Two post-docs at the end of their school days journey into Hell to try and bring back the soul of their mentor, Professor Jacob Grimes. Along the way, they discuss paradoxes, depictions of Hell, the many sufferings of grad school, their personal failings, and the many different ways great people can have failed legacies. It works best when it is smart and funny (and alas Kuang abandons this combination for a fair chunk of the novel’s center) and seems a quite important book, just one as flawed as the book’s characters.
Tag: Review
A nunsploitation horror that belts out several gross notes and moments of fairly extreme cruelty but which still manages to tell an engaging story. Only for those who are ok with the harder edge of horror, but when it hits it hits.
Moan is the 2025 English Version of the 2013 Japanese Language Junji Kessakusha 8: Umeku Haisuikan which, in turn collects Junji Ito’s short stories from the early 90s. If you like Junji Ito, you’ll like it. It is not the strongest collection, but Blood-Orb Grove and Flesh Colored Mystery are both worthy of further note, and others will spark interest.
The trippy and questionable science at the surface of One Word Kill barely detracts from or adds to the novel’s fairly stereotypical coming-of-age style story. Not an astounding work but a fair one with its moments. If only it felt more like itself.
Chugong’s Solo Leveling is an unabashed power-scaling fantasy romp where the narrative borrows heavily from videogames and RPGs. If that floats your boat, then you might really enjoy this.
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.
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.
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.