The Seductive Ache of Obsession - Cosmically Toxic Situationships, Beloved Spirits, Heroic Healing, Promiscuous Pirates, & Automated Gods - Reviews
"An escape is just a nod and a casual wave / Obsessed about it, heavy for the next few days"
Welcome back to our “regularly” scheduled program. I’m particularly excited for this post because I’ll be discussing some of my favorite books I’ve read so far this year, including some 2024 titles I missed out on last year.
Without further much ado about nothing, let’s dig in.
The Drowning Machine and Other Obsessions by Emma E. Murray, Undertaker Books
When I went to finally sink my fangs into Emma E. Murray’s upcoming collection of fiendish tales, I had one simple question: “On a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being the intensity of Crushing Snails, how devastating are these stories?” I had just come off of reading Sam Rebelein’s collection, still reeling from the one story, and I recall Emma placing this release at like a 6?
I maybe would have placed it at a 7 or 8.
The Drowning Machine and Other Obsessions tells you exactly what it’s about, exploring differing levels of obsession, as well as the myriad subjects we often find ourselves obsessing about. Separated into three sections, each one comprising stories with similar themes including Murray’s stellar novelette, Exquisite Hunger, which if you haven’t seen the chapbook version with Caitlin Marceau’s positively stunning illustrations…I highly suggest it.
The first section explores obsessions within motherhood, whether with how our child is developing, the world we’re bringing them into, and various horrific scenarios. Despite the devastation nature of nearly every story collected here, there is a sense of deep and unrelenting love, both wildly toxic and passionate selfless. As J.A.W. McCarthy brilliantly states in her introduction, Murray is not “afraid of love.” Love, in many ways is almost the most terrifying considering how we often run ourselves ragged and bloody to defend or attain it. McCarthy continues, stating:
“Monsters, serial killers, kidnappers, grotesque omens from the heavens—they hold no dominion over us if we remain afraid of love. You wouldn’t fear the noose if you didn’t have anyone or anything to live for. You wouldn’t find power in pain if you didn’t love yourself enough to fight for your autonomy.”
This sentiment travels throughout the collection, as it becomes evident that love sits at the root of the fear in each story. This is best personified—to a beautiful degree—in the story “As I Hold You,” a story where a mother makes a powerful decision to save her ailing daughter. This is one of my favorites because it balances its horror and potentially squirm-inducing imagery with a positively selfless act, as will as unwavering love from the mother herself.
Make no mistake, even some of the most terrifying or devastating stories in this collection pack powerful emotional punches as well. You’re going to want at least two full boxes of tissues by your side the whole time.
Short stories from Murray are a particular kind of treat. I’ve praised her character development before when discussing last years Crushing Snails, and it’s in the story length and limitations where this superpower shines at its most radiant. The second section focuses on children: siblings, friends, etc. If there’s two things this collection excels in—there’s more than two—it’s the depictions of mothers and children facing these particular horrors and struggles. Section two’s opener, “Take Control,” is every sibling and parents worst nightmare, detailing an older sister’s tragic decision as a means of saving her sister from a kidnapper.
My two personal favorites, “The Profound Pain of Letting Go” and “Through the Holler, Into the Dark,” present the pain of grief in visceral and unflinching detail. The former reminded me so much of a Michael Whitehouse story I read back in the Creepypasta days called “Valentine’s Day,” where a young man does his best to honor a lost classmate, yet this story somehow goes even harder in the scenes prompting ever-flowing tears department.
The latter tells the story of a sister bringing offerings to a god focused on finding lost things. Part of her service is selfish, she hopes the deity will locate what happened to her sister who went missing long ago. She feels fulfillment in helping lost or murdered women find closure, yet she can’t find the closure herself. Murray displays the kaleidoscope of grief with clarity, not burying the lede entirely in metaphor, so as to highlight the sheer humanity of the sister’s struggle as she contends with something much older and stronger than herself. As the god intones as the end of the story, “To be lost is not to be forgotten.”
The third and final section is where things kick into high gear. Here we witness objects as points of obsession, whether its a…demonic lathe? Or even a drowning machine or the moon, these characters experience the peaceful pull of extermination and determination in what surrounds and confounds us. The book’s closer, “Follow the Moon,” is a massive standout, and likely the story to hit me the hardest. Dealing with Alzheimer’s disease, it follows a family experiencing a profound lunar event, all while dealing with the mother’s encroaching memory loss.
I can never begin to imagine what my grandmother went through as she experienced her descent, though I paid witness to it several times before she passed. Murray does an excellent job at portraying the slipping feeling emblematic of Alzheimer’s. These sorts of stories are important to me, and alongside Brian McAuley’s superb Curse of the Reaper, this stands as another of my all-time favorite depictions in horror, let alone fiction in general.
