Full disclosure: I'm friends with the author. That said, anyone who knows me knows I'm not nice enough to say things I don't believe about a book I diFull disclosure: I'm friends with the author. That said, anyone who knows me knows I'm not nice enough to say things I don't believe about a book I didn't love.
Coup de Grâce almost lost me at the start with its chirpy, acerbic narrative voice. Thank God I kept reading long enough to figure out what Ajram was doing, to watch her peel the rotting onion of a human personality succumbing to necrosis while still alive. As a lifelong lover of Brutalist architecture there's so much to savor here on an aesthetic level, with descriptions that feel like some unholy cross between House of Leaves (I'm sure people will compare the two books ad infinitum; all I'll say is that Ajram has no need of metafictional conceits) and the blurry, monolithic deathscapes of early console shooters, a labyrinth of alien, impersonal concrete that subsumes and denatures everything it touches, but it's in its depictions of the slow destruction of the artifice of personhood as a bulwark against chronic suicidality that Coup de Grâce really shines. This is something special, a stone-cold feel-bad son of a bitch of a book....more
In this thousand-plus-page brick there are perhaps two or three hundred pages of actual substance. An amateurish disaster more fixated on settling obtIn this thousand-plus-page brick there are perhaps two or three hundred pages of actual substance. An amateurish disaster more fixated on settling obtuse online grudges and railing against criticism of the author's other work than it is in telling anything like a coherent or interesting story.
As a disclaimer I despise Rowling, but I enjoyed the first two books in this series well enough. Palatable mysteries done well and readably. She has since come entirely unglued....more
A particularly tedious and threadbare entry in the "Gender Apocalypse" subgenre, which has proven to be a dumping ground for nice liberal women who waA particularly tedious and threadbare entry in the "Gender Apocalypse" subgenre, which has proven to be a dumping ground for nice liberal women who want to dabble in TERF-adjacent thought exercises without being publicly associated with the increasingly right-wing and violent movement. Thoroughly regressive and only mildly and intermittently interesting, its imagery weak, its supporting cast unmemorable.
THE MEN fundamentally misunderstands what patriarchy is and what perpetuates it. A lot of bland runway across the backs of the marginalized for a morally lazy white woman's guilty flight back to the arms of suburban heterosexual security.
Thank you to Granta Books for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review....more
Genuinely frightening, a collage of intimately sketched people with poignant, believable flaws and foibles. Its flashbacks are laser-targeted, its 4.3
Genuinely frightening, a collage of intimately sketched people with poignant, believable flaws and foibles. Its flashbacks are laser-targeted, its moments of despair and heartbreak fully earned. If it has one structural flaw, it's in its waffling approach to the origins and nature of its supernatural elements, which are by turns too talked-over and underexplored. ...more
Harsher and more biting than Stoehr's first collection, SISSY BITCHES II is no less insightful in its excavation of the invisible lives of poor and woHarsher and more biting than Stoehr's first collection, SISSY BITCHES II is no less insightful in its excavation of the invisible lives of poor and working-class trans women. Her stories are full of desperation and tedium, depression and weed smoke, toxic relationships and odd, intriguing beauty. There is nothing else like Stoehr's work, but I know in time there will be. Nothing this good fails to inspire imitation. ...more
Of all the haunted house novels to attempt to take the bull of Anglo-Saxon imperialism and its countless repulsive offshoots and tributaries by the hoOf all the haunted house novels to attempt to take the bull of Anglo-Saxon imperialism and its countless repulsive offshoots and tributaries by the horns, TELL ME I'M WORTHLESS is both the most sickening and the most successful. The house is the self and the self is the house and all of it is rotted to the core. Essential reading....more
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