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I had the absolute best Trick or Treat Exchange experience.

I got two winter Friday the 13th stories:

Chocolate and Blood. Fluffy/cracky story about the sweet relationship between a mother and her hard-working son, complete with dorky Christmas sweaters and hot cocoa. It's just that they're Pamela and Jason Voorhees.

Slay Bells. Absolutely feels like the cold open to a winter Friday movie! Great setup, awesome use of the setting and winter season, slasher-style creepy, and accompanied by some downright iconic cinematic images.

And I got two Ginger Snaps fics:

Aqua Eyeshadow and Knee Bruises. A happier ending for modern Ginger and Brigitte--but, in inimitable werewolf style, there's still a dead Avon lady. Funny and oddly sweet, with the perfect blend of horror and comedy and dark suburban satire. And werewolves digging holes with their hands/paws.

Dead Men's Tales. Awesome "found manuscript" folkloric horror set in historical Canada. Beautifully written, incredibly creepy, and so very much my jam. And this one will totally work even if you don't know canon, so I highly recommend it for your Halloween horror needs.

And the very first Twin Peaks Cooper/Audrey/Laura fic, at least on AO3:

Under So Many Lids. Stunningly poetic--"get drunk on the language" prose--and a perfect evocation of Lynch in general and The Return in particular. Post-canon Cooper keeps searching, and, on a winding and mythical path, is eventually reunited with both Laura and Audrey. Bittersweet, gorgeous, and with some scorching hot sex. I adore it, and I'm going to slide this in as the perfect canon postscript.

And this amazing Misery fic:

Sophronia. Annie conjures up Misery out of fan love so she can save her from her dire fate... and keep her favorite character imprisoned in her house as a kind of grotesque living doll. This somehow manages to be a skin-crawling bit of horror, an incredible metafictional look at a character from a romantic and Romantic world transported into our own, a sweet and lived-in look at my fiction-within-fiction OT3 (Misery/Geoffrey/Ian FTW!), and incredibly suspenseful and well-paced and clever. <3

This is a complex, dark, and gorgeously written horror novel; I definitely recommend it if you can tolerate some pretty bleak, visceral descriptions of realistic atrocities.

The Sea Dreams It Is the Sky starts in Malaga, where Isabel, an isolated academic living pretty much hand-to-mouth, gradually develops a prickly kind of friendship--or even familial relationship--with an older man she at first knows only as The Eye. They're both expatriates of a fictional South American country, Magera, which underwent a violent, totalitarian coup when Isabel was a child. (One nudged along, unsurprisingly, by the CIA--the most terrifying thing in The Sea Dreams It Is the Sky is a calm, professional American man in a suit, quietly pushing things along for his higher power.) The Eye turns out to be Avendaño, Magera's most famous poet, a larger-than-life figure as famous for his outbursts, insults, and affairs as he was for his poetry (which Isabel has never liked--"self-indulgent and misogynistic... if they did not celebrate drunken womanizing, then they were pensive and shallow explorations into the most rudimentary and puerile existentialism"). But Avendaño lost his poetry in Magera, along with his eye, and now he just wants to enjoy the small pleasures he has left--and try to live with the horrors of his past.

But then he's drawn back to Magera, even though he knows it might mean his death, and Isabel is left alone to house-sit his lavish apartment--and to find the troubling manuscript he left behind, a memoir of his horrifying captivity and torture at the hands of the new Mageran government. It's also a memoir of his own experience with a found manuscript, a kind of abstract guide to Lovecraftian witchcraft, which he begins to translate. Isabel sinks into Avendaño's history even as she has to figure out what to do with her present and what risks she should potentially take to save Avendaño from whatever has found him in Magera.

What this novella does brilliantly is intertwine the real world horrors of coups, dictatorships, and uncaring international chess games with supernatural and cosmic horrors; it pulls this off in a way that heightens both. It feels like it understands both the realistic and symbolic/metaphorical nightmares it's describing, which is no mean feat--sometimes things translated into fantasy wind up dwindling what they're trying to evoke, or offering cheap solutions to real problems. Jacobs doesn't do that. And the characters are interesting--Avendaño's guilt and deflated arrogance are really well-done, as is Isabel's growing sense of connection not only with him but with the world around her (her queerness is nicely and casually handled as just a background part of her character).

