amalgama

📚 Here to discuss books with other people who love reading ℹ️ 30s | they/them

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My Taste

It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror

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16h

Sisäsiisti

Miska Valos

Nuoren kirjailijan kiihkeä esikoisromaani. Sisäsiisti on parikymppisen Miska Valoksen vahva esikoisromaani oman turvaverkon löytämisestä ja ympäröivään maailmaan sopeutumisesta. Transpojan näkökulmasta kerrottu teos tutkii miehen malleja perheessä, kaveriporukassa ja kulttuuripiireissä, joita kaikkia leimaa hyväosaisuus – ja joissa yksilöt voivat pahoin. Esra on transpoika, lukion toisella ja kulttuuriperheen kuopus. Hän räpiköi läpi perheillallisten, bileiden ja pakollisten kurssisuoritusten, ja ennen vapaudelta tuntuneet asiat ovat jo menettäneet hohtonsa. Elokuvaohjaajaisä on tehnyt Esrasta näyttelijän, äiti kirjoittaa autofiktiota ja siskon syömishäiriö herättää perheessä lähinnä julmuutta. Kyynistynyt Esra kamppailee ulkopuolisuuden tunteen kanssa ja kaipaa turvaa, muttei tiedä kuinka asian korjaisi. Miska Valos kirjoittaa tarkkanäköisesti perhesuhteista, nuoruudesta, transsukupuolisuudesta ja Helsingin kulttuuripiirien itseironisista vesoista.

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Let the Right One In

John Ajvide Lindqvist

48%

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Let the Right One In

John Ajvide Lindqvist

It is autumn 1981 when the inconceivable comes to Blackeberg, a suburb in Sweden. The body of a teenage boy is found, emptied of blood, the murder rumored to be part of a ritual killing. Twelve-year-old Oskar is personally hoping that revenge has come at long last—revenge for the bullying he endures at school, day after day. But the murder is not the most important thing on his mind. A new girl has moved in next door—a girl who has never seen a Rubik's Cube before, but who can solve it at once. There is something wrong with her, though, something odd. And she only comes out at night....

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Someone You Can Build a Nest In

John Wiswell

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20h

Crawl: Stories

Max Delsohn

A darkly comic, introspective debut collection that looks beneath the surface of trans life in 2010s SeattlePeople called it paradise, but baby, it wasn’t. What to do when starting testosterone unlocks a newfound desire for men? How to respond when your boss’s boss asks if you’ve had “the surgery” and then requests you talk her niece out of transitioning? What obligation do you have to intervene in the faltering mental health of the baby trans drug dealer you’ve met only once while tripping on the acid he sold you?The young transmasculine characters in Crawl navigate these and other questions in the dive bars, bathhouses, parks, workplaces, music venues, beaches, and college campuses of 2010s Seattle. Max Delsohn’s stories—by turns exuberant, heartfelt, tragic, and wry—portray the pleasures and pains of sex and romance, the possibilities and ambivalences of gender expression, and the joys and failures of community in a city and a time that has branded itself a radical queer utopia but proves much more complicated in reality.

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19h

The Book Eaters

Sunyi Dean

Out on the Yorkshire Moors lives a secret line of people for whom books are food, and who retain all of a book's content after eating it. To them, spy novels are a peppery snack; romance novels are sweet and delicious. Eating a map can help them remember destinations, and children, when they misbehave, are forced to eat dry, musty pages from dictionaries. Devon is part of The Family, an old and reclusive clan of book eaters. Her brothers grow up feasting on stories of valor and adventure, and Devon—like all other book eater women—is raised on a carefully curated diet of fairy tales and cautionary stories. But real life doesn't always come with happy endings, as Devon learns when her son is born with a rare and darker kind of hunger—not for books, but for human minds.

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19h

Before We Were Trans: A New History of Gender

Kit Heyam

A groundbreaking global history of gender nonconformity  Today’s narratives about trans people tend to feature individuals with stable gender identities that fit neatly into the categories of male or female. Those stories, while important, fail to account for the complex realities of many trans people’s lives. Before We Were Trans  illuminates the stories of people across the globe, from antiquity to the present, whose experiences of gender have defied binary categories. Blending historical analysis with sharp cultural criticism, trans historian and activist Kit Heyam offers a new, radically inclusive trans history, chronicling expressions of trans experience that are often overlooked, like gender-nonconforming fashion and wartime stage performance. Before We Were Trans  transports us from Renaissance Venice to seventeenth-century  Angola, from Edo Japan to early America, and looks to the past to uncover new horizons for possible trans futures. 

