Unquiet
Things

The Midnight Muse by Jo Kaplan Metal band Queen Carrion returns to an Oregon cabin a year after their lead singer Brynn vanished in the woods, only to encounter fungal body horror weirdness that begins infecting and transforming them one by one. The premise had real potential – mycelium horror meets heavy metal in the Pacific Northwest, which should have been catnip for me – but Kaplan tries juggling seven different POVs while jumping between timelines, and it just never found its footing. The first half had some unsettling body horror and atmospheric moments that held my interest, but around the halfway point, it started dragging, and I found myself losing momentum as the characters kept making baffling choices (staying in a cabin with no reviews feels like extremely questionable judgment). What could have been a tight, nasty little horror novel needed serious trimming. I kept hoping it would pull itself together, but instead it just kept going and going until I was exhausted and resentful of the whole story and everyone in it. Publishing March 10, 2026

The St. Ambrose School for Girls by Jessica Ward A scholarship student with bipolar disorder navigates the toxic social hierarchy of an elite 1990s boarding school, where the relentless bullying from queen bee Greta Stanhope becomes entangled with her struggles to distinguish between reality and her own unraveling mental state. This isn’t the thriller the marketing promised, but rather a slow, heavy character study about mental illness and teenage cruelty that happens to include a death near the end. I found myself completely absorbed anyway. Ward’s portrayal of severe bipolar disorder felt convincing and unflinching (the way Sarah’s illness becomes its own unreliable narrator, the long dissociative tangents, the constant questioning of her own credibility), though I understand why some readers found those sections exhausting or distracting. I picked this up last year, bounced off after two chapters, then tore through it in one sitting this time; I think if you go in expecting a twisty dark academia thriller you’ll be disappointed, but if you’re prepared for something darker, sadder, and more interested in Sarah’s internal landscape than in plot mechanics, it’s pretty compelling.

Portalmania by Debbie Urbanski uses portals, sometimes literal sci-fi gateways, sometimes metaphorical escapes, to explore asexuality, difficult marriages, and the desire to be someone other than who you are. The stories share recurring characters and situations that feel like variations across parallel dimensions, which creates an interesting structural concept but also leads to a sameness that became overwhelming for me by the midpoint. I appreciated the unflinching examination of topics rarely explored in fiction (asexuality in conflict, coercive sex in marriage, the unglamorous reality of parenting neurodivergent children), and a few stories like the witch one and the AI replacement service really worked for me. The collection has ambition and Urbanski’s prose has real power, but ten stories covering such similar emotional territory felt like too much; I kept wishing for more variety or a tighter selection of maybe six or seven pieces instead of revisiting the same themes and character dynamics repeatedly.

Dollface by Lindy Ryan A masked killer starts slashing through a New Jersey suburb, targeting PTA moms one by one, while horror writer Jill tries to figure out who’s behind the murders before she becomes the next victim. Jill’s juggling her codependent relationship with her sister Kitty, trauma from her mother’s death, pressure from her editor for new pages, and desperately wanting to fit in with the Brunswick PTA despite her horror movie t-shirts and Final Girl coffee mugs. This had potential as a campy suburban slasher and the unhinged neighbor Darla (who calls everyone “dear” despite being maybe in her forties, which cracked me up) was mildly entertaining, but the killer and the twist were so obvious from very early on that I spent the rest of the book waiting for something I’d already figured out. Publishing February 24, 2026

Needle Lake by Justine Champine Fourteen-year-old Ida, neurodivergent and living with a congenital heart defect in the tiny logging town of Mineral, Washington, finds her quiet world upended when her charismatic sixteen-year-old cousin Elna arrives from San Francisco for the winter. Elna introduces Ida to shoplifting, drugs, and a kind of reckless confidence Ida has never experienced, but after the cousins witness a man drowning in Needle Lake on Christmas Eve, their relationship shifts into something darker and more complicated. I kept expecting some big dramatic reveal or confrontation that never materialized, only to realize in the final pages that the real story – Ida’s gradual understanding of herself, Elna, and their family’s secrets – had been unfolding quietly the whole time through Campine’s gorgeous, atmospheric prose. The pacing felt uneven (the ending rushed after so much careful buildup) and I wanted more resolution, but I found myself completely absorbed in Ida’s voice and the way she navigates a world that doesn’t quite make space for someone like her.

The Mad Wife by Meagan Church I’m not entirely sure what I was expecting from this 1950s housewife-slowly-unraveling story, but it turned out to be more slow-burn domestic drama than psychological thriller, following Lulu Mayfield as she struggles after giving birth to her second child and becomes fixated on her new neighbor Bitsy while everyone around her dismisses her concerns as hysteria. This was on the lesser side of fine for me. There were two twists I didn’t see coming – one genuinely heartbreaking, the other feeling like it tried to tie everything up with a neat medical explanation that somehow answered too much and too little at the same time – and while the exploration of women being gaslit and dismissed by doctors resonated (because yes, that still happens), the whole thing felt like it pulled its punches when it should have leaned into the bleakness it was building toward.

Tantrum by Rachel Eve Moulton Thea’s third baby Lucia is born with a full set of teeth, grows at an alarming rate, and announces she wants to eat her brother, which would be horrifying enough without Thea also grappling with dark memories from her own childhood and wondering if she’s passed some monstrous inheritance down to her daughter. I liked this even though it got weird and nonsensical; Moulton uses the “monster baby” setup as an extended metaphor for intergenerational trauma and maternal anxiety, and it works until suddenly it doesn’t (maybe? I can’t decide?) veering into bizarrely fantastical territory that seemed like it was aiming for catharsis but left me uncertain whether it resonated the way it was meant to. The dark humor against the heavy themes worked for me, and I appreciated how short it stayed (173 pages) rather than dragging the metaphor out past its usefulness. It’s inventive and original in ways that don’t stack up predictably, which I found compelling even if I’m still not sure how I feel about where it all went.

If You’re Seeing This, It’s Meant For You by Leigh Stein When Dayna (39, unemployed, recently dumped via Reddit) agrees to help turn a decrepit LA mansion into an influencer hype house, the job comes with a complication: Becca, the tarot card reader who used to live there and amassed a huge following, has vanished. The mansion has a strange history and seems to exert its own influence on the young creators living there, while Dayna navigates her complicated past with Craig, the owner who she hasn’t spoken to in twenty years, gets involved with Jake, the last person to see Becca, and teams up with nineteen-year-old Olivia to investigate what happened. I actually really liked this despite some baffling character choices; Dayna was weirdly out of touch for someone who’s only thirty-nine, considering I’m 49 and more plugged in than she seemed to be at the start, but then she’d suddenly have these confident, on-point ideas about how things should work and just run with them immediately. Her observations about visibility, aging online, and the cost of being seen were pretty sharp, but Stein seems to borrow from Gothic fiction (a crumbling estate, a mysterious disappearance), without fully embracing it ….this is more a decaying mansion with Wi-Fi than a brooding psychological mystery (though at some point the mystery stopped feeling like much of a mystery anyway.) I had a good time with it anyway.

They Bloom at Night by Trang Thanh Tran In the aftermath of devastating hurricanes, Vietnamese-American teen Noon and her grief-stricken mother navigate the waters around Mercy, Louisiana, where a red algae bloom has transformed the landscape and mutated sea creatures into something grotesque and unrecognizable. Noon’s mother refuses to leave, convinced her dead husband and son have been reincarnated as sea creatures, leaving Noon feeling invisible – not enough as a daughter, not enough as a person, despite being alive and right there. When the town’s local thug forces them to hunt down whatever creature is lurking in the swamp and sends his daughter, Covey, along to keep watch, Noon is navigating grief over her lost family, trauma from an assault, rage and self-loathing she can’t shake, and the growing sense that she might be undergoing her own monstrous transformation. I wanted to like this more than I did – there were so many elements I appreciated (the body horror, Vietnamese mythology, the metaphor of monstrous transformation as response to trauma and alienation from one’s own body) but they didn’t coalesce into an enjoyable whole, feeling sluggish and scattered instead. I really like Tran and their ideas though, so I’m glad I read it and will always pick up more from them.

