Happy Book Birthday to Nightmare on Queer Street

On October 17th, Nightmare on Queer Street officially went live on Amazon!! (I'm a little late to the party, but cue the balloons and confetti anyway.) This Halloween anthology features a collection of short horror stories (and poetry!) from the YYC Queer Writers group in Calgary, Alberta (Canada). The anthology is self-published by the group and 100% of sales are donated to Camp fYrefly, a leadership camp for 2SLGBTQ+ youth in Alberta.

The YYC Queer Writers is a group of (you guessed it) queer writers that get together about twice a month to share ideas, write to prompts, and get those creative juices flowing. The group has put out several holiday themed anthologies so far, including one for Christmas and two for Valentine's Day, Screw Chocolate and Screw Chocolate 2. This Halloween anthology is the newest addition to the collection and features some of the scariest storytelling of all - writers who write about writing, haha. 

The collection features: 

- A poem about the horrors of dating apps. 

- A clown serial killer loose at a college party. 

- Vampires hunting vampires. 

- The Devil visiting the child of a Satanist family. 

and more. 

As mentioned, all proceeds from book sales will be used to send kids from lower income families to Camp fYrefly, an arts and leadership camp for 2SLGBTQ+ youth. I'm so proud to help out this camp in any way I can - they do incredible work. When I worked in the child welfare system, I worked with several kids who were able to attend this camp through initiatives like this, and they had nothing but positive things to say. Even kids who never had anything positive to say about anything still liked this camp. The camp is run through the University of Alberta and uses evidence-based and Indigenous led programming, with Indigenous Elders running the camp's ceremonies and some programming. They also provide mental health supports, an artist in residence, and it's located in the mountains of Kananaskis Country. The camp also keeps its doors open to cis, straight, questioning or curious youth, which helps to educate allies as well as empower queer youth. 

Check out Nightmare on Queer Street and the YYC Queer Writers Group through the links below. 

Amazon  |  Goodreads  |  Facebook 

Book Review: You Could Make This Place Beautiful

 

Book Review: You Could Make This Place Beautiful by Maggie Smith 

Goodreads Description: In her memoir You Could Make This Place Beautiful, poet Maggie Smith explores the disintegration of her marriage and her renewed commitment to herself in lyrical vignettes that shine, hard and clear as jewels. The book begins with one woman’s personal, particular heartbreak, but its circles widen into a reckoning with contemporary womanhood, traditional gender roles, and the power dynamics that persist even in many progressive homes. With the spirit of self-inquiry and empathy she’s known for, Smith interweaves snapshots of a life with meditations on secrets, anger, forgiveness, and narrative itself. The power of these pieces is cumulative: page after page, they build into a larger interrogation of family, work, and patriarchy.

My Review: Maggie Smith is a poet by trade, so it's no surprise that her memoir is part prose and part poetry. The book is very much a conversation between you, the reader, and Smith herself, as she personally invites you into her emotional reality. Smith frequently breaks the fourth wall to speak directly to the reader and even addresses them as such. This kicks up the sense of intimacy, but also seats you inside her story as an active participant. Many books invite you to disappear into the story of another, to become someone else, so I found it particularly striking that in this memoir about self-actualization, Smith never forgets that you, dear reader, have value just as you are. 

There's a fair bit of repetition to the book, from framing devices to certain phrases, but this gives structure to a story that largely has no structure -- healing, after all, does not follow the plot beats of the hero's journey. By re-using certain poetic structures, such as the strawmen conversation or the way her house looks on Google maps, Smith is able to beautifully communicate the imperceptible inner change taking place over the course of the book. While some readers may be put off by this style, there's a cadence to the repetition that gives the narrative a melodic rhythm. 

While I enjoyed the book on the whole, I will admit the story loses steam in the second half as the more dramatic elements of Smith's divorce conclude. However, some of the best moments come from this slower-paced half of the book, including some of the best musings on life and happiness. The book culminates with powerful messages around self-love and learning to be single again after a long relationship, which could be very meaningful for those facing independence after spending their life as half of a whole. How do you build a life about you, for you, and filled with all the love and joy you deserve, when you've only ever built a life around someone else? Smith's book makes an excellent case for how.

