lavvyan

On the general principle that if I don't do it now, I never will ...

Hurt/Comfort Flash Exchange revealed yesterday and I received an absolutely delightful gift, Illusions - Biggles gen fic, about 2K of deliciously satisfying presumed dead. What an EXCELLENT old-school h/c reading experience it was. <333

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I found out Avengers Doomsday is happening in December somehow, which made me realize how completely I've fallen out of not just love but even interest in the MCU. The last MCU thing I saw that I enjoyed was Thunderbolts, and I really did enjoy it, but it was also a "wait for streaming" kind of experience (and it might've taken me years to get around to it if I hadn't been stuck on a 10-hour trans-Atlantic flight with limited viewing options). I'll get around to Doomsday eventually, I guess! Or maybe I won't, and somehow I don't think I'll be missing a whole lot.

I keep feeling like I have things to say about the whole cycle of that - how I went from a superhero-comic-reading teenager and young adult back when it was a niche interest that most people knew nothing about, to the sheer delight of superhero movies that were actually good, to some of my most active and busy fandom experiences as the whole world fell in love with it too, to overload and disappointment and now I just kind of wish we could look back nostalgically on the whole experience except that it's hard to do when it just keeps GOING.

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Watched a rocket launch yesterday evening ... sort of. We live about 20 miles south of Poker Flat Research Range, and try to go out in the yard and watch their launches when we can - how often do you get to see a rocket launch from two steps outside your front door? They mainly launch low-altitude rockets to study the aurora - a few times a winter - but these rely on waiting for the aurora to kick up, and so it's a lot of monitoring their Youtube channel and waiting for the countdown, and often they happen late at night or we otherwise miss them.

But this one was something else (studying particle behavior in the atmosphere or something?), so it was scheduled for late evening and easy enough to catch. And then it was too hazy and cloudy to actually see it. We saw the flash - a bright light on the horizon - and then about half a minute later, the sound gets to us, an astonishingly loud (for how far away it is) rumble that sounds like a jet taking off. But that was sadly all we could see from where we were. On clear nights it's possible to see the rocket go up and the stages fall off, but not last night, ALAS! But it was interesting to be reminded just how big a thing even a small rocket is.

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EDIT: Oh wait, I knew there was something else! I was thinking about doing some kind of Halloween Advent next week (yes I know that's not what Advent means, shhhh) with a series of posts for the week leading up to it; maybe Whumptober ficlets? Halloween/spooky fic recs? It seemed like a week or so of that would be a fun thing that I could PROBABLY keep up with. You are invited to do it too, for whatever sort of posts you wanted to make - anything October/Halloween/seasonal, or just random posts if you wanted to.

(This may not actually happen, but it ought to start on Saturday or Sunday if it does.)

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ETA2: Also, it snowed this week and it doesn't look like it's planning on going away anytime soon. I guess winter is happening whether we want it or not.

I enjoy reading horror in October; it's the spooky season, after all! So here's a roundup of what I've been reading this month, in the order I read it.

Seed by Ania Ahlborn - First and, unfortunately, least. The first half of the book was solidly spooky and interesting; then things went completely off the rails in the second half. It's set in small-town Louisiana, where a couple's marriage is struggling under the strain of class differences (he's a musician who works as a boat mechanic; she's from the town's upper-middle-class aristocracy and married down), with two young daughters. Driving his family home late at night, he veers to avoid the reflection of eyes in the road and flips the car. While the family is climbing out of the wrecked car, one of the little girls wanders off, and he finds her staring off into the woods. After that, Weird Stuff starts to happen.

( More, with spoilers )

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson - A classic which I've never read! I went into it knowing absolutely nothing except that there was a haunted house (probably). And I really enjoyed it! Unexpectedly, it reminded me somewhat of The Secret History - not in any overt way, but it was something about the lushly vivid setting + the powerful and unhealthy emotional bonds the characters form almost immediately + the not exactly subtextual yet not entirely wholly textual queerness.

Anyway, I had a really good time! ( More about that, not a lot of spoilers )

Salem's Lot by (do I even have to say this?) Stephen King - This was a reread, but I last read this book probably 25 or 30 years ago (possibly in the 90s) and I remembered absolutely NOTHING ... well, okay, I remembered one thing, but since it takes a while to show up, I spent the first third or so of the book going "Wait, isn't this the one with

spoiler

vampires?"

And it is, but it appears to be something else early on - in fact, now that I think about it, this is a quality not only of a lot of his books but also other classic horror (Haunting of Hill House has it too) where there are multiple supernatural things (or supernatural-ish, or horror-ish) going on in one book - it's not just the characters vs X supernatural thing, but there's darkness happening at multiple layers, some supernatural and some human.

( More, with some spoilers )

Blister by Jeff Strand - This is my first of his books, and I will definitely be reading more! "Twisty" doesn't even describe this book; I generally had no idea what was going to happen from one chapter to the next, and while it's possible to guess where at least *some* of it was going, then it would throw another curve ball at me. But underneath it all, it was genuinely very sweet. If it reminded me of anything else, it's Jason Pargin's books (the "John Dies At the End" guy) - bizarre and twisty and gory/disgusting in places but sweeter than you'd expect underneath it all.

( More about that, not very spoilery )