The Haar by David Sodergren Muriel McAuley is eighty-four and has no intention of leaving her Scottish fishing village of Witchaven, not even when an American developer shows up planning to evict everyone and build a golf course. A mysterious fog bank called the Haar rolls in from the sea, bringing something ancient and monstrous with it that becomes Muriel’s unlikely ally, and what follows is equal parts gore-soaked revenge tale and surprisingly tender love story. I think if I hadn’t been listening to the excellent narrator on audiobook, this wouldn’t have kept my interest – I went in expecting atmospheric dread and creeping horror, but got something that felt more romantic than frightening despite all the visceral violence. I genuinely liked Muriel as a protagonist, and I can appreciate love and sentimentality and grief all tangled up with body horror, but this didn’t work for me as the horror story I was hoping for. Viewed as its own strange hybrid thing, maybe it’s actually pretty great, but I kept wishing I could split it apart – give me the story of the town being bought up by a rich developer with one stubborn old woman refusing to sell, or give me the ancient entity lurking by the sea, but mashing them together left me wanting each piece to breathe on its own.

Play Nice by Rachel Harrison After her mother Alex dies, influencer Clio Barnes inherits the childhood home where Alex claimed a demon lived, specifically obsessed with Clio – claims that got Alex stripped of custody and labeled crazy. Clio’s sisters want nothing to do with the place, but Clio sees house-flipping content gold and begins renovations, only to discover her mother might have been right as she finally reads Alex’s out-of-print book about the possession. I liked parts of this: the sister dynamics felt real, the book-within-a-book structure worked was neat…but something was missing, like I wanted more of who Alex was before the house, more about how young Clio might have interacted with the demon, just more demon in general. What I actively disliked, though, was Clio herself, the bratty baby sister with her “I do what I want! Deal with it!” energy who dismisses her sisters’ legitimate trauma as manipulation while seeing dollar signs everywhere. I know that’s intentional character work, but I have a real problem with people who act like that (maybe because I’m an oldest sister), and her behavior grated on me so much it overshadowed basically everything else Also, blueberry bagels are Clio’s favorite, which just cements my dislike of her – sweet bagels are garbage, and if you want a round baked good with a hole to be sweet, just admit you want a donut already and stop dragging the poor bagels into it. They should be savory and loaded with fish and onions and terrifically smelly, as god intended.

The Salvage by Anbara Salam A Victorian shipwreck containing the remains of Captain James Purdie – a celebrated explorer who’s achieved near-cult status among the islanders – gets towed from Arctic waters to the remote Scottish island of Cairnroch in 1962, and marine archaeologist Marta Khoury arrives to salvage what’s inside. On her first dive down, she photographs artifacts and bones, but when she returns days later to retrieve them, everything’s gone, and she’s certain she saw a dark crouching figure in the wreck – which feeds right into the guilt she’s already drowning in from something terrible in her recent past. The Cuban Missile Crisis and a historically brutal winter strand her on the island, where she’s treated with suspicion as an outsider and has to navigate complicated relationships with Sophie (her boss/husband’s assistant, sent ostensibly to help) and Elsie, a local hotel worker she grows close to. I loved this, even though the 1960s Scottish island setting confused me initially since it’s not territory I usually encounter. The wintry atmosphere is spectacularly done and while many readers thought it dragged when the village freezes over and everyone’s scrambling for survival, I genuinely enjoyed watching the female friendships develop and spending time with these flawed, complicated characters navigating their various guilts and desires. The romance worked for me despite not usually wanting love stories in my ghost stories, though I’ll admit the casual attitude about the relationship didn’t feel entirely realistic for early 1960s Presbyterian Scotland.

The Search Party by Hannah Richell Max and Annie Kingsley invite their old university friends and their families to their new Cornwall glamping site for a trial run, but the reunion sours when the kids fight, the parents take sides, old resentments surface, and someone vanishes just as a massive storm rolls in. The setup had potential (isolated location, secrets, missing person, police investigation told through multiple timelines), but nothing about it really landed for me beyond people having predictable meltdowns in expensive tents. The one character I felt for was Kip, Max and Annie’s adopted son who has selective mutism and gets treated poorly by basically everyone. I finished it easily enough, but now all I can recall is a blur of dramatic confrontations and bad weather without any real sense of why I should have cared.

Smile For The Camera by Miranda Smith A reunion documentary brings the cast of cult slasher Grad Night back to the original Tennessee cabin location twenty years later, where they’re all hiding a terrible secret from the original shoot. Ella Winters, the movie’s final girl, finds herself navigating old resentments and cast drama before someone dressed as the movie’s killer finally starts picking off cast and crew members, which raises the obvious question of why this revenge plot waited two decades to kick in. I finished this easily enough and found parts of it entertaining, but the fictional movie Grad Night itself sounded incredibly dull (kids go to a cabin, kids get killed, there’s a final girl, the end), and there’s a weird twist that felt like it came out of nowhere and was never properly addressed in a way that made sense.

Spread Me by Sarah Gailey Kinsey leads a research team at a remote desert outpost where they discover a strange, grotesque specimen buried in the sand, which she breaks quarantine to bring inside, and the longer it stays the more everyone starts unraveling because this thing is searching for a host and making everyone weirdly, aggressively horned up Gailey commits fully to the strangeness here (Kinsey is sexually attracted to viruses, for instance), and while I generally find smutty stuff boring and would rather read about literally anything else, this was so boldly weird that I actually had a good time with it. The timeline jumps between present action and character backstories disrupted the momentum when I was invested in what was happening now, but overall, this was short, strange, and entertaining.

I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman Forty women live locked in an underground cage with no sense of time, no understanding of how they got there, and only the vaguest memories of the world outside. The sole exception is our narrator, a young girl who remembers nothing before captivity and has grown up entirely within the cage’s fluorescent, timeless hum. When a moment of chance and a sliver of ingenuity allow them to escape, the world they emerge into is far stranger and more desolate than anything they imagined, and the girl becomes both witness and sometimes interpreter—to a landscape devoid of answers. It’s part eerie survival tale and part philosophical unraveling, as the women wander through an empty world not knowing whether they’re the last people alive or simply the most forgotten. I loved this, even though the starkness of its setting, bleak plains, abandoned structures, and a world stripped to its bones, initially felt so spare I wasn’t sure how much emotional attachment I’d find. But the atmosphere is astonishing: quiet, unsettling, and strangely luminous, especially in the scenes where the women try to rebuild some kind of life with almost nothing to anchor themselves. I was captivated by the narrator’s loneliness and the way she tries to make meaning inside a reality that offers none. The sadness is constant but beautifully rendered, and the final pages left me equal parts hollowed out and grateful. I think I’m drawn to stories like this, and even to books as seemingly different as Island of the Blue Dolphins and The Boxcar Children (which probably sound ridiculous as comparisons, but hear me out), because I love narratives about people figuring out how to survive and build something from almost nothing, finding small moments of comfort and connection in a world that’s fundamentally indifferent to their existence.

The Place Where They Buried Your Heart by Christina Henry The abandoned house on Jessie’s Chicago street has been there her whole life, crouched and waiting, and she’s the reason her little brother Paul disappeared inside it when she dared him to go in as kids. The book follows Jessie over decades as she grows up on that same block, builds a life, and watches darkness spread from that house until eventually her own son vanishes into it and she has to confront what’s been festering there all along. I’m always here for a creepy haunted house story and loved the neighborhood friendships and support system around Jessie, but this never quite worked for me, despite wanting it to. What started as fairly standard supernatural coming-of-age/grief horror suddenly veered into something oddly fairytale-esque at the very end, a bizarrely fantastical pivot that fell awfully flat.

Coffin Moon by Keith Rosson Vietnam vet Duane Minor is bartending in Portland in 1975, trying to stay sober and raise his thirteen-year-old niece, Julia, when he crosses a vampire named John Varley, who retaliates by murdering Minor’s wife and sending what’s left of their family on a vengeful pursuit across the Pacific Northwest. This has a gritty 1970s noir feel and reads more like a crime thriller than typical vampire horror, which I appreciated, and while it wasn’t weird or extraordinarily wild in any way, I can say I’ve never read another vampire book quite like it. I think that uniqueness comes from getting Varley’s perspective, along with Minor’s and Julia’s, watching all three of them from different angles as the hunt unfolds. The grief and rage driving Minor and Julia felt raw and devastating; their bond developed naturally over the course of the book, and the whole thing was brutal and emotionally gutting without feeling manipulative about it. This was an utterly satisfying read and exactly what I want from horror.

