Jesse > Recent Status Updates

I know that I read this book but it was close to 25 years ago and the only things that stuck in my mind is Montag’s imagining of Mildred’s death, the discussion when they invite “friends” over and the other wife blathers on and on about cesarean section delivery, and the death chase with the electric hound. I am practically reading this for the first time again and the disaffected dystopia is so good.

when I was in my freshman year of high school the teacher, Mr. Rice, had a cabinet filled with various books. I think that we were required to read two of them and I can remember a few of them - The Color Purple, The Fellowship of the Ring, maybe Animal Farm? The two that I picked were The Three Musketeers, because it was an adventure story, and this one.

I love how the series is peppered with references to classical literature, in this case Georgina Orwell being linked with mind control (1984, a single eye also featuring prominently in the cover for that book)

OH MY GOD WHY CHILD LABOR WHY THE WEIRD HYPNOTISM

Oh god there’s still like nearly 100 pages left, that’s a lot of time for something horrible to happen

😬

I mean I’m not proud of calling it, idk how much of modern fantasy - YA or otherwise - is a long hot potato from catastrophe to catastrophe.

Like, idk whether this boyang assault is gonna go poorly and set the stage for the third book, but it’s gonna go badly

Well this particular plot twist was I guess hinted at in the book’s opening vignette. The nonstop war crimes tour examines the horrors of and motivation for war from all sorts of different perspectives.

This novel is brutal

Yeah the Hesperian are way worse than I imagined, they are colonialism personified, complete with White Savior gatekeeping and smug Abrahamic faith

okay maybe I had something in the back of my mind with Chaghan but I wasn’t expecting an explosively bi love triangle. actually, chaghan not being able to see the lingering spirit strongly suggests that, well, whatever happened, Altan isn’t dead! I’m amazed that we’ve gone 200 pages and no one has talked about the Cike dude that they broke out at the end of the first book.

If Dani says she can bring Altan back to life and Rin takes her up on it then I’m fuckin spaced

idk where we are going - I half-expect Altan to show up, not dead, at some point in the future - but it’s here that I realized that the second book in YA and YA-adjacent fantasies may be slightly weighted toward including sea travel. This book is going down the realities of war-induced PTSD and drug addiction. It’s good that someone isn’t enabling Rin here but uh…

It took a second to link back names with characters, lol. I’m realizing why this isn’t remotely YA fantasy all over again, even if - for a time - it seemed to boil down to everyone saying “fuck” a lot. Since this picks up where the first one left off, we are now deep into drug addiction to manage PTSD, as well as extensive self-harm cutting and stabbing.

Still freakin’ good. As much as I like the story arcs, I’m just as happy reading all of these dark fantasy short stories.

“Rue Barree”

More indiscretions from the youthful artists, focused around a young woman who has generally snubbed their advances. Whether this is the start of something or the end of a flirtation, idk. The ending is vague enough that I couldn’t say one way or the other with regard to Rue Barree and Shelby.

“The Street of Our Lady of the Fields”

A romance in Paris between a newly arrived art student and one of the women who frequents the Latin Quarter. She is charmed by how he treats her, ignorant of the reputation of women of the Latin Quarter. He values her as a person. When she finally confesses, she finds out that it really doesn’t matter to him, because her history - The Phantom of the Past - is immaterial.

“The Street of the First Shell”

A period drama about Americans living in France during the Franco-Prussian war. I really got caught up in it. The depiction of the horror of the siege, the starvation, and the desperate battle that MC Trent joins in is, well, really good. The bit with Hartman and Sylvia - there is some commentary on toxic masculinity here with WHY Trent goes and fights.

“The Street of the Four Winds”

This is a lovingly detailed story of a man making nice with a cat, speaking poetically all the while, and seems like the setup to a meet cute as he attempts to return the cat to her owner, only to find out that - yes, she is a girl you once knew, but there is Something Else. Sylvia links back to the artist of “The Yellow Sign”, also the name of his One True Love.

“The Prophets’ Paradise”

A baroque prose poem, beautifully obscure. The mood is… apocalyptic? One of the figures mentioned is specific to the King In Yellow - The Phantom of the Past. The rhythm is very fun to read.

“The Demoiselle D’ys”

A supernatural romance where an American touring French moors gets sucked into the 15th century and falls in love with a young woman who is an accomplished falconer. You might learn something about falconry in the Middle Ages and some French, too. There is a ton of it in between the transplanted MC and the girl making goo goo eyes at each other.

It strikes me that there is a preponderance of artistic characters in Weird Fiction, but Chambers is the first author I’ve read who has enough shop talk to convince me of his artists. His stories just feel more grounded. I mean, unless Lovecraft is writing about an author of weird fiction, or a dude who is obsessed with colonial New England.

“The Yellow Sign”

An artist and his model share bizarre dreams involving a hearse drawn by a corpse-man… and the corpse-man is real. Unlike “The Mask”, this story ends in tragedy after Tessie has confessed her love to the MC. She dooms herself out of a lovestruck contrariness, reading The Play because he tells her not to, and he damns himself so that she is not alone in her fate.