#the cuckoo

[poikaboo]

monster that slowly, bit by bit, replaces its prey with a wooden replica of themself at night when they're asleep. it starts slowly, innocuously, a fingernail or a scrap of skin. maybe an eye. the victim doesn't notice, beyond maybe a little extra stiffness or dry eye in the morning, before the body accepts its replacement and assimilates it.

the monster, as it requires, takes and replaces more and more from its prey. it's almost, almost, harmless, if it weren't for how the body, when fully replaced, loses that which was still animating it, and becomes fully wooden, and the flesh and bone which was stolen is finally accepted fully by the monster's form. the prey's mind remains locked in this puppet replica, and a shambling body that was once theirs appears on the edge of town, begging for help and shelter, or perhaps intent on finding the puppet before anyone else...

[professionalqueerbookworm]

Queer Reviews: Camilla Läckberg, "The Cuckoo" (Fjällbacka #11).

Miss Camilla "white cishet men ain't shit" Lackberg has done it again ❤️

Plot: Two terrible events, without obvious connection, shake Fjällbacka to its core. A famous photographer is found brutally murdered in a showroom. Henning Bauer, the Nobel prize winner in literature, suffers from a violent act on the small island where he is writing the 10th book in his world famous series.

While Patrik Hedström and his colleagues at Tanumshede police station struggle to investigate the cases, Erica Falck researches a murder on a trans woman in Stockholm in the 1980’s. She slowly realizes that the threads from the past are connected to the present time, and that old sins leave long shadows behind.

[iconsrequestsworld]

fav or reblog if you save 💉

[scolojendra]

4 Years of OCtober - Day 18 - Secretive

[sindirimba]

Кукушка (The Cuckoo), 2002

[writing-for-life]

Who would be Barbie's grandfather and what does the cuckoo's speech about him mean?

Hi there, thanks for your ask 🙂

So we’re in the realm of personal interpretation here, because we never get any information beyond what’s on the page in AGoY. But I’d say Barbie’s grandfather is just… Barbie’s grandfather?

The strongest indication for this is that she populated the Land with her toys, people and places she knew as a child:

So I guess we can assume that she had a relationship to her grandfather that was special enough for her to also bring him into her dreamworld.

A hieromancer is a diviner, someone who foresees the future. In her dreamworld, he apparently knew a lot about the hierogram and what was going on, and Barbie liked him and referred to him as “sweet”. And in combination with this panel…

…it makes me think of those family dynamics many of us probably know in one way or the other: While Barbie refers to her parents as good and nice people, they didn’t particularly understand her fantasies and dreams and worried about her. And I don’t know about you: There’s often one person in the family who gets and supports the child, even if the parents don’t. And in stories, it often is a grandparent, or the misfit aunt/uncle, that type of thing.

So my personal idea was always that for Barbie, that person was her grandfather. He might have been more supportive, more understanding, and maybe that’s why he had a special place in her dreamworld. As someone who knows, foresees and above all: protects? And he is now gone, but unlike with some of the other characters, this has happened offscreen, and we don’t get the exact circumstances. So maybe this is an indication of her grandfather dying in the real world, and that one person who understands and protects being gone?

It always struck me as fairly straightforward in the context of the story, because every little thing in it has to do with Barbie’s childhood, her toys, the people in her life. But obviously this is just my take, so I’m interested to hear what other people are thinking.

@clorofilarosa ask answered

[ALT TXT auto-generated, no guarantees for accuracy]

[comparativetarot]

Six of Wands. Art by Shannon Hochman, from the Sandman Tarot Deck.