mage4mage

A lot of these books are written by authors who really, earnestly believe what they're writing about and present the text as such, so this was a nice change of pace for paranormal mystery books. The author does not ever make the writing match a positive or negative belief of the events described. I've lived here for 10 years and a lot of these stories I was unfamiliar with, but the locations being familiar was exciting.

I also very much appreciate the sections that involve historical psychiatric institutions (especially the one on Frances Farmer) not being written in ableist (that is, negatively towards the mentally ill) ways. The outdated terminology 'insane asylum' was constantly written in quotation marks which was something I've never seen someone who isn't an pscyhiatry-critical advocate do. And the author didn't play up the 'insane asylums' being scary because of the patients, but instead because of the abusive doctors and nurses that treated the patients as lesser human beings. Thank you very much for that.