It's also beautifully, richly written. There's a line here that describes a particular kind of sudden, freezing panic so well that I kind of hate Jacobs for coming up with it. Here's the opening:

I can recognize a Mageran in any city of the world. Violence leaves its mark, and horror makes siblings of us all. A diaspora of exiles, dreaming of home.

On the streets, they called him "The Eye" for obvious reasons--the eyepatch, of course, but also his wary, sleepless demeanor. He would sit in the afternoons in the Parque de Huelin in the shade, a wide-brimmed straw hat on his head, a Bali cigarette hanging from his lower lip. The patch made him look like a veteran, and I guess we both were, though he was much older than I was then. I remember the scent of cloves around him, and the smell of the sea that we could hear but not sea. It hissed and murmured at us from beyond the Paseo Maritimo. At the time, I was teaching writing and poetry at the Universidad de Malaga. In the evenings I would ride my Vespa down to the park to catch a breeze from the sea, to drink in the cafes and watch the young, bronzed women, happy and glowing, and forget about Magera. And Pedro Pablo Vidal, the cruel. And my family. I was young and very poor.

This isn't in print on its own anymore, but it's available with another novella in a collection called A Lush and Seething Hell.

I will effectively buy any pulp novel I can find with its old-fashioned cover art intact, which is how I wound up with Sin on Wheels: The Uncensored Confessions of a Trailer Camp Tramp, by Loren Beauchamp. Here pictured being its glorious self:



The internet has now officially informed me that 1) you can buy this cover as a greeting card, which you should, and 2) the reason I was surprised by the level of craft here is because this was actually written by acclaimed SF author Robert Silverberg.

( Pulp pornography and middle-class ennui--discussion of infidelity and sexual assault. )

King of Exchanges, the Stephen King exchange, is now open! We've got a lot of great stories in a wide variety of fandoms. Go forth and be delighted!

I've fallen headfirst into passionate, swooning love with Star Trek TOS and Kirk/Spock, so much so that I went out and bought, well, twenty-two Star Trek novels plus the Star Trek Encyclopedia. (Guided in choice by rachelmanija, sholio, and these fan reviews.) I have thus far read four:

The Kobayashi Maru, by Julia Ecklar

Immensely fun. There's a frame story involving Kirk, Sulu, McCoy, Scotty, and Chekov on a downed shuttle, waiting for rescue, contending with injuries, and telling stories of their respective Kobayashi Maru tests (minus McCoy) to pass the time. Kirk's is brief but endearing. Sulu steals the book with his section, which features a sweet, nuanced relationship with his grandfather and an excellent look at his playful streak. Scotty and Chekov also get good turns, as Chekov overplays his hand by slaughtering everyone in what's basically laser tag and Scotty mopes through command track while his heart lies solely (of course) in engineering. Highly engaging, and especially great at providing development for the supporting characters.

My particular fannish delights: hurt/comfort, Kirk programming a computer to be impressed with him, Sulu's amazing paper airplanes that he uses to get around the rules in what's basically Starfleet Academy Model UN, and tons of Starfleet Academy worldbuilding in general.

The Entropy Effect, by Vonda N. McIntyre

The darkest ST novel I've read thus far--it's surprisingly downbeat even in the subplots, with Sulu realizing his ambitions necessitate him transferring off the Enterprise and his budding romance with the OC Head of Security being cut short by that and with Kirk feeling old regret for not having joined a love of his (a captain named Hunter) in her poly marriage. Now that I write that out, it all kind of works with the title: here we see the inevitability of decay. This one is also intensely science fictional, as McIntyre takes a plot that could feel fic-like--Kirk dies! The crew struggles to reverse it!--and sets it down in a labyrinth of complex time travel and in-depth mourning that involves not only death and lost chances but the decision to take loved ones off life support. It's a book that leaves a mark.

My particular fannish delights: temporary character death, Spock wearing civilian clothes (that Bones compliments him on! it matches his eyes!), implicitly bi Kirk, fringes-of-the-Federation worldbuilding, delightful background f/f shippiness with two OCs, cool aliens, creepy cobweb death gun, and incredibly shippy K/S scene where Kirk wakes up alive again.

