#whatever it was a guilty pleasure read for murder and sexy fun times

[theirwolfbicanthrope]

finished a book that was very much for my Id and was self indulgent junk food and it was enjoyable but the age of the FMC nearly ruined it for me. she was wayyyyyy too young for someone in her position, she definitely read as at least a few years older, and it made a plot twist reveal about another character FUCKING RIDICULOUS to the degree it almost stopped me from finishing.

[kokkuri3]

do yi he sounds sexy

The thing about Yi is he and Shivani only characters people are allowed to want to fuck

Full Name:Yijing Huang. Drops the -jing to piss his dad off.Gender and Sexuality:Gender is Whatever. Sexuality is BoysPronouns:Any rly but usually uses he/him. If someone uses something else he doesn’t care enough to say anything about themEthnicity/Species:Species: Jesus archetype. Mom human dad angel fuck. Both of his parents were Chinese immigrants technicallyBirthplace and Birthdate:Massachusetts, USA, Feb. 18th 20XXGuilty Pleasures:Engages in extreme acts of masochism, but to say he actually genuinely enjoys it as opposed to just… training or forcing himself to is kinda ehhhhhhh. Otherwise avoids feeling pleasure at all, though he’s bad at this. The other things he enjoys are all very pure and good so he can’t really feel bad about itPhobias:Doesn’t have any specific phobias.What They Would Be Famous For:Had a discussion about how he could be a terrifyingly powerful politician if he were marginally less moral. Otherwise fame is something he would actively avoid bc he hates attentionWhat They Would Get Arrested For:My guy hates cops so like. A laundry list of things. OC You Ship Them With:Ehhhhhhh no one in particular rlyOC Most Likely To Murder Them:Alright this is extremely circumstantial. MC would have probably attacked him in earnest at some point if not for the fact he completely lacks his own body. Blake actually takes genuine interest in him but also thinks it’s kinda hot to kill people so if not her then himFavorite Movie/Book Genre:Dude reads a LOT of philosophical/contemporary/political literature and talks about it frequently.Least Favorite Movie/Book Cliche:If you asked him he’d have difficulty answering but probably like, bury your gays or smthTalents and/or Powers:My guy is extremely intelligent in a lot of ways (he’s god awful at science and math and can’t navigate social situations for shit but) which combined with the fact he can Predict The Future means he’s kinda. The latter is ability is pretty much unique to him and as such it’s completely unexpected for the most part. This also gives him a few avenues to other powers unique to himself bc of the way powers work in this story but I haven’t come up w any yet bc I’m really bad at coming up w powers. Also worth mentioning he’s not rly human so medicines and poisons tend to be less effective on him (sometimes it doesn’t work unless he actually wants it to) and he doesn’t get sick. Otherwise has a typical lineup of demon powers since he never got the opportunity to rly use anything but the previously mentioned, meaning he can manifest a Big Fucking Scythe (it’s Symbolic) and is significantly harder to kill than humans, tho this is not for the same reasons demons are harder to kill than humans. His particular sector (name WIP don’t. don’t call it this) is mostly support-oriented so he’s not really special combat wise, other than stuff that benefits from being just extremely smart and also without much regard for honor or his own well being.Why Someone Might Love Them:Most Perfect Kind Wonderful Boy Who Cannot Do Wrong. He’s great and I love him so much. Of the 4 protagonists most consistently and genuinely kind and compassionate. Probably the kind of person you wouldn’t like upon meeting but after getting to know them realizing that they’re probably the best person you’re ever going to meet. Despite lacking understanding for science or math conversing with him would probably lead you to the conclusion that he’s very smart, which wouldn’t be incorrect, unless he makes deliberate efforts to cause the listener to think otherwise, which wouldn’t be unusual. He feels bad if he hurts other people’s feelings and gets told that he can be intimidating at times.Why Someone Might Hate Them:Also a lot of reasons to hate him uhhh. Chronic liar. Deep into uncanny valley. Pretentious. Hypocritical. Can be really rude or cold by accident. Doesn’t understand others on a non-academic level and has difficulty forming and keeping relationships bc of this. Comes off as a know it all and kinda is. Does Not Forgive Does Not Forget If You Wrong Him He Will Remember Forever though he does not actually really hold grudges. He mostly perceives actions as unforgivable but is more than willing to form positive relationships with people who’ve wronged him if he believes they’re not bad people. Has a tendency to introduce very heavy concepts into conversation suddenly which is not received well.How They Change:Forced to come to terms with the fact that he’s a person with emotions and needs like everyone else and simply bc he was ostracized and abused does not make him a bad or unlovable person. Starts being more open and honest w others after lying constantly started hurting other people more than it hurt him. Why You Love Them:Very fun to write and develop bc I got to think about how being able to predict the future your entire life would factor into a person’s development. Also he’s autistic and like That’s Me Babie so to a large extent I parallel his experiences as a child to mine. Also pretty fun to write a character who’s unarguably Good despite mostly operating on blue and orange morality.

