it will take me another 10 years to understand anything about psychoanalysis. but the foucault / power / construction of sex as natural / performativity stuff was really productive, glad i finally got around to this!!

if you told me what this book was about i probably wouldn't have picked it up... but my blind trust in james baldwin got me through the door and then each page reached out and clutched onto my heart so hard i couldn't escape till i finished. SO GOOD

just like the original novel, this retelling has a core heartbeat of urgency and dread but often meanders into alleyways and almost slice of life tales…. yes, it slows things down, but i didn’t necessarily hate it.

after reading white’s acknowledgments, i think we had very similar experiences with bram stoker’s dracula, so of course i enjoyed the twists she put on the original story, though some were… confusing. it was plotted out more like a tv miniseries than a movie, if that makes sense. this was not the characterization of mina i was expecting but i liked it. i think actually iris was the least compelling character to me, if only because i preferred the historical fiction and fantasy aspects. genuinely would have loved if iris’s timeline was set in the 1980s or something— something about the extreme contemporariness of it was not to my personal taste.

some really lovely writing, some slightly overwrought moments, but overall a lot of fun and i can overlook some of the plot confusion because i just liked the damn book. i will say i wished for a little more… idk, disturbing-ness? horror? it felt a bit sanitized at times. even though there’s a bunch of murder and violence going on, the writing doesn’t always make you feel the terror of it. the way iris was treated by the family definitely worked as horror, though.

i probably have more to say but for now its 3 am and im going to sleep. hopefully lucy will be there in my dreams 🤍