dnf @ 22%

i think this is my first dnf of the year? congrats to this book for that honor! pretty good run, however i genuinely can't bring myself to read any more of this.

not sure what the author is cooking in their acknowledgements, because they talked as if they wrote something cathartic but this is just a published fanfic, or at the very least, being incredibly generous, heavily inspired by another existing, massively popular media.

everything checks out, and i regret to inform that, despite my vigilance in the past ~3 years, even the greatest warrior must fall. i read a fucking baldur's gate 3 fanfic. you know, 439k steam reviews and counting, 46k players right now as i'm typing this, game of the year for 2023, bazillion awards - that game?

initially, i thought this was an astarion fic, which in itself is groan worthy enough, but by the time i decided to dnf i almost wished that was the case. no, this is a fucking dark urge fic. for those of you without context, astarion is a Hot Vampire with Sad Story, which has been written to death and will continue to be until the heat death of the universe. the dark urge, however, is something more specific. i will elaborate.

i'm pretty confident in my claim, and i could tell this was a bg3 fic because of, in no particular order:

→ pet names like 'little love', which was used for a total of 60 times throughout this 200 page story. this immediately tickled the neurons in my brain and why i initially suspected this to be an astarion fic. → aurelion is described to be amnesiac, with no memories of where or how he got all the wounds, scars, and gore of others on himself. → the sypnosis said, and i quote, "as one of many devilspawns" calling something a spawn isn't exactly a dead giveaway in fantastical stories with demons, but devilspawn? as in bhaalspawn? which leads me into... → aurelion having a deity-like being as his father. using lucifer as a stand-in figure for bhaal is diabolical in a way that i can't even begin to describe. → aurelion describing his murders as his 'art'. also not a giveaway on its own, but combined with everything else is very telling. → minor thing the paragraph of aurelion going off about the clauses in his contract. beat by beat how mizora describes her pact with wyll. you ain't slick. → the first real sex scenes between aurelion and celio. the way it's set up to be gory, edgy and depraved, and yet still somehow comes off as vanilla and not freaky enough considering the premise? dark urge fics are littered with this. you read one of them, you've read all of them. → this also applies to fanfics of other fandoms, but overusing describtors instead of just using the name of the characters. what i mean is examples like, 'the second son of the saint-orlant family', 'the shorter man', 'the priest', on and on, once you start seeing it you will never stop seeing it. idk why fic writers are very against just simply writing names to denote who the speaker is or who the paragraph is describing. → the quality of the writing itself. the author forgets that they have already described something as being in the scene, and proceeds to describe it again in the same way two or three pages later. calling it 'the church of sanctuary' every single time it gets brought up, despite the fact that there hasn't been any mentions of other churches so far, so 'the church' would've served the purpose of describing this particular church. → the fucking dialogue oh my god. the 'banter' between aurelion and celio is so painfully familiar to me. here, have an example:

"Needy, (...) Have I been letting you starve?" "(...) You've been abusing me, Little Love—I'm starving. I need you, I want you. All of you." "Then have me."

you might not think much of this but this kind of 'sexy' talk is abundant in both astarion and dark urge fics. again it's trying to be sexy but genuinely just not freaky enough to be. to be blunt for a moment, it reads like someone who's only experience with 'freaky' media is baldur's gate 3 (which isn't even that freaky!), not even the rest of the forgotten realms, and who has only read other bg3 fics so this is all they know how to write.

i would know. i wrote those fics too. i said the writing is familiar, because this is how i used to write. i pledge it takes one to know one, and my own writing has only deviated and improved once i left the fandom behind to write other kinds of stuff. i have no intentions of selling my writing ever, but this book is a published work, and unfortunately that means i retain my right to scrutinize it, as opposed to if i randomly stumble across this on ao3 instead.

(also, i'm not seeing why this story has to be set in a victorian era france. aurelion comparing his art to that of mozart's made me cackle out loud. i would've judged this less harshly if this was a completely fantasy world.)

giving this 1.5 stars, because i don't completely hate this, i only feel sad because i spent 100k words amount of time writing for the bg3 fandom lmao. i'm glad i don't go there anymore.

this is my third book by this author. and now i'll be honest with myself and say that i think they're just not an author for me.

their books tend have the kind of premise i would gobble up with the kind of greed the bible warned you about. yet, somehow, perhaps it's just me, going in with a wildly different expectation than the kind of stories they want to tell, they always fail to deliver for me.

this one is about an almost self-isolated priest's slow realization that he's falling for a demon he exorcised as part of his duty. i will give them a thumbs up for not going for the popular boys (they even lowkey made fun of that in this which did made me giggle too), instead opting to write about berith, an ars goetia demon. don't see that often in this side of niche queer stories, i can definitely appreciate that.

reading back to my own reviews on the previous books i've read (#1 and #2), my problems with the writing has remained consistent. they really enjoy writing these supposedly terrifying beings in an otherwise very domestic scenario. however, this is once again too much... fluff for me.