[kittenfemme27]

The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires

I don’t know about you, reader, but it’s been actual years since I was able to properly sit down and finish a book. My last one was Lovecraft Country in 2018, and many, many years before that. Reading used to be a big passion of mine, I loved to get lost in the worlds. I loved the movie that played out in my head as I read, as if it was projecting itself into my mind more-so than i was actually reading the words themselves. For a kid who didn’t always grow up with the internet or video games available, Books from my local library were a great escape.

So, having found myself getting more and more into horror around 2019 in all forms of media I consumed, I was more than happy to bookmark a tweet from a horror artist I follow on Twitter who had a list of all the horror books he’d read that year. This would be my chance to get back into reading, finally!

Cue.. 2 years later, and I’ve finally started on that list. The top of that list, “The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires“, was something I found immediately intriguing from the title and cover alone. I’m now regretting that decision so much that I’m not sure I’ll bother with the rest of the list.

(CW: R*pe, Gore, Racism)

“The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires” is an awful book. The only compliment I feel I could accurately give it is that it’s not written incompetently enough, from a purely technical standpoint, as to be unreadable.

The story stars Patricia Campbell, a housewife in the 1980′s-1990′s that is more apology than character, and her rag-tag group of similarly middle-aged, middle-income southern white wine sipping housewives who do, and I cannot stress this enough, almost nothing but test each other’s and the readers patience for nigh on 310 out of 357 pages. They bicker, they fight, they treat Patricia as crazy when she repeatedly shows them evidence that children around them are dying, and most of all they refuse to do absolutely anything, leaning more into pure disbelief until the problem has literally violated one of them. The book club women don’t lead interesting lives, either. They’ve got husbands who are not in love with them, children who hate them, and friendships with each other that can be broken by what feels tantamount to bringing the wrong wine to a meeting. Throughout the story, Patricia is accosted by the resident Vampire-like creature, more akin to a human mosquito than any sort of real “Vampire”, that moves in after his aunt dies. A man named James Harris. He smoothly worms his way into everyone’s lives in the charismatic way a vampire does and convinces everyone that Patricia is more or less insane for ever suspecting him of being a vampire after she watches him feed on a child. This leads to her attempting suicide after being pushed into a corner by her doctor husband who seems to have been ripped straight from the 1950′s and thinks women should be Seen and not Heard. She gives up and more or less goes comatose as a character for roughly 3 years until finally she snaps to her senses after seeing a ghost of her dead mother in law who knew the Vampire when she was a small child, who leads her to one of the bodies he’s got stored in his attic, and convinces everyone else in her book club, who has routine abandoned her at this point, to help her kill James. They do, chopping his body to bits while it taunts them and then throwing the bits into a fire. Patricia divorces her husband at the end and somehow that makes her children lover her, happy-ever-after ending.

That’s the rough synopsis, but it doesn’t really do the grossness of this book any justice. That first child James kills, is a black 9 year old named Destiny who later kills herself as it’s revealed that the Vampire-like creature’s bites feel so good and so sexually pleasurable, that if you are deprived of them after becoming addicted you’re likely to just commit suicide. This is AFTER she’s taken away from her mother by child services because they assume the bite marks are syringe injection marks and that her mother must be a druggie. She’s not the first black child to die this way either. In-fact, by the time Patricia becomes wise to James’ ways, she’s the third. They’re all from a poor black neighborhood that is literally described as shady, dangerous, and being full of “Super Predators” called Six-Mile, which is the de-facto feeding ground of the Vampire for a good 75% of the book, as well as the home of the literally only surviving named black character, Ursula Greene, who herself is nothing more than a “wise old negro” trope along with being a maid to these rich white people who think of her as trash. This is probably the biggest overarching problem in the book. It tries, in the authors words, to explore the relationships between the white, rich women who brag about how their cul-de-sac is so safe and pure that nobody even locks their door, and the poor black characters from Six-Mile. The book thinks its clever, because Mrs. Green constantly points out that the white characters let the black children die callously so that their white children would live, to which they can only reply about how guilty that makes them feel and how they’re sorry. I’m not sure what the author hoped to accomplish by pointing out the institutional racism of the 90′s, but whatever he hoped to accomplish, it fail flat on its face in the most racist way it could.

