Even though I'm a librarian, I'm not a public librarian, so my knowledge of new releases is restricted to the "New Books Hitting Shelves This Week" posts on ONTD. (Sometimes I look at the "Hot Titles" shelf at the branch, but they're not as fun. When I worked at LPL, there was a new release shelf for comics and manga, but they don't have that at BCPL; I also think it's more attention-grabbing to face as many books as you can OUT for new titles, but BCPL only faces out maybe six or seven.)
Anyway, I saw that My Darling Dreadful Thing came out and I looked to see if it was on order, but I could just get it on hoopla and so I got it on hoopla and read it all in one sitting. Then I found out that Home is Where the Bodies Are had come in on hold so I picked that up and read it yesterday too! Two books in a day is pretty fun. My Darling Dreadful Thing had me from the get-go: the epigraph for the first chapter was from "The Turn of the Screw" (I also have the collection of Henry James' ghost stories checked out, so now I want to get back to that), and there are elements of Spiritualism, Gothic horror/romance, and madness (of course). I liked this book, but because it was listed as a "most anticipated horror" I was hoping for a higher horror element. Based on the blurb, I was also expecting more of an angle of the reader having to decide if the protagonist is insane or if she actually has a spirit companion, but there isn't really that type of angle. The spirit companions are so real in this book that at some point my brain just was imagining Ruth as a slightly altered version of Rem from Death Note. The spirit companions in this book are also basically bog bodies, which is integral to the plot as well as an interesting take on how spirits are tethered to the world. The Sapphic romance aspect was a delight and I wished we'd had more of it. The conflict and resolution of this novel felt a little bit rushed to me. It was not scary and I also didn't understand why there was no attempt to eliminate the threat in some way? Maybe I have been reading too many superhero comics, but it seemed like there would have been some thought put into how to somehow undo what was done, rather than just hiding. I think that this would be a great scary movie, though, but I found it a little low on the horror/spooky scale as a novel. Home is Where the Bodies Are is another find from ONTD. Three siblings, previously estranged, reunite after their mother dies. The oldest sister has been present in her mother's final weeks. The middle sister has been struggling with addiction (and losing), and the youngest brother, rich and successful, looks down on his sisters for being mediocre just as they look down on him for having opportunities that they didn't have. Their father mysteriously disappeared fifteen years prior, with no updates or contact. As the siblings make arrangements for their mother and begin sorting out her things, they find a box of VHS tapes of home movies their mother had made, and the end of one tape has footage that links their parents to an unsolved crime that shook their small community many years before. Were their parents involved in murder? This book was a moment! I was swept in and would not let go until I knew the answers. It's told through alternating narratives of the siblings and sometimes has interludes told through Laura, who is the mother that has passed on. I did not see the end coming, even though I was trying my very best to figure out whodunnit! It's very suspenseful and also really captures life in a small town and the tensions between siblings. I really recommend this one!
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I guess I could've seen the season finale of X-Men '97 by now, but I did not stay up late & so I will have to catch it when I get home from work. Last week, we had the moment from X-Men #25 where Magneto rips the adamantium from Wolverine's skeleton. What's been kind of fun about X-Men '97 is that if you have some familiarity with the storylines, you'll kind of know what's happening, but with enough changes to keep you pleasantly (or unpleasantly) surprised by the ways the storylines have shifted. In the comics, this storyline - Fatal Attractions - culminates with Colossus leaving the X-Men. Previously, his little sister, Illyana, had died tragically - I think this was the first X-Men comic I had bought, the death of Illyana Rasputin in Uncanny X-Men #303. Colossus isn't in this animated series, but they've shifted the tragic death and "defection" angle to Rogue.
