protean depravity

Even though the weather hasn't noticed it yet, the summer is supposed to be knocking on our doors, and that means more events, open air cinemas, new challenges and similar stuff. Let's take a look at what's up in Berlin and in my reading plans in the early summer 2025.

There's a reason that out of body experiences such as body swaps or astral projections are a staple of speculative fiction – the possibility of experiencing life in a different body, literally walking in the shoes of someone else, is EXCITING, it is the antidote of looking at the same old boring face in the mirror every single morning. But it is only when the experience is not a swap anymore, and becomes one sided, say like a possession or a haunting, then we're entering horror, uncanny territory. And if the bodies merged belong to people of backgrounds antithetical in nature, let's say the richest and most powerful white man of the world, the president of the USA, and an orphaned boy in Nigeria, you have pure social comedy, and that's what Nigerian-British author Nuzo Onoh explores in her latest book The Fake Ghost .

Slowly closing in on the final pages of King's debut short story collection The Night Shift , this penultimate look will be all about chain smokers ( Quitters, Inc. ), uncanny stalkers ( I Know What You Need ) and creepy kids ( Children of the Corn ), possibly even about creepy kids who smoke and stalk , who kows! Let's go! It would be good for you to read along the stories I'm discussing in this column, because I'll spoil everything!

There's a special kind of sadness reserved for the week after a film festival, and I'm going through that right now, post fantasy filmfest. I'm all the more sad because I only saw four movies this spring, although the complete lineup was fantastic and when I sat in my comfy seat at Zoo Palast, I felt that wish in me to just keep sitting and watching more movies, to watch them everyday for three-four days... (It's not that dramatic, they expect you to go out and walk around, eat something between movies and they actively make you stand up, so you don't have to die watching movies.) Let's look at the films I was able to see, not every one of them was amazing, I have to say, but at least one was!

Finally, I've managed to accumulate some books, some crime and thriller books to discuss here, it took me long enough... Enjoy these reviews, and don't forget that the world's very best crime fiction bookshop, Hammett Berlin , is turning 30 years old in the first week of June and we are celebrating throughout the whole week with games, food, non-alcoholic drinks, reinforced presence (I'll be there on Monday, Thursday and Saturday afternoons) in the shop and a raffle in which you can win dapper new books which the publishing houses gave us for free to give away to you! It will be fun, mark your calendar; June 2 - 7, at Hammett! Now, off to the reviews.

C'est le moment où un homme sain d'esprit qui cause avec un fou ne s'est pas encore aperçu que c'est un fou. The above quote by Marcel Proust from À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs , the second installment of his In Search of Lost Time series, describes a moment you haven't yet realized that the person you are chatting with is, in fact, insane. It is this quote, oddly enough, that has always sprang to my mind, the feeling that surfaces from within me, when I listen to the American folk rock band Neutral Milk Hotel. It is the core of what this music's surface of pleasantness and harmony, conveyed by melodious, honeyed, smooth tunes, hiding outbursts of intense emotion and distorted, disrupted by glimpses of insanity, by cacophony, awakens in me. And it intrigues me, it haunts me, I can listen to them and be inspired to a different feeling every single time, but that basis of oddity, of weirdness remains.