madarauchiha's reviews
446 reviews

The Keep by Jennifer Egan

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adventurous dark mysterious sad medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

✨🌠 my about / byf / CW info carrd: uchiha-madara 🌠✨

Once you get used to the dreaminess, it's not half bad. Not entirely horror, there's no supernatural or paranormal. Definitely kinda creepy. The location was interestng and I liked the plot twists. The finale was very sudden but in context I can understand why.

I liked the variety of characters and rotating view points. I think it was pretty well written. I don't know how accurate the prisons parts were but you know, it's fiction.


major alcohol use, bullying, confinement, drug abuse meth, medical content, police, police abuse, prisons, ptsd, racial slurs, sexual assault, sexual harassment

medium addiction, child death, drowning, drug abuse, homophobia, infidelity, injuries, injuries, medical content, pregnancy

minor anti black racism, antisemitism, car crash, child death, drug use hard drugs, gun violence, homophobia, prison rape, racism, suicide, trafficking

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We Need to Do Something by Max Booth III

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dark tense fast-paced

2.0

✨🌠 my about / byf / CW info carrd: uchiha-madara 🌠✨


....it was ok. :/ I don't have anything to say about it really tbh.


major body horror, cannibalism, child abuse, child death, death, domestic violence, drug abuse, gore, gun violence, islamophobia, insects, murder, racism, revenge porn, self harm, sexual harassment, snake, suicide attempt, toxic relationships, violence, vomit

medium ageism, animal death, antiblack racism, drug abuse, racial slurs

minor cancer, parent death, infidelity, 


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I Wish I Was Like You by S.P. Miskowski

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0.0

✨🌠 my about / byf / CW info carrd: uchiha-madara 🌠✨

dnf chapter eight. it started out so strong with her finding her own dead body bc she's a ghost and then it immediately trawls through her entire boring life. Between chapters is a brief blurb about a random someone commiting suicide.

jesus christ. if i wanted to read about tedious white people I'd pick up a shitty hunger games twilight knock off.

If there's a decent pay off, I will not be experiencing it. god speed y'a'll'll who'l do read it.

no rating on purpose. as of posting this, it's got, like, 2.50 stars and that's hars h enough imo.

major death, excrement, gore, murder, sexual content, suicide, suicide ideation, teacher student relationship

medium drug abuse prescription drugs, drug use smoking tobacco, scars, self harm, suicide

minor animal death, car crash, child death, drug abuse, drug abuse cocaine, drunk driving, excrement, fatphobia, fire injuries, gun violence, menstruation, sexual content, sexual harassment

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Our Wives Under The Sea by Julia Armfield

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mysterious reflective sad slow-paced
✨🌠 my about / byf / CW info carrd: uchiha-madara 🌠✨

As filling as sea foam. I'm left wanting horror having fed none. It's very pretty writing. This book is really, like, white woman oriented. And bland. Where is the fucking? There's lesbians for christ sake. Of course we fuck. And where is the horror? Forgotten in the sea? The most we get is a little body horror and some oh noes DX moments in the ocean. Meh. 

No rating because I'm aware that I'm the wrong audience. 

If you came here looking for lesbian horror, ehhhhh skip this one. Listen, read this.

▪ “Ghosts don’t speak,” she said to me. “People misunderstand this. They think that when you’re haunted you hear someone speaking but you don’t. Or not usually. Most of the time, if you hear something speaking, it’s not a ghost – it’s something worse.”

This is the most horror you get out of this book. No really.


major blood, body horror, confinement, injuries, medical content, mouth injuries, parasites, parental death, religion catholic, sexism, sexual content, vomit

medium alcohol, animal death, drug abuse, self harm, sexual harassment

minor animal death, religion catholic,

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High Lonesome Sound by Jaye Wells

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0.25

✨🌠 my about / byf / CW info carrd: uchiha-madara 🌠✨

dnf 14% i ain't reading this misogyny trauma porn trash. shitlist !

