J.E. Glass | Published author of UNDERGROUNDER | Finalist in Indie Ink and Page Turner Awards | Writer of Dark and Urban Fantasy | Lesbian| Witchy nerd 🧹🏳️🌈
The last place Alexandra Bailey expects her routine life of domestic journalism to lead is being sucked into icy floodwaters below New York City with a knife in her ribs. Headlines like this happen to other people, but it's real, and she knows she's dead. Which makes the circumstances of her survival as impossible as the woman who drags her from the water.
Saved but hardly safe, Alex wakes in the Underground, a world of misfits and monsters thriving below the streets. It's a journalism goldmine. One Alex can't resist digging into after learning her beastly savior is Leanna Farrow, adopted daughter of an infamous and "presumed dead" scientist. But Alex's curiosity, coupled with her rapidly developing feelings for Leanna, put both women in danger when Alex’s inquiries pique the interest of a powerful family with bloody secrets connected to the Underground.
If Alex wants to unravel the secrets of the world below she'll have to walk the razor's edge, but some mysteries are better left buried.
🕮 Over 2000 copies sold
🔖 600k+ pages read on KU
⭐ 200+ Amazon reviews
🏆 2 Awards
🎖️ 4-time Indie Ink Award Finalist
🔥 One hell of a #sapphic read
New page! Malaya is skeptical that anyone involved with this event isn't insane
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-1035+ pages (not as intimidating as it may seem)
-Follows Malaya Walters who was bitten by a werewolf at five years old. She grows up raised by her human family and has to face her werewolf side as an adult to save her family and her town. Mal learns a lot about herself along the way and generally everyone is figuring themselves out (except for Tom)
-Her werewolf mentor may have a thing for her brother, but Mal is going to ignore that because they're both too awkward to deal with
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trying to bed a knight like: *unbuttons your jupon* *unbuckles your cuirass* *unbuckles your gorget* *takes off your hauberk* *stops to catch my breath* *unbuttons your gambeson* *takes off your shirt*
“For me this glass is already broken. I enjoy it; I drink out of it. It holds my water admirably, sometimes even reflecting the sun in beautiful patterns. If I should tap it, it has a lovely ring to it. But when I put this glass on the shelf and the wind knocks it over or my elbow brushes it off the table and it falls to the ground and shatters, I say, ‘Of course.’ When I understand that the glass is already broken, every moment with it is precious.”
twigs rewatches Agatha All Along - Episode 2, Part 5
Episode 2 - Circle Sewn With Fate Deep Dive Part 5
Oh Lilia, she reached back through time, held her own hand and signed her name onto the coven's list. She signed her own death. She will fall.
And it is time for all of us to fall back into the deep dive! Let's go! Time to meet Jen!
When I first watched this in Sept of 2024, I remember thinking that the animals were all Rio following Agatha, taunting her. Learned better by the end of the episode (and then looked up their comic designs and was flabberghasted by those). But I still loved the idea Rio was being a menace.
I wish we had gotten a bit more on Agatha and the Salem Seven. Or just the Salem Seven in general. They have such fantastic motifs and costume design (even if the lighting makes it so hard to actually enjoy said design).
Agatha having a tantrum over it being Jen on the list is funny. She respects Jen! She has avoided trying to drain her before. But she also was the one who bound her. Oh Agatha.
Jen!! I am so glad out of the coven, she makes it off the Road. She's frankly such an interesting character. I love how she mirrors Agatha's need to self-protect by hiding behind a con, a snake oil salesman routine. Where Agatha puts on and dresses herself up with a bit of femininity here and there to sell a con, Jen is deeply at home in the feminine.
She has instead, opted to really utilize capitalistic feminine as a way to survive. I wonder what happened to her coven or family. Who she had in the world before she was bound, if she still has them. She has been abandoned by the witching community, and as we see even without her magic, she is a powerful healer! Deeply tragic.
She still looks like a Blues Brother to me in this outfit. It's the hat. She's such an annoying dumbass.
Billy was frankly unprepared to hear about Agatha's pelvic floor. He already saw enough with the tussle between Rio and her!! Stop traumatizing him.
(Spoiler: she's only getting started!! Watch her next trick. She's going to be the cause of so many years of therapy, if anyone ever got that in these sorts of things. No need!)
Jen is blowing up Agatha with her mind.
The fact she made it to 350 is truly amazing!
I love her very much, your honour.
Jen is doing her best!!
It's interesting Agatha does not put on a part for this con. Jen knows her. But she does play up how annoying she is. Clown Agatha to an extent is one of her facades. I am not saying she is not annoying, clearly she is a menace when she wants to be, but Agatha, true and vulnerable Agatha--she is much quieter, much more staid.
No one gets to see behind the curtain. Not anymore, if she can help it.
Agatha knows she has to get to business with Jen. Jen isn't going to join the coven if Agatha cackles her way through the sales pitch. Agatha knows her targets! She pinpoints what she needs to do to get to them, to get under their skin, and to draw them in.
Jen is smart! She is smart and talented, despite the circumstances she has found herself in. And she is not purchasing what Agatha is selling, not yet at least.
