Bitter Karella

While most of the horror is coming from the violence and the disturbing or disgusting imagery, what hooked me in was the unsettling moment after Sarah and Andy discovered they’d already used their insurance against the horrors of the forest, Leviathan’s Favored Son (a fungus that erases recent memories). There was that moment of slow, hair-raising realization that they’d already encountered something horrifying enough to risk leaving themselves lost and disoriented in the forest to show more escape the memory of it. And worse, they could only poke futilely at the blank spot in their memories and wonder what they’d gone through. It set up the desperation and paranoia of their situation perfectly.

Then, when they reach the cult, the threat of the eldritch horror of the forest lightens, but it keeps the tension on since we know more than Sarah does how willing the cult is to hurt and kill “phallic alecs” as they call anyone with a penis. Some of the cult’s behavior was truly bizarre and unsettling, while in other areas, they were playing on very familiar tropes. They’re TERF-y political lesbians whose spirituality is built upon ideas of the divine feminine and veneration of typical perisex AFAB bodies.
I appreciated how their transmisogynistic ideology was undermined not just through Sarah’s thoughts on it as a trans woman, but also subtly as more was revealed about the Green Lady and the Lord of the Forest. It became obvious how little sense it made to apply limited human-made gender essentialism to nature.

However, after Sarah reached the cult, I felt bogged down at times, stuck pushing through fetish content. Not to say something can’t be good horror and sexual or fetishistic, but I got a little tired of hearing the same descriptions about the same women’s bodies repeatedly, with Mother Moonflow particularly. There was shock value in that first meeting with Mother Moonflow where it’s revealed it’s a raccoon suckling at her (enormous, pendulous, fat) breasts (with wine cork nipples), that fit right in with this type of horror novel. But after multiple scenes focusing on her fat, her breasts, and her lactation with the similar language used each time or similar scenes taking place, it felt overplayed. I wasn’t getting the horror aspect anymore at that point, and without being into it personally, it was losing me. show less

First things first. I'll have to get into something that I learned right after finishing my read. Bitter Karella—who uses both masculine and feminine pronouns with a preference for interchanging them—has a large body of work published in anthologies and short-form fiction circles. This informs a massive part of my opinions on Moonflow. Points in favor: if you are familiar with the genre it is very easy to read, it has a lot of great ideas, and I did find it amusing. However! I feel that show more the book is too long, because it is trying to do too much all at once. This would have been an excellent anthology, and many of the hanging plot points could have been tightened up into a gloriously gnarly tale that I'd read again & again. I really wanted to like this book. I did! Part of me still does. However...

In the shortest possible summary, Moonflow is about a trans woman— Sarah —going into a magical forest in search of absolutely biznasty mushrooms that are unfortunately guarded by a bunch of naked TERFy lesbians that all have a lactation fetish. That is the entire plot. The B-Plot to that is there are mushroom gods, one with huge breasts and the other with an unbelievably massive penis. It slaps between his legs when he walks. This is remarked upon multiple times.

On its face, I absolutely love the conceit. In fact, there's a lot that I really really really liked about Moonflow. It has genuinely good ideas about things like humans transplanting their gender ideals onto literally anything, the trials of being trans in a world that isn't ready for you, a running commentary on fatness as it applies to attraction and what makes being fat hot versus not, plus a really fun underlying god lore that pushed me to read the entire book despite massive misgivings. There's a lot of nasty, gory, absolutely vile sex... and I love that shit! That is precisely what I expect from splatterpunk; it's why I bothered picking this book up from my local library in the first place.

Let's get a few things out of the way. Moonflow is absolutely obsessed with boobs. When I tell you that this book is 20% tit mention by volume, that is honestly a lowball of the sheer breast involvement. Clearly, I am not the target audience, because ass will always be my first pick. As a result, it made every reminder of a character's rack into an icepick drilling my ear. Mother Moonflow's pendulous pair are often the first [and foremost] detail of her repeated appearances. I'm trying to see the plot but I have to lean around this wide-as-fuck TERF's Grand Tetons to see the divinity of the human form. Please. My family misses me.

