teniamonet's reviews
77 reviews

Reader, I Murdered Him by Betsy Cornwell

4.0

Don't Want You Like a Best Friend by Emma R. Alban

3.25

Bride by Ali Hazelwood

5.0

A Dowry of Blood by S.T. Gibson

5.0

Lucy Undying by Kiersten White

4.75

But as my mother taught me, if someone frightens you, make them love you. Then you will be in control. 

Going back into the past to Lucy Westernra’s life before becoming a vampire and after was the best bit of this book in my opinion. I especially loved the client transcripts where she is speaking to her therapist Vanessa about what she’s been doing with her eternal life. Lucy, the Queen, the Doctor and the Lover were the most interesting characters. I didn’t care too much for Iris and her chapters that weren’t helping us find out more about Lucy and what the connection between the two were.

Mina being connected to the Goldaming empire was a twist I wasn’t expecting, I really didn’t see her being a vampire and still being alive in the cards.

Even not knowing who I was, barely remembering what I had been before becoming this creature filled with panic and need, I remembered Dracula.

He had wanted me. He had claimed me as his own. And yet I was alone. Not for long, though. Dracula’s brides were already on my trail. And not just them. There were so many like me out there, waiting. So many I’d meet and love and betray and hunt and kill.

Is it murder when a wolf sinks its teeth into a rabbit? When a hawk snatches a mouse? Where is the line between murder and survival?

There’s a theory I have of vampirism, though, having met so many of our kind. What we held in our hearts the moment we died doesn’t change. It never leaves us. We’re not just preserved in body, we’re crystallized in soul and mind. Frozen.

I had never noticed before, but the Lover was well and truly insane. With vampires, it’s a fine line between reason and madness. We all tiptoe along it. She just tiptoed firmly on the wrong side all the time, rather than some of the time, like I do.

But what devastate me was that I really did understand her. The Lover desired above all else to be coveted and claimed.

I had let Raven touch me and control me. I had let the Queen hold me captive. I had let the Doctor use me as one of her tools. And I had let the Lover spin me into her glittering web of madness and hedonism.

What would I give, to be seen? To be carefully studied and perfectly understood? Would I let someone carve me up, if it meant feeling like i was loved? I knew the answer was yes, because it had always been yes. I had let others bleed me dry for the sake of feeling wanted, even before Dracula came into my life. I wasn’t any different from the Lover. Staring into a face I adored and finding only pathetic need and madness, my questions shifted. I no longer cared why Dracula had killed and changed me.

I wondered why I had let if happen.

Lucy, you’re not a monster…You were a nineteen-year-old girl who was stalked, manipulated, and murdered. You’ve told me almost nothing about your life before that, but I can connect the dots that you were never truly, selflessly loved. You’ve been looking outward for that love ever since, treasuring your idea of this Mina, desperate for validation from the monster who changed you, trying to find communion with other lost, desperate souls.

Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield

4.25

How do I begin to describe my thoughts on this and how it made me feel?

I remember the first time she went away, the first time I traveled to see her off. I remember the last time - the fact that she was supposed to be gone for three weeks and disappeared for six months, the fact that none of us knew what had happened, the way the Centre called several times to give out contradictory information before ceasing to call at all. 

More than once, Leah had been held up without explanation, had wound up home belated and weary and smelling of salt. Sometimes I think you prefer it down there, I had said to her, holding her face in my hands and wondering whether I meant it to sound like a joke or reproach, you go so deep you forget you’re supposed to come back.

It’s not grief, one woman posted, it’s more like a haunting. Her sister had disappeared two decades previously, run away or otherwise removed via the back door of their childhood home when she was fifteen years old. There was no proof that anything bad happened, the woman typed, no proof of anything at all. They told us hope wasn’t lost so often that it became impossible to live with it. It’s too hard, trying to exist between these poles of hope and death. You just find yourself imagining all these possibilities, all these possible sisters wandering around half-unseen like people with sheets over their head, except that somewhere among them, you know that one of them’s real - one of them’s dead, one of them’s the ghost.

I used to hope, I typed once, that I’d die before my partner, even though I knew that was selfish. I used to think that I hoped I’d die before she died and before the planet died and really just generally before things got any worse.

I didn’t send this message, specifically because it seemed to imply that my views had changed, when they hadn’t.

She is still scratching at the inside of her arm and this time she shows me, pulls the sleeve of her robe back father than i have seen in forever, reveals the changing texture of skin, the rubbed-raw glint of something unfamiliar. 

