A Sapphic K-Pop Horrormance: Gorgeous Gruesome Faces by Linda Cheng

the cover of Gorgeous Gruesome Faces by Linda Cheng

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Content warnings for self-harm, homophobia, racism, sexism, suicide, violence, and gore.

Sunny, Candie, and Mina were a young K-pop group on the rise, starring in a popular TV show that launched their career. That was before everything fell apart. Before Sunny and Candie turned against each other. Before the ritual that went wrong. Before Mina jumped to her death.

Now, Sunny is 18 and feels like the best years of her life are behind her. She squandered her shot at fame, and Candie won’t speak to her. They used to be be inseparable, but now she won’t take Sunny’s calls. While following Candie on social media, Sunny discovers that she’s entered herself into a K-pop competition. To her manager mother’s delight, Sunny joins the same competition, but it’s not really to try to relaunch her career. She wants to reconnect with Candie and finally talk about what happened to Mina, as well as the secrets they’ve been keeping. Meanwhile, something is wrong with the workshop: girls keep getting injured, the hallways seem to rearrange themselves, and Sunny could swear she can see Mina out of the corner of her eye sometimes.

The story rotates timelines between the K-pop competition and the lead-up to Mina’s death. This is described by the publisher as a “speculative thriller,” and I think that fits better than “horror.” There are horror elements, including some unexpectedly upsetting gore, but the majority of the book has an off-putting and surreal feel.

At the workshop, Sunny is placed with Candie as her roommate—but Candie continues to be standoffish even in close proximity. Because I don’t think this is a spoiler, I’ll say that Sunny and Candie’s relationship isn’t strictly platonic, but Candie pushed her away to maintain her image. That history simmers below the surface, and in some ways, this is a bit of a horrormance: their fraught relationship is at the centre of this story.

I don’t want to give away the supernatural element, because the answers to what happened to Mina and what’s happening at the workshop are unspooled throughout the story, but I will say it’s a different focus than I’ve seen in a horror novel before. On the other hand, there is a scene with teeth and scissors that I will truly never be able to get out of my head (bad choice of words…) Because the book is mostly dreamlike and unsettling, that scene really shocked me.

There is more going on here than just shifting hallways and girls with the wrong faces, though. It also touches on the pressures of the K-pop industry and the difficulty of fame, including racism and stalking.

If you’re a fan of K-pop, horror, dark fantasy, sapphic romance subplots, and surreal settings—or any mix-and-match of those—pick up Gorgeous Gruesome Faces. This is Linda Cheng’s debut, and though I thought there were a few clunky lines (especially the dialogue tags, which shows just how picky I’m being), the premise and atmosphere was strong enough to override any drawbacks, and I look forward to seeing how her writing develops in her next books.

Susan reviews Alone in Space by Tillie Walden

the cover of Alone In Space

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Alone in Space is a collection of short comics and standalone pieces by Tillie Walden. Some of the pieces have already been released as graphic novels, so they might be familiar to you already.

“The End of Summer”

A royal family and their servants lock themselves away to survive three years of unending winter ahead of them, and the entire family unravels at the seams… I’m not gonna lie to you, I don’t get this one. I understand what is happening, I get all of the individual threads and events, but not the point that it’s building to. And I expect that to a certain extent with Tillie Walden’s work! She’s very good at stories where internal conflict is externalised into a fantastical landscape! I’m quite happy to let them wash over me and figure out the meaning once I’ve got the full picture. But I’ve read The End of Summer three times now and I still can’t tell you what it’s about.

All that said: the art and composition is fascinating. The backgrounds are detailed and intricate, the figures are rougher. The amount of space the cold, swooping architecture takes up on any given page compared to the characters really enhances the loneliness and isolation of the story! And it means that the contrast when the characters are constrained to smaller spaces or places with more texture or a hyper-specific close-up really stands out. I can’t work out if the characters being so much rougher than the objects was an intentional part of the storytelling – a way to show their impermanence or self-destruction, maybe? – but thanks to that I found it hard to tell the characters apart visually. It’s definitely a story that I’ve pondered over, as you might be able to tell. I think I like it on a technical level; I can definitely appreciate it as a demonstration of skill. But on an emotional level, it left me cold…

