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You Weren't Meant to Be Human
Andrew Joseph White
Post from the Queer Horror forum


I've had a ton of these on my tbr for AGES, so now I have an excuse to prioritize them! What's everyone starting with? I think my first pick is The Salt Grows Heavy!
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Iron Widow (Iron Widow, #1)
Xiran Jay Zhao
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Natural Beauty
Ling Ling Huang
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Lucy Undying
Kiersten White
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David Bowie Made Me Gay: 100 Years of LGBT Music
Darryl W. Bullock
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How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures
Sabrina Imbler
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Herculine
Grace Byron
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Be Gay, Do Crime
Molly Llewellyn
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The House Across the Lake
Riley Sager
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Mad Sisters of Esi
Tashan Mehta
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From psychedelic fever dreams to things that go bump in the night: all things queer and scary.
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Meddling Kids
Edgar Cantero
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Walking Practice
Dolki Min
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The Scourge Between Stars
Ness Brown
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The Church of the Mountain of Flesh
Kyle Wakefield
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The Cabin at the End of the World
Paul Tremblay
SkywardStorytelling finished reading and left a rating...
Buckle up, babes - this one is a SAGA.
I'm really curious how long it took Caroline Fraser to write this - not only is it a whopping 16 hour audiobook, but the level of detail included on all three subjects is astonishing.
Murderland is best described as three connected stories braided together around a single thesis - that the absolutely bonkers levels of heavy metals and toxins pumped into the environment by the smelting industry is a distinct but underexplored factor in the development of history's most recognizable serial killers and contributed to a higher rate of violent crime in the US in general during the period between the 1920s and the phasing out of leaded gasoline in 1992. The third story is Fraser's own biography and her experiences living through the height of the serial killer era, particularly when Ted Bundy is killing women basically in her backyard.
I will admit that it took me a long time to "get" this book - if you aren't paying attention (which I was trying really hard to do but audiobooks are hard for my brain sometimes) it can seem like an endless slog through the lurid details of the 70s serial killer craze and the violence of the times - rapes, domestic violence, endless horrific car accidents. It's rough, I'm not going to lie to you. But Fraser is using the horrors to push us toward her ultimate point - corporations don't care about us, and they have been allowed to flood our world with poison and build projects that are proven to be violently unsafe (looking at you, Mercer Island Bridge đ) with impunity for decades and these societal issues are partially the consequences of this disgusting level of indifference to human life and health.
The thing that I appreciated the most was Fraser's consistent acknowledgement of nuance - she doesn't claim that heavy metals are the ONLY factor that led to these monstrous crimes, nor does she imply that this factor allows perpetrators to escape accountability. I had mixed feelings about how much the book lingers on Ted Bundy (haven't we talked about this dickhead enough??) but he is a really good example of what Caroline is talking about, and his crimes are enmeshed in the history of true crime that she follows to make her point.
Overall, this was a really interesting entry in the "environmental true crime" (thank you person who commented on my last update for this term and also for the shrimp trauma đŠ) genre, but it's by no means light reading.
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