Night Watcher by Daphne Woolsoncroft Nola Strate hosts a late-night radio show in Portland about hauntings and cryptid sightings, but when a caller describes something chillingly similar to her childhood encounter with a serial killer called The Hiding Man, she becomes convinced he’s back and targeting her (yet somehow does absolutely nothing to keep herself safe in ways that stopped feeling like character behavior and started feeling like the author needed her to be a reckless moron for plot reasons.) This could have been so good, but I was deeply disappointed by how it turned out, starting with the fact that the author telegraphs early on exactly how the killer is accessing his victims, which removes most of the tension. The writing felt simultaneously over-detailed about mundane things (kombucha, coffee, endless mentions of Powell’s Books to remind you we’re in Portland) and strangely flat when it came to actual character development or emotional stakes. When the killer is finally revealed, it’s someone so random and disconnected from the story that you’re left thinking “oh, that’s just dumb.”

Self Care by Leigh Stein Everyone’s got a favorite trashy genre, and for the past few years, this has been mine: something about wellness and social media and influencer culture, sometimes through the lens of a thriller, sometimes presented as sad girl/weird lit fic, but there’s something so garbagey junk food about it that I can’t get enough of. This one follows the female cofounders of wellness startup Richual as they struggle to balance their feminist values with profit margins while their company implodes from various scandals, including sexual misconduct allegations against a board member and a PR nightmare when COO Maren Gelb tweets something terrible about the President’s daughter. I flew through it and enjoyed the specificity of the brand-dropping, the absurd self-care products, the performative wokeness, and the way it captures how these companies commodify feminism while exploiting the people working for them. The ending felt abrupt and left me wanting more closure or comeuppance for certain characters, but overall, this scratched the exact trashy itch I was looking for.

The Caretaker by Marcus Kliewer Macy Mullins is broke, grieving her father’s death, and desperately trying to provide for her younger sister when she takes a caretaking job she finds on Craigslist that involves following mysterious rituals at an isolated Oregon Coast house to prevent some incomprehensible evil from escaping. My stress levels while reading this were off the charts—poor Macy just could not get her shit together, screwing up the instructions at every turn in ways that left me frustrated with her and for her. The plot veers into such bizarro territory that some readers will absolutely be put off, with that meandering weirdness that made me think of the r/nosleep community, and when I looked it up, I realized that’s because Kliewer was a writer there. The dread and tension were real, but I closed it feeling like it was almost good rather than anything approaching actually great. Publishing April 21, 2026.

The Sound of the Dark by Daniel Church. The premise here involves haunted audio tapes from an abandoned RAF base that caused an experimental artist to murder his entire family in 1983, and decades later, true crime podcaster Cally Darker decides to investigate.  The writing had serious weird/gross/annoying problems throughout: at one point, Cally is using sex to distract her boyfriend, but the narration tells us she wasn’t trying to distract him anymore because she was “genuinely enjoying herself.’ I find this extremely doubtful, classic man-writing-women garbage. At another point, Cally puts on a pair of gold harem pants. Gold harem pants. Seriously? What!  At least two completely different interview subjects both use the word “benighted” in the span of about two chapters, and aside from that, these two very different characters spoke almost exactly the same. The same wry, sardonic tones, similar turns of phrase, etc. I don’t know that I could let that go in a book I was actually having a good time with, but in this one, it was exceptionally egregious. And the villain was such an over-the-top incel caricature that I wanted to throw the book every time he said “pretty Cally Darker.” By the end of this, I think I was hate-reading it.

Dead Weight by Hildur Knútsdóttir Unnur reunites a lost black cat with its owner Ásta, a local woman who seems a bit vulnerable and squirrelly (we soon learn why); Unnur agrees to keep the cat temporarily, which leads to an unlikely friendship between the two women. I tore through this in one sitting—it’s a quiet little book (gruesome but not bombastic about it) that leans more thriller than horror, and I liked it better than Knútsdóttir’s last one. The friendship felt genuine, and I was really invested in watching Unnur transform from someone living a bland, isolated life with a terrible married boyfriend into someone who actually cares about another person, especially once it becomes clear Ásta is in an abusive relationship and things take a violent turn. Short, focused, and doesn’t overstay its welcome. Publishing May 26, 2026.

Too Close To Home by Seraphina Nova Glass This is the first Seraphina Nova Glass book that didn’t quite work for me, which surprised me given how much I’ve enjoyed her other work. An upscale lakefront community is thrown into chaos when a car bomb explodes at the annual Labor Day party, killing the wrong person, and the story follows three suburban moms, Regan, Andi, and Sasha, whose lives are all tangled up in the aftermath. I love Glass for that close-knit, neighborly intimacy and the way she weaves community together, but this felt too sprawling and ambitious, with so many plot threads (bomb threats, missing persons, messy divorces, resurrected husbands) that I never found my footing. The three women were so interchangeable that I struggled to keep them straight well past the halfway point, and while everything technically came together at the end, the resolution felt both over-the-top and underwhelming. I missed the warmth and tight focus of her other work. Publishing April 14, 2026

Buyer Beware by Catherine Ryan Howard Starting over is hard enough without your new house hiding someone else’s deadly secrets, but that’s what happens when Hannah moves to 1 Delaney Row under a new name, trying to escape her past. At first her situation stressed me out because it reminded me of Adam Nevill’s No One Gets Out Alive—desperate woman, creepy house, creeping dread—but thankfully the book doesn’t bloat like Nevill’s did, dragging on for 600 pages. The dual timeline structure following two women whose stories eventually converge around the house worked well enough, but the mystery’s resolution felt unfairly convoluted: when a barely-there neighbor character suddenly becomes the keeper of crucial secrets the whole story hinges on, it doesn’t feel earned, it just feels like information was withheld arbitrarily. Readable enough, but that resolution soured whatever goodwill I had toward the book. Publishing July 28, 2026

Nothing Tastes As Good by Luke Dumas A clinical trial for a very experimental weight loss product promises miraculous results, and retail worker Emmett Truesdale, over 300 pounds and desperate for change, enrolls only to discover the side effects include lost time, overwhelming (and alarming) cravings…and a possible connection to people who were cruel to him now disappearing. You could tell this was written by an actual fat person who has experienced actual fat person struggles, from the way society treats Emmett to the constant bullying to the self-loathing, all of it felt authentic in ways that made parts of this horribly relatable, even when other parts were gross and cringe. Emmett’s childhood trauma around his weight happened in his own home, where he should have been safe and protected, which adds another layer of devastating realism to his character. The social commentary on fatphobia and diet culture isn’t subtle, but I appreciated the inclusion and found myself caring about Emmett despite knowing things weren’t going to end well for him. The ending went a bit over the top, but this worked for me more than it didn’t. Publishing March 31, 2026

The Lamb by Lucy Rose A mother and daughter live isolated in a cottage by the forest, their quiet life interrupted only by strangers who knock at their door seeking shelter, strangers they consume after feeding and caring for them. When Eden arrives during a snowstorm, everything rapidly shifts in ways both tender and terrible. Mama becomes utterly besotted with Eden in a way she never was with Margot, desperately in love, while what she’d given her daughter had always been something fraught with resentment and possession rather than genuine affection. Eden seems to care for Margot while also returning Mama’s passion, leaving Margot nowhere to belong, and whether Eden’s arrival was accident or design is never quite resolved (though in a story this dreamlike and fairytale-esque, do we even question where new entities come from?). This was weirdly beautiful and terribly, monstrously sad, told entirely through Margot’s childlike perspective.

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My latest column for Rue Morgue Magazine is out now! Well, it’s the November/December issue, but my copy only just arrived today!

In The Tiny Murderers In My Garden (Are Really Bad At Murder!) I explore finishing Sarah Maria Griffin’s recent offering, Eat the Ones You Love – a novel narrated by a carnivorous orchid plotting to devour its beloved florist – and the immediate urge to acquire tiny potted predators of my own. Spoiler: Baby the orchid’s predatory scheming is a lot more dramatic than the reality of bog water maintenance and humidity checks.

Turns out that bringing horror home just means learning about distilled water requirements and obsessing over light exposure while Patty and Selma (my venus flytrap and pitcher plant) laze about in the Florida sun, proving themselves more decorative than dangerous. Pick up the issue to read about scheming and scandalous blooms, the uncanny oppression of overwhelming greenery, a shocking confession about a beloved horror classic, and the anticlimactic reality of actual carnivorous plant ownership.

P.S. I was also thinking about naming them after The Duras Sisters, Lursa and B’Etor.

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I am posting these a bit early, because I am taking the next two weeks off from all things perfume-writing-related!

