Diving Pool: Three Novellas | 
pickThese are slow stories that twist the mundane into something unsettled and uncomfortable. Maybe it‘s the relatability of the domestic that renders porous the barrier between what is ordinary and what is horrifying. A terrible kind of horror that is not scraping at doors, howling in the night, but growing inside us like mould. 1/4
BallroomsOfMars I love how the stories give just enough detail to grasp some dimension of character, some sense of context, but what remains untold raises more questions than the words give answers. There are no conclusions, just maybe, maybe, and the reader is made culpable as they imagine what might hide in the narrative gaps. The reader has some agency in how they join the dots, and the horror — the size of it, the muckiness — becomes their responsibility. 2/4 4d
BallroomsOfMars Days after finishing, I keep thinking about the freedoms and dangers of invisibility. How, overlooked and unwitnessed, a person can slowly warp out of shape with the world. They can pass through life as observer only, detached from life like a ghost, their sense of culpability corroding with their sense of self. 3/4 4d
BallroomsOfMars I find myself thinking about why the two sisters are living together despite one being married and pregnant. About grapefruit segments, glistening and skinned. About the slow ooze of honey from a split comb. About whether a body, hollowed by absence, collapses in on itself in the vacuum of loss. 4/4 4d
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pan
so-so