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Howdy!

Welcome to my course blog for Lit 345: Horror, Fantasy, and Science Fiction. I'll be sharing my musings on any of the readings done for the course, so stay tuned.

Until next time!

Squish

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NEW WEIRD: Wilder Girls by Rory Power (Novel)

I’d been trying to figure out how to describe this book for as long as I was reading it. Recently, my friend said, “The world is dying and my body reflects that.” That sentence does the job pretty well. Wilder Girls is a novel that does interesting work in blending body horror with romance and inexplicable science fantasy. All of these elements work in tandem, making for an experience that cannot be excavated from any of the genres it falls into.      What sets Wilder Girls apart, what I think will start to define the “New Weird” as we call it, is its marriage to (and, in a weird way, celebration of) the marginalizations of the cast. The book is comprised almost exclusively of women, two of the main cast, Hetty and Reese, are queer—something that Reese openly states outright, unprompted and unabashed. The body horror, then, starts to become indicative of both their individual characters (Hetty has something growing, squirming in her left eye; Byatt has two spines a...
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THE GOTHIC: Frankenstein by Mary Shelly (Novel)

Goddess bless Mary Shelley, mother of my genres. Part of why I took this class was to try and get my feet wet in some of the roots and core ideologies of the genres in which I write. Discussion on this, for example, has helped push me into wanting to pivot the genre of my thesis from straight contemporary fantasy to wanting it to be more neo-southern Gothic.    But I digress! The gothic traditionally is very concerned with questions of mortality. Namely how to escape it or the repercussions of attempting to do so. I’m pushed to think of Edgar Alan Poe, who is constantly grappling with death and what it means in his work—probably because everyone he ever looked at died of TB within 20 minutes of meeting him.       Mary Shelley wasn’t too much better off, so Frankenstein doesn’t come as a shock. But Frankenstein asks what happens when you try to cheat or outwit death. Frankenstein’s monster is the bastardization of life itself, and Doctor Frankenste...
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WITCHES AND WOMEN: Akata Witch (What Sunny Saw in the Flames) by Nnedi Okorafor (Novel)

Before sinking my teeth into Akata Witch , I want it on the record that the book’s title is different in Nigeria and in the UK because of the fact that the word akata is an anti-African-American slur more or less translating to “cotton picker.” Little meaning would be changed if the title were “Nigger Witch," an anti-Black slur. All that is to say, hearing that repeatedly made me itchy. But, as an akata, I will continue using that version of the title in my writing.      Comparing Akata Witch to Harry Potter feels almost like a disservice to Nnedi Okorafor’s work. Mostly because I actively resist the idea of comparing an Author of Color’s work to a white author, basically saying ”it’s this thing but brown.” (Which, by the way, is what everyone seems to say about Roshani Chokshi’s Gilded Wolves , calling it a brown Six of Crows .) It puts an idea on the table that fails to really encompass the depth that Akata Witch goes to. For example, one of the biggest things that...
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