lostlenore

It's almost Halloween, so this week is the week of ~spooky~ recs to get you in the holiday mood! I've got one novel, a TV show, three fics and a podcast for you this week so let's get to it.

The Novel:

1) Welcome To Nightvale by Joseph Fink and Jeffery Cranor

I GOT TO GO TO THIS BOOK SIGNING AND IT WAS AMAZING. There were so many great things happening at this signing, including but not limited too Fink telling the moderator that he hoped this book would be banned and the entire auditorium cheering him on. It's new original characters in a story line that connects with the town of Nightvale, but is not a re-hashing of previous episodes of the podcast. The book centers around a girl named Jackie, who works in a pawnshop, and a woman named Diane, who's son is a shapeshifter, It's written very much in the style of the podcast, aka a wonderful mixture of irreverent and weird and deep. I had to stay up all night to finish it because I needed so see how it ended, which is probably the highest praise I can give a book. Two ghostly thumbs way up.

The TV Show:

1) iZombie

This show, man. It's been nominated for Yuletide, so hopefully I'll be reccing some great fics for it in the coming months, but cannon is every bit as fun and weird as a show about a zombie corner should be. Liv, the main character, is a med student who gets bitten by a zombie on the eve of her engagement and takes a job at the local corners office to supply herself with brains. The side effect of the whole brain-eating thing is that she absorbs the victims personalities, and gets flashes of the last things they saw before they died. Naturally this means she needs to use her powers to fight crime! The first three episodes are available for free on Hulu and the entire first season is up on Netflix, and I highly recommend you try it out, it's so much fun. Each episode is its own little AU, plus you get great guest stars like Bradley James on your screen again even if you want to fight his hair stylist. (Also- if this moves you to write me Ravi/Major fic....please...link me. I have a mighty need.)

The Fics:

1) Almond, Clavicle, Orchid by kivikindi (MCU) Gen 5k

Post-Winter Soldier fic about Bucky slowly unraveling bits of himself and relearning how to become a person instead of a weapon. It's beautifully, beautifully written, featuring pieces of songs, poems, and fairy tales. Steve and Natasha feature heavily in this story, and I especially loved the scenes with Bucky and Natasha puzzling together their shared experiences of the Red Room. Additionally, this fic is written in second person which I know a hard 'no' for a lot of readers (including myself) but I think it's a choice that works well here, as Bucky is still working on developing a sense of self and is caught between a first person 'I' and an omniscient 'he.' It fits in a creepy, fridge-horror sort of way.

2) In Medias Res by starlingthefool (Inception) Arthur/Eames & Mal/Dom 52K

A mirror-verse AU where Mal is an extractor, Eames is her pointman, and Dom is the shade that just won't let her rest. The author does such a wonderful job of creating a creepy atmosphere in this fic, and a lot more attention is given to the dream levels that the team creates which are 100% more ~spooky~ than those in the movie. Heads-up warning that his fic contains a mention of a minor character who commits suicide, so please read the warnings.

3) The Rat and the Ruby Slippers by indigostohelit (WTNV) Cecil/Carlos 7k

A fantastic fic where Carlos wakes up in Desert Bluffs with Kevin feeling like something if off, but unable to pinpoint just what it is. The story is loosely based on the Ballad of Tam Lin, and it's difficult to describe without giving away too much of the plot, but suffice to say it's perfectly spooky in the uncanny way Nightvale the podcast excels at.

The Podcast:

1) Lore

This podcast creeps me the fuck out. It's a collection of folk tales, ghost stories, and in some cases, historical weirdness, made even creepier through the medium of audio storytelling and wow is it successful in getting me to sleep with my lights on. Aaron Mahnke is the narrator and he has the perfect whispery-quiet voice for reading these stories, honestly, I can't listen to this one at night anymore. Favorites include episode four, Dinner at the Afterglow, and episode eight, The Castle. The podcast is released bi-weekly.