Mrs. Doc
526 posts
@MrsDocAtCDI
Yes I married him... Turns out after 20 years he grows on you I'm told mold does that too...
My girlfriend kept saying I should treat her like a princess. So I forced her to marry an old guy she's never met to secure an alliance with the French.
"Still Here" My thoughts, some might call it a review **★★★★½** Look, I'm gonna be straight with you: this book broke me a little. *Still Here* follows Amy, an eighteen-year-old nobody special, which is exactly the point, through twelve days of captivity under Dr. Gwen, a woman who'd correct you if you called her a torturer. She prefers "curator." or "Artist." She doesn't want to destroy Amy. She wants to erase her and build something clean on the blank space. She documents the process like she's writing a thesis, not committing atrocities. And that's what makes Gwen terrifying. She's not a slasher villain losing her mind in a basement. She's calm. She's articulate. She cleans Amy's wounds not out of compassion but to preserve her "material." The juxtaposition of medical sterility and absolute barbarism creates a kind of dread that sticks to you like humidity. You can't shake it off. Here's the thing, this isn't really Gwen's story. It's not even a torture story, though it will absolutely feel like one for the first few days. What Still Here actually is, underneath all the clinical brutality, is a book about what happens when a mind refuses to die. As the days pile up and the methods escalate, electroshock, sensory deprivation, procedures I don't want to describe over breakfast, Amy's psyche doesn't collapse. It fractures. And those fractures become people. Internal voices show up: one's a sarcastic bastard who weaponizes gallows humor like a survival tool, one's calm and grounding and focused on breath, and one's tied to a name scratched into a table, "SARAH" a ghost of someone who was there before, who fought and left a mark. These aren't hallucinations. They're not "going crazy." They're the mind building a committee to distribute weight it can't carry alone. The interplay between them, the bickering, the dark jokes, the moments of genuine tenderness, is where the writing is at its absolute sharpest. In a book this relentlessly dark, the humor doesn't undercut the horror. It throws it into relief. It reminds you that personhood persists even when everything external has been stripped away. The day-by-day structure works perfectly because it mirrors the captor's own methodology. You're counting days alongside Amy. You're documenting. You're complicit in the observation, whether you like it or not. And the pacing knows exactly when to zoom into clinical detail and when to pull back into the floaty dissociation of a mind that's running out of places to hide. The ending is going to divide people. It's ambiguous by design, a syringe, a smirk, a whispered defiance that's either the ultimate victory or the ultimate cost, depending on what you came looking for. I found it devastating. The book was never about escape. It was about endurance. About whether survival that costs you your original self still counts as winning. It answers that question by refusing to answer it, and I think that's the right call. One more thing: the academic citations tacked onto the end aren't decoration. They retroactively reframe the entire book. Amy's internal chorus isn't genre invention, it's grounded in real dissociative and cognitive research. It makes the whole thing feel less like fiction and more like a case study you weren't supposed to read. That's deeply uncomfortable, and I think that's the point. Fair warning: this is an intensely disturbing book. Graphic, sustained, unflinching. It is not for everyone, and there's zero shame in that. It walks right up to the line of gratuitous and stays on the right side of it, barely, because every single thing that happens serves the story's thesis about identity and survival. But "serving the thesis" doesn't make it easier to read. For the people who can sit with it, though? Still Here is something special. It's a horror novel that's genuinely psychologically sophisticated, a survival story that earns its darkness, and a meditation on selfhood that'll rattle around in your head long after you put it down. Amy's final whisper says it all. Still here. Not safe. Not whole. Not the same person who woke up on that table. But still here. And that's enough, it has to be enough, if you're Still Here. x.com/Amy_IsStillHer…
