![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
A Jewish couple dealing with a new baby, a new disability, and a horrible landlord win a housing lottery to get a fantastic New York City apartment in a ritzy building inhabited by the rich and famous, plus a few lucky subsidized housing lottery winners. And then they live happily ever after in their lovely new home, the end. Just kidding. This is a horror novel.
Due to an extremely rare labor complication, Ana, formerly a dancer and personal trainer, was paralyzed from the waist down. She's dealing with post-partum depression and post-injury depression, all while trying to care for baby Charlie and keep her new career as an audiobook reader going. (Her big audiobook series, Blood Rink, is about lesbian vampire hockey players and I want to read it.)
Reid is run ragged as the main caregiver for both Ana and Charlie. He's thrilled to escape their awful old apartment, and even more thrilled to move into such a great building with a fascinating and mysterious history. He can only find one book on it, which he reads and re-reads and re-reads. And when he meets the neighbors, they're everything he hoped for and more.
But Ana isn't so happy. The new apartment is on the top floor, and that's not her only qualm. The window in Charlie's room keeps getting left open, even when she's positive she never opened it. Charlie regresses behaviorally and seems unhappy and stressed. But that's natural under the circumstances, isn't it? Reid begins to worry that Ana is getting paranoid...
Nestlings has a cracking pace and is very fun to read. With its sheer readability, attention to detail of place and character, fascinating monsters, excellent action sequences, and some spectacularly disgusting scenes, it reads like something Stephen King might have written if he was a Jewish New Yorker. I particularly loved Ana - she's angry and depressed and messy and brave, and she has a terrific character arc.
The climax/ending felt a bit rushed and had too many loose ends, and while the Jewish content was excellent I wanted even more of it. But overall, if this sounds like something you would like, I bet you would. If you want to avoid the most disgusting scene, skip the chapter from the point of view of a victim-to-be who's a down on his luck guy trying to stay sober. BARF FOREVER. (The second and third most disgusting scenes are, respectively, plot-relevant and can't be skipped, and extremely brief.)
I would love to discuss this book so I hope some of you read it. It's best read without spoilers, so I suggest not clicking on the cut if you haven't read it yet.
If you do read it, read the afterword about its inspiration, and continue past the part where Cassidy thanks his agents and so forth. It's a jaw-dropping story about the worst year of his life. Contains death, including the sad but natural/old age deaths of his cat and dog.)
SPIDER AND BLOOD VOMIT BARF FOREVER. Truly disgusting scenes.
I loved the apparent running joke of the Hasidic bread-givers becoming an actual plot point, but I wished there was even more/better integration of Jewishness into the horror plot. The point Isaac makes about the stereotypical idea of Jews being the same as the stereotypical idea of vampires was really fascinating, but it was just brought up and that was it. I would have loved to have had more of an exploration of that, and also more Jewishness in the vampire fighting. Isaac kind of drops out of the book, and I wanted more of him.
Ana's realization that her wheelchair is freedom, not confinement, was wonderful. So is the last action sequence with her making her way through the apartment in her wheelchair. Also the bit where she gets trapped in her own sound recording booth.
We last saw Georgia entranced but alive, so I wanted to see what happened to her (and maybe have Ana rescue her). I guess we can assume she was killed off-page but that felt anti-climactic.
I liked the final decision to leave Charlie where she was, but it felt too fast from Ana's perspective. She never even saw Charlie scuttle across the ceiling! Charlie crying when Ana held her but being happy with the vampires could have been explained as brainwashing, not an unalterable physical change.
What happened to the kid Charlie bit???
So Reid becomes a Renfield??? And the vampires really do have healing abilities??? I really wanted a bit from his POV afterward.
Stephen King homages: Reid reminded me a bit of a less sympathetic Louis Creed from Pet Sematary, and Charlie of course is a nod to Charlie McGee in Firestarter.
Content notes: child harm/endangerment, gaslighting, depictions of bigotry (not endorsed by author), physical disability and mental illness (very good portrayal of both IMO), bugs, VOMIT.
Due to an extremely rare labor complication, Ana, formerly a dancer and personal trainer, was paralyzed from the waist down. She's dealing with post-partum depression and post-injury depression, all while trying to care for baby Charlie and keep her new career as an audiobook reader going. (Her big audiobook series, Blood Rink, is about lesbian vampire hockey players and I want to read it.)
Reid is run ragged as the main caregiver for both Ana and Charlie. He's thrilled to escape their awful old apartment, and even more thrilled to move into such a great building with a fascinating and mysterious history. He can only find one book on it, which he reads and re-reads and re-reads. And when he meets the neighbors, they're everything he hoped for and more.
But Ana isn't so happy. The new apartment is on the top floor, and that's not her only qualm. The window in Charlie's room keeps getting left open, even when she's positive she never opened it. Charlie regresses behaviorally and seems unhappy and stressed. But that's natural under the circumstances, isn't it? Reid begins to worry that Ana is getting paranoid...
Nestlings has a cracking pace and is very fun to read. With its sheer readability, attention to detail of place and character, fascinating monsters, excellent action sequences, and some spectacularly disgusting scenes, it reads like something Stephen King might have written if he was a Jewish New Yorker. I particularly loved Ana - she's angry and depressed and messy and brave, and she has a terrific character arc.
