The July 2026 Lurid Things
Hello!
How are we doing? Did we mark ourselves safe from the Diarrhea Lettuce of 2026? Did we don our old KN95s to ward off the smoke from the thousands of burning hectares of Canadian forests? Did we chug our electrolytes in the 2026 North American heat wave? (There’s already a Wikipedia page.) Did we cook the living salmonella out of our eggs until they screamed, flopping onto their watery knees for mercy?
Or were we tweeting (x-ing? Ew) the goings on from our prison cells like we’ve been sent to the Western Front?
It’s very much giving:
There was some good news! Christopher Nolan is single-handedly driving Emily Wilson’s book sales. Love this for her! Loved her translation. (Watch her perform a selection in Ancient Greek at the 92nd Street Y.)
Sorry, Nolan, but this (in my humble opinion) is the best on-screen adaptation of the Odyssey to date:
Without further ado…
Merriam-Webster defines ‘lurid’ as:
Lurid: adjective (lu· rid) ˈlu̇r-əd1 a: causing horror or revolution b: melodramatic, sensational2 a: wan and ghastly pale in appearance b: of any of several light or medium grayish colors ranging from yellow to orange3 shining with the red glow of fire seen through smoke or clouds
The July Lurid Things
(Book) The Buried Truth Beneath the Lurid Flames: The Reformatory by Tananarive Due
(Music) Norma Night’s “Romantasy” Is a Delightful Banger
(Art) The Uncanny Paintings of Aron Wiesenfeld
(Movie) The Only Way Out Is Through: Mārama
(Object) The Poetry of the Inefficient: The Jewelry of Middaia
(Science) Sizzle Sizzle Pop: The Wet-Bulb Globe Temperature
*We’re fresh out of sensations this month, because I think we’ve all have quite enough of those!
(Book) The Buried Truth Beneath the Lurid Flames: The Reformatory by Tananarive Due
June 1950
Gracetown, Florida
Robert Stevens held his breath and counted to three, hoping to see Mama.
What Robert does that fateful morning is what little boys often do—play games to see if ghosts (haints) are real. It’s an innocuous thing, which is, say, as innocuous as kicking a boy later that morning when he tries to harass Robert’s sister. The problem lies in the fact that Robert is black and the much-older boy he kicked is white, which is enough evidence for the Klan-friendly deputy to arrest Robert the next morning.
A judge sentences Robert Stevens to a “lenient” six months at Gracetown School for Boys, and that is where Mama and the haints return. No longer a game of nighttime whimsy, the haints become real; the antics of one in particular send Robert to the incongruously named Fun House for an evening of near-unspeakable corporeal horror.
The plot structure was so airtight I was greedy: gobbling the pages until the wee hours of the morning. I felt the need to stand and clap once I’d finished, a tribute to Due’s framework of unrelenting tension. It’s a squeamish read for more reasons than the gore and the violence—namely, the necessary accuracy of the virulent racism during Jim Crow and all the ways with which a white person can fail their neighbor, friends, and in one character’s case, distant family.
If you’re aching for a historical horror that’ll keep you up all night reading, then The Reformatory by Tananarive Due is for you.
You can purchase The Reformatory on Bookshop.org
(Music) Norma Night’s “Romantasy” Is a Delightful Banger
Norma Night (the stage name of Kelsey Ellison) has released her self-proclaimed ‘demisexual book nerd anthem’ and it does NOT disappoint. Half-70s throwback, half-medieval remixing, “Romantasy” is a fun ride.
The art of attraction is an unsolved mystery,Need a detective, c’mon Agatha Christie!On the Piccadilly Line, I’m looking for a sign,Something catches my wandering eye.So many immersed in their pages,Imaginations are so captivated.So I follow my curiosity,And I discover it’s just what I need!
It’s a clever little song, devoid of moralizing, with a hypnotic medieval beat. But beware! It’s been stuck in my head for over a week, and I think it’ll be stuck in yours, too!
Be sure to check out her other earworms that I love: “Tan Lines” and “HIGHWAY HYPNOSIS.”