D’Annam Mooncake smells different every time I wear it, sometimes an approximation of golden syrup, sometimes a vaguely eggy center, sometimes honey’s thick, golden musk. I can’t speak to whether it’s accurate because I might just not like mooncakes? (I also find those egg custard tarts at dim sum restaurants kinda gaggy even though everyone else seems to love them, so maybe this is a me problem.) But then I am weirdly relieved to say it settles into Victoria’s Secret body spray territory. Whipped warm vanilla beaten into syrupy clouds, not exactly caramel or butterscotch adjacent, but some secret third vanilla thing, light and sweet and glazed donut-sticky, thoroughly slutty. This is what someone in a wish dot com sexy Tinkerbell costume smells like, and I mean that with complete affection. Cheap glitter and cheaper wings, body spray applied liberally in a dorm bathroom, going out to the club with lots of enthusiasm and exactly zero plan; that version of me never existed, but I was kinda jealous of her! Trashy, charming, the kind of scent that conjures nostalgia for someone else’s youth. I’m genuinely fond of it. I almost want a full bottle, except it is also pretty gross.

Regime des Fleurs Blood Spider Orchids This is an intensely sugared cinnamon and autumn fruit compote, with a bit of brooding, jasmine-y burlesque sultriness. Big Titty Goth Girlfriend harvest spice simmer pot. Too va-va-voom to be cozy, too cozy to be moody, too moody to be come-hither. Sort of like [Mae West voice] “Come up and see me sometime,” but it’s ultimately an invitation to drink boozy hot cider in the dark while rubbing each other’s feet and watching Over the Garden Wall on endless loop and streaming yourselves for freaky guys who are into that kinda thing.

Escentric Molecules Molecule 01 + Cistus Frozen smoke, ghost trails, crystallized vapor, memory of fire. Cedar’s bare branches, skeletal wood, stripped trees, winter forests. Lemon peel frozen mid-curl, preserved brightness, acid blade on ice, bone-white, moonlit. Amber trapped sap frilled and shivery-bitter, colorless, and pale. Glacial cold, silver sheen, mirror surface, morning rime coating everything. Muted, hushed, dulled edges, sound absorbed by snow. Edmund Dulac’s Snow Queen on her icy throne, layers of ice and shadow, laminated, frigid, still. Remote majesty, solemn dignity, the ceremony and sorrow of ceaseless winter.

Nos Republic Cor Serpentis is pallid astral berries translated through the cellular mimicry of a creature from beyond the stars, who’s only ever known the pale juice of celery. Gellid minerals, wibbly, rocky aspic. Acid rain-forest-ozone melting, morphing, form in flux, clouds with limbs, bark and branch lightning-struck, caustic drip. Lavinia Whateley as Virgil Finlay-starlady, but in a story wholly her own. Weirdness made manifest independent of limited human frameworks and someone else’s stunted stories. Invoking a wriggling, writhing Yog-Sothoth on her own terms, a ruin of her own making, an undoing of her own feeble design.

Poesie’s Sleighcation Winter 2025 Collection…

Birch Please Þvörusleikir energy! This lil dingus coming in from the cold into the steaming grass turf-roofed home, a little musky, woodsy, stealing a carved wooden spoon, sneaking into the Baðstofa where the family is mending by firelight with laps full of sheepskin for warmth – not exactly the best hiding spot, but here he is anyway. Cold clinging to him, outdoor sharp conifer and sweet sap meeting indoor steam, turf-and-timber warmth, the scent of gathered bodies and pelts.

Merry Gentlethems Wow wow nutmeg wow! Lots o’ nutmeg! But also a winking, waltzing salami? Anthropomorphized food, inexplicable sausages with faces, bizarre Victorian holiday postcard logic. That earthy/floral woody bouquet of that divisive spice -and-cured-meat combination, wrapped in a quilt, decorating a mantle. (I am late to the love of nutmeg, but if you think you hate it, grate it fresh and have another think!)

Pink Reindeer Club Midcentury Roald Dahl Tupperware party, James and the Giant Peach, except it’s a jar of marmalade. Cranberry ginger ale garnished with a jelly orange, glossy and bubbly, tart-ruby-bright.

Plaid Shirt Deconstructed avant-garde art-installation haute cuisine dessert brought to the masses via a food truck with a name like Essence & Element or some such. Menu item Untitled No. 3: Blonde gingerbread stripped spices, lemony and crystalline, rock sugar facets, edible crystal. Delicate green-fresh floral anise, fennel fronds just blooming, licorice-flower translucent sweetness. Precious, conceptual, demanding you meet it where it is (served from a window with a line around the block).

Arcana Knights Templar John Willie fetish illustration. Chained boots, exaggerated heels, high-contrast drama. Patchouli leading, dark earthy command, resinous weight. Cedar following, clean wood, crisp structure. Musk as polished leather bands, warm metal on skin, restraint as ornamentation. Patchouli’s opacity directing cedar’s transparency, composed control, intimate tension. Incense smoke chain links, insubstantial, immersive; a binding emblematic and allusive. Elegant constraint, sophisticated dominance, a study in control and compliance, rendered in resin and wood.

Aysha Hansen Ghost Lover The sleazy, dangerous-divine charm of an Anne Rice mummy. Bandages steeped in sullen honey, infused with bitter, bracing cardamom and burnished amber incense, the aromatic pique of peppercorns tucked in various orifices and cavities for an afterlife eternity. Smoky, intimate burial, earthly fortune pressed to pulse points, swaddling of intimate opulence for eventual resurrection, rapture, and ruin. The transcendent high of choosing violence, (inviting carnage / welcoming chaos / accepting inevitable devastation / choose your own adventure here) and yet… you would not kick it out of bed for eating crackers. Which is a phrase I thought of because this smells a little biscuity, too.

Aftelier Memento Mori The potpourri of a keepsakes box, dried flowers, brittle bouquets and boutonnieres, precious posies pressed between the pages of diaries and photo albums, sachets tucked among stored remnants and relics, and tokens of remembrance and reverence. Decaying roses in a dusty vanitas painting, blooms dried to powder, musky and musty, ghostly and haunting, sweet and acrid, baby-soft musk, rendered in pressed petals. The grief equal to the love, the tokens never equal to the weight they carry, entirely evidenced upon opening the box and releasing what’s tucked within.

If you enjoy posts like these or if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have shared, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?

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Now that I’ve spent December celebrating everyone else’s books, it seems only fair to mention my own. There are still a few shopping days before the holiday, though I can’t guarantee anything will reach you in time.

But if you’re shopping for friends who trace sigils in the margins and dream in symbols, the family member who gets lost in museum rooms for hours, who collect visual obsessions like other people collect recipes, or if that person is absolutely, unquestionably you sitting there right now thinking “yes, actually, I do deserve something gorgeous and weird that rewards endless returns”—here’s my trilogy.

The Art of the Occult: A Visual Sourcebook for the Modern Mystic is where sacred geometry meets spirit art, where witches conjure alongside alchemists, where astrology and Kabbalah and ceremonial magic all get their visual due. Over 175 artworks spanning centuries, organized into The Cosmos, Higher Beings, and Practitioners. Artists driven by that soul-deep hunger to reveal hidden truths, to make the invisible visible, to show us the secret shapes underlying everything. Essential for tarot readers and Hermetic scholars, for anyone who’s ever traced a sigil or stared into a crystal ball, for those building occult study curriculums or simply hungry for imagery that transcends the ordinary and reaches for something vast and glimmering and strange.

The Art of Darkness: A Treasury of the Morbid, Melancholic and Macabre is nightmares and plagues, mourning art and murder ballads, the monstrous feminine and supernatural beings, memento mori and existential dread. Artists who understood that darkness carries weight and beauty, that our shadows deserve attention, that facing our demons might actually comfort us. Over 200 artworks across centuries asking: why are we drawn to the macabre? What happens when we stop denying our darkness and start reveling in it? Essential for Gothic souls and Victorian mourning enthusiasts, for anyone who’s ever felt more at home in graveyards than crowds, for those who understand that beauty and horror often share the same face.

The Art of Fantasy: A Visual Sourcebook of All That is Unreal is beasts and forgotten realms, myth and impossible landscapes, artists building entire worlds from imagination alone. Dragons and wonderlands, magic and philosophy, hope made visible through paint and illustration. Fantasy isn’t escape—it’s that irresistible impulse toward wonder, that refusal to accept reality as the only option, that hunger for what could be. Essential for worldbuilders and folklore scholars, for anyone who’s ever needed to see how you make the impossible feel real, for those who understand that imaginary worlds deserve our fiercest attention and deepest study.

