Ivy Grimes

Thank you so much for including me!

Great Novellas and Short Novels Requests for really good novellas or short novels come up a lot on the Tales of the Grotesque and Dungeonesque Discord, so I made a Google S...

Recommendations for novellas and short novels are a popular request, so here's a sheet of some of my personal favorites. @ivygrimes.bsky.social! @lairdbarron.bsky.social! And more! You can't go wrong with these. talesofthegrotesqueanddungeonesque.blogspot.com/2025/12/grea...

Cowards!

YouTube video by Iñaki Ballesteros Polloni Cab Calloway - "St James Infirmary Blues" (Extended Betty Boop Snow White Version) [REUPLOAD]

A weird cartoon: Betty Boop and Cab Calloway:

I saw this a few years ago when I was looking into folk songs, and it pleasantly freaked me out. All old cartoons are scary, I guess, but this one had some elements that stuck with me.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sZF...

We can all relate

Professional Services I’m available for hire for a variety of projects and topics such as writing, books, review/critic work, California history, Black history, librarianship, critical AI literacy, and others. Pre…

Did a massive update to my website recently, and now I have a full section just on hiring me for things. Put me on panels! Let me do presentations! I cover everything from librarianship to critical AI literacy to books and reviews. bookjockeyalex.com/professional...

NOW OPEN FOR NOMINATIONS
If you published speculative ecofiction this year, we'd love to consider it for ECO25 💚🌿🐾🐚🦋🌿💚

The Cellar Below the Cellar: A Folk Horror Novella Discover and share books you love on Goodreads.

www.goodreads.com/book/show/24...

this #GivingTuesday, consider giving the gift of writing.

Cold words from Grandma in The Cellar Below the Cellar:

www.apexbookcompany.com/products/the...

The Cellar Below the Cellar: A Folk Horror Novella Discover and share books you love on Goodreads.

www.goodreads.com/book/show/24...

"The overarching theme that emerges is one of community—that sometimes just “putting up with one another” is a profound and constant act of faith." 🤝🌌

Thank you to @thefantasyhive.bsky.social for your excellent review of @ivygrimes.bsky.social's CELLAR BELOW THE CELLAR!

💜💜💜

Today is the 70th anniversary of Rosa Parks' arrest. Six myths: 1) She wasn't old or tired. 42 years old that day, she had a "life history of being rebellious" & had spent two decades helping to turn the Montgomery NAACP into a more activist branch alongside ED Nixon and Johnnie Carr.

NOT-SHORT STORY REC: Feast of the Pale Leviathan, John Chrostek From the beginning, my temptation was to read this not as a novel, but as a “romance”. Now, by “romance” I mean not in the modern, HEA sense but in the Gothic sense, which was taken to mean simply an extended fictional narrative of marvellous or unlikely incidents. And by “from the beginning”, I mean the table of contents. Something about opening a book and being greeted by that lengthy list of chapter titles preceded by Roman numerals called to mind HTML versions of, like, Anne Radcliffe or Horace Walpole on Project Gutenberg, and certain passages here I could totally imagine an early 19th century reader getting super titillated over…but then again, it is at the same time a book which starts with some dude named Owen who takes some shrooms and goes tubing.

It then occurred to me I might also call this “metamodern”, which is a term the YouTube algorithm has insisted I familiarize myself with recently. In a book about being swallowed by a sea monster, it’s no surprise to find some elements of pastiche: a certain old-fashioned solemnity, deliberate echoes of Melville, of Jonah and the whale. But then we wildly oscillate from mythic-adventure pastiche at sea into present-day satire on land, all radio ads and Powerpoint presentations and stale continental breakfasts and yes, eventually, a YouTube video (not about metamodernity but rather ‘You’ll Never Believe What Happened Next: 7 Impossible Survivors’). Meanwhile, inside the belly of the beast we discover a society of victims from different historical moments with their signifiers and values all coexisting at once, their backstories a mosaic of nautical epics and aristocratic drama and Cold War intrigues, overlapping dichotomies of good and evil, darkness and light, oppressors and oppressed, haves and have-nots. The cultural logic of cultural logics, embodied in a subacqueous humanoid giant.

But as the story takes on its true dimensions, there is one thing which becomes perfectly clear, and that is: Feast of the Pale Leviathan is ultimately and unabashedly a Genre Novel, and it does not shirk its duties on that score. Vibrant cast, artful pacing, plot twists and escalations, eyeball kicks and mindfucks, moments of operatic pathos, it’s all here. It’s a “fish-out-of-water” story (ironic, maybe, i guess), a portal story of sorts, certainly a cosmic horror story, and for all its outré imagery, its evocations and provocations (post-/metamodern or otherwise), Chrostek never loses sight of his central characters, the relatability of their struggles, and the novel is so much the better for it. Available wherever rad books are sold!

I missed this yesterday, but @nmwhitley.bsky.social wrote up this goddamn gangbuster review of Feast of the Pale Leviathan.

Find it in his newsletter, Short Story Rex (which always does a fantastic job of highlighting great fiction + dwelling on its craft and impact)

buttondown.com/shortstoryrex/

Many thanks to RSL and The Fantasy Hive for this beautiful and deep review of The Cellar Below the Cellar 💜🖤

RSL reviews Ivy Grimes' upcoming folk horror novella THE CELLAR BELOW THE CELLAR:

"with its poetic turns of narrative to its easily imaginable characters, reminds me time & time again that to die is not an absence, but a shift in perspective"

More: tinyurl.com/53juhdpp
bsky.app/profile/ivyg...

Death toll passes 1,000 in devastating floods across Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Malaysia and Thailand – latest updates Hundreds remain missing in Indonesia and Sri Lanka as rescue efforts continue after Cyclone Ditwah

This is devastating. Climate Change is affecting the countries that contribute the least to carbon emissions. Action was needed decades ago. www.theguardian.com/world/live/2...

Brown Shetland pony in evening light with thatched crofthouse behind

When I write about about Shetland ponies, I am writing about love. Love for #Shetland, it's windswept hill and wild sea. Love for island memories of independence despite exploitation & love for the ponies who helped folk survive & who still connect people to land & history.

The whispers are true. We open to submissions at midnight (12am EST)

👀👀

They look like St. Lucy's eyes, right?

Oh yes you’ll need to start your Christmas pudding soon after all

BBC Two - Tudor Monastery Farm Turning back the clock to early Tudor farming on monastery land.

You must

www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b...

It's about that time again....time for Tudor Monastery Farm with Ruth Goodman

shop indie, shop small, buy books, feed your heart

eveninghousebooks.com

@eveninghouse.bsky.social

Cover of Cormac McCarthy's book The Road. Gray background, an abstract flame in the middle. Silhouette of father and son holding hands while looking at the fire.

Another inspiration: Cormac McCarthy's The Road

Cormac and I don't have much in common, God bless us, but The Road made me think seriously about what would happen to us if we lost most of our technology.

In CELLAR, I wanted to explore this loss in the context of a small community.

If You Knew Me: A Novel Amazon.com: If You Knew Me: A Novel: 9781662531835: Miskowski, S.P.: Books

You know what makes a great holiday gift AND an excellent distraction from holidays? A book. This book. MY book. I wrote it for me, and for you. I hope it makes you laugh and gives you a chill.

That's them. Those are my best wishes.

That's them. Those are my best wishes.

back in the land of Cheerwine