I picked up Brom’s novel Slewfoot more or less on a whim— I know him from his comic book work, but was unaware that he’d written any books until finding this one on a table at Barnes & Noble. That cover is haunting as hell (an apt description for most of his artwork, to be honest) and the book actually has an insert of several full-color paintings of the main characters, plus smaller pieces of artwork adorning each of the chapter headings, so I figured even if the writing itself wasn’t that good I would be getting some cool artwork out of the deal.
Well, I’ll be picking up more of his books, now that I know they exist. Slewfoot is not the most original book ever written— when I tell you the main character is a woman in Puritan Connecticut during the 1600s, combined with the cover and the subtitle “A tale of bewitchery,” you will no doubt be able to map out a lot of the broader beats of the story all by yourself with little effort, and you’ll mostly be correct. Is religious intolerance a theme? Yep. Is there a group of men whose goal is to fit main character Abitha into a box that she doesn’t want to be in? Yep. Will there eventually be a trial scene where she is accused of witchcraft, and the accompanying scenes of torture and interrogation? Yep.
(She doesn’t have goat legs, by the way. At first.)
Because, of course, the next question is going to be “Did Goody Good see her with the devil,” and the answer’s going to have to be sort of. Abitha’s husband dies early in the book and her shithead of a brother-in-law immediately starts to try to steal her farm out from underneath her so that he can pay off his debts, and, yeah, there’s something in the woods, but is it The Devil with capital letters? It certainly doesn’t seem to be. And Abitha has certain talents and skills learned from her mother, a cunning woman in her own right, and certainly not a Puritan— in fact, Abitha herself wasn’t born a Puritan, and in fact appears to have been more or less sold to her husband as the seventeenth-century version of a mail-order bride.
So she’s an outsider, too, in addition to all the other stuff, and, well, that’s not entirely a new idea either.
This book, in other words, isn’t necessarily good because of what it’s about, because as soon as you say Puritan you’re automatically conditioned in this country to expect a certain kind of story, and you’re going to get more or less what you’re expecting. Right up until the goat-legs thing, at least. And the bloody, bloody revenge. But there’s room for something to be reasonably predictable while still being a really good example of the thing that it is, and that’s what this is. Yeah, this is a book about a sort-of-but-not-really witch who is mostly just a woman with her own mind and her own opinions, in a world where all of those things are strongly frowned upon, and we’ve read that before. But I like genre books for a reason, and originality isn’t everything, and this is a really good seventeenth-century horror story, stuffed full of cool art as a bonus. It’s well worth checking out.
It has been an annoying little nothing of a day, and there is somehow snow on the ground outside again, and I hate all of it. I’m going to eat some hot dogs and go to bed.
With about fifty pages left in Nicholas Pullen’s The Black Hunger, I showed my wife how much book was left and told her that there was no way the book had enough book left to end right.
I was wrong.
Real, real, real wrong.
Now, obviously I can’t spoil the book’s ending. I mean, I can; I’m not going to. But it makes the book kind of hard to talk about, because having read the ending, I now feel like it’s the only possible way that the book could have ended, and to be honest I feel kind of dumb for not having seen it coming. But God damn, Nicholas Pullen. My dude pulled an inside straight here, and I’m genuinely in awe of how this book is put together.
But before I get too far ahead of myself: The Black Hunger is a whole lot of things. It feels very neo-Lovecraftian despite not actually referencing any of the Lovecraft mythos; it’s somehow cosmic horror without quite being properly cosmic; it’s historical fiction, referencing real people and real events, right up until the point where it isn’t. There is, at one point, a story within a story within a story. It’s gory and supernatural and Gothic and super gay. I was already thoroughly enjoying myself even before finishing the book, and the last ten pages or so are a masterclass. It starts off at Oxford and wends its way through India, Tibet, Russia and China before it’s finished. Pullen even throws in an 1870s British paranormal spy agency and the Dalai Lama just for the sheer hell of it. The main character is an academic and a minor British lord who ends up in the civil service in the back-end of India just because it seemed like a good idea at the time.
In a move that really shouldn’t have worked and somehow did, the middle third or so of the book is a lengthy letter involving an entirely different set of characters that also itself includes a lengthy digression for another letter.
This, uh, appears to have alienated some people, from looking at the reviews, and the rest are mad that there is Gay. Do not trust Goodreads on this one, is what I’m saying.
