Nevill hits all the right notes in one of the best paced and balanced books of his long and (hah, pun!) storied writing career. While already a fan, this story of kayakers caught up in the tail-end of a much broader horror tale has helped to rekindle a spark. Too bad I’ve read pretty much everything by him, eh?
This hybrid ghost- / animatronic-horror movie coasts on a mixture of good visuals and the good chemistry of the sibling pair at its core but regularly slams into walls of non-sense. More a missed-chance than modern classic but fair enough when it just lets the cast shut up and the screen do the talking.
The horror genre was a major part of my life for decades but this year I have decided to take a step back, especially in what I read, because horror and I need a little bit time apart. For reasons…
On why having shrew-wives and shitty moms does not equate adding women to your horror, basically. A rant in brief…
The Long Walk does an astounding job of bringing the source material to life and both honoring the original but also updating it in dozens of minor ways to show how the story of young men walking to their death is still a poignant parable. Great cast. Great choices. It is perhaps only the ending that ultimately fails to convey the horror.
Jeff Long’s The Descent is a hefty novel overfull of plot and characters, many elements that are simply too underdeveloped to stand up to their own weight. Still, throughout its labyrinthine plotlines and setting, there are many elements that make it an interesting read.
Kago’s collection of four stories are strange and quirky and occasionally repulsive. While they explore some interesting concepts in novel ways, it is hard to recommend the collection without a couple of caveats.
Now that Halloween is over (by a few days, even), time to show off the stack of movies I watched in celebration. As is legally required for any horror-adjacent blog (see 27-A-ยง13-10.31).
Real life astronomy news is always a good source for the kind of language and concepts you can blend into your own cosmic weird. In this case, a neutron star/pulsar seems to have struck a galactic “bone.” The scale of it is amazing.
The most damning praise I can offer for Jurassic World: Rebirth is that I did not hate it. It does an ok job of continuing the world building from previous films and gets quite a few things right. Those things are often buried and entangled in a lot of errors that give a sense of wild mix of ideas being pressed together. The resulting “soup” is sometimes strange and confusing in its ingredients. It is nearly better to think of it as two separate movies that just happened to be playing at the same time.