Halloween Reading: Monsters! Mormons!
An apt title that encompasses my favorite holiday, Tony Kushner's Angels In America, my trip to Utah, and thoughts on Rachel Yoder's Nightbitch.
Welcome to another edition of Amateur Bibliotherapy, my newsletter about book-y things. Use this Google Form at any time to tell me about what you’re reading—you might be featured here or on my Bookstagram! I’m an affiliate of Bookshop.org, which means that I may make a small commission if you make a purchase through my affiliate links. That commission will be donated to Welcome To Chinatown before the year’s end.
Happy Halloween! If you’re not colossally hungover from last night’s festivities as a slutty meme or worn down from toting around a costumed dog, I hope you’re able to engorge on candy corn and watch a seasonal movie of your choice while enjoying a Bone Daddy state of mind.
I celebrated yesterday by seeing The Woman In Black, a stage adaptation of Susan Hill’s 1983 gothic novel of the same name. It was a most seasonally-appropriate haunted house tale. The McKittrick Hotel’s Club Car has previously hosted personal favorites like the eerie and creepy song cycle Ghost Quartet, so it’s no wonder I enjoyed it so much.
ok but MONSTERS and MORMONS were PROMISED
First of all, the monsters and mormons thing that has latched itself in my brain for 15 years is directly from page 53 of Angels In America, which I am once again begging you to read/watch. Second of all, regular readers of this little newsletter might have noticed that I haven’t been in touch in a few weeks. I was squadded up with pals in Moab, Utah and simply could not find a moment away from climbing rocks or playing the fanfic-centric Slash board game to write! We did leave our friendship compound to hike in Arches National Park, a “red-rock wonderland” of extraterrestrial-esque rock fins and stone arches. Whoever designed the tragically-defunct theme restaurant of my youth, Mars 2112, clearly visited Moab.
The town’s main drag included the lovely Back of Beyond Bookstore, which specializes in books on natural history, locally-written guides to the Colorado Plateau, and environmental literature. My Utahan pal Al also brought me to The King’s English Bookshop in Salt Lake City, an independent bookstore that has been in business for more than 40 years.
My time exploring the beehive state’s absolutely Martian nature subsequently inspired me to watch Dune (2021) and, unfortunately, I love anything that includes a giant killer worm.
anna, books are the subject of this newsletter
Right, right, yes. I’ve been so busy playing Dead Cells, a hack-and-slash video game about a headless prisoner endlessly trying to escape his fate, that I haven’t been reading much new stuff. I am currently making my way through A Lesson In Vengeance by Victoria Lee, a witchy and sapphic dark academia story about rich girls and occult dabbling and death.
🥩
I did recently finish Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder, which was 100% bonkers. The plot is simple: an initially unnamed stay-at-home mother is convinced that she is becoming a dog. From the first page, the reader is thrust into a “feral fairy tale” of therianthropic magical realism; it’s “exhilarating, even cathartic, to watch this woman’s rage take a corporeal form” as she changes her son’s diapers while running her tongue over newly-elongated canine teeth (Chicago Review of Books). As the mother spirals into her delusions—are they delusions if they come with tangible tufted hair and a spur of bone that feels like a tail?—of near-lycanthropy, she unleashes herself from her Midwestern perspective on what it means to be a perfect mother. The second half of the book, in which the mother and son play “doggy games” and sniff and bite and play like pups, displays an unbridled form of familial bonding and the resurgence of the mother as Nightbitch herself: an unrestrained expansion of “motherhood into new, surreal dimensions.” There are bunnies as literary devices(!), multi-level marketing schemes, and monstrous moms. Apart from a movie adaptation of this deranged tale starring Amy Adams, what more could you want? (Assuming that the book passes your CW/TW test.) This is not a book for everyone, but those looking for an unhinged interrogation of monstrous/magical mommies (the line between those two words being pretty thin) will enjoy it.
RIYL Bunny by Mona Awad; Medusa; rare steak; bacchanalia; Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son; body horror; The Dinner Party by Stephen Morrison.
That’s all from me this week. If you’re also re-entering your office for the first time in nearly 2 years, this comic from The Lily articulates an optimistic and (hopefully) relatable perspective on going places again.