It is meaningless to speak of the soul in the twenty-first century (it is treacherous to even speak of the self). It has become a dead metaphor, one of those words that survive in language long after a culture has lost faith in the concept, like an empty carapace that remains intact years after its animating organism has died. [...] At the fundamentalist college where I studied theology, I had pinned above my desk Gerard Manley Hopkins's poem "God's Grandeur," which imagines the world illuminated from within by the divine spirit. [...] I believed for many years—well into adulthood—that I was part of this illuminated order, that I possessed an immortal soul that would one day be reunited with God. It was a small school in the middle of a large city, and I would sometimes walk the streets of downtown, trying to perceive this divine light in each person, as C.S. Lewis once advised. I was not aware at the time, I don't think, that this was a basically medieval worldview. My theology courses were dedicated to the kinds of questions that have not been taken seriously since the days of Scholastic philosophy: How is the soul connected to the body? Does God's sovereignty leave any room for free will? What is our relationship as humans to the rest of the created order? [...] In place of the pneuma, the spirit-force that once infused and unified all living things, we are now left with an empty carapace of gears and levers—or, as [Max] Weber put it, "the mechanism of a world robbed of gods."
From God, Human, Animal, Machine by Meghan O'Gieblyn (bolding mine)
my thoughts on the backrooms movie as someone that’s too scared to watch horror is that this was far too big of a leap for easing my way into the genre, but i rly enjoyed the film regardless. sorry to everyone in the audience that had to see me physically flinch so hard it was like i was being attacked 💔 it’s just that i’m scared of silent jumpscares and being watched and uncanny valley and mild gore and monsters and being chased and the unknown and—!
IN MY DEFENSE the reason i watched it in the first place was bc i saw an interview w the director where he said he didn’t want to market the movie as a horror and was more interested in portraying the mystery and conceptual aspects of the backrooms, so i was like “oh, that sounds very interesting!” and then BOOM. scary monster chasing me 💔💔💔
(also i had just donated blood right before the movie and didn’t get anything to eat after bc we were already late, so maybe i wasn’t 100% all there. very unique movie-watching experience)
spoilers below:
what i didn’t expect was the movie to be so… sad?? i thought the characters would be secondary to the backrooms, not the very heart of it. the emotional narrative got me bad, esp since i’ve been rly into media abt the self and its mirror image lately (like clones, alternate universe selves, etc). as someone that doesn’t know anything abt backrooms lore, i was pleasantly surprised and horrified to see those themes explored in this movie
i loved clark as an unreliable narrator, he wasn’t a good person but he didn’t feel like the bad guy either. bc yes, he is the reason that everything happened to him, but smth abt him makes me wanna cry anyway, even from the start of the movie. it feels topical, being so helpless/unsatisfied/unwell that you find relief in the liminal space that kills you. maybe the real horror was the capitalism along the way
i thought the house motifs were fun too, how mary was trapped in her house growing up and clark was kicked out of his. one wants to escape, the other wants to return. i’m still a little confused by mary’s ending tho, maybe smth abt how she’s still trapped after all this time, ending up in the same position as her schizophrenic mother when she was put away in a facility 🤔 in that way, mary and clark both trapped themselves, continuing the theme of how your behaviors, when trying to fill a void, can lead you down the path of being alone? idk i’d have to rewatch the movie to get a stronger understanding but uhhh. i am not doing that lmao
if i wasn’t so terrified by everything abt this movie, i would’ve thought that the backrooms and captain clark were cute. if i were to sapientize it, there’s smth innocent/endearing abt a non-human “creature” replicating human experiences thru its limited filter of understanding. the upside down stacked chairs being represented as a single object bc it doesn’t get that a person would stack chairs on top of each other… you’re doing great, buddy 🥹👍 i loved that the director described it as if smth was trying to “cosplay” a building. i’ve seen this type of behavior in robot and alien characters and i fucking love that shit, so i can extend that affection to the backrooms as well, in theory. the backrooms truly is just a neutral entity, which makes it both LESS and MORE scary to me. and even more harrowing that suffering still exists within it, as if to imply these human conditions are merely… neutral. god.
