nathalie

Grotesque queer horror of the most beautiful and trashy variety. It is so rare to find something that so bluntly captures the trans experience, trans survival, love and gore wrapped in a scrapnel coated blanket. It is uncompromising, at times bordering on cruel, the accumulation of a thousand daily tragedies spilling out over a ceaseless apocalypse.

Within that pain are the pockets of hope that sustain us. The relationships and messy connections and bitter loyalty of communities continually rebuilding themselves because nobody else is going to save them. It is an uncertain future, but a future all the same.

Wasn't allowed to read these growing up so now doing my own belated book club. Blown away at how good this is right out of the gate. Has a great campy sentai-show setup but pulls no punches with how gruesome this intergalactic war actually is. All of the morph descriptions are straight body horror, and the violence only gets away with being this gory because of Halo rules (it's not blood, it's yellow goo).

Our first POV, Jake, is fully the likeable leader boy archetype, but the character voice is so strong it hardly matters. Particular highlight is dog brain, which is exactly what you'd expect but even more charming. Under the YA nonchalance is a surprisingly affecting tragedy, particularly Jake's distant relationship with his brother (I imagine we'll see even more devastating scenes from the other POVs whose family life seems even more complicated).

Great start to this series. I am sure it goes off the rails over the next 50 (!!) books, but I'm fully bought in right now.

Like sledding down a hill on a piece of cardboard, hurtling towards a cliff, bailing too late and tumbling, limbs snapping like twigs as you become another piece of debris to careen over the edge. The chaos at the center of Stephen Florida is unrelenting, his drive to wrestle both pitifully insignificant and the only thing that has and will ever matter. To what degree any of what's happening is real or true is irrelevant to the kinetic energy that starts fully built on page one and refuses to decelerate until crashing headfirst into the acknowledgements.

The only comparison I can reach for are Johnny's chapters from House of Leaves, both painting images of isolated, angry men rapidly detaching themselves from reality until all that's left is their own paranoia. If you found Johnny's depraved ramblings hard to stomach I would recommend leaving Stephen Florida off your list (or at least heeding the content warnings because there is a lot of shit sprinkled between lines through these brief 289 pages). I have discovered that few books are more engaging to me than those concerning masculinity's proclivity towards antisocial self destruction. I'm not yet sure what to make of this information.