The Drowning Machine and Other Obsessions is a truly unique collection, existing along many of the great short story writers of today. If you’re looking for some spooky stories to devastate you in cathartic ways, this is absolutely one to add to your TBR. Also, that cover design, come on.
My deepest thanks to Emma for the e-ARC and personalized physical copy, you know I’ll always go hard for your work. The Drowning Machine and Other Obsessions will be released 2/21/25 from Undertake Books.
I Can Fix Her by Rae Wilde, CLASH Books
2025 is not ready for this novella, y’all. A propulsive, soul-rending distillation of attempting to save a toxic queer relationship, Rae Wilde has found a way to make explosive couples cosmic horror and it is delightful.
We meet our embattled protagonist(?) Johnny as she witnesses her ex, Alice, leaving a cafe, trying to shake the strange feeling that she’s been here before. Thus begins a temporal nightmare of heartbreak and self-actualization as Johnny crosses time and space to attempt to fix the relationship she failed. Obviously this comes with immensely mixed results.
The comparison often paid to this book is a horror version of This is How You Lose the Time War and it’s absolutely apt, simply in the opposite sense of romance. It also reminds me of the queer sci fi graphic novel Bolero by Wyatt Kennedy. The main protagonist(?) is attempting to heal her relationship with her “one” so to speak, and meets an otherwordly deity offering her the chance to try again in different timelines, drastically altering things each time she does so.
The beauty of exploring tumultuous relationships through these lenses lies in the human propensity to fight for what we love as hard as we can, even if the things or people we’re fighting for aren’t serving us in the best ways and vice versa. It’s never a cut and dry situation, with plenty of gradations for each connection, which is why fiction has used time travel as a means of exploring those complexities. About Time, anyone? It’s additionally the perfect vehicle to discuss the malleability of memory, how we look back on certain relationships with rose colored glasses.
I Can Fix Her takes these tropes to their most extreme—and, honestly, logical—end, practically tearing reality itself apart to hold onto some semblance of that addictive feeling of relational bliss. We receive a majority of the narration through a version of Johnny who has experienced many of the loops up until this point. It’s a voice acting as the “logical” side of our minds when we’re caught up in grief or euphoria, trying to reason with the heart so as to avoid further destruction. It’s one of the more tragic aspects of the story, as I know I’ve found myself in similar situations in the past. Just minus the ability to time travel.
Rae Wilde continues to champion her immense skill at exploring even the darker corners of queer relationships. It’s a horror similarly as unflinching as Emma E. Murray’s, refusing to sugarcoat any aspects and revealing the bloodied, raw core of our experiences as we search for that explosive, firework-like kind of love. Though it’s not a hundred-some page tome, the level of depth she fits in is staggering, leaving any reader perplexed long after they’ve finished its final page.
Endless love and thanks to Rae and the CLASH team for providing me with an early copy. I Can Fix Her will scream onto shelves 6/3/25 from CLASH Books.
My Darling Dreadful Thing by Johanna van Veen, Poisoned Pen Press
Fellow bookstagrammer Amanda Bernat (@ohtinybibliophile) have vastly similar tastes when it comes to books. My Darling Dreadful Thing was a title I wanted to get to last year and tragically didn’t, so when I saw Amanda share it as one of her favorite books of 2024, well, that sealed the deal. I had to read it.
This novel, without hyperbole, has joined the growing list of incredible and inventive gothics that have joined my all time favorites. It’s tone, queerness, structure—all of it is a blissful, gorgeous tapestry of storytelling just ambiguous enough to keep readers guessing, but its strong commentary persists until the end.
My Darling Dreadful Thing tells the story of Roos, a young girl whose ability to see apparitions has allowed her guardian to take advantage of her for years. Roos’s kindship with the spirit she sees, Ruth, whose body was hidden in a nearby bog. Their kinship is a complex but loving one, and this connection is put to the test when a woman attending one of their staged seances takes a special interest in Roos and Ruth.
Agnes Knoop witnesses Roos’s gift, also noting the girl needs far better care than she’s currently receiving, thus, Agnes offers the guardian a fair sum to adopt Roos, offering the girl a chance at a real life. Something Roos could have never expected though is a blossoming love between her and her new caretaker.
While it may be obvious Agnes harbors similar feelings for Roos, she’s still wrapped up in the loss of her deceased husband, Thomas, as well as contending with Thomas’s resentful, ailing sister. As Roos’s love grows even fiercer for Agnes, she seeks desperately to bring light to her caretaker’s life, thus deciding to bury Thomas’s body in a bog nearby to bring his spirit back to Agnes.
