ghoulnextdoor
-
Content Count
815 -
Joined
-
Last visited
7 Followers
Recent Profile Visitors
4,591 profile views
-
The Donkey's Tail
ghoulnextdoor replied to doomsday_disco's topic in Gifts with Donation or Purchase
I don't want to write a review for this, I only want to tell you this smells like an extremely fuckin' haunted doll and also that I want twenty bottles of it. But that's not fair, and it is also a bit lazy. So: You dream of someone crying. soft and persistent as rain on wool. At the antique stall, "Mourning keepsake," the card said. "Unknown provenance." Her head, porcelain. Her dress, pewter silk and blush-faded ribbons, lavender stems worked through cotton. Someone loved her into being. Someone, heart-rent, hands shaking with grief. Heavier than she looked. Inside, something whispered and later, the seam gave way. Funeral roses. Brown now, petals ground to dust, packed tight into her body like prayers into a throat. Tell me— when you wake from the dream of her crying, what do you do with all this sadness this grief that isn't yours? -
Roses preserved in amber resin, petals crystallized to honeyed bronze. Estate sale jewelry boxes lined with yellowed velvet, gilt-edged brooches oxidized to a dusky patina. Caramelized corsage, barley sugar twists and horehound drops, unctuous burnt-sugar varnish. Your grandmother's nosegay pressed between the pages of a 1950s etiquette book, ribbons still faintly fragrant with Helene Curtis Spray and the face powder she wore to Wednesday night bridge club, way back when getting dressed up called for gloves and a little hat, even if you were only going three blocks over to Maureen's house for that undrinkable coffee everyone politely finished because that's just how you did.
-
There's no cardamom listed in this scent, and there's no cardamom here, not really. But this is what cardamom might smell like, absent its bitter spice: green eucalyptus sharpness, citrus-wood undertones, cool and aquatic, faintly aromatic. Ghostly flowers float on inky waters, musk of a moon moth, sweet and clear as a bell. This is a being who exists on a frequency you'll never tune into. She operates in a reality parallel to yours. She has never been human. She will never be human. The concept of humanity might not register as something worth knowing. She also does not know what cardamom is. Who? She asks, eyes insectile and lunar. Glassy, unblinking, and strange.
-
Following the international bestseller KRAMPUS'S FORBIDDEN GRIND... TRIPLE SHOT AT LOVE: GROUNDS FOR SUSPICION #1 in Rare Book Romance (CW: dangerous manuscripts, competitive bidding, caffeine as foreplay) When rival rare book dealers Sebastian and Margot both find themselves at Café Arcana hunting the same impossible alchemical manuscript rumored to transform gold into the perfect cup, they agree to a temporary truce. The barista, fair Ophelia, has been counting on exactly this. The moment they trust each other, they're hers. She serves them a dark demonic brew roasted at temperatures summoned from the ninth circle of hell, and they settle in among brittle manuscripts and ravaged bindings reeking of forbidden knowledge and dust older than empires. As ancient pages whisper their mysteries and Ophelia's brews grow dangerously, addictively potent, they realize she isn't just making coffee. She IS the manuscript. She's been waiting 300 years for the right combination: two rivals stupid enough to think they could possess her, arrogant enough to deserve what's coming, and desperate enough to stop competing and start copulating. I mean collaborating. "Finally, a love triangle where everyone WINS and also maybe loses their SOULS" (Occult Romance Weekly) "The chemistry is UNREAL and so is the coffee and I haven't slept in 48 hours" (#BookTok)
-
Violet wallpaper in the hallway, plum velvet drapes in the parlor, lavender silk sheets on the bed. Lilac gloves laid out beside the mauve hatbox. An amethyst brooch pinned to her orchid-colored blouse. She arranges the iris-patterned teacups just so, checks her reflection in the mirror framed in wisteria wood. The aubergine carpet muffles her footsteps. In the kitchen, eggplant preserves gleam in glass jars on a pristine countertop Her tools rest in a mulberry-lined case: the No. 7 crochet hook polished to a shine, sharp as surgical steel but delicate as the hyacinth lace she crocheted last winter. She does beautiful work. Precise. You can barely see the hole hooked into the throat of the corpse on the floor. When she's finished, she washes up with thistle-scented soap, changes into her indigo dressing gown, and sits down to crochet something new. Maybe a shroud.
-
A lime on an ice floe, wearing sunglasses. Pale juice, cold-zapped. Sun on snow, blinding white. The lime casts no shadow but casts a circle in salt. The lime is simultaneously freezing and thawing, bright. Sharp. Frozen, broken things having a good time at the end of the world.