Enterprise: The First Adventure, by Vonda N. McIntyre

Probably my favorite so far! This is, as the title would imply, a look at the Enterprise's first voyage, focused on the crew getting to know each other as they wind up--amazingly--escorting an old-fashioned circus around the galaxy. They eventually wind up in conflict with a dangerous rogue Klingon, but I personally would have been happy to just read an entire book about their circus-related adventures. Everyone gets incredible character beats here. Kirk spends the entire novel dealing with a sore knee, loneliness, command anxiety, and random animal attacks, and I like that he gets to fuck up a couple of times in a believably inexperienced way before making thoughtful amends. Spock spends some time debating how much emotional, impulsive humanity he wants to expose himself to, while saddled with the return of an old Vulcan cousin (now a juggler) who is a "pervert" who seeks out emotional sensations. McCoy gets beamed up in flippers and a wetsuit; Sulu gets beamed up with a fencing foil over his shoulder. Uhura's sense of music proves crucial and she strikes up a genuinely sweet friendship with Rand and shows an awesome sense of creative revenge. Rand gets the woobie backstory of my dreams and an amazing amount of competence kink. OCs Lindy (the circus owner) and Stephen (the Vulcan juggler) are especially great. Scotty and Kirk have a whole antagonists-to-friends character arc. Designated Fandom Jackass Gary Mitchell even gets a good, emotionally complex turn.

My particular fannish delights: all of the above but especially still-finding-his-way Kirk and woobie Yeoman Rand, Kirk riding a winged horse to Spock's rescue, Lindy's struggle to run her old-fashioned vaudeville circus, the eventual Klingon reactions to said circus, Sulu grandly seizing the opportunity to make a Shakespearean performance, more cool aliens and one case of a cool fake alien, Stephen the Vulcan juggler and his childhood history with Spock, Kirk saves the Klingon Empire, Kirk and Spock talk about ethics, and Uhura's music.

The Wounded Sky, by Diane Duane

An "inversion drive" has been invented that will allow ships to travel to other galaxies, and the Enterprise has just gotten permission to take it out on its maiden voyage, accompanied by its primary designer, the creative physicist (and glass spider alien) K't'lk. Complications ensue, and initial bursts of oddness and hyper-empathy during the use of the drive turn into potentially universe-destroying consequences and an intoxicating, sensawunda-filled blend of science and theology that deals with the complex ramifications of a lack of entropy. This is just such an exuberant, creative book, bursting at the seams with ideas and affection for the characters. I'm particularly touched by Scotty and his friendship with K't'lk and by the depiction of McCoy's burning compassion.

My particular fannish delights: how strongly one scene reminds me of the "further up and further in" bit of The Chronicles of Narnia, strong and sweet Kirk & Spock & McCoy friendship, GLASS SPIDER ALIENS with a complex society that seems ripe for a bunch of romantic tragedies and epics, casual inclusion of various types of nonbinary aliens, the rest of Starfleet turning up to escort the Enterprise home, the way the true selves of the crew manifest and the way they can only see others and not themselves, the sad-sweet bit of Chekov POV on his love for Russia, the vibe of the crew being basically an OT430, and Chapel working on her doctorate.

More to come, undoubtedly.

Thank you so much for writing for me! I'm so excited about all these fandom and tag combinations; feel free to mix and match requested tags if you see some that would go well together. I had more scenarios/details for some prompts, but occasionally the prompts just seemed to stand on their own--I'd really be happy to get any of them, regardless of whether or not I could expand on it.

I'm scioscribe on AO3 and scioscribe on Tumblr. All requests this year are for fic.

And thank you again! I hope you have a great exchange.

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sholio gave me three (delightful) things to write about.

Hot Cocoa

It was a longstanding tradition of mine as a kid, during the winter, to make a mug of hot cocoa and take two cookies--usually these little vanilla creme ones with colored sprinkles--and curl up in an armchair and sit and read, and this is still one of the things I think about when I think about the holidays. I liked to put in little marshmallows, and I always let them soak for a while and then ate them with a spoon. There was also a really excellent coffee shop where I went to college that sold peppermint mocha hot chocolate and gingerbread during the winters, and when I had a long break between classes, I'd get this and, again, read. So even the thought of hot cocoa makes me smile--and makes me think of books and cookies, which also make me smile.

Pluto

I have never bothered to do much research into the question of Pluto's planethood or lack thereof, but I grew up with it as a planet and it will always be one in my heart. I like to think of it out there, cold and far away and somehow peaceful. (One of my favorite random details in Santa Clarita Diet is Eric's T-shirt that says, "Leave Pluto Alone.") You would think I would be socially obligated to have an opinion on this because my in-laws are astronomers, but the subject has somehow never come up.

