My brother in Christ, you chose the body parts.

Mild spoilers

I'm not sure reading this book alone is enough for me to understand MSSOM's mind. No doubt it suffers from being the origin of so many tropes and traditions. Reading it for the first time in 2025, it feels that I am doing it to have "read a classic" and properly "get the references". It's not too challenging a read; despite the language and style being outdated it isn't inaccessible.

Maybe there's a lot more to this book that bounces off my dense skull. I'm not sure what the merit was behind it being a nested story although I'm assuming horror was perceived differently a couple hundred years ago. There's philosophical questions and debates that are discussed but nothing that will be revalatory to a modern reader. The protagonist makes a slew of silly choices, I think the most glaring being completely misinterpreting the wedding-night theat. Even for 200 years ago, surely that was so predictable to have not been a "twist".

In the end, I've nothing much to say. I don't like or dislike it. Glad to have read it, unlikely to do so again.