flemmings | (no subject)

If I pushed I might finish Macdonald's Phantastes tonight, but then I'd go to bed feeling lousy and wake up the same way. Macdonald makes me feel grubby and unclean and soul-sick, like a muggy summer night crossed with an incipient migraine. No, I don't know why. Probably the way he writes women. Possibly his language. Maybe just his worldview. I read him as a kid and liked the Curdie books well enough, but everything else, I'm now recalling, gave me the fantods. Horrors just out of sight. Must look at some 100 Demons before bed and hope the clean invigorating air of Ima Ichiko's youkai, to say nothing of Ritsu's female relatives, sweeps away the Victorian vapours.

(Takahashi Rumiko isn't quite as bad, but she has the same sort of effect on me. All her clean-featured pert and/or genki characters feel like they're avatars of some hideous unseen inward rot.)