thevampiremars's reviews
200 reviews

We Are ‘Nature' Defending Itself: Entangling Art, Activism and Autonomous Zones by John Jordan, Isabelle Fremeaux

emotional hopeful inspiring medium-paced

4.5

Not a how-to guide by any means, but it does demonstrate possibilities outside the enclosures of capitalism, with emphasis on building community and connections not only with your fellow humans but with the broader ecosystem. Inspiring.

CONTENT WARNINGS: climate change/ecological collapse/extinction, eviction, police brutality 

Portrait of My Body as a Crime I'm Still Committing by Topaz Winters

emotional medium-paced

3.5

My favourite poems were “Serenade to Surrender,” “Insomnia,” “Event Horizon,” and “July”

I found many of the other poems to be unfocused and meandering. I also noticed some were structured in a way that makes sense visually but not rhythmically, and couldn’t unsee that afterwards. Some outstayed their welcome (“Self-Diagnosis” was good but would have been more impactful had it been confined to a single page, I think.)

The whole thing felt a bit amateurish, a bit Tumblr... It is raw and tender, but in a slightly clumsy way. To be fair, Winters was in their late teens when this book was published (and some of the poems may have been written a few years prior). I’d like to read their more recent work.

CONTENT WARNINGS: disordered eating, self harm, suicidality

Death by Landscape by Elvia Wilk
Did not finish book. Stopped at 15%.

It’s alright. I’ll probably revisit it at some point, but I don’t really have the energy for it right now. I don’t get the sense that there’s some uniting theory or conclusion being set up. It’s just a collection of brief essays connected by theme but not really building upon one another, and for the most part they’re just plot synopses for short stories I haven’t read. The writing is accessible and the concepts explored are interesting (though they’re not Wilk’s concepts, so I’m not sure I can give her too much credit). There’s just not enough substance to keep me hooked. 

Ariel by Sylvia Plath

dark reflective fast-paced

3.5

“The world is blood-hot and personal”

I picked up this book because I was vaguely familiar with Sylvia Plath through cultural osmosis but had never actually read her work, and I wanted to change that.

I’m not sure what to make of this collection. There were a few poems I liked (“Tulips,” “Berck-Plage,” “Paralytic”) but others seemed... jumbled? I’m not sure if that’s the right word.

There’s a dreamlike quality in Plath’s writing, evoking imagery mostly by naming colours, which is enough to establish the location or the mood but then I’d feel a bit lost. I felt like I never quite got what she was gesturing at; I know she was a writer and I know she was abused and I know she killed herself, but I didn’t know her, so the deeply personal nature of many of these poems made it difficult for me to grasp her meaning.

CONTENT WARNINGS: death, suicide, injury, blood, racism 

An Apartment on Uranus by Paul B. Preciado
Did not finish book. Stopped at 36%.

In these brief essays, Preciado idly comments on (then-)current events or half-remembers a Wikipedia article he read. I was drawn in by the Uranus motif and the idea of reclaiming/reinventing uranism, but he doesn’t really do anything with the concept beyond mentioning it. His observations are mostly obvious. Sometimes he’ll say something that might be interesting but his point is obscured by buzzwords and neologisms.

I stopped properly reading about a third of the way through, but I did skim the rest. I don’t like giving up on books but honestly? This was a phenomenal waste of time.

Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

reflective medium-paced

2.5

Unfocused. I admire the ambition and the insistence on including a wide variety of voices and angles, but the scope is just too broad for the anthology to truly come together. I wish there had been more emphasis on the idea of passing. I don’t know whether the issue stems from most of the writers not understanding the assignment, or whether the brief they were given was too vague to begin with. In any case, a lot of these essays had little to do with passing and instead discussed tangentially-related topics like presenting yourself as one of the good ones, or reclaiming a previously suppressed identity, or generally experiencing discrimination (societal and intra-community). It’s not that these topics aren’t worth talking about, they’re just not what the title and synopsis of this book promised, and the anthology format means no one subject gets the thorough examination it deserves. Even the essays that do engage with passing are rather rudimentary. Dean Spade’s essay, for example, identifies passing as a prerequisite to accessing privileges (and rights) which would otherwise be denied, such as healthcare. But surely this is common knowledge to anyone even vaguely familiar with the concept of passing? It offers no new insights if you are, yet it also isn’t quite basic enough to serve as a primer for people who aren’t.

