We were close to the divine. We touched gods, felt them flow through our veins. Felt lust, envy, greed, quicken our hearts — but for a while, we were truly, spectacularly alive. I might have been any one of us, sitting there like the Madonna on the gently rocking swing. Sheer luck made it her, not me.
Even now, if someone explained a book to me like that, I'd want to read the shit out of it.
Abso-fuckin-lutely.
I would hunt it down, pay whatever the asking price, even if I had to beg, borrow, and steal, whatever it took, that book would be in my grabby little paws before the sun went down.
My witchy, grunge-loving, feminist heart wouldn't settle for less.
And I thought I had it, I thought that book was in my possession, like my very own grimoire, writhing with terrible deeds and even worse possibilities.
And it's not because it's bad, or lacking in imagination, or fails draw you in - it does all those things, with a side order of blood spray.
There's just a small, little, tiny problem:
It does sort of scream blatant rewrite of an already brilliant story.
A palimpsest, if you will (and I will because pompous verbiage is my jam), with lofty aspirations lain artfully to left over the original tale of female of occult revenge gone wrong.
A double exposure with no purpose other than to say: Hey, I loved this story, here's my take on it.
Which is a fantastic reason to write any book, it's why fanfiction exists, why perhaps all stories inevitably become fanfiction of another's work simply because there are only so many tales to tell.
There are, however, infinite ways of telling it.
And The Furies perhaps didn't excoriate enough of its inspiration's layers to transform it into something new.
So, as a piece of original storytelling? I didn't love it.
But as a love letter to The Craft and the power of women taking vengeance on their oppressors? I think Nancy Downs would give it the cool girl/scary girl eyebrow raise of approval.
...
And then probably rip the book apart with her teeth and use the wreckage as the kindling for some mordacious spell against whoever pissed her off that day.
But that's just watch witch-bitch's do, and why we love them so.
Tomorrow, I will choose my four: the next four [and] all those who've come before.
And I'll teach them all I know, all my predecessors have known — the power of angry women, the fates we hold and furies we possess. I'll let them stretch their wings and claw at the eyes of those who stare; teach them to burn with righteous fire and cleanse the world with learning. I'll teach them beauty, revenge, madness, and death, and if they burn it all, and start again, the more the better. For they'll be fearless, becoming bold.
*sigh*
It'll never not offend my entire being that Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board goes against the laws of physics and my adolescent dreams of sprouting magical powers will never come true.
It's been the most unapologetically soft ride with loveable-beyond-belief characters, and I'm going to miss them all terribly.
And I can't even pick a favourite.
I think it's Roy, and then Jamie barges into view, Keeley pushing him out the way so her and Rebecca can glam up the screen.
And then there's the main man himself, Mr Ted Lasso, the only Theodore I'll ever love as much as Keanu Reeves at peak himbo.
How could I ever pick a favourite within a veritable bounty of characters purposefully written to make me smile until my cheeks hurt?
Not. Possible.
And thank fuck for that.
I love a show that makes me work for it, that's intellectual and jaggedly beautiful, but more often these days it's the stories that are infused with unapologetic kindness and joy that nourish me the most.
I should be, because I really wanted more for both of them, for these two indomitable whirlwind women to escape the inevitable, priveleged jadedness that comes with public success - I didn't need a realistic ending for a show that's been so spectacularly rooted in the unhinged.
Even better the second time around, and I still can't seem to muster a fuck over a twenty five year old nobody duping a bunch of billionaires and robbing them blind.
If we can't tax the fuckers, may as well take their stuff.
". . . you have to fall in love with stories, with literature.
And what you're doing when you do that is . . . is you're . . . You're always trying to see things from someone else's point of view.
You're trying to occupy a different space.
Uh . . .
And . . . when you're in the middle of a story, you're in a state of possibility, as opposed to whatever state of oppressiveness you're in in real life.
The text is kind of a living thing, and it's a dance, an ongoing conversation that you have with it.
Sometimes, you love a poem so much, you . . .
Every time you read it, you learn something new and you feel transformed by it.
It's a very complicated but faithful relationship."
The first time I watched these glorious idiots I had to put the subtitles on.
And not because the Derry accent is insanely thick (but maybe a little), but because every time Clare's blood pressure rose beyond human capabilities and she had a full on gay panic(every episode), she didn't actually form words anymore but simply Celtic vowel sounds shot through with existential dread.
This time, when you looked into the water, you caught a fleeting glimpse of your true reflection. And it was only then, when you saw your own gory, blue-eyed face, bright hair hidden beneath rusted mail, that you understood who you were and who they were. You saw yourself as an unholy triptych, three into one, one into three: she then girl, you're the Devil, and I the Saint. And you understood, finally, that there had never true been a she or a you but only a terrible, lonely I.
This is a love story.
For better or for worse, there's no other, truer, way to describe it.
Woven in the guise of a mediaeval folktale with the godhead, imperial devotion, and innate violence as its framework, it tells the classic tale of a knight divinely plucked from impoverished obscurity and made legend.
A tale told since storytelling began, inherently recognised by every generation as if the collective unconscious reads it as glimpse of a past life tucked away for safekeeping, destined to be rediscovered, relived with each new telling.
