Feb. 28th, 2024

lb_lee: A skeleton wearing a crown of blooming roses (the bony lady)
[personal profile] lb_lee
"The you that killed Viola Wright was mulched a month later. I found my outlying scrap of consciousness balled up in Gus's pocket, all unbeknownst to him, along with the rest of your magically compressed matter and a great charge of vibrating magic. It was an unsettling vantage, for where I curled infinitesimally in your remains I could hear what I might call my primary self screaming above Gus's head.'"

Blurb: Gus is a sorcerer so obsessed with Catherine that he murders her, and her ghost is stuck haunting him forevermore. Unable to accept that Catherine doesn't love him, Gus then becomes obsessed with finding other girls that remind him of Catherine and making THEM love him... only to kill them when the inevitably don't'. He creates magical duplicates of himself to do that dirty work, forever recycling them into new copies, using Catherine's ghost to follow them. But over the decades, that means a piece of Catherine is embedded in those pieces of Gus. And she still wants her revenge...

Why is it worth your time?: It's pretty good! This is a book covering 150+ years of time, with three major time periods and two (or three, depending how you count) different points of view, and a decently sizable cast, all organized well enough so as not to throw us. Gus is utterly convincing as that special brand of romantic obsessive who sees himself as the most loving person, all the while being an utter horrorshow, and Catherine's revenge is delicious.

Plural Tags: abuse (mostly of a ghost) high-focus, cofronting, copies, the dead, enmity, setting-specific, possession

Content Warnings: contain spoilers; see comments

Access Notes: Available in print, ebook, and audiobook
lb_lee: A happy little brain with a bandage on it, enclosed within a circle with the words LB Lee. (Default)
[personal profile] lb_lee
Submitted by [personal profile] packbat!

"And indeed, this is what must have happened now, because the next thing I knew was that I was waking suddenly out of sleep.

"A Full Moon stood in the centre of the Single Doorway, flooding the Hall with Light. The Statues on the Walls were all posed as if they had just turned to face the Doorway, their marble Eyes fixed on the Moon. They were different from the Statues in other Halls; they were not isolated individuals, but representations of a Crowd. Here were two with their Arms about each other; here one had his Hand on the Shoulder of one in front, the better to pull himself forward to see the Moon; here a Child held on to its Father's Hand. There was even a Dog that — having no interest in the Moon — stood on its Hind Legs, its Front Paws on its Master's Chest, pleading for attention. The Rear Wall was a mass of Statues — not neatly arranged in Tiers, but a jumbled, chaotic Crowd. Foremost among them was a Young Man, who stood bathed in the Moonlight, elation in his Face, a Banner in his Hand.

"I almost forgot to breathe. For a moment I had an inkling of what it might be like if instead of two people in the World there were thousands."


Blurb: A series of journal entries by a man living in an apparently-infinite House full of Statues, oceans, and clouds, as he comes to learn more about the nature of his world and realize certain truths which were hidden from him.

Why is it worth your time?: Mostly it's a really cool story and we loved reading it? The protagonist's memory issues mean that he is solving a mystery where we know a lot more than he does. But also, the story being structured around a journal lets us see the perspectives of multiple inhabitants of the protagonist's body over the course of the story.

Plural Tags: abuse:high-focus, memory work, visions, closeting,

Content Warnings: gaslighting, animal death (fishing, a monkey offscreen), human death, kidnapping, unsanitary (one character is implied to have soiled himself, another throws up), fatphobia (very brief but intense), violence, drowning. Also, there's a heroic cop character, and the only explicitly LGBTQ+ character out of the dozen or so named characters is a villain.

Accessibility Notes: Available in audiobook, and in MANY languages, including Spanish, Polish, German, Spanish, Dutch, Chinese, Italian, Portuguese, Korean, Turkish, French, Bulgarian, Russian and Czech.

Misc. Notes (if any): There is a lot of obvious inspiration from Jorge Luis Borges and similar otherworldly fantasty, but it also draws from the author's experience with ME/CFS in a lot of subtle ways. And it has a good ending, which for us Packbats makes it easier to deal with the heavy stuff.


lb_lee: A happy little brain with a bandage on it, enclosed within a circle with the words LB Lee. (Default)
[personal profile] lb_lee
Submitted by [personal profile] hungryghosts!

