I just finished reading John Darnielle’s third book Devil House which came out earlier this year.

It’s about a true crime author who is asked by his editor to write a book about a sensational crime that went largely unreported and was completely unsolved. An abandoned porn store was defaced and turned into the site of a satanic, ritualistic murder. No arrests were ever made.

So the author buys the house-turned-porned store-turned-crime scene, moves in, and begins investigating.

I hate true crime, and after reading this book it’s absolutely clear John Darnielle does too. It was a ridiculously good read, one of the best fictions I’ve read in a while, my favourite of the year for sure.

For anyone still on the fence: a slumlord and a real estate developer get hacked to bits with a broadsword and not one moment of the book ever acts like this is a bad thing, really, because didn’t they have it coming? It’s not about them. They’re dead.

As far as non-fiction, I’ll be starting Reform or Revolution and The Mass Strike by Rosa Luxembourg (I was given The Essential Rosa Luxembourg as a gift), and also How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective

For the theory discussion group I lead, we’ve been reading Caliban and the Witch: Women, The Body, and Primitive Accumulation by Silvia Federici, a pioneer of Marxist Feminism. It’s an exploration of the ways in which the period of transition into capitalism, the time of Marx’s primitive accumulation, was also marked by an increase and a fundamental shift in the forms of violence against women in order to create a class of unpaid reproductive labourers. This oppression was most visibly and powerfully enforced through sexual violence and culminated in the witch trials.

We’re also about to dig into Transgender Marxism, a collection of essays on queer liberation through Marxist thought