just watched please baby please (2022), a film about an ostensibly heterosexual pair of newlyweds who get tangled up with the leader of a gang of leather daddies. the husband wants him, the wife wants to be him. cue! well, you can guess. also, it's a musical. it's set in the 1950s and has been generally described as if West Side Story were a campy, deranged parody about BDSM / leather culture.

the good: leather daddy musical. aesthetically / texturally a blast. delightfully horny.

the bad: it was trying to say a lot about gender. like, so much. too much. weirdly coy about queer sex despite being wildly horny.

the so what: you won't see anything quite like this elsewhere

#films #y2022

^{_{I'm a data journalist and media educator based in the Pacific Northwest. Follow what I'm reading live on Storygraph. You can subscribe to this blog via email or via the Fediverse @stetting@write.as. Find me at @petrinkae on Twitter or on Mastodon.}}

Here's a quick roundup of my top October readers, generally grouped by seasonal spookiness and heebie-jeebies.

What Moves the Dead by T Kingfisher

Kingfisher takes the imagery of despair and decay in Edgar Allan Poe's Fall of the House of Usher and turns it into a spine-chilling tie-in novella replete with eldritch horrors. There was also some unexpected and fun trans worldbuilding via a POV character from a speculative historical country.

They by Kay Dick

Recently republished and lauded (maybe... wrongly) as one of the first truly “gender-neutral” and “bisexual” novellas (despite being published well after some ground-breaking sci-fi that plays much more directly with both gender and bisexuality), it was kindof more... philosophically queer, than anything. But! Eerie dystopia! Artists and dilettantes fleeing a strange government-adjacent threat to creative life! A fun read.

Queer Little Nightmares ed. David Ly & Daniel Zomparelli

Fantastic collection of horror shorts. A few standouts (Andrew Wilmot's sci-fi piece about technological glamours prompted me to immediately order Wilmot's published novel), but no true duds in this one. Also appreciated the inclusion of poetry (notably, two pieces by Kai Cheng Thom). Other reviewers have noted that the collection was less horny than expected — it's definitely less sexy, more freaky.

Unreal Sex ed. Adam Zmith & So Mayer

Fantastic collection of erotic shorts across a few speculative genres (including horror). Once again a few standouts but no duds. And maybe a better option for anyone looking for queer romance or erotica with a horror flavor. Lots of monsters in this one.

The Bruising of Qilwa by Naseem Jamnia

Not an obvious shoe-in for this list, but it does deal with blood magic and has some gruesome scenes, as well as a throughline of dread, so although it's marked as “dark fantasy,” it felt like it had more roots in horror at a number of points. Still, this novella is deceptively rich for its size, packed with complex navigations of refugee identity, queer coming-of-age and trans adulthood, and colonial violence. “What if someone took the idea of bloodbenders from Avatar: the Last Airbender” and really ran with it.

Virology: Essays for the Living, the Dead, and the Small Things in Between by Joseph Osmundson

Nonfiction! But, you know what! The COVID-19 epidemic is certainly a horror all its own. Osmundson's essay collection explores queerness through the lens of epidemics (old and new), via personal and intellectual writings on COVID-19 and HIV/AIDS. A really interesting collection of work, with a scientific and humane bent.

Honorary mentions:

• Rescued by the Married Monster Hunters by Ennis Rook Bashe as R Bird caught my attention as a polyamourous book involving a trans man character. Didn't float my boat due to the prose style (I've preferred Bashe's other work), but worth mentioning.
• Just Like Home by Sarah Gailey. As a big Gailey fan, this felt like more typical/rote fare than their usual work. Still, a big blast of a serial murdery, haunted housey tale. That said, I preferred their short story Haunted on similar themes.

#y2022 #roundups #adultfiction

^{_{I'm a data journalist and media educator based in the Pacific Northwest. Follow what I'm reading live on Storygraph. You can subscribe to this blog via email or via the Fediverse @stetting@write.as. Find me at @petrinkae on Twitter or on Mastodon.}}

After Picnic on Paradise, I wasn't convinced by Russ's fiction. (Though, her vaunted nonfiction collection How To Suppress Women's Writing was an excellent read.)

A friend convinced me to try again by loaning me We Who Are About To... and Souls, both later works of hers that veered away from “badass government agent” setup of Picnic (a premise that, though revelatory and subversive around its initial publication in 1968, when it ran counter to many pulp sci-fi tropes, was less interesting to me).

Who Who Are About To... in particular stood out as an attack on colonialism-in-space, survivalist narratives, and forced-birth premises. Though written from a different era, the book felt like an antidote to several recent popular sci-fi series I've read, where humans defeat the outside alien scourge or survive great odds thanks to the depth of the human spirit, so on and so on. When Russ's protagonists crashland, there's no “foreign space enemies” on the new planet, like in many space travel narratives — the travelers feel compelled to settle the planet regardless. With no hope of rescue, the group's leaders concoct an illogical plan to breed, despite having no survival skills, no ability to farm or hunt or build, and no real sense of reason or purpose for continuing to exist, beyond the thought that they probably ought to because that's what you do.

The book turns into an intense indictment of “survival at all costs” stories, as well as an attack on forced-birth, eugenicist, “survival of the species” narratives that pervade older sci-fi (and persist in subtler forms in modern franchises). Though the comparison to Lord of the Flies might be tempting, the book is less interested in mankind's reversion to its savage nature; it's more interested in questions about the cost (and value) of survival at all.