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16h

The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women

Kate Moore

The incredible true story of the women who fought America's Undark dangerThe Curies' newly discovered element of radium makes gleaming headlines across the nation as the fresh face of beauty, and wonder drug of the medical community. From body lotion to tonic water, the popular new element shines bright in the otherwise dark years of the First World War.Meanwhile, hundreds of girls toil amidst the glowing dust of the radium-dial factories. The glittering chemical covers their bodies from head to toe; they light up the night like industrious fireflies. With such a coveted job, these "shining girls" are the luckiest alive—until they begin to fall mysteriously ill.But the factories that once offered golden opportunities are now ignoring all claims of the gruesome side effects, and the women's cries of corruption. And as the fatal poison of the radium takes hold, the brave shining girls find themselves embroiled in one of the biggest scandals of America's early 20th century, and in a groundbreaking battle for workers' rights that will echo for centuries to come.Written with a sparkling voice and breakneck pace, The Radium Girls fully illuminates the inspiring young women exposed to the "wonder" substance of radium, and their awe-inspiring strength in the face of almost impossible circumstances. Their courage and tenacity led to life-changing regulations, research into nuclear bombing, and ultimately saved hundreds of thousands of lives.

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14h

Grief Horror

by tritsy

15 books

themes of grief and loss but also horror

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14h

Make Me Better

Sarah Gailey

You were pure once. You can be made pure again. Celia is so tired of being alone. All she wants is to have a family―to belong to someone. That's why she's going to Kindred Cove for the annual Salt Festival held by the secluded community that lives there. They promise that healing is possible. They promise that transformation is inevitable. There is no grief at Kindred Cove, because there is no suffering. Nothing is ever lost. Celia knows that, at that mysterious island surrounded by that impossible, ever-growing reef -- she will find herself. She’s ready to be healed. She’s ready to be transformed. She's ready to believe.

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15h

Model Home

Rivers Solomon

Welcome to Rivers Solomon's dark and wondrous Model Home, a new kind of haunted-house novel. The three Maxwell siblings keep their distance from the lily-white gated enclave outside Dallas where they grew up. When their family moved there, they were the only Black family in the neighborhood. The neighbors acted nice enough, but right away bad things, scary things—the strange and the unexplainable—began to happen in their house. Maybe it was some cosmic trial, a demonic rite of passage into the upper-middle class. Whatever it was, the Maxwells, steered by their formidable mother, stayed put, unwilling to abandon their home, terrors and trauma be damned. As adults, the siblings could finally get away from the horrors of home, leaving their parents all alone in the house. But when news of their parents' death arrives, Ezri is forced to return to Texas with their sisters, Eve and Emanuelle, to reckon with their family’s past and present, and to find out what happened while they were away. It was not a “natural” death for their parents . . . but was it supernatural? Rivers Solomon turns the haunted-house story on its head, unearthing the dark legacies of segregation and racism in the suburban American South. Unbridled, raw, and daring, Model Home is the story of secret histories uncovered, and of a queer family battling for their right to live, grieve, and heal amid the terrors of contemporary American life.

amalgama finished a book

15h

Model Home

Rivers Solomon

amalgama is interested in reading...

16h

Sisäsiisti

Miska Valos

amalgama commented on amalgama's review of The Troop

16h

amalgama

Apr 14, 2026

The Troop

2.5

Enjoyment: 2.0Quality: 3.0Characters: 3.0Plot: 2.5

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The first reason I didn't really like this is more of a me problem: I don't (usually) particularly enjoy stories following a group of teenage or preteen boys and hearing about their fart jokes, mean games, targetted bullying, etc. Very few books play with this kind of group dynamics in an interesting, engaging way, and this wasn't one of them. If you've read Lord of the Flies or similar horror books, the group of boys this follows won't feel like anything new: you've met them before, you know them; you might even, like me, be a bit bored of them

The second reason this didn't totally work for me is more of a suspension of disbelief issue: this doesn't at all feel like it's set some time around 2010, like the existence of Facebook would indicate. The group dynamics between the boys and their banter feel outdated (think 1970s-80s), and the science... There is a "scientific research" component to this story that is so unrealistic that it kind of made the whole thing feel a little bit too silly for me

The scientific research featured here, and the actions of the researchers involved, would NEVER be allowed to happen in a modern setting. I'm not saying researchers never try to push the limits of ethics boards, university policies and what have you, but in this book it was so extreme that even if it were set in the 1950s it would feel like a stretch. We have a story that is supposed to be set in the 2010s, but everything about it feels outdated. I'll also link 🔗a forum discussion about this for those interested

The 2.5 stars are for the body horror and the extremely gross parasite worms that the author came up with. I have a phobia of worms so this should have EASILY been one of the scariest books I've ever read, but sadly I didn't really click with the characters and couldn't suspend my disbelief for some of the parts of the story that should have felt grounded in reality

amalgama commented on kingsglaive's review of The Deep

16h