-
SPECIMEN CLASSIFICATION: CRYSTALLUS SINGULARIS Observed December 21st, 1927, Miskatonic Valley Professor Elias Wentworth, Department of Crystallography Upon first observation, the specimen presented geometries of such singular and cyclopean complexity as to defy conventional Euclidean classification. The primary hexagonal structure, while superficially conforming to known ice crystal morphology, revealed upon closer examination a fractal recursion of nameless intricacy, each branching arm subdividing into ever-smaller iterations of impossible precision. The coloration proved equally anomalous: not the expected translucent white, but rather a frosted sage of spectral luminescence, shot through with veins of glacial verdure and gelid chlorophyll that seemed to shift and multiply when viewed through the kaleidoscopic lens. The effect was not unlike peering into dimensions of space hitherto unknown to mortal science—angles that should not exist, proportions that violated natural law, yet arranged with such terrible beauty as to inspire equal measures of awe and incomprehension. Most disturbing: the specimen exhibits a menacing quality I cannot adequately describe. Fresh. Chilly. Herbal citrus notes emanating from its crystalline surface. Further study req— [ARCHIVAL NOTE: The above entry represents Professor Wentworth's final coherent observation. He was discovered three hours later in his laboratory, having etched hexagonal patterns into the laboratory walls, floors, and his own flesh. He remains under care at Arkham Sanitarium, where he continues to mutter about "the geometry" and refuses to look at snow. The specimen in question melted without incident. —Dr. H. Armitage, University Librarian, 1928]
-
You're having a peaceful morning, enjoying your elevenses, minding your own business, and living quietly as one does when you glance out the window and there's your weirdo neighbor again. Full setup this time: gimbal rig, ring light positioned to catch the morning sun, lavalier mic clipped to their embroidered waistcoat. They've arranged a tableau on their hobbit-hole's front step - bowl of heritage grain toasted oats, bunches of fresh carrot greens still dirt-speckled, pot of fresh, lemony verbena tea steaming invitingly. "Good morning, Shire fam! Welcome back to my channel. Today we're doing my cozy morning routine - very clean hobbit aesthetic, very second-breakfast-core." Take after take, adjusting the angle, moving the honey pot three centimeters left. "This heritage oat situation has been such a game-changer for my wellness journey, link to the mill in my description, don't gatekeep!" The whole scene smells genuinely wholesome despite the production: toasty grains, fresh-pulled vegetables, proper tea poured with care. They grew those carrots themselves. The oats are from their own stores. They might be ridiculously mugging for the camera, but you can't fake roots that deep. You smile ruefully and help yourself to another slice of seed cake. Maybe a barley scone too. It's a long time til afternoon tea!
-
A memory you can't explain the significance of, where nothing happened but everything felt inevitable and true. Late afternoon, winter, pulled over on some rural highway to watch the sunset. Purple streaking through grey, the sky bruised and soft, every shade of twilight from plum to dove, from amethyst to ash. A cardboard cup from a small-town artsy café, steamed milk infused with flowers, vanilla syrup frothed and foaming. A scarf that smells faintly of perfume, worn three days ago when the trip began. The woods beyond the guardrail are bare, sanded smooth by wind and cold, no angles or edges. Breathing winter air through cabled wool stitches, once dense and taut, now relaxed and shaped to our skin. For reasons you'll never articulate, this moment brands itself into your soul as important. Years later, you'll catch this scent and be back on that shoulder, cup warming your hands, light failing, everything soft and rounded and impossibly tender. Impossible that it ever happened at all.
-
"3 AM/awakened by a sweet summer rain/ Distant howling /of a passing /southbound coal train." Jim White's low, laconic narration, Aimee Mann's sweet echoing lullaby. "Was I dreaming, or was there someone just lying here/ Beside me in this bed?" Lavender's herbal whisper, threaded with cool grassy thistle. Clean linen, powdery soap, freshly laundered pillowcases, cotton worn thin and shaped to a body that doesn't feel like yours anymore, it hasn't in a while. Hiss and hum, signal loss between stations, the fuzzy half-awake feeling where you can't tell what's real and what's dreamed. Every certainty you built your life on dissolves into white noise and snow. The quiet crisis of middle age, waking in the dark and realizing all your convictions were just incomplete pictures, inadequate attempts to understand. Everything you think you know is just static on the radio.