I wish that was where gross things ended for this book, but its not. At one point, the Vampire-like creature rapes one of the book club members and she is more or less outright stated to be pregnant with a monster from that rape and it is also revealed that the rape gave her an “Auto-Immune Disease” that the characters husband immediately likens to AIDS and that is very quickly killing her. This information causes her to choose to have her body cremated so nothing can spring forth from her corpse when she dies. The implications this has are frankly appalling. The books decision on whether or not a woman who gets pregnant from rape is worthy of life is to resolutely and proudly say no and treat that as if its a feminist answer. That if you’re raped, it’s akin to something like AIDS and life simply isn’t worth living. it’s one of the grossest things I’ve read in a long time.

It’s not even the only shock value the book uses to make it’s events feel real and scary, others include Patricia’s son “Blue” being obsessed with Nazi’s, for genuinely seemingly no reason. He just brings them up to make you, and everyone in the story, uncomfortable. There are constant overwrought descriptions of gore or simply gross scenarios, such as an indepth description of Patricia’s ear-lobe being ripped off, or rats gnawing the flesh off on a old woman, or a cockroach crawling inside someones ear. There is also the repeated child murder or child suicide, which doesn’t really serve a purpose other than to shock the middle-aged mothers this book was meant for, with multiple sentences in which Patricia thinks about how much it would hurt if that were her children, inviting the reader to do the same with their own.

And we couldn’t forget that this book is just unrepentant in its horniness. It’s outright stated that being fed on is the most sexually pleasurable thing one can feel, which makes it all the more awkward when you consider that the Vampire’s first set of victims are children, later Patricia’s teenage daughter who she walks in on in the middle of being fed and who she has to stop from literally masturbating in that moment while attempting to punch the Vampire off of that same teenage daughter. But, of course, it doesn’t end there. It’s a book about almost entirely women written by a Cis Male Author, which means there are constant depiction of female bodies in the nude or in violence. It’s no “She boobed boobily”, thankfully, but it’s not much better than that. Describing pubic hair, breast shape, and even making it so that the Vampire-like creature drinks from a penis-esque proboscis that extends from it’s throat and right into the upper thigh of it’s victim, which is mentioned twice to be right next to the vagina. It even goes so far as to try and sexualize its own rape, aswell as having Patricia tell the rape victim how good it feels with this section between the two. Something I’m including here in its entirety because no amount of words I can write describes how gross this passage is, in context.

   “Grace already... told me,” Slick said, opening her eyes, pulling her mask away from her face to speak. “I made her... give me all the details.”

   “Me too,” Patricia said. “I was out from what he did to me.”

   “How did... it feel?” Slick asked.

   Patricia would never have said this to anyone but Slick. She leaned forward.

   “It felt so good,” she breathed, the immediately remembered what he’d done to Slick and felt selfish and insensitive.

   “Most sin does,” Slick said.

I think the thing that angers me the most about this book is that it’s tricked a lot of people who read it into thinking its a fun, feminist read. All of the main characters are overworked mothers who struggle with being that overworked, and then come out on top anyway because of their motherly intuition and love for their kids. It’s the kind of book that a single struggling mother would read and think “Yeah, I’d do that, that’d be me! I’d save the day!” and it makes them feel good about themselves, and about being a mother, and about how hard it is to make the kids lunches and clean the husbands dirty underwear and make sure the house is clean and dinner is on the table by 6 PM all while looking hashtag fabulous and like a girlboss. A quick trawl through any review site will show roughly the exact type of single mothers this book is written for giving it 5 stars and calling it hilarious and empowering. And y’know, I don’t have a problem inherently with prose written for that demographic. But this book gets away with a ton of racism, sexism, and outright disgusting content by hiding itself under that veneer and I think that’s just awful. It should be held to scrutiny for what it is, for how bad it is, and it clearly never was.

Don’t read this book. It sucks. It sucks so fucking much. I want my night I spent reading it back.