#thgw

[torrentialslide]

Was thinking about thgw at mach speeds then realised that i do in fact have a tumblr blog where thoughts may be yelled at. I may have overlooked this.

Tgrailwar so so good…….

[actual-autocannibal]

reading negative reviews about things have gotten worse and quietly seething because none of them understand agnes and zoe the way i do and i already have a psychotic attachment to this story

[torrentialslide]

Scrolling twitter and came across a beautiful piece of art of Richard fighting Constantine and i know its just a coincidence but man i miss the couldve beens still. Shoutout to you Constatine miss you buddy

[autoneurotic]

not me workin on a huge things have gotten worse since we last spoke painting 🫢

[autoneurotic]

still very really right for this one

[autoneurotic]

i need a minute and also 100 dollars

[turningnumber]

things have gotten worse since we last spoke - review

i'm somewhere between favorable and meh on things have gotten worse since we last spoke. read it because the cover art is absolutely killer and i was not disappointed by the horror elements but it was too short and the dialogue left much to be desired in terms of believability (i can see someone posting a forum ad that verbose but nobody emails like that. some great prose but absolutely did not feel like i was witnessing 2 real people.) there was also very little to distinguish between the two characters' voices; i felt like i was reading the same person talking to herself, which i suppose could be serving some thematic end or another, but if so i certainly didn't pick up on it.

agnes' descent into madness, as it were, was impressively well developed despite taking place across such a short time period. plenty of full length novels don't pull that off as successfully as this did. the few peeks we were granted into her backstory helped her feel fleshed out and gave her instability some context. the same cannot be said for zoe, who never reports on anything happening in her life and apparently does what she does solely out of a callous desire for control. that's perfectly fine, but i think the story would be improved substantially if it gave the reader a better understanding of where that need for control comes from.

i've seen some people complaining that this book is "lesbian porn written by a man"--ignoring that dismissive attitude towards the author's nonbinary identity, i also have a hard time viewing this story as smut. i will admit it skirts literotica territory with the red dress and underwear stuff, and tonally i did find that section jarring as the rest of agnes and zoe's 'contract' wasn't particularly sexual, but it played an intermediary role in progressing the toxicity of their relationship from 'mildly troublesome' to 'deeply horrifying.' i don't think its inclusion was intended to be titillating.

also, my general stance on who's "allowed" to make porn about which minority groups is that fetishism requires a degree of sexual objectification that really isn't present here. being a cis man (which i again emphasize is not true of this author) doesn't mean you are incapable of writing about lesbians without fetishizing them. same goes for any other group. i'm inclined to approach that type of content more cautiously, of course, but this story didn't raise any red flags for me? but everyone's entitled to their perspectives, and i am not in fact a queer woman, so that's all i'll say about that.

tl;dr the email/IM format of this book wasn't used to its full potential, resulting in both characters and a setting that felt a bit too unmoored from reality for my liking. but the third act was deeply disturbing and vile in a way that it absolutely earned, no cheap shocks or predictable beats there. i doubt it'll end up on my bookshelf (although that cover art...i am tempted.) but i'd recommend it to anyone who wants to read something quick and gross and weird in the most complimentary sense :)

3.5/5

[autoneurotic]

i love you agnes and zoe i love you so much but how and why did neither of them think about a sperm donor. like. you went ‘i want a baby. a life inside me.’ and your girlfriends first thought was ‘stick a salamander in your pocket’ and then when that wasn’t good enough and also she made you kill it her next plan is ‘ok i had a tapeworm once. 100% a living thing thats in you and depending on you. do that.’