I think my only complaint about X-Men '97 is that it's going at breakneck speed. The first season is only ten episodes, and so there's less time to have the more easygoing, character-centric episodes we saw in the original series. The closest the new series has come to that has been the Jubilee Mojoverse episode, which shared airtime with Storm's Lifedeath arc. Where the original series largely featured Wolverine, this series leans heavily on Cyclops and Jean Grey. I didn't realize how much I missed Wolverine until we got the Wolverine and Nightcrawler versus Bastion's human sentinels scene. Inferno, which is a story arc that needs a lot of buildup to have a really effective impact, was told in one episode. On the other hand, I guess studios feel a need to really deliver on first seasons because we've seen even very popular streaming shows get canceled after one season. After watching last week's episode, I re-read Wolverine #75. It's a terrific comic. I remember finding it on the rack, possibly at the grocery store; it was the only one I could find in my tiny hometown and the hologram on the cover had been heavily damaged. There's a lot of drama in this issue: The X-Men who were in space are trying to get Wolverine stabilized because his healing factor can't keep up with the massive damage from Magneto's attack. Professor X and Jean, at first trying to keep Wolverine's mind stable, have to split up so Jean can telekinetically keep the Blackbird from falling apart as they re-enter Earth's atmosphere. The X-Men on the ground are flipping out, all crowded around Moira as they wait for news. Jean, who has managed to hold the plane together, is about to fly out of an open hatch and Wolverine regains consciousness and pulls her back from the brink of death - which is what he says Jean did for him psychically. And that's not even the whole issue! All of that action aside, the real reveal of Wolverine #75 is that his claws, which the reader has always assumed have been Weapon X implants, are bone. It's a really dynamic issue and it was a great introduction to how good X-Men comics can be. I'm kind of wondering/hoping that some of this issue makes its way into the season finale - it seems silly to write that now, when so many people have already seen it and I'm behind - but I'm looking forward to what this last episode brings, regardless. It's been really fun watching this new show, because it reminds me of the feeling of discovering X-Men when I was in middle school and how different it was from anything else I'd read as a kid. I had read comics for as long as I could remember, but they tended to be Disney comics (Donald Duck, Uncle Scrooge) or the Harvey comics (Richie Rich, Casper). (The Batman comic I had read as a kid was too much for me - it was some grim tale of women being murdered and dismembered, and I didn't pick up another Batman comic for a long time.) Superheroes with powers were new and fun and there was a lot to learn about them. The 90s were also a great time to start reading comic books, because they were not only everywhere, but so much new stuff was happening in the world of comic books, like the birth of Image Comics and the rise of indie creators. I feel like I knew a lot about what was going on in the comics world back then, because I could read Wizard every month and be up to date. I would say the 90s were also the beginning of the end of the Comics Code Authority. Yesterday I scanned most of the first issue of Murder of Crows. I'm excited about it. I can't wait for y'all to see it. I'm going to boo hoo hoo when I have that first published issue in my hands. I know I haven't posted in forever. Two months!! I may have been busy. I feel like I have been super crazy busy. I really don't have a lot of hustle or Type A or girlboss energy in me, so there's only so much I can juggle at one time. I go to work, I do grad school, I work on this comic book, I do some very bare bones volunteering for the alumnae alliance at my alma mater. Anyway, I took this month off from grad school because there is only so much I can do at once and I was feeling like toast. (Grad school, for whatever reason, is month by month and sometimes just a two-week class, so at least there's that.) Apparently I wrote the worst final of my life which I received a 75 on in a class I really wanted to do well in, so that bummed me out like hell yesterday because not only did I get this low grade but it also lowered my overall grade by like 15 points. I absolutely cried about it yesterday. In a Dark Mirror was one of the Amazon Prime First Reads and I picked it up because it seemed to be based on the Slenderman stabbings. I remember writing about the trial on ONTDCreepy...I bet that is one of the last posts there. Maybe I should post about this book on ONTDCreepy and see if anyone else is still watching the community.
