really admirable for how tight the execution of the core themes manages to be without being airlessly so, there's room to breathe. religious trauma obviously, and totally structures the world here - the strong sense of in/outgroup morality, the playful irony teased out between logic and faith as they dialectically sustain each other, the ritual of willful sacrifice and blood magic - all of it is deftly tied back into the one-sidedly destructive homosocial interpersonal/epistemological dynamic, linking two forms of suffocating transparency together while not quite arguing for opacity. with this subject matter, it would be easy to allegorize simplistically and with one-to-one mimesis between the internal logics and the external structuring preoccupations, but the authorial voice is far more gnomic, unresolved, and therefore more interesting than that. need to sit with it for a bit and there's stuff i still don't feel i really grasp fully but definitely incredible