The second thing to internalize about this book is that it is very... shallow. The setting of the Pamogo Forest, where all the weird spooky mushroom god shit is happening, is occasionally the topic of vague reads on white colonialism, but the story never really delves much deeper into the obvious discussion to be had about going into clearly haunted woods on allegedly [per the book] Native land to retrieve psychedelic mushrooms for personal profit. It is also interesting that the only race anyone is confirmed to be, is white. Sarah is white, her forest guide Andy is white, and her friend Damon is white... but no other character is directly described as having any race at all—which is really... interesting to me. Especially when multiple characters ARE described as having flawless or beautiful "alabaster skin" to denote their beauty. As far as I can tell, the only other skintones mentioned are the mushroom gods. One is green [the "good" one] and the other isss reddish brown. Okay.

To be fair, I am not really expecting a deep dive into racial politics here. It's just interesting to include an entire segment in which Sarah bitingly asks about how many Chinese workers were displaced or killed while Some Guy set up a failed lumber mill, only to never address any other narrative in that direction at any other point. It is weird because I was actually expecting some intersections of TERF ideals with racist dogma, given how heavy-handed a lot of the other TERF-related elements were, but alas. This is silly, and pedantic. It still bothered me. LOL!

This book really really really hates TERFs. Which is fair, because I do too. Their beliefs are dangerous, and play a role in shaping the safety [or lack thereof] in society. But the way Moonflow talks about TERF rhetoric often conflates it with [specifically] cis lesbianism as a whole, often through biting sarcastic dismissal of popular TERF arguments. It weights the characters into being caricatures of a problem, or fully fleshes them out as exceptions because they have sucked a dick before. As a result, many scenes that are supposed to be gripping or terrifying are just kinda... silly.

Sarah is made a captive audience of a live birth ceremony and, when everything goes wrong, a bunch of naked cis women high on moonflow [AKA the magical mommy milk from their cult leader, Mother Moonflow, lest we get it twisted] all stand around her and shout that she is a phallic alec bringing evil penis energy into a divine feminine space. This was impossible to take seriously. Phallic alec? I don't know, Moonflow has a thing for rhyming terms. Yonic tonic is a common one too. Sure. Whatever.

Oh, and the mushroom gods. The twist is pretty self-evident once you get to the last 3ish chapters, which was a little disappointing. All that lead-up, talk about how the Lord of the Forest did not have the face of a man, only for it to be a sorta silly droopy Typical Horror Monster face. It is what it is. Maybe I wasn't supposed to be rooting for him and his giant penis, but I was, and I'm real sad that there was very little firing of that Chekov's... uh... rifle? Actually a lot of the god-specific stuff is completely overshadowed by boring relationship drama between TERFs. I don't care about Moonflow's pregnancy. Splatter some god residue on me already!

[Oh, and. A lot of the mushroom terms mentioned in this were Just Wrong, but I won't get into that.]

This isn't even touching on how fucking MEAN this book is to Skillet. Maybe I just have a different perspective, being fat myself, but honestly I found the constant dogging on her for being into fat bitches extremely weird. The narrative, the TERFs in the woods, even the protagonist is rude as hell to Skillet for wanting some chunk in her soup. Especially when this is followed up on with constant body shaming of her for having a "weird" vagina, or being kind of ugly, or a skinny bitch. I don't know what "her pussy looks like she sat on a hot plate" means and frankly, I'm peeved that came up more than once! It all just reads as insanely bitter and strange. Justice for my girl Skillet. If I ran into a crazy naked nympho that wanted to snort shrooms off my huge ass in the woods, I'd let her hit, and I don't care who judges me for that. show less

The Midnight Pals are amusing as ever! I've seen some of these individual Tweets on Twitter (back when I used Twitter before it became X or whatever) but I'm still glad to have them in book form.

For myself, I like the short Tweet format the best. The Midnight Pals books also include some (fake) ads and longer stories in the style of one horror author or another, but in general I don't like those nearly as much as the Tweet discussions between the authors. And while I've never read (and show more likely never will read) a Dean Koontz novel, he's quite probably my favorite of the Midnight Pals. show less

If you like the @midnight_pals Twitter account, then this book is for you. It's a collection of the Twitter posts in book form. I found the book—like the Twitter posts—highly amusing.