-
A lost Wes Anderson screenplay wherein Little Red carries the remnants of her Halloween candy to grandmother's house for Christmas. The contents: six tangerine-orange circus peanuts (slightly stale), twelve lemon sherbets wrapped in yellow cellophane, three jammy strawberry boiled sweets the color of fresh arterial blood, and one spiced pumpkin confection shaped like a small gourd. She encounters the wolf at precisely 2:47 PM, seventeen meters past the old balsam grove where the snow is deepest and wettest and most tactically advantageous. Act I: The Decoy. The basket drops in slow motion. Candy scatters across white snow in a perfect radius—citrus orange, sherbet yellow, strawberry red, pumpkin amber. The wolf's pupils dilate, furry nostrils flare. He has, Red notes with satisfaction, a documented weakness for sugar. This was always part of the plan. Chapter Two: Infrastructure and Positioning. While he inhales the scent of lemon sherbet (his favorite), Red moves through the balsam with the efficiency of someone who attended Camp Hemlock, Summer 2019, Wilderness Survival Track. Her supplies: three beeswax candles (ivory, hand-dipped), one ball of cranberry garland (crimson, 6.5 meters), hearthwood kindling, and a small tin of smoked myrrh resin she's been saving for exactly this scenario. The tripwire is string between two symmetrical trees. The kindling arranges itself into a small, controlled pyre. Part III: The Immolation. The wolf collects circus peanuts in his mouth like a child. He doesn't notice the garland at ankle height, stretched taut and gleaming. The fall is spectacular—all four legs, perfect cartoon arc. He lands directly in Red's carefully constructed fire pit, which ignites on impact. The smoked myrrh makes it ceremonial. The beeswax makes it beautiful. The spiced pumpkin treat, crushed beneath him, makes it smell like Halloween and Christmas happened simultaneously in the same terrible instant. Grandmother receives her Christmas candles at 4:32 PM. Most of them, anyway. Red keeps one as a souvenir, amber-drizzled and slightly singed.
-
Thomas Dambo's wooden trolls spend their days in the elements, rain-soaked, moss-creeping up their knuckles, lichen settling into the grain. By nightfall, they're sodden all the way through, rotting slowly like any forgotten sculpture left to the weather. But they have a place to go when darkness falls, a sanctuary no one else knows about. Inside, the air is warm and impossibly dry. Cured wood, glossily lacquered, polished and gleaming. Spices whisk and whirl—cardamom and allspice, toasted and bronzed and blistered. A warmth that draws the damp, straight through to heartwood. They settle in, creaking and groaning, and feel a glow kindling in their hollow chests, the feeling inside when you're finally, finally home.
-
The smell of creative obsession after you've been working for days without noticing, that moment you finally surface and realize you're hungry and aching and haven't showered in who knows how long. Something sour and unwashed, cheesy and human, the physical cost of disappearing into your work. From across the room it's intriguing, that musk of someone deep in the zone, but up close it's almost repellent—the reality of bodies neglected in service of making something. Where do we go when we're like that? What liminal space swallows us whole, spits us out days later blinking and disoriented? You leave your body there, or it leaves you, time moves differently or doesn't move at all. You emerge with paint under your fingernails, ink stains blooming across your palms, the ghost of ideas still clinging to your hair. The work gets done but you can't remember eating, sleeping, the basic maintenance of being alive. You've been somewhere else entirely, some fevered creative underworld where the only thing that matters is finishing, completing, manifesting whatever's been clawing at your insides demanding to exist. This is what that place smells like—not the glossy fantasy of the tortured artist, but the actual funk of artistic sin. Stale breath and forgotten meals, skin gone sour from stress hormones and tunnel vision, clothes worn too many days in a row because changing them would mean acknowledging the outside world still exists. The sourness of someone who's been burning themselves as fuel, converting flesh and sleep and sanity into something tangible, something real. You bring back the work, yes, but also this smell, this evidence of the sacrifice, proof you went somewhere most people won't follow because it costs too much to stay there. The dry down smells like the finished work itself, an earthy elegance polished by multiple drafts and a diligent editor, refined into something presentable... but underneath runs an insistent current, the indelible signature of the creator's weird funk.
-
What if the green fairy wasn't absinthe at all but lime flavoring? That chemical brightness that tastes nothing like actual limes but everything like the Platonic ideal of citrus translated through laboratory genius. An electric emerald conjuring that appears in jelly beans, gummy bears, snow cones, Jello molds, Freezee pops, a green that only exists in artificial form, nature could never! La fée verte viridian visions granted not through wormwood but through whatever makes lime lifesavers taste like that, like chartreuse and shamrock make you feel, impossibly, deliriously green.
-
The main character from some isekai anime I'm making, totally making up just for this perfume review, but if someone writes the screenplay, they'd better give me credit! "I Died Choking on Strawberry Milk Pocky and Got Reincarnated as the Autumn Demon Queen." Dead leaves crushed underfoot, meeting kawaii streetwear: the crunchy vegetation of seasonal decay paired with fuzzy pink cable-knit and cartoon-animal faces. She's supposed to preside over fall and mortality but shows up to every council meeting in a patchwork sweater with bunnies on it, strawberry milk powder dusting her sleeves, strawberry marshmallow mochi in her pockets, strawberry white choco latte in her baby pink Stanley cup, pastel in a world of russet and rot, autumn trying its best to be taken seriously while its demon queen insists on being adorable. (I'll be honest, this sweater inspired this entire review.)