"one day i was watching a movie... when suddenly my tail came to life!"

Blurb: Kittylove's tail comes to life and makes it happy.

Why is it worth your time?: It's a cute little comic about plural joy!

Plural Tags: abuse not mentioned, cofronting, nonhumans [cat person, sentient limb], friendship

Content Warnings: None!

Access Notes: Screenreadable! Free!

Misc Notes: Read it online here! (EDIT: Cohost is going down; here's another link. Also a back-up link. As always, all entries with the "LB local copy" tag mean you can ask [personal profile] lb_lee for a copy)
lb_lee: A happy little brain with a bandage on it, enclosed within a circle with the words LB Lee. (Default)
[personal profile] lb_lee
Submitted by [personal profile] hungryghosts!

"Carving away until only flesh remained would deny us entirely

we don't want that

I don't want that"


Blurb: a personal reflection on vulnerability and nonhuman identity, in stark black, white, red, and yellow.

Why is it worth your time?: Short, free, and striking.

Plural Tags: abuse low-focus, nonhumans [wolf, pony, robot, cat]

Content Warnings: blood, mention of violence from others and self

Access Notes: Free, not screenreadable.

Misc Notes: Read it online here! Creators' website is here.
lb_lee: A happy little brain with a bandage on it, enclosed within a circle with the words LB Lee. (Default)
[personal profile] lb_lee
Submitted by [personal profile] hungryghosts!

""AS OF RIGHT NOW I FEEL CREATIVELY STUNTED YET SUBLIMELY FREE AND ALL I HAVE TO CHEW ON ARE THE BONES OF THIS DEAD HORSE"

Blurb: A poetic reflection on escaping a poisonous relationship, ambiguously described, and having to refind yourself and your art afterward, shown through a conversation between two headmates.

Why is it worth your time?: Poetic and moving, and I haven't seen this topic done before. Free and short.

Plural Tags: plural creator, abuse intermediate focus, otherworld, nonhumans [wolf, pony from My Little Pony]

Content Warnings: Mention of a bad relationship in the past, dealing with feelings afterward.

Access Notes: not screenreadable. Free.

Misc Notes: Read online here!
lb_lee: A happy little brain with a bandage on it, enclosed within a circle with the words LB Lee. (Default)
[personal profile] lb_lee
Submitted by [personal profile] erinptah!

“Just take a seat anywhere you like, there’s a dear. Oh! By chance, did you see someone leaving just now? We had another applicant here a moment ago, sweet girl. But she seems to have run off. Didn’t even wait for her tea, poor thing.”

“Um…” Elaine is clearly calculating the manifold reasons that might propel one into premature flight. But there is no whiff of gingerbread as of yet.


Blurb: What happens when you mix one drunk fairy godmother with a multitude of blue cocktails, add a stubborn barmaid with a unique taste in adventures, and filter it all through a sarcastic narrator who can't seem to keep themselves out of the story? Elaine is on a quest to rescue a dragon egg, through a world of "every fairy tale is real, but not quite the way you were told..."

Why is it worth your time?: Funny and charming. The character voices are well-rendered and entertaining. Some of the jokes will be predictable if you've read other fairy-tale parodies, but others are still refreshing. And "what if the Seven Dwarves were one dwarf system with seven alters?" is a really solid twist.

Plural Tags: creator: bodyshares, abuse: not mentioned, cofronting, people: children, relationships: family, relationships: teamwork

Content Warnings: as per the original fairy tale, the Seven Dwarves have Snow White in a glass coffin, and it's ambiguous whether she's dead or not

Accessibility Notes: Available online, plain text, screenreadable

Misc. Notes (if any): The Seven Dwarves only feature in chapters 6-7, but Elaine's quest is episodic enough that you can read that adventure as a standalone piece and enjoy it. Given the plural co-creator, I figured I'd err on the side of reccing it!

(The novel is a WIP, and the video says the dwarf system is slated to reappear eventually...but as of this writing, it hasn't updated in A While.)

Found this via a video on the Gianu System's channel, a chat with the other two (singlet) members of their writing collective, where the novel came up. (Link is to that specific section of the video.) The IRL system was very involved in working out how to write the fantasy system in a way that would make them happy to read, and sounds really proud of the result.

Read free online:

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