You must first internalize that it’s just not that big of a deal. People have different tastes; if someone doesn’t like the book you recommended, so what! Maybe they have bad taste. Maybe it’s not a reflection of you and everything you thought you believed about yourself, like that you have good taste in books and interesting opinions on literature and a thoughtful way of imagining what other people might enjoy. Maybe, it, um, says more about them than you? Or maybe it means you have just ruined a lifelong friendship and not only will this person never trust your opinion on literature again but they will probably never trust YOU again and they might even un-invite you to be a bridesmaid in their wedding which would not only be extremely embarrassing because you’re already on the wedding website but you would have to try and return that custom $300 dress.

Ok deep breaths, deep breaths are good, that was just the overthinking getting in your way of confidently recommending a good book to a good friend. Probably your friend will like it. If they don’t, probably they won’t even remember that you recommended it. Probably they will forget all about it. Unless…there is that scene in the third chapter that involves a cat getting stuck in a tree and your friend’s childhood cat did die four years ago. Oh my god, how could you have possibly been so insensitive? Your friend probably hates you now. Great. How many hours did you waste driving to visit her during college??? Maybe you would have passed intro to Spanish, except that she was having such a hard time freshman year and you wanted to be there to support her. And now that was all a waste because you didn’t even think through the potentially sensitive content in the book you recommended. 

Whew, that was a big one. Let’s acknowledge those bad thoughts and move on.

So, what I wanted to address in this piece is that there is no need to overthink your book recommendations. Say this three times in the mirror: “I have good taste in books. I am a confident reader and I can live with it if someone doesn’t like the book I recommended.” Would it even be your fault if someone didn’t like the book you recommended? Maybe they just didn’t get it. Oh my god, what if they don’t understand that it’s satire and think the book you recommended is misogynist. You might want to text Fred and find out if he gets that the book is satirical. If he misses that, it could be a real disaster. He must think you are a total idiot and completely clueless. “Why would she recommend a book by an author who clearly despises other women???” Oh wow, you really didn’t think this through. You just thought the humor and social commentary was so biting, but maybe if he doesn’t get it, he’ll think you didn’t get it in the opposite way? And then he’ll be all, “didn’t she major in English lit? Why would she recommend this dreck?” 

Okay, so that kind of thinking is exactly what you’re trying to avoid (but just FYI, you did text Fred and he does get the satire. Thank god!). Something that could be helpful if you tend to overthink is to have a set list of go-to recommendations. Books that have received critical acclaim and that you also enjoyed, so you have not only your own opinion but the critics to back you up as well. Although, what if then people think that you can’t think for yourself and you’re only recommending books that they could go find in the New York Times Book Review? That would be kind of embarrassing as someone whose “thing” is books. And what if you have this go-to list and you accidentally recommend the same book to the same person twice? They would probably be all like “what, has she only read three books? Why am I taking advice from someone who clearly barely reads herself?” That would also suck. That could really negatively impact the way people see you — they might think that you are just a bland follower, not confident in your own opinions and therefore not confident enough to deliver a speech at their wedding…

When it comes to science fiction, there is a fine line for the suspension of belief. To truly sit within the science fiction genre, you have to have some element of realism with your science. Otherwise, it is simply fantasy (which is okay and I have no problem with this, but at least be honest with yourself). Real science fiction takes what we know about science and then adds the story on top.

To be fair, science has been leaping forward every day with new discoveries. Sci-fi writers only need to turn on the news for a brief moment before they are inundated with ideas for their next story. Many readers, including myself, LOVE this element of realism. Maybe it’s because I like a book that does exactly what it says on the cover. Maybe it’s the scientific mind, always asking and seeking a reason why. Either way, the love for realism in science fiction continues to grow, splintering off into the sub-genre, Hard Science Fiction.

Food cozies are one of the most popular sub-genres of cozy mysteries including themes based on everything from ice cream to grilled cheese to cupcakes, and even a cannabis bakery! Food brings people together. Imaginary food, even more so. Plus, there are often recipes that you can really try. 

But how much do the cozies that take place in restaurants, bakeries, and other food establishments reflect the reality of working in the food industry? It’s important to know that this isn’t to point fingers at books that get it wrong but more as a thought experiment about the differences and more importantly, why those differences exist in the first place. 

