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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
lillyklymiuk's review against another edition
dark
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Body horror
Moderate: Death and Grief
foldingthepage_kayleigh's review against another edition
dark
emotional
sad
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
The novella expertly blends themes of horror and grief together. You can just feel the tendrils of alienation wrap around you and pull you down into Rita’s psyche. But by the end, you come out the other side in reconciliation with life and death, and how despite your dissociation, your depression, Creator loves you and you are always at home on the land.
Overall, I liked this novella and found Rita relatable. The combination of eco-anxiety and Indigenous identity made for an engrossing read. Although the writing was a bit too literary and flowery for me, thus why not a full 5 star read for me.
Overall, I liked this novella and found Rita relatable. The combination of eco-anxiety and Indigenous identity made for an engrossing read. Although the writing was a bit too literary and flowery for me, thus why not a full 5 star read for me.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Body horror, Gore, Racism, Suicidal thoughts, Toxic relationship, Blood, Vomit, Grief, Suicide attempt, Death of parent, Colonisation, and Injury/Injury detail
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
witchvial's review against another edition
challenging
dark
mysterious
reflective
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.75
Content Warnings
Graphic: Body horror, Suicidal thoughts, Grief, and Suicide attempt
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
savvylit's review against another edition
dark
emotional
mysterious
reflective
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.5
Green Fuse Burning begins with an introduction to Rita via her artwork. Framed as a gallery show, readers are provided the results of Rita's hauntings before ever being given the context behind them. The hauntings themselves are fevered, atmospheric, and rooted in Rita's real world grief.
Green Fuse Burning is a short and creepy novella that could easily be digested in one sitting. Fellow fans of atmospheric horror will absolutely devour this one!
Green Fuse Burning is a short and creepy novella that could easily be digested in one sitting. Fellow fans of atmospheric horror will absolutely devour this one!
Content Warnings
Graphic: Body horror, Blood, Grief, and Death of parent
dolores_lola's review against another edition
dark
emotional
inspiring
reflective
sad
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
5.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Body horror, Cancer, Death, Panic attacks/disorders, Self harm, Suicidal thoughts, Suicide, and Death of parent
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