forever we try

I got a very fun and bittersweet Treasure Planet fic featuring not-quite-post-canon Jim & Silver meeting up one last time and now feel very spoiled, not just because Treasure Planet is the near-and-dear movie of my heart (and the request I was secretly most excited about) but because after having to default I wasn't expecting a gift. 

Learn What's Never Shown: Jim Hawkins stumbles across an old friend while on a mission from the Intersteller Academy. 

Other great fics that jumped out during my first pass through the collection:

The Colors of Lorbanery (Earthsea): The woman who had once been Akaren stayed inside her house for several days, changing.

A wonderful, compassionate look at one of my favorite characters from The Farthest Shore. 

And stormy grew the sea (Sir Patrick Spens): They say that the King of Scotland will never touch wine.

A ghost story with gorgeous, folktale-style prose. 

Inauspicious Auguries (The Fantod Pack): Fragments of a life refracted.

Not a ghost story, but still creepy; this fic is based around Edward Gorey's Fantod Pack, an eerie and nonsensical deck of tarot cards. It's eerie and nonsensical, and also a total treat.

Flora's Adventures in Ghostland (The Turn of the Screw): An excerpt from the beloved children's novel. 

Henry James meets Alice in Wonderland. 

Reading

The Turn of the Screw by Henry James, a reread I meant to do over the Halloween season and never got around to. The first time I read this I was in high school, maybe even middle school, so even though before diving back in I remembered the basic plot and the creepiness, I didn't remember most of the actual encounters with the ghosts--which are eclipsed in creepiness only by some of the conversations the narrator, a governess, has with the two kids in her charge, Miles and Flora. There's such a shivery, I-know-you-know-I-know vein of horror running under most of their interactions, especially her conversations with Miles. It's fantastic. 

The Girls at the Kingfisher Club by Genevieve Valentine--another reread! This doesn't quite nab the #1 spot as my favorite 12 Dancing Princesses retelling of all time (that would be Entwined by Heather Dixon: it has a lot less bite than Kingfisher Club, but it's sweeter, with a big ol' dash of Gothic horror). It comes in a very close second, though.  I love the setting (1920s New York! Flapper princesses! Dance halls and speakeasies!), the prickliness of all the sisters, and the fact that it's ultimately much more their story than the story of their romances--though there are romances, and those romances are handled in some unusual, interesting ways. 

Read

I finished Trick Mirror. 

The Mark of Cain by Lindsey Barraclough, the sequel to Long Lankin. It suffers a bit from not having the same sense of mystery, but it does have the same sense of oppressive atmosphere, and the ending wraps things up with a little more resolution for the characters, which is nice. 

Watched

Он – дракон | I Am Dragon, aka the big dumb Russian dragon movie I loved with all my heart. The story--a princess is kidnapped on her wedding day by a dragon who oh-so-conveniently can transform into a hot and sweet, if angsty dude; at first she's solely focused on getting back to her equally hot but much less sweet fiance, until of course dragon dude wins her over with his angst and sweetness--is more or less Beauty and the Beast, but with dragons, so there's never any doubt that Miroslava (the princess) will end up with Arman (the hot dragon dude). Instead, you can sit back and enjoy scenes like Princess Teaches Hot Dragon Dude How to Spruce up His Man Cave (I love that most of Miroslava's advice for living as a human boils down to "Get better at interior decorating; also wipe your feet,") and Hot Dragon Dude Teaches Princess How to Fly a Kite.

The scenery and costumes are both gorgeous, and the worldbuilding is a little thin, but satisfying; there are lots of cool details like a wedding ritual where the bride gets decked out in a gorgeous costume, lies down in a little gondola, and floats across the water to her groom. The whole thing reminds me of some of the Russian movies and soap operas I used to watch with my sisters and my mom, in that even when things get cheesy there's this genuine feeling and sweetness to them, which makes the cheesiness not just bearable but enjoyable. 

One day I'll have it together enough to post more than belated exchange reveals, but that day is not today. 

I ended up writing in two fandoms that I'd never written in before, which is always a little nerve-wracking, but overall I'm pretty happy with how both fics turned out. 

A House by the Sea (Ghost Quartet): Pearl White is snow-white, and Rose Red is blood-red, and they live together in a house by the sea.

like gun metal, cold and unsure (Peaky Blinders): Naturally, Esme meets the brother who styles himself head of the Shelby family days before she meets the brother she’s to marry.   