Does Agatha know? Does she know at this point that she was the one who bound Jen? There's a good possibility she does know already. The entire song and dance during the Earth trial could simply be just that: a song and dance, a routine. A way for Agatha to come clean about something she has known for awhile, but never admitted out loud. Or she genuinely didn't know!
It's interesting! There are a lot of possibilities there.
Billy, as we learn in episode 6, genuinely does like Jen! He likes her products! But he is also getting really good at falling into the role he needs to, to keep up with Agatha's con.
Time for twigs' headcanons! So, there is an old video where Hahn talks about the possibility of Agatha having gotten the Darkhold from Ghostrider (who was in Agents of Shield).
Technically!! This is not the Ghostrider in the comics that Jen is related to, but I still think it would be fun if it was/or if simply Ghostrider things, heard it from her cousin: that's how Jen knows about Agatha and the Darkhold.
Sometimes, I wonder if Agatha killed someone Jen knew or cared about, the way that Jen calls her Witchkiller (the way she knows about the rumours of what happened to Agatha's son, the Salemites' demise, et cetra). There is something of disgust in Jen's expression, to me, here.
"At least I'm still a witch."
Out of everything that Agatha has been through related to her coven, to witchhood--the thing Agatha values most: being a witch. Her craft! She loves magic! She wants to be a great witch, the best witch.
And this is twisting the knife. As if being bound removes Jen from being a witch, pushes her further outside of the community. Already ostracized, and Agatha denies who she is here. She no longer is even a witch.
Jen has so much pain she hides behind her surface facade. It is what makes episode 7 and her connection to Lilia so meaningful. It is fun to laugh at Jen being a mean girl or having little snark-offs with Agatha, but in reality, she is so deeply hurt. The first few episodes are so funny in Agatha All Along, and then the darkness and pain really begins to weigh more heavily. And on rewatches, it is far easier to see and feel the reality of how much these witches carry.
On first watch, I think it is easy to believe it really will turn out okay, everyone is going to get what they need and no one is going to die, not for real! It's all going to come out okay at the end of the Road. But the reality is that none of this is easy! There's a reason for the distrust that others have towards Agatha. Generational trauma, acts of violation, grief, et cetra are not things that are easily fixed with a bonding session around a campfire. One vulnerable moment does not fix centuries of so much pain.
Of course it doesn't fool Agatha! Agatha would probably bite off her own nails if she could have been loved by her coven, if she could have had people. But they failed her, and while she found love with Rio, with Nicky--everything has been fleeting, she has not been able to hold on, and she protects herself, pushes others a way in advance now. We'll see that a lot with Billy. But honestly, we see it with the coven too! She planned to kill these witches all along, so of course she never really planned to bond with them. Her concern becomes wholly Billy. She does not really give too much time or thought to the coven, despite growing somewhat closer to them on the Road.
Emotions are high, and what can Billy Kaplan do under those circumstances?
Read someone's mind, of course! And this is where we get to see him in action. On first watch, it is easy to believe he simply researched and prepared ahead (a nerd like his mentor), but... No, he is picking up on what he needs to say and do to sell this to Jen. He simply does not realize what he is selling to Jen. He has no idea that the Road isn't real.
Jen and Brujapedia tell us so much how Agatha is seen in the witching community. And while Agatha did not sacrifice Nicholas, there is a reason for the beliefs and rumours that surround Agatha. She is guilty of a lot of awful crimes! But it is also interesting what she is not guilty of, but allows to be said about her.
Agatha is such a confident character, but I read her as having a lot of self-hatred. There is also, of course, protection in those rumours. People do not get close to her, do not try to really understand her, and she does not have to sit in the painful, difficult feelings she avoids at all costs. But it would also be easier if she had sacrificed him. Then she would have had some agency, some control.
Agatha has so little control in her life. For as much as she happens to others, life has happened to her, and she does not know how to handle that. To handle the grief that comes with that.
She does not break here the way she will do in other episodes, but her expression is still pained. This is not Agatha laughing or talking about how delicious babies are. That rumours hurts Agatha.
And Billy to the rescue for the con. He has the perfect hook to reel Jen in for this!
When these two work together, they are doubly annoying and trouble for everyone else around them! Jac was right to say that we should be worried about Agatha being the one in Billy's ear post-Agatha All Along. She's going to teach him so many troubling things!
Agatha's own trial did not go well with her own coven. I also enjoy how witches have their own culture and history within the context of the worldbuilding! it is interesting!
Poor Jen dealing with these two poking at her current pain. She is trying so hard to have a life when the idiot in the hat took away her magic and her connection to herself as a witch!!
Again, it is so easy early on to watch these scenes and laugh, but Jen has so much anger here (rightly so).
But this is also: Agatha's MO. This is how she gets magic! Annoying people, pushing on their vulnerabilities and where they are weak so they have to rely on you and join you.
They're in the zone, and they know they have the right thing over Jen so that she will join them on the Road. Agatha is so impressed by how well he has taken to the con! This is the sort of thing she would have loved to do with Nicky.
Nicky never enjoyed gathering witches to be sacrifices at his mother's altar though (and Billy does not approve either once he really learns what happened).
Still, Agatha loves having a partner in crime. Okay! Hit my photo limit!! Thank you for sticking around! It is fun to dip back into this as always.
