Sarah O'Connor

Book Review: Love and Other Monsters in the Dark by K.B. Jensen

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August 30, 2022

I received this book from The Next Best Book Club in exchange for an honest review.

“I had a kinky sex dream about Alex Trebek. It wasn’t all bad, but then again, I can remember only snippets of it. Running my fingers through his gray hair. I answered him, “What is the meaning of life?” And he declared me the winner,” (Jensen 13 “Final Jeopardy”).

Usually when I review short story collections I like to rate every story and give a mini-review for each of them. But since many of the stories in K.B. Jensen’s collection are flash fiction pieces, I didn’t want to spoil what some of the shorter stories are about. That’s the beauty of flash fiction, they’re brief but memorable!

Love and Other Monsters in the Dark certainly has it’s memorable tales with stories that cover a variety of genres. We have a few contemporary stories, some horror, science fiction, even a zombie story but what connects them all is monsters. Serial killers, ghosts, abusive boyfriends, neglectful husbands, Jensen shows the many different types of monsters that exist in fiction and in our own lives. Continue reading

Book Review: What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher

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August 19, 2022

“The dead don’t walk,” (Kingfisher 113).

Retired soldier Alex Easton has received a letter from their childhood friend Madeline Usher saying that she is dying. Alex heads to the imposing old house of Usher and finds horrid smelling mushrooms on the grounds, strange hares that disturb the people around the land, and an oddly glowing lake. Once reuniting with their childhood friends, Alex finds the Usher siblings are worse off than they expected: Madeline sleepwalks and speaks in an odd voice at night and Roderick startles at the smallest of sounds. Things are not right in the house of Usher, but with the help of a British mycologist, an American doctor, and an army friend Alex may be able to figure out what is happening. Continue reading

Book Review: The Prince of Infinite Space by Giano Cromley

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August 17, 2022

I received this book from The Next Best Book Club in exchange for an honest review.

“Sometimes I think we wound people just to see if we’re capable of wounding them. Or maybe we do it to see if they’re capable of being wounded,” (Cromley 55).

It’s 1990 and seventeen-year-old Kirby Russo has finally found peace. Attending a prestige’s military school, Kirby believes he finally has his life figured out: that once he becomes the chief editor for his schools newspaper his life will finally have the purpose he’s been looking for. But his dreams are dashed when a rich classmate gets the editorship over Kirby, and his old delinquent habits come back along with his long-absent father who wants to bring him to Chicago, where Kirby’s ex-girlfriend Izzy also happens to be and where she may be in trouble. Things haven’t aligned the way Kirby planned out but they’re taking him somewhere, and Kirby is ready to take that road wherever it leads him. Continue reading

Book Review: Manhunt by Gretchen Felker-Martin

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August 13, 2022

“Community is when you never let go of each other. Not even after you’re gone,” (Felker-Martin 256).

Beth and Fran are manhunters. Living in a post-apocalyptic world, they hunt feral men who were exposed to the T. Rex virus and harvest their organs to maintain their estrogen levels so they don’t meet the same fate. Robbie is alone, having been hurt and burned too many times before, he prefers his isolation until a horrifying attack brings the three together. More struggles await them though, including an army of TERF’s, a sociopathic bunker brat, packs of feral men, and their own pasts, but this found family may have just what it takes to survive. Continue reading

Surprise! It’s a story!

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August 12, 2022

Last year I entered Dawson’s City 2021 Authors on Eighth Contest. I didn’t win, which wasn’t shocking. I remember the story was a bit of rambling, me trying to process how quickly everything was reopening, my fears and disappointments and trying to understand what normal looked like now versus what it was, if I could ever go back to the normal of before. There were too many thoughts and none of them concise, it didn’t deserve to win, let alone be published.

But apparently they decided to publish it on their website anyways! Continue reading

Book Review: The Pallbearers Club by Paul Tremblay

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August 8, 2022

“What if the part you so achingly want to fix, change, banish, or destroy is the part that is fundamentally you?” (Tremblay 217).

When Art Barbara was in high school he was not cool. A loner who listened to metal, he decided to start a extracurricular club for volunteer pallbearers to help at poorly attended funerals. At one funeral he meets Mercy, a cool, punk girl with a Polaroid picture she uses to take pictures of the corpses before the service. Which is weird, along with her knowledge of creepy New England folklore. Strange things happen to Art around Mercy, and decades later he decides to write it all down in his memoir. But Mercy has found the memoir, and she has some issues with how Art has remembered some things and isn’t afraid to make some cuts. Continue reading

Why Physical Media Matters

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August 3, 2022

I love Midnight Mass. I haven’t written a post about it yet, vaguely mentioned it in a book review, but I’m still working on how exactly to say it. I have too many words and none of them seem good enough yet, but I promise you it’s coming.

