001.
In the spirit of Halloween season, I'd like to encourage every literarily-inclined person reading this post to take a look at my favorite classic horror novels, The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, by Shirley Jackson (not to be confused with the estimable Shelley Jackson, although they are both excellent writers of freaky-ass shit). You're probably familiar with Shirley Jackson already, whether you know it or not; she was the author of "The Lottery," that dystopian short story about a pastoral town that randomly selects one of its citizens to be ritually stoned to death at its annual festival. Sound familiar? It's widely anthologized, and most people I know had it as required reading at some point in middle school, high school, or college. It doesn't hold a candle to her novels, in my opinion; in longer works, Jackson's ability to immerse herself and her readers in the psychology of nuanced, believable, and very troubled characters gets to shine forth. The horror in these books lies as much in their protagonists' struggles with their own fears, pasts, skewed perceptions, and unreliable minds as it does in their ambiguously supernatural elements. To lesser (The Haunting of Hill House) or greater (We Have Always Lived in the Castle) degrees, they explore the common trope of the unreliable possessed or insane narrator who doesn't realize that she is a monster, but they do so with an unusual amount of authorial empathy and respect for those characters, making them not just sympathetic or pitiable but likable, even charismatic. Shirley Jackson was also a legit agoraphobe (towards the end of her forty-eight year life, she was sometimes unable to leave her house for months on end), and it's pretty clear that her perspective was informed by her agoraphobia-- The Haunting of Hill House is the only haunted house novel I have ever read that makes the haunted house in question seem less daunting and depressing than most of the world beyond it (if not necessarily less scary). There's an element of comfort present whenever characters are cut off from society in a small, private space, no matter how strange, austere, or dangerous that space may be. While I still leave my house at least once every few days, that's a sentiment I can really relate to.
Moving along to other subjects, this clothing line designed specifically for people with Down's Syndrome is a neat idea. I'm dubious about Craig Thompson's new graphic novel, Habibi, though I do want to read it-- I'm worried that it might turn out to be cringe-inducing Orientalist cultural appropriation, but I loved Blankets and supposedly Thompson did a lot of research while working on Habibi ...though that in no way eliminates the possibility of Orientalist cultural appropriation. I'm not as worried about the Controversial Rape Scene, strangely enough; maybe because Blankets dealt with (unfortunately autobiographical) sexual abuse in a very sensitive, non-lurid/exploitative manner. Alicia alerted me to the existence of Daughters of Smoke and Bone, which sounds like something I will like; I'm a little frustrated that YA urban fantasy novelists appear to be contractually obligated to put a tense, star-crossed romance at the center of every. single. book (and always a het romance, at that), since I would prefer to just read about awesome magical creatures and adventure and fighting and mystery and misfit teens coming into their full powers as supernatural badasses and platonic friend-bonding and all those fun things. I know Laini Taylor can write romance well, at least, so that aspect probably won't feel shoehorned in even if it isn't the most interesting thing to me personally. I'm rediscovering the joys of long walks and sleeping for normal amounts of time at semi-normal times of day. This morning I spent ten minutes panicking that I'd lost my contact lenses before I realized that I had already put them in. I have terrible, terrible, I mean really fucking terrible eyesight, so that is not a reasonable thing for me to get confused about. I don't even know what I was thinking. Must've still been groggy.
I'm rediscovering that one Weakerthans song that always makes me almost cry. It's a song about a cat. There are sadder songs, I mean, I don't know why this one hits me harder emotionally than, say, this one (although those lyrics are. ouch. wow). Oh! And then there's this one. Persona songs about real people who died tragically are the saddest.