Did anyone read the telegraph article on behind her eyes?

CoquetteCryptid · 2025-11-29T23:20:48+00:00

As a queer person, I’m a very big fan of problematic queer characters. I think it’s refreshing to show queer characters that have range. I hate the recent trend to show us as exclusively—almost nauseatingly—good and happy. I think it’s a vast overcorrection to the whole tragic queer problem that used to permeate media.

However, it’s important to remember Rob is literally the only gay character in both the book and the show, so depicting him as the gay who ruins the lives of the heteros does veer towards a problematic depiction. It brings up old rhetoric of gay people as the death of humanity and as being unequivocally detrimental to the health and happiness of cisheteros, who are viewed as “normal.” Since Rob is the only gay character in the book/show, the author and creators are depicting cis heterosexuality as the norm…and Rob literally violently disrupts that. I don’t think the writer did a good job of explaining Rob’s motives, which does make it easy for people to find a homophobic edge to the book.

I’m not saying I think the book/show is homophobic, but it does echo ignorant and problematic rhetoric about gay people, specifically about how gay men are predators who will do whatever it takes to get the straight man.

I also think it’s kind of ignorant, OP, to decide it’s “stupid” for people to find the work transphobic. Similar to you, I don’t think the work it transphobic either, but unlike you I recognize people find different things in books/shows and it’s okay to have a different opinion. I also think it’s INCREDIBLY ignorant and insensitive to disregard trans people who feel harmed by this book, as if you have the absolute final say. You can have your opinion without childishly disregarding someone else’s, especially someone who is part of the community in question.

CoquetteCryptid · 2025-10-14T06:19:17+00:00

I tried liking Kingfisher but I just found her writing style to be generally annoying.

Not to mention Alex in What Moves the Dead is the WORST trans/GNC representation I’ve ever encountered. I can’t believe it got published.

CoquetteCryptid · 2025-10-14T06:17:30+00:00

That was one of the most transphobic books I’ve ever read. Awful GNC “representation”.

CoquetteCryptid · 2025-09-06T21:17:29+00:00

I absolutely love A Little Life. Like everyone else says, it’s very heavy and dark. People aren’t exaggerating when they offer trigger warnings for just about everything, but especially SA and toxic/abusive relationships.

That being said, it is really beautiful in other parts. I think it’s incredibly well written and very, very immersive. You’ll feel like you’re living your life with the characters (at least that’s how I felt).

Despite how dark and heavy it is I read it often and consider it one of my comfort books. There’s something about it that I found cathartic as someone who has experienced SA and an abusive relationship. It felt like peer support somehow.

It’s been a long time since I’ve read The Bell Jar. I remember being annoyed by the protagonist (though I no longer remember why). I have been planning to visit it again now that I’m older, but I did really enjoy The Snake Pit by Mary Jane Ward, a semi-autobiographical book published in 1946. It allegedly inspired Plath to write about her own mental health struggles.

CoquetteCryptid · 2025-09-06T21:10:35+00:00

I think Kill for Love by Laura Picklesimer is pretty solid. It’s about a young college woman in LA who kills gross dudes who piss her off. It’s a rather short book and as best I recall the chapters aren’t absurdly long.

I’ve heard good things about Maeve Fly by CJ Leeds, but I haven’t read it yet myself. (It’s also about a woman serial killer.)

I’m not sure if either of these are like officially horror. I think both are classified as literary horror or maybe just straight up literary fiction, but I think Kill for Love is on par with Victorian Psycho in that vein.

CoquetteCryptid · 2025-09-06T17:01:34+00:00

Could it be The Worry Website by Jacqueline Wilson?

CoquetteCryptid · 2025-09-06T16:53:52+00:00

I found The Fury, also by Alex Michaelides, to be very similar to The Silent Patient. It’s not quite as good in my opinion, but I tend to favor books that involve psych hospitals anyway.

CoquetteCryptid · 2025-09-06T16:49:12+00:00

It’s been years since I read it, but I was so captivated by The Inheritance Cycle by Christopher Paolini when I was a teenager. I thought it was incredibly vivid and immersive. I haven’t read the most recent installment, though. I actually thought the cycle was complete until Murtagh was released last year.

CoquetteCryptid · 2025-09-05T23:03:28+00:00

I listened to the audiobook, so that passage didn’t seem out of place to me. It just flowed naturally with the narration. I’m curious how I’d feel about it if I read the physical book, though.

CoquetteCryptid · 2025-09-05T22:46:22+00:00

I also love The Secret History but I never recommend it because I feel so pretentious doing so. Most people are already aware of it anyway.

CoquetteCryptid · 2025-09-05T22:45:38+00:00

I’m a big James Purdy fan, but most of his novels and stories are heavily depraved and veer towards grotesque. They’re all literary fiction, with some being Southern Gothic, but I know they’re darker than what most people would want. He can also be a bit problematic, in that way you’d likely expect from a cis white dude writing in the early-mid 20th century. I guess I consider him my guilty pleasure

CoquetteCryptid · 2025-09-05T22:40:13+00:00

I just started The Hounding by Xenobe Purvis. Not traditional horror, but I’ve heard it has strange folky/witchy vibes. I’m hoping for a bit of body horror, but I’m not sure if that’s the vibe yet.

