pinkmalady's reviews
134 reviews

lots of fun with some nice, poignant, well-incorporated emotional moments, but i don't know if it clicked with me personally. it's good, but most of it doesn't exactly reach greatness. might try to read the next volume, but it's not high on my to-read list after this. 

some of the humor is still pretty grimace-worthily out-of-place, feeling like it was written by a bunch of adults trying to sound 'cool' to teenagers (and, like, that is most definitely true), but this was actually a pretty good read.

i saw a lot of people giving 'dying inside' a hard time for the preview/issue #0 that was released for free comic book day, but once you get past that (and even that part has its charms), it gets much, much better and more sensitively told.
 
the art is beautiful, (most of) the characters are fun to follow, the emotions resonate, and MOST (i was surprised) of the jokes land. though, as i said before, when the jokes don't land, they have me cursing pete wentz aloud for being a cringe old man. as if that is entirely his fault (it probably isn't, but hey). (that being said: call me!)

it lost me a bit during the climax when

the villain is finally being confronted and we learn that he was (at least partially) redeemed/stopped being outright evil off-screen.

it very abruptly and clumsily killed a lot of the momentum of the story.

that, paired with that ambiguous, sequel-bait-y ending (which i actually really loved some of the details of! i actually stopped in my tracks and had to take a moment to collect myself when i realized some of the possibilities/interpretations put on the table during the last few pages!), left it feeling unfinished, like it should've had more time to fully unpack all of its ideas.

i'm kinda hoping they decide to continue this graphic novel in one form or another, because its story is very much worth telling and expanding on further than what we got here.

initially, i was on the fence about whether or not to pick up this book at all. i was vaguely interested in the plot since i'm a huge horror fan, particularly of gothic horror, and had heard many positive reviews by people i tend to have a lot of taste in common with, but i just hadn't quite heard anything about it that piqued my interest enough to actually check it out. i bit the bullet after seeing one of my friends rate it highly and considering that the plot is, on a fundamental level, up my alley.

after reading it, i kinda wish i hadn't pick it up, or, at least, that i hadn't bought it instead of getting it from the library. if i would've known about all of the mushroom/fungus business present in it, i definitely wouldn't've picked this book up; it's a personal squick of mine.

the comparisons to 'crimson peak' are very accurate. i love that movie! and this book treads a lot of that same ground in terms of plot, characters, and themes while adding its own commentary on racism, eugenics, and white supremacy, and making the themes of colonialism more explicit in the text. it isn't a 1:1 copy of 'crimson peak,' but the comparison is apt. something could be said about how both are re/deconstructions of gothic horror as a genre in general, and took inspiration from a lot of the same sources (like 'wuthering heights'), so of course there would be similarities. but sometimes it really struck me sometimes just how much they have in common. they both use a lot of the same tropes, themes, and cliches, however, 'mexican gothic' tends to do it much more messily.

i was most interested in the political commentary (especially on prejudice) in this book, but most of it fell flat or was left relatively untouched upon. the central metaphor/allegory that is used for colonialism/abuse of power is clever enough on its own and actually pretty effective! sometimes it was a bit too heavy-handed, but i think at its core it executes the criticism/intermingling of colonialism, racism, familial trauma, and abuse fairly well. the parts about ruth and agnes especially hit in that department.

i hated most of the mushroom shit, though. conceptually, it works! but in actuality it's just so much more gross-out than thought-provoking. that is one of my biggest take-aways: this book was more disgusting than scary. i've heard so many people hail this book as 'terrifying,' but, personally, it was just kinda super fucking gross and nasty. and NOT in a good way. in a repulsive, it-made-me-want-to-put-the-book-down-every-other-chapter way. it relies so much on gross-out body horror and sexual violence that it kinda takes away from the power that both of those ideas have relative to the plot and its central themes. those things could've added to the story in some more moderation or better execution, but, as is, it just disgusted me. once again, mushrooms/fungus is a squick of mine, but even i could see that when it did work in this book, it really does! but a lot of it was just vile to have to sit through. i almost DNF'd this book several times on that alone.

a more rudimentary issue i have with this book is that the prose comes off as amateurish in its attempts at sounding 'deep' or intellectual. there are so many moments of inane redundancy and over-explanation that it made me roll my eyes and wish i could cut these sentences up myself in editing.

this book is barely 300 pages and it managed to feel like an eternity with its meandering. the pacing is dreadfully slow for the first two-thirds, but it does pick up in the final third and get much, much better, but i shouldn't have to sit through two-thirds of a shitty book to get to its good parts. so inconsistent! so frustrating!

the only character i came away from this book especially liking was Noemi, and even her meandering frustrated me to no end. her status as an upper-class lady, modern woman, and socialite of color contrasted against the Doyle family's old-timey whiteness, on paper, is interesting as hell, and is the real heart of the book. the book doesn't expand as much on it as i would have liked despite taking its sweet time for over half of its length. most of it is reserved for witty 'gotcha' quips or references about relatively surface-level race politics. i understand it wanted to leave a lot of the bigger conversation to subtext/allegory, but it kinda pissed me off how surface-level a lot of the explicit discussions were. i wish it would've gone harder, basically, but that is kind of a me-thing. so much of the book is so heavy-handed, but it still managed to feel shallow in the end.

this book is so up my alley in terms of set-up and themes (mushrooms aside), but it let me down time and time again. i only finished it because by the time it got really shitty, i was at the half-way point and figured i might as well finish it to add another book to my log, and in hopes that it'd get better, and it did! briefly, during the third act, i started to enjoy it, but it was 200 pages too late for it to affect my final opinion all that much. the final chapter also pissed me off. it tries to comment on the trauma of the fallout of the events of the book, but, once again, it falls apart in its shallow attempts as deepness.

cute romance with some pretty great smut at times, i just wish it was more fleshed out. it reminded me a lot of a typical romance fanfic in terms of tone and writing style: plot-light, mostly lighthearted, and sexy. i kinda wish there was even less plot, especially considering how barely present it was, and more time spent getting to unpack the main couple's problems. i kept almost forgetting the stakes with how little focus is put on the mystery besides the potential danger it could cause to the mfc.

the romance and smut scenes were pretty good. i keep seeing other reviewers complaining about the 'large' amount of smut, but that was part of i why i was interested in this book in the first place, so i didn't mind.

in particular, i really liked the scene in the parking lot. like, yeah it's kinda silly how anyone could've just walked out and seen them, but public sex is hot. plus, i thought they were setting up that the man was gonna be jealous of a sex toy but he wound up being not just fine with it but super into it. when she says, 'pretend it's you,' i lost my mind. definitely the highlight scene in terms of smut for me. the intimacy of the church scene was also hot.

i liked this book at its most when it was striking up a good balance between the emotion vulnerability and sexual tension between the two main characters.

as a matter of preference, a nitpick i have with this book is the mmc's age. i picked up this book as a rec for age-gap romances and was a little let down with how small the age-gap was (he's early-mid thirties and she's mid-late twenties). that's more of a false advertising problem in the reviews i had read, i guess, but he talks and acts so much older than 30-something that it threw me off a little. the way he talks about being a jaded divorcee and ex-PD makes it sound like it's been a long time, but it's actually only been three years. i mean, it's not unbelievable or anything that a 30-something year old had been through so much, but i was just expecting him to be older based on how he was described in the text.