while playing piano, reaching for the keys with total concentration. Small white-robed figures hover in solemn a circle around a caged lion wreathed in flame, themselves ensconced in a larger wheel, part of a strange cycle. An owl-headed scholar, his body composed of stacked books, holds open a text with both hands as though the answer to something urgent is in there somewhere.

None of this is played for laughs. None of it invites you to find it absurd. And yet there is something in the cumulative weight of all this earnest, diligent strangeness, creatures going about their ancient business with the focused gravity of beings who have never once questioned the logic of their world, that produces in the viewer a feeling adjacent to a gentle fondness, adjacent to amusement, but not quite either. Something warmer and more complicated than both.

machumaYu’s world did not begin when you arrived. It feels conceived in a candlelit scriptorium by someone with a melancholic disposition and an extensive knowledge of folklore, deeply committed to alchemy and the collective unconscious, and indeed it has centuries behind it, ancient myths, founding narratives, lost histories of characters whose names have dissolved into time.

The Rohm Founding Myth gives us a many-horned goat presiding over a jagged rock formation encrusted with the ruins of a miniature city, two armored figures riding an enormous wolf below, an old-world map hovering in the sky above like a record of territories long since forgotten.

Universe assembles four animal-headed figures around a root-limbed child at the center of a circular fortress, a deer holding scales, a lion clutching a book, a hare with a crystal ball, a figure whose head has become a tangle of branches, as though we have stumbled into the founding ceremony of something that will long outlast us. And yet this world is not only ancient history; it has its own living present, its own seasonal rituals and natural laws.

In The Night Party of Flowers, a doll-like girl cradles a lizard beneath lush, oversized blooms that dwarf the surrounding trees, a flower with a human face presiding at her side, a human figure with a blossom head, accompanied by an accordian, and In Death and Life: The Cycle, three animal skulls rest on the ground amid mushrooms and small plants while swirling vines wrap themselves around fox and owl and hummingbird alike, the whole composition a tender and unhurried account of everything that ends and everything that follows.

The same figures return across machumaYu’s paintings like characters in a story that has no single beginning and no fixed end. Lions and deer, foxes and hares, wolves and leopards, children with enormous solemn eyes. They migrate from painting to painting, appearing in new configurations, new landscapes, as though their lives continue between canvases in rooms we cannot see.

They move through a world rendered in the muted, dimmed palette of something viewed through old glass or remembered imperfectly — ochre and ash and pewter, the occasional bruised blue, colors that feel a little moth-eaten and weather-beaten, dusk, and shadowed and eternally overcast.

And everywhere, containers: glass flasks holding girls and unicorns, domes enclosing entire ecosystems, circular structures, armillary spheres, globes. machumaYu is drawn to the world within the world, the small and sovereign place inside the larger one, which is perhaps why their paintings feel less like windows and more like diminutive vivariums: controlled and enclosed, rare and self-sustaining behind glass, breathing its own air, following its own ancient rules.

machumaYu calls it “bright darkness,” and spending time in this world they have built, you understand just what they mean. There’s a lonely, dolorous undercurrent running beneath everything in this fanciful ecosystem, and yet there is warmth here too, and tenderness, and something that sits just beside a droll whimsy without ever quite becoming comical, and none of these things resolve into each other or cancel each other out. They companionably coexist, the way they do in the deepest parts of the human interior.

machumaYu keeps vigil over this world they have built with the attention of someone who built it from nothing and knows every corner of it, keeping faithful watch over the brightness and the darkness in careful, equal measure.

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Wouldst thou like to live uncommonly/strangely/mysteriously, etc.?

I can help with that! I am still slinging my spooky, weird, gently used books over on Pango, and I just did a little shop update!

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Once, in another lifetime, I was having a phone conversation. I don’t remember with whom, or what it was about, but I uttered the phrase “…unbeknownst to me.” Just in passing, really, without even thinking about it. Because it was the right word for whatever I was trying to say.  It’s just a word that lives in my head, the way certain words do, the kind you’d use whether anyone was listening or not.

Someone was listening, as it turned out. And he wanted to know why I had to “talk like that.”

Like I was showing off. Like “unbeknownst” was something I’d hauled out to perform intelligence at people. I didn’t understand the accusation at the time, it took me years to fully parse what was actually being said, which was not you “think you’re better than everyone” so much as “why can’t you think and talk and act like me.” It wasn’t, I think, insecurity exactly. It felt more like a profound intolerance for anyone operating outside his frequency. I was supposed to be a mirror. Smaller. Simpler. Legible to him.