TL:DR: 5/5 stars. A deeply emotional reflection on marriage, happiness, and love.  

Book Review: What Moves the Dead

 

Book Review: What Moves the Dead by T Kingfisher 

Goodreads Description: When Alex Easton, a retired soldier, receives word that their childhood friend Madeline Usher is dying, they race to the ancestral home of the Ushers in the remote countryside of Ruravia.

What they find there is a nightmare of fungal growths and possessed wildlife, surrounding a dark, pulsing lake. Madeline sleepwalks and speaks in strange voices at night, and her brother Roderick is consumed with a mysterious malady of the nerves.

Aided by a redoubtable British mycologist and a baffled American doctor, Alex must unravel the secret of the House of Usher before it consumes them all.

My Review: What a creepy, atmospheric read! Kingfisher reimagines Edgar Allen Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher with a fantastical twist: the rotting house of Usher, both the building and the family itself, have been infested with a fungus that makes the dead walk. The thematic rotting of the Usher House is made literal through Kingfisher's fungi, which behaves similarly to the real family of cordyceps mushrooms that make zombies out of their living hosts. This omnipresent infestation creates a tense and claustrophobic atmosphere that is so tangible it's almost another character. Even before readers know exactly what it is, there's a sense that the characters are constantly being watched by a predator waiting for its moment to strike. What Moves the Dead follows Poe's original story quite faithfully, with the added elements only serving to flesh out (heh) the original story. 

While Poe's story was not particularly queer, Kingfisher changes that up by playing with gender identity and neo-pronouns in her retelling. The novel features the made-up country of Gallacia, where gender and pronoun use differ from the rest of Europe. They draw from an expanded set of personal pronouns with individual pronouns for God, minors, and soldiers. The main character, Alex Easton, is also a transgender man or trans-masculine nonbinary, which was really cool to see representation-wise. Since Alex is a soldier, the book explores the 'soldier' gender category and how it manifests differently from masculinity. While the 'soldier' gender is presented as masculine, the way it is expressed is tied more closely to the role of a warrior than the typical 'male' role, i.e., more concerned with duty than domination. I really enjoyed how Kingfisher wove these ideas into the overall plot. While gender and pronoun use do have a role to play in the plot, it's not Alex's gender that comes under the microscope. It's refreshing to see gender feature as a main plot point without focusing on bigotry, coming out, or a crisis of identity. 

All in all, this was such a delightful read. The writing was gorgeously haunting. Kingfisher's ability to blend modern slang with the formal language of Poe's era added a musicality to her text that made it a true joy to read. Plus, at less than 200 pages, this novella reads quick but leaves a lasting impression. 

TL;DR: 5/5 stars. Freaky fungi, some queering of gender, and a whole lot of atmosphere. 

Book Review: Pageboy

 

Book Review: Pageboy by Elliot Page 

Goodreads Description: Pageboy is a groundbreaking coming-of-age memoir from the Academy Award-nominated actor Elliot Page. A generation-defining actor and one of the most famous trans advocates of our time, Elliot will now be known as an uncommon literary talent, as he shares never-before-heard details and intimate interrogations on gender, love, mental health, relationships, and Hollywood.

My Review: First off, I've been a fan of Elliot Page since I saw Hard Candy as an edgy teen, and as a trans person myself, I'm in full support of Page's politics -- trans rights are human rights, baby. But this book was terrible. It was worse than terrible, it was barely even a book. It's not often that I give one star reviews, since I can usually find positives in any book I read. However, Pageboy is disorganized, poorly written, and fails to provide nuanced insights into the trans experience. It often reads like a teenager's diary that focuses more on Page's pain than deriving a message from it that would be useful to anyone but him.