However, what Roos doesn’t realize is Thomas was a certifiable piece of work. Angry, mentally and physically abusive, and so much more. What follows is a heartbreaking fight for love, endurance, and sanity. In-between chapters of Roos’s telling of the story, we receive transcripts of sessions between a mental health doctor and Roos, following the ending events of the novel. This adds a spectacular depth to the novel, meant to act as a way of discrediting the girl’s tale, but ultimately highlights the rigid skepticism of women’s health of the time it’s set. It’s a strong commentary reminiscent of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s revelatory works, channeling the unsettling and romantic notions of a gothic, with the gorgeous modern sensibilities of horror.
Van Veen has crafted something remarkable: a gothic that not only understands the assignment, but actively works to subvert, elevate, and challenge the subgenre, offering an entirely exciting experience readers are not to forget for years to come. Her next novel, Blood on Her Tongue, is already receiving glowing accolades across the community, so it’s safe to say 2025 will be another knockout year for the Dutch writer. I cannot recommend this book enough, it is incredible.
My Darling Dreadful Thing is available now through Poison Pen Press.
How to Survive This Fairytale by S.M. Hallow, Hedone Books
This book has consumed my entire life and I humbly ask you to allow it to consume yours as well.
Adult fantasy is nothing new in terms of genre convention. We know the names, we’ve read their work, but after a while you feel almost complacent reading certain books that seek to upend fairytale traditions and the like. It’s an undertaking with various successes and failures. This is precisely why I was so excited to finally read S.M. Hallow’s debut, How to Survive This Fairytale.
Hedone Books had a hell of a 2024, and between this and the next book I’ll be talking about, they’re about to have a killer 2025 too. Fairytale is a shining example of how to take fairytale tropes and utilize them for modern storytelling. Hallow proves to not only intimately understand fairytales, their mechanics, and the classics that have come to define our cultural consciousness, but to also realize the fairly untapped potential of using them to heal the hearts they’ve broken over the centuries.
Folk tales have been a tool for everything from social mores, manners, cautionary tales, and so much more. We treat them as a larger piece of our human puzzle, and with good reason. However, while they’re typically a means of warning or delighting, they’ve additionally acted as ways of alienating, harming, and fostering beliefs about others. We view our lives as the linear trajectory of a fairytale, chasing our Happily Ever After, and nursing the disappointment familiar to those who come to realize there is no such thing as an “American Dream.” Christ, an entire media conglomerate has made their whole brand adapting fairytales, and they essentially rule the planet now.
Hallow intimately understands these complexities and contradictions, consistently using them to poke holes in the seeming hopelessness at the center of telling a “dark fantasy.” Within the world of Fairytale, we’re introduced to super familiar characters including Hansel and Gretel—Hansel being the focused protagonist here. If you’re a fairytale and folktale nerd like me, you’ll be doing the Leo point throughout this whole novel. This universe imagines Hansel escaping the witch as Gretel sacrifices her life, sending them both hurtling into the oven. Once Hansel escapes, he comes upon an apparent peasant girl, whose brothers have all been cursed to live as swans for the rest of their days.
Hansel forms a closeness for one of the swans, a gentle intimacy that grows from two people sharing such understanding and closeness. Queer people know. One afternoon when the two are out searching for food, Hansel is intercepted by sentrymen for the feared queen of the lands. Instead of having the boy killed, the queen decides to take him on as a steward, but this ultimately leads to him becoming her hunter in training. This leads to some more storybook faves as the evil queen gives birth to Snow White, and when her beauty defies the queen’s mirror, she orders Hansel (now Hans) to kill Snow and take her heart.
It’s Hans’s choices propelling much of the story, with an omniscient voice serving as the rigid, rule-bound omniscient narrator of the story, offering the man alternatives to his story when it ends with death and brutal violence. It’s once our protagonist starts making his own choices that the true power and beauty of this novel comes in. Anyone who comes from an experience of trauma will readiy tell you it’s one of the hardest things to come back from. Healing is never linear, your mind constantly second guesses itself, there’s all the stages of grief…it’s a lot, and Hallow acknowledges this by having the mechanism of choice work in his favor. We pay witness to Hans working to overcome his guilt and shame, alongside all of the cuts and thorns saddled with those emotions.
The brilliance of Fairytale lies in its approach to healing trauma. The title itself is a deconstruction of the fantasies of capitalism our lives have become. We’re expected to fuel a bleeding machine, which itself is a remarkable fantasy, so to survive this particular fairytale we must divest from a myth set to destroy us. I won’t spoil the impact of its second half, but if you’re someone committed to healing your inner child, you will want to read this book. It delivers scores more wisdom than 90% of self help books today.
