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Two Essays on The Count of Monte Cristo

I love The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas. I have read the unabridged version more than once, and my most recent reread was in 2023. At that time, I wrote a couple of brief essays which I posted on Tumblr, one of which was about a canonically queer character and the other discussed a character who is often left out of the various adaptations. I present for you these essays with expansion and alteration, because I keep returning to them as pieces of writing and because I don't want them to be limited to those original posts. I'd like to thank longtime Patron Case Aiken, who receives a monthly shoutout, as well as new patrons DivineJasper and Sasha Khan. (Quotes are from Robin Buss’ English translation of Alexandre Dumas’ work.) Link to Audio Version. ----- Canonical Queerness in The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas You’d need to change surprisingly little of The Count of Monte Cristo to confirm Eugénie Danglars as a trans man (or a masc-leaning nonbinary person...
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Singularity by William Sleator

Identical twins Barry and Harry Krasner are house-sitting at their great-uncle's Midwest farm. It's peaceful at first, but soon they realize there's something about the farmhouse that makes locals stay far away. The twins are sure that the locked shed out back is their reason why - but what they find there is more shocking than anything they could have imagined.

TITLE: Singularity
AUTHOR: William Sleator
PUBLISHER: Puffin Books
YEAR: 1995
LENGTH: 176 pages 
AGE: Young Adult
GENRE: Science Fiction
RECOMMENDED: Yes

Queer Rep Summary: No canon queer rep.

“Think about what it means to go through. Once you start, there’s no changing your mind and turning back… You’d be totally alone… Think how lonely and awful that would be. You’d… kind of be a singularity yourself.”

Harry and Barry are twins, temporarily staying at their recently-deceased great-uncle's farm when they discover something strange about the backyard shed. 

Harry is content being a twin, he's more bothered by how vocally Barry seems to hate being his twin. This tension drives a very drastic choice Harry makes late in the book. Their relationship revolves around meager attempts at bonding followed by bullying in various forms. There's a neighbor girl who exists mostly as an outsider to verify that what they think is happening has actually happened. She serves to shift the balance of power between them (usually in Barry's favor) rather than having an endless back-and-forth of the kind it seems they had at home.

The worldbuilding is well done, a bunch of little things early on end up having a pretty cool answer, fitting together in a great way. I like the plot, but the ending has an ambiguity which makes it hard to know whether it's supposed to be read triumphantly or as horror. I come down more on the side of horror, but I definitely didn't pick up on that when I first read it as a teenager.

CW for ableist language (brief), vomit (brief), mental illness (discussed), confinement (graphic), eating disorder, bullying, emotional abuse, slavery (brief mention), animal death, death.

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Two boys looking down into a pool of water with the image of a metallic shark creature looming inside


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