#american elsewhere

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Books of 2026: February Wrap-Up.

Slower reading month, because I am getting Back Into Revising!! I have a Very Attainable Plan of "revise a scene a week to finish by deadline," and I am so far fairly on target?? Who am I, even*.

I'm also still crushing my reading challenges and games: making Book of the Month progress for poetry quest and reading through my 26 in 2026 list, all that. I'm partway through three (3) books, which is broadly unlike me, but sometimes these things just take time. I have linked photos and reviews below!

PORTRAIT OF A THIEF ★★★★ Chinese college students heisting cultural art? Their research largely informed by Ocean's movies?? What a delight. Chapters are thriller-short, style more literary than I was expecting; loved this, have preordered Li's next book.

HOME ★★★★ Poetry translated from Arabic! Very approachable little volume, covers a lot of ground tonally, and I am STILL, a full month later, thinking about "The Mechanic's Heresy" (pictured in review!).

DEATH OF THE AUTHOR ★★★½ Love Okorafor, liked this one, took me a while to get through. Super meta, would probably hold up extraordinarily well on a reread. Loved the book as a story object.

DREAD NATION ★★★★ I was not expecting to have as much fun with this one as I did. Funny! Dread-inducing! Badass heroine! Alt history and zombies!

AMERICAN STREET ★★★ This was my only non-planned book, which I read because reshelving my YA meant this one no longer fit lol. Shortish contemporary about a Haitian teen immigrating to Detroit. Tackles heavy stuff. I loved Fabiola's voice and sincerity.

AMERICAN ELSEWHERE - 211/662 pages read. Picked this up for Driscore Vibes, and Boy Howdy Does It Deliver (hello, detached eyes in jars as the first page teaser?? fucked up shit happening between a pair of mirrors? liminal spaces and people who aren't and eldritch monsters in the woods and deserts and road trips and cars and weird insular little towns???? I'm having such a great time so far!). Enjoying myself immensely!

STRUCTURING LIFE TO SUPPORT CREATIVITY - 102/256 pages read. Buddy reading this with a writer friend, and Tayler keeps coming for our throats. Very practical and reflective type book.

COMPLETE AKHMATOVA - 62/942 pages read. Okay. Listen. I know this is also Book of the Month poetry quest material, but I am NOT reading 900+ pages of poetry in a month; I am working through this one a little bit at a time and will finish in December, thanks. Love how much bio info is up front, it's a very helpful orientation.

Under the Cut: How I Generally Conceptualize ~*★Stars★*~

★ - This was Bad. I would actively recommend that you do NOT read this one, no redeeming qualities whatsoever, not worth the slog. Save Yourself, It's Too Late For Me. Book goes in the garbage (donate bin).

★★ - This was Not Good. I would not recommend it, but it wasn't a total waste or wash--something in here held my interest/kept my attention/sparked some joy. I will not be rereading this ever. Save Yourself (Or Join Me In Suffering, That Seems Like A Cool Bonding Activity).

★★★ - This was Good/Fine/Okay/Meh. I don't care about this enough to recommend it one way or another. Perfectly serviceable book, held my interest, I probably enjoyed myself (or at least didn't actively loathe the reading). I don't have especially strong feelings. You probably don't need to save yourself from this one--if it sounds like your jam, give it a shot! Just didn't resonate with me particularly powerfully. I probably won't reread this unless I'm after something in particular.

★★★½ - I liked this! I'll probably recommend it if I know it matches someone's vibes or specific requests, but I didn't commit to a star rating on Goodreads. More likely to reread, but not guaranteed.

★★★★ - I really enjoyed this!! I would recommend it (sometimes with caveats about content warnings or such--I like weird fucked up funny shit). Not a perfect book for me by any means, but Very Good. This is something I would reread! Join me!!

★★★★★ - I LOVED THE SHIT OUT OF THIS, IT REWIRED MY BRAIN, WILL RECOMMEND TO ANYONE AND EVERYONE AT THE SLIGHTEST PROVOCATION (content warning caveats still apply--see 4-star disclaimer). Excellent book, I'll reread it regularly, I'll buy copies for all my friends, I'll try to convince all of Booklr to read it, PLEASE join me!!

[liesmyth]

COSMIC HORRORS? IN MY NEIGHBOURHOOD? IT'S MORE LIKELY THAN YOU THINK

The last book I finished was American Elsewhere by Robert Jackson Bennet; halfway through it, I described it as "What if Omelas was next to Area 51?" and I stand by it.

dimension-hopping eldritch beings who've taken over a quaint New Mexico town

a teenage waitress who's also the devil's bride

cosmic-scale mummy issues. motherhood. dysfunctional siblings. hope. recovery.

MAD SCIENCE

annoying man with a big phallic gun gets what's coming to him

elderly neighbourhood gossip lady is surprisingly resilient

hard-living woman in her late 30s is covered in blood that's not hers (HOT)

a whole lot of blood, in general. tentacles. some gore. mass murder. hopeful endings. a good time all around.