I had the opportunity to talk to two mystery writers who have experience working in the food industry. Misha Popp, author of the delightful Pies before Guys series, started baking for fun before she decided to work at a bakery in Western Massachusetts, which closed after a fire. She returned to working on her own small dessert catering for people in her life. The second book in the series, A Good Day to Pie, came out in February.

Leslie Karst, author behind the Sally Solari Mystery Series, has worn many hats. She worked as a waitress through college, became a lawyer, and later went back to culinary school. She even got to cook for the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg which is the topic of her forthcoming memoir, Justice is Served: A Tale of Scallops, the Law, and Cooking for RBG (April 4, 2023).

The steampunk genre has been my jam since I first laid eyes on the epic airships of the Final Fantasy IX Playstation game as a kid. I loved nothing more than watching my brothers play it. Sometimes I would play too, but it was less effort to sit back and watch the game unfold in front of me. Seeing airships again while watching Treasure Planet in theaters in 2002 gave me so many feelings. If we want to get technical, the movie’s technology involves solar power rather than steam, but the speculative 19th century atmosphere definitely gives it a steampunk feel. As I explored more steampunk growing up, I fell further in love with it, including steampunk comics.

That’s the thing with steampunk though. It’s not just a genre of books and media involving Victorian-era settings with impressive steam machinery. It’s a whole aesthetic. Finding ways to subtly dress steampunk is very much my vibe, ticking earrings and all.

Along with this though, Amber Troska makes an excellent case on how steampunk extends even beyond the aesthetic. In her analysis of one of my favorite steampunk Studio Ghibli films, Castle in the Sky, Troska (2020) writes, “Yet, despite how entrenched the term has become as an aesthetic marker, I would argue the best steampunk stories regularly engage with social and political issues, with the rewriting of history through alternate histories and technologies operating as a deconstruction (and reconstruction) of contemporary concerns.”

Troska also digs into distinctions that may arise in steampunk content created, explaining,”Western steampunk stories are often set at the height of the colonial and industrial power of Europe (especially Great Britain), while Japanese entries in the genre are perpetually aware of the collapse of their imperial might on the world stage and the destructive height of industrialization.” It’s interesting to think about the various adaptations of steampunk and how different cultures can place unique lens on these fantasy worlds.

There are a lot of suspicions that during this era of book bans, we’ll begin to see a different output of material from publishers. They may pull back on queer books and/or books by people of color, those books which approach “sensitive” topics like sex and sexuality, and even graphic novels. Unfortunately, because of how publishing works years in advance, we won’t be able to see how this plays out for another year or two.

But there is another element of the publishing ecosystem worth reaching to see if they have seen changes: literary agents.

For those who are not familiar with what agents do, the short answer is they represent the authors and books and work to sell those books to editors on the behalf of those authors. They are, for lack of a better way to describe it, the intermediaries. As such, they have a lot of insight both into what’s happening to authors and what’s happening in Big Five Publishing.

This week, I’ve put together a survey for literary agents to share what they’re seeing in the world of books with regard to book bans. Any agent is welcome to partake, and they may pass the survey along to colleagues — it is anonymous, with no required number of questions to be answered.

You can access the survey here.

As I get older, and the world gets worse, or gets differently bad, or stays the same but my understanding of its badness deepens and broadens, I grow ever more dependent upon books like Akwugo Emejulu’s Fugitive Feminism. This short, sharp text reminds readers that, like the rattling door in a haunted house or the concerned face of a friend who understands well the way a lover is slowly bringing about your annihilation, it is good to leave that which does not serve you. Fleeing, as in the case of the enslaved from the plantation, is no act of cowardice but a tremendous gesture toward liberation.

The flight Emejulu encourages is not from a place but from a conceptual space. Referencing the work of Black critical theorists like Sylvia Wynter, Fugitive Feminism troubles the notion of the “human,” arguing that it is not a neutral, objective term for one type of mammal but a philosophical and political category informed by colonialism that, from its invention, excluded Blackness and Black people. For years, many have fought (to no avail) to be, for once, called and acted upon as humans, but for Emejulu, there is nothing to be reclaimed in that cursed white supremacist taxonomy. When we stop seeking inclusion into a category built on genocide and eugenics, there is freedom to explore other ways of being, seeing, and doing.

