protean depravity

Jenny Kaplan is as New York City as they come – independent and complex, trying to make a living through a severely underpaid job at the lifestyle magazine Bread and Circus , and always one rent away from being evacuated. Her biggest accomplishment is a very personal and honest piece of autofiction that includes her break up and abortion, titled “Drano”, which got her the most views and support she ever had, but also brought along powerful enemies, such as The Brotherhood and, unfortunately, the owners of her workplace.

A couple of years ago my way to work passed through the so-called "Pissallee" behind the Berlin train station Zoologischer Garten - a terrible, derogatory name for a street in Charlottenburg inhabited by homeless people, the walkway usually packed with tents, makeshift beds, blankets, shopping carts and bags full of stuff to live on scattered all around, so much so that sometimes you didn't really have space to walk. One evening on my way to the train station I saw from the corner of my eye a sleeping bag - nothing unusual in this street - which looked empty to me the way it was thinly spread across the floor. Just as I was passing, it started moving and wriggling around like an earth worm, giving me for a split second the impression the empty sleeping bag is doing this eerie squirmy dance. In that split second I felt such a dread in me, felt my stomach drop and my spine chill with such a force that it threw me off for a moment and I felt the need to first collect mysel...

Thinking about where to start with Black City Skyline and Darker Horizons , my thoughts keep on going in circles which always end in the same one word: Providence. "I can't tell you what's going on in this city, Detective. Maybe it's a combination of gentrification, global warming, and crime, with a hefty dose of lockdown anxiety. Maybe it's something else." Courting ground to Edgar Allan Poe as well as home to H.P. Lovecraft, Cormac Mc Carthy and yes, Barry Lee Dejasu, Providence has a substantial claim to fame when it comes to North American literature. In the tradition of other evil small towns like King's Salem, Levin's Stepford, or the more recent examples of Baxter's Gulpepper, Jones' Proofrock, Junji Ito's Kurouzu-cho, Dejasu's Providence too plays a crucial, almost characterlike part in his debut short story collection. So much so that this horrible place, of which characters often complain but never do or even can leave, is th...

Death can't be like life. Then it wouldn't be death, would it? As one of the few horror publishing houses that can look beyond their own local backyards, Valancourt did the worldwide horror community a great service by issuing Hungarian author and screenwriter Attila Veres' English debut short story collection, The Black Maybe: Liminal Stories . So, I want to give them a huge thank you to begin with. Where to start with this one? Maybe at the end, the very end. The moment I read the last page and closed the book. I was overwhelmed, appalled, fascinated and stirred inside, all in a good way, by the ten stories I had just read from an author who has the powerful talent to suck and tie in his readers immediately, no time lost. I'm saying this as a person who usually needs some time to warm up to new stories. I get attached to characters and when I go through an intense experience with them, as it is the case in a short story, I feel like it is hard to just quickly set tha...

The very first review here on Protean Depravity was about Alan Baxter's tongue-in-cheek slasher/creature feature The Roo , the story of a kangaroo going amok in the Australian Outback killing people in super inventive ways - that fucken roo... In his latest, The Gulp , Baxter returns to "serious" horror; small town terror divided into five short stories set in the fictional Australian seaside town Gulpepper, or The Gulp, as everybody calls it; a place travelers should definitely stay well clear of.

Last month was a pretty crazy reading month. I joined many reading groups where I read books out of my comfort zone I wouldn't normally have chosen, but also re-read books from years ago I had almost forgotten about. But in the end it feels good to stray from the plan every now and then and rediscover old stuff. Enjoy the wrap up!

I have a new favorite horror author who has me in a proper frenzy - a Hailey Piper frenzy. Within the last month I have read three novellas by her ( Benny Rose, the Cannibal King; The Worm and His Kings; The Possession of Natalie Glasgow ) and can't get enough of her writing, she's that good. Even though I didn't always like her choice of stories, that's not the case with The Worm and His Kings , which I would say is the best horror book I have read this year so far - this book blew-my-mind! We follow the story of Monique, who lives in the tunnels under New York City after she and her girlfriend Donna lost their jobs and became homeless. But that’s not the biggest of Monique’s troubles; Donna disappears without a trace too. Word is under the streets that there is a talon-ed and absolutely huge creature called “Grey Hill” lurking underground snatching women and Monique is convinced that Donna was taken by this monster. But it turns out Grey Hill is nothing but ...

Well played, Catherine Cavendish, very well played… You had me fooled throughout the bigger part of this book, had me thinking I had figured it out, rolling my eyes at the ostensible Victorian banality of it all... And then you speed up toward the end and come up with that bombshell in the last quarter that I can only applaud. The Garden of Bewitchment is an exquisitely crafted, wonderfully astonishing, plain fantastic book! Forget all you know about cozy Gothic fiction because Cavendish is here to push the boundaries of convention and rewrite it all in letters of dread!

With a discussion that stretched over two days, we had a rather unusual Otherland book club session last weekend on a rather unusual book - Stonefish by Scott R. Jones. And I'm using unusual in the best sense of the word! A Lovecraftian skeleton and existential body in gnostic clothes, as described by its author, this great debut centers on Den Secord, a journalist who is set on the mission of finding the eccentric tech guru Gregor Makarios. And that mission is a truly, distressingly, depressingly mind-bending experience which will turn all reality toroidal and poloidal . Stonefish is a very thought-provoking and profoundly interesting work which will grab, occupy and frighten your mind while playing with and yes, even reinventing traditional tropes and notions. It is a blast to discover new good books, new authors and when those authors turn out to be great people who are genuinely interested in their readers, the whole experience turns into double the fun. This is what happen...