DO NOT go for the audiobook because the narrator put me to sleep and doesn't do the story justice.

If you like epic fantasy with great worldbuilding, murder investigations, and dead gods, I also recommend City of Stairs by the same author.

[st-just]

When she was in elementary school in her podunk town in Texas one of her classmates, Nola Beth, experienced a sharp drop in grades around the second grade. They quickly figured out Nola's vision had steadily gotten worse and worse, she just couldn't see the blackboard. One day Nola came into school wearing a pair of incredibly thick glasses and, though they did no favors to her appearance, Nola was ecstatic: she could see all kinds of things now, things she hadn't even known were THERE. She had no idea trees were so pretty, she said. She could see every leaf waving in the wind, now. For some reason, this terrified young Mona. It wasn't that Nola's vision had changed, it was that her vision had changed without her even knowing it. There were all kinds of things happening around her that she'd never know about, that she was blind to. Though her experience of the world seemed whole and certain to her, in truth it had been marred, filled with blind spots, and she'd had no idea.

American Elsewhere, by Robert Jackson Bennett

[yayfortea]

“There is a certain darkness you can never imagine until you are actually in it. It is a darkness so deep and complete it not only makes you doubt if you have ever seen light, it also makes you doubt if the world is still truly there: If I stretch out my hands, you think, will I feel anything? If I walk in one direction for miles and miles and days and days, will there be only nothing, nothing forever and ever?”

– Robert Jackson Bennett, from American Elsewhere

[bigcats-birds-and-books]

Books of 2026: Daisychaining, Title Edition!

Please witness: DEATH is kind of like DREAD, and then we go from a NATION to a STREET (in AMERICA even, double nation whammy), and then from a STREET of AMERICAN we get to an ELSEWHERE!!

Anyway, yeah, these happened to wind up stacked vertically in my TBR in this order, and I looked at them and said "....huh. yeah okay I dig that flow, let's go."

[bigcats-birds-and-books]

Books of 2026: March Wrap-Up.

I'm still revising along, which has slightly shifted the flavor of my reading for this month (trying to squeeze in more writerly-adjacent nonfic for habits/perspective adjustment). Somehow multi-wielding books did not spectacularly backfire on me?? I'm sure I will learn nothing from this experience. Relative to how my TBR's been going so far this year, many of these were Not Planned (Writer's Block, Notes, Hail Mary), and also not remotely the direction I thought side quests would take me, but Here We Are.

Reviews linked!:

AMERICAN ELSEWHERE ★★★★★ Cannot begin to express how directly up my alley this was. Weird, fucked up, funny, immaculate vibes, perfectly meshed with my revision project. Highly recommend.

PORTALMANIA ★★★½ THE most sex-repulsed asexual collection I've read in my entire life. Microvariations on a theme. Glad I read it, heavy and fucked up. Tonally fascinating.

BROWN NEON ★★★ More academic than I was expecting. Interesting perspectives, but I didn't have quite enough context for this to hit right for me.

AROUND THE WRITER'S BLOCK ★★★★ Helpful and practical!! If you want an assist getting Unstuck in your writerly life, check it out.

PROJECT HAIL MARY ★★★½ Had fun! Weir is Weir, and boy howdy does he Have A Type™. I liked THE MARTIAN better overall but Rocky is perfect so...

ON TRAILS ★★★★ Enjoyed this a lot more than I was expecting too! Very cool mix of hiking/ecology/memoir/biology/paleontology/history with a dash of linguistics in there. Also funny. Do recommend.

NOTES ON WRITING FICTION ★★★★½ Enjoyed this VERY much more than I thought I would, will be preordering the paperback. Tonally very different from the other writing-adjacent nonfic I've been reading. Insightful and hilarious. Also recommend.

MY POEMS - 22/154 pages read. I was doomed to fail the timeline on at least one (1) Book of the Month installment, really, it might as well be the one where I'm trying to read Russian poetry from ~1910-1934 in Russian, huh. Having a good time when I sit down to do it! Struggling to make myself sit down because it's a lot! Translation is wild! Poetry in translation is especially wild! I do have a favorite so far though :)

STRUCTURING LIFE TO SUPPORT CREATIVITY - 202/256 pages read. Buddy reading in the home stretch! The book is now available on The Beloathed River Site (and therefore Goodreadsable)!

ANNA AKHMATOVA - 80/942 pages read. I will not lie to you: The eighteen (18) pages I have "read" since last month were further translator/editor notes and then fourteen (14) pages of photographs with captions lol. Progress is Progress! We are Behind on Poetry Quest! It is Fine!!!

I miss fiction, and I'm very excited to get back to fiction next month! I am simply not built for the Majority Nonfiction Lifestyle, I don't think.

Under the Cut: How I Generally Conceptualize ~*★Stars★*~

★ - This was Bad. I would actively recommend that you do NOT read this one, no redeeming qualities whatsoever, not worth the slog. Save Yourself, It's Too Late For Me. Book goes in the garbage (donate bin).