You can find these wherever books are sold, or order signed copies from me directly. I can’t promise they’ll arrive in time for your Hexmas gifting needs as the postal gods remain mysterious and unknowable, but I promise to get them in the mail today. Receiving a book in January when you’ve half-forgotten you ordered it feels like a gift from your past self anyway—an extended holiday, a little magic arriving precisely when January gets bleak, and you need it most.

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The sensible thing would be to spend December hawking my own books on social media, as that’s what you’re supposed to do during this annual consumer frenzy. But I’ve spent the month creating a gift guide for other authors’ work instead. That just feels more in the spirit of the season and nicer for my brain overall, to be honest. So here is a bookish December gift guide, except it’s books I love by authors I adore!

If you need gift ideas for collectors of strange facts and stranger passions, for readers who want their beauty served with darkness, their scholarship seasoned with the supernatural. For friends who see magic in the margins and find wisdom in the weird, and follow mystery wherever it leads! Well, maybe you will find something here for them…

Worlds Beyond Time by Adam Rowe a stunning gallery-in-a-book celebrating 1970s sci-fi art in all its trippy, hyperrealistic, cosmically awe-inspiring glory. Skeletons (and dolphins!) in spacesuits, cities sealed under geodesic domes, emperors dressed like otherworldly Popes, lonely astronauts whose helmet reflections contain entire alien landscapes—all the dazzling weirdness that made this era of genre illustration so wonderfully bizarre and unforgettable.

Essential for retrofuturistic dreamers, anyone who’s ever stared at a vintage paperback cover and felt their synapses light up with starfire, lasers, and demented glee.

Little Hidden Doors by Naomi Sangreal guides us through a luminous sanctuary for exploring the mysteries of our sleeping minds. Sangreal, a psychotherapist and intuitive guide, weaves Jungian psychology with creative prompts (writing, collage, meditation) making complex concepts like shadow work and anima integration accessible without losing their depth. Her approach treats nightmares as messengers rather than threats, offers practical guidance on lucid dreaming, and frames paying attention to our dreams as a radical act, a rejection of wake-centricity, a subversive reclamation of the nocturnal. The artwork throughout is gorgeous and serves as inspiration for your own visual dreamwork. My copy is heavily annotated, margins filled with insights, and it’s become one of my most frequently recommended books.

Essential for anyone ready to move beyond transcription into actual dreamwork, for people building intentional practices around their inner lives, and for those seeking what emerges when you start opening those hidden doors.

Salt Is for Curing by  Sonya Vatomsky, a book I have purchased and given away more times than I can count. When I first read this collection, it took all that I had not to devour it in one greedy instant. I feared that to do so, to ingest all of these potent magics at once, would give me a terribly heartsick sort of heartburn and yet leave me with the very worst sort of emptiness, knowing there is no more to be had. I drew it out for as long as I could stand.

Sonya writes about folklore and the body, curses and cures, salt and blood. Poetry that reads like spells. Essential for readers who seek the ritual in the repast, who recognize the grimoire in a constellation of scars and the deep bear growl of the belly, that memory and personal folklore isn’t precious, it’s raw and bleeding, a sandwich of wounds seasoned with tears and duck fat and ticklish sprigs of tragic forest herbs; that the mouth is where curses live alongside prayers, that to eat is to invoke and to speak is to consume, swallow your tongue or spit it out.

What does any of that mean? I don’t even know. My word salad tribute to a dear friend, an incredible writer, and a beautiful weirdo poet without peer.

Dark Archives: A Librarian’s Investigation into the Science and History of Books Bound in Human Skin by Megan Rosenbloom. Medical historian and biblio-adventurer Megan Rosenbloom’s investigation of books bound in human skin doesn’t just reveal details about the anthropodermic books, or the collectors who greedily hoarded them, or the craftspeople who created them; she passionately and humanely explores the people these books used to be.

Along the way we learn of gentleman doctors in their mahogany-shelved libraries, flaunting strange collections; the gruesome and clandestine theatrics of midnight corpse-thieving grave robbers, midwives to royalty, 19th-century highwaymen in their final hours, poets and paupers, murderers and scientists. This book is deeply intersectional, touching on gender, race, socioeconomics, and the Western medical establishment’s colonialist mindset. Come for the weird books facts, stay for the unexpected and powerful human questions.

Essential for death-positive weirdos, librarians with morbid curiosities, anyone who’s ever wondered about bodily consent across centuries, readers who want their macabre served with ethics and empathy, and those who’ve ever wondered what should happen to their own skin after they’re done with it.

Lapidarium: The Secret Lives of Stones by Hettie Judah Have you ever gazed into a stone and wondered as to the stories it stores? The powers it possesses? Hettie Judah explores the hidden history of these lithic marvels in Lapidarium, from their role in ancient cultures to their modern-day influences and uses. An absolute feast for the senses, the book itself feels like a collector’s treasure, a hoarded wunderkammer of mythic and mysterious curiosities.

Sixty stones, each with imaginative descriptions and wild stories. The Meat-Shaped Stone of Taiwan (banded jasper that resembles braised pork belly). Pele’s Hair (golden strands of volcanic glass spun by volcanic gasses). Angel-appointed wife swaps in alchemist John Dee’s smoky quartz cairngorm. The TikTok moldavite craze. From emerald moons to fossilized feces, from violent lunar origin stories to simple earthen pigments—Hettie writes with humor, compassion, and wit (I cackled out loud more times than I can count).

Essential for anyone who hoarded gemstones in Splendor like a greedy dragon, for people who made a beeline to the mineral rooms at natural history museums, for readers who want their geology served with soap opera drama and alchemical WTFery, and for those who need a weird rock fact to lodge in their brain like a wayward pebble in their shoe to guide their energies for the day.

Witch Hunt: A Traveler’s Guide to the Power and Persecution of the Witch by Kristen Sollée. A hybrid travel guide and memoir that dips into historical fiction, this book reflects research gleaned from travels to seven countries, forty-five cities, towns, and villages. Kristen, a second-generation witch, explores the fraught and fascinating history of these haunting figures from the past and uncovers how the archetype of the witch has been reclaimed as a symbol of power.

We learn of the trauma and tragedy baked into the history of these places, but also how they’ve resurrected and reclaimed this archetype for commerce, community, and activism. Her descriptions of the locations and spaces she spends time in bubble with intensely curious spirit, wicked sharp observations, and expansive, imaginative storytelling—with an eye toward both the sensitivity crucial to conversations about these archetypes and the actual people involved in these histories, all balanced with an irrepressible sense of humor and appreciation for the absurd. Kristen is indisputably at the height of both her writerly and witchly powers.

Essential for witches seeking their lineage, for travelers who want their history alive with magic and fury, for readers who understand that reclaiming dangerous archetypes is its own form of spellwork, and for anyone who’s ever wondered how persecution becomes liberation becomes tourist attraction becomes revolution.

The Magical Writing Grimoire by Lisa Marie Basile is part guided journaling practice, part interactive magical grimoire. It explores writing as a transformative tool for magic, manifestation, and ritual. Lisa Marie Basile approaches writing as both occult practice and craft, half channeling from something electric and cosmic, half chiseling that raw transmission into shape through years of training and intentional work.

Each chapter contains writing prompts woven with magical ritual and tools: working with crystals, spell incantation, candle alchemy, moon phases, bibliomancy, shadow work, automatic writing. You’ll learn to create a personal grimoire of self-rituals and intentions, to write letters to your deepest self without censorship or judgment, to use water and rest as sacred recharge, to resist the linear when intuition calls for scattered poem-spells hidden in purses and tucked on altars. Lisa understands that the grand ritual is returning to sacred moments again and again, that process-oriented magic, the long game of healing old traumas and identifying patterns, leads to massive shifts in joy, health, and abundance. That through writing, we can reclaim our pain, take ownership of our stories, and understand that the word itself is eternal and a wand we’ve been carrying all along.

Essential for writers who sense there’s magic in the marks they make, for those who need to hear that the voice blooms at its own pace, for those who want permission to show up wholly themselves with all the conundrums and strangeness of the human condition, and for anyone who understands that writing is communication with something deeper than readership—with the self, with mystery, with whatever lives at the bottom of the well.

Death’s Garden, Revisited: Personal Relationships with Cemeteries edited by Loren Rhoads. A gathering of tapophilic musings from all walks of life—genealogists and geocachers, travelers and tour guides, academics and amateur sleuths explore the culture, zeitgeist, landscape, philosophy, and history of cemeteries, as well as the stories of the people, both infamous and obscure, buried there.

