protean depravity

So I can't believe this wonderfully warm summer is almost over, I only realized from the amount of books I have collected for the Soul of Wit that it's been quite a while, and I'm a little sad about it. I hope you enjoy the short reviews and find something that speaks to you!

Ever since an editor told me that in anthologies and collections the best short stories are traditionally placed in the beginning (to get the reader hooked), I have been wondering about the placement/arrangement of short stories and whether or not what he told me is even true. Is it like an album where there's a sort of continuity between the pieces? Or was he right and you get hooked with the first story and the rest of your read is but a chase for that same high you found in the beginning? How do they even decide which the “best” story is? In my own reading experience, I have seen it all – anthologies that start strong but fizzle out, anthologies that have a strong middle streak, collections that end with a banger, or those that suck all together.

Time to look at upcoming movie screenings and the Fantasy Filmfest, my dears! (And I'm already loving the -incomplete- program.)   There are a couple of interesting open air screenings left in this summer, and that coupled with the Yorck specials and a few films regularly showing will help bridge the time until FFF begins. Let's have a look. And no, Hokum isn't part of the lineup... yet?    So, the Freiluftkino Kreuzberg is showing a Science Fiction movie , old or new, every Tuesday until the end of August and although I missed "2001 A Space Odyssey", I feel compelled to watch Tarkowski's Solaris  on August 18, at 8.30 pm. I have only seen the newer Solaris movie with Geroge Clooney, and quite liked it, and I generally like Tarkowski's style, so I'm glad they're screening it. Freilichtbühne Weißensee continues its series of screenings of original films from the former east bloc, and there's a two-part mini series called NöNöNö that takes place ...

Six, six, six, and I again forgot my blog's birthday! But this way I will celebrate it later and later each year and so it can have birthday all year long, which is neat too. Please, as usual, have a little drink for us to celebrate this occasion! I have a little present for you guys too, namely a giveaway. I have started and dnf'ed quite a few books this year. Plus, I recently scanned my shelves and added some of my older science fiction/horror books to the pile. Reach out to me through the usual means if you want to have any of the books, and don't hesitate! I'm giving them away gladly to someone who will enjoy them more than I do. Have a great time!

I have absolutely no idea how something as trite as a surface with a reflective metal coat has become one of the main staples of horror fiction, but here we are to find out why. Reflections, whether on glass, mirror or water, have always had confrontational, psychological, existential and inherently uncanny undertones in what they might (or might not) show us and what that might stir up inside - from Narcissus to Poltergeist. A mirror, or a reflective surface in the broader sense (a television screen, a photographic lens, a camera's eye, a celluloid film, etc.), shows the bare truth - and yet it is impossible for us to touch, smell, hear or taste that truth. We can only see it. So on the one hand it has the claim of reliability, but lacks depth. There is a conflict there. It is not our world, thus it must be a different one. It is illusion through and through and yet tells us so much about ourselves and our fears; vanity, introspection, evil twins, parallel universes, the future....

Hey, hey! I'm not doing much these days except for working, reading and hanging out on my balcony drinking self-made mocktails, so I don't have much to report until I'll have some vacation next week. So I hope you enjoy the short reviews, there are some nice books out there!

It's thriller time again! I preferred my thrillers in the shape of audiobooks this past month, as there's so much to do when the weather gets warm and that amps my energy levels up. It is a special kind of happiness to finish an audiobook while cleaning your windows and at the end of the day you have another title crossed out of your list and you can look through clear windows. Or have a squeaky clean bathroom. Or enjoying whatever it is you are cleaning. The haul of titles this time is truly a mixed bag, ranging from awesome to meh, so let's take a look at them. Enjoy!

A couple of weeks ago the Final Girls Berlin held an event-ful Midsummer weekend during which a collection of the festival's best folk horror short films were shown at the open air cinema Freilichtbühne Weißensee, as well as many super interesting talks (all free) were presented at the annual online Brain Binge event. I missed some of the Brain Binge Events, notably and sadly the "The Hills Are Alive: Singing and Screaming in Horror Musicals" which honestly sounds like fun, "The Bleeding Edge" about Menstruation in Horror, and the "Pitch Your Idea Workshop", which is a shame because although I usually stay at a safe distance to horror, and I am an avid reviewer and observer of the genre, I in fact do have a couple of ideas of my own and could use a hand in the realization.

  Every year in June, at the middle of the road, I turn back to take a look at the year in horror and the books I have read so far, and since time is nothing but a blur these days, we're there already, if not a little late. In order to do so I answer a series of questions that we used to sum up our reading year/half year over at the Shine and Shadow reading group on Goodreads. At this point I have some bad news, though... At the beginning of this year I quit my role as admin of the group, as people returned to their normal lives and spent less and less time on Goodreads (and no need to say, reading less and less) and the workload of the group became much bigger - because nobody did the work anymore. Also people just stopped communicating and that was really frustrating and annoying. So, I jumped off that train although I loved my reading group and talking with people about the books we read together. But hey... Things always keep on changing and I hope that I'll find new peop...