This book is a work of fiction and it was okay. I read it yesterday in one sitting, more or less. It follows the girl who was more of an accomplice to the stabbing, Maddie, and tells the story of her release from the mental hospital ten years after the stabbing and trying to reintegrate into society interspersed with flashbacks from her actions when she was twelve. Slenderman is still pretty much Slenderman, but Kat Davis just refers to the entity as "Him", which was more ominous. I wonder if the idea of Slenderman is trademarked now after all those movies, or if it's just more serious to rename the idea as a more vague entity called Him. Kat Davis did a terrific job of writing Maddie's emotionally immature mom and shitty born-again stepdad. This was a very realistic novel in that there really isn't much happening at the conclusion, and it kind of left me wishing the author had taken a different direction. I'm not sure if it's because it's based on a real life tragedy and the author wanted to respect those people (in this novel, just as in real life, the stabbing victim manages to survive) or because the author was going for a plot twist that would be more realistic, or both, but I wanted her to either lean into the supernatural aspect (from the other girl's perspective, Him is real and she sees and speaks with him, so there was potential to lean into the horror idea of Him actually being real) or into the internet crazies aspect (there is a website dedicated to Him and to the girls' crime, where the girls are referred to as "The Founders", that Maddie checks even though she knows it could violate the terms of her early release). The plot twist revolves around the internet crazies aspect, but it was less actually twisty than I would have liked; it twists, and then untwists, and then the conclusion just fizzled out for me. It wasn't terrible, it just wasn't very powerful. It felt like the author was holding back. My brother got me a care package from Silver Sprocket (thank you!!) and one of the goodies was Benji Nate's Girl Juice. I read it this morning on the bus ride to work and it was so terrific and funny. I've been a fan of Benji Nate since I read her comic Hell Phone, and Girl Juice was so fun. I was laughing out loud on the bus. It's mostly one-page gags, kind of like Jillian Tamaki's SuperMutant Magic Academy. Anyway. I love love loved it. The perfect way to start your morning. Made a little run of these prints for FREE THE BOOKS: A Print Exhibition. It runs through the month of March at the Evanston Public Library in Illinois.
One of these prints did not come out super great (lots of extraneous markings). I have five on this thin paper and a couple more on thicker paper, before I changed papers and brayers (and before they extended the deadline, so I had more time to make a nice one to send in.) I'm going to try to get the shop part of the site set up by March, but if you want to buy one of these guys they're $15. Shoot me a lil ole email at royalmontgomery [at] gmail [dot] com and I can let you know what everything else in the run looks like. I re-read a lot of The Sandman last week or so. I skipped a couple parts ('Brief Lives', 'Fables and Nocturnes'), but my favorites are 'The Kindly Ones' and 'The Wake', anyway, so it was fine. I really like how interwoven the characters are - Barbie from 'The Doll's House' reappearing in 'A Game of You', Ken from 'The Doll's House' now in Sandman: Nightmare Country.
I found Sandman: Nightmare Country because I found Sandman Special: Thessaly and needed to know what happened. The ways that DC have tried to lead the reader through these books is very poor. They sent me from Thessaly to Nightmare Country #4 to Dead Boy Detectives, and that is not the reading order at all. The reading order is Nightmare Country, Thessaly, Nightmare Country: The Glass House. Whatever is happening in Dead Boy Detectives I don't know and I don't really want to find out because 1) it's super boring 2) the continuity does not make sense based on the events of the books that actually are telling the story I want to read. One of the things that is terrific about The Sandman is that the writing is great. The story is not always satisfying. It does not always come to an end that is just and wrapped up in a bow and everyone is living happily ever after, but Neil Gaiman tells it in such a way that it doesn't matter. There are a lot of messy stories with messy people, gods, and every kind of being in between, and it's just told so well that it's very real. When I saw that James Tynion IV had written the Thessaly one-shot, I was super excited. I've been reading a lot of his other work and so I knew I was walking into something good. Unfortunately, the art in the Thessaly one-shot is poorly done - the same artist did Nightmare Country #6 and the already sloppy work is even worse in that issue. (Tynion IV also wrote the two Nightmare Country mini-series.) The art for the rest of the two mini-series is mostly well-done, and the cover art is lovely, as seen above. I think it would be difficult for a new reader to fully grasp the storylines in these books, because they're very heavily steeped in the Sandman lore. But for people who know the characters and their origins, it's a terrific tale that is still unfolding - the next installment is coming out in April of 2024. I definitely have a new appreciation for Morpheus' re-made nightmare, Corinthian, and I'm happy to see more of Thessaly and the new incarnation of Dream. I went back and read The Sandman Presents: The Thessaliad as well. I love reading about this clever, calculating witch and how she moves through the world. The thing about bad art is it motivates me to get some work done. So I have been plugging away in the studio, much to the dismay of my sleep schedule. Not sure when I will get the time for the non-Murder of Crows comics I've been thumbnailing in my sketchbook, but we'll get there. Another year, another chance. In my review of last year, I found that things had gone...pretty well, actually. There were some bad things, but there were a lot of good things. The good things edged out the bad things for the first time in a long time. For that, I'm very grateful.