You can support Ellison’s main page on Instagram, or Norma Night here
(Art) The Uncanny Paintings of Aron Wiesenfeld
I found Wiesenfeld’s work the way I found a lot of art these days: on my Instagram Explore page. Bless and curse the algorithm (and all the water it’s glugging), but by god, was it spot on. Disaffected youths in unsettling locales? Sign me up!
After training at Cooper Union, Wiesenfeld got his start at Marvel Comics in 1993, contributing to Cable and X-Men. He then went on to work for Wildstorm Studios, working on Team 7, Deathblow, and Wolverine.
Wiesenfeld’s pivot to painting began after he completed his studies at the ArtCenter College of Design. You can see the influence that illustration had on his style and subject matter: His subjects posses movement and the transience of a moment’s blink. Action and intent are clear from the first glance, as are the contradicting intents in the environment. Wiesenfeld’s is a style that tells story, much like my personal favorite illustrator, Edward Gorey, who Wiesenfeld says inspires him.
You can follow and support Wiesenfeld on Instagram and on his personal website
(Movie) The Only Way Out Is Through: Mārama
To move into our future we must understand our past…
Mārama opens with a familiar Gothic structure: An unemployed governess arrives in a remote part of England, answering a mysterious letter that claims knowledge about the identity of her birth family. The movie sharply departs from traditional structure when the cabbie transporting her suddenly halts the carriage, hands her her luggage, and forces her to walk the rest of the way. It’s an abrupt departure from the expected class structure in a traditional Gothic tale, as Mārama (or Mary Stevens), our heroine, is immediately othered by the cabbie’s arbitrary and unexplained whim. The moment goes unexplained, but it sets the tone for the rest of the piece: Like in all “polite” societies, racism is never fully explained, just tiptoed around, hinted at and absorbed the way one knows to avoid a locked and forbidden room. Mārama eventually finds that room and the way in, forcing to lurid, flaming light the appalling atrocities the Cole family has wrought against the women of her family.
It’s a gorgeous movie, with all the shots of natural beauty as evocative as an oil painting, but not in the moments of depravity. Those moments, when the movements tickle and then churn with a stomach-clenching drop, and when the blood runs splattered and then thick with a cruel clarity, are shot matter-of-factly, almost clinically in their unflinching depictions. There is no romanticism or lingering, just an unspoken focus and shift that seems to say, “This is what happened. And then this, and then this.” We the viewers are given the opportunity to bear witness to a rectification, to a woman refusing to bend to the culture of another. Indeed, all the women in the movie display what are considered “male” emotions (like rage and unspeakable grief), tabooed by white patriarchy, while the Victorian white men in the film seemingly display “feminine, acceptable” emotions like empathy, cultural sensitivity and inclusion, patience, and understanding. This choice takes what could be an overly simplistic revenge/exploitation tale and shatters the format with nuance, as one of the horrors of the film is not the individual men that Mārama encounters, but the childlike innocence they possess. Their stunted brutality comes from their buried entitled beliefs, and that is why they ultimately withhold Mārama’s necessary truths. It is the way a child acts before they learn the lessons of the world, that despite your best intentions, you can still hurt another with your need. However, the ultimate horror of Mārama is in learning that the truths she seeks should have been given freely, or, as we learn later, should have never happened and perhaps (definitely) left entirely alone.
Mārama is a necessary film, not just for the Māori people of Aotearoa, but for people everywhere. Ignorance is a knife easily wielded, and films like Taratoa Stappard’s Mārama remind us that no one is ever safe from its cut. It’s the true mark of a talented storyteller to make an abstract evil immediate and chilling, and Stappard does so many times over. It also doesn’t hurt that he gave his heroine one of the coolest, multi-symboled dresses in horror canon:
You can watch Mārama on Apple TV or Prime.
Visit the film’s website here
(Object) The Poetry of the Inefficient: The Jewelry of Middaia
Launched in 2021, Middaia is a Parisian jewelry brand with an ethos as anti-utilitarian as it is hauntingly beautiful. Each piece is handmade from recycled sterling silver or ceramics and deadstock antique lace, inspired by pieces from bygone eras. It’s a brand that begs multiple questions: Does jewelry have to be uniform? Does jewelry have to serve a specific use? Can things just be beautiful and appreciated as such? What, if anything, is the use of use?
