Horror Poetry: Lightsey Darst’s “Find the Girl”
Darst presents a poetry collection that hinges on our society’s obsession with female bodies, obsession, and our fixation on the murders of girls and women. This collection is absolutely stunning and heart wrenching. Victimhood is approached through the lens of the CSI industry and our desire to participate in it as audience.
The way that Darst creates the sickening feeling novels like Lolita present to the audience based on femaleness and age and obsession is masterful. The uncomfortability that Nabokov gives us in Lolita and Bryn Greenwood presents in a similar relationship in All the Ugly and Wonderful Things is channeled in this collection. This is the poetry equivalent and it is done so well.
page 53
I couldn’t stop marking lines and page numbers to return to and reread. Darst even has me obsessing over the words in the collection, just as the subjects and narrators obsess over female corpses. I want to quote a ton from this collection, but here are just a few of my favorite lines.
“Find the girl in time and she doesn’t / wind up in the newspaper with her feet / photographed bare sticking out from under / a rhododendron bush” (20)
~ from [Methods. listen]
“pierce me / The house of the murderer will stand / where the stream running from this crime / stops singing” (42)
~ from [Beautyberry]
“you told me I couldn’t keep / the red embroidery and clear water / apart / On my trail in these woods I keep seeing / pieces of my bodies like mine strewn / and bees humming to visit them” (47)
~ from [Helen, seventeen]
This collection is one that I will teach my college students from in the future. These poems are accessible and easy to understand with one to two readings. More and more nuance is revealed as the reader returns to each poem and the content is captivating. Darst’s words are sunlight rays over a rotted corpse and I loved this collection immensely.
(5 / 5)
Keeping it all in the family, Julia Bartz’s The Writing Retreat is the debut novel of the sister of Andrea Bartz, author of We Were Never Here, which I reviewed here.
I was much more impressed with The Writing Retreat than I was We Were Never Here.
The Plot
Five up and coming female writers under 30 are invited to a writing retreat hosted by the reclusive and acclaimed horror writer Rosa Vallo. Rosa reveals the details of the retreat: each writer must complete a full length novel from scratch over the next month. The best novel wins a multi-million dollar publishing deal with Rosa.
Suddenly, the retreat turns into a nightmare when one writer goes missing in the snowy terrain outside.
The novel hinges on friendships in turmoil and has a focus on LGBT+ representation as well as interpersonal female relationships. The novel explores the dark publishing world and the search for fame and the Great American Novel.
The Verdict
This novel is atmospheric and intellectual, page turning, and the English major’s required reading. I absorbed this novel and found Julia Bartz’s writing and conceptual chops to be leagues above her sister’s.
Ths novel releases on February 21, 2023 and it should be in your cart right now.
(4.5 / 5)
Buy it here!
The Plot
“A brilliantly genre-bending, mind-twisting answer to the question How far would you go to save your child?” — Ruth Ware, #1 New York Times bestselling author
Jen watches her son murder a stranger. Stab him to death. She and her husband, Kelly, watch as their son Todd is taken into custody.
The next morning, Jen wakes up and it’s yesterday. Jen knows that at the end of the night, her son kills someone. She is determined to stop it.
Jen goes further and further back in time trying to discover why Todd murdered a stranger and how to stop it.
The Verdict
This book is twisty. Right when you think you know the ending, something else is there to prove that the story is more multifaceted than that. While the premise of the novel is simple, Gillian McAllister elevates a simple concept with deep, dark twists.
It is best that you don’t know too much going into this one. For fans of Blake Crouch, this is such a good thriller with time travelling vibes.
(4 / 5)
“That doesn’t invalidate it,” Angel said. “There’s no statute of limitations on pain.”
The Plot
Angel is a man who knows pain: physical, mental, sexual. The story begins with Angel visiting Room 6 at the Lonely Motel and ordering a plus-size sex worker to his room. What comes next is Angel’s retellings of painful stories while performing sexual acts on the sex worker, Shyla.
The novel reads as a book of short stories, as Angel relays stories to Shyla and she tells him stories back. This is a novel of pain and disgust. Angel’s stories are so dark and traumatic that Shyla can’t believe they are true. As Angel bares his soul, we see a side of him that is melancholy and unable to process hurt in a natural way.
The Verdict
This novel is full of disgusting visuals and isn’t afraid to get dirty. This truly is an extreme horror novel. As a warning, there is discussion of feces, blood, rape, sex, and body horror. This novel is not for the faint of heart. You’ll close this short novel feeling dirty. Angel is a character that begs for sympathy while his stories narrate that he may not be as innocent as he perceives.
When the subtitle says this novel is extreme horror, believe it. Only the strong will survive Duncan Ralston’s Woom. It is more splatterpunk than anything, but true literary quality lies beneath the filth.
(4 / 5)
