The monster is an incorporation of the Outside, the Beyond, of all those loci that are rhetorically placed as distant and distinct but originate Within. Monster Culture (Seven Theses)

dark books for bright girls

"Gothic novels were about getting married to someone you couldn't trust, having to live in his home and find out that he had his ex-wife locked in the attic. They were all about the sexual politics of the day, and that's why so many women wrote them and why so many women read them. That's the foundation of horror: Domestic stuff. Sexual stuff. Body stuff. Super intimate stuff that in day-to-day conversation is seen as too 'feminine.'" (Sady Doyle, "Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers")

From Mary Shelly to Carmen Maria Machado, I love to read spooky shit by women. I love to read women writing about other women writing spooky shit.

Recent posts are in the sidebar to the right, but here are my book reviews which are not exactly pure reviews, rather a mix of review, reactions, and ramblings. If I did not like a book or did not finish it (ahem, 2666, literally what the fuck is wrong with you) I won't write about it so if I've written something at all that's basically a Kalamity Endorsement.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - Great Shit You Should Absolutely Read - - - - - - - - - - - - -

books, essays, classics, etc.

  • The Weird and the Eerie - Mark Fisher
  • The Yellow Wallpaper
  • 'My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamonix: Performing Transgender Rage'
  • Bodies Becoming Pain: Unusual Strategies of Dissent in Some Transnational Latin-American Women Writers
  • Creepypasta and Internet Literature: Unmasking Digital Horrors and the Evolution of Contemporary Storytelling
  • Lamia, Sirens, and Female Monsters: Feminist Reframings of Classical Myth in 19th-Century Literature
  • Passionate Women, Vengeful Spirits: Female Ghosts and the Japanese Gothic Mode

    • "The weird is constituted by a presence-- the presence of that which does not belong. In some cases of the weird (those with which Lovecraft was obsessed) the weird is marked by an exorbitant presence, a teeming which exceeds our capacity to represent it. The eerie, by contrast, is constituted by a failure of absence or by a failure of presence. The sensation of the eerie occurs either when there is something present where there should be nothing, or is there is nothing present when there should be something." - Mark Fisher

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