What to Read Between Murder Mystery Games
Most of my month, thus far, has been full of murder mystery games. The books are starting to reflect that, too.
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It’s October! As a late-in-life goth, I love Halloween season and plan to make this month’s newsletters a little ~spookier~ than usual. Let’s go.
Because I am a menace who can’t be stopped, I’m theming this week’s newsletter around ‘Paradise Killer’, an absurdly cool vaporwave dream of a video game that I spent about 20 hours playing through. It’s an open world mystery game in which you, an exiled investigator, get brought back to your cult-run island paradise home to solve the murder of your cult’s leaders. You can design your own justice, sleep with suspects, and talk to a god. There’s a lot of (often campily pink) blood. Big Halloween energy coming through these screenshots from the game.
The Articles
‘Great British Bake Off’ Is a Strange Vehicle for Change, Heated (~6 min). Netflix dropped new episodes of Great British Bake Off recently, which means I have been plowing my way through older seasons (long live Nadiya! Justice for Kimberley and Chetna!) in the company of some clotted cream and scones from Tea & Sympathy. Ruby Tandooh, a finalist from the show’s fourth series, authored a piece earlier this year about how the show “raises profiles of POC while symbolizing an implicitly white Britishness”:
“For those who are spun through the ‘Great British Bake Off’ mill, those things that were once clearly delineated — possible, plausible, dream, and outlandish fantasy — begin to fold into one another as smoothly as beaten eggs into pastry cream. Baking presents itself as a space of endless opportunity when you have done well on perhaps the most well-known and -loved food competition ever to air. But when you’re a pawn in a game this big, so much more is at stake in a Yorkshire pudding or a babka than there ever ought to be.”
Her article goes well with this aptly-titled article, “I Hate Dishoom,” which lambasts the way “~contemporary Indian street food~” in London sanitizes Indian cuisine for a white audience and outlines the colonial history of British curry houses.
It also goes well with my best slap-of-the-subscribe-button this week: the inimitable Folu launched a newsletter in which she assesses the world’s best snacks that she’s never tasted. Each week, she scours reviews of four snacks—one sweet, one savory, one thirsty, one boozy—so that we can collectively imagine the global power of flavorful snacks.
In 2020, My Zoom Backgrounds Say Everything I’m Thinking, Level (~4 min). This article celebrates the power of the Zoom background as an extension of identity during a time when most of our interactions are virtual. While I will never really enjoy turning my camera on for meetings, it sounds like the author of this article has developed a rotation of virtual backgrounds that express his sense of humor, his identity as a Black man, and the “ever-trash news cycle” of the year.
Why Are Kpop Groups So Big? The Pudding ft. Kontinentalist (~5 min). The soundtrack of my year has been my K-pop playlist. K-pop is undeniably huge, not just in popularity but in the size of the K-pop groups themselves:
“...rock bands typically consist of a lead singer, a drummer, a bassist, and a guitarist. K-pop group members have similar specialized roles across leadership, rap, dance, vocals and visuals. This kind of segmentation allows for a clever division of labor and screen time, song parts, and placement in photoshoots and choreography are often allocated according to these roles.”
This analysis from the data viz wizards at The Pudding and Kontinentalist includes a detailed historical timeline of the growth of K-pop (and, for those new to the genre, a playlist!).
Sohla El-Waylly Adds Hot Dogs to Soup, Grub Street (~8 min). It’s been a big week of food media for me. Sohla El-Waylly launched a new YouTube cooking show, which means we have been blessed with a Grub Street Diet column as part of promoting the show. I am deeply infatuated with her concept of making a charcuterie and cheese board that lives in the kitchen all day, so you can grab a bit of it whenever you pass by.
I'm A Gamer Girl Now, Gold-Plated Girls (~2 min). It feels like the internet’s latest obsession is actually wholesome this time: ‘Among Us,’ a “multiplayer social deduction” game that involves jelly bean-like astronauts searching for an imposter on their spaceship, has been blowing up my feeds. This newsletter has one of the most delightful descriptions of the game’s mechanics:
“You compete with a group of friends, Internet strangers, or a mix of both. In a round of the game, you and up to nine other people are sent to an adorable little space station, where you must complete basic tasks. While you try to do them, some of your fellow jelly bean astronauts are trying to kill you. Every time a body is discovered, the beans try to vote out the killers. If you get rid of them before they kill you all, you win. If you die, you come back as an adorable ghost bean who can finish tasks.”
The Guardian wrote about the game’s popularity from the angle of “the paranoid Covid era,” but I prefer to think that its low-stakes nature and the way it lets you bond with strangers over something silly make it resonate right now. Gold-Plated Girls nails this point:
“Playing ‘Among Us’ this weekend felt like the first time I’d talked to strangers in …. forever. It was the first time in a long time I had something to gossip about, secrets to keep, drama to decode. It was thrilling in the way few things about quar life are.”
The Books
This week I finished Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss, a compact and gloomy read that revels in the grotesque and uncanny setting of North England’s bogs and brambles and fog and mist. It focuses on a 17-year-old girl’s summer spent emulating the lives of Iron Age Britons, in which escalating acts of violence make her question her personhood. It was dreary and darkly magical, which makes it a great October read. I’ll probably read it a second time for more impact.
This Week’s Book Haul
I bought The Collected Schizophrenias by Esmé Weijun Wang, an award-winning collection of essays in which the author “maps the terrain of her mental illness” and Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs?: And Other Questions About Dead Bodies by Caitlin Doughty, an intriguing Q&A with a mortician, from The Strand. I also bought Foucalt In California by Simeon Wade, which chronicles discourse daddy Foucault’s LSD trips, from Open Borders Books.
Here are some dystopian books to read if you’d like to escape to a darker timeline; several great mysteries and thrillers by African writers; and some mood-driven book recommendations that, as a lover of specificity, I deeply appreciate.
That’s all for now. Until next week, enjoy this tidbit of trivia that combines contemporary politics with a nostalgic look at my teenage bookshelf.