Told from thrillingly diverse voices spanning the globe from Iceland to Argentina, from Portland to Prague, these writings illustrate one author’s observation that “once we escape from the bony grip of mortality, we find common ground.” We read stories of joy and mirth: first dates, weddings, reunions, ghost tours. We also read of sadness and rage and things vile and unconscionable: vandalism, desecration, racism, revolutions, murders. We read over and over of the peace to be found at the end of all things. That despite their eerie and unsettling associations with ghosts and the supernatural, despite being thought of as bleak, gloomy places, the taboo nature of their existence—well, as one writer declares, “That’s not scary, it’s family.”

I read this book at a snail’s pace, one essay a day, and I think that might be the best way to take in these stories. Reading about death is intense and heavy—grave subject matter, if you’ll pardon the pun. I found myself either delicately weepy or hiccuping with unexpected sobs after quite a few of them. It’s a profoundly affecting, powerfully beautiful collection.

Essential for cemetery wanderers seeking solitude, for anyone who’s ever felt more at peace among gravestones than crowds, for readers who understand that cemeteries are spaces outside of time where the living and the dead find common ground, and for those who know that the quietest places on earth hold the loudest truths about love, memory, and our own fragile, brief lives.

Weird Liza’s Colorama: Vol. 001: Fantastical Creatures, Beasts and Other Nonsense by Liza Rein. Here’s a thing about me: coloring books usually trigger my anxiety. It feels too high stakes somehow, even though I’m literally just filling in lines someone else drew. But something about the weird whimsy and gentle fever dream phantasmagoria of these creatures—I mean, the title has “nonsense” right in the name—put me at ease straight away. “We’re all strange and silly friends here,” they seemed to burble and clack at me, “come on in!”

Twenty trippy hand-illustrated pages of delightful fancy and furry friends, feeling dark, weird, bizarre, or abstract, and this coloring book will not judge. Two hours disappeared while I watched TV and spilled my anxieties onto the page, letting them mingle with the ink, and before I knew it I had a streaky purple bird-wizard conjuring up shadows. My fingers stained in a kaleidoscope of hues, breathing in the quiet hum of something that feels a lot like creativity. A wacky alchemical act transforming unease into art.

Essential for anyone whose hands need a rest from their usual craft, for people who find standard coloring books too precious and need permission to be weird, for readers who can’t just sit and watch TV without doing something with their hands, and for those ready to exorcise the anxiety demons in a wonderland of nonsense.

Murder Ballads: Illustrated Lyrics & Lore by Katy Horan. Ever since I first heard Ceoltoiri’s haunting version of “The Cruel Sister” on their Women of Ireland CD 25 years ago, I’ve been haunted by that moment when “the harp began to play alone”—those goosebumps still chill me every single time. Katy Horan’s Murder Ballads feels like the perfect companion to that long fascination. She brings together beautifully unsettling illustrations with meticulous research into twenty traditional murder ballads and their real-world origins. She doesn’t just retell these dark stories but excavates their histories, tracing how some songs evolved from actual murders while others spring from pure folklore and mythic tradition.

Her approach is both scholarly and sensitive, restoring humanity to victims often reduced to cautionary tales while examining the genre’s troubling roots in patriarchal violence and white supremacy. Each ballad entry includes recommended recordings, making this as much a gateway into the music as it is a cultural study. Horan’s art has a strange, folkloric beauty: darkly whimsical but never twee, weaving folk tradition and rustic charm alongside a gothic sensibility touched by shadow and mystery. A quality of illuminated manuscripts crossed with old Appalachian almanacs and herbalist guides.

Essential for anyone who’s ever gotten goosebumps from a murder ballad, for readers drawn to the darker threads of folk tradition, for those who want their music history served with cultural critique and gorgeous art, and for anyone who understands how real tragedy and timeless myth both become song.

Visual Alchemy: A Witch’s Guide to Sigils, Art & Magic by Laura Tempest Zakroff. Since the dawn of human creativity, magic and art have been deeply, powerfully intertwined. But somewhere in the midst of that conversation sits me—and others like me, I’m sure—excited by this idea, sensing that we have both art and magic in our souls, but not having the faintest idea how to unlock this potential, how to even begin to “do the thing.” “Arting” when you’re not an “artist” is a terrifying prospect!

Laura expands on her signature sigil witchery method, guiding us through exercises and practices to move past our fears and trust our intuition. We explore and grow and create meaning and magic from the shapes and symbols and patterns we find within, weaving these elements together, imbuing them with intent, creating something wholly, uniquely ours alone. Everything around us has a pattern. We find layers of meaning encoded in how shapes and symbols dance forth from our hands. Through art, we are communicating with the divine as much as we are discovering ourselves.

Essential for anyone who senses they have art and magic in their souls but doesn’t know how to begin, and for those ready to discover that the doing itself is the thing, the work, the spell.

Symbolorum: The Secret Wisdom of Emblems by Mandy Aftel. Giant hands reach from the sky to pluck flowers while spiders spin their webs and frogs have spa days. Lions gambol past village churches and platters heap with abundant fruit. Dragons contemplate their visage in mirrors. Camels recline in repose. Snakes eat their own tails. Swans do a funny little wiggling dance! Each small, round engraving contains an entire world mid-story, frozen in some strange dramatic moment, accompanied by a Latin motto that reveals timeless wisdom drawn from Aesop, Ovid, medieval bestiaries, and a worldview in which human lives are tangled with plants, animals, the moon, and the stars.

Natural perfumer Mandy Aftel spent decades reading antique books of botanical illustrations and aromatic lore, discovering not just recipes for perfume but an older vision of the natural world threaded with magic and mystery. When she encountered Joachim Camerarius’s Symbolorum et Emblematum from the 1590s, she recognized something extraordinary: a cosmos where nature was animate and instructive, where every creature held wisdom, where everything spoke in symbols. She acquired an original 1654 edition, translated the Latin texts, selected 100 emblems to illuminate with watercolor, and wove her own insights through Camerarius’s meditations on existence.

Emblems share tarot’s symbolic language, speaking not to your rational mind but to your intuitive and emotional self, pairing image, motto, and meditation to convey timeless wisdom about how to navigate life. Knowledge that moves through the body as much as the intellect. Open to a page at random every morning, let the image and its wisdom guide your day. Today, a hairy leg descends from the heavens to tromp on something that kinda looks like a bunch of garlic bulbs, PULCHRIOR ATRITA RESURGO—I rise again more beautiful for being crushed. Well then. Maybe being ground down isn’t the end of things? Maybe this bruising is exactly where the blooming happens? Bibliomantic wisdom for the day!

Essential for anyone hungry for a less rational understanding of the natural world, for readers drawn to uncover ancient wisdom where everything in the cosmos connects, for those who love old books and tarot and understand that symbols engage us in seeking beyond linear reason, and for anyone who recognizes the transformative power held in these curious circular images.

Magic Maker: The Enchanted Path to Creativity by Pam Grossman explores creativity and magic as inseparable forces: spellcasting and invocation, divination and spirit communication, all in service of making whatever it is you’re meant to make. A song, a novel, a path through this strange world.

She writes about preparatory rituals and consciousness-shifting, about anointment and adornment and alter egos, about the tingly sensation of being “activated” when Big Inspiration strikes. About how chaos must shimmer behind the veil of order—the way the back of embroidered work is a riot of tangled threads and knots, what I call “the nightmare side” of any pristine creative surface. Her references range from Remedios Varo to Orville Peck, from Chelsea Wolfe to Beyoncé to Prince, from David Lynch talking about catching big fish in the depths to André Breton insisting that all art is magical in its genesis. She describes ekphrasis as speaking out about a piece of art and adding your own embellishments through unique interpretation, which made me sit up and think: that’s exactly how I write about art. Magic, she says, is an intentional means of collaborating with Creative Force to transform a state of being, and creativity is the truest expression of our magic. They’re the ouroboros eating its tail, the lemniscate looping forever—two sides of the same sparkling coin, flipped and spinning through infinite possibility.

I haven’t finished this book yet. Normally I would wait until the end before writing about anything, and there was that familiar pull to rush through it, to consume it all at once so I could discuss it properly and give you the full picture. But I wanted to include it in this gift guide while it’s still timely, and I think it’s actually more helpful to write about a book like this in stages because it is teeming with insight and revelations. There’s so much here to absorb and sit with. I can always come back and write more later. But I prefer to experience Pam’s books parceled out more slowly, letting each idea land and resonate before moving to the next, giving them space to breathe and bloom and burrow their way through my wriggly brain noodles, setting off sparks and lighting up pathways and making unexpected connections.