WAIT, NO, THAT PUN WAS NOT INTENTIONAL —

“I Love This Part”

I’ve been wanting to revisit my review of “I Love This Part” for a while now. It was my first ever review for the Lesbrary, waaaay way back in 2016, and at the time an unhappy ending for queer characters felt like a betrayal of trust. (If anyone else remembers the conversations about dead lesbians in media we were having that year: it made an impression!) Seven years later, I’ve read a lot more media with happy queer characters, so I can better live with the sad ones. I’ve read more of Tillie Walden’s work, so I recognise a lot more about the themes and logic behind her narratives. And with that perspective, I feel like I was unfair about “I Love This Part”. Characters ripping themselves apart on their own internalised homophobia? Still not my preference! But now I can appreciate what the narrative is doing and accept that it’s just not for me, rather than it being a fatal flaw in the work.

This is still a great visualisation of how a relationship can make you feel like the only ones who matter, still a short introduction to Tillie Walden’s style of surreality. It’s just not one that I’m the target audience for, and that’s fine.

“A City Inside”

I’ve also “A City Inside” before, and I’m going to stand by that initial review. It’s full of quiet and melancholy and hope, and I’d definitely recommend it on its own.


The rest of the book is mostly one or two page comics. Some of them are assignments from her studies at the Center for Cartoon Studies, some of them are posters or art pieces. (It blows my mind that Tillie Walden is willing to share the comics she made when she was a teenager. Respect for that courage!) Generally the art and the composition is really good – even the stuff from when Tillie Walden was a teen, what the hell – and it’s really cool to see elements from her later works taking root in these pieces. The limited colour pallettes are often a stand-out piece in her art, so seeing where they started sparked joy for me.

I will say that I had a harder time wrapping my head around some of these stories. They’re all visually striking, and the stories about teens and children feel realistic in their voices! Just some of them need a bit more thinking about. I will say that “Lars and Nemo” and “What It’s Like to be Gay at an All Girls Middle School” are my favourites of the short comics. “Lars and Nemo” shows the protagonist of “The End of Summer” meeting his giant riding cat (!!!), which is obviously great. As for “What It’s Like to be Gay at an All Girls Middle School”: I too went to an all-girls secondary school, so this was uncomfortably familiar! I was surprised by how frankly Tillie Walden showed using heteronormativity as a cudgel to pass under the radar, despite having read Spinning and knowing how upfront she is in her autobiographical works.

Long story short, Alone in Space is a very technically accomplished anthology that’s a great snapshot of how Tillie Walden’s art and storytelling has evolved over her career. If you want to see her short works in context, or if you’ve read On a Sunbeam and want to know what her other stories are like, this is a really convenient collection! But tonally most of the stories are bleak, so be aware of that before you go in.

[Caution warnings: abuse, bullying, confinement, mental illness, terminal illness, murder, suicide, child death, animal death, homophobia, off-screen rape and incest]

Susan is a queer crafter moonlighting as a library assistant. She can usually be found as a contributing editor for Hugo-winning media blog Smart Bitches Trashy Books, or just bringing the tweets and shouting on twitter.

Susan reviews White is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi

White is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi

White is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi is a surreal, lyrical horror novel that follows generations of women haunted by their racist, xenophobic house, which wants to keep them all inside its walls forever. The story loops forwards and backwards through time to tell their stories and the house’s.

The language and imagery are beautiful, and work together well to create the surreal atmosphere of this house – to the point where when it switches point of view to someone who’s never been to the house, it’s like a breath of fresh of air. White is for Witching is excellent at leaving things unspoken and telling the shapes of stories between scenes; relationships, horrors, explanations, all told through gaps and the things people don’t say, which works so well for a narrative where reality is a hard thing to pin down. The sense of menace that works under the layers of the story are really well done, especially the scenes where it actually bubbles to the surface.

The characters can sometimes feel completely unknown to a reader, which is a function of the narrative and its spaces. I never felt like I understood Miranda or Elliot, but I don’t think I was ever really supposed to. Ore is the point of view character who makes most sense, the one who is not actually invested in this house or its inheritance, and she doesn’t show up until halfway through – that breath of fresh air I mentioned! And the way that the narrative loops and twists through all of the characters’ stories without snarling is really well done.