The disorganization and lack of clear narrative was especially aggravating, because it felt like Page was prioritizing the "artistry" of his book over coherence, i.e., he makes no attempt to ground you in a timeline, or even the scene itself. The book routinely meanders from subject to subject in naval-gazing monologues; Page will start a paragraph discussing one event, but quickly name at least five other incidents based on a similar theme. While he's trying to link these incidents together, he focuses more on artfully describing details rather than connecting them in a meaningful way. It often felt like Page was trying to be James Joyce without understanding how Joyce's writing style worked. It's easy to compare this to Jeanette McCurdy's memoir, because even though she jumps around in the timeline, she grounds readers in a tangible scene and leaves enough clues so we know where we are in her life. Pageboy makes no such attempts. 

Not only is the book confusing as hell, but it fails to articulate anything meaningful about transgender people. The book tries to be both political and personal by using Page's experiences to justify the necessity of transgender rights, yet there's a disconnect between the stories he's telling and the messages he's trying to impart. It all feels inauthentic and contrived. It seems like Page chose messages he wanted to impart and then found a moment from his past that kind of fits that message, rather than showing how his life experiences caused him to learn those lessons. Because of that, we get a story from Page's past with a ham-fisted moral at the end that doesn't fully fit. Page has moments where he authentically shows how being trans has shaped his life, but these moments are fleeting and don't connect to form a bigger picture. Because of this, the messaging is as disorganized as the narrative. As a trans person, I know my way around the queer watercooler, yet I still found it difficult to understand what exactly Page was trying to say. If someone who is well-versed in trans politics has a hard time understanding the message, then it's unlikely that people with little to no experience with the trans community will be able to take anything meaningful away from this book. 

All in all, not worth it. This was such a terrible reading experience that I can't recommend this to anyone, unfortunately. 

TL;DR: 1/5 stars. A disorganized recollection that lacks substance and coherency. 

Book Review: I'm Thinking of Ending Things

 

Book Review: I'm Thinking of Ending Things by Iain Reid 

Goodreads Description: I’m thinking of ending things. Once this thought arrives, it stays. It sticks. It lingers. It’s always there. Always.

Jake once said, “Sometimes a thought is closer to truth, to reality, than an action. You can say anything, you can do anything, but you can’t fake a thought.”

And here’s what I’m thinking: I don’t want to be here.

In this smart and intense literary suspense novel, Iain Reid explores the depths of the human psyche, questioning consciousness, free will, the value of relationships, fear, and the limitations of solitude. Tense, gripping, and atmospheric, I’m Thinking of Ending Things pulls you in from the very first page…and never lets you go.

My Review: After watching the movie adaptation, I scooped this book up immediately to see if there was more to the story. I was in a slump after watching too many boring, uninspired movies, so when I stumbled across this story, I was immediately drawn into its mysterious and introspective nature. While the book has a slightly different ending, for the most part, if you've seen the movie, there's not much more you're going to get out of the book. The book is quite clear about aspects that the movie keeps vague or layered in metaphor, but I personally preferred the movie's ambiguity over Reid's more direct approach. 

There's a lot of things to like about this book. It's a fascinating character study on the 'incels' of our society -- isolated men struggling with their mental health who direct the frustration for their situation onto women. These are the people who become mass shooters, who fall down radicalization rabbit holes, who kill themselves. Though we are introduced to and carried through the story by Jake's girlfriend, the entire book is eventually revealed to be a study on Jake. Even the parts that don't appear to be about him end up being about him. The book spends a lot of time philosophically musing on relationships and solitude-- both in dialogue and narration-- which is reflected in Jake's life-- a tangible example to contrast the theories proposed. 

