Eliza and her Monsters by Francesca Zappia Eliza lives with a sitcom family of annoying siblings and health-nut parents who just “don’t get it”. They don’t get computers, they don’t get the Internet. They think the way to live life is out of doors, socializing face to face. And that’s not the only place to find friends and success. Especially for severe introverts like Eliza. Eliza is just a high schooler who writes a webcomic. A damn successful one. From the sound of it, it’s on par with Penny Arcade and xkcd in terms of popularity, but more dramatic (and made in manga style with space-existential elements). But on the…
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The Books I Read: September – October 2017
This is Where It Ends by Marieke Nijkamp In a word, melodramatic. In many other words… The tone of this story skews so heavily feminine it’s distracting. I’m not saying femininity is a bad thing, but an event like this is going to have a lot of different reactions from different people. It’s supposed to be about a real school shooting, but it’s so cheesy it doesn’t feel real. The narrative is split into the perspectives of four victims in four different situations. One is the ex-girlfriend of the shooter, another is the sister of the shooter, another is that sister’s lesbian girlfriend, and last is the trouble-making brother of…
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Is Stephen King Getting Worse or Better?
Stephen King’s going to go down in history as THE novelist of the late twentieth century. More than Dean Koontz or John Green or Danielle Steele. They even made a horror movie about him. I’m not talking about a documentary or his directorial debut (and finale) Maximum Overdrive or a thinly veiled pastiche like in “In the Mouth of Madness“. I mean he was the subject matter. He’s ceased to be a person, but a brand. That’s what I call being part of the public consciousness. Not even J.K. Rowling has that (yet). But art changes over time. Simply because people change over time. Steven Spielberg doesn’t make the same…
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The Books I Read: July – August 2017
Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman I expected this to be like Edith Hamilton’s Mythology. And I got what I wanted. It’s a tightly paced retelling of the old Norse creation myths. Problem is, there aren’t many of them. I suspect that’s more to do with lack of surviving source material, given what Neil Gaiman says in the foreword. Maybe a long time ago there were scrolls and scrolls of Loki and Thor stories. Now all we’ve got are comic books. And if you’re any fan of Marvel’s interpretations, this is required reading. The nice thing is that the re-tellings are up to date. I expected something Shakespearean or textbook-dry, like…
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The New Pennywise is Scary, and Thus, Not Scary
I haven’t seen it, but reviews on It are mostly positive. However, some movie buffs I follow had mixed responses. They said it’s a hodge-podge, a “curious mess” (which is much like the book). The characters are given scary scenes with real horrors like child abuse, nightmares, alcoholism, animal abuse, gun threats, pedophilia, psychological drama, etc. And then a clown shows up. So we got some tonal dissonance here. I had a feeling this might happen as soon as I saw the new design for Pennywise. It’s just too scary. And thus, it’s not scary. In 1986, clowns were not scary. They were funny, jovial, friend to all children (like…
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My Kindertrauma: Creepshow
Pretty much something from each element in this movie showed up in one childhood nightmare or another. Like all the other Kindertrauma in my life, I blame my mother. But not for the reasons you think. She was attending college and took a class in horror movies. That meant trips to the video store and not caring if we were in the same room as her or not. There’ll be more on this later, but thanks to her ambitions, I got exposed to several episodes of Tales from the Crypt, Tales from the Darkside, Halloween, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and others. Bad enough I’d already been warped from VHS boxes and…
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On the Origin of Supernatural Characters
So this is something I’ve been thinking about for quite some time, but my passion for finding an answer hasn’t reached the level of putting down words until now. So let’s imagine you’ve got a horror movie. And your movie needs a scary killer. Something palpable and not en masse (not zombies or plague). Something like a big spider or a hillbilly cannibal or a pale kid ghost. Here’s the question: do you give that bad guy an origin? Here’s why I ask. Is it scarier when you don’t know where the bad guy came from? What his/her/its motivations are? What its nature is? Or is that just lazy writing?…
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The Books I Read: March – April 2017
I Hunt Killers by Barry Lyga(unfinished) I love Barry Lyga, but I had to stop after twenty-five percent. There was too much telling and not enough showing. The story’s about a teenager who knows all the serial killer tricks because his father was one. So there’s analysis, backstory, and thinking, but not much action. Too much of the text is setup for the ongoing series, not the current story. I wanted to know what’s happening with the murder now, not ten years ago. It would have been better if the text was presented in flashbacks so there was more immediacy, instead of recall. The narrator is just not interesting enough…
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Random Thoughts
Are the “It” from “It Follows” and “It” from “It” related? Asking for a friend. OMG, I think The Rescuers and the Rescue Rangers are somehow related. Maybe they’re like rival companies? The Rescue Aid Society is the big business and Rescue Rangers is the offshoot startup. I think I’ve got my next Disney crossover. What would happen if you ate the One Ring? Would it just pass through your system or could you digest it? I know stomach acid isn’t lava, but still, I don’t know what’s special about Mount Doom’s lava. Or would it just stay there? And would it make you invisible? You’re not wearing the ring…
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The Worst Books I Read in 2016
The Beast Within by Serena Valentino (original review) A sloppy, emotionless, and most of all, non-canon telling of the Beast’s life. I don’t know who looked at this and said “print it!” They don’t get key elements from the movie right, and all the new things, like the three witches, make no sense in the context of the original movie. Most harsh is that this will make you hate the beast more than sympathize with him. You don’t need this in your life. Friend by Diana Henstell (original review) Yeesh. Eighties robots and school crushes and child geniuses and bringing the dead back to life. Sounds like a fascinating story…