“What’s that?” I ask, and she shakes her head, pulls up her other sleeve, then parts the floor-length folds of the dressing gown to show me her legs, pulls the cord at the waist, and shows me everything. It is not at all what I expected, all those times when I looked at the scuffed-off particles of matter in the bathtub and imagined her flayed and fraying beneath her clothes. It is something else, and I don’t know what to call it or what to say. I look at her and think, briefly, of the strange oyster sheen of her underarms and elbow creases in the first long weeks of her return, of the way she had shown me and said, with a bland sort of certainty, that she’d been told it would go away. I think, too, about the way she had bled, from the face and the gumline, so many mornings of bleeding that have since petered out, as though there might be no more blood to lose. 

Now, from the midcalf to upper thigh, along her sides and then across her breasts and up along her arms to mid forearm, she is at first surf-white, uncertain, and then changing as I look at her, white to blue to green - her skin a drifting textured, somehow unmoored, as though it only floats upon the surface of her flesh.

Our understanding of the universe, so she said, comes from the ocean: It has taught us that life exists everywhere, even in the greatest depths; that most of life is in the oceans; and that oceans govern climate. Perhaps because we’re so terrestrialy biased, air-breathing creatures that we are, it has taken us until now to realize that everything we care about is anchored in the ocean. I had my back to the window as I thought this and found myself suddenly unable to bear the oppressive blanket of space beyond the glass. Where are you all, I wanted to scream, overcome with a sudden vivid grief at the thought of this nothing - no strange deep-ocean creatures, no bioluminescence, no life. Come on, I found myself thinking, give.

I think,” Juan says, after a pause, “that the thing about losing someone isn’t the loss but the absence of afterward. D’you know what I mean? The endlessness of that.” She looks sideways at me and sniffs. “My friends were sad, people who knew my sister were sad, but everyone moves on after a month. It’s all they can manage. It doesn’t mean they weren’t sad, just that things keep going or something, I don’t know.” She rolls her shoulder, shakes her head. “It’s hard when you look up and realize that everyone’s moved off and left you in that place by yourself. Like they’ve all gone on and you’re there still, holding on to this person you’re supposed to let go of. Let go of them in the water is something I read once. Seems a bit of a joke in the circumstances, but still. Something about how living means relinquishing the dead and letting them drop down or fall or sink. Letting go of them in the water, you know.”

But I can see it happening already, look down at her in my arms as the towels fall away, weighed down by the water that has saturated each in turn and left them too heavy to cling. Passingly, I think that this might always have been inevitable, that perhaps she had always known it but had wanted to hold on for me, for as long as she could. I can see it now, the way her chest begins to frill, the upward swell and tremor of the skin that registers its natural habitat, growing first translucent, then entirely clear. I can feel, as well, the way the body I am holding is becoming less a body, the way she slides between my fingers - first my Leah, then the water, first my Leah’s arms, her chest, her rib cage, then the water they are struggling toward. I think of nothing, then I think about the sea lung, the day on the beach with Leah where the ice sat on the water and the air around us seemed about to take some other form. This alchemist sea, changing something into something else. I think of this and I look at her face, the remains of her face, my Leah. She is looking at me - this now, the last of her - and she is still looking at me when i move my arms to release her, when she melts between my hands and into water, twisting down into the rolling tide.

What persists after this is only air and water and me between them, not quite either and with one foot straining for the sand.

Leah the wife that goes missing. Miri the wife left behind

Woman, Eating by Claire Kohda

3.75

All life, to sustain itself, must devour life. - Lafcadio Hearn, “Ululation,” In Ghostly Japan

A 23 year old anxious, shy, clumsy and truly unremarkable young vampire with mommy issues. 

Lyd a young vampire, on her own in the world separate from her mother for the first time. This definitely wasn’t the type of vampire story that I was expecting. Lyd is so mundane and in this world that Claire Kohda has created it seems like being a vampire gives you no real advantage or special abilities. 

I don’t know where this sudden decision to flirt has come from. I suppose, in this room, in the very dim light, I feel quite powerful. Men, I think, feel insecure in silence and much more confident when there’s the sound of traffic and other people all around. And this room is completely silent. 

I lie down on the floor. It’s just plain concrete with nothing on top. No carpet or rug or anything. The cold feels good on my back. The lights are still low. I’m more comfortable in the dark. It’s not even that the lights in here would burn me; it’s that sometimes too much light is overwhelming, especially after a day filled with things I’m not used to doing much of - packing, moving, traveling. It’s too much input, almost painful for the brain, not necessarily the skin. However, sunlight does burn. Not in the way it does in films and TV programs; I don’t let off smoke or singe, or burst into flames. Rather, my skin burns as if it has no pigment at all, as if I’m without any melanin, as if I’m completely and purely white. 

