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.
Author: Doug Bolden
A huge fan of horror, mystery, weird fiction, and other various genres turning his love into this site.
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.
Though published before Strange Pictures, this novel has been released as something like a spiritual successor to its follow-up in the English-reading world. Jim Rion does another great job of translating Uketsu’s work. This time, it follows a mystery that begins with discussing strange aspects of a house’s floor plan and then grows from there, culminating in a decently creepy story though the author (and translator) have left purposeful gaps in knowledge. It initially argues its central mystery from first principles and architectural drawings – i.e., how oddities in a floor plan might be linked to murder without any other proof besides a sort of Socratic debate. The abstract nature of the first half combined with the much more definite – and darker – nature of the second half might turn off some readers, but fans of Japanese mysteries, architecturally-themed mysteries, and mysteries that try something a bit unique: it should satisfy.