And The Six Deaths of the Saint is no different; a shock to the system in its familiarity, its universality, caught in an endless, jolting, devoted cycle of live, love, die, repeat.
Ouroboric, devout, and crushingly sad, but ultimately, blessedly, overrun with love.
The desperation to attain it, and the malformed creatures we turn ourselves into to do so; the lies we tell ourselves and the cruel palms we curl our cheeks into to feel even a modicum of its warmth; the way we overlook it when it's so freely, selflessly given, offered with no conditions or expectations; and ultimately what we'll do when we finally recognise it, what we'll give up to keep it.
This is a love story.
One that made me brim with tears, and resolutely refuse to let fall.
I don't know why.
He asked, as he always did, if it was worth it.
You sat up, turning to face him so that the two of you were kneeling face to face. There were tears in his eyes, and you pressed your brown hard to his. "No," you whispered, and you meant it.
"Then run, go now, before dawn―"
"Would you make a coward of me, here at the very end? After everything I've done, everything I've become―"
Gwynne's voice cut through yours, his brow still resting heavily on your forehead. "I would rather love a coward than mourn a legend."
My first Alix E. Harrow, and most certainly not my last.
No one else I know has watched this, so I have no one to talk to about how fucking astoundingly brilliant it is, how wonderfully Andrew Garfield plays tribute to Jonathan Larson, the music, the cinematography, the framed storytelling, THE MUSIC.
And it's driving me slightly crazy.
Someone please watch this so I can make unintelligible noises and burst into random bouts of song at you.
This is going to be a story about the Lynch brothers.
There were three of them, and if you didn't like one, try another, because the Lynch brother others found too sour or too sweet might be just to your taste. The Lynch brothers, the orphans Lynch. All of them had been made by dreams, one way or another.
[...]
Dreams are not the safest things to build a life on.
The only way I can even come close to explaining Call Down the Hawk is to liken it to the intangibility of a near-waking dream, where those early morning unrealities allow our subconscious to be present enough to invite awareness, but not necessarily participation.
They trap us in an endless stride through impossible doorways, leading to a seemingly vital nowhere, each step laden with an unwavering fixation to find what lies just beyond, just through the next door; the before slipping away without notice, the what comes next taking immediate precedence.
It's not that you choose to follow, it's that you simply must.
To follow is for dreamers, to stop is for the wakeful.
And every fanciful creature/environment/word that veers into your path along the way won't demand anything so conscious as acceptance to win their tenability, they simply are and always have been, because the rules are different when we close our eyes.
Impossible is struck from the vocabulary, inexplicable an unknown concept, disbelief a never felt emotion.
In their stead exists only of course, go on, tell me more,because there are no question marks in dreams, only ellipses.
You are bigger than that, bigger than what is real. You have been raised among wolves and now you've forgotten you have thumbs. Real was a word invented for other people. Scrub it from your vocabulary. I don't want to hear you say it again. If you dream a fiction and wake with that fiction in your hands, it becomes fact.
Do you understand? For you, reality is not an external condition. For you, reality is a decision.
This is how it feels to read Ronan's first foray with his brothers outside the familiar safety of Henrietta, Cabeswater, the Barns, even his friends: Adam, Gansey, Blue, and long-missed Noah (at least by me; Blue and her boys don't mention him anymore and that makes me hopelessly sad).
Call Down the Hawk is a languidly meandering dream strung with dangling, tangential storylines like Tantalus and his fruit: just out of reach, effortlessly toothsome, and purposely unresolved.
With each chapter, each character, Maggie Stiefvater hooks you into a new dream and drags you through yet another door you're perpetually unsure you should walk through: fraught with peril, here be monsters, beware Ronan's sun dogs.
A signpost for every uncertainty, an invitation to lure you in.
And you can't help but be lured.
If only because it's the first time we've been granted true access to the inner workings of Ronan himself, unimpeded by death curses, Merlin-esque paramours, and a slumbering once and future king.
This isn't about Gansey and his monarch, Adam and his sylvan spectres, or Blue and her curse, this about Ronan: who he is, what he is, and why he is.
Ronan, the middle brother, defended his safety by being as frightening as possible. Like the other Lynch brothers, he was a regular churchgoer, but most people assumed he played for the other team. He dressed in funereal black and had a raven as a pet. He shaved his hair close to his skull and his back was inked with a clawed and toothed tattoo. He wore an acidic expression and said little. What words he did unsheathe turned out to be knives, glinting and edged and unpleasant to have stuck into you. He had blue eyes. People generally think blue eyes are pretty, but his were not. They were not cornflower, sky, baby, indigo, azure. His were iceberg, squall, hypothermia, eventual death. Everything about his suggested he might take your wallet or drop your baby. He was proud of the family name, and it suited him. His mouth was always shaped like he's just finished saying it.
The Lynch brothers had many secrets.
[...]
