Dragotheus

 I can say for a fact I was never a fan of Harry Potter. I loved magic and all sorts of fantasy, but I always regarded Harry Potter as, well, trash. I know Rowling was the first to do a lot of things, but she was way over-glorified for my liking. Praised as a female writer, and promoter of women, yet stars a male child who's story is just a copy of old Greeco-Roman myths. Love triangle and drama, it was clearly meant for children with no idea what life is like. Even if magic were real, it paints a very perfect image of how cleanly things are tied up. So, if I hated Harry Potter this much, what did I think Akata Witch had to offer? If I could have ever got off the "this is just Harry Potter" part I would have seen the other stuff sooner. It had unique aspects, juju instead of mana, rituals, sacrifices, murder mystery, racial and gender discrimination. And was I impressed? Unfortunately, not at all. Reimagining your own magic system is a feat in itself, but when some of the...

Relations with Lovecraft mythos I have read a few of Lovecraft's stories, and I can say there is something they all had in common: being changed. Most of the narrators don't return from their expeditions to the realms featured in Lovecraft lore, and those who do are never the same again. Whether they feature physical mutation or mental warping, they are not who they once were. The sentence when this all clicked for me in Annihilation is when the Psychologist tells the narrator "You've changed." This was like a punch in the gut for me. The narrator, at that point, wasn't showing major signs of physical change. But the psychologist could still tell something was different about her. I think the most chilling part of the story wasn't the experiences the narrator had but rather the transition of being human to something else. Separation of Soul and Body Part of the transition is a physical change. The narrator starts to noticeably glow, and there could be othe...