The climax/ending felt a bit rushed and had too many loose ends, and while the Jewish content was excellent I wanted even more of it. But overall, if this sounds like something you would like, I bet you would. If you want to avoid the most disgusting scene, skip the chapter from the point of view of a victim-to-be who's a down on his luck guy trying to stay sober. BARF FOREVER. (The second and third most disgusting scenes are, respectively, plot-relevant and can't be skipped, and extremely brief.)
I would love to discuss this book so I hope some of you read it. It's best read without spoilers, so I suggest not clicking on the cut if you haven't read it yet.
If you do read it, read the afterword about its inspiration, and continue past the part where Cassidy thanks his agents and so forth. It's a jaw-dropping story about the worst year of his life. Contains death, including the sad but natural/old age deaths of his cat and dog.)
SPIDER AND BLOOD VOMIT BARF FOREVER. Truly disgusting scenes.
I loved the apparent running joke of the Hasidic bread-givers becoming an actual plot point, but I wished there was even more/better integration of Jewishness into the horror plot. The point Isaac makes about the stereotypical idea of Jews being the same as the stereotypical idea of vampires was really fascinating, but it was just brought up and that was it. I would have loved to have had more of an exploration of that, and also more Jewishness in the vampire fighting. Isaac kind of drops out of the book, and I wanted more of him.
Ana's realization that her wheelchair is freedom, not confinement, was wonderful. So is the last action sequence with her making her way through the apartment in her wheelchair. Also the bit where she gets trapped in her own sound recording booth.
We last saw Georgia entranced but alive, so I wanted to see what happened to her (and maybe have Ana rescue her). I guess we can assume she was killed off-page but that felt anti-climactic.
I liked the final decision to leave Charlie where she was, but it felt too fast from Ana's perspective. She never even saw Charlie scuttle across the ceiling! Charlie crying when Ana held her but being happy with the vampires could have been explained as brainwashing, not an unalterable physical change.
What happened to the kid Charlie bit???
So Reid becomes a Renfield??? And the vampires really do have healing abilities??? I really wanted a bit from his POV afterward.
Stephen King homages: Reid reminded me a bit of a less sympathetic Louis Creed from Pet Sematary, and Charlie of course is a nod to Charlie McGee in Firestarter.
Content notes: child harm/endangerment, gaslighting, depictions of bigotry (not endorsed by author), physical disability and mental illness (very good portrayal of both IMO), bugs, VOMIT.
From:
no subject
But the vampires were so fantastically cool and disgusting--shades of Grady Hendrix there!--and I love that it's all so organically rooted in its social contexts. Reid ending up as one of the frozen doormen is haunting (and I'm curious if that is indeed always what they intended for him, as Ana suspected, or if he hypothetically would have had a better, if equally complicit and coerced, fate if the vampires hadn't lost so much power). And the book does a really great job of leaning into the horrors of pregnancy and motherhood and loss of control: the flashback to Ana almost killing Charlie was really visceral and well-done, and you can totally see how she wound up at that psychological breaking point. And it's such a small detail, but I also love the unsettling doubled refrain where you can't be sure if it's "know your home" or "know you're home."
From:
no subject
BARF FOREVER.
The plot-related loose ends were frustrating--I'm especially surprised we didn't get a firmer resolution on Georgia's fate--
Me too. Especially since if we hadn't earlier seen her alive, we would have just assumed she'd been killed at the end of her POV section.
but even more than that, I wanted more on the Jewish vampire lore and more of the differing ways Ana, Reid, and Isaac relate to Judaism.
Me too! What we got was so good, but it came in so late and then its actual use was minimal. I especially wanted to see the vampires react to Judaism, and more on the stuff about Jewish stereotypes/vampire stereotypes. Like did vampires deliberately cultivate that so no one would think of Christians as vampires?
Though Ana using the chai sculpture as a weapon was fantastic. But I wound up feeling really bad for Isaac from the bit of his backstory that we get, and it felt like his plot ended on a relatively downer note, with just the one note of hope that he was going to maybe start emphasizing survival over suffering.
Same. I wanted him to at least know that his studies had been helpful.
But the vampires were so fantastically cool and disgusting--shades of Grady Hendrix there!--and I love that it's all so organically rooted in its social contexts.
I loved the vampire ecology. Especially the interplay of vampires and spiders and gargoyles. And Camilla not seeing becoming a gargoyle as a horror, but as a satisfying final stage in her life.
Reid ending up as one of the frozen doormen is haunting (and I'm curious if that is indeed always what they intended for him, as Ana suspected, or if he hypothetically would have had a better, if equally complicit and coerced, fate if the vampires hadn't lost so much power). And the book does a really great job of leaning into the horrors of pregnancy and motherhood and loss of control: the flashback to Ana almost killing Charlie was really visceral and well-done, and you can totally see how she wound up at that psychological breaking point. And it's such a small detail, but I also love the unsettling doubled refrain where you can't be sure if it's "know your home" or "know you're home."
Yes, all that was great. I also loved that complete disaster of a birthday party, and briefly thinking Reid had just hurled the guests off the roof!
From:
no subject
It's sooo difficult to get non-wheelies to accept this!
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
I did skip the cut, thank you so much for always putting a cut! :D