First off, I read Paperbacks from Hell by Grady Hendrix, which is an absolutely hilarious/delightful, and very pretty (for a definition of "pretty" that includes all the bizarre 80s pulp horror covers you could ever ask for) overview of the insanity that was 80s horror paperbacks. Just thanks to my own interests, I was especially into the "Creepy Kids," "Real Estate Nightmares," and "Gothic and Romantic" chapters, but the entire book was a treat. Being an overview, it's more interested in getting you interested in the genre (which, mission accomplished) than going super in-depth, though it also paints a great broad-strokes picture of both the publishing history of horror paperbacks and the cultural context that would make writing a book about Nazi leprechauns seem like a good idea. Oh, and there are also lots of great one-liners, though my favorite has to be this one describing Robert Marasco, who wrote the incredibly creepy-sounding haunted house novel, Burnt Offerings: "Marasco was a high school English teacher, which meant any illusions he’d ever had about human nature had long since been stomped to death." 

I also decided to reread Long Lankin, which scared the crap out of me in high school: it's a YA ghost story based on the Child ballad (which is scary enough on its own) and set in 1950s England. For some reason, YA horror is pretty hit-or-miss for me--either I really click with it or I absolutely don't. Long Lankin was one of the ones I remember really clicking with; I loved it to pieces even though I literally had trouble sleeping after I first read it, and rereading it I wasn't quite as scared (either because I already knew what was coming or because I've read and watched a lot more horror since high school), but I still loved it to pieces. The atmosphere is so creepingly oppressive, even from the get-go, and as things unspool it only gets worse and worse, until by the end you're praying that the characters will all make it out okay while being so, so scared that they won't. It's also got an unsentimental but very sweet depiction of a big family, three fantastic narrators, and creepy ballads being sung by an invisible someone just behind you. 

I'm increasingly bad at keeping track of them on DW, but here are three of my latest fics, all Hadestown, all written in the last three months or so. 

Awful Lot of Medicine: She samples it on the regular is the thing. Wind, rain, sunshine. Moonshine if she ain’t swapped moonshine out for starlight and starlight if she has. Not so much as’ll have Persephone falling-down drunk—that she saves for behind closed doors, mostly, where her husband can take to his office with a jaw set tight like a snare and the lips over that jaw zipped tighter. Just enough to warm her belly and her head pleasant-like, enough so as she feels halfway through winter already, halfway to home. [Technically the oldest of the bunch--I think I wrote it back in August, maybe even July--but fandomgiftbox  didn't reveal until yesterday, so I'm counting it as the newest.]

trembled when he laid me out: Mortal girl in question raises her chin. Says, “All right then.” [Missing scene; Hades/Eurydice.]

Letters from the Underground: Boss has got something pumping the black, cold blood through his black, cold veins. And something, she will admit, ain’t nothing. [Post-canon Hades & Eurydice, with Hades/Persephone and Orpheus/Eurydice ever-present in the background because of course. I wrote both this and Awful Lot of Medicine for acequeenking , who's a lovely person and who wrote me an absolutely fantastic--and fantastically long--Hades/Persephone fic way back when forhurtcomfortex . I'm pretty sure I'll never be able to repay her in kind, but I've been trying.]

...but I do have a Lydia Deetz icon, which is pretty much the same thing!

October weather has...very much not been a thing so far (even though we're only two days into the month, so I shouldn't complain, but also I should and will complain, because ninety-degree weather past September is ridiculous); I'll have to jury-rig myself some October/Halloween spirit.

I did rewatch Coraline the other night, and even though I'll always think the book is scarier (not by much, to be fair), the movie is also incredibly creepy in a way that gets under my skin. The intro sequence with the mechanical spider hands and the doll! The landlady's long-lost twin sister who disappeared in the same house! The Other Father, who actually loves Coraline in his own way (and how he eventually transforms when the Other Mother doesn't need him anymore always breaks my heart, in both the book and the movie). The mice-rats! The buttons!

The buttons. 

I've been putting together a (short) list of other horror and horror-ish movies to hopefully watch in the lead-up to Halloween. Not promising myself that I'll get to them all in time, but here are the ones I've been thinking of:

Beetlejuice (see above)
The Witch
Little Shop of Horrors
Midsommar
The Suspiria remake

Beetlejuice and The Witch I've seen before, and all the rest are movies I've been meaning to watch for ages--I love horror in theory, but in practice I haven't seen a whole bunch of it. With any luck, I'll try to write up at least a couple thoughts on each movie, too. 

Finished Black Sails! ...And the fourth season (especially the season/series finale) was so good I can't think of much else to say; it was incredibly well-plotted and ridiculously satisfying and if you love pirates or Treasure Island or gritty, playing-fast-and-loose-with-the-facts period pieces or complicated, not-necessarily-heroic characters who grow and change over time or lots of canonically queer characters or unexpectedly hopeful endings or any of those things in any combination, just watch it. Do not pass go, watch it and then come back here and we can talk about how amazing it is.