I also once made a model of the solar system out of cake for a science project, but I cannot for the life of me remember what represented Pluto.

Soulbonding

I love this, and I love how it's not exclusively a fandom concept but shows up in original works as well--Stephen King's ka-tets all share khef in a form of soulbonding, they're important and bonded to each other and can share thoughts. I also love how it's not rigidly defined: there's a lot of flexibility in terms of how you want it to work. Pain-sharing? Telepathy? Empathy? Need for proximity? Shared dreams? It's a great pick-and-choose buffet. I think I probably first stumbled across it in Sentinel fic*, which had a ton of this.

* I eventually saw a couple episodes of The Sentinel, but that was only after I'd consumed a metric ton of that fandom's hurt/comfort.

Soulbonding also works great for forced proximity, one of my favorite tropes for enemies-to-lovers or enemies-to-friends; I love the idea of characters suddenly brought into unexpected and even unwanted empathy with each other and importance to each other. I also like it for groups--the ka-tet thing again--and I have no idea why it's not basically universal fanon for the Guardians of the Galaxy to all have a group soulbond.

If anyone wants three random topics, hit me up and I can provide them!

Years and years ago, when this book first came out, I kept borrowing it off a friend of mine and then not actually reading it. I'd loved Speak and, later on, loved Wintergirls, but had never gotten around to reading more Anderson than that.

Catalyst is good but not as good. And reading it now as an adult, I can see why I kept shying away from it as a kid. Sexual assault and anorexia were thankfully subjects I had no real experience with, but academic stress and getting yourself into a shitty situation and continuously lying in the hopes that it would spontaneously resolve itself? Bristling with prickliness and resentment? Yeah, that sounds familiar. And unbearable.

The novel centers on Kate Malone, a driven and single-minded high school senior. She sees herself as split into Good Kate (shows up for her dad's chicken and biscuit dinners at church even though she's an atheist, takes care of her younger brother, is polite) and Bad Kate (selfish, occasionally seething with resentment, full of lusts and faults). Good Kate has applied to MIT, her (dead) mom's alma mater and her dream school. So far, so good. She was waitlisted and, as the novel opens, is now stuck in the agony of checking the mail everyday. It's particularly agonizing because, well, Bad Kate applied only to MIT, despite misleading everyone in her life into thinking she had safety schools. MIT is it for her, or it feels like her whole life is going to come crashing down around her.

Into all this comes Kate's classmate Teri Litch, whose house has burned down. She and her little brother move into Kate's house at her dad's invitation and very much not at Kate's. Kate grows to like the little brother, but at first it seems like nothing could make her like Teri, who steals from her (including the watch that Kate got from her mother), bullies her, and once beat her up. It's clear that class issues are part of this, but not, to be fair, the entirety of it; Teri genuinely and deliberately makes herself into someone pretty unpleasant to be around. For, it turns out, understandable reasons.

While Wintergirls and Speak both have prominent social issues they're tackling in a way that Catalyst doesn't--not as directly, anyway--Catalyst nonetheless feels like a cheaper, more "problem novel" take.

Spoilers below the cut.

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The Marvel Femslash Exchange collection opened yesterday and I've already read some great stories and stared in jaw-dropped wonder at some great art.

I received What's Good for You, a scorchingly hot bit of Carol/Minn-Erva mindfuckery. I love f/f anal and you hardly ever see it, so that part was an extra treat, but even if that's not your thing, this has Minn-Erva fooling an amnesiac "Vers" into believing that they used to have sex and that Minn-Erva knows all her preferences already and it's deeply disturbing and awesome.

In an honest effort to blog at least briefly about every book I read in June, I'm honorably backfilling to cover a book I read before I accepted the rachelmanija challenge.

Betty Neels wrote roughly a quadrillion Harlequin novels from roughly 1970-2000, all of which appear to exist in a kind of 1930-1950 haze that make it impossible for you to read them in as actually taking place in the year they were published, so don't even try. Occasionally Harlequin reissues ones and upgrades record players to CD players and this is nonsense.

