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Showing posts from August, 2020

Horror in Elk's Clothing

In her relentless account on the colonization of the American continent entitled La Férocité Blanche , the wonderful author and activist Rosa Amalia Plumelle-Uribe states something along the lines of "For the ones who know what it is, colonialism is not a word that needs to be explained. It consists of horrific and dreadful deeds" - in other words; horror is an inherent part of colonialism; horror is in colonialism . In the recently published The Only Good Indians the also wonderful Blackfeet author Stephen Graham Jones ingeniously reverses this statement by putting colonialism inside horror and brings horror back to where it has always belonged. During the whole time I was reading The Only Good Indians , not once did I guess where the plot would lead, nor did I foresee the emotional magnitude of that glorious conclusion. The story of Rick, Lewis, Gabe and Cassidy, four indigenous men who are being haunted by the elk they have hunted a decade ago, at first sounded like a

...the Soul of Wit

Enjoy my new short reviews! 

It Leads, Indeed

Reviewing Stephen King's If It Bleeds In an interview on multiverses from 2015, Michael Moorcock states that authors who write a lot, gradually and unintentionally start writing about the same character. While Moorcock goes on to explain how that phenomenon affected his own work, especially in Eternal Champion , my mind drifts to another of my favorite authors, Stephen King, whose protagonists are usually a carbon copy of his younger self: white male author, married with children, lives in New England, preferably in Maine. In fact, King writes so much that he can afford to run four or five separate protagonists issuing from a certain range of archetypes. The same applies to his tropes and villains by the way. Since the preparatory work would take a lot of time (but would be totally worth it!) I will not present you a list of all tropes that King deals with and how he tends to cross two or more of those in his stories and novels - anyone who has read some King will know what I am ta

More of These Attacks, Please!

Attention readers: The world of speculative fiction is under attack... the attack of author Stephen Graham Jones and he is way taller than 50 foot, he's gigantic! "The Attack of the 50 foot Indian" was a wonderful surprise in this horrible year 2020, since I was only expecting The Only Good Indians to be released by Jones. I haven't read the latter yet by the way, but only due to the sheer overwhelming mass of seriously good horror literature being published right now. BUT I very soon will catch up since the 50 Foot Indian has left me wanting to read more Jones and made me rearrange my TBR-pile. This little book follows the Hollywood tradition of very large people or things attacking the world, but is highlighted by Jones' very own, very necessary sociopolitical twist. An Indian giant is discovered sleeping between the Bering Sea and Siberia. They name him "Two Moon" because two moons have been sighted the night he was found; one yellow, one brown. As c