Faint

very... claustrophic. it feels unfinished? also the cat dies.

DNF @ pg 9

i dont like the prose :/

I went to read this and discovered that I've already read it. I don't remember anything about it lmao but I think I liked it good enough.

10/10 more books should be about bloodthirsty mermaids and enby plague doctors who fall in love

dnf @ pg 68

I wanted to like this one because I liked her haunted house one and the premise is fucking wild but also like. I understand what Gailey is doing and I feel like I have a pretty good grasp of where the two ways the MC might be heading but I just do not care about the characters so that's a no from me.

good! had some fun bits and I enjoy watching men argue so I'll definitely be grabbing the next one from the library.

dnf @ pg 166

IDK why I gave Emily McIntire another chance man. after crossed i should have just tossed this one onto the sell pile and left it there but ughhhh I wanted to at least try.

anyways, it's bad. jafar is white but like Italian white so he can still have a cringe nickname for Yasmine and be ✨spicy✨ and Aladdin is now... Aiden. I... I got all the way to the marriage of convenience and was like I just can't keep going like this there are so many other books to read.

dnf @ pg 105

okay I picked it up at the library because it was pink and it looked interesting, but the minute I read "piercing the imaginary line between literary and genre fiction" in the introduction I was like mmmmmmmmmaybe not. some of the stories were great (I went out of my way to make sure I read Stephen Graham Jones' contribution and was NOT disappointed) but most of them were just... meh.

the collection was meant to (according to the intro) blend traditional terrors with more real life or modern ones and that's fine. horror is often a metaphor for our fears of something else. but that only works if you're subtle about it and these authors.... mmm. no. very heavy handed. and this might be a side effect of each story being less than 2k words, but the overwhelming feeling of pretention slapping me in the face every time I started a new story was more than I could handle.

anyways. this was pretentious and most of the 19 stories I read were mid at best and talking down to you at worst.

some of these were good some were great and I skipped some. the author of the hp lovecraft style short story really dedicated herself to making sure it contained a healthy dose of period accurate racism.

dnf @ pg 28

the prose is like walking through molasses and not in a good way

dnf @ pg 45

I MIGHT have been able to overlook our heroine being 15 but Bertrice Small described things in what I can only describe as... creepy

kate, girl, if you don't want the man with the skull cup pls give him my number kthxbye ALSO good for Bonnie Quinn she knows what the fey are in a way that no romantasy author ever will