The Shrieking Shack

The Exquisite Torment of Loving Your Enemy chapters 16-18

We have never been more 30 years old. We spend our first segment chatting about appliances, time management, and how far we've come since our exploding microwaves from goodwill days. This week's reading is... surprisingly okay! Or at the very least, it's splashy and indulgent, with a lot of over-the-top gore and a fish-out-of-water dinner party scenario. Finally, we round things out with a lesson in branding from a guy who came up with a really, really good pun.

The Exquisite Torment of Loving Your Enemy chapters 13-15

This week we discuss the natural law of forum community drama before learning way too much about Osric's anatomy. Not like, size, or shape, or anything like that; more just like what it's up to, how it feels in different kinds of fabric, that sort of thing. It's a truly baffling chapter this week, including a frankly alarming plot thread where... Fairhim maybe forgets what they did? And Osric notices that? And doesn't say anything? There's really no getting around the weird vibe the story gives off here, but we do our best to meet it where it's at and imagine what it might've been trying to do and what a more interesting version might look like. There's also some stuff about zombie soldiers!

Finally, we take a trip to Orlando and learn all about the Booktok-inspired "scare zone" that features guys doing awesome kneepad slide tricks on the sidewalk and one (1) fog machine.

Content note: there's a decent chunk of episode devoted to picking apart this book's depiction of consent. We keep it light, but if you'd rather not hear any of that skip from the end of the chapter summary to 34:10, where we start talking about the Dreor plot instead

The Exquisite Torment of Loving Your Enemy chapters 7-12

We're back at it with a double-length reading this week! Thank you for your patience. Yes, we read twice as many chapters this week--although you wouldn't really know it, because the real meaty segment this week is the news. We've got a lot to cover (and more we'll get to next week!) as we march towards Pottermania 2.0. Casting drama, product announcements, and Dobby's grave... a lot's been piling up.

Meanwhile, over in TETOLYE: We read twice the chapters we usually would on accident, but perhaps it was for the best. We're square in a patch of awkward characterization and plodding table-setting, but hey,! At least we have a sex scene.

The Exquisite Torment of Loving Your Enemy chapters 4-6

With the 25th anniversary of the first movie and a new show bearing down on us, it's Brands Week on the pod. We take a look at the first volley of press releases for cross-promotional products aimed at 30something Potter fans before getting into our reading. TETOLYE has certainly gone all-in on the adventure story aspects we picked out as the saving grace of the first novel--can it keep up the momentum? And perhaps more importantly: can it make a magical adventure story about bad guys who secretly conspired to invent a disease not as collar-tug-worthy as it sounds? Finally, we attempt to dig into a few more products in the third segment but get very, very off track.

The Exquisite Torment of Loving Your Enemy, chapters 1-3

It's new book day! It's a short but sweet one this week: we convened at late-o-clock to make sure to get this one recorded, because the prospect of covering a book while it's (relatively) new is too exciting. Given our dim view of the first novel, what sort of first impression does the sequel make? It turns out... hey, not bad! We're as shocked as you are.

We discuss the refreshingly brisk opening of the novel, the stylistic changes apparent in the opening chapters, and the odd situation the book finds itself in as a piece of fiction that seems to be trying to escape the Potter orbit while still being marketed directly to Dramione fans.

big ass thunderclap is at 6:05

No reading this week! Just goofing off.

Our next book just released the night before we recorded, so we had a bit of a gap episode this week. There was still plenty to talk about though, including an exhaustive breakdown of how to throw the best party ever, a very 30something rant about pop media, and a second round of last week's fanfiction guessing game.

Draco Malfoy and the Mortifying Ideal of Being In Love

After finishing TIUTFFYE, we dove straight into another extremely long acronym. How does the fic that got publisher attention hold up compared to its descendant? Would you believe... hey not bad! We discuss the differences between fanfiction and fiction, the ways characters are warped by popular perception, and ponder what it is that matters to readers who seek out fanfiction. We'll have more to discuss next week once we've read more, but until then we've also got a poorly-conceived game that puts Liz's ship recognition powers to the test.

The Irresistible Urge to Fall for Your Enemy finale

We finished the book! Or rather, the book just sort of finished. We discuss the strange, sudden ending of TIUTFFYE and gather our thoughts on the novel as a whole. Speaking of hole, there's one last explicit scene for the road in these chapters, and it sends us on a quest to understand what "spice levels" are. What makes a book spicy? Who defines the different levels? Have you shared a low-tongue-description kiss with a partner lately?

It's so good to be back! Thanks for listening.

Notes: we don't talk about it in detail but peppered throughout our book discussion are references to domestic abuse in the story; we mostly just talk about how tasteless we found it without going into detail but it's there. This is also, just generally, a pretty explicit episode!Lots of bodily function talk in this one.

The Irresistible Urge to Fall for Your Enemy, chapters 16-18

RIP Doctor Who. The Tardis crashed into a space embankment at two trillion miles per hour and he blew up. There's been precious little Potter news lately, so we spend some time chatting about how every major tentpole franchise seems to be falling apart these days and how we hope that it happens to Harry soon. Then we discuss our penultimate reading of TIUTFFYE, which... was pretty fun? It's a pleasant surprise, but it's also a tick upward right before the end of the book, so it could all come crashing down next week. We spend a while discussing this surprising turn of events, and then plan a vacation by sifting through a list of wizarding-themed AirBNB listings.

NOTES:

https://www.onlyinyourstate.com/stays/arizona/themed-airbnb-az

https://www.purewow.com/travel/harry-potter-inspired-airbnb

The Irresistible Urge to Fall for Your Enemy, chapters 13-15

Woof. Remember how last week we thought things might be improving? Forget we said any of that. This week we've got some just plain nasty stuff to dig through, but don't worry! We have some fun chatting about Final Fantasy, James Bond, and Dodgers fan Dobby too. Then we get right with the Lord and learn what sort of people are still writing Potter clickbait in 2026. It couldn't possibly be a conservative Christian getting mad about his kid learning that slavery is bad, could it? Well,,

Some notes:

-This week's reading features a lot of clumsy, tasteless depictions of sex work and attempted assault, and we spend most of our time going in on it. Nothing too specific, but it's a bit too broad to give a specific skippable timestamp. It's just kinda all bad this week

-"Fun" fact: ye olde revivalist preacher in the third segment was not only a slave owner, but I did some idle reading after the show and discovered that he also got fired from his parish for inappropriate behavior. In the 1700s! The more things change, eh?