So why bring up Midnight Mass if I’m not going to describe my love for it in painstaking detail? Well, since I love Midnight Mass, I tend to recommend it to people I know who like horror series. And yes, you can argue that everyone has a Netflix account or the password to a friend’s Netflix account, but the reality is that there are people who don’t. So what do you do if you don’t have a Netflix account or a friend willing to share it with you? Video rental stores are a thing of the past, but libraries are forever (and I will die on that hill). As a long time library user (and lover), I was curious if they carried Midnight Mass and was shocked to find they didn’t but do carry Flanagan’s other series The Haunting of Hill House and The Haunting of Bly Manor. I googled it and couldn’t find a DVD set of Midnight Mass that was out or even a hint that it would be out (though I pine for this limited edition VHS set daily), and it was only when I went to Mike Flanagan’s twitter that not only is Midnight Mass not available on Blu-Ray/DVD but neither are his works Hush or Gerald’s Game and that he has repeatedly pleaded to Netflix to release them in physical media. The reason The Haunting series is available on digital media because they were released through Paramount. Continue reading

Book Review: Dream Pop Origami by Jackson Bliss

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July 29, 2022

I received this book from The Next Best Book Club in exchange for an honest review.

“Language is a cross-cultural love story of chatty merchants, violated verb conjugations, insolvent loan words, and forgotten Latin declensions. Language is a giant swingers party where slang swaps partners with grammar. Language is an hourglass of human culture, a vivid ekphrasis of the physical world,” (Bliss 112-113).

I followed the Calvinist Method while reading Jackson Bliss’ Dream Pop Origami, meaning I read the book from beginning to end like any old book only because it was difficult to get to the page I wanted to using the “Choose-Your-Own-Adventure” model on a PDF. I attempted to read it backwards as well because I didn’t want to follow the status quo but that just ended up stressing me out, so Calvinist-status-quoing it was! The plus to that method is that I got to read every bit of the memoir, because the thing with Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books is that you never really get to read the whole story, just the story you choose. Unless you start again and choose a different adventure, honestly I’ve never been a big “Choose-Your-Own-Adventure” fan so I really don’t know how you “finish” a book of that genre, only that I very literally did so by reading Dream Pop Origami in order. I will say one of the drawbacks to that is that it does get repetitive at times, certain facts and parts of Bliss’ life are repeated, but then again a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book isn’t really meant to be read chronologically. Continue reading

Book Review: What We Both Know by Fawn Parker

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July 27, 2022

CW: Sexual assault (off-page), animal death.

“I will hide her small truths in this story and she will take shape among the pages, emerge like a pop-up, come face to face with the reader. Then they will know. Then, his story will be concluded,” (Parker 86).

Famous Canadian author Baby Davidson is writing a memoir, or rather, his daughter Hillary Greene is writing it for him. Secretly, of course. Baby’s health is declining, his memory fading, and most days Hillary finds her father watching Charlie Rose or old interviews of himself, trying to memorize his own words and hang on to who he was. Hillary acts as her father’s caregiver, and an aspiring though unsuccessful writer herself, she’s dedicated to ghostwriting his memoir, struggling between her desire to show the world the truth of her father or keep his literary legacy intact. As Hillary learns more about her father it adds to the grief she feels over her sister Pauline who died a year before, as Hillary struggles with the things she is learning and how they are all connected and affect her. Continue reading

Book Review: 21 Things You May Not Know About the Indian Act

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July 25, 2022

“I think it is critical that non-Indigenous Canadians be aware of how deeply the Indian Act penetrated, controlled, and continues to control, most aspects of the lives of First Nations. It is an instrument of oppression,” (Joseph 4).

I didn’t learn about residential schools until I was in university and to this day I’m grateful for my professor for requiring we read some Indigenous authors and understand Canada’s history of colonialism and treatment of Indigenous peoples in order to fully understand the readings we were assigned. So in a way, I’m lucky that my white cisgender male professor chose to be transparent about Canada’s history, we could have spent the term reading Margaret Atwood but instead he chose to educate us about Canada’s history including it’s treatment of Indigenous people, which then prompted me into taking Indigenous literature courses while I was in university. Continue reading