I love to read, but these three books really didn’t do anything for me.
The ‘BookTok’ content TikTok deemed suitable for me wasn’t the fairy porn masquerading as romance and rebranded through the platform’s rigid algorithmic doublespeak as ‘spicy books’.
Rather, I found myself drawn into the arguably more embarrassing ‘weird girl’ fiction wormhole, where goths compete to unearth the most bizarre, disturbing or otherworldly fiction to propose. While I’ve received some excellent suggestions from this cultural subset, the disappointments have outnumbered the successes.
Here are three books I read based on BookTok recommendations that have solidified my choice to abandon internet-sourced suggestions.
My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh
My Year of Rest and Relaxation achieved cult classic status several years back as the epitome of ‘weird girl’ fiction. The protagonist, an unnamed, miserable and skeletal twenty-something woman inhabiting New York around 2000 is detached and callous.
She chooses to self-medicate herself into the closest approximation of a coma to manage her overwhelming depressive episode. It’s a genuinely intriguing premise for a novel, but unfortunately it simply doesn’t deliver.
I recognise the anxiety that accompanies descending so far into depression that nothing holds meaning, the subtle terror that exists within a society where materialism reigns supreme and meaninglessness becomes a belief system, but I grasped these ideas before I even opened this book.
The subsequent 306 pages offered little additional insight into these subjects. I closed this book with the principal impression that while well crafted – it was extraordinarily dull. I detested reading it so intensely that I blamed the writer, yet I’ve subsequently read two of her other works (Lapvona and Homesick for Another World) and adored them both. I’m uncertain why this particular book proved so utterly unmemorable but I’m happy to leave it that way.
Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield
Another brilliant concept for a story that regrettably just didn’t succeed. Our Wives Under the Sea is a sapphic romance between Leah and Miri. Leah, a marine scientist, has just come home from a catastrophic expedition where the submarine she occupied lost contact and plummeted to the seabed.
Now reunited with her spouse Miri, it’s evident that something is terribly, terribly amiss. The narrative alternates perspectives, moving between Leah’s nightmarish underwater captivity, and Mira’s silent battle to restore Leah to the person she once knew. I genuinely wanted to adore this book, but regrettably it simply felt like it was grasping for something it never fully delivered. The concept of being stranded beneath the ocean, isolated from civilisation and alone in the blackness is gripping and frightening, yet Armfield only ever portrays it as ordinary.
The same applies to Mira’s perspective. As her spouse starts transforming into an Eldritch nightmare confined to the bathtub, Mira phones her workplace and maintains the water flow.
I do appreciate the notion of exploring what occurs when the individual you fell for is completely changed — psychologically and physically — but I believe significantly more could have been accomplished with the characters. Their voices are remarkably alike, which might have been a deliberate artistic decision, but for me, it simply made the book challenging to complete.
Maeve Fly by C.J. Leede
Promoted as extreme horror fiction, Maeve Fly tracks the eponymous character through her existence in LA, employed at a particular theme park as a character performer playing a particular frosty princess. Additionally, she’s interested in ‘murders and executions’ — a clumsy reference to Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho.
Maeve’s relentless monologues regarding Halloween music represent another attempt by Leede to honour American Psycho, but merely copying a classic isn’t remarkable. Maeve Fly does nothing to advance the genre and feels like a teenager’s fanfiction. It may be the worst book I have ever read.
The notion of a serial killer who happens to be a woman – shock horror – is hardly feminist or groundbreaking, yet C.J. Leede appears to believe she has achieved something genuinely daring by crafting a female protagonist who is thoroughly despicable. The characters are remarkably one-dimensional and their motivations are completely non-existent. Lengthy, overwrought depictions of violent murder and sexual assault do little to disguise the fact that this novel will never deliver on its own ambitions.
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