libraryofbaxobab

[libraryofbaxobab]

April 11, 2025:

This book is BEGGING to be made into a FNAF-style game. Oh, your pov character takes a shady, easy but repetitive job which involves security rounds checking hallways of frozen bodies, pressing a single all-important button at very specific times, and staying away from the ~forbidden floors~ no matter what you hear or see on the cameras? An antagonistic supervisor? The previous worker "ran away in the middle of the night"? The facility was converted into an educational attraction for children and then abandoned years ago? Cr1TiKaL would play this on Steam for $2.

I mean, for what it is, this book is perfectly serviceable. It's got some weird mysteries to solve, it's got a decent backstory, it's got the good old psychological "may or may not be haunted" I like so much. It's fine.

My main question is: Was Dead Silence a fluke? I loved that book soooo much I became a ride or die for this author immediately only to be disappointed now by her next two books. Don't get hung up on why I rated Ghost Station higher; this is much better than Ghost Station.

Also, I rarely do this, but I want to address the cover art. This cover is significantly worse than the other two, and I am having a hard time putting my finger on why. It just feels weirdly low-contrast or something. I feel like it's patronizing me: the unsubtle clawed shadow taking center stage is so Goosebumps-coded (derogatory).

5.5/10 #WhatsKenyaReading

[libraryofbaxobab]

April 11, 2025:

Yes hello please, WHAT is going on? I'm so confused about the ending and what it means??

I cannot figure out what this book is about. Sure, it's "about" a group of women pursuing graduate degrees in creative writing, it's about the lone outcast joining their clique / cult of toxic positivity, and it's about doing artsy witchcraft to create hot mindless rabbit-men homunculi. But I can't tell if this is primarily a critique of Girlboss Feminism; a complaint against modern art which relies on a flashy, pretentious, or extreme medium but is shallow in its meaning or politics; a metaphor for deeply hidden gay feelings; or somebody's thinly-veiled fetish.

This is the voice of someone in academia who hates academia, writing a character in academia who hates academia. That's a vibe I do not tend to fuck with, nor fiction writing about the act of fiction writing. Stories like that tend to get self-aggrandizing too quickly, in my opinion.

There's a lot of hay made about what is a true artist and what art is supposed to be and do, and while I think that's a fine debate, I think this is just a liiiittle too pointed. It's kind of uncomfortable that everyone who disagrees with the pov character's thoughts on art and academia and writing, etc, is a full airhead caricature. Somebody somewhere pissed this author off in a class and this book is a rebuttal to them specifically.

6/10

#WhatsKenyaReading

[libraryofbaxobab]

April 11, 2025:

Ironic, considering I literally just gave an enemies-to-lovers romantasy high praise (The Familiar, Leigh Bardugo) but this is NOT doing it for me. I found the bickering extremely annoying and the emotional parts honestly pathetic.

I suspect the part of this that would shine for me is the world-building. I gave up too early to have a good grasp on it, but it sounds like some of the characters have a Grey Wardens (of Dragon Age) deal going on, hunting down some sort of terrible former humans? Mortician's services are involved? This sounds like it has my name all over it but the spark just wasn't there this time.

DNF/10 #WhatsKenyaReading

[libraryofbaxobab]

April 6, 2025:

Single secretly-Jewish Cinderella figure seeks cursed scary corpse-man for magic tutoring and maybe more. Must have sense of humor and class consciousness.

I don't say this often: I found the romance subplot more exciting than the main plot. And no knock against the main plot, either: it's a Magic Competition Tournament which is quite popular right now, and this is one of the better ones.

Classic servant raised not to the gentry but a secret third class. Classic magic is a blessing from The Lord until it's not useful to us politically. Classic intrigue of who's trying to assassinate whom while who's in the king's / church's good graces. When it works, it works for a reason.

9/10 #WhatsKenyaReading

[libraryofbaxobab]

April 5, 2025:

I actually wanted this to be worse? The clear 4chan greentext reference? The protagonist being a Terminally Online loser? The awful tagline "Be online or be unalive"?? This shoulda been terrible!

Unfortunately (un4chanately) it's just sad. This guy falls down a deep dark hole of online gore and violent content because of his overwhelming grief, and you dear reader have to endure that for many, many pages. There's some big action scenes and more sex than you'd expect, but the book is broken up by extremely slow portions, so it's very easy to get frustrated with the amount of wasted in-universe time. Later on, I felt indignant and defensive on behalf of the main character, which is quite a feat considering he is a horrible person. Well done.

