protean depravity

I'm lagging seriously behind my schedule for this Stephen King short story re-read, and so here we are at almost one collection per year... I was hoping I could do at least two or even three per year... Still, we're finally at the point where I'm done with  Skeleton Crew , and for that I'll be discussing the remaining short stories  Morning Deliveries (Milkman No. 1) , its companion piece  Big Wheels: A Tale of the Laundry Game (Milkman No. 2) , the terrifying Gramma ,  The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet , and last but not least  The Reach . I still have to review The Monkey , which I'll be doing under the "Based on Books" column in comparison with its film adaptation by Oz Perkins. Our next short story collection will be Nightmares & Dreamscapes published in 1993 (There are a couple of novella collections which I'm skipping because we're interested in shorts stories only here!). So, having set the record straight, let's get to it!  As usua...

Hello and hi! I hope you're starting a great and sunny week. I have been reading older stuff these past weeks, like Donoso's The Obscene Bird of Night , that has been beleaguering my tbr for years, or 'Pemi Aguda's Ghostroots that I wanted to read ever since its publication a couple of years ago. I'm always proud of myself when I can cross titles out of my backlist, so consider this post a success! I hope you enjoy it too and find something you'd like to read, even if it's not brand new.

According to the Merriam-Webster, an underdog is a "loser or predicted loser in a struggle or contest" and so I can at least find consolation in the fact that I was not the only loser joining the Final Girls Berlin Underdog Marathon this past Saturday, watching movies about other underdogs, or underdog movies that never quite made it but are secret gems - I even received the "one of us" certification that I now stuck on my bathroom door with pride.

  While slowly moving away from the spring, easing into the summer with the weather still brisk and rainy, let's take a look at the filmic highlights awaiting the horror fan in Berlin...

Enjoy the short stories of the last month and have a great day!

Welcome to the final part of Cult Classics! It seems like cults are everywhere right now; in the independent news, in conspiracy theories, in media we consume, in movies we watch... Whether an organized group of powerful extremists controlling our lives really exists, or it is the mere paranoid fear thereof mirroring into horror fiction, it is worth to take a look at this phenomenon and the way it is represented in recent horror movies. In this final installment we'll study the cults in  Baskın (2015), The Invitation (2015), The Endless (2017), The Empty Man (2020) and The Bone Temple (2026). The titles are linked to their respective imdb pages for full film information and stills. I do presuppose that you watched the movies discussed here, so I will only give the shortest plot summary. It would make sense to watch the movies before reading my cult descriptions, as I SPOILER EVERYTHING. Here we go!

  There are spoilers in this blog post, so maybe see the movie before reading, but definitely go see it!  The best horror movies are those that take us to a place of emotional vulnerability, and then hit us with supernatural terror. Hereditary did it, The Babadook did it, and now  Obsession  does it... Horror's newest enfant terrible Curry Barker's first big budget production will soon start ravaging movie theaters and justly so. I have had the opportunity to see Obsession twice - at the past Fantasy Filmfest Nights and at the Creepy Crypt Sneak Preview this past weekend - I didn't know what I was going to see as it was a sneak preview, but I still would have gone if I had known that it is Obsession. The movie is a hoot.

When I was a child in my early teens, perhaps as a way to rebel against the classic fairy tales I was reading growing up, I found a special kind of fascinating escape in stories and books which featured peculiar characters, the weirder the better, the more interesting for me, going through unconventional adventures, thus providing fresh outcomes, outlooks and lessons than your habitual happily ever after. I could lose myself for hours in those stories, utterly hypnotized.