sebastian and berith talk to each other a lot. and i mean a lot a lot. so much that this whole book is, for the lack of better way to put it because it has been misued to death, just talking and Nothing Ever Happens. sebastian has a moment of self-hatred? they talk. sebastian goes to exorcise demons? they talk. real trouble finally arises and baal came knocking? you guessed it, they talk. the talking is so convenient and solves practically every single problem that ever comes their way that it becomes wildly unbelievable.

not even mentioning the fact that the last two chapters slip into Crazy Cliches territory, with the power of love and friendship, and the ol' classic, "i know you're still in there" like OH that one hit. not the way the author probably intends to. right in my cringe bone. felt like they were testing me with the final confrontation.

lastly, there's a non-insignificant amount of grammar errors in here. this is for the kindle unlimited version. some lines are missing the opening quotation marks, some lines are said by the wrong character with relation to context, and i'm not sure if books can just do this, but there are dialogues that literally goes, Name: The line they are speaking. like as if you're reading a screenplay if you get what i mean. i'm wholly unsure if that's truly intended, or the author were just getting the lines out and forgot to edit it in post. it was nonetheless very bizarre to read.

i did also enjoyed the (very small) pov switch to berith, and i think the story could've used a bit more of that, because while knowing sebastian inner turmoil matters, it is just the mostly the same thing over and over again, and seeing how berith views that more often maybe could've staved off the boredom i started to felt in the latter half of the book.

i think this is me throwing in the towel. i wish them the best in their publishing journey but after three books, i know my limits and it's for the best if i don't read their work anymore.

bookclub's read for april 2026.

i hated pretty much every moment of this. it was bootycheeks.

the author, catherine lacey, is new to me because i'm not in tune with that side of the literature world at all. some people like to google the authors they read before jumping in. i myself don't usually practice that, after lacey though i just might, perhaps those people have a point.

you see, this book is about a woman (cm) grieving her late wife (x) through the process of wanting to disprove another writer's wildly inaccurate biography about her. so she journey through time in the form of interviewing the people that x had come across throughout her life, with cm putting together pieces of her wife with each new information. neat, a story about grief and the coming to terms of it? simple enough premise, seen many times, this is borderline unfuckupable.

...what do you mean that she said, in a guardian article, that:

"I thought the worst person to write a biography would be a surviving spouse with a bit of a grudge, but I didn’t want to get into the heterosexual dynamics of a man writing about a woman or a woman writing about a man; it had to be two women. At the same time, I wanted the novel to be set in the mid-20th century but I wasn’t interested in writing about the actual struggles a prominent lesbian couple would have gone through in that time. So my alternate history grew out of that problem. I thought, if I have an America where this female artist could exist and this couple could exist without having to justify themselves, I just need a totally different America."

in this one statement alone, lacey did an one-two combo that i never saw coming. she simultaneously implies that, 1) a queer relationship is automatically, by default, deeper and more meaningful than a straight one, but the only brand of queer she cared about was queer women, because of Men Bad (pin this, we will come back to it later), and 2) she herself is a bisexual woman, but isn't interested at all??? somehow??? in exploring what that means for her through this piece of fiction she constructed, because of 'umm sorry don't feel like it actually :/' mentality.

(btw, by her own admission as of january 2025, she has never been with a woman. this is perfectly fine! except she implies her belief that because she had never done that she doesn't feel 'qualified' to be a 'real' 'bisexual'. this was something that immediately jumped out to me and my actually bi friends. digest this info how you will.)

the complete disregard of the amount of effort, pain and suffering queer folks (mainly america, because that's what the story is centered around) had gone through, paving the way with tears and loss, for her just so that she could even begin say garbage like this with the only repurcussion being some asian trans gay fuck being so pissed at her that he's sitting here typing this out in disbelief that he even have to do it.

so she wrote this whole new AU for 50's america just for... cozy vibes? what the fuck is the implication here? modern women are inherently inferior to 'ciassic' women? women like me good, other women bad? the rotten intent, or the sheer lack of it, can't decide which one's worse, fucking haunted me every time i tried to pick this back up to continue reading.

this whole story, AU included, is just so fucking white. by making shit up, lacey had managed to write black people and their involvement in the time period completely out of the narrative, and handwaved it by saying 'yeah they were ok with the racism and slavery because it was god's plan lol'. i'm serious. search 'god's plan' in the ebook copy. it's the only result.

it's legitmately just like a teenager's first worldbuilding, and the only way they know how to make their world so Gritty and Serious is to shove as much edgy shit as possible into the story, and brag about how 'you're just too thin skinned for my world' when people inevitably go 'hey dude what the fuck?'. there's a radical activist group in the story that assassinates key people that helped to reunite the country that lacey very aptly named the afk. american freedom kampaign. with the k. i wouldn't even make this up as a stupid joke because of how on the nose it is.

