protean depravity

The first month of working at the murder mystery bookshop Hammett behind me, I naturally have been focusing on reading thrillers and mysteries, since my new colleagues have lots of good recommendations and I too need to have a few good books up my sleeve to recommend to customers. It is both similar and very different to working in Otherland as the reading habits of crime fiction readers are quite something else. For instance, there's no such thing as second reading in this genre. Once you know who the murder is it's done, you neither need to re-read nor really own that book anymore. Serializing crime stories for Netflix and other streaming platforms interestingly works against this genre, since, here too, once you know how the story ends, you don't really need to read it anymore. That's completely the opposite for Science Fiction and Fantasy, as once an SF/F story is filmed, that's where it grabs the audience's attention. After the first episode they come to bo...

Full of spoilers, as always! Make Room! Make Room! , one of the best predictive science fiction works of its time, and one of the most underrated too, foresaw in 1966 that the end of the century would be a time out of hell for New York City, opening the flood gates to an even more hellish new millennium: Climate change and scorching heat burning the planet down; the world bursting at its seems with extreme overpopulation; serious food and housing shortages; barely any water to drink and as a consequence, the lack of a vital infrastructure pushing the masses into crime... Not an ideal place at all. The book shows how people from different backgrounds cope under these utterly dire living conditions. Against this hellish backdrop we focus on Andy, a police detective tasked with investigating the seemingly mysterious death of the ultra rich mobster Mike O'Brien, Big Mike, who in fact has been killed by Taiwanese-American street boy Billie Chung in an attempted robbery. During the inves...

  For crime readers who like it a little harder and darker: Berlin's first Horror-Crime corner has opened in the Hammett Bookstore!

  Here we are at the peak of horror in the third millennium, dear people! Continuing from the last post which covered the first two of the pre-pandemic golden years of horror cinema, we'll now take a look at the following two years in which climactically good horror was released. Let's take a look at the best of the best!

Hey friends! Hope you're having a good time in this Euro-summer. Don't forget to read, though, and enjoy the latest short reviews!

Time for some spring cleaning in my home! And that always means discarding some books too. Since, like everything in life, books too get more expensive, I'd like to give them away. Before they wander into the second hand section of the Otherland Bookstore or the phone booth little free library at the end of my street, I'm giving you guys the choice to take any of the books on the picture you may want to have. 👉 Please remember that these are review copies and apart from a couple of exceptions I haven't purchased them with money, so don't hesitate at all and seize the opportunity!

  For those who aren't very interested in football, here are some cinema/book ideas and plans for the upcoming summer in Berlin!  It's time for open air cinema again! Because that went really well last year... I'm going to try it again, though, there's no giving up and maybe the weather will play along this year. Doesn't look like it yet, but there's always hope. Although some theaters don't even have a summer program yet, some have announced the movies they will be showing, and let's take a look at the attractive ones, old and new.

Enjoy the latest short reviews!

Is insanity something that can be shared? Does bad karma exist and won’t it leave involved persons alone until it is cleared, spoken of? And is the baby-crazy childless woman trope still a thing? These are but some questions of many which occupy my mind having finished Poly Hall’s extremely enthralling latest novel Myrrh .