I’ve been in awe of Pam’s work for what feels like forever now; she’s been a continual source of inspiration, and what she does thrills me to the deepest gloops of my marrow. We’ve known each other online for nearly twenty years, fellow travelers on similar creative wavelengths, sharing the same fascination with where art and magic collide. Her words have this particular power to bewitch and transport, to ensorcell you completely, leaving you utterly immersed and somehow changed. I trust her to take me places both wondrous and magical.

Essential for anyone who’s ever felt that tingle beneath their skin when inspiration strikes, for those who understand that getting out of your own way means making space for something grander to move through you, for anyone who wants to see their tangled nightmare-side threads as proof of magic working rather than evidence of mess, and for those ready to remember that making and magic have always been the same shimmering, infinite thing.

If you enjoy posts like these or if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have shared, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?

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My second book, The Art of Darkness, now has a German-language edition: Die Kunst Des DUNKLEN.

Wow. That title goes so hard. And it looks like they changed the cover art to now feature John Singer Sargent’s masterpiece, TAKE THESE SNAKES MOTHERFUCKER!

Ok, but for real, it’s “Orestes Pursued by the Furies,” and it certainly makes for an intense initial impression!

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When you stand before one of Chie Yoshii‘s paintings, you might notice the technical mastery first—that jewel-like luminosity built up through countless translucent glazes on wood panel, each layer deepening the richness until gold leaf seems to glow beneath skin, until fabric appears soft enough to touch. Every thread is visible, every feather meticulously rendered. It’s a technique inherited from the Flemish masters, requiring patience and precision. The attentiveness  to the process is such that you could almost smell the fragrance of the painting (and if her art were perfume, I think it might have notes of whipped orange blossom honey, pomegranate flower smoke, and petitgrain, neroli’s bitter, greener cousin, sweet and dark and verdant all at once.)

But then your attention and your appreciation shifts the longer your gaze lingers upon the canvas. A woman with a lion cub pressed against her cheek gazes downward. A fox perches on an armored shoulder, both human and animal staring forward with identical intensity. A unicorn leans its head on a woman’s shoulder in water so blue it seems to glow. You begin to realize these seem less like portraits of dominion or allegory, more like moments of profound communion.

This quality—this sense of communion between human and animal—drew me to include Yoshii’s work in The Art of Fantasy, alongside other contemporary artists who explore the spaces between human and animal, real and imagined. In my caption for her painting Hemera, I wrote: “The artist often features animal companions in her works, from the mundane and many-legged to the fantastical winged and scaled variety, and whose appearance suggests companionship and camaraderie rather than danger or menace, or, on the other end of the spectrum, mere pet ownership.”

“Painting for me is ‘participation mystique,'” Yoshii has explained. “It is not about reality, but about the fantasies aroused by its effects. They are viscerally conceived and more tangible than reality.”

Participation mystique describes a state where the boundary between self and other becomes porous, where one participates mystically in the life of another being. Beautiful and unsettling, this dissolution of separateness, an experience of depth and power. Perhaps you cannot rush into such a state. Perhaps it requires the same quality of patience and presence that Yoshii brings to her panels, building up color through repeated application of thin glazes, each layer a small act of faith that the accumulated whole will eventually reveal what needs to be seen. What develops between her figures, woman and wolf, woman and owl, woman and lion cub, is a secret language of history between two beings, spoken without words, understood without translation.

A deep sense of reverence permeates Yoshii’s work, visible in every corner of her compositions. She paints with exquisite exactitude. A butterfly hovering at the edge of the frame receives the same meticulous attention as the face at its center. A cluster of berries is rendered with the same care as a crown. Every petal, every strand of hair, every individual feather—nothing is disposable, nothing hurried. This isn’t technical skill alone, though the skill is undeniable. It’s a quality of respect for the work itself, for the time it takes, for each element that comprises the whole. You can feel it when you stand before these paintings: you’re in the presence of work made with deep care.

Yellow butterflies scatter across compositions, landing on bare skin, hovering near feathered companions, perpetually transforming between one form and another. A woman submerged in brilliant blue water shares that water with a white unicorn, surrounded by tall grasses and white lilies, each blade of grass, each lily petal given its due. Dense dark foliage creates sanctuary around them. A celestial creature stands on a tree branch surrounded by cascading purple wisteria, her light blue wings spread wide, her peacock-patterned tail feathers transitioning from blue to green in elaborate eye-marked plumage—each eye-spot on each feather carefully observed and rendered. She appears entirely at home in her hybrid nature, neither fully human nor fully bird but both at once.

A woman rests in flowing white, and on her hands sits a small winged creature with a jewel-encrusted collar, part mammal, part fantasy. Red drapery and pink roses glow behind them, each fold of fabric, each rose petal attended to. Her expression is utterly peaceful, her breathing synchronized with this strange companion.

The women gaze downward or close their eyes entirely, turned inward to some shared interior space. Large ornate antlers curve upward from serene faces, adorned with blue and purple flowers woven through their branches, clusters of bright red berries, white lilies blooming where throat meets collarbone. The antlers, traditionally the stag’s, the hunter’s trophy, become a framework for flowers, the boundary between human skull and animal bone no longer fixed or certain.

“I stare at the darkness in my mind and images slowly float up,” Yoshii has said of her process. The concept or interpretation comes later, sometimes only after the painting is finished. You cannot force the unconscious to yield its images on demand. You can only create the conditions: the patience, the stillness, the quality of attention…and wait for what surfaces. She channels myths, allowing archetypal forms to surface from what Jung called the collective unconscious.

Just as bees know instinctively how to dance, she suggests, we all carry within us inherited images, patterns imprinted in the substrate of human consciousness long before we learned to articulate them in language. Jung wrote that mythology is filled with symbols that echo archetypes in our minds because it was itself inspired by those archetypes. We inherit these images, patterns, and forms that surface across cultures and centuries because they speak to something fundamental in human psychology. Her paintings exist in these resonant frequencies, moments between souls.

An entity sits enthroned on dark swirling clouds, crowned with elaborate headdresses swirling in invisible winds, pouring golden grains endlessly from her hands while geese circle through a moody sky. The extravagant contrasts between near-black shadow and luminous flesh create theatrical drama, but Yoshii’s figures emerge from darkness into light, existing comfortably in both. Jung wrote that everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in conscious life, the blacker and denser it becomes. In Yoshii’s work, the shadows receive as much careful attention as the light, both necessary, both honored.

This year saw the publication of Dreams, Yoshii’s first major monograph—200 pages collecting over a decade of paintings alongside essays, enlarged details, and text in both English and Japanese.  It’s the kind of book you want to touch, to turn pages slowly, to return to again and again. The kind of object that deserves a place on your winter solstice wish list, though fair warning: once you bring it home, you may find yourself reluctant to wrap it for anyone else.

And perhaps that’s the point! To return, to sit with these images, to let them work on you slowly. The women in Yoshii’s paintings exist without explanation, crowned and adorned, accompanied and embraced. The more time you spend with them, the more you notice: another flower hidden in shadow, the way an animal’s gaze mirrors its human companion’s, the quiet revelations that accumulate in the luminous space between their closed eyes and resting heads, between the darkness behind them and the light that illuminates their faces. There, we might glimpse our own reflection, animal and human both, inseparable.

If you enjoy posts like these or if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have shared, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?

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Heretic Parfum kindly sent me their A Very Gorey Holiday collection, aromatic spritzes for your space evoking the somber pageantry and whimsical gloom of this beloved artist’s work. Here are some of my initial thoughts on this ominous quartet of room sprays, and yes, I actually did just happen to have this framed Gashlycrumb Tinies poster tucked away in the corner for years, just waiting for its moment to shine!

O Tannen Baum: A skeletal whisper of winter forests, brittle fir needles mummified with age, spiced clove dust, spectral resins eerily whistling on the wind.

The Evil Garden: Candy-sweet florals grown under bell-domed glass, sugared petals and crushed green stems, confectionary chaos cultivated in a Victorian conservatory.

The Haunted Tea Cosy: Sharp, tart citrus flesh, bitter peel and tannic black tea possessed by a poltergeist, soft stone fruit tossed dementedly at your head during afternoon service, pulpy bonks.

