I have always had a vague understanding of the US Postal Service but never really gave it a lot of thought. It was always one of those government services that’s Just There and Always Works. When recent postmasters started trying to dismantle it / set it up to fail, I was dismayed that leftists couldn’t really offer a cogent reason for it other than “it’s a basic service of a functioning society”.

Needless to say, I learned a lot and I would’ve retained a lot more if I had read this instead of listened to it. I may yet pick this up from the library because I’d like to brush up on the names and dates of the different eras. This is a well written book, the author takes great pains to make the history come alive through characterization and anecdotes. The author starts by describing how post worked before the revolution, and then traced the evolution of the USPS up to the Obama years. A good understanding of US and world history is immensely helpful, the author doesn’t do a good job of describing the nuances of the forces at play regarding Congress, the executive, and the USPS.

Here’s some interesting tidbits I recall:

“Neither snow, nor rain…” isn’t the official motto of the USPS. It’s from an old poem about dedication and valor that got quoted in a mural painted many years ago that the USPS main offices.

The postal service started off in the colonies as a sideline business for anyone who had a building big enough to sort bags of mail. Delivery was haphazard, with no standardized system of addresses or dedicated delivery personel. After the revolution, not much changed - though Ben Franklin’s appointment as the first Postmaster General started what became a long and storied tradition of nepotism and politically based appointments.

The postmasters of each office were expected to turn their own profits - standardized postage didn’t happen until many years later.

Post offices used to be able to do minor banking - converting cash into basically ‘traveller’s checques’ for mailing or just to convert to a more secure format. IIRC, this ended in the early 1900s when bankers convinced Congress to make it illegal for the USPS to do anything remotely like banking.

The post office turned to Congress from very early to get laws passed to protect their monopoly on delivering messages. It wasn’t until DHL and FedEx built systems in the 50’s and 60’s that the post office had to relinquish it’s monopoly on letters.

Zipcodes came about in the… late fifties, early sixties sometime. I had no idea they were so recent; I thought that happened back in the 1800s.

During the early parts of the 1900’s, mail was delivered twice a day in urban areas. Rural mailbox delivery wasn’t a thing until later in the 1900s, it was hard for USPS to get the money for it from Congress.

The US postal service was never expected to turn a profit until the Reagan era - it was always considered a necessary service. Postage was to defray operating costs but ‘running it like a business’ wasn’t a priority until the radical libertarians came to power. They passes laws meaning the pension fund has to be overfunded, taking away huge amounts of operating capital private businesses enjoy.

There are seven different unions representing postal workers, and they are considered a very powerful political block. When they struck in the early seventies they won nearly every concession they asked for.

The USPS has been confirmed by independent analysts to be far and away the most efficient and most accurate postal delivery system in the world.

Well over half the USPS’s non-parcel volume comes from junk mail, and junk mail profits are basically carrying first class mail. Amazon is by far the largest parcel customer.

I listened to this audiobook while running/cycling/swimming/etc and I'm not an audio learner, so my retention of the book is iffy at best.

Reading Level: adult Prequisites (Prior Knowledge, etc): US history and geography, world history Credibility/Research/Citations: Very few citations provided Tone: Educational without being academic Bias: the author worked very hard to avoid the appearance of bias towards either the working class or the bourgeoisie Author's Qualifications: The author did not present any credentials

authenticity/uniqueness: ⭐⭐⭐⭐ personal impact: ⭐⭐⭐ intrigue: ⭐⭐ logic/informativeness: ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Does the book accomplish it's goal: yes

Kindle/Audible only? NO

I hadn’t really heard of John Skipp, thought to hear him talk about it, he was right there at the horror convention where the term was invented. This is not to say I think he’s full of poop; I don’t have any reason to doubt him and his writing absolutely feels like classic splatterpunk. I think he was most prolific at a point in my life where I just wasn’t reading much, and what little I was reading were mass-market scifi paperbacks. Which is a bummer, everything I’ve read since would be better framed if I had these classic tropes under my belt sooner. John is a craftsman, all of the stories are very well written with his strengths being pacing and drawing a setting with just the right amount of detail.

1. SO WHAT THE FUCK IS SPLATTERPUNK?

2. Splatterpunk 101

3. Splatterpunk 101: Addendum ⭐⭐⭐⭐ This is John’s recollection of the beginnings of splatterpunk, and he works hard to both separate it from Extreme Horror (Ketchum, Straub, etc) and name drop some contemporaries. I believe he wants the reader to understand that: Splatterpunk is not defined by being Extreme or Gross, it’s about taking the ideas of horror way out past the uncomfortable boundaries set by mainstream publishers in ways that empower the powerless It’s a term that organically came about to describe a genre that many writers were writing in before they got labeled as such He might be gatekeeping a bit, but he Was There, Man!

4. THE LONG RIDE ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ What a great story! The narrator has such a great voice, even while his emotions are all over the place. I was almost all the way through it before I realized the twist - and I was 100% there for it. Worth the price of admission right there.

5. GO TO SLEEP ⭐⭐⭐ Rich guy acts like a self-entitled jackass superior to everyone else, then gets his comeuppance. I’ve read this soooo many times already, even in other collections nominated for the same prize this year.

6. THE SPIRIT OF THINGS ⭐⭐⭐ This feels like the end of a story - arcane forces upset by the mutation of All Hallow’s Eve into what is today exact reveng. But why on the MC? And why now? I feel like there’s a lot of unresolved questions that weaken the impact of the story.