i think that’s what also makes me sad. narratively, the backrooms isn’t outside of reality; it IS reality, reflected. clark extends love to a version of himself that refuses to accept it. he’s a blackhole that consumes everything around him, and he only finds that out by being on the other side of it. to take any snapshot of yourself and make that its entire existence… idk man it makes my heart ache to think abt. the sadness feeds the fear and vice versa, which is not smth i’ve ever considered abt horror before. this movie explored a lot of new things for me in general
rly beautiful cinematography, practical effects, and set design too. or yk, what i was able to see thru my fingers 😅 i’m surprised that clark was able to make a tangible map of the backrooms, i thought the rooms were going to be constantly changing and you’d never be able to trace your way back. i also thought that there were separate backrooms created whenever a new person stepped in, uniquely tailored to them, isolating each person from anyone else that might be inside. and then i thought that when mary went into the backrooms and found clark, the real clark had died and he was the 2nd copy that the backrooms replicated, which is why he was so off since the last time we saw him. i also thought that mary’s flashback was actually her and her daughter instead of her being the child (<- vaguely faceblind) and that her daughter had clipped thru the cement when they put their hand prints in. clearly i have an active imagination lmao
what it ended up being was much less abstract, which probably made it tamer to some ppl. but in a different way, it still made my stomach turn. clark had no right to say that the creatures don’t feel pain or anything at all when he just got there and doesn’t know how anything works. bc we KNOW that’s not true. the redhead lady running away was proof! if they can feel fear, then who’s to say they can’t feel pain! AND HE’S BEEN EATING THEM!!! oh god! she scares me so fucking bad but she doesn’t deserve to live a life of fear too 😞 this is why you got eaten by your mirror self bro
i did think some parts were a bit heavy-handed, particularly mary’s revelation abt trying to save others to save herself, and then literally saving herself by her own hand. it’s not a bad arc, i just feel like the emotional narrative could’ve been strengthened if we saw more of this in her flashbacks. the revelation was necessary for her character development, but i would’ve preferred smth subtler. show don’t tell ig. i’ll always sympathize w a “child of mentally unwell mother” character tho. i liked it a lot as an explanation for her character, why she would go so far for a client she didn’t even like. he didn’t even get missing posters, that’s how much no one likes him 😭
another complaint i had is that some things felt too modern to be set in the 90s, and i wonder if that’s bc the director was born after that era. truly a negligible problem, it was just little things like actors having “iphone face” or audio quality being too consistent in old commercials. still, i kept forgetting it was supposed to take place 30-ish yrs ago. i genuinely expected someone to pull out an iphone at one point lol
that said, i was grateful for anything that took me out of the immersion if only to give me a small reprieve from the onslaught of terror. i wish i was a horror fan bc i love the themes that this genre can explore, but even as someone that’s very removed from this genre and series, i found backrooms to be better than i expected. maybe one day i’ll rewatch it and appreciate it from all angles, but for now, i give it a solid 7.7/10 ^__^
Happy April, happy spring! We’re now less than seven months away from the release of Cassandra Clare’s The Last King of Faerie and I think it’s safe to say that we all can’t wait for this book! It’s been a while since the publication of a full-length Shadowhunters novel so my friend Rossella from Shadowhunters.it and I came up with something fun!
TMISource.com and Shadowhunters.it will be hosting…
As I've talked about previously, I desperately want to reread the entirety of ASOIAF, but I am accountable to no one but myself, and I know that gal's a softie and won't hold me to it.
That's where you (hopefully) come in.
Let's read together!
I'm planning to start reading A Game of Thrones beginning Monday, June 1. Another poll said that people would prefer to take 6 weeks to read the book (which is perfect for me because I'm juggling this with a full time job and a two year old) and have set chapters/pages to read each week. This averages out to one to two chapters each day with a breakdown below for each week (In the mass market paperback, this is about 19 pages a day or 134 pages a week). Since GRRM doesn't do chapter titles, I've broken it down by the character name and which of their chapters it is (so if it's the second Arya POV chapter, it's called Arya II).
