Blood Meridian (cont'd) & Helen House
the dreaded f-word
Hello welcome to my blog (basically) where I just talk about books I’m reading, the conditions in which a video game more or less counts as a book, and what the act of reading is like, except I’ve looked over what I’ve posted lately and yeah I forgot about books just a little bit.
I’m pretty meh on Blood Meridian so far. Last time I mentioned reading it I was waiting for it to make sense, and it’s kind of drifted as much as it’s started to come together. Our nameless main character seems wholly abandoned, but it’s become clearer the novel is more so really about a type of violence a person like him becomes accessory to. I don’t totally hate the abandoned main character in principle; on a personal tastes level I don’t miss him because he was an unnamed, unlikeable, aimless man who very intentionally didn’t have much going on, and on a “how is this text working” level, it’s honestly pretty interesting to use a main character juuuust barely long enough until you can write about your real main character, the concept of violence.
I’m tempted to say it’s an anticolonialist view of violence specifically, but it might be more accurate to say the main character of Blood Meridian is the nihilism of colonialism. Now, the nerds will argue that’s a theme, but that argument is boring. The book sort of has characters in the normal sense (ie, people), but instead of developing their motivations it mostly just depicts massacre after massacre as just what one does every day with no real end goal in sight, like an office job.
Thus, it’s been a difficult read. I did not want to take it to the beach.
My girlfriend and I went to the beach over the weekend and I’m trying to allow the beach into my heart. I have long hated it because it’s crowded, takes forever to get there and back, and I sunburn easily. But we saw the Barbie movie and our job is beach now. I brought my Kindle but wasn’t sure if this was a great idea given the sand, Blood Meridian definitely did not seem like a great idea given the trying to enjoy the beach, and looking around my apartment I found the tiny ~80-page novelette Helen House by Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya. Helen House is a spooky, supernatural-lite horror story in which a lesbian couple goes to one parents’ house for the first time, and it turns out that’s exactly what I want to read at the beach.
I don’t exactly write “reviews” here, but conversely I don’t want to write about reading for writers, although I dunno, this scratched so many itches for me it sort of has left me thinking why don’t I try writing horror, why isn’t this a thing I already try to do? (Not counting my poetry about horror movies, which, if I were to really scrutinize what compels me to write, aren’t terribly different from what I try to do with blogging.) It moves quickly, is immediately compelling, doesn’t withhold information from the viewer like a lot of horror resorts to but still manages to unfold like a horrible Russian nesting doll of lust and grief.
The character work, in sharp contrast to Blood Meridian (god, ReadOnly is so stupid lol), is the focus here. Our main character is grieving her sister who died a few years ago in a car accident and has since turned to sex to feel alive, feels like this makes her a bad partner, or worse a barely living person. The girlfriend oddly doesn’t reveal that she also has a dead sister – who died when they were young children – until right before the two take a trip to her parents’ as a warning that her parents might be a little weird because of it. It’s like lesbian Get Out or horror Happiest Season, if those aren’t already those things, respectively. The spooks are pretty subtle, which works great at first setting up the mind game of a good horror story, although it carries through to the ending which kind of just is an ending. I didn’t love it, it didn’t ruin it. I bet if I thought about it enough and read more queer theory I could appreciate it.
Smarter – and also more – people than me have written about why we think horror is fun. And it’s also not difficult to contrast the nihilistic violence of a “not-fun” read like Blood Meridian with the metaphorical violence of a “fun” (beach???) read like Helen House. The book I’m reading on my Kindle, untouched on the sand, is a collection of essays about queer readings of horror movies (It Came From The Closet) and a common theme in there – also, coincidentally, in Helen House because the grad student main character is studying this – is the queer reader seeing themselves in the monster, one outsider to another. I’m not a lesbian (cited needed) but there’s more to play with here than Blood Meridian’s heady evil in the heart of all man fare; I instantly had fun lying on the beach reading a main character haunted by her own horniness, knowing this is a horror novel and some literal haunting is going to happen in some way or another, wondering how the two were going to scare meaning out of the other, was fun. Looking back on my reading list, I often exclude room to have fun.
I forget what my girlfriend started reading at the beach but she said it wasn’t that good.
Standard plugs zone:
Over on Trash Garbage, I made a playlist for everyone else obsessed with the psychedelic drumming band warmup recap opening scene of the new spiderverse movie because it is all I’ve thought about for a month. gwen stacy’s spiderverse band vision board. Co-trash curator Sammie described it as “what Trash Garbage does best, which is get inspired by something and then create a whole vibe off it”, which is a shockingly concise explanation of what Trash Garbage is outside of “so it’s just spotify playlists?”
I’ve joined the team at Kissing Dynamite as a Book Reviews Editor! I write reviews of small press/self-published poetry books (the first one is now live), but I’ll also be editing other writers’ reviews of small press poetry books. So: hit me up if 1) you’re a poet with a book coming out, or 2) you’ve got a review of a poetry book you want to write!