celestialviolence

An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom

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My Taste

The Thursday Murder Club (Thursday Murder Club, #1)

Tarot and Psychology: Spectrums of possibility

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HydroLung

Thoughts from 32%

I know he’s supposed to be the sort of “enlightened” character, living somewhat outside of the crazy dystopian society, but Bernard is still so insufferable. He’s like the picture of toxic masculinity. Talking down to the lower caste members much more aggressively, and constantly judging the women around him for their looks and personality faults all because he himself is lacking self confidence in his own physical looks and place in society. I get that a lot of it is stoked by the societal norms he’s surrounded by, but just like in real life, that doesn’t give you an excuse to be a misogynistic twat.

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celestialviolence

Dec 19, 2025

5.0

Enjoyment: 5.0Quality: 5.0Characters: 5.0Plot: 5.0

Has this heightened my existential dread because it shows how little progress we as a species have made in 100 years? Yes. Was it well worth it? Also yes. I really do think half the world's problems are from people in power reading this and missing the fact that it's a satirical judgment of these notions and behaviors, not an endorsement.

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Brave New World

Aldous Huxley

Aldous Huxley's profoundly important classic of world literature, Brave New World is a searching vision of an unequal, technologically-advanced future where humans are genetically bred, socially indoctrinated, and pharmaceutically anesthetized to passively uphold an authoritarian ruling order–all at the cost of our freedom, full humanity, and perhaps also our souls. “A genius [who] who spent his life decrying the onward march of the Machine” (The New Yorker), Huxley was a man of incomparable talents: equally an artist, a spiritual seeker, and one of history’s keenest observers of human nature and civilization. Brave New World, his masterpiece, has enthralled and terrified millions of readers, and retains its urgent relevance to this day as both a warning to be heeded as we head into tomorrow and as thought-provoking, satisfying work of literature. Written in the shadow of the rise of fascism during the 1930s, Brave New Worldd likewise speaks to a 21st-century world dominated by mass-entertainment, technology, medicine and pharmaceuticals, the arts of persuasion, and the hidden influence of elites. "Aldous Huxley is the greatest 20th century writer in English." —Chicago Tribune

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Brave New World: Revisited

Aldous Huxley

When the novel Brave New World first appeared in 1932, its shocking analysis of a scientific dictatorship seemed a projection into the remote future. Here, in one of the most important and fascinating books of his career, Aldous Huxley uses his tremendous knowledge of human relations to compare the modern-day world with his prophetic fantasy. He scrutinizes threats to humanity, such as overpopulation, propaganda, and chemical persuasion, and explains why we have found it virtually impossible to avoid them. Brave New World Revisited is a trenchant plea that humankind should educate itself for freedom before it is too late. Brave New World Revisted (first published in 1958) is not a reissue or revision of 0060850523 Brave New World. Brave New World is a novel, whereas Brave New World Revisted is a nonfiction exploration of the themes in Brave New World.

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celestialviolence

Dec 15, 2025

5.0

Enjoyment: 5.0Quality: 5.0Characters: 5.0Plot: 5.0

I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this one. Cult horror mixed with supernatural elements, and it all came together pretty satisfyingly at the end. Kyle and Dan made for a fun dichotomy of a pairing, and Max was also a character I enjoyed. Definitely loved to hate him. The twists and turns were not quite going where I expected, and while some parts were a bit of info dumps here and there, it didn't detract from the story. Overall, definitely enjoyable.

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All the Sinners Bleed

S.A. Cosby

A Black sheriff. A serial killer. A small town ready to combust. Titus Crown is the first Black sheriff in the history of Charon County, Virginia. In recent decades, Charon has had only two murders. After years of working as an FBI agent, Titus knows better than anyone that while his hometown might seem like a land of moonshine, cornbread, and honeysuckle, secrets always fester under the surface. Then a year to the day after Titus’s election, a school teacher is killed by a former student and the student is fatally shot by Titus’s deputies. Those festering secrets are now out in the open and ready to tear the town apart. As Titus investigates the shootings, he unearths terrible crimes and a serial killer who has been hiding in plain sight, haunting the dirt lanes and woodland clearings of Charon. With the killer’s possible connections to a local church and the town’s harrowing history weighing on him, Titus projects confidence about closing the case while concealing a painful secret from his own past. At the same time, he also has to contend with a far-right group that wants to hold a parade in celebration of the town’s Confederate history. Powerful and unforgettable, All the Sinners Bleed confirms S. A. Cosby as “one of the most muscular, distinctive, grab-you-by-both-ears voices in American crime fiction” (The Washington Post).

