telephones make strangers out of lovers whiskey makes the strangers all look good well my angel of the mourning is in mourning my life was misspent, don’t let me be misunderstood

well it’s bad luck, and it’s a hard luck story, i’m sorry i ain’t stickin around i got a real bad feeling that a book of poems ain’t enough

wolf-alice also reminds me of patti smith’s poem Female and how she was changed by puberty from a wolf to a bitch

ligotti has the sense about him that the grotesque is already in his head and in his perception of the world, and he can only joke about it in ways that don’t diminish it. very marquez style of sort of ugly dry humor. i’m struggling to pinpoint what i mean by this but i think the comparison is there

wolf-alice is somehow both a story about a girl who becomes a woman rather against her will, and a very trans narrative. reminds me a lot of how, in the epic of gilgamesh, enkidu isn’t really aware of being not-a-beast until he has sex with a human woman

any time! glad to talk to someone who’s read a lot of the same weird stuff as me :-)

i think ligotti is perhaps better compared to some of the grimmer and more explicit short story/novella writers of latin america than he is to carter? allende comes to mind, but more specifically, marquez, especially in “no one writes to the colonel”

she differed from rice in that her stories always still felt a bit like the fairy tales they came from, just ramped up about three notches on the awful dial (the snow child being perhaps the most horrific of the bunch)

it’s been a minute since i read the bloody chamber but one of the things that struck me about that collection was carter’s insistence on hope in all her stories, whether they had happy endings or not

and that’s me ignoring all the weird incestuous dynamics in the vampire chronicles! the first two books alone are wall to wall philosophically difficult vampire kink!!!