Emejulu’s writing is clear, evocative, and concise, and while readers with no background in the subject material may find places where they need to spend more time, Fugitive Feminism is an extraordinarily accessible text that will touch many of those left behind by society without sacrificing complexity and critical rigor.

—Rivers Solomon, author of “This Is Everything There Will Ever Be”

For years, hundreds of high-profile manuscripts — including early versions of books by Margaret Atwood and Sally Rooney — were stolen in a phishing scheme. The most puzzling part of the case was that nothing seemed to come from these thefts; uthe manuscripts were not leaked or sold, as far as anyone could tell. So why go to the trouble of impersonating a publisher in order to get these manuscripts?

Last year, we finally found out the person behind the theft of roughly 1,000 unpublished books: Filippo Bernardini. But that didn’t address the bigger questions about the case.

Bernardini has now gone to court and pleaded guilty to wire fraud. His lawyer, Jennifer Brown, argued for a light sentence, saying he grew up lonely, often bullied for being gay, and found refuge in books.

Bernardini said he “wanted to keep them closely to my chest and be one of the fewest to cherish them before anyone else, before they ended up in bookshops” and that reading them at this stage felt like having a “special and unique connection with the author, almost like I was the editor of that book.”

The argument worked, in that Filippo Bernardini will not be going to jail. He will be deported to the UK or Italy, however, and must pay $88,000 to Penguin Random House to cover their legal fees.

In a letter dated June 1, 1925, Upton Sinclair announced a revolutionary experiment: the petro-novel, a new category of fiction inspired by modernity’s most vexing paradoxes of fossil-fueled life. “This oil novel,” Sinclair predicted, “will be the best thing I have ever done.” Over the next ten months, that story poured out as a “gusher of words” to become the great American novel of petroleum power. By turns ardent family saga, scintillating potboiler, and anti-capitalist tirade, Sinclair’s 1926–27 tale warrants its exclamation mark. Oil! is an energetic tour de force whose plot goes everywhere. From ivory towers and gated estates to bleak frontiers of slow death, the book shows how a thirst for crude created new democratic dreams of freedom and their opposite. Through it all, the novel anticipates how the wreckage unleashed by big oil might lead to a greener, more inclusive world yet to come. It remains one of the most important critiques of fossil energy ever printed.

Today the earth is on fire, and fossil fuel corporations keep raising the heat. Recent years have been the warmest on record, sparking waves of mass migration and accelerating die-offs, with no real cooldown in sight. In a way, we’re all to blame. Climate experts agree that the extreme weather of our time comes from human energy use. Northern countries like the U.S. have burned eons of accumulated hydrocarbons since the twentieth century’s dawn—too much and too fast for the planet to absorb them again, leading to a carbon cycle that’s perilously out of whack. But vowing to scale back and buy less, to burn less, won’t kill the flames. The truth is that twenty-five fossil fuel giants are responsible for more than half of all carbon emissions now, and a huge fraction of U.S. workers already live hand to mouth while energy earnings soar. Dismantling these institutions and their pyromaniacal profit-motives will require concerted action. It will require new intimacies across economic, racial, and gender lines. And it will require alternatives to very old habits of thinking that make it hard to conceive a world without oil. To avert a dead-end future for humans and our planetary kin, we must reimagine who we are, and in no time flat.

Oil! is the novel that best illuminates how we got here and that leaves the blueprint for a more equitable future out of its ashes. At its core is the story of a whole new kind of society being born through the early twentieth century, when elites learned how to control a petroleum-powered system of production; that system allowed a few white men to get rich quick by exploiting everyone else below them. It’s a system that has turned the world into the private landfill of oligarchs who have taken our land and labor and would now, in a final move, take a habitable future from us as well. But the novel shows that the story of oil isn’t a tale for all time. We can contest an unsustainable system of energy and work that took hold not long ago, when deep-pocketed corporations combined to let the world burn. A hundred years after fossil capitalism kicked into high gear, the question at the heart of Sinclair’s novel remains: How may we transition to a postcarbon democracy now? Oil! provides an outline for this urgent mission, the unmet demand on which all future life depends.

***

This is a section of the diary I kept while writing my forthcoming novel, Enter Ghost, about a performance of Hamlet in the West Bank.