I have a hard time focusing on a whole year's worth of resolutions and so I have been doing these monthly challenges. The sketchbook challenge was okay. I think it was good. The drawings themselves are not good, but having myself do this whether I wanted to or not was a good exercise. I even felt weird on the first day of February when I realized I didn't have to fill a sketchbook page on that day. My goal for February is to buckle down and finish the first issue of Murder of Crows. Click on the "Read More" button if you want to see the sketchbook pages from January. I was thinking about reading the first John Bellairs Johnny Dixon mystery, which is called The Curse of the Blue Figurine, but I logged on to Hoopla and now none of these books are available anymore. So I went on eBay and bought a bunch of them for $30. I didn't buy all of them - I think The Trolley to Yesterday has a really low re-read value for me personally, and I don't think I bought any of the ones that Brad Strickland wrote. I've been working on upkeep on a Substack which is sadnightcrimes.substack.com, it updates on Wednesdays and Sundays. I draw a little illustration for it. I got hit by a truck two weeks ago and it made me a little sore physically, but mentally and emotionally it really knocked me down. I mean, it physically knocked me down also, but the effects were more emotional than anything else. This series is really fun and I have been telling everyone about it. It's set in 1920s New York City, and the first book follows Evie O'Neill, who has been exiled to New York by her parents after one of her "party tricks" reveals that a high class boy - who is of course engaged to a high class girl- has knocked up a lower class girl. Evie can read objects - psychometry - and she winds up in the care of her uncle, who runs the fictional Museum of American Folklore, Superstition, and the Occult. The first book involves a supernatural murderer, the second a sleeping sickness that affects people who are dreaming, and the third examines what Diviners are and how they came to be. Turns out that there are more Diviners than just Evie, and they all have similar origins - what can her uncle tell her about the mysterious Project Buffalo?
These books are quite long - the first one was a bit of a slow burn but I ran through the last two very quickly. I'm waiting for the library to pull the last one for me - if they don't hurry up I'm going to pop down there and pull it myself. I'm not sure what happened after the first one, but I haven't seen any of the sequels have a cover style like the image above - the design of the covers changed and I don't really like them that much. This one is a little more mysterious, I think. The next book that I'm waiting for, The King of Crows, is the last book, and I'm a little sad about it! I'm not really ready for the end of these fun flapper friends. Usually I never say this, but this would be a really terrific tv series. The rights for a movie were already acquired, but the last book came out in 2020, so I don't know if a project never got off the ground or if the pandemic slowed things down. I don't know if anyone reads my little old blog anymore, but it's useful. I like having it. I think I'm going to leave Twitter pretty shortly. I'm on Bluesky, LiveJournal, and substack. And here. I didn't realize this until I opened weebly to write, but I read the remaining five books in the Johnny Dixon series after the last post. I just finished the final book, The Wrath of the Grinning Ghost. I'm very very grateful for Irwin Terry's blog Goreyana, which is still active! Mr. Terry has posted all of these dustjackets for the John Bellairs books that were illustrated by Edward Gorey. (The new covers are so plain in comparison.) I've been reading these books on Hoopla, and they all have the new ebook covers: All right, let's see. - The Chessmen of Doom: Classic Bellairs in that there is some weird stuff happening that is never fully explained. Suspension of Disbelief Dept.: Prof. Childermass gives up on a $10 million dollar inheritance because he doesn't want to deal with the hassle of contesting his brother Peregrine's will. (Is tenure THAT good? Maybe it was.) Loved the witch at the end and the mention of Hecate. - The Secret of the Underground Room: Johnny, Fergie, and Professor Childermass have to rescue Father Higgins, which entails a trip to England. Johnny Dixon truly gets to go all over the place and Professor Childermass foots the bill. I'm sure the idea of Johnny and Fergie running around by themselves in a foreign land would scandalize parents these days, but this is the 1950s, so of course these thirteen year olds are on their own for most of the day while the Professor is in the library finding clues. I was going to finish writing about these other books, but Weebly just logged me out as I was writing this post and I lost about half of what I had just written. So I will do that another time because now I'm irritated.
