Black Flame, Gretchen Felker-Martin

So I love media about media! Stories about stories! This short horror novel is about a film archivist who works on restoring a film and begins to experience strange, occult happenings was just... chef's kiss.

It's also about gender and sexuality and family secrets and loneliness and work and heritage/preservation.

I enjoyed the scares, and I found it gave me a lot to think about, mostly how we remember the past, what we chose to forget, and how media be it books or movies plays a role in all of that.

I feel likes this book is probably not for everyone, it's weird and gross and horny but it absolutely was for me. My one very gentle piece of criticism is that our protagonists mother is very 1 dimensional. But this is a minor issue as the book is short and I dont think it should have to do EVERYTHING especially as it does a really excellent job of evoking and describing the lost media it's about.