(Fascinatingly enough, Russ wrote the book as a direct response to Darkover Landfall, the Marion Zimmer Bradley novel infamously panned by Vonda M. McIntyre for being anti-feminist, pro-forced-brith, etc. Shoutout to Sandstone for bringing that to my attention — the back-and-forth between critics documented on the Fanlore wiki is fascinating.)

Souls, overall, was a lot less fascinating to me — although if you're a reader interested in 12th-century Viking conquests and weird metaphysical musings that mirror aliens, the Catholic church, and religious transcendence, this might be a novella for you.

#y2022 #books #scifi #adultfiction #sffclassics #essays

^{_{I'm a data journalist and media educator based in the Pacific Northwest. Follow what I'm reading live on Storygraph. You can subscribe to this blog via email or via the Fediverse @stetting@write.as. Find me at @petrinkae on Twitter or on Mastodon.}}

just finished Davey Davis' X, which feels very much like an heir to Patrick Califia's lesser-read work (and only published novel, iirc) Doc and Fluff.

It's not that they're particularly similar. Beyond starring transmasculine protagonists who have a ton of BDSM sex, much of it well outside of SSC or RACK paradigms while navigating romantic relationships, sex work, and queer intracommunity conflict... they're pretty dissimilar in tone, politics, approach to character and relationship. I'm not sure I particularly enjoyed either, and I have thwarted feelings about where to place them on any objective rating scale.

But there's something to be said for the fact that there's not much out there like it: dystopias often focus on a promised hero (especially in the YA vein of Divergent/Hunger Games), or an everyday office schmuck (ah — Calvin Kasulke's several people are typing), or grizzled survivors (Walking Dead, various zombie comedies, Torrey Peters' infect your friends and loved ones). Not a lot start from the lives of people already on the outside of society structures, struggling to make rent & stay housed just on a normal day. People who just function under passively, banally evil bureaucracies in futuristic worlds that are near-identical to modern reality.

(the treatment of bureaucratic evil also feels in line with Bornstein/Sullivan's approach to nearly roadkill's fumbling internet regulators, although that book's world is certainly more fun and less graphically violent & dour than Califia or Davis.)

curious whether there's an entire genre of banal dystopias that I need to hunt down, or whether this is just a strange trans stub-genre that rears its head once a decade and disappears.

#y2022 #books #horror #dystopia #essays

^{_{I'm a data journalist and media educator based in the Pacific Northwest. Follow what I'm reading live on Storygraph. You can subscribe to this blog via email or via the Fediverse @stetting@write.as. Find me at @petrinkae on Twitter or on Mastodon.}}

Catching up on the LaRocca craze, as I managed to entirely miss the hype (which I guess? occurred? via people on TikTok hating on things have gotten worse since we last spoke). Not sure how I missed it, as it's queer body horror that makes people mad. aka. my genre.

you've lost a lot of blood manages to meld two wildly different premises: the cold-blooded queer murderer, vis a vis Poppy Z Brite's exquisite corpse, and time loop/virtual reality shenanigans (Cronenberg –> eXistenZ?) through a nested novella. The murderer and his boyfriend argue about the nature of art & horror vs. exploitation (lol) while characters in the murderer's book have a very bad time running from horrific creatures while trapped in a madman's postmortem magnum opus. Also, poems are threaded in. There's a lot of philosophy and genre commentary packed in here, at times sarcastically so, and some of it is fun but some of it is just annoying. Still, the collection as a whole was fun, weird, creepy, etc. Never quite grabbed me at the character level, but consistently entertained at the conceptual one.

we can never leave this place landed less well for me. a tale of a girl living in sewage in a crumbling home that her mother refuses to abandon, even as war rages around them. after her father dies (while trying to abandon them), her mother takes in the malicious Rake, who promises to bring back the girl's father. Which is, of course, a trap. There's a lot going on in this one, nearly all allegorical, and for me there was just too much metaphor and not enough literal for everything to work for me. it's about grief & survival, but through the dark fairytale lens with indulgent prose and symbolic characters. eh.

bonus: interesting brief piece on poorly behaved queers & reactionary criticism against their existence in books. More relevant to you've lost a lot of blood / things have gotten worse since we last spoke. some interesting framing for LaRocca's work & certain criticisms of it.

#y2022 #books #novellas #horror #adultfiction #essays #reviews

^{_{I'm a data journalist and media educator based in the Pacific Northwest. Follow what I'm reading live on Storygraph. You can subscribe to this blog via email or via the Fediverse @stetting@write.as. Find me at @petrinkae on Twitter or on Mastodon.}}

This blog has been pretty empty this year — I've been very busy with a new job (and also reading more nonfiction than speculative fiction).

But! Ancillary Review gave me the opportunity to read E. Saxey's collection of dreamy, discomfiting short fiction. It's a fantastic selection of work. I especially loved “The Librarian’s Dilemma,” “Missing Episodes,” and “Raising the Sea Drowned,” but it's the rare collection where every short was worth the read, for me.

Check out my review on Ancillary's website.

#y2022 #shorts #adultfiction #external #books

^{_{I'm a data journalist and media educator based in the Pacific Northwest. Follow what I'm reading live on Storygraph. You can subscribe to this blog via email or via the Fediverse @stetting@write.as. Find me at @petrinkae on Twitter or on Mastodon.}}