It's weird how much this clearly expects you to know about various online spaces, their reputations, their dark corners, and even their mannerisms and etiquette, but goes out of the way to overexplain much simpler words & concepts, like the title word "rekt." If you didn't know what that meant (and couldn't google it), why would you have picked this up? Just kind of a weird book.

5/10 #WhatsKenyaReading

[libraryofbaxobab]

March 29, 2025:

Could have been incredibly interesting, but it stopped where I'd expect a book like this to get started. There's a lot of interpersonal pettiness that didn't mean much of anything to me, and then once it was revealed exactly what we were dealing with--which would have been super awesome to learn more about--it just sort of ended. This was a journey aborted before it really got into full swing.

3/10 #WhatsKenyaReading

[libraryofbaxobab]

March 29, 2025:

Okay the front cover isn't doing this book any favors: it looks like super generic sci-fi from 20-30 years ago (not even old enough to be charmingly generic). It's a post-Earth setting, where most surviving humans are refugees after the attack that killed everyone and everything they knew. A bleak setting that calls for a disaffected badass heroine who's tougher than everyone else because she's sad and also has some sort of super powers bestowed on her.

Yeah, maybe the generic cover sort of does fit. This all just felt very tired, and I didn't care about the characters, not even the robot bartender sidekick! The ex who's now literally married to his ship! We had such opportunity for goofs, but instead the whole thing was mostly stark and forgettable.

3.5/10 #WhatsKenyaReading

[libraryofbaxobab]

March 26, 2025:

...Where am I? Sorry, I heard "sapphic monsterfucker" and passed out.

This gave me distinct Spirited Away vibes but featuring a spider goddess who wants a bride.

The mystery portion is not necessary, and I think even the book knows that. There was barely an investigation and it felt halfheartedly tacked-on for the sake of stakes. Even worse, the romance suffered for it. It's a short novella, so we didn't get treated to the little details that make a spark into a blaze.

5/10 #WhatsKenyaReading

[libraryofbaxobab]

March 25, 2025:

I expected a more typical haunted mansion story, but that's not quite what's happening here. It's closer to Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island, but it's not quite that, either. It's a subtle, tricky examination of race, of Blackness, of the adoption of the trappings & aesthetics of whiteness, of respectability politics, of optics vs experience, somehow all outside the context of (ethnically) white characters. There's an impressive element of how to treat the past: avoiding it, becoming trapped by it, acknowledging it, correcting it.

It's heavy stuff but the mystery-adjacent intrigue keep it moving.

7/10 #WhatsKenyaReading

[libraryofbaxobab]

March 25, 2025:

This character study / vignette of extremely complex emotions is exactly what I was hoping for in a LaRocca novel. No grand, intricate plot, just a sad, deranged man and the uncanny freelance work he's created for himself.

It has very little--if any--hope or comfort to offer, but there is a sense of understanding, of detached nonjudgement of its protagonist. This is deep depression-hole literature.

7/10 #WhatsKenyaReading

[libraryofbaxobab]

March 22, 2025:

Yeah, this is more like it. This has a great mix of brutality on the micro level and kindness on the macro level. Like, the story itself is punch after punch of despair, but you can kind of feel that the story carries a certain hopefulness for itself. This isn't the unrelenting revulsion gauntlet of Between Two Fires (Christoper Buehlman), but I think there's similarities there that aren't just the setting.

This grows from a local governmental dispute to an intricate war with existential stakes, with some wild mythological characters sprinkled in. The vague fairytale vibe--and I mean old school old school fairy tales, like pre-Grimm folklore-- is really cool to me.

Oh, and a narrative about a defenseless town begging those they cast out to help them fight back against a ruthless brigand who brutally took their government by coercion and his right-hand scheming wizard who hates him but uses him for political power? Doesn't remind me about anything in particular. Don't worry about it.

7.5/10 #WhatsKenyaReading

[libraryofbaxobab]

March 19, 2025:

I have never actually seen The Thing, but after hearing a brief summary, yeah this is it almost beat for beat, especially the central fear that the people who are dangerous look right, can almost pass for normal. Don't come in here looking for something different and then complain that it's literally just The Thing with cell phones.

That said, the movie is a classic for a reason, and I think the setting and scares are pretty effective. In the harshest place on Earth, the only thing you can depend on is the same two dozen people you see every day, and when you can't... well, disaster. According to the author's note, this book was at least mostly written actually in Antarctica! I had been wondering how many of the little details were accurate to the experience.

