#REVIEW: The Black Hunger, by Nicholas Pullen

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, Reviews1 Comment

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.

In which I’m not doing it

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching2 Comments

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.

Bah.

On memory lane

On By Luther M. SilerIn ParentingLeave a comment

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.

Apocalypse soon

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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.

In which I vegetate

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

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.

#REVIEW: Trad Wife, by Saratoga Schaefer

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I’ve been suffering through a little bit of a book drought lately— of the seven books I’ve read in March, I’ve only ranked two of them above three stars, and if you’ve paid any attention to my Goodreads or Storygraph accounts (Follow me! I want friends!) you know that I tend to rate generously, as I don’t often buy books I don’t expect to like.

My wife was a little startled to see that I’d picked up Trad Wife, though, which probably doesn’t look like something I’d usually read, especially if you don’t happen to notice that clawed hand on the cover. I own this because of my Aardvark book box subscription; it’s pretty easy to get me to take a risk on a hardcover if it’s only $10, and the club in general has had a pretty good record for horror novels for me.

Because, yeah, this is a horror novel. It’s Rosemary’s Baby crossed with Nightbitch for the TikTok/Instagram generation, which was not a thing I ever expected to type. Main character Camille Deming is an aspiring Instagram influencer and “trad wife” person, meaning she stays at home and cooks and cleans and constantly posts pictures and videos of her perfect house and her perfect lifestyle. The problem is that she doesn’t have a baby, and she feels like her social media is never really going to take off (I feel you, sister) unless she manages to get herself knocked up. The problem is it keeps not happening, and her husband seems to be losing interest in her.

So obviously she’s gonna fuck the first demon who invades her dreams to promise her a child. I mean, really, who wouldn’t? And if the baby doesn’t turn out … quite like she expected, well. Do it for the ‘gram. Or something. I feel like young people at least used to say that.

I actually posted a review of this to GR/SG, and it read, in full, “Absolutely deranged. I loved it.”

A few hours later, this is probably going to be one of those books that declines a bit in my esteem with the passage of time, but its strength is that it’s a fast, propulsive read (only 300 pages) that you will probably finish far too quickly to think about it too much. Once you sit down and think about it— and, to be clear, this is something that I don’t recommend— it’s gonna develop a couple of holes here and there, and a couple of things about the setting are going to feel like they were contrived specifically so that the plot would work. Camille and her husband have just moved to a new home in a new town, for example, away from family and friends. Camille has no one other than her husband and an infuriatingly persistent and nosy neighbor who she’d rather do without, and she kind of has to be isolated for the plot to work— if she even had one good girlfriend the book would not have been able to unfold the way it did.

The book doesn’t actually really address her lack of friends; I assume it’s because she’s decided to dedicate herself solely to her husband; you’re gonna have to roll with it if you want to have a good time. Similarly, if her husband was even vaguely interested in being a good husband or a good father— either! it doesn’t have to be both!— a whole lot would have gone very differently. You will be annoyed by things like this if things like this generally annoy you. Do you want to like your main characters? You may not like Camille very much. I’m not certain you’re supposed to; I’m not sure the author likes her very much. But Trad Wife succeeds at being a creepy page-turner for the few hours you’ll spend with it, and sometimes that’s enough. I needed something I could dive into and enjoy, and it filled that role nicely.

The most exciting thing that happened today: Saturday edition

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

One:

Two:

Three:

Patching, repainting and putting the trim back in place is gonna wait to next weekend, and rearranging the room until the weekend after that, but that job was a lot easier than either of us thought it was going to be.

The most exciting thing that happened today

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I have made this observation in three different places so far, which is almost certainly more than it deserves: the most impressive thing about the Big Arch I had for lunch today is that it looks exactly like every picture of the Big Arch that McDonald’s has been using to advertise it. If you eat at restaurants at all you know how ridiculously uncommon that is. The review: pretty damn tasty, almost too big, although I could still taste it three hours later and I suspect my breath may still slightly smell of onions.

This week was utter madness.

Two different two-hour fog delays, which led to me talking for five hours straight on Thursday, as everything I had planned for that day had to be compressed into two hours less class time, meaning I did nothing but lecture the entire day. This is not a thing I do. I was so tired when I got home I forgot to take my Mounjaro shot, which has been a regular Thursday thing for at least a year now. Today they took the test I was doing the guided notes for yesterday; I still have two classes to grade, but early indications are that the bed appears to not have been shit in. Monday and Tuesday were it’s getting warm and there’s a full moon behaviors and Wednesday was an e-learning day and tons of meetings.

Y’all, I am exhausted. And all of this is before we get to the bit where the fucking world set itself on fire more than once in the last couple of weeks– have I even used the word “Iran” on this blog yet? How long ago was the first attack? It could have been anything from yesterday to a month ago at this point; I’m so fried I can’t even tell. The second-dumbest guy in the Senate is apparently getting promoted? Gas prices have shot up by a dollar a gallon since I filled the tank on Monday.

Oh, and while I’ve generally tried not to talk too much about some of the medical issues my son has been having, for probably-obvious reasons, I cannot pass up mentioning that he was prescribed a nasal spray this week for migraines that are somehow in his abdomen, and no part of me is capable of dealing with the fact that that sentence represents something real and is not word salad.

So naturally tomorrow we’re going to tear down a wall in the bedroom. Wish me luck.

I’m sure it’ll be fine.