reading

Trad Wife (2026) by Saratoga Schaefer. A would-be tradwife influencer wants a baby for both personal and professional reasons, but her husband won't have sex with her (because he's clearly cheating on her), so instead she has sex with the shadow creature in the well on edge of the property. This plan obviously has no flaws whatsoever. AKA: the trad wife novel that ISN'T about time travel.

This was fun and a quick read. It leaned harder on the monsterfucker element than I expected, and where I was expecting mostly psychological horror with elements of the supernatural, no, the supernatural stuff was front and center. I appreciated how our tradwife has depths that she is progessively less able to keep hidden, and I was just as mad at the past and present men in her life as the book wanted me to be. Her husband is just the woooooorst.

That said, ( spoilers )

I also felt that the degree to which she's consciously, actively deceiving herself about what's happening with her pregnancy was just kind of silly. I would have liked subtler writing there.

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Roadside Picnic (1972) by the Strugatsky Brothers. A man makes a living sneaking into the "Zone," a restricted area full of dangers and treasure left by a one-time visit by aliens.

I completely coincidentally got interested in this and the adaptation Stalker almost simultaneously, without realizing they were related. In both cases I went in with, it turned out, unfounded (but different!) expectations of what I was going to get. Stalker isn't really a cosmic horror movie, alas, although the bones of one are there, and meanwhile this isn't very interested in the Zone at all, at least not as a setting, which if nothing else is a big contrast from the movie! I can see why people say it's a very loose adaptation.

This novel is actually about the daily life of a guy trying to steal forbidden alien artifacts and sell them to the black market, his dealings with various shady characters, and how hard this all is on his family. There are a lot of themes of hopelessness and corruption. It feels very 70s in its mundane focus with Big SF Ideas relegated to the background.

Unfortunately I was super uninterested in most of this. The grimy details of social corruption as seen through our lead's gross sexist lens: not what I came for! I came here for the weird horror shit, the "hell slime" that disintegrates your bones and turns your limbs into rubber, the gravity traps that crush you flat, and the various other hazards of the Zone, which we get only at the very beginning and very end.

I can definitely see why it's a classic: it generally accomplishes what it's trying to do, and it treats its characters and their reality with total unironic seriousness. But it was not what I wanted, alas.