Wednesday, May 20, 2020

My world has shrunk dramatically. The benefit of lockdown for me is learning to live day in day out without constant change. This is life, time passing. This is how I imagine most people live.

I looked at the objects in the house

Given a space to inhabit unobserved, I will immediately convert it into a physical representation of the inside of my brain. My annual trip to the old Zillow listing for the farm I bought eight years ago leaves me stunned every time: it was once the kind of house one could list on Zillow! Now it is mine; I have filled the walls with pictures,hung the surplus ones on the ceiling, crowded every surface with dioramas and precarious unidentifiable objects that look like chess pieces from outer space. There is nowhere to sit in the house except on the floor with the dogs (and, every hatching season, with the emu chicks who run figure eights around the obstacle art). Like my brain, it’s a fun place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there.

My house, the physical building, is an arranged marriage of two old farmhouses that were dragged from different parts of the country and clumsily conjoined. I decline to speculate on which side is holding up the other. There is a secret spiral staircase, accessed through a cupboard door, with ludicrously uneven treads; the wavy glass windowpanes cast distorted shadows. The two halves of my house must have each accommodated entire families, but the current inhabitants between them, in descending order of population, are: eggs, birds, dogs, me. 

Every morning around eleven, having done the farm rounds and broadcast feed to the loyal birds, I commence with the small-scale batch production of objects that promise but do not fulfill utility. I tend to work compulsively and repetitively, making hundreds of variations of the same thing until I exhaust my supply of the necessary materials or my own fascination with it. There are blown-out, intact eggshells equipped with antennae or working motion sensors; eggshells hinged to open like boxes, or with latched hatches, lined with poppy red flocking; emu egg dirigibles rigged with ball chains, hanging from the kitchen rafters. Over the  past six months, I’ve manufactured thousands of one-inch hollow resin spheres, each kitted out with some combination of magnets, O-rings, and fishing tackle and beads. Each one of them is perfect, and the only people who see them are the bewildered tradesmen who need access to the circuit breaker in my kitchen.

I love birds most for the combination of complexity and stupidity they exhibit: their deep-seated, unplumbable impulse to perform elaborate, apparently pointless procedures. The contents of my house demonstrate that it is an impulse I share.

I began listening to Wicca Phase Springs Eternal’s Full Moon Mystery Garden after I took two road trips through Death Valley, the first literal (in California) and the second figurative (in a hospital). So when I heard him say “On a mountain under full moon / I could say goodnight and mean it” and then “Another night I’m in the magic mirror / Another night engaged in seeing signs,” it felt like, well, a sign. Symbols, like mirrors, are roads to the other side; I have always been obsessed with looking for and in both. Though both of my trips actually happened, their allegorical affinity made them each less real, and harder, somehow, to return from. Seeing yourself through reflections can be a way of playing dead, of getting lost where you are not; in Full Moon Mystery Garden, it is also a way to get found.

The album’s sigillic scenery is almost too familiar: black cat, black Polo, moon, mountain, mirror. But Wicca has an uncanny ability to show us what are basically gothic stock images under a strange new light, reanimating them. If similarly symbolically-hyperactive Bladee’s falsetto makes incantations out of normal nouns, Wicca’s hoarseness brings the otherworld to earth: rural Pennsylvania; Providence, Rhode Island. That’s magic, I guess—or music. Wicca’s older work is equally lyrically brilliant, but more claustrophobic: words are exchanged in bedrooms, in clubs, over text, in bad relationships. Now, he’s alone in a car looking out, “the twilight on repeat.” The album, which has four different songs with the word moon in the title, drives you along a kind of psychogeographic cul-de-sac, a looping map of road signs that seem to occur in too many places at once—the same way certain American towns all look the same, the way they all have a Main Street, a Crescent Street, and trees at their edges. Ex–emo teens will recognize the landscape. The album’s frequent refrain—“In one mile, turn left on Garden Avenue”—is spoken by a female GPS. Though he knows what road he’s on (“Dark Region Road”) and where he’s going (the “portal through the pines,” “Hickory Grove”), he still needs directions: a voice from elsewhere, an image out there that lets him recognize what he already knows. Funny how another person’s words can lead you gradually back to a place where your self and your world coincide—to life. “The meadow isn’t that far away,” and the mystery, meanwhile, is here.

