Alex

[Book Review] ‘Women’s Weird: Strange Stories by Women, 1890–1940’ Think of weird fiction and, probably without even realizing it, you will think of one thing: men. Whether it’s H. P. Lovecraft’s tentacled monstrosities, the decadent necromancies of Clark Ashton Smit...

After the sad demise of Dead Reckonings the team at @whatsleepsbeneath.com were kind enough to offer some of my older reviews a new home. I’ve just noticed that this one for the excellent Women’s Weird is now up on the site!

www.whatsleepsbeneath.com/archive/wome...

@melissae.bsky.social #weird

I LOVED Weapons. I thought I’d fallen out of love with horror movies.

A t shirt with a graphic of a black cat sitting on a pumpkin

I am ready for Halloween.

I read both Omar El Akkad’s One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This and Saeed Teebi’s You Will Not Kill Our Imagination this year and I don’t know how you can’t be transformed after reading those books. I really don’t. I want to send them to my elected representatives. Free Palestine.

Took my cats to the vet for a check up, rabies shot, nails clipped, and Bella had some blood work done. I really don’t mind spending the money on them. Next year I’ll have had them for a decade 🤯 The time has gone by so quickly. I hope they both live until 20 like my childhood cat did.

An achingly stunning, orange, sunlit cat sting on a wood chair of the same color.

Blending into October.

I agree with every word Zelda Williams says. And this at the end from OpenAI makes me want to go full Ned Ludd. Creators can’t have a blanket opt-out on copyright infringement of their work and have to fill out a form appealing to OpenAI’s mercy every time? Fuck off into the sun

The Future is Disabled, Disability Intimacy and How to Tell When We Will Die are all very good. Can’t wait to read If I Were You I’d Kill Myself.

I want to see this SO BADLY.

In an orange lit room, a strange, long, dark arm reaches through the blinds of a sliding door to pet a black cat that walks up to greet it. String lights line the door and a decorative jack o lantern paper cut out is taped to the wall above the cat.

Fall Forever : Can I pet your cat?

No Good Art Comes From Greed | Defector The packages arrived square and thin and carefully wrapped on Saturday afternoon. There were three of them, but only one was mine. If I could have rejected my package, sent it back from whence it came...

The state of online media is such a bummer, I sometimes think: who cares? Then, I read something so smart and so funny and so uniquely the product of this compromised but generative space, that I remember: I care!
This, by @mckinneykelsey.bsky.social, is a tour de force. defector.com/taylor-swift...

hands up if you're motivated by spite

Oh yes, thank you, I’d heard about this one!

I’ve preordered a few really promising looking 2026 books. I’m excited.

I preordered Emi Yagi's forthcoming novel, When the Museum Is Closed, about a lonely museum worker who falls in love with a statue. I don't need to know more than that, it already sounds like something I'd be into, and I'd previously read and enjoyed Diary of a Void.

OK I need to watch this it looks amazing

Taylor Swift announces next album title: The Queen in Yellow. She told Variety: "A few years back I came across this amazing play and I was so inspired. It's been living in my head for years. I even dream of it, of the city in the play."

Yet schools are $6.3B short, special ed ignored, universities gutted, hospitals starved, ODSP frozen, shelters full, rents soaring. Billions go to highways, tax cuts, corporate breaks. This isn’t discipline, it’s neglect. Ontario doesn’t have a debt problem. It has a Ford problem.

Even ‘working’ is iffy, I can make up to $500 a week before they take benefits away. So with working and ODSP I get a maximum of 3k per month. Thank god I live with my parents because that would make living on my own impossible. I also couldn’t marry someone making more money than me.

disability/poverty pay should provide more than the bare minimum, not less. People can't live fulfilling lives when all they can afford to do is eat and sleep. (not that the amount I receive on ODSP in ontario even covers THAT.)

I ordered two books directly from the publishers having temporarily forgotten about the Canada Post strike. Oops!

I too am waiting for the Community movie. I wonder what happened?

Disassociation ain’t hittin' like it used to.

Favourite books I read in September (it was a good month!): No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood, The Hunger We Pass Down by Jen Sookfong Lee, The Extra by Annie Neugebauer, Good and Evil by Samanta Schweblin, Restoration by Ave Barrera, and Autumn Rounds by Jacques Poulin #booksky

Ms Vickie’s vodka sauce pizza chips and a notebook with a black and grey cat on it that says “hardcore”

I went out and got treats.

It’s really wonderful. I read somewhere that he didn’t want to have to write this book but I’m so glad he did.

You Will Not Kill Our Imagination: A Memoir of Palestine and Writing in Dark Times by Saeed Teebi

Another strong contender for book of the year.

Comic panel of people going into library. Quote: "Let's go into the occult book section and get a rundown on witchcraft!"

Finally, it's October for book lovers.

And Then She Fell by Alicia Elliott, A Mind Spread Out on the Ground by Alicia Elliott, Rehearsals for Living by Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Making Love with the Land by Joshua Whitehead, Split Tooth by Tanya Tagaq, God Isn’t Here Today by Francine Cunningham, This Wound is a World and NDN Coping Mechanisms by Billy-Ray Belcourt, The Big Melt by Emily Riddle, Letters in a Bruised Cosmos by Liz Howard, The Red Files by Lisa Bird-Wilson, curved against the hull of a peterhead by Taqralik Partridge

Put together a stack of nonfiction, novels, short stories, and poetry for #NationalTruthandReconciliationDay:

please read this story today from @moiradonovan.bsky.social, with incredible photos by Darren Calabrese, which considers the physical history of the residential school system and survivors' efforts to ensure this history is never forgotten