Their recent Perfume Vial collection interrogates our modern complacency with “clean aesthetics”: clean eating, clean girl makeup, and clean open-air floor plans (hiss hiss). In the spirit of Medieval pomanders, we see jewelry that acknowledges the plague and the bad smells as a reality that does not need to be obliterated. Instead, the camouflaging can be quite chic:
In a time when COVID is still rampant and plaguing, Meddaia’s jewelry feels both apt and prescient. In the face of many things that seemingly have no present cure (the widespread environmental destruction by data centers, the barbarity of ICE, the callous erosion of our constitutional rights by flock cameras and AI, etc., etc., etc.), Meddaia’s mystical talismans hold great appeal.
I’ve been a longtime admirer for some time. When I say admirer, I mean that I’ve downright coveted their Opal Leaf Lace Ring for over a year until it tragically sold out:
You can purchase any and all Meddaia here
(Science) Sizzle Sizzle Pop: The Wet-Bulb Globe Temperature
It’s been a scorcher of a summer. Across the American Northeast, we reached temperatures closer to 110 in the shade (with humidity). If you have POTS like I’ve had my entire adult life (Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome), then you probably asked yourself more than once this past month: Is today the day I die? Is this how I go? Compressed bodily to an inch of my life, chugging seven electrolyte packets back to back and willing the power to stay on through various magical chants, all while hiding Grey Gardens-style behind blackout curtains? During actual Disability Pride Month, no less?!
Miraculously, I did not die (it did get a little touch-and-go with the breathing), but like the sickly Victorian-child-wilting-in-the-bed that I often am, I decided to take this lemon (my stir-crazy) and make some research lemonade. It turns out that there is an actual marker for the unbearableness that I experienced, and it’s called the wet-bulb globe temperature (that’s WBGT to you). Unlike the heat index, which only measures air temperature and humidity, the WBGT measures heat stress on the human body in direct sunlight.
And guess what? That heat advisory I was just alluding to? It was a whopper of wet bulb.
According to the National Weather Service, the WBGT:
…estimates the effect of temperature, relative humidity, wind speed, and solar radiation on humans using a combination of temperatures from three thermometers:A Wet bulb measures the temperature read by a thermometer covered in a wet cloth. As water evaporates from the cloth, evaporation cools the thermometer. This mirrors how the human body cools itself with sweat.A Black globe is used to measure solar radiation. Solar radiation heats the globe and wind blowing across it cools the globe.A Dry bulb calculates the air temperature measured in the shade. It is the temperature you would see on your thermometer outside.
All of these components come together to calculate WBGT in the following equation:
Tw is the wet bulb temperature, which indicates humidity
Tg is the globe temperature, which indicates radiant heat
Td is the ambient air (dry) temperature
Once the WBGT has been calculated, you can compare the result to the various WBGT categories of death—I mean, heat illness. (I’m not taking you to the CDC’s website for this image, because apparently the funding cuts extended to the programming and graphics team. Actually, you know what? You need to see this for yourself.)
A better image from the National Forecast Digital Database:
And more detail concerning the categories:
As you can probably infer, these categories are applicable to able-bodied individuals. I’d be curious to see what a wet-bulb globe temperature advisory would look like for individuals residing in current heat islands and individuals with diseases like myself. I’m already extremely sensitive to weather changes, such as changes in barometric pressure, and I can tell you with the same painful accuracy of an arthritic 80-year-old if a storm is coming. (No rain today, but judging from the slight tightness in my joints, I’d say it’ll be partly cloudy later on.) Like AQI warnings for air quality, it would be wonderful (well, life-changing) to have a more widespread advisory warning for heat-related illness, given how prone POTS individuals are to heat intolerance, and subsequently, heat stroke.
I won’t let myself get too excited, considering how we currently devalue science and education in general in our country, but I’ll let this essay be my penny that I cast into the rusting fountain of our public discourse.
Hello!