Much like how Coup de Grâce took over my entire life last year, so to has How to Survive This Fairytale this year. Approaching some of the hardest internal struggles and emotions, S.M. Hallow defies tradition to highlight immense innovation within the fantasy genre. It’s a fairytale vital to our ongoing cannon because it dares to go to the places others may shy away from. It’s queer romantasy done right, and I cannot recommend it enough.
Infinite love to S.M., Caitlin, Nelka, Barbie, and the rest of the Hedone team for the early e-ARC. How to Survive This Fairytale is currently available everywhere.
Queen O’Nine Tails by Lindz McLeod, Hedone Books
Okay, so, I’m officially a Lindz McLeod fangirl now. I haven’t read all her books yet, but, I sure want to. McLeod’s second release from Hedone, Queen O’Nine Tales, continues along Hedone’s Dark Sails series, centering queer voices telling intimate, at times racy, horror and adventure tails on the seven seas. In this particular slice of pirate shenanigans, an aristocrat with a penchant for espionage is captured by a ship of femme pirates, her fate to be sold as ransom at the next port.
What Gloria Vane doesn’t realize about her captor, however, is that Valentina Mallozzi coveted her for reasons of a more…sensual nature. Set to work with a crew who positively hates her, Gloria must put all of her skills to the test to bend this crew to her will, with hopes of somehow escaping the ransom and the ship. But then she begins to fall for the charismatic and terrifying Mallozzi. Is this her ticket to freedom?
However, what initially appears to be a semi-peaceful, albeit stress-inducing environment, receives a dangerous injection of paranoia as it appears some force has infiltrated the ship, possessing crew members and seeking to sow discontent. Concurrent with said discord is Mallozzi’s own descent into paranoia, endangering the lives of the crew and Gloria in the process. Can Miss Vane save this newfound family of pirates, as well as her love for its powerful queen?
McLeod is a true master at blending horror, adventure, and steamy romance—these elements coming together to tell a propulsive yarn that snares its claws in you and refuses to let go. While the nine tails is featured prominently on the cover, and it certainly does feature in some of the steamier moments, I was surprised at how little of a roll it played…or did it? You’ll have to find out for yourself.
Queen O’Nine Tails is everything I can ask for in a queer pirate horror. As the rest of the Dark Sails series has proven, there is a space and demand for these form of stories. Boy, are there a glut of intensely talented authors writing them.
As I stated above, infinite love to Hedone and McLeod for sending this e-ARC. Queen O’Nine Tails is currently available everywhere.
The Music of Marie by Usamaru Furuya, One Peace Books
I’ve been slowly dipping my toe back into reading manga, thanks in no small part to my friends Peter and Jack. This title came to me by way of Peter, who had this title as a part of his staff picks at Doylestown Bookshop. I semi-jokingly asked him to sell it to me and his description was all I needed.
This is a fairly early work by Furuya that recently received a reprint compendium edition. As someone obsessed with the anime of Osamu Tezuka’s Metropolis, this was the perfect anime for me to read. Rich in image, mythology, as well as the philosophy of faith and belief, The Music of Marie is a steampunk fairytale packed to the rafters with gorgeous prose, fascinating characters, and a breathtaking central focal point in the god-like automaton Marie.
Set in a time where humanity had already destroyed itself once, Marie acts as a peacekeeper in all of the lands surrounding the utopic Pirito. Her purpose is revealed in a gorgeous and dark fashion, completely reconfiguring Pirito’s purpose and the harmony of its denizens. Additionally central to the story are friends Kai and Pipi. Due to an accident years ago, Kai is able to hear Marie’s song that she sings, as well as hearing the movements beneath the earth, which earned him a job in the mines of Pirito. Pipi is in love with Kai, yet his devotion and focus appears to lie solely with and on Marie. Planning to construct a flying device to prove her love for Kai, their relationship, as well as Kai’s relationship to Marie, will be tested in monumental ways.
Furuya’s illustration style is beyond description, building an entirely ultra-detailed world to life, and magically capturing the cosmic proportions of its conflict. What this book has to say about violence, capitalism, plus larger themes of the human appetite to consistently build upon more and more automation and growth, is earth-shattering. You certainly won’t walk away from this one the same. Prepare for your brain to question everything for months.
I know I sound like a broken record at this point, but Marie is yet another book best experienced by going in as unaware as possible. I read the synopsis very briefly before diving in, and I am so glad I did. The complexity is best experienced in real time, like immersing yourself in the warmest fairytale. If you, like me, delight in steampunk aesthetic manga, then you need this book in your life immediately. You will not regret it.
The Music of Marie is currently available everywhere.
And that’s that! We’re probably caught up now on reviews. There’s a solo review or two in the works, but we’re mostly back to our regularly scheduled program moving forward.
I’ll see you all very soon <3.