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Showing posts from May, 2025

Alone with You in the Ether by Olivie Blake

 ...art is tragedy.  Art is loss. It's the fleeting breath of a foregone moment, the intimacy of things undone, the summer season that passes.  It's the peeled lemon and bony fish in the corner of a Dutch still life, rotten and dead and gone. It's him lying next to you, legs tangled with yours, only to know he'll be specter in your thoughts by next month, next week, ten minutes from now.  This is what makes it art, Charlotte, and you've always understood that.  You've always understood, above everything, that what makes beauty is pain. Every time you love, pieces of you break off and get replaced by something you steal from someone else.  It seems like it's the right shape but it's slightly different every time, so that eventually, very very quietly and over days and days and days, you are tranasformed into something unrecognizable, and it happens so slowly you don't even notice, like shedding scales and making new ones. What an appropriate passage t...

The Hollow Places by T. Kingfisher

 ***WARNING*  FREE FLOWING TRAIN OF THOUGHT RUNNING OFF THE RAILS BELOW*** Why was I thinking that a book which on the cover bares the comment from PUBLISHERS WEEKLY (why in all caps?? Why no possessive 's??) "Chilling... This one is a keeper for horror fans." would be the fun-filled, humorous romp of Danny Dragonbreath or Harriet Hamsterbone?  Noooo.  While I was still harboring such expectations on page one when I read that uncle Earl owned "The Glory to God Museum of Natural Wonders, Curiosities, and Taxidermy" - calling to mind both "Eyegore's Curiosities and Monster Museum (note - with an apostrophy) in Cawker City, Kansas (best known as home of the "Largest Ball of Twine") and the wedding/reception of my friends and neighbor's Dave and Mary (in what now must no longer exist- because I've searched for it and for it's name recorded for posterity -  but was a little white wedding chapel and taxidermist in Fayetteville NC). ...