𝐃 𝐗 𝐌 𝐈 𝐍 𝐈 𝐐

I only know two bookstores focused on speculative fiction, and one of them is Dark Carnival. It’s a cramped, chaotic place: narrow aisles, overstuffed shelves, and stacks of books that block nearly every path. Finding what you’re looking for can be difficult, but that’s part of the experience. The inventory far exceeds the floor space, and the disorder feels strangely deliberate. I hope it lasts another hundred years. I like the low-grade dread it stirs up every time I visit it.

In other news: I may need another bookshelf soon. I’ve been cutting out media. I fear my brain is rotting from watching too much PopMart unboxing videos. That’s why I’m turning to reading speculative fiction that also doubles as social critique.

We, Yevgeny Zamyatin –

Zamyatin’s We is the cracked mirror precursor to Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World, written in a style both clinical and fevered. The One State, a glass city run on total surveillance and mathematical perfection, is narrated through the diary entries of D-503, an engineer unraveling under the pressure of forbidden desire and emerging individuality. The novel’s imagery is sharp and abstract, more like a nightmare in geometry than a fleshed-out world, which heightens the sense of alienation.

What makes We essential is its chaotic rhythm. The prose lurches between rational clarity and lyric madness, reflecting a mind breaking free from state-sanctioned sanity. Zamyatin predicted the machinery of ideological control with brutal accuracy, but he also understood the seduction of rebellion. It is not a clean book or an easy read. That is its power. It resists assimilation.

I’m not going to lie—the past few days have been full of anxiety and distractions. My husband and I have been out and about, and as a result, I haven’t been able to give the books the attention they deserve. As much as I can appreciate a text I’m not personally invested in, it can be exhausting to push through and try to absorb the story when my mind is elsewhere.

City of Saints and Madmen, Jeff Vandermeer –

Jeff VanderMeer’s City of Saints and Madmen is less a novel and more a puzzle box disguised as a short story collection, all orbiting the bizarre, fungal city of Ambergris. Here, history, hallucination, and horror collapse into each other. The stories shift from academic treatises to surreal horror tales, from colonial allegory to personal obsession, with footnotes that sometimes contradict the main text. It reads like Borges after a mycological breakdown.

What holds it together is the city itself. Ambergris is a living thing, sprawling and layered, its streets haunted by mushroom-folk and deranged scholars. VanderMeer writes like someone who has been infected by his own world. Reading City of Saints and Madmen is disorienting by design. It traps you in a place that feels real, then rewrites the rules. It is a foundational work of New Weird because it insists that meaning is always mutating towards the weird.

That’s all, folks :)