A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

Ambitious, weird, metafictional horror-fantasy set in a magical city where all but three faeries have fled post-war. It’s now occupied by tightropers who spit out ropes and live in the air, and gnomes who live belowground. Faeries are immortal and every part of their body has its own sentience; they shed glitter constantly and each speck of glitter has its own awareness, which they tune out because otherwise they’d lose their minds. They are not considered dead until there is literally nothing of them left, so the heroine carries her father’s ear and eyeball in a jar; it presumably is still able to see and hear, though not speak. Pre-war, faeries had a wary co-existence with the gnomes, which eat faeries, usually bit by bit. Each eaten limb stays aware until digested. I think. It’s a little unclear what you have to do to a faerie part before it ceases to be aware.

And that is just one of the many, many, many things which are unclear in this odd, frustrating book. The ideas are intriguing, original, and horrific; the execution often uses that maddening trick of excusing its flaws by pointing them out and saying that they’re deliberate. The plot makes no sense? Well, real life often makes no sense. The emotions are weirdly distanced? The narrator is traumatized and emotionally numb. Key incidents are incredibly confusing or elided altogether? The narrator is traumatized and doesn’t want to think about them. Basic facts like how the body part sentience is actually experienced, how big faeries and gnomes are relative to each other (the gnomes can eat a faerie in one bite, but can also have normal-sounding sex with them), what the tightropers look like, the characterization and relationships of major characters, how any race survives when almost all females are killed by the act of giving birth to their first child, etc, are vague or confusing or contradictory or make no sense? It’s because the narrator is a traumatized teenager writing about experiences they don’t understand or can’t face, not a professional writer.

Here’s an example:

Once upon a time there was a writer who couldn't write a fucking book.

I don't know what comes next. That whole chapter's going to need to get thrown out anyway. You completely forgot halfway through that you'd said it was raining at the beginning.

Was it raining?

No one's ever going to know and it's all your fault.

Put a fucking map in the next draft.

The novel held my attention and is certainly plenty weird and ambitious, but using “in real life a traumatized teenager would write an incoherent mess of a book” as excuse to write an incoherent mess of a book did not work for me. The novel was too realistic to work as surrealism, too inconsistent to work as fantasy, and the whole “everything makes no sense because the narrator is a traumatized teenager” device didn’t work for me. These are the exact same problems I had with Moskowiz’s other novel I read, Break, so this is clearly her signature style and I’m just not her audience.

The worldbuilding is really interesting, which made it all the more frustrating that it had so little focus and what we did get didn’t make much sense. However, the novel also does some unusual (spoilery) things with narrative and metafiction, so if you like that sort of thing and don’t mind the issues I had with it, it’s worth a try. The horror is more conceptual than graphic, but dismemberment is crucial to the plot. (One of the things I found most frustrating was that I was really intrigued by the concept of having scattered awareness via shed glitter, eaten body parts, clipped hair, etc, but because the characters tune this out, you rarely get a sense of what that actually feels like.) Note that it contains underage (late teens, not children, but still) sex work (not graphic, but still).

A History of Glitter and Blood

A non-fantasy YA re-telling of "Beauty and the Beast" in modern times which attempts to stick as closely as possible to the original fairytale (with one very significant exception) while making it seem plausible in context. Intriguing idea, so-so execution.

Teenage Izzy has never experienced sexual feelings, unlike what seems like her entire school, and feels like a freak. It only gets worse when the hot guy one of her friends is in love with starts hitting on her. But then her father (under understandable circumstances) picks a rose from a bush growing on the grounds of a flower shop, accidentally damaging it.

The owner suddenly appears. He has been hideously burned and has no nose. Also no lips. He demands that in repayment for the ruined rose bush, he get... Izzy's services as a highly paid part-time flower arranger. Since Izzy needs a job anyway, she agrees. For the rest of the book, she is torn between the hideously burned Leo (who also has hideously burned clawlike hands) and Roger, the hot guy from school.

The main way that this diverges from most retellings of this fairytale is that the Beast is not animalistic in a disturbingly sexy way, but a forty-something man with no nose. This makes Roger a genuine rival, because not only is noselessness not sexy, but in a realistic setting the age difference is much more of a barrier. Cohen makes it less skanky than it could be by having Leo request a kiss rather than marriage, but still.

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Yesterday I inflicted the world's worst anime on Yoon. I have to review it for Green Man Review. This will be my first ever review in which I will be forced to confess that I was unable to finish it. Truly appalling, and also none of the characters have noses. Yoon has proof in screencaps.

BAD. BAD. BAAAAAAAAAAAAD. And yet it won awards in France! What were they smoking? Even if the French track was substantially superior to the English, which is very likely since the English was the worst ever, there's still the noselessness.

ETA: According to Wikipedia, "The reason Savin Yeatman-Eifel gave for the almost noseless design of the characters was that he "didn't like noses.""

Await my full review. In the meantime, please describe to me the worst anime you've ever seen.