Overall, I think this book is kinda long for how just okay it is. I don't necessarily think any parts were superfluous, but it probably could have been tightened up to flow better.

6.5/10 #WhatsKenyaReading

[libraryofbaxobab]

March 17, 2025:

"A Vampire Opera in Verse" is literally all I, and you, need to know. A story told via a few hundred sonnets, which rhyme(!), with a perfect tone both funny and tragic, and above all, at all times, romantic.

Fuck it, ten outta ten

10/10 #WhatsKenyaReading

[libraryofbaxobab]

March 16, 2025:

There's tons of people on the waitlist for this one because Tender Is The Flesh is so famous, but I actually liked this one much better! They're not, like, in the same universe or anything so there's no reason to compare the two books further.

We've got an inscrutable pandemic-apocalypse no one has time to worry about; we've got a cult with an intricate hierarchy based on the mutilation of healthy women; we've complex relationships with extremely sapphic overtones (the simultaneous jealousy/hatred/eroticism of rivals-in-piety? I don't even know where to begin unpacking that); we've got a mysterious newcomer-turned-saint...

A really impressive piece

8/10 #WhatsKenyaReading

[libraryofbaxobab]

March 15, 2025:

This started out so promising, but didn't build to the intensity I wanted. This feels like the first half of what I hoped I was reading, like there should be a whole second book where everything gets turbo haunted and the weather gets worse. Survival horror (especially fighting The Cold) with Something Unexplainable outside wakes me up like smelling salts, and to be fair what is here isn't bad at all. Landmarks disappearing and reappearing, one guy subtly starting to act too out of pocket, the dumbass decisions to impress the fellas, the voluntary isolation... it's great stuff.

In the end, it was a little too delicate & polite in my opinion. You have all the right ingredients, please fuck me up next time.

This is perfect if you like low scares but high dread, a little blood and a lot of psychological, and things not getting too intense.

7.5/10 #WhatsKenyaReading

[libraryofbaxobab]

March 14, 2025:

This is a typical haunted lighthouse story, it's exactly what you're thinking, and damn if that's not effective. I found my eyes watering like I was a kid at a campfire hearing a tale that happened in these very woods. Some great scares for such a short & simple story

8.5/10 #WhatsKenyaReading

[libraryofbaxobab]

March 13, 2025:

Here's the thing: this is much better than the second book, The Cradle of Ice, and in fact some of my specific gripes have cleared up. The characters' relationships are more dynamic, for one. .... That may be it but it was definitely less annoying. Yet I still didn't have a good time reading this.

It took weeks longer than I anticipated; I felt like I was on a literary treadmill. I chipped away at this for hours and my bookmark barely moved. By the time I was getting close to the end, every time a new chapter came up I thought "Ugh, there's MORE??"

For one thing, I know all this author's tricks. Every shocking reveal, every plot twist, every new dangerous creature, every character death (and character death fakeout) was telegraphed from miles away because I've just read too many Rollins novels. Not that books have to be surprising to be good, but he relies heavily on dramatic, slam-on-the-brakes shock moments for excitement and tension. If those don't work, there's no substance. He has a formula and this sticks to the playbook exactly. But there's another reason I struggled with this book:

This writing style is repetitive in a really weird, subtle way. Several lines of dialogue or narration will say the same thing, sometimes with the same wording, but in a way that sounds like it's giving you more information. Like there's a scene where the Character A figures out that they have to use Character B's mysterious powers, and they're like "Hey Character B I noticed your powers are really helpful right now, I wonder if we should use a power like yours to solve this puzzle" and then everyone stands there like "But where are we going to get a power like that we can use??" and then go into the history of the powers and what they do and why it would be helpful but oh gosh where are we going to find any of this power and then Character B dramatically reveals that "We have a source of this power! ME." DRAMATIC END OF CHAPTER!! Uh, yeah?? We knew you had this power and that it was helpful here and that you were available & willing to help, so.... Why did we have that whole conversation? We knew all this information already. Somebody already figured it out. Can we get on with it, please.

The whole thing is full of these little eddies of pointless reiteration, this was just the most obvious one. Most of them are so small you don't really notice until you've read two pages, realize you got nothing new, wonder if you just zoned out, reread the pages, and find out nope you did it right, it just didn't say much of anything.

Now I'm in a weird position where this is like, objectively better than the second book but it absolutely wasn't worth my time.

5/10

#WhatsKenyaReading