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papercraftalex's review against another edition
adventurous
dark
emotional
hopeful
inspiring
mysterious
sad
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
Green Fuse Burning is so creepy, but somehow so inspiring and hopeful. It offers excellent commentary on race, art, death, and nature and how they all intertwine. It so powerfully explores depression and grief and why we stay in toxic relationships. I recommend it to everyone, even people who aren't usually fans of horror!
Content Warnings
Graphic: Animal death, Body horror, Mental illness, Suicidal thoughts, Toxic relationship, Medical content, Grief, Suicide attempt, Death of parent, and Injury/Injury detail
bdingz's review against another edition
dark
reflective
tense
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
4.0
A welcome addition to the “mushroom horror” canon. I love bogs, I love rot, I love unsettling rabbits.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Body horror, Grief, and Death of parent
Moderate: Sexual content and Medical content
Minor: Animal death
mossybookworm's review against another edition
dark
emotional
hopeful
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
lush and beautiful. i really liked the focus on nature's cycles and how grief and nature and life and death are all connected and all inform each other. i liked the framing with the art pieces, but thought the end was a little rushed/thesis-statement-y - but frankly i resonate with the thesis statement so whole heartedly it gets a pass.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Animal death, Body horror, Death, Suicidal thoughts, and Death of parent
Moderate: Emotional abuse and Self harm
alanahcw's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
hopeful
inspiring
mysterious
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
5.0
Incredible. A story of grief and healing that is at once haunting, powerful, and beautiful. I'm not usually a horror reader, and am so thankful I was given the chance to read this one.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Animal death, Death, Suicidal thoughts, Terminal illness, Blood, Excrement, Vomit, Grief, Death of parent, and Colonisation
Moderate: Child abuse
jahnadv's review against another edition
dark
emotional
reflective
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? N/A
- Diverse cast of characters? N/A
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
2.5
Content Warnings
Graphic: Suicidal thoughts, Grief, Suicide attempt, and Death of parent
Moderate: Animal death and Body horror
Minor: Sexual content, Blood, Vomit, Medical content, and Medical trauma
bladebailey's review against another edition
dark
emotional
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.75
While staying in a remote lakeside cabin to create her latest painting collection, Rita faces terrifying phenomena and her own emotional turmoil.
Green Fuse Burning blends together achingly beautiful prose, descriptions of art pieces relating to the story, heavy subject matter like climate change and grief and suicidality, and the vicious, gnashing natural world to form a truly unsettling piece of literature. Rita struggles with the recent traumatic death of her father, her rapidly failing relationship with girlfriend Molly, alienation from her Mi'kmaq community, and mental illness all while buckling under the expectation to produce excellent art. Graphically violent imagery of gored animals and mycelium-infested burning women haunt Rita by day so that she paints them at night. While I sometimes struggle with true horror, Green Fuse Burning employs such gorgeous prose and raw dialogue in a single character study that I find it an exquisite contribution to the genre.
Green Fuse Burning blends together achingly beautiful prose, descriptions of art pieces relating to the story, heavy subject matter like climate change and grief and suicidality, and the vicious, gnashing natural world to form a truly unsettling piece of literature. Rita struggles with the recent traumatic death of her father, her rapidly failing relationship with girlfriend Molly, alienation from her Mi'kmaq community, and mental illness all while buckling under the expectation to produce excellent art. Graphically violent imagery of gored animals and mycelium-infested burning women haunt Rita by day so that she paints them at night. While I sometimes struggle with true horror, Green Fuse Burning employs such gorgeous prose and raw dialogue in a single character study that I find it an exquisite contribution to the genre.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Animal death, Gore, and Grief
sapphicbugs's review against another edition
4.5
Content Warnings
Graphic: Animal death, Suicidal thoughts, Grief, and Death of parent
Moderate: Gore and Sexual content
Minor: Child abuse and Injury/Injury detail
bookishmillennial's review against another edition
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
disclaimer: I don’t really give starred reviews. I hope my reviews provide enough information to let you know if a book is for you or not. Find me here: https://linktr.ee/bookishmillennial
Thank you to my bookstagrammer friends who influenced me to read this: @titalindascorner & @borrowedbyaudrey <3 I adore yall!
This was such a gorgeously written novella, and I genuinely wish it was longer (but it works perfectly as a novella!!!) Here are some examples of the writing:
Thank you to my bookstagrammer friends who influenced me to read this: @titalindascorner & @borrowedbyaudrey <3 I adore yall!
This was such a gorgeously written novella, and I genuinely wish it was longer (but it works perfectly as a novella!!!) Here are some examples of the writing:
The city, for all its sutures of concrete, let her be anonymous; hell, it encouraged facelessness, participation in community optional.
She’d brought the outside world’s deep greens into her body, accepted the infection of her mind. Now the canvas would surrender to her wounded hands.