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Last Days

Adam L.G. Nevill

When guerrilla documentary maker, Kyle Freeman, is asked to shoot a film on the notorious cult known as the Temple of the Last Days, it appears his prayers have been answered. The cult became a worldwide phenomenon in 1975 when there was a massacre including the death of its infamous leader, Sister Katherine. Kyle's brief is to explore the paranormal myths surrounding an organization that became a testament to paranoia, murderous rage, and occult rituals. The shoot's locations take him to the cult's first temple in London, an abandoned farm in France, and a derelict copper mine in the Arizonan desert where The Temple of the Last Days met its bloody end. But when he interviews those involved in the case, those who haven't broken silence in decades, a series of uncanny events plague the shoots. Troubling out-of-body experiences, nocturnal visitations, the sudden demise of their interviewees and the discovery of ghastly artifacts in their room make Kyle question what exactly it is the cult managed to awaken – and what is its interest in him?

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celestialviolence

Dec 06, 2025

3.0

Enjoyment: 3.0Quality: 3.0Characters: 3.0Plot: 3.0

Honestly, the writing style was very self-published on Wattpad and a lot of the dialogue felt stilted. Also wasn't a huge fan of how the plot progressed and I think it would have been better if it had gone more along the lines of the way part two was structured, but it wasn't unreadable. Ferron was hot and tbh that was the only saving grace and what got me through the 1k+ pages, ngl. The ending was pleasant and i'm glad it ended the way it did.

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Alchemised

SenLinYu SenLinYu

In this riveting dark fantasy debut, a woman with missing memories fights to survive a war-torn world of necromancy and alchemy—and the man tasked with unearthing the deepest secrets of her past. “What is it you think you’re protecting in that brain of yours? The war is over. Holdfast is dead. The Eternal Flame extinguished. There’s no one left for you to save.” Once a promising alchemist, Helena Marino is now a prisoner—of war and of her own mind. Her Resistance friends and allies have been brutally murdered, her abilities suppressed, and the world she knew destroyed. In the aftermath of a long war, Paladia’s new ruling class of corrupt guild families and depraved necromancers, whose vile, undead creatures helped bring about their victory, holds Helena captive. According to Resistance records, she was a healer of little importance within their ranks. But Helena has inexplicable memory loss of the months leading up to her capture, making her enemies wonder: Is she truly as insignificant as she appears, or are her lost memories hiding some vital piece of the Resistance’s final gambit? To uncover the memories buried deep within her mind, Helena is sent to the High Reeve, one of the most powerful and ruthless necromancers in this new world. Trapped on his crumbling estate, Helena’s fight—to protect her lost history and to preserve the last remaining shreds of her former self—is just beginning. For her prison and captor have secrets of their own . . . secrets Helena must unearth, whatever the cost.

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celestialviolence

Dec 05, 2025

5.0

Enjoyment: 5.0Quality: 5.0Characters: 5.0Plot: 5.0

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Veniss Underground

Jeff VanderMeer

In his debut novel, literary alchemist Jeff VanderMeer takes us on an unforgettable journey, a triumph of the imagination that reveals the magical and mysterious city of Veniss through three intertwined voices. First, Nicholas, a would-be Living Artist, seeks to escape his demons in the shadowy underground—but in doing so makes a deal with the devil himself. In her fevered search for him, his twin sister, Nicola, spins her own unusual and hypnotic tale as she discovers the hidden secrets of the city. And finally, haunted by Nicola’s sudden, mysterious disappearance and gripped by despair, Shadrach, Nicola’s lover, embarks on a mythic journey to the nightmarish levels deep beneath the surface of the city to bring his love back to light. There he will find wonders beyond imagining…and horrors greater than the heart can bear. By turns beautiful, horrifying, delicate, and powerful, Veniss Underground explores the limits of love, memory, and obsession in a landscape that defies the boundaries of the imagination. This special edition includes the short stories “The Sea, Mendeho, and Moonlight”; “Detectives and Cadavers”; and “A Heart for Lucretia” and the novella Balzac’s War, offering a complete tour of the fantastic world of Veniss. Praise for Veniss Underground “A wonder-filled journey that echoes Dante’s Divine Comedy, the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, and the landscapes of Hieronymus Bosch.” —Publishers Weekly “Audacious . . . full of beautiful sentences, black humor and terrible wonders.” —San Francisco Chronicle “[The novel’s] milieu recalls Philip K. Dick, its passages of prose poetry Edgar Allan Poe, its wry fatalism Jim Thompson. Wow!” — Booklist “In the hands of a brilliant writer like Jeff VanderMeer, writing fantasy can be a means of serious artistic expression . . . also playful, poignant, and utterly, wildly imaginative.” —Peter Straub, author of lost boy lost girl

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nezuu

Thoughts from 10% (page 29)

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celestialviolence

Dec 02, 2025

5.0

Enjoyment: 5.0Quality: 5.0Characters: 5.0Plot: 5.0

Every time I read this book, I find something new about both it and myself, which is what makes it a classic for me. It's satirical but there's always a bit of truth within the satire (sometimes more truth than one is willing to admit).

celestialviolence is interested in reading...