To ape someone. To monkey around. Monkey business. Ape arms. Monkey basket. Monkey see, monkey do. From the top of my head, I can think of quite a few idioms and sayings involving monkeys, and none of them have an even remotely positive connotation. Why is that? Well, I'm not an expert, but I think apart from their often aggressive and unpredictable nature, I would say that it's the same underlying fear as with dolls - their resemblance to us. Monkeys  look like humans, but they're not quite us. They surely act like us, but in a distorted way and that's eerie. We tend to be afraid of human-like things that look like us, but are underneath strange, that's somehow unsettling. So, take a doll, a toy in the shape of a monkey and it's double scary, especially with creepy eyes and teeth and a lethal music instrument, for whatever reason... Stephen King milks that fear to its full potential in his short story The Monkey , where such a toy monkey causes death every time...

Alex Grass is the author of several horror, SF and dark fantasy novels based in Brooklyn, NYC. His new book "Infernal Tramps: Tales of Weird Terror", a short story collection of seventeen short stories that I reviewed here , will be published this summer, on July 15th, by the Dickinson Publishing Group. I was mesmerized and delighted by this collection and even more delighted when Alex accepted an interview with Protean Depravity... 

I'm lagging seriously behind my schedule for this Stephen King short story re-read, and so here we are at almost one collection per year... I was hoping I could do at least two or even three per year... Still, we're finally at the point where I'm done with  Skeleton Crew , and for that I'll be discussing the remaining short stories  Morning Deliveries (Milkman No. 1) , its companion piece  Big Wheels: A Tale of the Laundry Game (Milkman No. 2) , the terrifying Gramma ,  The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet , and last but not least  The Reach . I still have to review The Monkey , which I'll be doing under the "Based on Books" column in comparison with its film adaptation by Oz Perkins. Our next short story collection will be Nightmares & Dreamscapes published in 1993 (There are a couple of novella collections which I'm skipping because we're interested in shorts stories only here!). So, having set the record straight, let's get to it!  As usua...

Hello and hi! I hope you're starting a great and sunny week. I have been reading older stuff these past weeks, like Donoso's The Obscene Bird of Night , that has been beleaguering my tbr for years, or 'Pemi Aguda's Ghostroots that I wanted to read ever since its publication a couple of years ago. I'm always proud of myself when I can cross titles out of my backlist, so consider this post a success! I hope you enjoy it too and find something you'd like to read, even if it's not brand new.

According to the Merriam-Webster, an underdog is a "loser or predicted loser in a struggle or contest" and so I can at least find consolation in the fact that I was not the only loser joining the Final Girls Berlin Underdog Marathon this past Saturday, watching movies about other underdogs, or underdog movies that never quite made it but are secret gems - I even received the "one of us" certification that I now stuck on my bathroom door with pride.

  While slowly moving away from the spring, easing into the summer with the weather still brisk and rainy, let's take a look at the filmic highlights awaiting the horror fan in Berlin...

Enjoy the short stories of the last month and have a great day!

Welcome to the final part of Cult Classics! It seems like cults are everywhere right now; in the independent news, in conspiracy theories, in media we consume, in movies we watch... Whether an organized group of powerful extremists controlling our lives really exists, or it is the mere paranoid fear thereof mirroring into horror fiction, it is worth to take a look at this phenomenon and the way it is represented in recent horror movies. In this final installment we'll study the cults in  Baskın (2015), The Invitation (2015), The Endless (2017), The Empty Man (2020) and The Bone Temple (2026). The titles are linked to their respective imdb pages for full film information and stills. I do presuppose that you watched the movies discussed here, so I will only give the shortest plot summary. It would make sense to watch the movies before reading my cult descriptions, as I SPOILER EVERYTHING. Here we go!

  There are spoilers in this blog post, so maybe see the movie before reading, but definitely go see it!  The best horror movies are those that take us to a place of emotional vulnerability, and then hit us with supernatural terror. Hereditary did it, The Babadook did it, and now  Obsession  does it... Horror's newest enfant terrible Curry Barker's first big budget production will soon start ravaging movie theaters and justly so. I have had the opportunity to see Obsession twice - at the past Fantasy Filmfest Nights and at the Creepy Crypt Sneak Preview this past weekend - I didn't know what I was going to see as it was a sneak preview, but I still would have gone if I had known that it is Obsession. The movie is a hoot.

When I was a child in my early teens, perhaps as a way to rebel against the classic fairy tales I was reading growing up, I found a special kind of fascinating escape in stories and books which featured peculiar characters, the weirder the better, the more interesting for me, going through unconventional adventures, thus providing fresh outcomes, outlooks and lessons than your habitual happily ever after. I could lose myself for hours in those stories, utterly hypnotized.

Here come the crime write-ups from the past month or so, enjoy!