Fruitcake: An invisible man at the party taking up impossible space, scuffed leather jacket creaking and crackling, sharp brandy drunk sloppy, straight from the bottle, candied citrus peel and scorched nutmeg smoke clinging to his swaggering, unseen form.

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Noir Kei Ninomiya’s Spring 2026 collection opened with Japanese poet Aoyagi Natsumi’s voice reciting the names of sea creatures, but what emerged on the runway looked less like anything from the ocean and more like someone’s childhood bedroom ceiling come to life : goth Syfy channel creatures wearing the cosmos.

Star-shaped metal frameworks sprouted from bodies in geometric sprawls, crusted with crystals and glittering elements that looked like Ninomiya had raided several glamorous aunties’ jewelry boxes, plucked out all the most aggressively bling and sparkly bits, and used them to bedazzle the night sky.

Tulle dresses exploded into impossible three-dimensional structures – one resembling a tutu crossed with a full-body loofah – while sharp blazers and crystalline pentagram bralettes anchored the more sculptural experiments. Harnesses extended into sprawling wire halos, and dresses grew pointed, silvery tinsel-esque extensions that swayed and bobbed with movement.

Shinji Konishi’s molded headpieces looked like they’d been constructed by alien insects, wasp nests made from something inorganic and vaguely sinister, bulbous forms painted in midnight hues with surfaces that suggested secretion rather than craft. The Jimmy Choo collaboration brought loafers studded with star-shaped grommets which seemed oddly practical footwear for otherwise celestial beings!

The designer said he wanted something playful, “like childhood, the first drawing,” and you can see that impulse in garments as modular systems where fabric and metal build wardrobes for a dimension where midnight skies walk around on two legs and the stars from a pulpy Ed Emshwiller comic book cover illustration have developed their own sartorial obsessions, complete with Lookbook.nu accounts and everything.

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Santa Maria Novella Quercia I know I talk a lot about grey overcast skies and thunderstorms and fog and mist and loving the glooms, but even I can appreciate an objectively beautiful day. Quercia is that day…clear clear air, clean clear water, when people say fresh air or water is sweet, this is what they mean, a sharp lucidity you can taste. Something green but not heavy, not dense forest green, lighter than that, the pale spring green of new growth and tender stems crushed underfoot releasing their watery juice. A cloudless, cool spring morning that makes you genuinely think “I am glad to be alive,” the kind of day that feels like a gift you didn’t ask for but accepted anyway. Dappled light pooling through ancient oak branches, the tree itself barely present except as shadow, as the reason for this filtered sun, this meadow existing in its patient protection. Lying in the grass eye-level with buttercups and bluebells, yellow and blue blooming heads, their petals hold that papery, delicate sweetness, barely-there floral, more like the idea of flowers than their actual heavy perfume. They’re good-natured about being trampled. They know they’ll be growing on your grave one day, gentle and insistent, reclaiming everything with the same cheerful persistence. For five hundred years, the oak has stood watching smaller things bloom and fade and bloom again, and you’re just another small thing, bright and brief and beautiful. Studio Ghibli sunlight, that glowing animation warmth where death exists but doesn’t overshadow, where graves get flowers and flowers get walked over, and it’s all the same turning wheel, all the same dappled afternoon. The shadow is there – hence the coolness, the morbid turn – but that’s the way of things. Just keep enjoying the flowers while you can. (Many thanks to my dear Flan for bringing this back from her recent travels for me!)

Air & Weather Paris, 5 A.M. Gourmand, but make it runway, through a filter of sheer delectation. You could bite into it theoretically, but you wouldn’t; it’s the expansive, exultant feeling right before you laugh with unexpected joy at something beautiful. Amber laminated like a croissant, all those folded layers, but impossibly light, airy where it should be heavy and resinous. Hollow chambers of golden fluff, bird bones that shouldn’t be able to support flight but do. Plumage structured in tiers, soft but strange to the touch, not quite what you expect when you reach for them. Phoebe Buffay as amber confection as a trilling Bjorkian lullaby swan dress. Wearing something ridiculously elegant and beautiful and warmly nourishing all at once. Playful spectacle of soft golden resin folded over and over into itself, sweet baked warmth and downy impossible lightness, earnest and gorgeous and committed to the charm of taking pleasure seriously without being serious.

Arcana Wildcraft Black Death There’s a particular kind of gothic imagery that Black Death calls to mind: baroque church architecture in shadow, where stone angels tucked into dusty alcoves have awakened hungry, wings once outspread in reverence now twist inward in sacrilege, enfolding flesh in the dark. A century’s worth of prayer-stained marble suddenly weeping blood; an inverse of holiness; the stony flame of the frozen heart. Black Death is cold where it should be warm. Clove should read as warming spice but here it’s numbing, that sharp eugenol prickling before the needle’s sting, tingles cold and strange. The smoky haze of offerings burnt to forbidden names. Sweetness emerging from the dry smoke and numbing spice, out of place, a lure you know better than to follow but follow anyway. Temptation heavy and inescapable, smooth and terrible in its certainty, the sweetness of something you were always going to do. Desolation and eerie stillness, the chilled moment of being found by what you’ve forever been circling. This is what it smells like to stop praying for the shadows to spare you and call them closer instead. Fear and desire meeting in the same alcove, two faces of one shadow. The darkness was coming regardless – might as well open the door to it yourself.

Hellenist À l’Ombre d’Artémis The wild goddess of the hunt peeling citrus in a mossy starlit clearing, an unlit Baies candle wafting blackcurrant and dewy rose from her pocket. In another pocket (cargo pants, lots of pockets): crushed mint, pale green sparks, cold mineral facets. Retinal ghosts when you close your eyes after staring at something bright. The quality of light more than light itself. Green stems snapped, leaf sap on fingertips. Petals pressed between glass slides. Forest floor dampness clinging to knees. Atmospheric, solitary. Citrus as quartz as starshine, crystalline and remote. Grains of light-fall suspended. Psychic gossamer, sour afterimage. Florals at dawn, night’s lingering chill. The moon in your mouth, its clear eye sees all.

Epichron Nightchild When I first sampled Nightchild months ago, I thought it smelled like an epic ballad by a Finnish heavy metal band, all Nightwish operatic drama and intensity, soaring vocals over crushing walls of reverb and distortion, cathedral-sized forests rendered in smoke and electric guitars, everything amplified and enormous. After purchasing a full bottle, I realize it’s something equally intense, but different: not operatic shrieking but guttural chanting, throat-singing incantation, Heilung summoning spirits in a clearing. Green-earth-smoke, tangled and inseparable. Coniferous sap weeping, clinging in translucent filaments. Forest floor moss, rooty, dark, and creeping, peeled away in damp handfuls, exposing Xenolithic scars. Loamy sweetness and soil, minerals apothecary-bitter. Cedar knife-edge, incense cutting sharp, clean and cold. Herbs twisted and wrung, citrus peel, crushed pine needles, and black pepper ground fresh. Less actual smoke than the drama suggests, more breathing near where smoke was, its ghost hanging in frigid air. A ritual performed for an audience of one. Maybe you’re dreaming—the clearing, the figures circling, the intranslatable incantations carved on gold, the owl cries, the wolf howls, the gods laugh like thunder, that kind of thing. Dry ice fog rolling low across the stage floor, backlit for maximum atmosphere and vibes. Hazy incense shrouding stark forest, ancient spells you mouth without understanding, throat-singing layered with crystalline chant, the ceremony private and enormous simultaneously. You’re watching from inside the dream, close enough to smell the vapor, far enough to know it’s performance. The ancient forest rendered, amplified, made devotional, and only for you.

Brown Sugar Babe Wildcard (BR540 dupe) Wild Card smells posh, polished nonchalance, elegance carrying a slight edge. The dryness of unlit cigarettes, tobacco-adjacent without being tobacco. Something golden and floral threaded through, warmed with spice, woods that feel cosmopolitan rather than earthy. Smart, savvy, confident, plugged-in – an It-girl who knows everyone, goes everywhere, looks expensive doing it. No interior life to speak of, but she doesn’t need one. A pack of Gitanes tucked in a Parisian model’s handbag alongside a perfect lipstick, a vintage Hermès wallet soft with age, a dog-eared French paperback, loose euro coins, and keys to an impossibly chic old apartment. (I don’t know if it smells anything like BR540; I had a little sample ages ago, but it didn’t leave much of an impression. Probably a little too sweet, though. No matter how much or how little Wildcard resembles that scent, it is by far a better purchase.) Over on Patreon this month, I share a favorite layering combination involving this scent!

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