Every time she mourned her father she also mourned the idea of a life that had him in it. And guilt compounded her remorse and confusion, the sense that she was grieving incorrectly in her mourning that seemed both selfish and impersonal. Tomorrow — and all the days after it — was something that had only ever lived in her imagination.
The verdant and the vermillion burst forth in tapestries of life and death, blood and blooming, the abstract strokes constituting vine and flower, all wrapping the monstrous woman from previous paintings in an exciting culmination: instead of being devoured by flames, she is at one with life and her surroundings — a wishful sentiment accentuated by the artist’s mysterious disappearance shortly after its creation.
The urge to confess to them was absurd, but her words erupted like new growth rooted in testimony. If this was the last thing she would ever do on this earth, why shouldn’t she give them, these hallucinations or ephemeral monsters, her feelings about what it had meant for her to live? Maybe this was what they wanted from her. “Life was like a language I couldn’t speak.” </spoiler
Like, absolutely stunning writing. I was in awe as I read this, and can't wait to read more from Tiffany Morris.
This novella is about Rita, who in the midst of her grief, is accepted to a week-long artists residency after her girlfriend Molly submitted an application on her behalf. Though Rita is rightfully pissed off at the paranoid idea that Molly is trying to simply get rid of her and have some space from her, she goes to the cabin, which coincidentally is where her estranged late father grew up. Rita begins seeing and hearing things at the cabin, especially near the swamp, and must confront her deepest fears about mortality, her relationships, and her future.
Though I have not lost a parent, I felt completely immersed in Rita's grief, anger, and fear. TM's writing imbued Rita with such fervor, anxiety, and pain that felt almost tangible! Like you could reach into the book, touch it, and pull it out. It was atmospheric, eerie, and forced you to ruminate on these things alongside Rita. I read this in one sitting, and I highly recommend it!
Author info: Tiffany Morris is a Mi’kmaw/settler writer of speculative fiction and poetry from Kjipuktuk (Halifax), Nova Scotia.
(more) quotations that stood out to me:
The Mi’kmaw language always sounded weird coming from her mother, even though her mother was half Mi’kmaw. She had been estranged from that side of her family for years and wouldn’t tell Rita why, wouldn’t share any knowledge with her other than a few words or phrases. She was much more into telling Rita how she should behave and what convoluted beauty rituals could improve her appearance.
I am not indigenous, I am Filipino & Chinese, but I could so deeply relate to this quotation, as I am not fluent in any of my parents' native languages, yet the sharing of cultural knowledge that was inherently sexist and misogynistic hits so close to home.
“To accept death is to accept your own nothingness — not the act of dying in itself, but the fact that death resides in you, the fact that you will, eventually, be dead. To be in this state of perpetual otherwise. Accepting death is the understanding that consciousness is the shell of experience, not its inner sanctum — and death becomes a pilgrimage outside the golden cage of our material existence. I don’t mean this as an encouragement of death, rather a call to understand that you, too, are nature, and nature loves above all else transmutation, and impermanence, and creation. We do not protect life by denying death’s existence, yet our capitalist and colonialist structures are based on this denial. We do not protect anything through denial.”
Grief formed her new reality, her new understanding of time, an invading force that occupied land and bodies in equal measure. Her memories were colonized by trauma.
It had taken me over a year to realize that I suffered from PTSD and wasn’t bad at grief — mass culture is just that deeply avoidant about both death and trauma... Everywhere you turn in a capitalist society there are sweet and numbing routes to escapism, clichés about love, products determined to sanitize and smother in nostalgia every disorienting and uncomfortable part of the human experience. (author's note/acknowledgements)
Content Warnings
Graphic: Animal death, Suicidal thoughts, and Grief
Moderate: Body horror, Blood, and Death of parent
tomatocultivator's review against another edition
dark
emotional
reflective
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.5
Content Warnings
Graphic: Sexual content and Suicidal thoughts
Moderate: Animal death
destiniev's review against another edition
dark
emotional
mysterious
reflective
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
Rep: Indigenous Author, Indigenous MC, Lesbian MC
Format: Ebook
Quote: “Why did people need to be in nature to process the things that happened to them? Maybe it was because what was thought as wild did not require a veil- it saw you as you truly were: an animal skulking around animals”
This is my kind of horror! This books explores the themes of grief, grief of losing someone, grief of community, grief of loss of self/ identities/culture/ language, grief of the loss of land both through colonialism and the climate crisis. The writing was beautiful and the atmosphere was unsettling. I love a good horror involving nature and Morris delivered with her swampy isolating setting. This very much felt like a fever dream and there were points where I was both unsettled and emotional as the main character explores the loss of her father and with that loss the understanding of all the forms of grief she is going through. I’m so glad this was my first read of the year and I hope to read more from Morris’s in the future.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Animal death
Moderate: Suicidal thoughts