Depending on interest, interaction, and my own motivation, we'll see about continuing with the other books. It's my hope to reread the entire series over the next few months, so y'all gotta keep me accountable :)
Book I: A Game of Thrones Breakdown
Week 1: June 1-7
Prologue
Bran I
Catelyn I
Daenerys I
Eddard I
Jon I
Catelyn II
Arya I
Bran II
Tyrion I
Jon II
Daenerys II
Eddard II
Tyrion II
Catelyn III
Week 2: June 8-14
Sansa I
Eddard III
Bran III
Catelyn IV
Jon III
Eddard IV
Tyrion III
Arya II
Daenerys III
Bran IV
Eddard V
Jon IV
Eddard VI
Week 3: June 15-21
Catelyn V
Sansa II
Eddard VII
Tyrion IV
Arya III
Eddard VIII
Catelyn VI
Eddard IX
Daenerys IV
Bran V
Week 4: June 22-28
Tyrion V
Eddard X
Catelyn VII
Jon V
Tyrion VI
Eddard XI
Sansa III
Eddard XII
Daenerys V
Eddard XIII
Jon VI
Eddard XIV
Arya IV
Week 5: June 29-July 5
Sansa IV
Jon VII
Bran VI
Daenerys VI
Catelyn VIII
Tyrion VII
Sansa V
Eddard XV
Catelyn IX
Jon VIII
Daenerys VII
Week 6: July 6-12
Tyrion VIII
Catelyn X
Daenerys VIII
Arya V
Bran VII
Sansa VI
Daenerys IX
Tyrion IX
Jon IX
Catelyn XI
Daenerys X
If you do want to participate, I think I'll use the tag #dbbasoiafreadalong, #dragonbadgerbookclub and my usual #dragonbadgerchallenge. I'll try to also do discussion questions to give a starting point :)
Also also: is there any way, or will there be any way, for readers without whichever special edition (?) it’s in to read “Letters to My Lady from the Abyss…”? Reading your Reddit AMA in a desire to know more about this wonderful book and the idea of a tiny bit extra has me 👀
Thank you for wishing to know more! FairyLoot special edition is the special edition with bonus content. I will explain more.
FairyLoot is a wonderful UK-based group who make fancy special editions for their monthly boxes. People sign up for FairyLoot and get books picked for them. You can get Young Adult, Adult Fantasy, or Romantasy, or a combination thereof - Long Live Evil was the August Adult Fantasy pick - and you can buy other special editions from their website. So the FairyLoot folks are Tastemakers as well as makers of beautiful objects.
(ISN’T IT BEAUTIFUL? Pictures stolen. Interior art by Bon Orthwick who got Marius’s hair PERFECT.)
But you can’t buy the monthly boxes, unless they have extras! If they do have extra Evils to buy, I will put up a link.
There are many boxes now, but FairyLoot and Illumicrate are the two biggest and have made a lot more people embrace reading and see books as a special treat. Waterstones and Barnes & Noble have started making special editions of books because of them.
A while back I knew none of this, because I was staying away from publishing, working with IP books (very different branch of publishing) and training for a different job. But then I did a catch-up call with my frien. She talked about FairyLoot. I did not understand her and thought maybe the deadlines had got on top of her and she believed fairies had looted her manuscript.
Holly: So these FairyLoot editions have (She holds up a copy of… I think… the Coldest Girl In Coldtown?) been amazing for UK sales.
Sarah: Sorry but why are these books so beautiful?
Holly: Because I just explained to you why, girl.
Sarah: Can I have this.
Holly: No they’re limited!
So then I knew FairyLoot was a Giant Deal and they were offered Long Live Evil but I was sure they wouldn’t pick me.
My lovely editor Jenni: great news, the FairyLoot people picked you!
Sarah: are you. are you quite sure.
Jenni: … yes? Could you write them some bonus content?
Sarah: YES! A thing I can do for them? Oh yes! Here’s three things I can do. Tell them they can pick which one they would like!
I wrote a letter for them as well, to be bound in with the book. But the bonus content is an extra adventure or point of view you didn’t get to see in the main book. FairyLoot picks what they think their readers might like most.
I really like epistolary novels, where the action is told though letters, such as Jane Austen’s Lady Susan and Amal El Mohtar and Max Gladstone’s This Is How You Lose The Time War. So I thought it would be fun to do a story through letters!
Obviously I then had a moment of dark self-doubt.
Sarah: O my god why did they pick this nobody’s going to like him what shall I do!
Holly: When I was writing Cardan’s letters you said ‘epistolary is so fun, you said, this is a piece of cake, you said, get in loser we’re writing romantically sinister letters, you said…’
Sarah: my Vision is a romantic The Screwtape Letters.
Holly: … oh dear. Okay. Get in loser we’re writing romantically sinister letters.
And so with a lil help from my kind frien, I wrote Letters to My Lady From the Abyss, which is an epistolary short story with a POV we don’t get in book 1 and an adventure we don’t get to see. But I did write it, as you see, for FairyLoot so it belongs to them and it’s up to them. I think I might get it back in a year and then I’ll put it up on my website. I will let you know!
I am so sorry for this very long explanation, I just wanted to let you know what was up.
Should you read it, I hope you enjoy. And I will write more bonus content, I promise!
Also speaking of FairyLoot, they’re doing a readalong of Long Live Evil right now if anyone might like to chat about the book. Here’s a link to people talking about chapters 1-7 - they will do a different chunk every day! I like that people are choosing favourite characters, so far the Cobra, Key and Emer have the votes!