“Lydia,” she said, using my full name, which she only did when she was angry. “Do you think God would feed a body like yours?”

I had tentatively shaken my head, but I didn’t really understand. My mum continued: “Something else lets us eat, not God. God wouldn’t want to help a demon survive, and that’s what we are, Lyds. We are unnatural, disgusting, and ugly. Look at us; we are just sin.”

The missing suitcase feels like it means more now than it did earlier. Under this man’s gaze, I realize that I don’t really know who I am. My life in a sense begins tomorrow, when I start my internship at the gallery. Today, I’m still an embryo. My skin is thin and waterlogged; my eyes haven’t yet opened. The man’s gaze is like a spotlight. There’s nothing I have that proves I have existed and that i have an identity beyond my appearance. I shake my head and my big, black hair covers part of my face. I tuck my hands up into my sleeves like they are the heads of turtles sheltering in their shells.

I don’t know where the human and demon in me connect, whether there are roots that sprout from the demon and reach for and attach onto the human, or vice versa. Both live because the other exists. The demon survives off the blood my human body digests. And the demon, in turn, keeps my human heart very slowly pumping- at least, this is what my mum told me when I was young. When I imagine this, I see a little shadowy creature with feeble arms manually pumping the organ with bellows. Owing to the work the demon does to keep blood circulating, the human in me goes on living, and I retain some of the traits my human father passed down to me. 

We only ever got pig blood. This wasn’t because it was the only type of animal blood the butcher had. “Pigs are dirty,” my mum said once. “It’s what your body deserves.” But it turns out that pigs aren’t naturally dirty. Rather, humans keep pigs in dirty conditions, feeding them rotten vegetables, letting the mud in their too-small pens mix with their feces; the filth of the pig is just symptomatic of the sins of the human. Wild pigs eat plants. They’ve even been shown to clean fruit in creeks before eating it, and they never eat or roll around in their own feces. I told my mum this, but she was adamant that the pig was the filthiest animal and was what we deserved. It was what I grew up eating, never touching anything else — just thinking, dreaming, imagining the taste of other blood. 

I can’t really describe how it feels to have another person’s blood in your veins, feeding to your heart, even just a little bit: a human’s blood, not a pig’s, two legs, upright and elegant, hints of something - of foods and memories and experiences, of birth, of being ill and getting better, of love and grief and fear - in it’s flavor. I feel huge; I feel like, if I were to stand up and run toward my studio wall, I’d just break through it. Like I could trample on cars and people outside, whole families under one foot, roaring until ship windows shatter.

I felt no regret about sucking Ben’s blood out of the towel. I didn’t feel bad about myself, and I didn’t feel disgusting. I didn’t feel dangerous either, or more wrong than right, more evil than good. I think I realized quite a long time ago that the demon isn’t necessarily linked to God; it’s not the antithesis of human, or of the soul. It is just a different animal, which has a different diet from humans. 

When I was maybe nine or ten, my mum told me that turning me was the biggest sacrifice she had ever made, “because I didn’t know whether you’d grow up still or if you’d just be stuck as a baby forever, stuck as my responsibility forever.” But now I wonder whether she somehow knew all along that I would continue growing and whether she had just said that to make me feel indebted to her. And if that was the case, it worked. It excused her behavior. Her madness and her fluctuating moods, her self-hatred, while I was growing up. Everything in me that makes me anxious moving forwards in life, that makes me feel as though I’m doing things wrong, that I’m not on the right path, somehow, that I’m bad in some way, comes from her, and yet I’ve always forgiven her.

Now I wonder if I’ve been useful to her only as something she can pour everything she despises about herself into, something that she could raise to hate itself so that she’d have company in her feelings. “We are both things that have been raised not from birth but from death,” she once said. “From an ending rather than a beginning, and we will exist together until we die again and the world dies with us.”

We’re apart now. Properly apart. And I feel I can finally start my life. But the burden of her loneliness feels like it’ll never leave me.

I don’t know how other people do it. How do I go from where I am here, being moved out of photographs, and replaced with actresses like I don’t exist, to where I want to be? In just a couple of months, I’ll run out of money to rent my studio. How is it that vampires in all the books and films and TV programs always seem to be so successful and wealthy, and able to rent or even buy studios, flats, houses, sometimes whole estates? How is it that they all manage to feed themselves and stay so strong too - how can they all, including the good ones with sounds, get hold of blood so easily, while I’ve struggled to even get some fresh pig blood - while I struggled, now, to even replace what I got from a meager duck?