Also, while I was writing this post I found that there is another book? I'm not sure how I feel about that, though. I actually haven't read the first book in the series! Maybe I will go back and read that one. Well, I knew I said that I wasn't going to buy or check out anything new until I cleared my backlog, but my willpower was not strong enough. I am obsessed with these little Johnny Dixon mysteries. I don't know why! It's like a craving for food. That's the only way I can describe it. I read this time-travel one even though it did not have the most interesting premise and it was VERY silly compared to the previous installations. Not silly like humorous, although I did appreciate Brewster's once-in-a-thousand-years magic trick, but silly in that it was over the top. It was still fine, though. I'm on the next one now, which has a much more interesting premise: Professor Childermass' brother has died, leaving behind a huge estate (both monetarily and in property) - but his will has some Mysterious Conditions! I hope this one has some haunted house action. I like these little friends. Daryl Surat reports that Wikipedia describes this series as "children's Gothic horror", but I wouldn't consider them horror books. Maybe "children's occult mystery."
Job hunting is becoming depressing, but also kind of infuriating? Starting to make me feel kind of: Why are these people wasting my time, energy, and sometimes money? I just had an interview and the start date they quoted was a week away from the time they informed candidates of a decision. At that point I kind of figured there was an internal candidate for that position, because how is anyone going to relocate and get settled in a week? So...why are you wasting my time? And getting my hopes slightly higher than off the ground? Same kind of deal with my friend from LPL: she applies for a position, they have someone in mind, everyone tells her that they have x person in mind and she says, well, I'll withdraw my application and they say oh no no you shouldn't withdraw. So we're just living on pathological hope over here and very little money. Even though we have master's degrees. Okay. I am a member of the American Academy of Religion which is nice because it gives me JSTOR access. They had a little career exploration thing and I went to log in to that but it's for people who have PhDs. I do not have a PhD. I wish I had a PhD. Just a little. I think about getting a PhD. Then I think about all the work that I did to do my bachelor's degree at 30, and all the work I did and the trauma I went through with former friends and family I no longer communicate with to get my master's degree at age 40, all of which was to better my job prospects so that I could buy a fuckin' house & stop moving around like a backpacker. And here I am with a terrific education and I do not make enough money to rent an apartment on my own. I do not own a bed. Most of my belongings are in storage. Meanwhile, everyone I know who is making good money has a BA, if that. It's really, really depressing. So I'm sad because I want a PhD, I want to study and know and read, but it doesn't seem like it's going to make my life any better and will possibly make it worse. Although I don't know if it gets much worse. I guess in 2018 I had seventy-five cents in my bank account. That was probably worse. Yesterday I put on the Confessions Special Edition for my little studio soundtrack. Confessions came out in 2004. In 2004 I was waiting tables and had no college education but I had my own apartment. Maybe I can get a book deal out of all these restaurant stories. I tell you this shit has got to stop. My thing about this blog is I will not write a bad review of something terrible that I read. Bad things that happen are, for whatever reason, more memorable than good things, and so I would rather promote good things and try to re-wire my brain to remember the good things.