Reid is excellent at building tension and suspense. The book sinks its hooks in you from the first page and never lets up. The slow build of mystery and threat made it hard to put the book down, but this tension felt too drawn out over the climax, as if Reid didn't know how to escalate it into a full conflict when the time came. At times, Reid strays into cheesy territory by using phrases that feel both clumsy and condescending. Lines like, "I'm so attracted to him," lacked any subtly, while the epilogue's meta direction that "You should read it. But maybe start at the end. Then circle back," felt like Reid was talking down to his readers, as if he didn't trust them to understand what he'd done without directing the audience to re-read the book with its twist ending in mind. It is good to keep in mind that this is Reid's debut into fiction (with an established non-fiction career preceding it), so it may be that Reid doesn't yet trust that his readers will pick up what he's laying down. Hopefully this is resolved in his later books. 

TL;DR: 3/5 stars. An interesting philosophical dissection of relationships and solitude with mediocre prose. 

Book Review: Brave New World

 

Book Review: Brave New World by Aldous Huxley 

Goodreads Description: Brave New World is a novel written in 1931 by Aldous Huxley and published in 1932. Set in London in the year AD 2540 (632 A.F.—"After Ford"—in the book), the novel anticipates developments in reproductive technology, sleep-learning, psychological manipulation, and classical conditioning that combine profoundly to change society.

My Review: Brave New World is a difficult classic to get invested in. Huxley had a point to make with this book, but he largely expresses that through worldbuilding rather than narrative. The dystopia he presents is indeed fascinating -- governments controlling people through pleasurable distractions rather than pain -- but it's coupled with next to no plot, unlikable characters, dry, colourless writing, and awkward pacing, which makes it a difficult swallow for modern readers. Brave New World is a quintessential dystopia through its soul crushing ending, but its lack of plot and character depth also robs that ending of some of its power. Instead of seeing how these characters struggled against the system and lost, we see them tour their world before ultimately submitting to it. I'm sure others feel differently, but I felt that many other classic dystopias do a better job at emotionally engaging the reader with the characters' struggle.

Now, the worldbuilding in this book is indeed fantastic. Huxley's ideas around governments conditioning behaviour and controlling people through pleasure was truly ahead of his time. It would be another 30 years before theorists like Michel Foucault began echoing these sentiments during their research on governmental and systematic power. Huxley's vision of this control is absolute, beginning with psychological and biological conditioning before birth, and continuing through pleasurable distractions like drugs (Soma) and sex (orgies). Huxley also questions the concept of civilized society, contrasting his "utopian" future against a racist caricature of Indigenous "tribal" life. Huxley posits that for all society's advancements, our moral regression has left us less civilized than the "savage" societies we purport to be superior to. While Huxley makes some interesting points about what is "savage" and "civilized," he singles out polyamorous sexual behaviour as the ultimate moral failing of modern society, which feels pretty dated. 

If you're just getting into classic dystopias, I don't recommend starting with Brave New World. It is worth the read, but more for the concepts it introduces rather than the story it's trying to tell. 

TL;DR: 3/5 stars. A fascinating world with a mediocre narrative. 

Book Review: Tits On The Moon

 

Book Review: Tits on the Moon by Dessa 

Goodreads Description: Tits on the Moon features a dozen “stage poems,” many of which Dessa performs at her legendary live shows; they’re funny, weird, and occasionally bittersweet. The collection opens with a short essay on craft (and the importance of having a spare poem around for when the power goes out). Proudly published by Rain Taxi in association with Doomtree, Tits on the Moon features a stunning cover pressed with gold foil and structurally embossed.

My Review: Dessa's collection of poems begins with a short essay that sets the 'stage' (heh) for the rest of the collection - when technical difficulties delay the show, it's important to have a handful of poems to appease the waiting crowd. As a writer and rapper, Dessa's comfort with the written word shines through her experimentation with different poetic forms. Some poems are free verse, some use a more rigid rhyme scheme and meter, while others play with cliched phrases. There's a nice balance of cynicism and hope, so while Dessa pokes at some darker subjects, they're handled with a nice dose of dry humour to keep things light. The collection also ends with a piece called Stage Dive, which coupled with the opening essay, create perfect thematic bookends for this short and sweet collection. 

TL;DR: 3/5 stars. A rap artist's perspective on poetry.