Friday Links: Get Spooked, Get Candy Edition
"It was a mathematician's response. Of course she was correct, but the answer was useless." - Percival Everett, 'Dr. No'
But first, your weekly Vine: Thursday was Chapter 40, “Werelion of Vine.” Today is Chapter 41: “Fields.” We got an another episode of the podcast releasing today, and don’t forget to sign up for the newsletter.
Is there a chill in the air? A masked, coverall-ed figure leering at you from behind a dumpster, or yellow-leafed tree? Oh shit, did a bird come a-tapping, gently rapping on your chamber door while you were thinking of Lenore? Watch out, dude, that avian is gonna quoth at you.
What I’ve Been Reading Lately:
A while ago, I said that horror doesn’t really stop around these parts, since I’m a horror writer. So while I’ve spent these last weeks watching a ton of horror movies and becoming a full-on Flanafan, this week is not going to be wall-to-wall horror. Good books though! I’m talking, of course, about Who Will Cradle Your Head? by Jared Beloff and Dr. No by Percival Everett.
Who Will Cradle Your Head by Jared Beloff: it’s almost like Jared opened my skull and poked around my brain for subject matter here. There’s climate change anxiety/hope, there’s fatherhood, there is, perhaps most importantly, a thoughtful Sasquatch. The blurbs describe these poems as “tender,” and there is a tenderness, but there’s also a clear-eyedness to these poems. It’s a great book, one I expect I’ll be returning to.
Dr. No by Percival Everett: my local bookstore has its horror/sci-fi/mystery/romance section all in the same nook, with sometimes-difficult-to-parse delineation between the sections. I picked up this book not really knowing what to expect besides some play on Bond-style supervillains, which, yep. Not horror at all, but let’s call it a bridge between spooky season and Noirvember. Horrifying ending, though. And man, what a delightfully fun book. Our narrator is a probably-autistic mathematician, an expert on “nothing.” Our supervillain is flamboyant, charming, ostentatious, and righteous in his anger at the U.S. Along the way, we have a brainwashed captive, a one-legged dog, a government agent named Bill Clinton, and all sorts of casual absurdities. Whimsical as this book is, though, it doesn’t get too hung up on its own whimsy. It’s got teeth, too. I couldn’t put it down.
A note on the ending: I had hoped something like that might happen, but never in a million years thought. I laughed out loud. Cackled, even. Am I the monster at the end of this book?
LINKS!
But first, some spooky music? I was making fun of AFI earlier this week, but there’s one AFI song I to-this-day love. It is the third track of their All Hallow’s EP, a four-track reminder for early 2000s goths that 1) Halloween was one time called “All Hallow’s Eve” and 2) the Misfits were a band that existed. KaZaA—an early 2000s mp3 file exchange program that was like Pandora or shuffle mode on Spotify/Apple Music, except waaayyyy more likely to lead to some strange, dark corner—led me to randomly download this one, and what a track. It’s one of those where the bass and guitar really harmonize well with each other, even if they’re playing simple stuff. Plus the jack-o-lantern-headed scarecorew on this YouTube visualizer moves!
Linze Rice in Block Club on the haunted mansion of the West Loop, the Schuttler House. A house inspired by the governor’s mansion, built by a wagonmaker who covered the walls in single dollar bills, an audacious display of opulence in a neighborhood of otherwise impoverished people. Get some haunted Chicago history this Halloween weekend. It’s wild, as much Chicago history as I read (more than most but not as much as some), how I’ve never heard of the Schuttler family. Always something new to learn about this city.
Speaking of Chicago being a big place, I hadn’t heard of Routine Fuss before last week, but have been thoroughly enjoying this punk/midwest emo record, I (never) want to be left alone. Kinda scratches my dormant Manchester Orchestra itch (minus screaming), with a real “oh yeah this is nice” guitar tone.
Jesus said a prophet will never have honor in their hometown, but who cares about that when you can read “Leavittown” by Richard Mirabella in Split Lip? Can you go home again? Probably not to a suburb. Jesus never considered the suburbs, that’s why he thought humanity could be saved.
Not to hard pivot into wrenching, but Dan Sheehan over at LitHub chronicles the last words of Palestinian novelist, poet, and educator Heba Abu Nada, killed in her home by an Israeli airstrike. “We find ourselves in an indescribable state of bliss amidst the chaos…” it begins. How often what’s happening personally gets horrifically interrupted by what’s happening politically. RIP Heba.
We end with one of the funnier things we have to say each year: no one is putting drugs in your kids’ Halloween candy. Drugs are expensive, and people aren’t that twisted. Here’s a Slate article from 2019, from Jane C. Hu. Show it to your stupidest neighbors and relatives, maybe it’ll stick this time.
What’re you still doing here? Go read Vine!
If you’re in the service industry, may you clean up in tips this weekend. And may you eat the exact right amount of candy, the amount you want, without getting sick.
Also don’t worry about that howling off in the distance, it’s fine.
Sorry you got an email,
Chris