I was on a back road by myself
In Waverly Township
Totally immersed in where I was and what I felt
Amazing how a simple drive
Can open my eyes
To what is out there

—Olivia Kan-Sperling, assistant editor

We are delighted to announce that on April 4, at our Spring Revel, Harriet Clark will receive the George Plimpton Prize, and the inaugural Susannah Hunnewell Prize will be presented to Ishion Hutchinson. 

The George Plimpton Prize, awarded annually since 1993 by the editorial committee of our board of directors, recognizes an emerging writer of exceptional merit published in the Review during the preceding year. Previous recipients include Yiyun Li, Ottessa Moshfegh, Emma Cline, Isabella Hammad, Jonathan Escoffery, Eloghosa Osunde, and the 2022 winner, Chetna Maroo.

Harriet Clark’s slanting, beautiful story “Descent,” which appeared in our Summer 2022 issue (no. 240), is narrated by a young girl caught between her mother—imprisoned for her part in a botched robbery intended to finance revolutionary struggle—and her grandmother, whose grief encompasses a cruel resentment. A graduate of Stanford University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Clark is the recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship and was a Jones Lecturer in Creative Writing at Stanford. She is at work on her first novel. The Review’s publisher, Mona Simpson, writes:

In “Descent,” Harriet Clark deftly tells an enclosing story about the wish for resurrection. An eight-year-old girl, “a great stayer,” knows departure as a fact of life. She and her grandfather simulate disappearance and recovery in a game they play with her in the trunk of the car. A silence is kept in honor of a felled deer. Strange cats attack the old man. Clark somehow manages to give us each character’s interiority: “if my mother told this story she might say that one day her father disappeared.” Clark ends where she began, with a conundrum, this time inflected with the grandmother’s harsh language: “To want to go home was to wish a man dead but I did want, very much, to go home.”

I’ve been clean for over twenty years. Let me give you an example of the kind of problem addiction is, the scale of the thing. In April 2019 I went to the dentist. I had a mild ache in a molar. He said the whole tooth was totally rotted all the way through, that they couldn’t do anything more with it. It was hopeless. The tooth was a total piece of shit and would have to be extracted. He gave me the number of a dental surgeon and I called and made an appointment. I talked to my dad, who’d had many teeth extracted, and he told me it was no big deal. When I got to the dental surgeon’s office I told him that I’m a recovering addict, and that I wanted to avoid opiate painkillers. He looked in my mouth and when he got out he said, “You’re going to need opiate painkillers.”

Then he shot me up with Novocain and he went in there with a wrench, and I realized that dentists have soft, delicate hands and seem like doctors, like intellectuals, but when you really need dental care, you go to a dental surgeon and their main qualification is brute physical strength.

This guy had white hair and arms the size of my legs, and he put the pliers on me and wrenched and wrenched and wrenched, and despite the Novocain, the pain was like a hundred Hitlers gnawing on my nerves, gnawing them right down to the roots and then just sinking Nazi teeth up to the hilt in my brain. There was blood everywhere. I was making horrible sounds out of my throat, and the dental surgeon was saying just hold on for one more second, saying it through gritted teeth, and I was writhing in my chair with tears pouring out of my eyes.

Then it was over and he was wiping the pliers on his white coat and I thought, I never knew something like this could happen in America, and he said, “I’m going to write you a prescription for Percocet.”

When I was in my twenties, my grandparents finally moved out of the house my mother had grown up in. In the attic where we used to sleep as kids, and where my grandfather would come in at bedtime and sing “Goodnight, Irene” to me and my younger brother and sister as we lay in a row in our little cots, I had found my mother’s typewriter, a Royal Quiet Deluxe, perfectly preserved from her high school days. My grandfather was the sort of person who would make sure it was in pristine working order, and when I opened the case, the keys gleamed. It didn’t even need a new ribbon. It made a satisfying, well-oiled clack.

I lugged it to the house I was living in on School Street, in Northampton, Massachusetts. I had moved from California back to the same weird little valley where I had gone to college, to go to graduate school for poetry. Thankfully I did not yet know that a manual typewriter was a writerly cliché. For a while, the typewriter just sat there in the corner of my room.