How are we doing? Did we mark ourselves safe from the Diarrhea Lettuce of 2026? Did we don our old KN95s to ward off the smoke from the thousands of burning hectares of Canadian forests? Did we chug our electrolytes in the 2026 North American heat wave? (There’s already a Wikipedia page.) Did we cook the living salmonella out of our eggs until they screamed, flopping onto their watery knees for mercy?
Or were we tweeting (x-ing? Ew) the goings on from our prison cells like we’ve been sent to the Western Front?
It’s very much giving:
There was some good news! Christopher Nolan is single-handedly driving Emily Wilson’s book sales. Love this for her! Loved her translation. (Watch her perform a selection in Ancient Greek at the 92nd Street Y.)
Sorry, Nolan, but this (in my humble opinion) is the best on-screen adaptation of the Odyssey to date:
Without further ado…
Merriam-Webster defines ‘lurid’ as:
Lurid: adjective (lu· rid) ˈlu̇r-əd1 a: causing horror or revolutionb: melodramatic, sensational2 a: wan and ghastly pale in appearanceb: of any of several light or medium grayish colors ranging from yellow to orange3 shining with the red glow of fire seen through smoke or clouds
Subscribe to Lauren’s Lurid Things for free to receive new posts monthly.
The July Lurid Things
(Book) The Buried Truth Beneath the Lurid Flames: The Reformatory by Tananarive Due
(Music) Norma Night’s “Romantasy” Is a Delightful Banger
(Art) The Uncanny Paintings of Aron Wiesenfeld
(Movie) The Only Way Out Is Through: Mārama
(Object) The Poetry of the Inefficient: The Jewelry of Middaia
(Science) Sizzle Sizzle Pop: The Wet-Bulb Globe Temperature
*We’re fresh out of sensations this month, because I think we’ve all have quite enough of those!
(Book) The Buried Truth Beneath the Lurid Flames: The Reformatory by Tananarive Due
June 1950Gracetown, Florida
Robert Stevens held his breath and counted to three, hoping to see Mama.
What Robert does that fateful morning is what little boys often do—play games to see if ghosts (haints) are real. It’s an innocuous thing, which is, say, as innocuous as kicking a boy later that morning when he tries to harass Robert’s sister. The problem lies in the fact that Robert is black and the much-older boy he kicked is white, which is enough evidence for the Klan-friendly deputy to arrest Robert the next morning.
A judge sentences Robert Stevens to a “lenient” six months at Gracetown School for Boys, and that is where Mama and the haints return. No longer a game of nighttime whimsy, the haints become real; the antics of one in particular send Robert to the incongruously named Fun House for an evening of near-unspeakable corporeal horror.
The plot structure was so airtight I was greedy: gobbling the pages until the wee hours of the morning. I felt the need to stand and clap once I’d finished, a tribute to Due’s framework of unrelenting tension. It’s a squeamish read for more reasons than the gore and the violence—namely, the necessary accuracy of the virulent racism during Jim Crow and all the ways with which a white person can fail their neighbor, friends, and in one character’s case, distant family.
If you’re aching for a historical horror that’ll keep you up all night reading, then The Reformatory by Tananarive Due is for you.
You can purchase The Reformatory on Bookshop.org
(Music) Norma Night’s “Romantasy” Is a Delightful Banger
Norma Night (the stage name of Kelsey Ellison) has released her self-proclaimed ‘demisexual book nerd anthem’ and it does NOT disappoint. Half-70s throwback, half-medieval remixing, “Romantasy” is a fun ride.
The art of attraction is an unsolved mystery,Need a detective, c’mon Agatha Christie!On the Piccadilly Line, I’m looking for a sign,Something catches my wandering eye.So many immersed in their pages,Imaginations are so captivated.So I follow my curiosity,And I discover it’s just what I need!
It’s a clever little song, devoid of moralizing, with a hypnotic medieval beat. But beware! It’s been stuck in my head for over a week, and I think it’ll be stuck in yours, too!
Be sure to check out her other earworms that I love: “Tan Lines” and “HIGHWAY HYPNOSIS.”
You can support Ellison’s main page on Instagram, or Norma Night here
(Art) The Uncanny Paintings of Aron Wiesenfeld
I found Wiesenfeld’s work the way I found a lot of art these days: on my Instagram Explore page. Bless and curse the algorithm (and all the water it’s glugging), but by god, was it spot on. Disaffected youths in unsettling locales? Sign me up!