HOWEVER. I am going to use this blog, which no one reads anyway, to write my petty blog post about Lexington Public Library, because I have not worked there in over a year but my friends still work there and I am so tired of hearing about my friend getting consistently passed over for promotions, whether that's being interviewed for a position that admin already has someone in mind for or not being interviewed at all. When I was at LPL, I was a part timer. I was like, this is great, I have my foot in the door, I will get my MSLS and they'll promote me! I loved LPL. I worked at Northside and I LOVED Northside. The vibes were immaculate. My coworkers were all delightful and helpful. The patrons were mostly hilarious and nice. Of course there was the occasional rude person, but overall? It was a great place to work and I wanted to stay there. When I first moved to Kentucky, I was so so homesick for Florida, but after I got a job at LPL I was like, you know, I could stay here. I like Lexington (and still do). I saw myself settling down and being in Kentucky for a while. In retrospect, that was a mistake. I put all of my eggs in LPL's basket. I applied for a full time position and didn't get hired. I told myself that was ok! I didn't want to be a full time Library Assistant, I wanted to be a Librarian I. I told myself to be patient. My bestie at LPL also was a part-time LA with her MSLS. Kickoff to Summer Reading was coming up. This was a huge deal. It was like, petting zoo, outside activities, Scholastic Book Fair, just a very busy day for the branch. The branch manager asked me to come in on my day off to help. I went in on my day off to help and she told me, after the whole day was over (of course), that it was hard to move up from part time to an L1. That I needed more experience in programming, or this or that or the other thing. (It was always some flimsy excuse.) I just sat there in shock. I couldn't even speak. My classmates had just graduated and were getting L1 positions at libraries they'd never set foot in, but I couldn't get an L1 INTERVIEW at a place where EVERYONE KNEW ME? Now, I have programming experience. Any kind of non-academic thing I did in undergrad was RUNNING PROGRAMS. Movie nights, dinners, workshops, dances, Lavender Graduation, bonfires, you name it. I can run programs for adults, I can run programs for teens. I had just come out of what essentially had been running programs from 7am to 4pm for four children under the age of nine. So again, a flimsy excuse. They interviewed my work bestie and she did not get this position. The person who got the position was someone we worked with, who is a fine person, but they did not have the MSLS AND the reason they were hired was because the branch wanted someone who was bilingual. All of that is fine. I have nothing against this person who was promoted. I just think that 1) if being bilingual is the difference between getting hired for something and not getting hired for it, then that should be in the posting and 2) all I ever heard was that this person, who was hired on the basis that they can speak two languages, would only speak the second language to a patron if Literally No One Else Was Available. Otherwise it would be, "Ask _____". One of our managers was retiring and the other manager was managing two branches, so even if I did all the programming every day no one would be there to witness it. Because I had, in fact, not applied anywhere else due to pathological hope that LPL would appreciate me, I had to extend the lease on my UKY dorm because I was about to be completely screwed. My program was up, I had to be out of the housing, and I had no full-time job or the prospect of one. The person who was hired as the replacement to our previous manager listened to everything I told them about LPL, programming, how unfair they were being, and just did jack shit. (Well, not jack shit, because I've noticed that the programming that I wanted to do that I talked to this manager about wound up being programming at the library, just I wasn't leading it or getting the credit for it. As you can see, I have good programming ideas.) (I also emailed someone at Central about having a staff art show in the central branch's gallery, which, of course, happened after I left.) So now here I am a year later and I'm still mad as hell at LPL for shafting me. I went to HR after two days of not sleeping because I was incandescent with rage and all HR did was tell me, basically, You Have Not Because You Ask Not. "Is it poor leadership? Yes," the HR guy said. "But it's not illegal." I also told my work bestie to go to HR about LPL's bullshit and the HR guy looked at her calendar and kept trying to schedule a meeting for the times she was not available. She just got passed over for another promotion, AGAIN, didn't even get an interview. "Part of me just wants to cancel or stop all my programs and leave the library," she said. And I get it! But I don't think that would do anything, I don't think LPL would give a rat's ass, because they don't seem to care about the people who work for them. We would get emails about people being promoted after ten years. Ten years!! I was so alarmed. You were an LA for TEN YEARS and then you got promoted to an L1?? Here's what would happen if my friend packed her shit and left: it would mildly inconvenience everyone for about two months or more or however long it took HR to write and post an opening for her job. No lessons would be learned by branch managers or HR or LPL admin. They would add an item to their yearly meeting plan about how to retain people and prevent turnover (just like they had an item on their yearly meeting when I was there about not relying so much on part-timers, and then every month or so there would be a part-time LA position on the UKY listserv). There's nothing we can do to make them act right. They don't give a flying fuck as long as whatever they're doing isn't legal discrimination (thanks for letting me know, HR guy), and it sucks. I'm mad as hell at them on my behalf, I'm even angrier on my friend's behalf, and it's so frustrating to know that it doesn't matter. |
AuthorArtist, essayist, divinity school dropout. Here for a good time, not for a long time. Archives
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