protean depravity

The yearly StokerCon was last week, and the latest Bram Stoker Awards (BSA) have found their new owners. The BSA's are arguably the most important awards in horror fiction because they basically decide which books will enter the horror canon and which will not, and authors who have been granted the award, or even have been nominated, carry that title with a certain kind of honor - even though it's the books that make the authors, not the awards. Being a USA-based award, the lineup is usually heavily from there, which can be a shame as there's great horror from everywhere these days. It's always wonderful to see a name or two who made it despite being in translation, and this year there's Mariana Enriquez from Argentina and Sofia Ajram from Canada, but unfortunately nobody outside of the American continents. It is usual I don't always agree with the nominees or winners, as I think the same names keep on rotating and some fresh horror authors who do deserve to be ...

  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.

I only own these three from this year's Bram Stoker preliminary ballot. I'm not gonna lie, I'm kind of tired and won't even bother to pretend I care about a good picture, please pardon my bad photographic eye anyway. Although their statuette looks like made out of earwax and I personally don't always agree with their selection and think they sometimes blatantly ignore deserving books, the Bram Stoker Awards matter nevertheless and they are the primary source any horror reader does and should go to to find writings and authors of high quality. To receive the Stoker award is probably a kind of honor for authors too, but from a reader's point of view, it doesn't really matter to me who, in the end, receives the hideous earwax castle, it is the preliminary ballot which really counts, because it gives me a wider list of books against which I can compare and check if I have been reading the good stuff, or which books I have been missing. Also, back when I was buil...

  The year 2023 is almost upon us with who knows what fresh terrors and here we are on its brink... Before making that jump, though, let's go over a short wrap-up of my past reading year and finally announce the winners of 2022.

Spring and summer time are also awards time and it is exciting to watch the ballots of all major horror and SFF awards slowly trickling in. A couple of weeks ago the first Bram Stoker preliminary ballots and later the final lineup were announced and that lineup is, together with the Shirley Jackson lineup as well as recommendations from my network of fellow horror fans and friends, one of the major sources from which I make my tbr-list. So naturally I wanted to take a closer look at the nominees and the books who got "so close": the books that will be competing for the titles of superior achievement in bold and below them the other shortlisted books that haven't made it into the top five. In my experience these titles are almost always just as good and if you ever wonder what to read next you can without hesitation grab one of them. There are quite a few titles I have already read and reviewed here, so I'll just link those to the corresponding Protean Depravity review...

High were the hopes for 2021 - after a disastrous pandemic year, tons of confusion, losses, sickness, bush fires, earthquakes and other catastrophes the world was going to enter a new, better era in 2021 with vaccination for all, freedom days everywhere, return to normality... It didn't turn out that way. Having reached the end of this year, having seen that the worst was yet to come, that those vaccines don't really work, 2021 actually feels like an extension of the most unpopular year 2020. The good things about the collective state that we are in can be counted on the fingers of one hand and one of them is certainly that there is much more time for reading compared to the old normal. So much did I read this year that it was seriously difficult to choose the winners for the Protean Depravity Best Books of 2021, but finally here they are!

Let's talk about horror awards! There are so many books to read and so little time... And despite the pandemic and the lockdown, TBR-lists are growing and growing to never-ending proportions. So awards really come in handy for the despairing and a little lazy reader, who wants to read all the good books and lose no time with the less good ones. In other words, very proficient readers doing the work for you; reading a bunch of books, narrowing their selection to four or five chosen ones, from which in turn, they select a winner - unless, of course, they are readers' choice awards. So, besides the list of most-anticipated reads of the year and the season's readings on Christmas and Halloween, it is a popular project of thousands of genre readers to devour this top-of-the-crops-selection. And if you happen to have more time on your hands, you just go through past award-winners.