After training at Cooper Union, Wiesenfeld got his start at Marvel Comics in 1993, contributing to Cable and X-Men. He then went on to work for Wildstorm Studios, working on Team 7, Deathblow, and Wolverine.
Wiesenfeld’s pivot to painting began after he completed his studies at the ArtCenter College of Design. You can see the influence that illustration had on his style and subject matter: His subjects posses movement and the transience of a moment’s blink. Action and intent are clear from the first glance, as are the contradicting intents in the environment. Wiesenfeld’s is a style that tells story, much like my personal favorite illustrator, Edward Gorey, who Wiesenfeld says inspires him.
You can follow and support Wiesenfeld on Instagram and on his personal website
(Movie) The Only Way Out Is Through: Mārama
To move into our future we must understand our past…
Mārama opens with a familiar Gothic structure: An unemployed governess arrives in a remote part of England, answering a mysterious letter that claims knowledge about the identity of her birth family. The movie sharply departs from traditional structure when the cabbie transporting her suddenly halts the carriage, hands her her luggage, and forces her to walk the rest of the way. It’s an abrupt departure from the expected class structure in a traditional Gothic tale, as Mārama (or Mary Stevens), our heroine, is immediately othered by the cabbie’s arbitrary and unexplained whim. The moment goes unexplained, but it sets the tone for the rest of the piece: Like in all “polite” societies, racism is never fully explained, just tiptoed around, hinted at and absorbed the way one knows to avoid a locked and forbidden room. Mārama eventually finds that room and the way in, forcing to lurid, flaming light the appalling atrocities the Cole family has wrought against the women of her family.
It’s a gorgeous movie, with all the shots of natural beauty as evocative as an oil painting, but not in the moments of depravity. Those moments, when the movements tickle and then churn with a stomach-clenching drop, and when the blood runs splattered and then thick with a cruel clarity, are shot matter-of-factly, almost clinically in their unflinching depictions. There is no romanticism or lingering, just an unspoken focus and shift that seems to say, “This is what happened. And then this, and then this.” We the viewers are given the opportunity to bear witness to a rectification, to a woman refusing to bend to the culture of another. Indeed, all the women in the movie display what are considered “male” emotions (like rage and unspeakable grief), tabooed by white patriarchy, while the Victorian white men in the film seemingly display “feminine, acceptable” emotions like empathy, cultural sensitivity and inclusion, patience, and understanding. This choice takes what could be an overly simplistic revenge/exploitation tale and shatters the format with nuance, as one of the horrors of the film is not the individual men that Mārama encounters, but the childlike innocence they possess. Their stunted brutality comes from their buried entitled beliefs, and that is why they ultimately withhold Mārama’s necessary truths. It is the way a child acts before they learn the lessons of the world, that despite your best intentions, you can still hurt another with your need. However, the ultimate horror of Mārama is in learning that the truths she seeks should have been given freely, or, as we learn later, should have never happened and perhaps (definitely) left entirely alone.
Mārama is a necessary film, not just for the Māori people of Aotearoa, but for people everywhere. Ignorance is a knife easily wielded, and films like Taratoa Stappard’s Mārama remind us that no one is ever safe from its cut. It’s the true mark of a talented storyteller to make an abstract evil immediate and chilling, and Stappard does so many times over. It also doesn’t hurt that he gave his heroine one of the coolest, multi-symboled dresses in horror canon:
You can watch Mārama on Apple TV or Prime.
Visit the film’s website here
(Object) The Poetry of the Inefficient: The Jewelry of Middaia
Launched in 2021, Middaia is a Parisian jewelry brand with an ethos as anti-utilitarian as it is hauntingly beautiful. Each piece is handmade from recycled sterling silver or ceramics and deadstock antique lace, inspired by pieces from bygone eras. It’s a brand that begs multiple questions: Does jewelry have to be uniform? Does jewelry have to serve a specific use? Can things just be beautiful and appreciated as such? What, if anything, is the use of use?