Anyway, Neels's books are a cozy kind of comfort reading for me. She wrote novels where young women--either snappy and sensible or shy Cinderella types--fall in love with (almost always) rich Dutch doctors while also wearing clothes and eating meals that Neels describes in some detail. (The wonderful site The Uncrushable Jersey Dress reviews the novels and includes at the end of each a non-comprehensive listing of food and costuming descriptions. They get me.) Generally speaking, everything is cozy and domestic. There is a stereotypical Other Woman that the hero does not love but nevertheless spends a lot of time with, presumably just to disconcert the heroine; the Other Woman wears slinky clothes and may range from "pettily rude" to "actively endangering children for sport." Class is super-important. Women are allowed to care passionately about and be very good at their jobs as long as those jobs are within the feminine scope, like nursing; obviously being doctors themselves is off-limits. There's plenty people might legitimately bounce off of here, but in this context, I'm rarely bothered. They're just quiet, undramatic books with lots of food and clothes descriptions and the satisfying children's literature arc of a character gradually getting to be appreciated, and they're smoothly written.

They hardly ever work for me as romances, mostly because the hero is contractually obligated to be inscrutable to the heroine (though not to us) for the majority of the book, so he's always behaving in ways no human being would actually choose to, but The Promise of Happiness, which is very quintessentially Neelsian in that it sports basically all of the above tropes, actually has several excellent romantic lines, including this:

'I like you, too, Becky.' His voice was beguiling.

She said stonily: 'Yes, I know. I heard you telling your mother than in Trondheim--you liked me, but I wasn't your cup of tea.'

'And I was quite right--but I do believe you're my glass of champagne, Becky.'

Plot! Becky opens the novel by walking miles through the rain with a cat in a shopping bag and a dog on a piece of string, and it gradually emerges that she's escaping a particularly hellish situation with her stepmother and stepbrother, who emotionally blackmailed her out of her nursing job and have been keeping her in their home as an unpaid housekeeper ever since. Her only money is what she's been able to scrape out of the shopping budget without them noticing. Her life has been horrible, and even though she's still essentially broke and without options, she's finally broken away at four o'clock in the morning (trying to get to town to catch a bus before her family will wake up and catch her) because she overheard her stepbrother plotting to finally kill her dog and cat while she's doing the grocery shopping. Threatening to kill them is how he got her to come home in the first place, but now he apparently figures the lack of money will keep her there anyway. Heroically, Becky sets off.

And is offered a ride by a rich Dutch doctor in a Rolls Royce. This is Tiele, who is a little irritated at being unavoidably morally obligated to help this mousy girl. He steps up nonetheless, offering her a ride and a meal and, when Providence intervenes to basically drop the opportunity in his lap, a job caring for his mother, who has just impulsively fired the nurse who was supposed to escort her on the cruise back to Holland. Great, Becky will look after his mother until her broken leg heals, and then Tiele will help her find a job in Holland, where her family will never find her.

Of course, increasing encounters conspire to keep demonstrating Becky's spirit, kindness, competence, and ability to find joy in her life, and Tiele gradually and irritably falls in love with her, though in typical Neels fashion he fails to break up with his current fortune-hunting girlfriend first, all the better to delay Becky's realization that he's kissing her for an actual reason and not just... random high spirits. They get a number of nice moments, from him rapidly calculating that she isn't (and can't be) dressed for the fancy dinner he wanted to take her to and saving it by pretending he always wanted it to be a picnic to him taking note of how quickly she's learning Dutch.

Basically, this novel is Neels to the Max, done very well. It's full of domesticity and cats and dogs and food and clothes and Cinderella tropes and great literary tours of Holland and Norway.

Food porn examples found just by searching the novel for the word "soup":

"...Becky, willy-nilly, had lived on a slimming diet as well, with little chance of adding to her meagre meals because she had to account for the contents of the larder and fridge each morning. Now she ate her way through mushrooms in sauce re-moulade, iced celery soup, cold chicken with tangerines and apple salad, and topped those with peach royale before pouring coffee for them both."

"The food was mouthwatering; Becky settled for crabmeat cocktail, chilled strawberry soup, Virginia ham with rum and raisin sauce with a sald on the side because the Baron assured her that that was essential to her good health, and by way of afters blueberry pie with whipped cream."

"Presumably the Baron had booked a table, for there was delay for them, they had their drinks and were served at once; iced soup followed by lobster and a salad because the Baron had recommended them and washed down by a dry white wine. And Becky was persuaded to sample a waffle smothered in whipped cream for dessert..."

I don't know what caused Neels's sudden fascination with iced/chilled soup, but it at least made it easy to find these particular passages.