September [reading] was based on a true story
September book reviews plus things to watch and all the book news
This month has everything1:
Hot witches
Graverobbing scholars
Secret syphilis
Imaginary feuds with Joyce Carol Oates
September was unintentionally a discourse on truth in fiction. It was a month of novels that blur the line between reality and imagination, author and art, history and fantasy. How does “reality” skew what we think we know about a text? And are we allowed to care about context? It was easily my best reading month of 2025, even though I took a chance on two new books and one elderly one. These titles will not be for everyone, but they sure were for me!
Will There Ever Be Another You - Patricia Lockwood
The thing about Patricia Lockwood is that the more you know about Patricia Lockwood, the better. We are often told to leave the author out of it - do not assume their art is a vehicle for their personal life, do not assume this is autobiography, do not assume the author is the narrator, is the story. Will There Ever be Another You is for people who have read every single Lockwood book/poem/tweet ever written, every interview she’s given, every podcast appearance. With Trish, the ability to comprehend her new novel is predicated on knowing her as an author, something I haven’t encountered to this degree before.
In the story, Patricia-as-narrator travels to Europe, catches COVID, and swirls into a brain-fog-induced existential crisis wherein she doesn’t know who she is, if she has become one with Anna Karenina, and who she is in a fight with. Like the novel-as-tweets format of her first novel, Nobody is Talking About This2, the style is a series of disorienting vignettes and scenes wherein our narrator suffers from cognitive phantasmagoria, never sure what is real, what is her, and what is all in her head3.
But you most likely would not get this just from reading the text. You need to hear it from Lockwood’s tweets or a podcast interview, from articles and reviews, to get it. Has there ever been another work of [auto]fiction such as this?? That not only invited but required you to know something about the author’s “real” life? This might be frustrating or even annoying for some, but I find it deeply invigorating. Instead of deflecting (“no, no, do not worry about the man behind the curtain"), Lockwood becomes one with the curtain-as-confessional. In an age of parasocial onlineness, where having an online presence can even be an authorial advantage, is this not the natural end?
There are moments in Will There bent on uncovering Universal Truth that makes it worth reading, even if you miss some external context. Having only read Nobody Is and followed Lockwood on socials/listened to a few podcasts, there was much that went over my head, yet the combo of humor, warmth, and sarcasm makes the experience worthwhile. In an ideal world, I wouldn't start with this one, though. If you are interested in Planet Lockwood, here is the syllabus I recommend (in order):
The Patricia Lockwood Syllabus
Listen: The Maris Review Episode 92: Patricia Lockwood
Read:
Article: Patricia Lockwood: ‘I Like to Give People a Very Vertiginous Whiplash’ (LitHub)
Poem: Government Spending
Reddit Thread: Rape Joke
More Poems (Optional): Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals
Follow @ TriciaLockwood on Twitter
Memoir: Priestdaddy
Article: Patricia Lockwood is searching for the last truly offline person (Dazed)
Novel: No One Is Talking About This
Finale: Will There Ever Be Another You
If this feels overwhelming or your FOMO is winning, No One is Talking is an excellent place to start - it’s quick and gives you a sense of her humor. If you are hooked by the first ten pages, Lockwood is your sort of gal.
The vibes👻: Lockwood is her own vibe, but I might call it what happens when an extremely online writer writes through COVID brain-eating amoebas
Further reading📰:
The Maris Review, vol 73 (Ghost newsletter)
Patricia Lockwood Goes Viral (The New Yorker)
Will There Ever Be Another You by Patricia Lockwood review – long Covid from the inside (The Guardian)
Patricia Lockwood and Emmeline Clein Interrogate the Viability of the ‘Sick Woman Book’ Canon (Cultured)
Patricia Lockwood’s Pleasant Fever Dream (Vulture)
The Wax Child - Olga Ravn translated by Martin Aitken
Every month, it seems, I try out a new spooky novel in translation, and every month I am continually BLOWN AWAY by the imagination and skill. You might think this gal is too easily pleased, and that might be true as I foray into translated horror, a corner as yet untraversed - but, you can’t know what you don’t know!
The Wax Child is about a group of women in 17th-century Denmark accused of witchcraft, pulling plot and quotes from real historical sources about real historical women, like trial transcripts and grimoires. The accused suffer claims of devil worship, unchristian acts, and revenge powered by dark forces. Narrated by a wax doll created as a sort of witch’s familiar poppet doll4, through this unique and uncanny POV existing outside of time, we enter a desperate period for women who dared challenge the patriarchal order of a premodern Europe. It is a beautifully surreal look at the ways women have been historically silenced (and murdered).
Wax Child is now quite possibly at the top of my Weird and Strange best of list5. Ravn creates dark magic, a gossipy tale of female friendship, love, and betrayal, my very favorite topic of late. It’s a short novel that is so gorgeously written that if your interest is piqued during Le Season, I highly recommend experiencing it even just for the sentence-level construction. A favorite passage to entice you:
…I saw the woolly reassuring darkness inside the human bodies, each and every one a blood-red alter sheathed by the pierceable casing of the skin, and they sang without knowing like clusters of wild grape, their chirping came to me as coils of smoke or threads of honey, and together they formed a grand and single chord that rang out across the fjord and mingled with the rush of the waves, the whistle of the wind, the stars’ metallic clang. They went through the streets like waves of sound with many eyes, and yet all these people were blind to their own gifts, to their being alive whilst I was just a doll. My mistress too was blind, and so was the girl who lifted the lid; like absent-minded children they opened their hands and obliviously let them be emptied of life that would never come again.