▪ As he watched them file past, he realized that each of those suspicious faces was lily white. His own white skin meant he wasn’t used to being an outsider, but in Moon Hollow he wasn’t just an outsider—he was the stranger. Maybe that’s why it was unsettlingly easy to imagine what might happen if a stranger with the wrong skin color stumbled into town.

rolling my eyes loudly and hard

major alcoholism, animal cruelty, child abuse, grief, parental death, physical abuse, violence

medium death, drowning, religion christianity, 

minor college professor student relationship, whorephobia 

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Harvest of Scorn by F.G. Cottam

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dark mysterious sad slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix

0.25

✨🌠 my about / byf / CW info carrd: uchiha-madara 🌠✨

EDIT Hi. I'm from the future. Or past, however you wanna read this. So here's the thing, right? I kinda thought we left evil Black people / Magical N*gro shit back in the 1950s or whatever with TinTin Goes To The Congo and all the African stereotypes with the big red rubber circle mouths and chicken bones in their hair.

Yeah, sorry, medium spoilers but this book is that. All of the books are that. It never changes, there's no plot twist of oh, the slave ship captain actually was just christian evil, possessed by the devil, the other plot thing was a misdirection.

Probably the best out of the trilogy, if only because it was medium / fast paced compared to the other two, and becaue it was a little more action packed. Again, compared to the other two books. 

If you didn't read or have forgotten it, chapter one fills you in on the first and second books. There's literally no reason to read the first two books unless you REALLY want to.

It's rather dry, detailed, does handle tension and scariness fairly well. Unfortunately horribly sexist in describing pretty much all the women characters in levels of sexiness and how fat their tiddies are.

It gets the barest, driest, minimal points for not making the single Black African character talk like, well you know. A racial stereotype.

"▪ Then she realized that the noise was coming from behind her and it registered as a human voice, accented and cold and slightly girlish. It was too faint to make out individual "

The human teeth belonging to the African man magician is described as feminine. Quell horror. Females... scary!?!?! oh noes DX

▪ She said, ‘They believed it originated in a duplicate world, a world the mirror image of ours except essentially dark and corrupt. You invite it to be born here instead of there and it germinates and grows and becomes sensate and of course hungry. Only someone with enormous power could achieve this voidal transition.’ ‘And Shaddeh had that power?’ ‘Horan’s journal gives an insight into the character of the man universally regarded as the greatest West African sorcerer of the modern age.’ ‘What are the other theories?’ ‘Some scholars maintain that there’s a clandestine side to our existing world, a netherworld, if you will. It’s here among us but conceals itself. The Albacheian sorcerers discovered or created a portal into it and developed a way to engage with its inhabitants.’ ‘None of this is very comforting.’ ‘The third and final theory is that these are alien species. Some of the Albacheian art and iconography supports that argument. So does the long lifespan of the beings and the fact that they’re born already carrying their own offspring and are almost impossible to kill. Biologically, they don’t much resemble mortal creatures in some significant regards.’


This is the background for the magical spookiness that the African sorcerer caused. None of this is real or referenced historical subjects.

Like I mentioned in my review of the very first book in this trilogy, shit sucks. You can find the first review here.
https://app.thestorygraph.com/reviews/fc9772df-41e1-4637-a4f2-7fe5f12679b7

major anti indigenous racism, antiblack racism, body horror, child abuse, gore, medical content, physical abuse, racism, slut shaming, torture, vomit, w.nd.g word used


medium anti black racism, fatphobia, slavery, torture

minor alcohol, alcoholism, death, drug abuse cocaine, gore, suicide, suicide ideation





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Blanky by Kealan Patrick Burke

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dark emotional sad fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Diverse cast of characters? No

3.0

✨🌠 my about / byf / CW info carrd: uchiha-madara 🌠✨

Well. That was a story. It was ok. Kinda a B or C movie type of a plot. The plot twist was silly to me but ok sure, nothing is original.

major alcoholism, blood, body horror, child death, excrement, gore, grief, mental illness, murder, police, unsanitary

medium sexual content, vomit, 

minor confinement, ableist c slur, alcoholism, pregnancy, vomit, 


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The Model by Robert Aickman

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medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? No

1.0

✨🌠 my about / byf / CW info carrd: uchiha-madara 🌠✨

mmnmnmm largely unimpressed. its a lil surreal and well written, sure. but i dont care lmao and the racism is just the cherry on top. standard cishet white author shit i guess.

major racism, sexism, sexual assault, 

medium domestic violence, murder, misogyny, femicide, 

minor ableism, ableist c slur, anti Rromani g slur three times, child death, colonization, gun violence, injuries, parental death, slavery, stillbirth, suicide


major racism of cultural stereotypes eg china women with tiny feet, maya or Aztec doing human sacrifices



▪ At least once she had been taken in a dream to see a performance by the great actress, Rachel, and Rachel had proved to be enormously tall, and blond, and not at all Jewish: more like an ordinary peasant woman. “That can’t be Rachel,” she had actually whispered to her Father. “Of course it is Rachel,” her Father had whispered back in his stop-talking intonation. 
medium antisemitism? wtf is this.