I was with this person for ten years. I was twenty-four when we met; he was thirty-five. By the time we moved in together I was pushing thirty and he was inching toward forty, which I mention only because the disparity in our ages felt, at the time, like evidence that he knew things I didn’t. That his read on the world — and on me — carried some authority mine didn’t yet. He was paranoid and controlling and could construct an accusation out of thin air and a vocabulary word. He also knew, on some level, exactly what he was. He told me once, with the particular self-satisfaction of a man confessing to something he expects to be forgiven for, that he was leftover meatloaf. His words. He already had a wife, a life, a family, and what I got was whatever was left on the plate at the end of the night. He said this like it was charming. Like self-awareness was the same thing as not doing harm.

What he could not do was meet me where I lived. And rather than acknowledge that gap, he spent years convincing me the gap didn’t exist — or that if it did, I had dug it myself, on purpose, to make him feel small. More than that: he convinced me I was fine with a small life. That I wanted it, actually. That the ceiling he’d put on our world was appropriate to someone like me, because no one would ever love me or understand me the way he did. I was too much and also not enough, and he was the only one willing to take on the specific burden of my particular whateverness. I believed him. For a long time, I genuinely believed him.

Here’s what I think I know now, that I didn’t know at twenty-four: people who are threatened by how you think are perhaps not going to grow into people who aren’t. When someone hears unbeknownst and reads it as a failure to be more like them, the problem is…probably not your word choice.

What it looks like when someone is actually on your level, or what it looks like for me, anyway: you say the weirdest thing that comes into your head, and they catch it. They throw something weirder back. Ývan knows I think I’m better than everyone (I’m not going to pretend otherwise!) and rather than flinching or sulking or demanding to know why I have to talk like that, he makes me even better. This happens multiple times a day, every day, without either of us keeping score or making it mean something about the other person’s worth. There’s no single example I can point to because it’s not a single example; it’s the texture of everything, the whole fabric of how we move through the world together. Either someone delights in how your mind works, or they don’t. I’m not sure there’s much of an in-between that holds.

And this isn’t only a story about a romantic relationship. The same principle applies now to everyone I let close,  friends, collaborators, people I gave my time and attention, and best words to. The meatloaf guy was the most extreme version, but he wasn’t the only one operating outside my frequency who I kept making excuses for.

I actually think about that post-telephone call exchange every day. But it was seeing one of those “what advice would you give your younger self?” social media posts that made me try to organize and articulate all of my thoughts about it. So here it is.

Younger me: If They’re Not On Your Level, Don’t Fuck With Them. Your weird heights are the view from which you were always meant to see the world; don’t you dare lower yourself. You are not too much. Do not swallow your words. Do not dim your vocabulary, your curiosity, your particular brand of expansive weird intelligence. Do not accept a half-life with a half-person and call it love. Do not accept leftover meatloaf and do not say thank you for it. Do not make yourself legible to someone who isn’t worth the translation.

At this point in my life I have, I’m glad to say, surrounded myself with people who operate at my frequency, who catch what I throw and throw something stranger back, who make me more myself rather than less. It took longer than it should have. But here we are.

And unbeknownst to that younger, credulous, catastrophically undersold version of myself: she was not, in point of fact, consigned by fate or deficiency to subsist upon the desiccated leavings of someone else’s life. She was owed, and has since received, the whole magnificent, unabridged feast.

Also: I’ll talk however I like, motherfucker. Go die in a fire.

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If you have spent any time in the darker corners of the internet where contemporary artists share their work, you may have already stumbled into Nona Limmen’s world without quite knowing how you got there.

The Amsterdam-based artist has spent years filing dispatches from a mysterious place whose existence remains unconfirmed, a vast kingdom obscurely bordering our own, wrought of shadows and secrets, its towering cliffs and dark caves and veiled inhabitants glimpsed only in the grain and blur her analogue techniques produce. Her photographs arrive like transmissions from memory or dream, specific and sourceless; impossible to recount and equally impossible to forget.

Limmen’s world has a way of finding its people. If you already speak the language of crow-black skies and candlelit staircases, of fog-eaten landscapes and figures who belong to no particular century, her photographs will locate you with an almost uncanny precision.

