Trope: Shock Value

  • A Guest in the House

    A Guest in the House

    After many lonely years, Abby’s just gotten married. She met her new husband, a recently widowed dentist, when he arrived in town with his young daughter seeking a new start. Although it’s strange living in the shadow of her predecessor, Abby does her best to be a good wife and mother, but the more she

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  • Witchcraft for Wayward Girls

    Witchcraft for Wayward Girls

    They call them wayward girls. Loose girls. Girls who grew up too fast. And they’re sent to the Wellwood Home in St. Augustine, Florida, where unwed mothers are hidden by their families to have their babies in secret, give them up for adoption, and most important of all, to forget any of it ever happened.

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  • After God Vol. 7

    After God Vol. 7

    You know what, I feel bad for Obikawa. He’s caught in this weird web of friendship and manipulation, and as my favorite character and the biggest rat-man in the series, I do not think he should have become a liquidated mass of meat. (not that I think the story should go differently, i truly wonder

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  • Black Sheep

    Black Sheep

    A cynical twentysomething must confront her unconventional family’s dark secrets in this fiery, irreverent horror novel from the author of Such Sharp Teeth and Cackle. Nobody has a “normal” family, but Vesper Wright’s is truly…something else. Vesper left home at eighteen and never looked back—mostly because she was told that leaving the staunchly religious community

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  • My Best Friend’s Exorcism

    My Best Friend’s Exorcism

    Was Grady Hendrix a teenage girl in a past life? Some of it is staggeringly teenage girl. The horror of being young and powerless rolls off this book strongly. No one believing you when you try to tell the truth, when things go awry. The world suddenly turning against you when you don’t have privilege.

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  • The Twice-Scorned Lady of Shadow

    The Twice-Scorned Lady of Shadow

    I’m learning to embrace who and what I am, but there’s one thing I can’t face: the night Zak betrayed me. But even with the mysteries of our shared past hanging between us, I can’t turn Zak away when he asks for my help. Powerful fae are going missing, and when he tried to investigate,

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  • The Long-Forgotten Winter King

    The Long-Forgotten Winter King

    Everyone is keeping secrets. Zak won’t reveal what really happened between us ten years ago. Ríkr’s been hiding so much I scarcely recognize him anymore. But the biggest secret belongs to my parents, and it’s the one I’m most desperate to unravel. Finding out who they really were, and who I am, means solving their

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  • The Bottom-Tier Baron’s Accidental Rise to the Top Vol. 1

    The Bottom-Tier Baron’s Accidental Rise to the Top Vol. 1

    Harem Scale H: All motives are entirely selfish. 0 A: He is very motivated by women’s bodies and they are weirdly obsessed with him. 5 R: 0 this guy sucks E: 5 it’s not got dicks but it really lays it on thick M: 0 fuck this i disliked this psuedo-gag manga so much that

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  • Be My Worst Nightmare

    Be My Worst Nightmare

    This third volume ends up going into another doll-dream situation, this one much more dire. Older brother bumps into a kid and starts mother hen-ing the guy, then it turns out the kid is a sex worker and has been sucking dick for attention. Needless to say, our bro ends up trying to save the

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Welcome to the Menagerie.

Here is where M logs their media activity. Partly because Goodreads is forgettable and keeping physical logs is harder. Sometimes M writes a lot. Sometimes M doesn’t write enough. It doesn’t matter. This is just a for-fun little blog so that M can remember what they thought about whatever they watched or read or played or. Whatever.


What is M?

I read. Voraciously. I have subscriptions to those book things on digital retailers. I consume books at nearly all hours. The hours I don’t spend reading? I’m writing. I’m drawing. I have a problem. I have a problem in that I love to read things that are in the same vein repeatedly. Book journals don’t work and as much as I text my friends screenshots of book passages, it doesn’t scratch the itch. Now I’m going to be doing… tiny… tiny book reports.


Truck-Kun Kill Count:


Books & Light Novels Read in 2025: 19/50
38%
Comics Read in 2026: 39/200
19%
Physical Owned Books Read: 477/830
58%


Menagerie Categories


Tagged in the Menagerie

Absolute Asshole NPC (86) A Fetish For Suffering (45) Can't Say No (67) Chekov's Gun (42) Childhood Friends (50) Curiosity Fucks You Up (76) Cursed (58) Damsel in Distress (57) Damsel in Distress (subverted) (85) Dangerous Reputation (85) Doting Husband (64) Double Identity (41) Everyone Loves MC (87) Evil Eyes & Big Heart (49) Fan Service (92) Grumpy x Sunshine (52) Hypercompetent MC (72) If You Love Them, Set Them Free (49) I Know a Guy (46) Last Minute Hero (97) Loss of Humanity (50) Main Character Coloring (69) MC's Skewed Metrics (71) Mean Boy (118) Mean Boy Love Interest (47) Modern Morals (45) Nat 20s (89) Not Actually Dead (74) Nuclear Revenge (68) OP Protag (91) Petty Revenge (44) Power of Friendship (73) Power of Love (68) Self-Sacrifice (67) Shock Value (44) Sympathetic Evil (63) The Moral is Community (60) Tragic Backstory (76) Twist! (55) Uniquely Skilled (87) Unreliable Narrator (53) Weird and Wacky On Purpose (74) Western-Style Fantasy (83) Wrong Place Wrong Time (64) Zero to Hero (77)


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