I actually wanted to do a from-episode-one rewatch as soon as I finished the last episode, and luckily for me my sister also wanted to start watching it, so we're working through about an episode a night (she works and I'm heading back into classes next week). It's interesting, having just blown through season 4, to go back to season 1 and see how different everyone is starting out: Eleanor's more or less secure in her role as the head fence/pirate queen of Nassau, secure enough to be a little cocky about it; Max sure isn't guileless but she comes across as much more innocent. Silver is a little shit (enjoyably so, but still); Jack is either going through a rough patch or nowhere near as competent as he thinks he is (yet); Vane is also nowhere near as competent as he thinks he is; Anne is exactly as competent as she thinks she is but saddled with Jack and Vane (and also about to be thrown into a major tailspin re: Max). Season 1 is also a good bit funnier than, I think, any of the other seasons--there's that absolutely hilarious part during negotiations in the third episode when Gates has to keep pulling Flint outside to remind him to at least try to be diplomatic. Come to think of it, a lot of the humor in the first season is thanks to Gates. He's a wonderful character, and knowing how the season ends I'm appreciating him a lot more this time around. 

You get the sense in the first season that everyone is just starting to get a feel for these people and how they interact with each other and what their core characteristics are. Sure, the main pieces are already in place, but the tone is a little more unsettled and a little more fluid...is it a funny, swashbuckling adventure story (sort of a TV-MA Pirates of the Caribbean minus all the magic) with some darker undertones or are the darker undertones the whole point? I mean, obviously there are plenty of dark and tragic and horrible things going on from the beginning, and though the later seasons get darker none of them are hopeless or humorless, but the first season, and, say, the first three episodes of the first season especially (right up until the last couple scenes of episode 3) feel lighter by comparison in a way I obviously didn't catch on to when I first watched them.

Oh, and of course now I have an ungodly amount of Black Sails fics saved to my "Marked For Later" list on AO3; I've been working my way through and might try to have a rec post up at some point. So far this one is a great exploration of the Jack & Anne & Vane relationship pre-canon, and this one focuses on Abigail Ashe (one of my favorite minor characters) finding her way forward after season 2. 

Did I love this book as a whole? Absolutely. Did I love the (first, plot-relevant) epilogue? ...Not so much.
( Longish, probably incoherent rant, plus 151-year-old spoilers )

Wi-fi was out through most of last week, so I got a lot of reading done, if not much else:

Read

Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat: A novel that reads more like interlocked novellas and covers the protagonist's life from when she's about twelve until up into her early twenties. When she's twelve, Sophie Caco leaves Haiti--very much against her will--to join her mother in New York City. By the point she eventually settles in and starts to become more "Americanized," secretly dating a non-Haitian (and much older) man and longing for some independence, her mother's own neuroses, which stem from an incredibly traumatic event in her past, are driving them apart. The mother-daughter relationship is the highlight of this book, and it's incredibly well-done; there's a lot of ugliness in her mother's past, and even though Sophie understands that the things she does( spoiler ) are motivated by a mix of tradition and trauma and genuine love, it doesn't make their reconciliation any easier. This book is hard-going, especially towards the end, but I enjoyed it quite a bit.

The Dew Breaker by Edwidge Danticat: "Dew breaker" was a synonym for "torturer" during the Duvalier regimes in Haiti; this novel/short story collection focuses on one who put that past behind him and fled to New York City. The short stories that make up the book are all for the most part interconnected--some of them focus on the dew breaker and his family, others on his tenants, and others on his victims or possible victims. Though in his past the dew breaker was by far and away a worse person than Sophie's mother in Breath, Eyes, Memory, both books are kind of similar in that they deal with the forgiveness of seemingly unforgivable things and how complicated that forgiveness is. Sure, the dew breaker is a different man now--but he's still in hiding. His wife constantly worries that one day they'll be found out and he'll be returned to Haiti to answer for his crimes (the story of how they met and she more or less redeemed him is my favorite in the whole book) and as a reader you aren't given much guidance on how to feel about that. Should he go back? Is living with all the memories of his past, plus the constant fear of being found out, punishment enough? For all the questions it raises the book doesn't give any straight answers, and I loved that. YMMV, though, considering what the guy's done.

AND

War and Peace: I'm officially (...minus the second epilogue, okay, but we don't need to talk about that) finished! It really deserves a post of its own, which I'll try to write up soon, but the Cliff's Notes version is I still love it very, very, much. The first epilogue did throw me for a bit of a loop--Tolstoy was by no means a feminist and had some...let's call them interesting views on women and marriage which come through pretty strongly in the last few chapters--but it's still a gorgeous book, large-scale and small-scale all at once, sweeping and romantic and philosophical and just...gah. A real joy to read.

Currently Reading

Tolstoy: A Russian Life by Rosamund Bartlett: Started this on my mom's recommendation. So far it's been great, easy to read and (from what I can tell) pretty thorough.

My sister texted me the link to this video with ( spoiler? )