protean depravity

First off: I was initially going to follow the order of short stories in Night Shift for this my column "The Short Story Lover's Guide to Stephen King" : with The Mangler , The Boogeyman and Gray Matter  up next. But considering that the latter two are both in an island position between many stories which deal with the horror of inanimate objects coming to life, I decided to go rather thematically just for this once. So, in this post we'll take a look at The Mangler , Battleground , Trucks and Sometimes They Come Back which all deal with lifeless things who have no business being alive and moving around. The fear of the inanimate animate, moving objects, the unexplainable, the unscientific is, as is well-known, a big fear of mine. Taking this fear beyond the initial "boo!" moment, King shows how to turn that shock into dread and terror, or even dystopia, and there's arguably no other book of his with a wider range of short stories about objects comi...

SPOILER WARNING! Please watch at least the movie before going on, don't blame me for spoiling this for you.   Don't Look Now, both the short story as well as the movie, follows a married couple who, in the wake of their daughter's death, comes to Venice and meets two elderly sisters with an esoteric touch who warn them to leave the city, or else bad things will happen. As is usual in such cases, John the husband is killed by a serial killer who roams Venician streets at night. The original short story by Daphne Du Maurier was published in her 1971 collection Not After Midnight, and Other Stories and was subsequently adapted into the 1973 thriller of the same title by Nicolas Roeg, with Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie playing the couple John and Laura.

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...

Here we go with the first ever piece of writing by good old Howard I'll be reviewing on this blog, yeah!

This post has lots of spoilers in it and assumes that you've already watched John Carpenter's The Thing at some point in your life. I re-watched John Carpenter's The Thing (1982) this weekend and have been dreaming of dogs in my sleep ever since, hah. So, I thought, if a work has affected me on such an unconscious level it deserves to be discussed here, and the fact that it is based on a little novella written by John W. Campbell provides a perfect frame to pack this under Based on Books.

Ever since I (re)watched American Psycho (2000, directed by Mary Harron) last week as the feature film at the Final Girls Berlin Halloween showing, I feel a little bit obsessed with this picture. The first time I saw it must have been fifteen or even twenty years ago and I felt so in awe with the gore and horror back then that I had completely failed to see this film for what it really is - a brilliant and monumental satire. I went home on Halloween night and still couldn't get this movie out of my head - the audience's giggles, the creeping and growing insanity, and Christian Bale fully owning the iconic personage Patrick Bateman...

There are spoilers all over in this text! I LOVE the metro, subway, UBahn, underground, metro, métro, metró, metroul, whatever you call it. As long as a city has underground trains and a plan to go with it, I can find my way around and feel safe too. It takes me where I want to go, it shields me from the weather, it provides me a space to (hopefully) sit down and read my book... I feel like getting out that door and running to the next UBahn station just writing this, it's just extremely cozy down there. But I hear there are people who don't share my enthusiasm, especially the dark tunnels and their supposed secrets animating the darker corners of their imagination - notably Clive Barker... whose iconic 1984 short story collection Books of Blood Volumes 1-3 even opens (as far as I remember) with a novelette/short story set in the New York City underground: The Midnight Meat Train. The striking story worthy of the title of the collection revolves around not one, but two protag...

Having read "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" last week and afterwards re-watching and comparing the book to Blade Runner in my review was so much fun that I'm repeating it this week with another book, and I even found a goodreads friend, Debbie, who is ready to read with me the book on which a famous movie is based off on a regular basis. We will then try and watch the movie around the same time and compare the works, but the focus will of course be on the book since I'm a bookworm and not a film critic in no way. And I'm opening a new column called "Based on Books" to sort these reviews in. Back around the time it was first released (2013-2104?) I had tried to watch the movie Under the Skin but unfortunately fell asleep while watching and so I couldn't claim I watched it. That was before yesterday, because after finishing Michael Faber's book I succeeded in watching it and here are my thoughts on both.