126 Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir — The Author-Reader Contract
Julia and Victoria marvel over the masterful point of view shifts and scream about the ending of Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir. Victoria buys some lemonade.
V&O: Fledgling by Octavia Butler – Ethical Vampirism
Julia and Victoria discuss the last vampire book of The Vampire & the Octopus series and then get very excited about two questions: Are there any ethical choices under vampirism? And, if so, are ethical vampires even interesting?
V&O: The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires by Grady Hendrix
Julia makes her case of why the creature in Grady Hendrix’s The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires is NOT really a vampire, and Victoria makes a counterargument that it is actually the MOST vampire. They are both generally infuriated with everyone in this novel except Mrs. Green.
V&O: The Memory of Animals by Claire Fuller — The Octopus in Captivity
Julia and Victoria read a pandemic book called The Memory of Animals by Claire Fuller where the octopus is not the focus of the story, but is at the heart of the book’s major themes of captivity and embodiment. Victoria makes the ill-advised choice to revisit some of her early-pandemic journals.
V&O: Woman, Eating by Claire Kohda — Parenting Your Inner Baba Yaga
Julia and Victoria get very hungry talking about the trope-flipping, contemporary vampire novel Woman, Eating by Claire Kohda.
V&O: Sea Change by Gina Chung — Loneliness & Adaptation
Julia and Victoria discuss Sea Change by Gina Chung and how authors use the octopus to contemplate loneliness and change. They discover that life really is about the friends we made along the way in this first book of The Vampire & the Octopus series.
123 Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield — Monsters of the Deep Subconscious
Julia and Victoria learn what the word “flannel” means in British English and formulate their own theories about what happened to a stranded deep-sea researcher in the devastatingly beautiful novel Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield.
122 How High We Go In the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu — Throw the Baby
Julia and Victoria conclude that How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu is a very good book–Julia is just sad.
121 Whale by Cheon Myeong-kwan — Gossip and the Grotesque
Julia and Victoria grapple with the grotesque narrative choices in Whale by Cheon Myeong-Kwan, translated by Chi-young Kim. Julia incorrectly uses the word “epigraph” when she means “epitaph” approximately 25 times.
120 Eight Billion Genies by Charles Soule & Ryan Browne — What Would You Wish For?
Julia and Victoria try to decipher the rules of Eight Billion Genies, the newest comic book series from Charles Soule and Ryan Browne, because Julia likes rules. They also learn about how one random French guy playing fast and loose with a One Thousand and One Nights translation made up most of what the “Western” world “knows” about “genies.” Tale as old as time.
118 Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan LeFanu — The One with the Lesbian Vampire
Julia is truly bamboozled, Victoria embraces that she is a vampire girlie, and they both dig into the context of Joseph Sheridan LeFanu’s Carmilla, edited with commentary by the absolute legend Carmen Maria Machado.
116 The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin — ‘70s Sci-Fi in Context
Exploring anarchism, feminism, and the Cold War, Julia and Victoria unpack the context of The Dispossessed by the brilliant and sassy Ursula K. Le Guin. Join for the sci-fi, stay for Barbenheimer, alien Jesus, and a confusion of Ursulas. Also Julia has minor microphone problems. (She sincerely apologizes).
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