7. A QUICKEE ⭐⭐⭐⭐ This is a proper mermaid story!

8. FILM AT ELEVEN ⭐⭐⭐⭐ The twist at the end is worth at least a star and elevates this above just another domestic violence revenge/torture porn

9. ROSE GOES SHOPPING ⭐⭐⭐ This was published in 2011, back when zombies were all the rage. It feels a bit dated and I don’t feel like it adds anything to the niche.

10. ART IS THE DEVIL ⭐⭐⭐⭐ This is like one of those “innocents stumble into a dark carnival” stories, but it all goes sideways for everyone involved. Final Girls FTW!

11. DEPRESSO THE CLOWN ⭐⭐ This was a dud for me. Some boring torture porn. With a clown.

12. THE SHITTIEST GUY IN THE WORLD (A CHRISTMAS FABLE) ⭐⭐⭐ Krampus would be proud.

13. FOOD FIGHT ⭐⭐⭐⭐ This could probably stand on it’s own as a novella, it’s by far the longest story. It hits a lot of my favorite tropes: insanity as enlightenment, deals with the devil, and the arcane overpowering capital “S" Science.

14. SKIPP’S SPLATTERPUNK ALPHABET SOUFFLE ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Microfictions where the titles proceed through the alphabets. Microstories aren’t everyone’s cup of tea, but if you’re into them this is a good collection. IMHO - best experienced in a single sitting to feel the emotional impacts hitting you from different directions in rapid succession.

15. JIMMY JAY BAXTER’S LAST, BEST DAY ON EARTH ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ A gun crazy MAGA nut job feels like the zombipocalypse is the best thing ever. Turns out some normal people do, too.

16. IN THE WINTER OF NO LOVE ⭐⭐⭐ That’s a pretty heavy trip, man.

17. THE INWARD EYE ⭐⭐ Another dud - it feels like the author is being literally autobiographical, then suddenly the dialogue goes off into something totally preposterous - and then back again. It just didn’t work for me.

18. NAME YOUR POISON This is written in the second person, so I didn’t read it.

Bechdel Test?: NO Mako Mori test?: NO Vito Russo test?: BI Latif test? NO

Reading Level: adult Romance: NO Smut: A couple stories have explicit sex scenes Violence: yes, this is splatterpunk. TW: child endangerment, drug use, all kinds of violence and self-inflicted harm

Kindle only? NO

⭐⭐⭐⭐

This is a fun book, it definitely falls into Splatterpunk territory by way of body horror, fungus fandom, trans identity, gender definitions and psychedelic exploration. Also, there’s a cat named Herman.

The plot is straightforward - city girl Sarah follows park ranger Andy into The Spooky Woods to collect spores from a fabled psychedelic mushroom so she can start growing them and get herself out of debt. It all falls apart pretty quickly for them both; Sarah realizes there is in fact truth to the stories about the forest being a place that has it’s own rules about space, time, and the nature of reality.

Things take a turn for the truly interesting when our intrepid heroes, in pretty bad shape after a night in the woods, stumble upon a commune of radical lesbian separatists and their semi-tame raccoon companions. As luck would have it, they are familiar with the mushroom Sarah is looking for, and after some consternation around Andy’s male gender they decide to let the “phallic alecs" stay with them until they’re fit to get back out of the forest.

There’s a lot going on in the Coven, with a baby due any day, a new member upsetting the delicate sexual politics and Sarah’s poking around in everyone’s business trying to find the fabled fungus. Enya’s Orinoco Flow is on repeat, though, so we can all stay mellow.

Over the next few days, the drama and tension ratchet up. Less and less of the forest and it’s ambience are predictable, the coven proves to be more complicated than their one-note hippy aphorisms would indicate, and Mother Moonflow has the most of anyone to hide. Sarah gets involved with the least mature and stable of the coven, Andy is written off into a corner - untrusted because he’s a cis AMAB - and hints of the nature of the psychedelic mushroom continue to drip out.

Things come to a head the night the baby is born; a night of a huge celebration that is supposed to herald the rebirth of the Green Lady and the end of the Lord Of The Forest’s reign. More than a baby is born that night, and the supernatural forces ruling the enchanted forest are reborn - but not in a way anyone expected.

This is a highly allegorical, though not even slightly opaque story. Gender - it’s definition, meaning, and experience - are the central themes at play here. There are “effeminate" men, butch women, women in leadership, women in subservient roles, trans women, and patriarchal shithead men. Mostly we follows Sarah’s journey trying to be accepted as a woman despite having been AMAB. Breasts are repeatedly used as a signifier of womanhood, and ‘shroom laden milk is used as a sacrament by the coven. For anyone familiar with gender studies, the concepts the different women represent will all be familiar.

There’s some leaps of logic - and some bits don’t make sense. Andy and Sarah entered the park (a northern california RAINFOREST) planning to spend the weekend hiking, but there is no mention of any gear. At night, Sarah just lays down to go to sleep - in the rain?? Also, Sarah and Andy feel trapped in the commune because they can’t find their way back to the park entrance - but Big Mama is able to drive in and out several times? Again, this is an allegory about how the nature of gender transcends human experience and expression, and overall the writing is lively and engaging, so I’m willing to overlook some painful oversights.

After all is said and done, things work out OK for Herman.

Bechdel Test?: YES Mako Mori test?: YES Vito Russo test?: NO Latif test?: YES

Reading Level: easy adult Romance: yes, as a complication to the main plot Smut: open door, reasonably vague Violence: yes - nature/folk horror (I don’t want to give away any spoilers), explicit premeditated home invasion and murder TW: prolific drug use, gun violence, genital mutilation

Kindle only? NO