Red X

"3.5/5 —> 4.5/5 (July 30th, 2023) the more I think about it, the more I like it. I will be reading this again. <br/><br/>I’m conflicted about this book. It started out really strong and I was really engaged. I don’t normally read books this fast. I was really gripped by the story and it’s writing style and the characters. I loved the mystery and horror and I was terrified of the shadows that moved in my room. <br/><br/>But then the letter at the end of 2000 happened and it took me out of it a bit. <br/><br/>I thought the letters from the author’s perspective were tangentially related to the happenings of the book and giving a little more context as to the terror of writing a horror story so closely connect to your loved experiences. But that big info dump about Alexander Wood and then the creature, Nicholas, talking directly to the author felt like a cop out. What should’ve been a really terrifying scene killed my terror for the book. I was able to read the rest of the book with relative ease. <br/><br/>The book was amazingly written, the prose was great and the characters were phenomenal. It touched on a lot of real hardships for the queer community, the unhoused and racialized people. It was a great book for its representation and it’s attention to real world issues. But it fell apart at the end and some of the latter chapters were incredibly confusing.<br/><br/>I know the intention of the book the entire time was that Nicholas was a barghest and just as effected by the terrors that the gay community went through as any of the other characters in the book but I thought that if you wanted to put all that work into developing the lore of your monster, there were more interesting ways to do it. For example, the way that Nicholas talked to Robin in 2016 or Salem saving Nicolas in 2008. I just personally thought that the author being included as a character in the book was a little tacky and lessened the impact for me. <br/><br/>I personally thought the strongest chapters were 1984, 1992, and 2000 aside from the exposition dump. Honestly, if the book was longer and the letters after chapters were taken as just essay segments and all the lore for the book itself was within the characters experiences I would be a lot more forgiving and I would probably have enjoyed the ending a great deal more. But it kind of fizzled out as it got more fantasy leaning.<br/><br/>Even though there are parts that definitely took me out of the book, it was still an amazing insight into a side of the gay village that I never got to experience as I am a queer woman/nonbinary person rather than a gay man and I was born in 2000. So, when I finally started going to the gay village for pride events, I was already in my early 20s and it had been gentrified even further than he mentions in the book. <br/><br/>It was a wonderful book, full of harrowing realism and terrifying real world stories about what happened to queers throughout the time period and still happens today. I just have a lot of complicated feelings about this book.<br/><br/>"

"3.5/5 —> 4.5/5 (July 30th, 2023) the more I think about it, the more I like it. I will be reading this again. <br/><br/>I’m conflicted about this book. It started out really strong and I was really engaged. I don’t normally read books this fast. I was really gripped by the story and it’s writing style and the characters. I loved the mystery and horror and I was terrified of the shadows that moved in my room. <br/><br/>But then the letter at the end of 2000 happened and it took me out of it a bit. <br/><br/>I thought the letters from the author’s perspective were tangentially related to the happenings of the book and giving a little more context as to the terror of writing a horror story so closely connect to your loved experiences. But that big info dump about Alexander Wood and then the creature, Nicholas, talking directly to the author felt like a cop out. What should’ve been a really terrifying scene killed my terror for the book. I was able to read the rest of the book with relative ease. <br/><br/>The book was amazingly written, the prose was great and the characters were phenomenal. It touched on a lot of real hardships for the queer community, the unhoused and racialized people. It was a great book for its representation and it’s attention to real world issues. But it fell apart at the end and some of the latter chapters were incredibly confusing.<br/><br/>I know the intention of the book the entire time was that Nicholas was a barghest and just as effected by the terrors that the gay community went through as any of the other characters in the book but I thought that if you wanted to put all that work into developing the lore of your monster, there were more interesting ways to do it. For example, the way that Nicholas talked to Robin in 2016 or Salem saving Nicolas in 2008. I just personally thought that the author being included as a character in the book was a little tacky and lessened the impact for me. <br/><br/>I personally thought the strongest chapters were 1984, 1992, and 2000 aside from the exposition dump. Honestly, if the book was longer and the letters after chapters were taken as just essay segments and all the lore for the book itself was within the characters experiences I would be a lot more forgiving and I would probably have enjoyed the ending a great deal more. But it kind of fizzled out as it got more fantasy leaning.<br/><br/>Even though there are parts that definitely took me out of the book, it was still an amazing insight into a side of the gay village that I never got to experience as I am a queer woman/nonbinary person rather than a gay man and I was born in 2000. So, when I finally started going to the gay village for pride events, I was already in my early 20s and it had been gentrified even further than he mentions in the book. <br/><br/>It was a wonderful book, full of harrowing realism and terrifying real world stories about what happened to queers throughout the time period and still happens today. I just have a lot of complicated feelings about this book.<br/><br/>"

"Horror tied in with the author's personal trauma. Real events create this monster's reality. It's like "it" for queer people but real and tangible because it applies to the real and fictional disappearances of queer men. Haven't finished reading it, but I love it already. "