Who Will Cradle Your Head <\/strong><\/em>by Jared Beloff: <\/strong>it\u2019s almost like Jared opened my skull and poked around my brain for subject matter here. There\u2019s climate change anxiety\/hope, there\u2019s fatherhood, there is, perhaps most importantly, a thoughtful Sasquatch. The blurbs describe these poems as \u201ctender,\u201d and there is a tenderness, but there\u2019s also a clear-eyedness to these poems. It\u2019s a great book, one I expect I\u2019ll be returning to. <\/p>Dr. No<\/strong><\/em> by Percival Everett: <\/strong>my local bookstore has its horror\/sci-fi\/mystery\/romance section all in the same nook, with sometimes-difficult-to-parse delineation between the sections. I picked up this book not really knowing what to expect besides some play on Bond-style supervillains, which, yep. Not horror at all, but let\u2019s call it a bridge between spooky season and Noirvember. Horrifying ending, though. And man, what a delightfully fun book. Our narrator is a probably-autistic mathematician, an expert on \u201cnothing.\u201d Our supervillain is flamboyant, charming, ostentatious, and righteous in his anger at the U.S. Along the way, we have a brainwashed captive, a one-legged dog, a government agent named Bill Clinton, and all sorts of casual absurdities. Whimsical as this book is, though, it doesn\u2019t get too hung up on its own whimsy. It\u2019s got teeth, too. I couldn\u2019t put it down. <\/p>A note on the ending: I had hoped<\/em> something like that might happen, but never in a million years thought. I laughed out loud. Cackled, even. Am I the monster at the end of this book? <\/p>LINKS!<\/strong><\/p>But first, some spooky music? I was making fun of AFI<\/a> earlier this week, but there\u2019s one AFI song I to-this-day love. It is the third track of their All Hallow\u2019s<\/em> EP, a four-track reminder for early 2000s goths that 1) Halloween was one time called \u201cAll Hallow\u2019s Eve\u201d and 2) the Misfits were a band that existed. KaZaA\u2014an early 2000s mp3 file exchange program that was like Pandora or shuffle mode on Spotify\/Apple Music, except waaayyyy more likely to lead to some strange, dark corner\u2014led me to randomly download this one, and what a track. It\u2019s one of those where the bass and guitar really harmonize well with each other, even if they\u2019re playing simple stuff. Plus the jack-o-lantern-headed scarecorew on this YouTube visualizer moves!<\/p>
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