Carla
Extremely offputting introduction. Listened for fifteen minutes before the author stopped talking about herself...then she talked about herself and the Covid epidemic. And she also squeezed in a plug for her first book, which is not on this topic, but rather about lipstick. She only then started talking about the Spiritualism movement, but led into it by talking about herself and how she mourns as opposed to how other people nowadays don't mourn. Made me very uncomfortable.
Extremely offputting introduction. Listened for fifteen minutes before the author stopped talking about herself...then she talked about herself and the Covid epidemic. And she also squeezed in a plug for her first book, which is not on this topic, but rather about lipstick. She only then started talking about the Spiritualism movement, but led into it by talking about herself and how she mourns as opposed to how other people nowadays don't mourn. Made me very uncomfortable.
Stopped reading at 13%.
The audiobook is so drily and…well, the word is aggressively narrated. Plus, the incredibly long introduction is narrated by two (uncredited) voices, the narrator and one other, so I am assuming the second voice is the author’s. It juts in unexpectedly and at odd junctures to read certain passages, no less drily or aggressively. How disappointing.
If I am to ever reapproach this work, it will have to be on paper…and I will be skipping the unnecessary detour on Freud’s work. I never thought I’d read the phrases “anal menstruation “ and “anal birth” more than once in a book on horror, and never have it refer to body horror. That section of the intro felt pretentious. I, too, read Freud in grad school—his entire oeuvre—but I don’t shoehorn his theories in where they might not belong. “Have you noticed a lot of horror fans are men? And that horror is often centered around the male gaze?…Did you know Freud had a one-sex theory about the genders?”
On second thought, I don’t think I will be returning to this book. There are so many other books, including academic studies of the horror genre, that I want to read.
Stopped reading at 13%.
The audiobook is so drily and…well, the word is aggressively narrated. Plus, the incredibly long introduction is narrated by two (uncredited) voices, the narrator and one other, so I am assuming the second voice is the author’s. It juts in unexpectedly and at odd junctures to read certain passages, no less drily or aggressively. How disappointing.
If I am to ever reapproach this work, it will have to be on paper…and I will be skipping the unnecessary detour on Freud’s work. I never thought I’d read the phrases “anal menstruation “ and “anal birth” more than once in a book on horror, and never have it refer to body horror. That section of the intro felt pretentious. I, too, read Freud in grad school—his entire oeuvre—but I don’t shoehorn his theories in where they might not belong. “Have you noticed a lot of horror fans are men? And that horror is often centered around the male gaze?…Did you know Freud had a one-sex theory about the genders?”
On second thought, I don’t think I will be returning to this book. There are so many other books, including academic studies of the horror genre, that I want to read.
Updated a reading goal:
Read 36 books in 2026
Progress so far: 11 / 36 30%
Updated a reading goal:
Listen to 20,000 hours in 2026
Progress so far: 86.93333333333334 / 20000 0%
I really, really wanted to like this book. But it wasn’t truly completed upon the author’s death and was left to a colleague and graduate students of his program to form the final work together and to edit it, and that process was not done well. I make this criticism as someone who has experienced the rigors of graduate school; had I turned in the introduction as a proposal, it would have been sent back to me with many, many instructions of change, as simple as subject agreeing with predicate, and as vast as my thesis being borne out by my research.
As I read, I found gaps in information (the author acknowledges women’s experiences, but then fails to address them, and not for the usual “they are beyond the scope of this book”, but just…vaguely doesn’t), and intense emphases on the psychosexual element of all types of consumption. I continued, because I so wanted to engage with the material.
I did not stop when Toni Morrison was vaguely criticized for writing the masterpiece Beloved (she shouldn’t have told those stories somehow, even though they were now being told in this book; this is mentioned more than once, and yet I still do not understand the problem). I did stop reading when this author (and others through him) accused William Styron of cannibalizing—or wanting to cannibalize—Nat Turner because he told his story in The Confessions of Nat Turner.
Finally, instead of exploring the homoerotic nature of slave masters consuming their slaves as product and actual food, this had begun to feel like a homoerotic book in many ways. Those are two different things. The first is a psychosocial, anthropological study; the second is homoerotica. There is a place for both. I had just planned on reading the former, and was disappointed.
I really, really wanted to like this book. But it wasn’t truly completed upon the author’s death and was left to a colleague and graduate students of his program to form the final work together and to edit it, and that process was not done well. I make this criticism as someone who has experienced the rigors of graduate school; had I turned in the introduction as a proposal, it would have been sent back to me with many, many instructions of change, as simple as subject agreeing with predicate, and as vast as my thesis being borne out by my research.
As I read, I found gaps in information (the author acknowledges women’s experiences, but then fails to address them, and not for the usual “they are beyond the scope of this book”, but just…vaguely doesn’t), and intense emphases on the psychosexual element of all types of consumption. I continued, because I so wanted to engage with the material.
I did not stop when Toni Morrison was vaguely criticized for writing the masterpiece Beloved (she shouldn’t have told those stories somehow, even though they were now being told in this book; this is mentioned more than once, and yet I still do not understand the problem). I did stop reading when this author (and others through him) accused William Styron of cannibalizing—or wanting to cannibalize—Nat Turner because he told his story in The Confessions of Nat Turner.
Finally, instead of exploring the homoerotic nature of slave masters consuming their slaves as product and actual food, this had begun to feel like a homoerotic book in many ways. Those are two different things. The first is a psychosocial, anthropological study; the second is homoerotica. There is a place for both. I had just planned on reading the former, and was disappointed.
The audiobook, narrated by Bruce himself, is a must. Such an intimate, honest read.
The audiobook, narrated by Bruce himself, is a must. Such an intimate, honest read.
I am a different—and better—person than I was before I read this novel.
Dark of the invisible moon. The nights now only slightly less black. By day the banished sun circles the earth like a grieving mother with a lamp.
Stream of consciousness dystopia, the end of the world as a flowing prose poem, sifting through the reader’s mind like the ash on the road.
I know this novel might seem unapproachable, or even painful, given the state of our world right now, but let me tell you, I feel like I have experienced a catharsis. I feel a wee bit stronger and ready to face the monsters than I did. My mind has been given a good cleanse, or a good shaking.
I am a different—and better—person than I was before I read this novel.
Dark of the invisible moon. The nights now only slightly less black. By day the banished sun circles the earth like a grieving mother with a lamp.
Stream of consciousness dystopia, the end of the world as a flowing prose poem, sifting through the reader’s mind like the ash on the road.
I know this novel might seem unapproachable, or even painful, given the state of our world right now, but let me tell you, I feel like I have experienced a catharsis. I feel a wee bit stronger and ready to face the monsters than I did. My mind has been given a good cleanse, or a good shaking.
