protean depravity

The reading slump... Sooner or later we all fall victim to this unuterrable nuisance and it's hard - all you want to do is escape and find shelter in imaginary worlds, but the real world and its weight interfer with your concentration and don't let you sink into your books. I have been suffering from a major slump in the past month or so, maybe even for longer, so I'm trying to concentrate on fewer and maybe lighter books or audiobooks I want to have finished until the end of the year, but honestly, I'm not sure I'll even be able to reach that goal. Nevertheless I managed to finish a couple of good titles, and I'm still reading some good ones that I haven't finished yet. So, I hope you enjoy the reviews and have a happy Halloween!

Just a tiny bit disappointed that I didn't find the thrill I was looking for in yesterday's Sci-Fi Filmfest's Weirded Out showing (most films just didn't speak to me, except, of course, the very first short film, Joan Vives' Els Amants, which was about a woman's love affair with a tentacled sea monster, but I left early and readily missed one film) I headed to the Creepy Crypt, the weekly horror screenings at Rollberg Kino. And it was the right decision because I could finish the night nevertheless horror-satisfied. I hadn't watched many trailers for In a Violent Nature and had only seen a couple of stills which show the utterly scary looking slasher walking around in the woods, eventually looking for victims. If you haven't seen the movie, my review might be kind of spoilery for you, though plotwise there's nothing to spoil in this movie. It's rather the case that the function follows the form for this once and not vice versa, and the novelty is...

    Got my ticket for the horror theme park!

We haven't even reached the middle mark of October yet, but turns out this month truly IS golden. Socializing with the science fiction crowd the last couple of weeks I was made aware of two more events which had escaped me, but I think are definitely worth visiting. The weekends are full this fall! Next Saturday, October 19th, the Berlin SciFi Filmfest opens its doors at the splendid Urania in Charlottenburg. This year's program is interesting as usual and consists of mostly short film screenings divided into thematic blocs such as Dystopia, Latin Science Fiction, Psychopunk (??!! I have no idea what this is but I already love it), AI, Canadian Science Fiction, and... Weirded Out , the bloc about weird fiction, unfortunately at 8 pm, the very last showing. It figures that the one bloc I want to see most would be the last, which gets me in a scrape. I have to work the morning shift at Hammett that day, and for the late evening I already have my ticket for the "In a Violen...

Dark, darker, American Narcissus … Chandler Morrison surprises with an unusually grim novel about the vapid, vile, self-serving, chain smoking rich people of Los Angeles. Against the backdrop of the wildfires that consume the city, we follow four people who are both part of this empty, shallow, cruel social system but also struggle to fit in: Arden Coover, rich junkie and proud owner of a useless philosophy degree from Berkeley; his sister Tess who tries to figure out if her affair with a narcissistic writer (“the” Writer , mind you) is worth it; Ryland Richter, an insurance executive, addicted to coke, to work and the new employee in his company who turns out to be unhinged and dangerous. And finally sweet Baxter Kent, surfer boy addicted to porn and afraid of real women, who meets an unlikely person to soothe his loneliness.

Hey all, I hope you're doing great! Here we go, finally some book reviews on this blog, and there are more to come, please do enjoy!

There's no shame in wondering about the background of people who do terrible things, and the extensive coverage of the lives of shooters, monsters or serial killers in the news, in literature, and especially in cinema is proof of that. Schroeder certainly isn't the first book to explore the mind of a killer, and yet I feel unusually torn thinking about this tormented character and the one fateful day in his life, his very last day after the last straw broke the camel's back.

Ah, the woman’s search for eternal beauty… The trope as old as time has always been a grab bag for storytellers, but in the last couple of years it has been seeing a true revival explosion, especially in horror. The wish to hold on to the one source of power granted to her in a world in which she is sexualized and measured by her youthfulness, fertility and sex-appeal is naturally a huge source of anxiety. Efforts to stop her body from aging and decaying, to appear desirable and pretty, not to lose “it” and not to succumb to cruel reality, and all this eventually leading to her self-destruction, are all themes organic to horror. Add to it a little snip snip here, a nip tuck there, a little blood, a couple of needles into the flesh, some body modification and you have yourself the perfect template for a class A body horror story that reminds us that ultimately we are nothing but meat. Books like Natural Beauty (Ling Ling Huang), #thighgap (Chandler Morrison) or Rouge (Mona Awad) disc...