As it happens, my own gaze tends to linger on portraits and landscapes that produce a specific unease, the shadow amongst summer trees, the figure glimpsed at the edge of a landscape, the beautiful thing with something occluded at its center. Limmen builds entire worlds from exactly this trembling, tenebrous material, and inhabits them with solemn reverence and indefatigable devotion.

Limmen’s visual vocabulary is immediately recognizable. Dusk light, deep and livid. Candlelight guttering against absolute dark. The ash and pewter of deep winter. Gothic spires piercing a roiling dark that resolves, on closer looking, into a thousand wings. Skeletal trees reaching into skies so dramatically violet they read as verdict rather than weather.

Stone and shadow, iron and fog, the overgrown gate with ivy reclaiming its archway, the castle glimpsed through a cloud of birds at twilight. Her settings carry the same weight and intention as any figure she places within them, as present and purposeful, as steeped in the work of the image. You are always, unmistakably, somewhere in Limmen’s midnight country.

Nearly every image Limmen makes is poised at the edge of something. The ghostly figure on the staircase landing, five candles held aloft, neither ascending nor descending, the darkness above and below equally absolute. The dancing figures in an open field beneath a sky gone the color of cold embers, mid-movement, mid-ritual, caught in a moment that feels both ancient and unfinished. The castle swallowed by dusk, its towers readable only as interruptions in the dark, secretive and permanent and sealed.

Her world exists in this suspended state permanently, always on the verge of some disclosure that never quite arrives. The haze and sediment of her darkroom sorcery holds the tension in place, the veil of her process keeping each image at precisely the distance where mystery remains intact.

The figures who move through Limmen’s photographs are not drawn from the sweeter registers of fantasy. Witches bearing torches, wresting the fire from the hands that once burned them. Vampires and succubi baring fangs, wings aloft, their power radiant and hypnotic and terrifyingly gorgeous. The exiled queen. The witch of the wood. The horned figure on the dune, blade in hand, commanding a landscape that receives her without question.

These archetypes have spent centuries as cautionary tales, as monsters, as the one must escape or defeat. In Limmen’s hands they are are feral and free and fully realized. She photographs them the way you would photograph anyone fully at home in their own skin, which is to say, with total and unselfconscious ease. The dark feminine here is simply sovereign. Ancient and absolute.

“When Night Comes” its brooding Gothic towers and swarming bats suspended against a sky of inky damsons, fresh figs on inky velvet, of violet-studded plum, is the image I included in The Art of Darkness, though I had been following Limmen’s work for years before that, summoned to it time and again with the insistence of a sentiment that speaks directly to the parts of my heart that live in the dark.

She has described her work as visual love letters to the night, and I have yet to encounter a more honest or more beautiful accounting of what she makes. Limmen has spent years in devoted correspondence with the dark, and her photographs are the proof of that fidelity: dispatches from a profoundly haunted kingdom that has perhaps begun to dream of her in return.

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I didn’t even know this sweet photo existed until recently, and now it is my favorite thing ever. This is from our teensy tiny wedding four years (but many hair colors!) ago.

Gosh. These two. It took these two weirdos quite a while to find each other, but I am so glad that they finally did.

I realize I’ve been posting little tidbits here on the blog lately, not many long-form pieces. Hopefully, I will get back to that soon! I’ve been a bit overwhelmed and am trying to keep it together, and while sometimes it helps to lose myself in an afternoon of writing, sometimes it is quite literally the very last thing I want to do!

Anyway, I am back from my work-related travels, and obviously, I survived, so now I can breathe again. And no doubt, the ideas, the thinking, the brainstorming, and then the writing about all of those thoughts will follow!

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Here is a a link fantastic interview I did with Dr. Pedro Ortega Ventureira of Aulós Publishing. I genuinely appreciated the thoughtful questions and the opportunity to ruminate on and attempt to articulate how I think about all kinds of things. The questions were genuinely considered and gave me room to think out loud in ways I don’t often get to.

We covered a lot of ground: my strange, sideways relationship with goth subculture, the heavy metal origins of my particular flavor of darkness, how symbolist and decadent art first found me through my mother’s tarot collection and album covers, the building of the Art in the Margins series, and some fumbling attempts to articulate what the occult in art means to me. There’s also some talk of what’s coming in 2026. I hope you’ll give it a read.

Art in the featured image includes Alphonse Mucha, Odilon Redon, Chet Zar, Unica Zurn, Joseba Eskubi .

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