Reviews with content warning for Death of parent - Green Fuse Burning

disclaimer: I don’t really give starred reviews. I hope my reviews provide enough information to let you know if a book is for you or not. Find me here: https://linktr.ee/bookishmillennial

Thank you to my bookstagrammer friends who influenced me to read this: @titalindascorner & @borrowedbyaudrey <3 I adore yall!

This was such a gorgeously written novella, and I genuinely wish it was longer (but it works perfectly as a novella!!!) Here are some examples of the writing:

The city, for all its sutures of concrete, let her be anonymous; hell, it encouraged facelessness, participation in community optional.

She’d brought the outside world’s deep greens into her body, accepted the infection of her mind. Now the canvas would surrender to her wounded hands.

Every time she mourned her father she also mourned the idea of a life that had him in it. And guilt compounded her remorse and confusion, the sense that she was grieving incorrectly in her mourning that seemed both selfish and impersonal. Tomorrow — and all the days after it — was something that had only ever lived in her imagination.

The verdant and the vermillion burst forth in tapestries of life and death, blood and blooming, the abstract strokes constituting vine and flower, all wrapping the monstrous woman from previous paintings in an exciting culmination: instead of being devoured by flames, she is at one with life and her surroundings — a wishful sentiment accentuated by the artist’s mysterious disappearance shortly after its creation.

The urge to confess to them was absurd, but her words erupted like new growth rooted in testimony. If this was the last thing she would ever do on this earth, why shouldn’t she give them, these hallucinations or ephemeral monsters, her feelings about what it had meant for her to live? Maybe this was what they wanted from her. “Life was like a language I couldn’t speak.” </spoiler

Like, absolutely stunning writing. I was in awe as I read this, and can't wait to read more from Tiffany Morris.

This novella is about Rita, who in the midst of her grief, is accepted to a week-long artists residency after her girlfriend Molly submitted an application on her behalf. Though Rita is rightfully pissed off at the paranoid idea that Molly is trying to simply get rid of her and have some space from her, she goes to the cabin, which coincidentally is where her estranged late father grew up. Rita begins seeing and hearing things at the cabin, especially near the swamp, and must confront her deepest fears about mortality, her relationships, and her future.

Though I have not lost a parent, I felt completely immersed in Rita's grief, anger, and fear. TM's writing imbued Rita with such fervor, anxiety, and pain that felt almost tangible! Like you could reach into the book, touch it, and pull it out. It was atmospheric, eerie, and forced you to ruminate on these things alongside Rita. I read this in one sitting, and I highly recommend it!

Author info: Tiffany Morris is a Mi’kmaw/settler writer of speculative fiction and poetry from Kjipuktuk (Halifax), Nova Scotia.

(more) quotations that stood out to me:

The Mi’kmaw language always sounded weird coming from her mother, even though her mother was half Mi’kmaw. She had been estranged from that side of her family for years and wouldn’t tell Rita why, wouldn’t share any knowledge with her other than a few words or phrases. She was much more into telling Rita how she should behave and what convoluted beauty rituals could improve her appearance.

I am not indigenous, I am Filipino & Chinese, but I could so deeply relate to this quotation, as I am not fluent in any of my parents' native languages, yet the sharing of cultural knowledge that was inherently sexist and misogynistic hits so close to home.

“To accept death is to accept your own nothingness — not the act of dying in itself, but the fact that death resides in you, the fact that you will, eventually, be dead. To be in this state of perpetual otherwise. Accepting death is the understanding that consciousness is the shell of experience, not its inner sanctum — and death becomes a pilgrimage outside the golden cage of our material existence. I don’t mean this as an encouragement of death, rather a call to understand that you, too, are nature, and nature loves above all else transmutation, and impermanence, and creation. We do not protect life by denying death’s existence, yet our capitalist and colonialist structures are based on this denial. We do not protect anything through denial.”

Grief formed her new reality, her new understanding of time, an invading force that occupied land and bodies in equal measure. Her memories were colonized by trauma.

It had taken me over a year to realize that I suffered from PTSD and wasn’t bad at grief — mass culture is just that deeply avoidant about both death and trauma... Everywhere you turn in a capitalist society there are sweet and numbing routes to escapism, clichés about love, products determined to sanitize and smother in nostalgia every disorienting and uncomfortable part of the human experience. (author's note/acknowledgements)

Content Warnings

archaicrobin's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional mysterious reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

A beautifully written literary horror novella tackling grief, depression, and trauma through the tale of an indigenous artist’s haunting experience at a secluded cabin near a large pond near her recently deceased father’s former land.

I wasn’t sure what to expect when I started this one but was pleasantly surprised by the depth of this novella. If you’re looking for a literary horror novella with eerie imagery and psychological horror elements blended with creatures and malevolent nature then you’ll love this one!

Content Warnings

rorikae's review against another edition

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dark emotional sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

'Green Fuse Burning' by Tiffany Morris is a reflective horror novella steeped in one artist's grief.
After her father's death, Rita is wallowing in her grief. To help her, Rita's girlfriend Molly applies for an artists residency for her. When Molly surprises her with the accepted residency application, Rita isn't completely sold but she decides to go anyway. Alone in the forest by a large pond, Rita delves into her grief through her painting but her feelings threaten to overwhelm her, especially when she starts to see strange things.
This is an excellent, evocative novella though it comes with strong content warnings for grief, loss of a parent, and suicidal ideation. Though we only spend so much time with Rita, Morris does an excellent job of helping us to understand her grief and how it is affecting her. She accomplishes this through a mix of beautiful and horrific nature writing with a slightly supernatural aspect. Rita is deep in her grief and since we are seeing the world through her eyes, it's unclear what is just a hallucination and what is real. One of my favorite aspects of the story is that each chapter starts with looking at one of the paintings that Rita created during the residency. These paintings help to inform our view of Rita's experience and how she is coming to terms with her grief.
Morris' writing is lush and horrifying at the same time. I will definitely be looking to pick up more of what they write next.

Content Warnings

myranda_the_bookwyrm's review

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challenging dark emotional inspiring reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

5.0

This scraped my insides raw in the best way.

Content Warnings

queergoth_reads's review against another edition

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dark emotional fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

Content Warnings

mfrisk's review

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dark hopeful reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

This book was an incredibly slow burn for such a short book. I really loved that about it as I found the buildup of the cabin in the woods setting and of our characters was served well by this choice. I really loved that much of the horror present was mysterious and some even left to our imagination.

That being said I do think the horror elements could have gone a bit further and was expecting more body horror based off of the cover and plot summary but I really loved this book overall and enjoyed the authors explanation as well of what brought her to write this story.

I loved the descriptions of art at the beginning of the chapters and found this author’s descriptions of nature to be breathtaking. She did a great job of delving into heavy topics such as grief, relationships (both with family and romantic partners), family background and identity.

I look forward to reading more from this author in the future and seeing all the stories they can tell.

Content Warnings

mentat_stem's review

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dark hopeful tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

The 2 main characters in this book are a young artist and nature. They are both attempting to understand their identity in the context of traumatic loss.

The physical book was surprisingly beautiful. The narrative was cleverly structured. The prose was as lush as the nature surrounding the isolated cabin.

This enough body horror and descent into madness to satisfy a horror fan. However, it's also a slice of an artist's life who's moving through the stages of grief. Definitely an entry point for anyone new to eco horror.

Content Warnings

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