What I’ve Read
Cinder House by Freya Marske – Oh, this is a very satisfying novel. I love a book that starts with the protagonist dying and ends with her happy ever after. I don’t want to spoil too much – not because it’s a mystery, even tho there is a mystery solved inside it – but also because I think the unfolding story is very good on its on merits and different enough from the folk talk and most tellings of it to be worth a fresh approach. Marske does a fantastic job of making the haunted house’s relationship with sensation, from the point of view of the house, feel actually sensuous and alluring. I admit that the resolution is a little clever, but so satisfying that I wasn’t upset to see that I’d called the ending.

Unrelated – I watched The Ugly Stepsister (Emilie Blichfeldt, 2025) which is a body horror take on how the Cinderella myth works for the step sister who cuts off parts of her feet to try and fit the glass slipper. Yes, they absolutely do that, it’s gory as fuck – and it’s absolutely merited because this film is about showing a vulnerable girl destroying herself for patriarchal approval. It’s utterly beautiful in every scene, using a dreamy filter for much of the film, including the scenes where our ugly young woman dreams of infecting herself with a tapeworm so that she loses weight. I cannot recommend this film enough, and it was fascinating to watch with Cinder House so recently in my mind.

Incandescence by serpentinerose - https://archiveofourown.org/series/5440201 – A Guillermo del Toro Frankenstein (2025) fic with Victor/Creature teased out for all the wildly unhealthy possibilities. The prose is lush, the references are classical, and my id is well-fed.

What I’m Reading
The Steerswoman by Rosemary Kirstein – I’m about 80% thru and it’s really great work. I am finding the prose just perfect – it gets out of its own way and still manages to give me a great line every now and again. Really enjoying this! I am surprised that I didn’t hear of it before, because literally every time I have posted about it, someone NEW comes to tell me how much they enjoyed the book. Another point in favor of going to cons – people will evangelize about their favorite little known books

What I’ll Read Next
Oh, god, I have so many library books out
Monks Hood – Ellis Peters
Master of Poisons – Andrea Hairston
Frankenstein
The Brightness Between Us -Eliot Screfer
The Husky and His White Cat Shizun – Rou Bao Bu Chi Rou (I picked this up after seeing that it was beloved by a fic author whose work I recently enjoyed but I have no idea what I am looking at here)
The Craft of Lace Knitting by Barbara Walker
Silver in the Wood and Drowned Country by Emily Tesh
Viriconium by John M Harrison
What Stalks the Deep by T Kingfisher