Essays. A lot of memoir – which I wasn’t expecting, for some reason, but certainly didn’t mind. The author is Cowlitz, a Coast Salish people from the northwest of what is currently the United States. She grew up in a coal-mining family in Appalachia, and then for much of the period covered in the book lived in Seattle. The title points towards the weave of the Euro-derived occult through both her life and the book, from astrology to Tarot, horror movies to Twin Peaks. Even the essay organized using her play-through as an adult of the old Oregon Trail video game – in which you guide settlers westward in the 19th century US, including through her nation’s territory – feels not just like a clever use of pop culture (though it is also that, and she does that elsewhere in the book for sure) but like it somehow takes on a similar logic (real/not-real/hyper-real/differently-real) to her engagement with things magical. Another central element of the book is the heavy presence of sexual and gendered violence, trauma, addiction and recovery, and death. It’s…a lot. Her life, including all of those elements, weaves through all the rest of the nonlinear tangle that she skilfully draws in – the pop culture, the occult, the history, the matter-of-fact glimpses into colonization past and present. I may be misreading it, but I wonder if one of the things that the author was trying to do in this book, with its juxtaposition of those various elements, was to get at how the sustained intensity of violence and trauma that she has experienced has the potential to change your sense of how causality works in the world. Anyway, she’s an excellent writer – I already thought so, though I wasn’t necessarily sure quite what my final assessment of the book was going to be, but the way its climactic essay interwove fragments from both several different but related timelines in her own life and from Twin Peaks, and also called back strategically to earlier essays, was pretty great. So…it’s not going to be for everyone, and I think it requires a comfort with ambiguous meaning that doesn’t necessarily come naturally to me, but definitely a thumbs up.
Originally posted by Scott on Goodreads.