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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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THE GOTHIC: Frankenstein by Mary Shelly (Novel)

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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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SPIRITUAL EDUCATION: Aru Shah and the End of Time by Roshani Chokshi (Novel)

Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series is the thing that got me to start reading long-form fiction for the first time. I vividly remember being in the fifth grade, watching the Lightning Thief movie, and being so excited that the movie was based on the first book in a five-book series. ((Imagine the growing pain that I experienced the deeper I got and realized how violently the movie butchered the book.) With Riordan’s work being the biggest influence on my reading tastes, it only makes sense that one of the books that helped get me back onto the reading horse, so to speak, was from Rick Riordan Presents, an imprint he started that focuses on the mythologies of cultures that he, a white man, should probably (definitely) not be writing about. Roshani Chokshi’s Aru Shah and the End of Time was the first book I bought to get back into reading, and I’m glad I did, and have been even happier to revisit now. It follows Aru Shah, shocker, a twelve-year-old who lives in the Museu...
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