(lacey believes that, in this version of america, bernie sanders would be a president in the 90s. digest this info how you will.)

the actual story is no better either. biography of x committed the cardinal sin of entertainment: being fucking boring. cm's voice is drier than overbaked bread but, okay, yknow what sure that's the point. what about everything else? the book is structured around the various interviews that cm gave throughout the years, except we quickly stopped bothering with the south around halfway through the plot? the rest of the book was spent talking to people (that's heavily implied to be Normal People Because They're Liberal) from the north. who fucking cares? lacey already missed the point by setting this in an AU, and by some miracle missed it again by refusing to engage any further with the societal split and how that would affect the country even after reunification. every time she tried, it was always 'yeah sometimes... there are... gasp... hate crimes... people get assassinated... and then... cm got yelled at... by a homophobe...' like wow, yes, no shit, those are decidedly bad things, you're preaching to the choir that already sings your music???

what's just as boring, is blatant spite lacey pours into this story (and the book that came after this, the mobius). she claimed that her ex 'betrayed' her, and it's like, cheating fucking sucks, i get it, now please get the fuck over it because tell me why, is this book, filled to the brim with her hatred of men? and by having this kind of men-loathing in her book she had unintentionally made it extremely male-centered despite the focus being a fucking lesbian relationship.

i kept track of the amount of times men in the story is described Normally, and i'm happy to announce there's a grand total of zero times that had happened. every single masculine figure had either died a painful death, or just a completely unlikeable caricature. not only that, they're always said to be incompetent, and needed women to step in to help prop them up. lacey is so 'feminist' brained that she takes achievements of real people (notably david bowie! the fuck did he do to you, lacey?), and gives it all to x. even goes to imply that bowie's tendency to cycle through characters was because he was that inspired by x.

she's so fucking ignorant and short-sighted that she didn't consider the implication by doing so (heh feminism is when we take from men! gottem!), that, she's saying that a woman could never have achievements of her own, and have to use men as proxy to 'get it out there'. even in this society where supposedly, women are free to do anything! to love anyone!

sure, fuck it, we make fiction about real people all the time. how many times have we retold journey to the west in media? then what about lacey writing real people into her fiction, claim that they're gay or trans with her full chest, when those people never came out during their times, and are now incapable of defending themselves?

i had to find out through the bookclub that connie converse was a real singer. information about her is scarce because she chose to disappear back in the 70's. her final message showed me an image of a determined woman, who had made up her mind about leaving everything and everyone she had ever loved behind. maybe she wanted to die in peace, out of the limelight; maybe she truly wanted a new life and to become one with the faceless crowd. the courage for this decision is unimaginable to me.

so why the fuck did lacey use her as a stand-in for your typical lovesick sad puppygirl? did it absolutely HAVE to be a real woman that existed? you made up a gay best friend who's jealous and sabotages x's relationship (Men Bad at work again), but this HAD to be connie? had to have her do the whole lay on bed, refuse to eat routine when x left her for the first time? had to keep mentioning that she was suicidal and is just One Step away from actually doing it? had to pitch her against said gay best friend to essentially fight for x's affection and attention? had to use her to say, 'actually x is bad and abusive to everyone that loved her' as if we're too fucking stupid to see that 100 pages prior to this?

though there are speculations on connie's queerness, ultimately, she never did come out when she was still around. lacey, tasteless as she was, not only wrote her into the story, but put a neon sign right beside her that said '⬅ gay as fuck!' what was the point? the story gained nothing by having her like that in there. she was more effected by x's presence than x did with her (and yet somehow lacey says that 'oh... connie was her first true love......... it just isn't the same when connie chose to go and eventually dies a lonely death........' like ????????? my brain just isn't wired in the way that would understand this choice.

the fuck did anyone saw in x? i was meant to be convinced that, within around 30 years of time, x has been an activist wife mother writer actor painter artist lyricist musician pianist bartender company owner government agent (and i'm sure i'm missing some)? each with a different name, attitude, way of speech, accent, appearance, and location? what the fuck are you talking about? it's like lacey's trying to write her ideal woman (the kind she 'would' want and love, because she's so bisexual), but can't decide on one, so she just wrote all of them in one character. and now she has the golden excuse of, "it's just x playing a character" when people think that x's character is utterly incoherent. insufferable.

for her to claim that she didn't want the hetero dynamic to essentially make her story feel worse, cm and x's relationship is just a hetero marriage, with the serial number filed off so now it's a lesbian marriage. x has the aloofness of a stereotypical abusive cis man, with cm literally, in a fit of emotion, tells her she's being a typical man (and having x go, yeah... that's good actually...), but is also at the same time a manic pixie dream girl where she goes around and Changes Lives and proceed to disappear, leaving them to ruminate in her Profound presence. she would hit cm, and tells her to stop feeling anxious and that she's 'not allowed to'. toxic women are fun to read in fiction, but i never want to read it from lacey ever again.

the whole plot is basically cm going, 'how dare you talk shit about x... ima show you... heh... oh actually... she's kinda awful... maybe i hate her... but none of you also deserve her... i'm the widow... heh... oh nvm i really do hate her now...' and it's just this, but for 400+ pages. lacey had the galls to make fun of long books in her own. i thank god for inventing audiobooks because i don't know i would've survived.

i probably have more to say but i'm tired. i don't think this shit deserves any stars, but knowing i would have a hand in bringing the average rating of this book down, it brings me joy. play warframe or something. read diversely, y'all.