★★ - This was Not Good. I would not recommend it, but it wasn't a total waste or wash--something in here held my interest/kept my attention/sparked some joy. I will not be rereading this ever. Save Yourself (Or Join Me In Suffering, That Seems Like A Cool Bonding Activity).

★★★ - This was Good/Fine/Okay/Meh. I don't care about this enough to recommend it one way or another. Perfectly serviceable book, held my interest, I probably enjoyed myself (or at least didn't actively loathe the reading). I don't have especially strong feelings. You probably don't need to save yourself from this one--if it sounds like your jam, give it a shot! Just didn't resonate with me particularly powerfully. I probably won't reread this unless I'm after something in particular.

★★★½ - I liked this! I'll probably recommend it if I know it matches someone's vibes or specific requests, but I didn't commit to a star rating on Goodreads. More likely to reread, but not guaranteed.

★★★★ - I really enjoyed this!! I would recommend it (sometimes with caveats about content warnings or such--I like weird fucked up funny shit). Not a perfect book for me by any means, but Very Good. This is something I would reread! Join me!!

★★★★★ - I LOVED THE SHIT OUT OF THIS, IT REWIRED MY BRAIN, WILL RECOMMEND TO ANYONE AND EVERYONE AT THE SLIGHTEST PROVOCATION (content warning caveats still apply--see 4-star disclaimer). Excellent book, I'll reread it regularly, I'll buy copies for all my friends, I'll try to convince all of Booklr to read it, PLEASE join me!!

[bigcats-birds-and-books]

Books of 2026: AMERICAN ELSEWHERE by Robert Jackson Bennett.

Y'all. I try to stack my reading material with my writing projects, so I picked this up because it looked perfectly Driscoll-related, and I'm not sure I have ever been more correct about any book in my entire life??? It's like this man climbed into my head thirteen years ago and scooped out every embryonic shred of Driscoll and shoved it into this massive, weird, funny, fucked up book, so really I was doomed from the start.

I think the back cover summary is a little too tame on its own. It catches the weirdness and the "things are not quite what they seem," and a lot of the cover blurbs are about Bennett's other horror work, but I think they're applicable to this one, too ("a deft amalgam of thriller, cerebral horror, and American Gothic"; "Compelling and truly horrifying," all that). File American Elsewhere under weird and horror and ~supernatural~ and SF (any time there are loadbearing physicists, I feel like it warrants SF) and fantasy, in that order.

The story mostly follows Mona Bright, ex-cop and house-in-a-town-that-doesn't-exist-on-maps inheritor, who is badass and competent and a mess. Her perspective is intercut with many other perspectives, some of which are experimental (and y'all know I love that!). It is a very long book, and other readers did not enjoy the meander, but it absolutely scratches the itch I have right now. It takes 200 pages to get into something resembling a Problem-Solving Plot. Everything up until then rides so heavily on vibes, but wow I loved those vibes.

It gives House of Leaves, it gives Welcome to Night Vale, it gives some Jeff VanderMeer, it gives what I suspect may be some Stephen King (I say, having never read Stephen King), it gives Lovecraftian (I say, having read primarily authors' of color and/or queer authors' Lovecraft-inspired takes, and no actual Lovecraft myself). It is also very much Mommy Issues: The Doorstopper, and Such a Book.

An incomplete list of elements that are exactly my jam: eyes in incongruous jars as the first page teaser; fucked up shit happening between paired mirrors; road trips and liminal spaces; people who aren't and eldritch monsters in the woods; deserts and cars; weird rules and weirder insular little towns; broken time and pandimensionality; loopholes and talking through type; body horror and gore; No Longer Being Yourself; scientists fucking shit up; hunger and hollowness and alienation and belonging; and everything about this late-book passage:

"have you never felt different from other people throughout your life? Detached, adrift? Have you never wondered why you appear to age at a much slower rate than anyone you know? Have you not found the fact that you, and you alone out of the human race, have visited the other side--even if it was only for a moment--and come back whole and unharmed, to be slightly odd? Do you not find it queer that your arrival in this town--this bizarre, surreal, strange town, where nothing has ever happened for decades--coincides with every terrible event that has happened recently? And do you not somehow feel that you have been to this town before, that you know that it is, in some indefinable, intangible way, a home you never visited, but knew was waiting for you, all along, all throughout your life?" (American Elsewhere, p521)

I laughed out loud many times, I howled at my own walls about How Perfect This Is For Driscoll Vibes, I sent so many snaps of snippets to people unprompted, I hurt myself trying to read this 662-page behemoth in bed, I have not been able to stop thinking about it for the week it's taken me to read it. The only (only!!!) thing I did not love was the lost pregnancy thread, but I'm glad I did not let that derail me, because the rest was so worth it.

(CW, spoilery: There is, however, a LOT of suicide/parents killing their children and then themselves toward the end, graphic.)

[bigcats-birds-and-books]

AMERICAN ELSEWHERE has really got me fucking HOWLING at the driscoll relevance btw!!!!