protean depravity

Time for new reads, enjoy! Children of Chicago by Cynthia Pelayo Children of Chicago borrows from the Grimm tale "Pied Piper" or "Der Rattenfänger von Hameln" to twist and bend into the horrific teenager killings taking place i n Chicago’s Humboldt Park neighborhood , signed with the graffiti "Pay the Piper". Detective Lauren Medina who is in charge of the case has many demons of her own and one of them just might have to do with what happened at Humboldt Park. Following her through the investigations, slowly unfolding the mysteries of that unfortunate night, doubts will unfold if she really is the right person to treat this case. Pelayo's crime/mystery/horror mash-up should be a real treat for especially German horror readers because it doesn't only borrow its main storyline from Pied Piper, there are also tons and tons of talk about fairy tales in general, and the Grimm brothers in special, and how terrifying they actually are! Incidentally, th...

The very first review here on Protean Depravity was about Alan Baxter's tongue-in-cheek slasher/creature feature The Roo , the story of a kangaroo going amok in the Australian Outback killing people in super inventive ways - that fucken roo... In his latest, The Gulp , Baxter returns to "serious" horror; small town terror divided into five short stories set in the fictional Australian seaside town Gulpepper, or The Gulp, as everybody calls it; a place travelers should definitely stay well clear of.

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Here are some new short reviews for you to enjoy! Mapping the Interior by Stephen Graham Jones I have first read Mapping the Interior a couple of years ago but didn't give it much credit, mostly because I had the feeling that I didn't understand it. Now, for yet another group read I re-read it and was lucky enough that I had people to discuss it with and explain things to me. These discussions having cleared the question marks in my mind, I think that I finally can give this book the appreciation it deserves. This is the story of Junior, an American Indigenous kid whose mother has left the reservation after the death of his father, taking him and his brother Dino to live in a sort of modular container house. Their life is marked by poverty, watching TV and the bullying of Dino, who has a sort of nervous disability. On the cusp of adolescence, Junior starts seeing the ghost of his father at nights. Having never properly known his father, he appears to the boy in the splendid t...