“Mum, I can’t take you with me.”
“Why not?”
“Because you make me feel like I’m not worth of life,” I hear myself say. “You just act like you’re dead, like you died when you were turned. How can I live my life with the shadow of that over me?”
“That is when I died. You know we are dead. Both of us. We are dead,” my mum says, though her cheeks are rosy. “The Sun has come for us, Lydia.” She looks at her reflection in the mirror. “Let me go with you.”

I think I have known for a while that neither side of me can be separated from the other, and that this is true of my mum too; that I can’t punish the demon by making it eat only pig blood without punishing the human; I can’t listen to just one side, and block out the other; I can’t force one side to be dormant while I live a life pretending to only be the other side; I can’t starve either side out of myself. Really, I don’t even have “sides” at all. I’m two things that have become one thing that is neither demon nor human. 

I’m not really sure what I am anymore, though - whether I’m a monster or whether I’m just a woman, or both. 

Brutes by Dizz Tate

4.0

We refused to be cordial. We would not be born out of sweetness, we were born out of rage, we felt it in our bones.

We tried so hard. We quietly copied. It was our first time being quiet doing anything and we were ashamed, but we could not help it. We wanted to be like them, to become even louder and brighter, but we could feel their futures slipping through our fingers, because we were not stupid. We could tell who was going to peak early and we were not. Even when we were happy, even when we reassured each other we were really living, there was a feeling lying in us that we were not. We squashed our faces against the glass of our own lives. Is this it? we asked. Are we having fun like they have fun? Are we in love like they are in love? We filled up our days following them, watching them, waiting to be invited in. We ran from the truth that the answer was in the question. We were not, and never would be, satisfied. 

If I remind my mother of something she has said to me in the past, her answer is always the same: “I never said that.” I used to be amazed at her self-deception, but now I see I am exactly the same. I used to think people only lied to make their lives mean something. Now I think people lie to make their lives meaningless, because it makes them so much easier to live. (Hazel)

I immediately want to send photos of these to Luke, and I think how ridiculous that is, that I’ve spent five years of my life valuing everything I see in terms of how much enjoyment he will get out of it, constantly sending him dumb reminders to love me. I close my eyes. 

I had always thought love was supposed to make you selfless, but it made me ridiculously vain.

When we started dating, everything I did that had seemed normal, even dirty, became charmed overnight. My sock drawer, my chipped nail polish, my bad singing voice, eating dinner in bed. All these facts about myself that had rattled around inside me unnoticed were suddenly his to witness. To be loved was just to be watched, or in my case, to imagine you are loved is to imagine you are watched all the time. I preened. I strutted. I imagined he was obsessed with me and so I was obsessed with myself. (Hazel)

For a long time, I didn’t understand why, but now I think that to humiliate a woman is the only way some men know how to love one. (Britney)

She seemed crazy. “My mother is dead!” she kept hissing. It seemed false and complicated to us, this multiplication of mothers. Our mothers could not also be daughters, just as we would never be mothers. (Britney)

I see my daughter’s face tighten. She’s listening so hard. She needs to learn not to want to please me so much, I think. She needs to learn that the things I tell her are not always good. She needs to know that some of us took other girls back. Some of us led girls by their hands and closed the door behind them. (Isabel)

Paradise Rot by Jenny Hval

dark medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character

1.0

This follows the story of Johanna a Norwegian student studying biology in a coastal town called Ayebourne who becomes the roommate of an odd woman named Carral Johnston who lives in a renovated/decaying former brewery.

This was sexually uncomfortable and grotesque. It wasn’t grotesque in the way typical horror can lean into body gore, but grotesque by how frequently it discussed pee.

At times I found myself wondering if Carral was a real person or just someone apart of Jo’s imagination. Hval is very description and plays into the senses what can you see, hear, smell, etc. but i often found it plot wise.

I’m typically okay with character driven books over plot driven but with this all Hval did was write a bunch of words with a disturbing amount of descriptive pee scenes that had an undertone of something sexual. It was so over the top and took me out of what was supposed to be going on.

I got the whole point of the mycology and how the girls were in a sense morphing into one but this book was absolutely deranged and i had no idea where the story was really going as it was somewhat hard to keep track of the passage of time and the narrator and the way Jo recounts things just didn’t pull me in. I wish i could get my three hours back.

Act Your Age, Eve Brown by Talia Hibbert

5.0