I was still toiling away, writing a lot of poems the way I used to: choose a subject, and try to write something “about” it. Use a computer. Those poems always felt labored and ponderous. No matter what I said, the thoughts in them were never new. Nothing was being added by my writing. I had already figured it out, and mostly it was banal and obvious. Death is sad. The city, if you have not been informed, is lonely at night. In it, other people are mysteriously uninterested in me, which is sad and lonely for me, and for them, whether or not they know it.

Occasionally I would try to let things go completely, and exert as little control as possible over the language. Those poems were a mess, and I would stare at them afterward with bored incomprehension.

The painter and poet Florine Stettheimer should have been easy to cook from. Her poetry, commercially published for the first time in the 2010 collection Crystal Flowers, has a section devoted to “comestibles”—including airy tributes to ham, bread, and tomatoes with Russian dressing—and her paintings often portray food. She was born to a wealthy German-Jewish family in New York in the late eighteen hundreds, part of a social circle that included Neustadters and Guggenheims, and she held salons that were a Who’s Who of the New York art world. (Marcel Duchamp, Carl Van Vechten, and Leo Stein were regulars.) Stettheimer did not oversee the cooking, but part of her work’s deliberate feminine aesthetic involved recording the parties, personalities, dishes, outfits, interiors, furniture, and floral arrangements that made up her life. On one canvas, Soirée, a plate of salad and pitcher of cocktails adorn a table in the foreground of a drawing-room scene, where assembled luminaries gaze at Stettheimer’s paintings-within-the-painting. These were unorthodox choices for a woman artist of her time—many others made strenuous efforts not to seem too overtly feminine.

Yet perhaps this femininity was also subversive. Today’s art world is reevaluating Stettheimer in the wake of the publication of Crystal Flowers and a 2022 biography by Barbara Bloemink, Florine Stettheimer, published by Hirmer. Bloemink situates Stettheimer as a surprisingly modern figure whose “female” topics—furniture and domestic interiors, flowers and frills, diaphanous fabrics, social events, her family, social narratives—were presented both unapologetically and with a wry, critical distance. Through the witty, effervescent tone of her poems and the originality of her painterly technique, she transformed her subjects into baubles for the artist’s gaze—and in so doing, de-gendered them. The following untitled poem is representative: “Mary Mary of the / Bronx aerie / How does your V garden / Grow? / with beans and potatoes / peas and tomatoes / and shiny bugs all in a / Row” is representative. Stettheimer’s choice of wording and image show the poem to be about making art, not salad. The “V garden” is cheekily abbreviated; its rhyming food is aesthetic and playful.

To cook from Stettheimer’s work, then, would be to acknowledge that her interest in food was not literal. In the section “Comestibles,” rhyming ditties, light as meringue, are entry points into discussions of sex and desire. Stettheimer went about this with a frankness unusual for the time period, and with a dollop of irony as well. A “comestible” is alimentary but not elementary; the fancy and fanciful word removes food from the cupboard and makes it more like art, if a bit unconventionally. In one poem, Stettheimer writes: “You stirred me / You made me giddy / Then you poured oil on my stirred self / I’m mayonnaise.” A frothy crush comes to a gluey and unsexy end in a mere four lines. Another untitled poem runs, “You beat me / I foamed.” In the next lines, its subject is “drowned” in sweetness and “parceled” out. She concludes, “You made me hot – hot – hot / I crisped into ‘kisses.’” Here, Stettheimer puts a lover’s attempts at mastering her into her oven and bakes them into female pleasure.

Gothic is a word that embodies so many different things. It can call up ornately designed cathedrals, haunted houses, heavy black eyeliner, and dance moves like picking cobwebs out of the air, to name a few. There is something that unites these ideas. There’s a fascination with mortality and the macabre side of things. These ideas come out in gothic literature as well, stories that focus on fear, monsters, and things that haunt us. The aesthetics of the genre make it easy for gothic literature lovers to broadcast their tastes through avenues like clothing and home goods. Trends come and go, but black never goes out of style. And the real ones will only stop wearing it once they create a darker color.

I’ve pulled together this creepy collection of gothic goodies. Most of them are inspired by the classics of gothic literature like Frankenstein and Jane Eyre. Other items are the perfect bookish accouterments to your perfect gothic reading day. You know the day. It’s very glum, and a cozy sweatshirt, a glowing candle, and a hot cup of coffee are necessary to arm you against the chill of your manor (you do live in a manor, right?) and the creeping dread.