Their recent Perfume Vial collection interrogates our modern complacency with “clean aesthetics”: clean eating, clean girl makeup, and clean open-air floor plans (hiss hiss). In the spirit of Medieval pomanders, we see jewelry that acknowledges the plague and the bad smells as a reality that does not need to be obliterated. Instead, the camouflaging can be quite chic:
In a time where COVID is still rampant and plaguing, Meddaia’s jewelry feels both apt and prescient. In the face of many things that seemingly have no present cure (the widespread environmental destruction by data centers, the barbarity of ICE, the callous erosion of our constitutional rights by flock cameras and AI, etc., etc., etc.), Meddaia’s mystical talismans hold great appeal.
I’ve been a longtime admirer for some time. When I say admirer, I mean that I’ve downright coveted their Opal Leaf Lace Ring for over a year until it tragically sold out:
You can purchase any and all Meddaia here
(Science) Sizzle Sizzle Pop: The Wet-Bulb Globe Temperature
It’s been a scorcher of a summer. Across the American Northeast, we reached temperatures closer to 110 in the shade (with humidity). If you have POTS like I’ve had my entire adult life (Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome), then you probably asked yourself more than once this past month: Is today the day I die? Is this how I go? Compressed bodily to an inch of my life, chugging seven electrolyte packets back to back and willing the power to stay on through various magical chants, all while hiding Grey Gardens-style behind blackout curtains? During actual Disability Pride Month, no less?!
Miraculously, I did not die (it did get a little touch-and-go with the breathing), but like the sickly Victorian-child-wilting-in-the-bed that I often am, I decided to take this lemon (my stir-crazy) and make some research lemonade. It turns out that there is an actual marker for the unbearableness that I experienced, and it’s called the wet-bulb globe temperature (that’s WBGT to you). Unlike the heat index, which only measures air temperature and humidity, the WBGT measures heat stress on the human body in direct sunlight.
And guess what? That heat advisory I was just alluding to? It was a whopper of wet bulb.
According to the National Weather Service, the WBGT:
…estimates the effect of temperature, relative humidity, wind speed, and solar radiation on humans using a combination of temperatures from three thermometers:A Wet bulb measures the temperature read by a thermometer covered in a wet cloth. As water evaporates from the cloth, evaporation cools the thermometer. This mirrors how the human body cools itself with sweat.A Black globe is used to measure solar radiation. Solar radiation heats the globe and wind blowing across it cools the globe.A Dry bulb calculates the air temperature measured in the shade. It is the temperature you would see on your thermometer outside.
All of these components come together to calculate WBGT in the following equation:
Tw is the wet bulb temperature, which indicates humidity
Tg is the globe temperature, which indicates radiant heat
Td is the ambient air (dry) temperature
Once the WBGT has been calculated, you can compare the result to the various WBGT categories of death—I mean, heat illness.
(I’m not taking you to the CDC’s website for this image, because apparently the funding cuts extended to the programming and graphics team. Actually, you know what? You need to see this for yourself.)
A better image from the National Forecast Digital Database:
And more detail concerning the categories:
As you can probably infer, these categories are applicable to able-bodied individuals. I’d be curious to see what a wet-bulb globe temperature advisory would look like for individuals residing in current heat islands and individuals with diseases like myself. I’m already extremely sensitive to weather changes, such as changes in barometric pressure, and I can tell you with the same painful accuracy of an arthritic 80-year-old if a storm is coming. (No rain today, but judging from the slight tightness in my joints, I’d say it’ll be partly cloudy later on.) Like AQI warnings for air quality, it would be wonderful (well, life-changing) to have a more widespread advisory warning for heat-related illness, given how prone POTS individuals are to heat intolerance, and subsequently, heat stroke.
I won’t let myself get too excited, considering how we currently devalue science and education in general in our country, but I’ll let this essay be my penny that I cast into the rusting fountain of our public discourse.
Here’s a cute little form on how to find and contact your elected officials if you feel so motivated!
That’s it for now!
If you need me, I’ll be having a tortoise-slow morning in the Azores,
sipping a lemon and butterfly pea flower tea,
watching everyone very carefully now that this guy walked into the resort…
See you next month,
XOXO Lauren
