Hej Hej

©aliyavuzata

Hello, good day and welcome to my new blog!

A few words about myself: İnci Asena German here, and if you found your way to this blog, we most probably met at the Otherland Bookshop, Berlin, where I worked as a bookseller before COVID.And if we haven't met there, it was probably in some book-related context.

I was born and raised in İzmir, Turkey and did my high school senior year as an exchange student in the USA, in North Andover, Massachusetts. I then returned to Turkey and studied Translation and Interpretation for the French Language at the University Hacettepe in Ankara. Following my graduation, I moved to Wuppertal, Germany and started a Master’s program for English Literature, which I immensely enjoyed but never finished. Instead I tried and failed to build a life in Paris, France, rallied in the streets, worked with refugees and ended up working in Düsseldorf in media monitoring with emphasis on the energy sector and environment, which is of great interest for me still today. After moving to my home of choice Berlin, I worked as a technical translator and later transferred to the Technische Universität Berlin where I still work as a linguistic and team assistant.

I may be a civil servant and slave to the wage by day, but I'm the biggest horror fan and scream queen by night. I'll be reading freaky books and watching freaky movies and sharing my opinions about them with anyone who is interested.

By freaky, I mean books that have a peculiar, weird, eerie, creepy touch to them: mostly horror, sometimes SF,  sometimes outright funny, anything that counts for speculative fiction but also sometimes non-speculative fiction, too.

To begin with, I will post a series of reviews of books I have read since the beginning of the lockdown, during which I mostly focus on individual stories rather than collective horrors. In retrospect I realize that with Ania Ahlborn's The Devil Crept In, Patrick Kealan Burke's Kin, Elizabeth Engstrom's When Darkness Loves Us, John Hornor Jacobs' Southern Gods, Robert McCammon's Boy's Life and, of course, Grady Hendrix's The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires I have been unusually keen on horror stories set in Southern US. But I also quite enjoyed not so heavy dread in the shape of horror crime stories like Simone St. James' debut The Sundown Motel, Marisha Pessl's Night Film or FG Cottam's The Lucifer Chord. I explored the dreamily magical worlds of Kij Johnson, in Max Brooks' Devolution I discovered the fascination with Bigfoot and magnified my isolation in quarantine with Ambrose Ibsen's Night Society and Iain Reid's I'm Thinking of Ending Things, which are both in their own ways commentaries on solitude.

 

It was either the first week of lockdown in Berlin or shortly after that someone from the Otherland horror book club asked me if I still could read horror in these times. This honestly made me stop and think for a while. I admit it wasn't, and still isn't, that attractive a prospect to read about horrible things while your own truth is terrifying enough. And I guess we all know how it is when one's personal camel is so overloaded with issues that a particularly dreadful movie or book can easily be the last straw to break its back and cause extra stress and sleepless nights (looking at you, "Hereditary"). But there are many reasons why we so to say consume horror: the excitement of exploring the uglier and more extreme sides of life from a safe distance, escapism, even politics or sheer angstlust... Whatever the reasons were, I personally have always returned to horror after (or even during) stormy times to keep contemplating the nasty and maybe a little bit to seek for guidance, to see how people, who are facing literally impossibly difficult situations, cope with these. (For more background you can check my post in which I recount my own story of horror at the Otherlander's blog, you can find it here).

 

Whatever your reasons are to be hooked on this depraved, twisted, warped kind of entertainment, I really hope you enjoy my blog. Welcome to my protean and colorful world of horror!

P.S:

"Protean depravity", as an aside, is a quote from Jack Vance's Cugel's Saga:

At the club-house Soldinck was saying: 'I distrusted him from the start! Still, who could imagine such protean depravity?'*

This book will certainly come up in this blog at some point because the anthology that comprises it, Tales of the Dying Earth, happens to be not only a freaky book, but also my favorite book ever.

*Vance, Jack. "Cugel's Saga". Tales of the Dying Earth. New York: tor, 1998. 388.