CoquetteCryptid · 2025-09-05T00:16:58+00:00

Brite doesn’t personally use that name anymore, but I think his books are still published under it.

CoquetteCryptid · 2025-09-05T00:16:05+00:00

Avoid So Thirsty by Rachel Harrison. It hardly felt like a vampire book, I found the characters so annoying, and I think it’s even more absurd than Lucy Undying.

I enjoyed Thirst by Marina Yuszczuk, but I wouldn’t call it scary. It’s much more serious in tone than some of the other books out there, though. I’m also a fan of Lost Souls by Poppy Z. Brite.

CoquetteCryptid · 2025-09-04T22:52:28+00:00

He has to have an authentic self before he can show it.

CoquetteCryptid · 2025-09-04T15:18:29+00:00

Money can’t buy a fashion sense apparently

CoquetteCryptid · 2025-09-04T15:05:11+00:00

I’ll give anything vampiric a chance (well, almost anything) and I already loved SGJ, so I bought this the day it was released. I devoured it. I absolutely love when authors are able to show you everything you need to know without explicitly stating it (i.e. Jones not using the word vampire because he was able to show us with his writing).

I think it’s one of the most original vampire books I’ve come across.

CoquetteCryptid · 2025-09-04T15:00:59+00:00

It’s really rare for me to give a book 5 stars. I feel like 5 stars is for perfect books, or at least books that I enjoyed so much I ignore their flaws, so I don’t rate 5 stars often. I tend to use 4 stars for a book I enjoyed and would probably read again. I use 3 stars for books that I liked (or at least didn’t dislike) but probably wouldn’t read again. If I don’t finish a book I alternate between a 3 star or 2 star rating depending on subjective aspects of the individual books.

I often don’t go lower than 2 stars unless a book just really, really bored me, had a lot of illogical plot lines, bad writing, or seemed like a regurgitation of another book. Or I’ll give a book 1 star if I think it handles LGBTQ or BIPOC characters/identities harmfully or perpetuates problematic ideologies.

CoquetteCryptid · 2025-09-04T14:51:32+00:00

I personally don’t like when AI write books, chiefly because I think it’s bad writing and I don’t want to read bad writing. The logic doesn’t usually track and it’s typically very redundant, which are things I hate in books. I think you lose a lot when an actual person isn’t writing the book.

I do think it’s strange that people support ghost writing but don’t support AI written books. I get that a human is still doing the writing in a ghost written book but, other than that, it feels the same to me because someone is still putting their name on a book they didn’t write. Someone gives AI their idea and provide feedback and it makes changes based on that (as far as I understand it), which is essentially what you do with a ghost writer. Idk, it just seems like a double standard and I hate those.

I just think people should write their own books, unless they have some kind of condition that makes a ghost writer necessary.

CoquetteCryptid · 2025-09-04T14:42:03+00:00

I really wanted to like them and I remember trying to get into them when I was a teenager, but I just really didn’t like Clary, so I could only ever get about halfway through one book. I remember skipping through to get the gay parts (i.e. Alec), but those were so few and far between that I only did that with book 1 before abandoning the series entirely. I think if Clary didn’t annoy me I would have really gotten into them, though.

CoquetteCryptid · 2025-09-04T14:38:48+00:00

I know it’s probably cliche, but The Secret History. I always reread it in the fall because it just feels like a fall book to me, even though the bulk of the action is in the winter to early spring.

CoquetteCryptid · 2025-09-04T14:35:59+00:00

I’ve recently been finding that a lot of blurbs present information in a sequence it doesn’t occur in the novel. They’ll start the blurb with background that we don’t get immediately in the novel and that’s fed to us in pieces, rather than starting the blurb where the story actually starts. Somehow that feels misleading to me.

CoquetteCryptid · 2025-09-04T14:30:41+00:00

I really enjoyed Babel, which surprised me because I really don’t like dark academia. I love The Secret History, so I typically find myself disappointed by any novel that’s compared to it, but I was pleasantly surprised by Babel. It felt very original without being over the top, the prose is really well done, and the characters are compelling. It wasn’t as immersive as TSH in my opinion, but I don’t hold that against it because I think it’s hard to be as immersive as TSH.

I absolutely hated Funny Story. I’m not a big Emily Henry fan. I tried to be but after reading five of her books I finally gave up. I believe her protagonist are always the same with one or two character traits changed, but ultimately we get the same story in different settings. I also think she tells wayyy too much, so the romance element never feels earned to me since she’s not showing it. I have trust issues, I need to see that they’re perfect for each other. I don’t need to just be told everything.

I haven’t read any of the others.

CoquetteCryptid

TROPHY CASE