Eric Larocca, Denise Mina, Matt Baume: Pajiba August 2024 Book Recommendations Superpost!

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Books | September 2, 2024 |

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Books | September 2, 2024 |

Hey hey, I fully returned to my reading groove last month. Blessed be to novellas and manga.

Hi Honey, I’m Homo!: Sitcoms, Specials, and the Queering of American Culture by Matt Baume

TV is gay. Everyone knows it. And, as TV scholar and celebrated video essayist Matt Baume reveals, it’s always been gay. The medium of television has long been a foundation for storytellers to push the boundaries and explore LGBTQ+ lives, and the genre of the sitcom was a Trojan horse of sorts to sneak progressive ideas into people’s homes under the guise of simple and ‘wholesome’ entertainment for the masses.

If you’re familiar with the work of Baume, one of my favourite people on YouTube, Hi Honey, I’m Homo will be a familiar read. Each chapter explores a ground-breaking moment in LGBTQ+ representation on TV, how it happened, and its impact. This includes shows like Barney Miller, All in the Family, and, of course, Ellen. Baume is a zippy, entertaining writer who gives thorough context without weighing the book down in needless jargon or academic styling. For non-Americans like me, it was a handy insight into stuff I’d often heard about but knew little of outside of. The downside is that, if you’re someone who watches Baume’s videos a lot, the book will be extremely familiar. It’s really just expanded essays from screen to page. That’s not a bad thing, of course. Baume’s work is good and deserves further exposure. It just made me want more because I love what he does so much. Still, if you’re new to him, check out both the book and his channel, which also has video essays on iconic queer stars like Rock Hudson, Howard Ashman, and Elvira!

Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma by Claire Dederer

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It’s the question we deal with every damn day: what do we do with great art made by bad people? In a post-#MeToo society where ‘cancel culture’ is the endless centre of the discourse and every aspect of it has become unbearably politicised, it feels as though everyone must confront the monster question. Claire Dederer’s book is a dissection of this conundrum and how it forces us all to become moral arbiters.

As someone who’s been writing about this issue for as long as I’ve been a professional critic, I was curious to see what, if any, new thoughts Dederer could bring to the table. We’re familiar with the basic beats: separating art from the artist; ‘oh, they’re products of their time’; if it really our job to judge; and so on. As she delves into the details and the sheer exhaustion of this ceaseless emotional entanglement, the conversations expands well beyond its foundations.

For Dederer, she admits that her own biases shape her ideas on the subject, as they do for all of us. She can still watch Chinatown and view it as a masterpiece but Manhattan is too discomfiting since it seems directly ripped from Woody Allen’s own life and views of women. She talks of the stain, of the ways that this malice and our knowledge of them irrevocably mar how we view art, whether we like it or not. For some, the stain is massive and for others, it’s negligible. There are those whose ‘genius’ has become irrevocably connected to their cruelties, and those whose work about evil has inadvertently made others suspicious of them. Male monsters get away with more than female ones, the latter of whom are often deemed beyond help for issues of maternal failing rather than wider abuses.

This is not a binary issue, as Dederer details. It’s unfair and sort of offensive to force these issues of systemic bigotry and corruption onto the shoulders of mere consumers, those who have been sold a lie about genius and its immaculate power for centuries. Personal decisions are important but not the thing that should define the wider question. I greatly appreciated Monsters for its nakedly emotional analysis of this topic that haunts us all. It’s also the most I’ve ever used the highlight function on my Kindle.

Three Fires by Denise Mina

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Girolamo Savonarola was a Dominican friar living in 15th-century Florence who became infamous for his hellfire sermons and condemnation of all forms of beauty and luxury that he saw as signs of sin. He was responsible for the infamous Bonfire of the Vanities, a series of burnings of books, clothes, art, and anything that was seen as too opulent to be godly. In her excellent novella Three Fires, Denise Mina offers a succinct but lingering portrait of a moment of shame that impacts us to this day.

It’s amazing how much Mina can do with only 140 or so pages. Her last novella, Rizzio, also dramatized a historical event with panache and a modern eye that offered modern context without becoming hopelessly anachronistic. It’s clear from the beginning with Three Fires that Mina is drawing parallels between Savonarola’s rabblerousing hysteria and the culture war Trumpism of the 2020s, but it’s not thuddingly laid out like a bad SNL sketch. Mina’s too interesting an author for that. The connective threads are all there, though: an ambitious but largely uncharismatic figure who is committed to a hard-line view of the world with no compromise; the sermons that inspire legions of devotees through fearmongering and targeting of already marginalized people; a tenuous connection to the divine created mostly through self-promotion and old-fashioned delusion. The omniscient narrator offers a sly view of his rise to power and the arrogance of a man who wants to be both a soldier of God and a deified leader himself. The book is short enough to stop Mina from getting too heavy-handed with her thematic intentions, and the end result is one of my favourite reads of the year so far.

Hex by Jenni Fagan

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The Darkland Tales project is a series of novellas by some of Scotland’s most acclaimed authors wherein they write their takes on important moments from the nation’s history, myth, and legend. As I mentioned above, Denise Mina wrote Rizzio, about David Rizzio, private secretary to Mary, Queen of Scots, and his assassination. Here, Jenni Fagan tackles the state’s murder of Geillis Duncan, a teenage girl accused of being a witch. On her final night of life, broken from extensive torture and awaiting her execution, she is visited by a 21st-century witch who seeks to comfort her in her last hours. Witch or not, however, things are unbearable for women regardless.

I have mixed feelings on Hex. The set-up is an alluring one but the more this brief read went on, the more I wish it had just been about Geillis Duncan and not this fictional modern witch brought in to make parallels between the misogyny of then and now. Fagan is a poet and it certainly shows here, often with beautiful sentences but also through a kind of meandering that takes away from her central focus. The whole thing feels like it would work better as spoken word or a two-person play, one I would watch, but as a novella, it loses its way.

You’ve Lost a Lot of Blood by Eric LaRocca

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Every time I look up lists of the most disturbing novels (which I do a lot because I’m weird and morose), I see the name Eric LaRocca pop up with increasing frequency. But for as many people calling them the new face of modern horror, there are those who cry ‘overrated.’ So, of course I had to check out the first work of theirs that was on sale (hey, I have a budget.) That their stories so often seem to be published without blurbs or easily definable plots only further piqued my interest.

You’ve Lost a Lot of Blood is a novella in three parts, with poems interspersed throughout. There’s a queer man on a serial killer spree with his lover, who he is thinking of murdering at some point; the poetry he’s written; a novella; and a novella inside of it about a video game designer who ends up at a creepy house.

Some elements are very unnerving. The novella at the centre of the tale is the most effective part, a classic body horror haunted house story about guilt and repeating the cycle of trauma that wears its Clive Barker influences on its sleeve. The outside parts are more disjointed, which I think is the point but it became increasingly frustrating to read. There are intriguing ideas at play there too, largely about the nature of art and plagiarism that cried out for a wider narrative so its purposes could be fleshed out. The serial killers’ parts are clearly Billy Martin inspired, largely from Exquisite Corpse (a.k.a. the most disturbing book I’ve ever read), but that book works because Martin unflinchingly reveals the awful but logical conclusion of its characters’ mindset. I really just needed more all-around from this. I plan to read more LaRocca stuff because they’re clearly talented but this one wasn’t quite it for me.