Ronan had the most dangerous of the secrets. Like many significant secrets, it was passed down through the family―in this case, from father to son. This was the good and bad of Ronan Lynch: The good was that sometimes, when he fell asleep and dreamt, he woke with that dream. The bad was that sometimes, when he fell asleep and dreamt, he woke with that dream. Monsters and machines, weather and wishes, fears and forests.
Dreams are not the safest thing to build a life on.
...
Which of course we gain no answers to - at least not not in this part of the trilogy - because like any dream it rarely makes sense while it's happening, nor holds permanence once it's over, and this story feels exactly that: impermanent.
Stiefvater led us down so many different paths, introduced us to a truly madcap set of characters, and in the end abandoned us with the penumbra of the story, Delphic and unfinished.
There's a charged, buzzing accuracy to those words, a gossamery film that clings to them and consequently, you.
And that same ethereality, intangibility, unreality, is what stays with you once the last word is read.
No matter how much you try to shake it off, those shadowy snares Stiefvater snaked between the webbing of your fingers like the clasp of a dreamlike hand continue to sinuously pull you along, tug with gentle insistence that there's more to see, more to feel, more to do.
A fairy bargain between author and reader: come away with me and find out.
Which is an invitation I'll never be able to resist.
It's the same inviting, insistent beseeching as when you wake, when the dreaming world recedes and the woken world starts to take over, and instead of following the light that woke you, the promise of sense and order, you choose to languidly fall back into that place behind the eyes, hoping desperately it'll take you back to a world that felt more real than the waking one ever could.
Even though you know that if by some slim chance you make it back, it'll be a little different, a little skewed, breadcrumbed with befores in a landscape of impossible never seen before but brilliantly familiar nows.
But that doesn't matter as long as you're welcomed back where anything's possible.
Stiefvater's layed the groundwork, she's sent out those tangled, plotted hooks, snarled them in our fabric and pulled us just far enough to make sure we can't go back, that we don't want to go back, and nothing will ever be the same again.
We've grieved Cabeswater and manifested Lindenmere, we've left behind Henrietta, we're past Ronan dreaming his impossible things in the fields of the Barns with his eternally drowsing cattle; those endless, dreamy summers are over, and in a way, that hurts more than anything else.
Of all the Raven Boys, Ronan was the one who needed the most protection; this fierce boy, this somnambulist wizard who snarls instead of smiles, who can't fall asleep without fear of bringing something deadly back, who only wants to dream safely and move in with his boyfriend, to live.
This was as Ronan remembered it. Adam's ribs fit against his ribs just as they had before. His arms wrapped around Adam's narrow frame the same way they had before. His hand still pressed against the back of Ronan's skull the way it always did when they hugged. His voice was missing his accent, but not it sounded properly like him as he murmured into Ronan's skin: "You smell like home."
Home.
Ronan felt steadier. It was going to be all right. He was with Adam, and Adam still loved him, and this was going to work.
But can't because he's more.
Just more.
You are made of dreams and this world is not for you.
I was never worried for anyone else in the series, not even when the very worst happened because I knew they'd be okay, but Ronan's fissured fragility was always akin to those intrusive thoughts in the dark that have you have knocking on wood to banish them before they even have the chance to contemplate being born.
Chaotic, nagging, never ceasing.
Ronan Lynch is the personification of faultless, ouroboric chaos, and Call Down the Hawk confirms it, confirms the worry that he is and might always be in danger, that his life with Adam will never be simple *ten second howling interlude to sob over my beautiful boys*, that the answers to who, what, and why for Ronan might just be his undoing.
And that he's not the only one:
🍃 Hennessy and her girls
🍃 Declan and his learned mundanity
🍃 Matthew and his unreality
🍃 Farooq-Lane and her loyalties
🍃 Adam and his perception
🍃 Bryde and his proclaimed somnambulist heroism
A new and old cast of dreamers, believers, seers to flit through the mirrored worlds of awake and dreaming alongside him, help him carry the burdens and joys of being a greywaren.
The Lynch brothers, the brothers Lynch. In a way, the Lynch brothers had always been the most important and truest definition of the Lynch family. Niall was often gone, and Aurora was present but amorphous. Childhood was the three of them tearing through the woods and fields around the Barns, setting things on fire and digging holes and wrestling. Secrets bound them together far more tightly than any friendship ever could, and so even when they went to school, they remained the Lynch brothers, the brothers Lynch. Even after Niall died and Ronan and Declan had fought for a year, they'd remained tangled together, because hate binds as strongly as love.
The Lynch brothers, the brothers Lynch.
Ronan didn't know who he would be without them.
Some friends, some foe, some unconfirmed, but all tethered to the end of Stiefvater's puppet strings, just waiting to see what impossible dreams she'll configure for them next, myself included.
All we have to do is keep on dreaming, and I, for once, will lay myself drowsy at the foot of Stiefvater's somnambular throne.
(The Buffy college years are, well, not the best, but my girls finally getting to live together - with Amy the Rat, of course? *mwahmwahmwahmwahmwahmwah*)
My chemistry buddy/benchmate in high school used to hold my pen hostage while the teacher droned on so I wouldn't trace over the notes I'd already taken.
Still bitter.
I just wanted to scribble my scribbles and not die of boredom, y'know?
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