Between this and The Poet Empress, I’ve definitely got some excellent early frontrunners for the end of the year.
I’m not, God damn it. I refuse to do it. I am not dedicating another blog post or another minute of time with my precious mind on trying to make sense of ILEARN results and how it has been several years since they have correlated in any way at all with my perception of my students’ abilities.
That way lies madness. That way also lies comparing my results to the other 8th grade Math teacher and trying to come up with reasons why our scores might be different, and that madness is even worse madness than normal madness. I’m gonna walk away from this fucking computer and go read a fucking book, and I’m not thinking about school or the internet or teaching or math or fucking test scores for one more single second tonight because it is not worth it.
My son will be attending the same high school that both my wife and I graduated from, and he had an appointment with his counselor tonight to get his freshman schedule set up. I wasn’t really sure if all three of us needed to go, but we all went anyway, and we spent a little bit of time after the meeting wandering around the building.
My head is still kind of swimming. There has been an immense amount of renovation in the — God — thirty-two years since I graduated, which means that fully half of what I remember literally isn’t there anymore and if it’s still there everything around it is different. There were occasional flashes of “Yes, I remember this hallway” or “Yes, I remember this stairwell,” but nothing seemed to connect to anything else the way I remember any more. I’m not even completely sure I went there any longer.
Also, my son is about to be in high school and I graduated from high school thirty-two years ago, and I’ll be over here, in the corner, crumbling into dust for the rest of the night.
It hasn’t started yet, but apparently the thunderstorms currently headed my way are going to bring flash floods, hail measured in inches, and several dozen tornadoes. So, great! We were all surprised by the two fog delays we got last week; apparently I get to look forward to flood delays tomorrow morning, because if 2026 has shown me anything at all, it’s that when it is possible for there to be fuckery, it is an absolute certainty that fuckery there will be.
The trend of rough-as-fuck days continues; I had to do an office referral today for a kid who wouldn’t stop using the word “jigaboo” in class, and amended the referral a bit later when I discovered he’d also written “KKK” on his desk. It was also one of those days where everyone is having the same comprehension issue and I absolutely cannot figure out what is causing it. We are working on simple volume and surface area formulas; today, specifically, volume and surface area of spheres. The relevant formulas:
I generally will teach them how to calculate both formulas (not especially tricky) and then point out that since 4π and 4/3 π are always going to be the same number, you can actually shortcut the formula and use 12.56r2 for surface area and 4.19r3 for volume. The volume formula is a little bit of an estimate, but they’re both perfectly cromulent for what we’re doing.
For the first time since I’ve been doing this, this year’s kids showed a marked preference for the fuller version of the formula, and a lot of them simply could not wrap their heads around the shortcut formula. I was getting a ton of them who were multiplying 4.19 by the radius cubed and then insisting that they needed to divide by 3 afterwards. I would point at the formula they were using and ask them where that formula told them to divide and it wasn’t helping.
“Literally just multiply 4.19 by the radius three times. So if the radius is 7, you’ll calculate 4.19x7x7x7.”
“Okay. So when do I divide?”
“You don’t have to divide. Dividing by three is already worked into the 4.19.” And then I’d demonstrate how I got that number, for, like, the fourteenth time. And then they’d do a sample problem and still divide by three.
I had one of them write the volume formula as (1πr3)/3– so the whole thing as a big fraction, but replacing the four with a one for some reason. I pointed out that they had that wrong and told them that they needed to use four and not one, and then walked them through a problem.
“Okay. So when do you multiply by one?”
<head explodes>
“You don’t. First, it’s not in the formula. Second, multiplying by one would give you the same answer anyway, remember? So there would be no reason to put that in there.”
“Oh, okay.” <Does a problem.> “So, now I multiply by one?”
I change tactics. “Point to the one in the formula.”
They point at the one in the formula that they wrote down and still haven’t fixed.
“Have you noticed that you’re pointing at the one that only exists in your formula, the one I told you was wrong? Look at the formula at the board. Is there a 1 in there anywhere?”
“No. So where does it go?”
…
For six straight hours. I’m going back to selling furniture, God damn it.
I got home from work at a decent hour, having left almost precisely as early as contractual obligations allowed, then sat in a chair and did not move for two and a half hours. Dinner was two bowls of Frosted Mini-Wheats.
I’m, uh, gonna go play video games now, these three sentences having represented the apotheosis of my intellectual abilities at the moment.