The vibes👻: the Salem witch trials but make it wild, elegant, Scandanavian.
Further reading📰:
Witch Trials and Wax Narrators in “The Wax Child” (Chicago Review of Books)
Possession: A Romance - A.S. Byatt
Possession possessed me like the ghost of my previous dream career6. Published on New Year’s Day 1990, it went on to win the Booker Prize that year and the hearts and minds of romantic scholars every year thereafter. It’s about two scholars, Roland and Maud, who uncover secret love letters between two poets, the contents of which threaten to shatter previous scholarship and incite the ire of academics everywhere. In between pages of sometimes dense first source material, we are blessed with a unique romance, a tense chase, and the cruelty of unrequited love. We ask (as scholars surrogate), can we really ever know anything about an author and what their works “mean”? (unless of course you are Patricia Lockwood, re: above).
Now, many of you reading this might have already experienced the overwrought joy that is Possession. For those of you who haven’t, this is an extremely academia-coded romance novel that requires time, patience, and perhaps at times a strong skimming ability. To say the novel is layered is an understatement - at any moment, one sentence might hold a page worth of notes on context, subtext, names, references, allusions, metaphor… I could spend an entire newsletter dissecting the use of mermaids and underwater creatures alone. Sentences are elaborate, beautifully constructed, obfuscating, and endlessly highlightable.
A craftsman is nothing without the exercise of his craft. So he ordered to be brought to him the finest silk cloth and brilliant threads, and made for pleasure what he had once needed to make for harsh necessity. - Possession, A.S. Byatt
The true beauty of Possession is its timelessness. Themes of loss, longing, love, self-interest, self-understanding, and creativity are the universal truths that bind us. What it means to possess, to own, to get what you desire, like a ghost on the perpetual hedonic treadmill. Even concepts that feel ancient, like the physical nature of research in the pre-digital age, bring a sense of nostalgia that will only increase as we move into an increasingly intangible world. I have a feeling there will always be something for future generations to discover in this brilliantly romantic novel about two unassuming scholars brought to life by the beauty of poetic unrequited love. Now I must go watch the Gwyneth Paltrow adaptation, cheers!
The vibes👻: Titanic meets dark academia meets Jane Austen vibes?? Would you agree??
Further reading📰:
Reading guide: Possession by A.S. Byatt (Booker Prizes)
I read this novel as part of Sara Hildreth’s group read which made my reading experience so much richer. You can find all her discussions on her Substack starting here: POSSESSION Chapters 1-3: “The tiresome and bewitching endlessness of the quest for knowledge”
SPOOKY SEASON IS UPON US. Friends, fam, it’s been too long! I have been unconscionably absent this October, but I am here now with a few things planned. Here is the soul-crushingly large stack of spooky season books I am considering in the next few weeks. I just finished The Bloody Chamber and started on The October Country - see any other favorites in the stack I should prioritize?
TV and Film 🎥
We joined a packed theater in consuming The Conjuring: Last Rites, starring everyone’s favorite paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga). The Conjuring 1 & 2 are two of my most favorite scary movies, and while Last Rites will never live up to those masterpieces, it was a fun and satisfying ending to a legendary franchise.
I know there are many opinions floating around regarding the new PTA /Leo DiCaprio film One Battle After Another, and while all those opinions are valid, I have to say I enjoyed the shit out of this film. We will be talking about this film for a long time to come. I highly recommend giving this podcast a listen after you see the film.
Links 🔗
The Millions Great Fall 2025 Book Preview is finally here!!!! They always help me focus my new book lists.
5 Reviews You Need to Read, including one of our gal Trish (Lit Hub)
I fully agree with this list of The 14 Best Covers of September (Lit Hub)
I am very particular about my dark academia reads, but I find this Dark Academia Starter Pack nearly flawless (NYT gift link)
Laszlo Krasznahorkai wins the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and now I must read another experimental surrealist novel (The New Yorker)
Is literary fiction really having a crisis of confidence? The Booker jury thinks so (The Times)
58 Books You Need to Read (Recommended by People Who Know (Lit Hub)
AND, A PROGRAMMING NOTE: I created a new tab on my homepage for all things spooky related - if you are newer around these parts, I highly suggest checking out some of the seasonally relevant content you might have missed here.
👻What was the best thing you read in September? Or the worst!
👻What are you ready for spooky season?
👻What is one offline thing you want to do this fall?
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See you around the bookshelf!
but also this is true no?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poppet
I think I should actually create this list…. more to come
At the height of the 2008 recession, I attempted to go back to school and get a masters in English, but was summarily rejected from the two schools I applied to, and am ultimately thankful for it (I think).
I vote for the Edith Wharton Ghost Stories - I read those last October and enjoyed them and while they were spooky, they weren't super scary so that me, someone who hates being scared, couldn't handle it.
Too many double negatives - Edith Wharton's Ghost Stories were good.
What a review of The Wax Child!! I've gotta get my hands on it asap. Can't wait to hear about your spooky reads!