White is for Witching is very well-written, beautiful, and strange. It’s not a book that I would normally have picked up, and I’m not sure that it’s one I completely understood. But I absolutely recommend it if you like surreal literary horror.

[Caution warning: eating disorders (specifically pica), racism, xenophobia, children in danger.]

Susan is a library assistant who uses her insider access to keep her shelves and to-read list permanently overflowing. She can usually be found as a contributing editor for Hugo-winning media blog Lady Business, or a reviewing for SFF Reviews and Smart Bitches Trashy Books. She brings the tweets and shouting on twitter.

Susan reviews A City Inside by Tillie Walden

A City Inside by Tillie Walden

Tillie Walden’s A City Inside is a short surreal book about a young woman growing into herself again and again.

As you’d expect from me reviewing Tillie Walden’s work, the art is beautiful; the protagonist’s various homes are especially well done, and the way that the art manages to tinge even the protagonist’s happier moments with melancholy is pleasingly visual. As with i love this part, the more surreal parts of the narrative are left for the reader to interpret as they will; the narrative is framed as someone telling the protagonist her own past and future, so the reader can take its accuracy and melancholy and hope as they will. And I did find it hopeful – even when the narrative takes the protagonist into an isolated city of herself, there is an underlying message of hope – it gifts her the hope of finding a place and a version of herself that she can live in and with, a future that she hasn’t seen yet and might not be able to, and that has value all of its own.

I found A City Inside to be a beautiful exploration of the different ways you can try for what you want (or what you think you should want), and the irreparable ways that these things sometimes contradict each other. I highly recommend it if you get the chance.

Susan is a library assistant who uses her insider access to keep her shelves and to-read list permanently overflowing. She can usually be found writing for Hugo-winning media blog Lady Business or bringing the tweets and shouting on twitter.

Danika reviews Girl Town by Carolyn Nowak

Girl Town by Carolyn NowakWhat a weird and wonderful book. This a collection of comic short stories, which differ in characters and style, but have a similar vibe of women’s complicated relationships with each other, and a general sense of unease and yearning. With beginning lines like “I have lived with Ashley and Jolene since we all got kicked out of astronaut school for being too good-looking to be sent to space,” Girl Town wastes no time in introducing you to a world that’s one step out of sync with our own, while still seeming eerily familiar.

The first story follows two neighboring houses of women who are sparring with each. One house has a bacchanalia where they ritually burn the main character’s sock dog, while she looks on, enthralled. It includes the line “Her nipples rattled against the windowsill with an odious rhythm.” Have mentioned how unapologetically strange this book is?

My favourite story is the second: “Radishes.” It follows two girls at an outdoor market. They try on clothes and explore the stalls, but while Kelly prances around the stalls, delighting in spinning around in dresses and cuddling with a tiger, Beth hangs back slightly, perpetually embarrassed. She makes fun of herself for her armpit fat, her chin, and her clumsiness. The two of them stumble on a stall with fruit and vegetables with magical properties. When Kelly accidentally duplicates herself, she wants to take her doppelganger home to mess with her parents. When Beth follows suit, she accepts a hug from her other self and begins to sob, apologizing to her.

“Diana’s Electric Tongue” follows Diana, burnt from a breakup, who finds comfort in a robot boyfriend. “The Big Burning House” is a portion of a podcast about a movie no one has seen since it was aired a few times in the 90s. The hosts speculate excitedly, as they prepare to watch a recently-found copy of the tape. “Please Sleep Over” follows two women (a couple) house sitting at one’s parents’ house. We see glimpses of their stay, but the scene that sticks out to me is them lying together in bed as one says “My parents are good. They’re really good parents. They will always support my choices.” [Panel of silence] “I just wish they didn’t think I was so stupid,” she continues, beginning to cry. Her girlfriend replies with anger, “Shut up. Parents can go to hell. My parents are ‘good’ too. They can go to hell. No one knows what you’re capable of.”

Girl Town is a surreal and affecting read. I felt off-kilter while reading it, with the odd worlds and only brief glimpses into these lives, but the emotions rang true. I read this book because my coworker put it in my hands and said “I just read this and I think you’re really like it.” Not only am I glad to have had it put in my hands, I’m also flattered to be associated with a queer weirdo feelings comic like this one.