{"id":40486,"date":"2026-06-27T10:16:10","date_gmt":"2026-06-27T10:16:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lesbianfunworld.com\/books\/?p=40486"},"modified":"2026-06-27T10:16:10","modified_gmt":"2026-06-27T10:16:10","slug":"dark-matters-by-susan-hawthorne","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lesbianfunworld.com\/books\/dark-matters-by-susan-hawthorne\/","title":{"rendered":"Dark Matters by Susan Hawthorne"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\r\n\r\nKate is arrested before dawn. She doesn’t know why. In the cell, the beatings are systematic. Sleep deprivation works its chemistry on the brain. But what actually tortures her is not knowing what happened to Mercedes, her partner. Whether she’s alive. Whether she’s being held. Whether she’s already gone.\n\n\n\n\n\nKate invents stories to survive. She pulls the myths her mother and grandmothers carried from Greece and rewrites them. She composes poems inside her head where interrogators can’t reach them. She holds herself together through language and invention and the knowledge that Mercedes might be doing the same thing somewhere else in the building.\n\n\n\n\n\nKate dies. Years later, her niece Desi inherits boxes of papers\u2014fragments, testimony, encrypted language. She inherits silence that demands to be broken. She travels to South America to find what Kate only partially knew: Mercedes’ family history, political disappearance layered across decades, the particular violence directed at lesbians under authoritarian regimes. The connection between Kate’s arrest and Mercedes’ family isn’t coincidental. It’s architectural.\n\n\n\n\n\nHawthorne builds the novel across two timelines, two registers. Kate’s poetic interior\u2014survival through mythology and language. Desi’s documentary reconstruction\u2014the gathering of facts, the assembly of history that no one wanted preserved. Throughout, the question persists: how do hidden histories pass between generations? What does it cost to carry them? How do you honor someone’s death when the machinery that killed them is still operating?\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Greek mythic tradition woven through Kate’s prison poems gives the novel formal weight that lifts it beyond political testimony, though it is absolutely that. The mythology becomes the structure through which unspeakable violence gets witnessed and preserved.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n\r\n
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