Reading Wednesday

Just finished:

[redacted]: This is my friend's YA novel that I was beta reading. She has a publisher and it's sitting with an editor at the moment, so I won't say much other than it has a really cool concept, I enjoyed it, and I'm looking forward to it being in print so that I can recommend it to people. I also do like the process of betaing because if you don't like something in a book, you can say to the author, "I don't like that you did this thing and you should do another thing that I like instead," and they do that.

Speaking of which...

A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara. I FINISHED THE TORTURE PORN BOOK YOU GUYS. I HAVE MANY FEELINGS.

Chief among them [spoiler] WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK HE KILLS HIMSELF AT THE END? what's even the point then??? He could have killed himself at least 200 pages earlier and we'd all be spared a lot of suffering. [/spoiler]

( I'm going to cut because I can't discuss my issues with it without a whack of spoilers and also talking about sexual violence )

Currently reading: Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo. This one's fun. It's about the eight occult secret societies at Yale (Skull and Bones and the seven other ones you haven't heard of) and Lethe House, which is tasked with making sure that the other ones don't kill anyone or open portals to hell, etc. The protagonist, Alex, is a fucked-up dropout recruited by Lethe despite a lack of academic credentials because she can see ghosts without the need for psychoactive magical drugs. Everything goes horribly wrong and her mentor/love interest disappears and a townie girl is murdered, and she has to go up against a bunch of wealthy occultists to figure out who's responsible.

It's one of those frustrating "why didn't I think to put that in my book? that's great and would totally fit with my worldbuilding GODDAMN IT" reads. My only problem with it so far is ( more spoilers and sexual violence )

Anyway, other than that, I'm really liking it.

This year

Last Sunday, two half-naked, blood-covered dudes wielding chainsaws terrorized Cherry Beach, which has its own sordid history of violence and mayhem and is definitely haunted. People were a bit freaked out but honestly, that's the kind of shit that goes down and wasn't worth blogging about against a backdrop of general apocalyptic catastrophe.

But! There's a twist!

It looks like the chainsaw guys were the good guys. Or at least after the bad guys.

The thing that they were attacking was an anti-mask event and they destroyed $4000 of DJ equipment at a pro-plague party. They were performing Chaotic Good.

It has been pointed out that they themselves were not wearing masks, and it's not unlikely that they were attendees at the plague party and left after a fight and then returned for revenge. But look, it's 2020 and boring explanations like that just don't pass muster, so my guess is that they're from the future, when herd immunity to covid has finally been achieved at the cost of the lives of most of the human race, and they've come to set the timeline straight in the most metal way possible.

This year, man.