{"id":133243327,"date":"2023-07-07T12:30:23","date_gmt":"2023-07-07T12:30:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lazyandentitled.org\/?p=133243327"},"modified":"2023-07-07T12:30:23","modified_gmt":"2023-07-07T12:30:23","slug":"friday-links-you-want-triples-of-the-sea-monsters-triples-is-best","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lazyandentitled.org\/?p=133243327","title":{"rendered":"Friday Links: You Want Triples Of The Sea Monsters, Triples Is Best"},"content":{"rendered":"

“you’re glad to have a uniform, right? \/ cool. \/ find another. some of us live in this one.” – Brandon O’Brien, “the repossession of skin” <\/h2>

Maaaaaaan I do not like the United States of America but boy howdy I sure do love the Fourth of July! Beach (my four-year-old willingly played in the lake this year!), grilling (smoked parmesan-stuffed mushrooms! My beloved cheeseburgers!), go up on the roof to watch the neighbors set off panoramic fireworks (not participating myself! This is important)\u2014it\u2019s just Peak Summer. Hope your Fourth was similarly summery. Now go read some Frederick Douglass<\/a>.<\/p>

What I\u2019ve Been Reading This Week:<\/strong><\/p>

I said I\u2019d finish <\/a>No Gods For Drowning<\/a><\/em>, and I did. Boy, did that turn out to be so much more than \u201ca braided detectives\/municipal services vs. serial killer narrative!\u201d Then I decided to throw a little more cosmic horror in the mix and check out Can You Sign My Tentacle?<\/em> by Brandon O\u2019Brien. <\/p>

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No Gods For Drowning <\/strong><\/em>by Hailey Piper: <\/strong>How would humans act if we knew<\/em>, indisputably knew<\/em>, that we were not the most important entity on the planet? (I believe that\u2019s already true, but I feel like I\u2019m in the minority). In this novel\u2014which is a gory, bloody delight that has reawakened my desire to read books that aren\u2019t simply horror but ones with supernatural worldbuilding\u2014the events are determined by bickering, self-important, indifferent Gods. Ones who physically inhabit the world. Not to mention there\u2019s a sea monster and some humanoid\/monstrous hybrid creatures at war with humans. How would humans behave? One of our main characters takes to human sacrificing\u2014like a lot<\/em>\u2014in this book. Another questions whether the Gods have any morality at all. There\u2019s a big conflict about the value of the human soul. Idk man, this novel got the ol\u2019 wheels spinning about humanity\u2019s place in the cosmos, which I\u2019ve liked to do since this blog started<\/a>. This isn\u2019t one of them \u201coooh I want to write this\u201d novels, but one of them \u201coooh I\u2019m going to have fun thinking about this world for a long time after\u201d novels. I still say someone throw huge piles of money at Hailey and make this a miniseries, it\u2019s a visually stunning book. <\/p>

Can You Sign My Tentacle? <\/strong><\/em>by Brandon O\u2019Brien: <\/strong>Another entry into two sub-genres I\u2019m learning I love: long, story-like genre poems (not unlike Escaping The Body <\/a><\/em>by Chloe N. Clark<\/a>) and Black writers interrogating the Cthulhu Mythos (not unlike The Ballad of Black Tom <\/a><\/em>by Victor LaValle<\/a>). These poems are wonderfully and casually grotesque, playful with their detached-yet-starstruck-ness towards both Cthylla and Hastur or Kendrick Lamar and Donald Glover. Narrative might twists and unfurl, but as multimodal as the poems get, they don\u2019t forget they are poems. The collection\u2019s awesome, and the end author\u2019s note\u2014self-consciously placing itself in and aiming to invert the lineage of works like Lovecraft Country<\/em> or The Ballad of Black Tom<\/em>, while calling \u201cfor Blackness to be seen as radically significant.\u201d<\/p>

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