The Cursed Judge

Found on Nebula, interesting-enough discussion of video games, like Jacob Geller, Errant Signal, Daryll Talks Videogames, ...

Helen Oyeyemi - "White is for Witching"

Intriguing book. Of the twins Eliot and Miranda (Miri).

Of their parents, and grand parents, and even great grandparents. Of witching. Of the house with its own mind. Of being unable to escape the witches, or the soucouyant, or the goodlady.

Most of it, interesting and well written, changing POVs you take a moment to realise.

Then suddenly, it becomes this amazing suspense/horror story, where Ore and Miri are lovers, but both pulled aside by their backgrounds, in that house where the mannequin moves when nobody sees it.

Only the repaired dolls were on view
    (Father let's go to the doll hospital and get you repaired)
    she didn't know where the thought had come from, she probably had to be careful because she had been mad.
    Miranda dropped her hand and came out of the fitting room, passing the woman who had been talking to her father as the woman returned to her cubicle. One of them smiled with all her teeth and the other looked blank.

'They killed him,' she wept. I could not respond. Her fear of her pica and the whispers and her fear of shrapnel and fire and, yes, her fear of me, of being left all alone in a big silent house. Her fear had crept out from the whites of her eyes and woven itself into my brick until I came to strength, until I became aware. I could keep Anna Good from killing herself and her child, but I had no other gift.

I walked out of the bathroom door and, I don't know how, found myself still in the bathroom. The room hadn't grown any longer, the door was still in front of me, I didn't feel any change in the ground beneath my feet. But when i tried to pass through the door again i was in the bathroom again, and my neck cricked, as if I'd turned my head too fast. I tried one more time, and came through into the passageway, which was meant to be arranged into an L, with the staircase completing the rectangle. I was on the longest part of the L - the bathroom was meant to be in between Eliot's room and their dad's room. But the doors had changed positions. All four doors on that floor were now ranged along one wall, and the rest of the 'L' was blank. None of the doors would open. The stairs were still there, and I inched down them carefully, one by one, afraid that they would change too, unsure where they would take me. The staircase ended in the kitchen, every surface heavy in the moonlight.
    There was a long shadow behind me. It wasn't my shadow. From the corner of my eye I saw it grow like a syrup stain, called from nowhere. I went to the counter, spilled salt all over it and ran the flat of a knife through the salt, on both sides. I turned before I could lose my nerve; or more, the knife turned and took me with it. Kill the soucouyant.
    'Ore,' Miranda said. I had her by the throat. It was the principle of knife and fork. You had to hold something down before you could stab it.
    She was holding a pair of dressmaker's scissors to my chest, opened into a stark 'v'.

Jeanette Winterson - "The Daylight Gate"

read it again (first time 2014: https://weesbij.blogspot.com/2014/08/jeanette-winterson-daylight-gate.html)

John Dee and Edward Kelly had intercourse with her in turn. When it was done John Dee went back to his books, for he was never comfortable with much that was not a book. Edward Kelley fell asleep. They had forgotten me and I had not minded.

    John Dee nodded. 'Do you believe in the life to come?'
    'I don't think I do.'
    'Yet you have seen many strange things with me, have you not? Apparitions, spectres, unaccountable sights not of human form?'
    'I think these things are the magick of our own minds, not visitations from elsewhere.'
    'Then our minds must be multitudes indeed.'
    'I think we are worlds compressed into human form.'