I don’t mean to single Spade out – I do appreciate his work and this essay is hardly the worst in the collection (that would be The End of Genderqueer by Rocko Bulldagger). There were a couple of essays I did like, namely Persephone by Helen Boyd and Hat by Tucker Lieberman.

Nobody Passes doesn’t quite work as an anthology and it doesn’t deliver on its promise to explore what it means to pass. I expected essays on the borders of gender being so zealously policed that cis people are misgendered or mistaken as trans; on what it’s like to pass as, say, a trans woman but not as cis; in-depth explorations of navigating a gendered world as a genderqueer person excluded by barriers most people don’t even notice. There was a bit of that, but this book really did leave me wanting more. In a way that’s a good thing, because I do feel inspired to write my own essays and create artwork about the subjects that I felt were un(der)represented here, to fill in the gaps with my own contributions. But yeah. I would have liked something more intentional.

CONTENT WARNINGS: transphobia, homophobia, misogyny, racism, antisemitism, islamophobia, colonialism, classism, eviction/homelessness, imprisonment, police brutality, domestic violence, gun violence, rape, incest, suicide attempt, drug use 

Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg

dark emotional inspiring reflective sad fast-paced

4.5

“You’re more than just neither, honey. There’s other ways to be than either-or.”

Brutal and efficient sketches that amass to something quite substantial. Dated in some ways but nonetheless a groundbreaking representation of gender nonconformity. Jess is a flawed and compelling protagonist. The story follows her life as a working class butch in America in the latter half of the twentieth century. It’s essentially a series of anecdotes, progressing from one job to another or one partner to another (it’s more engaging than I make it sound, I promise). The one thing tying it all together (besides Jess as a character) is the theme of change, summed up nicely in this quote: “things don’t change back [...] they just keep changing.” It works well, it’s a skilfully crafted novel.

I’m really glad I finally read this book. I can see why it’s considered a classic of lesbian/trans literature.

CONTENT WARNINGS: homophobia, transphobia, misogyny, racism, antisemitism, violence, sexual harassment and rape, police brutality, imprisonment, institutionalisation, homelessness, injury, suicide

The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall

emotional reflective sad tense medium-paced

3.5

Strange book. It starts off as a bildungsroman but it’s also a bit of a manifesto, so I have to assess it from both angles. Stephen is a stand-in for the author, her mouthpiece. Around the midpoint of the book

she gives an impassioned speech defending her queerness, arguing against her mother who deems it unnatural and wrong.

It seemed almost like wish fulfilment on the part of the author, imagining a braver version of herself who has the guts to stand up to bigotry and fight back (

though she does ultimately agree to leave her childhood home

). Later, these diatribes are delivered via narration rather than dialogue; they are suppressed to internal thoughts. This reflects Stephen falling into despair and becoming increasingly isolated and aware of the hostility which surrounds her, but it also seems as though Hall at this point wanted to make her declarations without having to convey them through a story.

There were a few elements that didn’t quite work for me as I was reading the book but, upon reflection, I can see what Hall was (maybe?) going for. An example: the First World War lasts only a couple dozen pages. Maybe Hall didn’t want to explore in-depth a recent real world horror. Understandable. But that short section does introduce

Stephen’s main love interest, Mary,

and there’s that whole thing about war being an opportunity to prove one’s masculinity and worth, something which appeals to Stephen. There’s no time to delve into that, though. The war kind of just happens. It’s a blip. Maybe that’s how it felt to those who lived through it? But it was odd considering the first half of the novel had really taken its time to flesh out the characters and breathe life into the world –

Mary is more of a plot device than a person

and the quickening of the pace from this point forward gives the impression of a montage.