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The Boy Who Drew Monsters by Keith Donohue

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slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

0.25

✨🌠 my about / byf / CW info carrd: uchiha-madara 🌠✨


Long tedious, disappointed at the autistic kid being magical. There is one character of color, a japanese woman, and she is also magical. So you got the ableist magical(?) savant trope and the racist magical native trope.

This book should have been a novella or short story. i would feel less rage at having my time wasted with this.

by the way, the ending? Abrupt, nonsensical, stupid, out of no where. Ok so basically, full spoilers, turns out the autistic boy
murdered his best friend, and ever since then he had been drawing the murdered boy every single day in order to keep him alive. So the mother, learning that the monsters were from his magical drawings, and the dead boy is also  magical drawing, orders her son to keep drawing the boy. Then the book ends.
Because???? No clue why?? 

The horror was non existent. The monster(s?) were sparse and occasional. The monster was a very basic
naked man crawling around
. Yes really, that's the monster. There's some unreality elements but they happen off screen and could easily be chalked up to boys playing games, or medical illness.

There's a implication of ghosts but that's all there is to it. 

There is no tension, just yawning boredom as we're ferried from one place to another, watching the daily bland boring life of a married cishet couple. 

The magic system isn't really explained much. There's no particular basis for it. It is confirmed, comes out of no where, and that's it.

▪ “I don’t mean Jip. I mean, how long have you been seeing this priest and this voodoo woman? She gives me the creeps.” 
major racism not just racist magical poc trope. Voodoo woman referring to a Japanese woman, who is nonblack and most likely not a practitioner of Vodou, a closed African religion.

Why did the author nickname the boy character Jip? That sounds way too much like g*p, an anti Rromani slur. Yeah this is a stretch I don't give a shit.

PS if you wanna read Autism In Horror that's done well and right and genuinely creepy, go check out Experimental Film by Gemma Files. It deals with ableism in past and present society, eugenics, family bonds, and a whole lot of folk horror. Also the main character is a woman too, not the usualy clueless cishet man bumbling a la scooby doo.


major ableism, animal death, blood, body horror, death, child death, dogs, gore, infidelity, police, pregnancy, sexual content, stillbirth, victim blaming

medium blood, child death, death, drowning, murder, psychosis?, ship wrecks, violence

minor alcohol, asperger mention, body horror, drowning, injuries, parent death, religion catholic, wars



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Twelve Nights at Rotter House by J.W. Ocker

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0.25

✨🌠 my about / byf / CW info carrd: uchiha-madara 🌠✨

Like others mentioned, the twist was pretty up front and blatant. I kept reading becaue I thought it would turn out differently.

Unfortunately no, it's a standard, deeply antiblack
cuckold revenge
story. Yes there's a Black man character and yes he does
die a horrible gruesome death. Twice even! Once off screen and then again at the end of the book!!


There were more media name drops than 'Ready play one' which made the book drag on even more. Which makes all the 4 and 5 star ratings make sense. I guess if you have brain damage or fandom brain rot or only like the bottom of the barrel shit, this will seem like mindblowing stuff to you.

Despite being only, eh, 1 hour read, it felt like it dragged on to three hours. 

I don't rec this book. If you're Black or PoC, skip this. You're not missing much.

Also someone else mentioned and I agree If you make your characters be racist and have the only Black character or Character of Color call them out on it for being racist, that's still racism. What the fuck is the point of that? Stupid garbage. It's not cute, it's just bad writing.

Major alcohol, amputation, asphyxiation, blood, body horror, gore, injuries, suicide, violence, 

medium amputation, animal death, antiblack racism, fire, fire injury, infidelity, racism, religion christianity, self harm, sex worker murder, torture, whorephobia

minor alcohol, antisemitism swastika mention, child death, death, infidelity, murder, serophobia, sexual content, suicide, ted bundy

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