protean depravity

There’s much to appreciate about an author who can, in a short story collection, juggle with a limited and recurring set of ideas without coming off as monotonous and repetitive. Collections are considered accomplished to the degree that they are varied and reflect a mixed assortment of literary devices; differing points of view, thematic and stylistic variation, anything to keep tedium away. It takes a master hand like Evenson to go against that convention and to write a collection of stories thematically focused and subtly interconnected, extremely well curated and arranged, unparalleled in minimalistic writing and laconic dialogues, examining themes like environmental collapse, paranoia, AI, or cruel family ties through heady, composed, original horror.

Finally I managed to read enough thrillers for this corner, phew! They're all recommendations I got from the Hammett crew, so they're all expert approved and quality controlled. Hope you enjoy!

SPOILER WARNING! Please watch at least the movie before going on, don't blame me for spoiling this for you.   Don't Look Now, both the short story as well as the movie, follows a married couple who, in the wake of their daughter's death, comes to Venice and meets two elderly sisters with an esoteric touch who warn them to leave the city, or else bad things will happen. As is usual in such cases, John the husband is killed by a serial killer who roams Venician streets at night. The original short story by Daphne Du Maurier was published in her 1971 collection Not After Midnight, and Other Stories and was subsequently adapted into the 1973 thriller of the same title by Nicolas Roeg, with Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie playing the couple John and Laura.

The reading slump... Sooner or later we all fall victim to this unuterrable nuisance and it's hard - all you want to do is escape and find shelter in imaginary worlds, but the real world and its weight interfer with your concentration and don't let you sink into your books. I have been suffering from a major slump in the past month or so, maybe even for longer, so I'm trying to concentrate on fewer and maybe lighter books or audiobooks I want to have finished until the end of the year, but honestly, I'm not sure I'll even be able to reach that goal. Nevertheless I managed to finish a couple of good titles, and I'm still reading some good ones that I haven't finished yet. So, I hope you enjoy the reviews and have a happy Halloween!

Just a tiny bit disappointed that I didn't find the thrill I was looking for in yesterday's Sci-Fi Filmfest's Weirded Out showing (most films just didn't speak to me, except, of course, the very first short film, Joan Vives' Els Amants, which was about a woman's love affair with a tentacled sea monster, but I left early and readily missed one film) I headed to the Creepy Crypt, the weekly horror screenings at Rollberg Kino. And it was the right decision because I could finish the night nevertheless horror-satisfied. I hadn't watched many trailers for In a Violent Nature and had only seen a couple of stills which show the utterly scary looking slasher walking around in the woods, eventually looking for victims. If you haven't seen the movie, my review might be kind of spoilery for you, though plotwise there's nothing to spoil in this movie. It's rather the case that the function follows the form for this once and not vice versa, and the novelty is

    Got my ticket for the horror theme park!

We haven't even reached the middle mark of October yet, but turns out this month truly IS golden. Socializing with the science fiction crowd the last couple of weeks I was made aware of two more events which had escaped me, but I think are definitely worth visiting. The weekends are full this fall! Next Saturday, October 19th, the Berlin SciFi Filmfest opens its doors at the splendid Urania in Charlottenburg. This year's program is interesting as usual and consists of mostly short film screenings divided into thematic blocs such as Dystopia, Latin Science Fiction, Psychopunk (??!! I have no idea what this is but I already love it), AI, Canadian Science Fiction, and... Weirded Out , the bloc about weird fiction, unfortunately at 8 pm, the very last showing. It figures that the one bloc I want to see most would be the last, which gets me in a scrape. I have to work the morning shift at Hammett that day, and for the late evening I already have my ticket for the "In a Violen

Dark, darker, American Narcissus … Chandler Morrison surprises with an unusually grim novel about the vapid, vile, self-serving, chain smoking rich people of Los Angeles. Against the backdrop of the wildfires that consume the city, we follow four people who are both part of this empty, shallow, cruel social system but also struggle to fit in: Arden Coover, rich junkie and proud owner of a useless philosophy degree from Berkeley; his sister Tess who tries to figure out if her affair with a narcissistic writer (“the” Writer , mind you) is worth it; Ryland Richter, an insurance executive, addicted to coke, to work and the new employee in his company who turns out to be unhinged and dangerous. And finally sweet Baxter Kent, surfer boy addicted to porn and afraid of real women, who meets an unlikely person to soothe his loneliness.