I recently listened to Crowbones, the latest book from Anne Bishop in the world of The Others. While listening to it I started thinking about how much I loved the original series that started with Written in Red. I decided to listen to that book again when I was finished with Crowbones.
Here’s what I was remembering about that series.
- It is so soothing. Alexandra Harris’ voice is so peaceful and sweet.
- The friendship/romance between Simon and Meg evolves over cuddling with a werewolf in wolf form like a cuddly dog while watching movies. That’s so wholesome.
- There are grumpy ponies who deliver the mail when they aren’t out causing natural disasters. Loving grumpy ponies is pretty much my life aesthetic.
- Wolf puppies!
I’m currently listening to the third audiobook so I definitely still love the series. This series is really dark though. I mean it opens with werewolves finding some intruders and knocking one unconscious. They make sure to wake him up before starting to eat him. It goes from there. It got me wondering about myself. I mean, this is a comfort read for me. There is forced confinement and cutting of girls with some rape thrown in. (I don’t generally read anything with rape in it. So this is extra weird for me.) Humans are getting murdered all over the place in gruesome ways. I started explaining some of it to my mom and she said that it didn’t sound that comforting to her. I played some of it for the husband so he could hear how soothing it was. It was a scene where a police officer is confronted by a strange vampire. No one gets eaten – just some mild threatening before they come to an understanding. The husband lasted less than five minutes before he told me to turn it off because it was creepy.
Oh well. I guess one person’s comfort is another person’s way too creepy.
It reminds me of a time when someone asked for comfort reads on Twitter. I confidently answered that I love to reread Mindtouch which is a platonic romance about alien empaths. I’ve reread it a lot. I think of it as a warm fluffy blanket. Someone else pointed out that a major subplot is about the death of chronically ill children. Well, yeah, there’s that.
Does anyone else have books that they absolutely love that might just be a little more unsettling than you remember?
[…] spent a lot of my month doing a re-listen to the whole series of The Others. That took up a lot of the time that I would have otherwise spent reading so my total book numbers […]