Hey strangers. It’s my first post.
Over my Christmas break, while trying to meet my annual reading goal (40 books in 2022), I impulsively bought Sarah J. Maas’s House of Earth and Blood (2020). Not the most practical decision—it’s over 900 pages long, and I had a deadline—or the coolest: Maas’s novels, while popcorny and enjoyable in my opinion, are both cringey and erotic. I had already read her preceding series, A Court of Thorns and Roses, which had me screaming and blushing and also maybe wanting to throttle Maas for beating me over the head with extraneous exposition. When buying into the next chapter in her canon, I thought, Well, hopefully this will keep me busy. It’s easy, it’s a page-turner, and I could use something light.
I was craving levity because the past four months had been a long, uphill battle, trying to make my love fit a relationship that just wasn’t working. At the beginning of December, I fell off the edge. In the post-Christmas haze, I thought a break from literariness would do me good.
House of Earth and Blood is a darker, more adult version of Maas’s usual fantasy romance. The main character snorts fantasy-coke and has fantasy-club-bathroom-hookups; the love interest is a slave who kills and tortures people; and all the charming side characters are gruesomely murdered in the first hundred pages. It’s also woefully unoriginal—the fallen angel, hunky-but-wounded Hunt Athalar, meets the street smart and sexy Bryce Quinlan, a sharp-shooting loose cannon in skintight everything. I’ve only read 500 pages so far, but I take it they are going to fall in love.
“Bare legs that were mere inches from him, golden skin gleaming in the firstlights. He forced himself to withdraw his hand from her knee, even as his fingers begged to move, to stroke along her thigh. Higher.”
Maas, Sarah J. House of Earth and Blood. 2020. Pg. 461.
As Hunt longs for Bryce, and Bryce secretly pines back, and Hunt internally reprimands himself for letting his fingers graze her thigh for too long, and all the tension admittedly makes me giddy, I’m thinking about desire. I had a conversation with a friend over the holidays where she explained that she needs to be chased a bit in order to find someone attractive. I was surprised at how true that rang for me. There was a controversial series of TikToks recently that sparked a heated debate about whether or not this seemingly ugly guy is actually attractive. The consensus seems to be (and I agree) that he is—kind of. It’s the way his face conveys unabashed desire that works for some of us. We crave open desire, holding it at the brink, letting it simmer and squirm. Romance novels give me this—the fantasy of being wanted, the security of feeling that want as omnipotent reader, uncut and risk-free oxytocin. I desire to feel desire(d).
As you’ve probably ascertained, given that I’m still only 500 pages in, I didn’t finish HoEaB on time. (I ended up reading “The Myth of Sisyphus” instead, because it’s only 25 pages but technically counts as a stand-alone book, and I was deep in the suicidal ideation trenches.) I took a lot of breaks while reading because, as I mentioned earlier, I was going through a painful and drawn-out breakup. I found it nearly impossible to feel fantasy desire without real past desire creeping to the forefront. I remember the last time I wanted someone this way. The whetstone of desire sharpens the tack lodged in my throat. I no longer trust desire; I procrastinate, watch sitcoms, go for runs, throw parties, apply for jobs. My dear friend Jenny has a tattoo on her hand: PROTECT ME FROM WHAT I WANT (Jenny Holzer, 1982). I think about what it means to her: a desire to be freed from desire, a paradoxical want to want for nothing, a fervent wish for contentment. This is where I find myself. I don’t masturbate; I don’t take or send nudes, despite losing a concerning amount of weight and liking how my body looks when it’s starved by anxiety. I socialize but don’t flirt. I can’t untangle my discrete desire from desire-for-(e)x. Even hearing about new loves between friends, celebrating in all sincerity those sparkling desirous beginnings, triggers a twinge of defensiveness. Depression wraps me in put-on contentment and I imagine myself as happy as Sisyphus.
But tonight, a few days after my 28th birthday, I finally picked up House of Earth and Blood again. I knew I had been avoiding it, and I had to read to understand why. It’s like feeling the blood rush back in to your fingers after they’ve gone numb with cold. It’s like sitting down at the bottom of the hill and letting the boulder roll down, bracing your back against it. It’s like the guilty-happy feeling of slumber party pranks. It’s terrible. This book is terrible. But I’m starting to desire again. I even have a crush on someone, albeit a highly impractical one. Fantasy is necessary for life, I think. Romance novels can be a lot of things - mawkish, mortifying, heteronormative - but they can also be a gateway to reclaimed desire, particularly for women and femmes. I think desire is as restorative as it is draining—it hurts like nothing else, but it also gives me purpose. It is a bullseye, and I throw myself like a knife. I’m forgiving myself for reading things that are indulgent and frivolous. I see myself wanting Hunt to want Bryce, and I see myself as worthy of desire and desiring again.