Solenoid

Mircea Cărtărescu

A highly-acclaimed masterwork of fiction from Mircea Cărtărescu, author of Blinding: an existence (and eventually a cosmos) created by forking paths. Based on Cărtărescu's own role as a high school teacher, Solenoid begins with the mundane details of a diarist's life and quickly spirals into a philosophical account of life, history, philosophy, and mathematics. One character asks another: when you rush into the burning building, will you save the newborn or the artwork? On a broad scale, the novel’s investigations of other universes, dimensions, and timelines reconcile the realms of life and art. The novel is grounded in the reality of late 1970s/early 1980s Communist Romania, including long lines for groceries, the absurdities of the education system, and the misery of family life. The text includes sequences in a tuberculosis sanatorium, an encounter with an anti-death protest movement, a society of dream investigators, and an extended visit to the minuscule world of dust mites living on a microscope slide. Combining fiction with autobiography and history― the scientists Nicolae Tesla and George Boole, for example, appear alongside the Voynich manuscript―Solenoid ruminates on the exchanges possible between the alternate dimensions of life and art, as various, monstrous dimensions erupt within the Communist present.

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Fight Club

Chuck Palahniuk

Chuck Palahniuk showed himself to be his generation’s most visionary satirist in this, his first book. Fight Club’s estranged narrator leaves his lackluster job when he comes under the thrall of Tyler Durden, an enigmatic young man who holds secret after-hours boxing matches in the basement of bars. There, two men fight "as long as they have to." This is a gloriously original work that exposes the darkness at the core of our modern world.

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celestialviolence

Nov 29, 2025

5.0

Enjoyment: 5.0Quality: 5.0Characters: 5.0Plot: 5.0

The humor was well done and the story itself was a winding road. I loved the characters, I loved the way the story was narrated, and I would definitely give this one a reread in the future.

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Unspeakable Home

Ismet Prcic

A stunningly original, stylistically brilliant, and brutally honest novel from an award-winning Bosnian refugee and writer who, decades after escaping his war-torn home country looks back on his childhood, imploded relationships, and battles with addiction—offering powerful insight into the human cost of conflict. It’s been two years since our narrator divorced his beloved and lost his safest and most adoring home when he fled Bosnia as a teenager. The marriage couldn’t survive his brokenness, the trauma so entrenched and insidious that it became impossible to communicate to anyone outside of himself—even the person he loved most. But, as he writes in the first of many courageously candid fan letters to the comedian Bill Burr, he knows he must try. A linguistically adventurous, structurally ambitious, and emotionally brave odyssey, Unspeakable Home takes us through the memories and confessions of our refugee narrator as he reflects on his bomb-ravaged childhood, the implosion of his relationships, and an agonizing battle with alcoholism. As multiple narrators surface in fragments with increasingly tenuous connections to reality, Prcic unearths the psychological cost of exile and shame with a roving, kinetic energy and a sharp, searching sense of humor. What emerges is a vivid and poignant exploration of the stories we create to hide the deepest parts of our identity from ourselves, as well as a hard-won, life-affirming promise of redemption.

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The Hopkins Manuscript

R.C. Sherriff

For fans of the popular and award-winning Netflix movie Don’t Look Up, a prescient, rediscovered speculative novel about how a small English village prepares for the end of the world. Edgar Hopkins is a retired math teacher in his mid-fifties with a strong sense of self-importance, whose greatest pride in life is winning poultry breeding contests. When not meticulously caring for his Bantam, Edgar is an active member of the British Lunar Society. Thanks to that affiliation, Edgar becomes one of the first people to learn the moon is on a collision course, headed towards Earth. Members of the society are sworn to secrecy but eventually the moon looms so large in the sky that the government can no longer deny the truth. It’s during these final days that Edgar befriends two young siblings and writes what he calls The Hopkins Manuscript—a testimony juxtaposing the ordinary and extraordinary as Edgar and the villagers dig trenches and play cricket before the end of days. First published in 1939, as the world was teetering on the brink of global war, R.C. Sherriff’s classic speculative novel is a timely and powerful warning from the past that captures the breadth of human nature in all its complexity.

celestialviolence finished reading and wrote a review...

celestialviolence

Nov 19, 2025

5.0

Enjoyment: 5.0Quality: 5.0Characters: 5.0Plot: 5.0

I wasn't expecting this one to go where it did, but I'm glad it went there. Overall, it was an enjoyable read. I liked the way it was laid out, and the ending left you with questions in the best way.

I enjoyed the story of Madi and Henry, both of whom made some questionable decisions, but the pacing was done well and it kept you on your toes.

It really is a good story depicting grief, the lies we are willing to tell ourselves to withstand that grief, and what happens if the lies no longer work. It tells us what happens when we are ready to let go vs when we aren't.

Definitely would recommend giving this one a read.

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