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How do I put this. This book made me pace a lot.

God. It's Machado's memoir of being in an abusive queer relationship. Each chapter is stylized or themed after a named topic; it worked for me because it was great framing for the (usually upsetting) content.

A later cluster of chapters lives rent-free in my head still. The Choose Your Own Adventure section? Oh my God. What a great use of form. It really hammered home how 1. bleak the relationship was by then 2. how repetitive the abuse was 3. how inescapable the abuse was (all of the page choices making you go back to the start of the day or a time of the day!!) 4. the extra meta chastisement from Machado if you just read the pages through straight, goddamn (“not following the CYOA rules doesn't mean you can escape that this happened”).

Picked this up on a whim because like many during the early days of the pandemic, I dreamed about moving out to the middle of nowhere to escape people and the plague. Conover's experience and writing about actually doing it and reporting on its realities is personally delivered here. I won't say the pace is plodding, but he takes his time (maybe he's even on prairies time). All in all, glad I caught this one.

What a great collection of short speculative fiction. I think Solaris and Rebellion did a great job of rounding up authors you ought to know–definitely going to go look further into some of them after having read their short stories.

I feel that some of the authors are more suited to the short story format than others, but every story at least had something I could think over: an ending, a concept, a constraint, and so on. 

To chop up a Tumblr post I made about the book:

The Luminous Dead was a super effective horror novel for me. I had to go sit next to my partner and be patted on the arm while I was getting through the last 10%, lmao.

The limited third-person POV works so, so well in a story where one character's understanding of her environment starts deteriorating.

Our protagonist Gyre is exploring a deep cave system at the behest of a mysterious corporate concern all by herself. She's wired into her cave suit, recycling and recirculating waste material in a closed loop, and subsisting off of food delivered straight to her gut because a monster in the caves may be attracted to any trace of humans.

From the second Gyre enters the caves, she's robbed of connecting to her environment with three of her senses: smell, taste, and touch. She especially laments the last as exploration of the cave wears on her.

All that's left to her is sight and sound, and it's not enough as she starts questioning why she's been hired to go down here and whether she's really alone.

While I can think of a logical reading of the novel—Gyre is hallucinating badly because of paranoia and stress from early on, and it only getting worse as things go to shit—the timbre of Gyre's panic and her constantly rounding back on herself on whether or not she can believe her perceptions color that whole experience. I cannot in good faith just say to somebody, “Oh, she imagined all those things.” Somewhere deep down, I question myself, too. And that's why “The Luminous Dead” will be on my mind for a long time.

First romance book I've read where fatness is really celebrated. Stinson's descriptions of weight and heft were loving and made me think twice about how I approach fatness myself. Super sensual, too.

I don't think there's necessarily a driving plot, but I enjoyed my read regardless.