As Stephen’s life falls apart, so too does the structure of the novel.

It’s an interesting artefact of queer history. For modern readers it blurs the line between lesbianism and transmasculinity; the prevailing concept at the time (or the one Hall subscribed to, at least) was inversion. It’s fascinating to see how concepts of gender, sex, and sexuality were (and to some degree still are) intertwined in the public consciousness – a woman who loves women must be on some level a man, and a woman who wants to be a man is and will always be a woman. And every invert has some physical sign of their disorder, like Brockett having feminine hands. It’s proof that queerness is true, that it’s more than an affectation or a behavioural choice. I think Hall was interested in exploring/explaining the origins of queerness. It is stated very clearly in this book to be a natural phenomenon. But the born this way narrative does in some way concede that queerness is undesirable, only we can’t help it. This entire novel is built on that foundation.
It is a sympathetic portrayal – sympathy really is the key word here. We are urged to understand Stephen and to pity her plight, because queerness is inseparable from tragedy.

Well.

CONTENT WARNINGS:

war, injury, death (including animal death), terminal illness, suicide, grief/depression, anxiety/self-consciousness, toxic/abusive relationships, cheating, outing, dysphoria, sexism, lesbophobia (including internalised lesbophobia), racism, drugs and addiction (and prejudice against addicts)

The Fealty of Monsters by Ladz

dark medium-paced

2.0

Not for me. It reads like fanfic, with a bare-bones plot serving as a vehicle for the juicy stuff (porn). I don’t think the author actually wanted to engage with the historical setting or the fantasy worldbuilding beyond a vague aesthetic, which is a real shame because this could have been a fascinating historical drama with a gothic twist. Instead the story oscillates between political matters one minute and “the muscular squish of boypussy” the next.

Sasza being a “stealth” vampire is hard to believe because he’s two metres tall with white hair and amber eyes.

Not that it really matters because Świetlana figures it out easily and Ilya, as it turns out, knew all along. To me it seems to parallel that have your cake and eat it too fantasy a lot of young queer people have where they want to remain closeted for the sake of safety but also don’t want to have the capacity to pass as straight/cis because they want it to be obvious who they truly are.

There’s only one scene that I can recall where Sasza being closeted is relevant, and I see what the author was doing there:

no one stood up for him despite there being more at stake (no pun intended) for Sasza himself, as a marginalised person, than there would be for his supposed allies. But the same effect could have been achieved if Sasza had been known to be a vampire, regarded as one of the good ones (albeit on thin ice). Honestly, it seems odd to introduce two types of vampire, one which is animalistic and reviled and another which is basically just a guy with a blood kink, if you’re not going to do something with that contrast. Vampires which resemble humans are tolerated because they’re not like those hideous bestiapirs. You know? And we know Sasza has the ability to transform into a bestiapir but do all vampires? His father was horrified at his transformation but is that just because he turned into a Buzzwole or was it his ability to transform at all that upset him? It’s implied to be the latter but I’m not sure. Anyway, Sasza is frustrated that his allies let him down so he immediately shifts from being closeted to going apeshit.

The violence in this book is just as gratuitous as the sex. I’m not at all opposed to either but it very much feels like this was what the author wanted to write and everything else was just half-baked filler. Which sucks because there were some interesting concepts. Wasted potential.

This novel should have been right up my alley but I found it amateurish and lacklustre. I don’t think I’ll read the sequel awkwardly teased at the end.

CONTENT WARNINGS: death, blood, gore, body horror, vomit, violence, limb loss, needles, drug use, alcoholism, self harm for magic use 

When I Arrived at the Castle by E.M. Carroll

dark mysterious tense fast-paced

4.0

Good stuff.

CONTENT WARNINGS:

blood, body horror/transformation, suicide, violence, mind games