Mind's Eye

These three books have absolutely nothing to do with each other except that I read them all recently and want to share. Brace yourself for whiplash, maybe?

Bloom by Delilah S. Dawson is a dark f/f novella. Fresh from a bad breakup, lit professor Ro meets a beautiful woman named Ash at a farmer’s market. Ash’s life is a cottagecore fantasy: old-fashioned, frugal, everything handmade and homegrown, and her Instagram-perfect despite the fact that she doesn’t own a phone. Ro falls head over heels at first sight. But Ash is also strange and prickly, with strict boundaries and a fierce need for privacy, and things take a bad turn when Ro violates both.

This was a gripping story full of lush descriptions of delicious food and wholesome country life, compelling characterisation, and a command of pacing that made it feel like a delightful, idyllic country romp until I realised that a sense of oppressive horror had crept up without my noticing. It was also, in the end, much too dark for my personal taste. More hardened horror aficionados may enjoy it as is - fiachairecht, snickfic, I thought of you guys - but I was hoping for a particular kind or reprieve that didn’t come, and the last couple of chapters ended up veering into deep squick territory for me. Still, if I could tear them out and rewrite my own ending then I think it would be one of my favourite things I’ve read this year so far.

Mistress of Life and Death by Susan J. Eischeid is a biography of Maria Mandl, head overseer of the Auschwitz women’s camp. Eischeid is a musician and academic specialising in the music of the Holocaust, who first took an interest in Mandl because of her founding of the Auschwitz women’s orchestra; but Mandl’s life and career are overall poorly documented, so it took twenty years to research and write this book, drawing from an amazing breadth of sources to flesh out a story many historians would have deemed untellable.

It is, as I’m sure no one needs telling, an absolutely brutal read. There are some ways in which Mandl strikes me as a better example of the underlying spirit of fascism than your Hitlers or Himmlers or Mengeles: she was an ordinary woman from an unimportant village with no particular interest in politics, who joined the camp system because it was a well paid job in a difficult economy. Experiencing power for the first time in her life, she quickly took a shine to it and embraced the state-sanctioned opportunity to take out all her own petty grievances on her prisoners in ever more gruesome ways. She had moments of kindness and (rather more) moments of truly diabolical creativity as a torturer, but by far the majority of her day-to-day conduct seems to have been driven by her own pedestrian desire to feel important and to live comfortably, enabled by lazy acceptance of the dehumanising rhetoric in circulation among her colleagues. The results were horrific and an awful testimony to just how easily small, "normal" people can become genocidal monsters.

I will note that the structure of the book is slightly strange: it's split into tiny, mostly two- or three-page chapters, presented in a way that I'd probably call "snackable" if it were about literally anything besides the fucking Holocaust. I'd have preferred a less disjointed narrative, especially given the gravity of its subject matter - but I don't think I can hold that too much against the book, because it is in every other respect a truly excellent piece of Holocaust research and one that is unfortunately, heartbreakingly relevant to our current moment.

Strategy Strikes Back: How Star Wars Explains Modern Military Conflict ed. Max Brooks, John Amble, ML Cavanaugh, Jaym Gates is just SO MUCH FUN, if your idea of fun includes taking dumb sci-fi worldbuilding far more seriously than it was ever designed for. It's a delightful and educational essay collection that uses examples from Star Wars to explore different aspects of modern US military strategy. The contributors are a mix of military personnel and sci-fi writers, and its subject matter ranges from sweeping doctrinal overviews to thinly veiled analyses of specific real-world conflicts (in one essay, Endor is Afghanistan and the Ewoks are an exploited local people to whom interplanetary jihad sounds increasingly appealing). This is a library find that I feel like I need to invest in my own copy of, because it's going to be useful not just for Star Wars fanfic but for any other writing I might ever do that involves military conflict.