protean depravity

Alright, constant reader, let's finish up this first chapter in the series A Short Story Reader's Guide to Stephen King, by taking a look at the last four short stories in King's first collection  Night Shift . The four stories discussed here are The Last Rung on the Ladder , The Man Who Loved Flowers , One for the Road , and finally, The Woman in the Room , two of them are horror stories and are pre-published before being included in Night Shift , while the remaining two are rather contemporary, or even literary short stories that are rather on the emotional side and which have been written specifically for this work. As usual, it might be better to read the short stories beforehand, because I will spoil everything.

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 ...

Finally did I collect enough short reviews to post here... I have been reading a lot of non-speculative fiction and the birthday week of the Hammett bookstore plus my regular day job finished my energy off, resulting in me not being able to read everything I wanted. But I'm still happy there were a couple of really good books amongst the ones I managed to read. So, here are the short reviews, I hope you enjoy them!

In the age of never-ending reinvention of the vampire trope (and frankly, of every other trope too), it is pretty damn hard to create something original, and more importantly, something meaningful out of this rusted, crusted, dusted motif. One way of achieving such originality is putting the vampire in all sorts of unconventional, unexpected, surprising, sometimes even silly or compromising situations, which, if we're being honest, isn't all that original anymore. Another way is to dive into the heart of what vampires are about, and use or maybe modify that foundation in order to suit your story and to make your point. Horror author Stephen Graham Jones makes exactly that in his latest novel, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter , and to make a meaningful point, as is well known, is his strong suit. The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is the nested narrative of present-day academic Etsy Beaucarne who wants to write a book about the 1912 diary of her great great great grandfather Arthur after it wa...

Heyo! Finally some short reviews before the spring, the academic semester and Easter holidays begin - hope you enjoy!

The first batch of 2025 movies behind us, now comes the fun part of raising hopes for upcoming horror movies that are in line for this year. There's even a concrete reason I'm posting this right now, because this Saturday is Sneak Preview time at the Creepy Crypt and since I have to stick around in Kreuzberg for hours after work until the Creepy Crypt showings begin, I choose my movies carefully. Well, Sneak Preview means that I have no idea what will be shown, only that it's an upcoming movie, so I took a look at movies that I think might be on this Saturday and I'm going to pitch their trailers here (the titles are linked to the teasers or trailers). So this post will be something like an exciting guesswork for the next Sneak Preview. Edit throughout time: They ended up showing the horror comedy Y2K , which really wasn't mine, so I left after the first 15 minutes. But it wasn't all lost, in order to pass the time between Hammett and Creepy Crypt I watched an...

In the same way as it is not unusual to return to the same music one used to listen in their teens and twenties, I lately feel the need to return to books that I've read in my early youth and that have left a mark on me. Of course, the role both books, music, and the associated communities play in the shaping of one's personality is undeniable, so presumably no matter how many decades past, you'll always be partial and subjective, and it's nearly impossible for the fan to give an objective assessment on these works. It would be still interesting to observe how you perceive them now compared to back then, and what feelings those same books awake in you today.

On the verge of her cousin Keziah's marriage, Bata, a girl who lives in a small Nigerian town with her family, has a kind of episode during which she steps into another dimension and, dressed as an awesome warrior-bride, kicks the ass of an evil ghost bride, who apparently formerly was engaged to her cousin's groom. See, Bata has been different all her life, suffering from nightmares which keep the whole household awake - and make them resent her a little bit. Before she is subjected to an exorcism by the town's medicine man Dibia, she is snatched by a magnificient spirit who takes her to Ibaja La, the land of ghost brides, and informs her that she is a sort of chosen-one, and she has a paranormal mission she needs to fulfill as a Bride-Sentinel. Of course, for a ten year old girl coming from a family in which things are less than ideal, a household divided into itself, a house in which she always has been the odd one, to arrive in a sort of wonderland of young women in ...

The reading slump... Sooner or later we all fall victim to this unuterrable nuisance and it's hard - all you want to do is escape and find shelter in imaginary worlds, but the real world and its weight interfer with your concentration and don't let you sink into your books. I have been suffering from a major slump in the past month or so, maybe even for longer, so I'm trying to concentrate on fewer and maybe lighter books or audiobooks I want to have finished until the end of the year, but honestly, I'm not sure I'll even be able to reach that goal. Nevertheless I managed to finish a couple of good titles, and I'm still reading some good ones that I haven't finished yet. So, I hope you enjoy the reviews and have a happy Halloween!

    Got my ticket for the horror theme park!

It always sucks a little bit when the summer ends; the days get darker and shorter, the weather gets chillier, the city gets fuller, the leaves change colors... But pre-fall, September and early October, is still a nice enough time before hell ascends to Berlin and stupid winter begins. And this year it's an even better time than usual, because there's so much going on that it's head-spinning!

Warning as usual, this article is full of spoilers, please see film first! Argh, new nightmare unlocked! On this planet, there is possibly nothing creepier than a surgically enhanced Nicolas Cage blowing you kisses, singing happy birthday. This is the gist of Oz Perkins' recently released horror picture Longlegs. But another paramount takeaway is that, congratulations Mr. Perkins, you are our new shooting star in the skies of horror, an auteur of our own! Let's first have a look at this delicious work of art which charms with beautiful and clever point of view shots, marvelous set designs and lightning, clashes of warm and cold colors in locations, and the combination of all these as a visual feast right from scene one!

  Here we are at the peak of horror in the third millennium, dear people! Continuing from the last post which covered the first two of the pre-pandemic golden years of horror cinema, we'll now take a look at the following two years in which climactically good horror was released. Let's take a look at the best of the best!

With not one but two nunsploitation movies about to be released soon, I have taken the cue that it's time for a blog post of collected nun and religion horror movies that are worth something for all I know. Because there are a lot useless ones, looking at you The Unholy and The Nun .

If you haven't read Chandler Morrison's Dead Inside and are sensitive about spoilers, it's maybe not the best idea to read my post before you've read this book, as I'm discussing things which might be considered spoilers. I just don't think knowing these would considerably reduce the enjoyment you can get out of it, as the beauty is inside the book, not in the description of its plot.

Spectacular! Another excellent horror anthology by Chrystal Lake Publishing, and this time the contributing authors were asked to write and put their own dark twists into the works of William Shakespeare. Beware before starting to read this, though - a rudimentary knowledge on featured plays would provide an additional level of appreciation for the reader, and I don't think they should be sufficiently enjoyable if you don’t know the source plays. So I definitely recommend to at least read the Wikipedia entries of the original works, it will be so much more rewarding. There are 42 contributions in total - so the number of highlights in this already wonderful anthology is accordingly high. And so is the number of stories and poems revolving around neglected characters or characters treated unfairly by The Bard, in an attempt to give them redemption or show their own points of view, bringing about a dark but karmic quality. Yes, “REVENGE” in capital letters is the motto for th...

image credit: FOTOKITA Looking for really good horror movies to send my blood pressure up, up, up in dark and sleepy days, I've come across the Science of Scare project, which measured people's heartbeats during special screenings over several weeks in order to find out the 50 most scary movies. Before I present you these films I want to state my utter disappointment and sadness that they didn't ask me to be a test subject in this experiment - I would have gladly sacrificed myself for science in this case... Hear me Science of Scare! As an additional point, on this list there are many movies I haven't yet seen, I was surprised to find out. So, I have been missing out on the real good stuff and call myself a horror fan... I'll shortly pitch some titles in the list, linked as usual to their imdb pages. Sometimes I won't comment a movie at all, maybe because I haven't seen it, don't want to see it or have nothing to say or nothing nice to say about it. ...

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...

A place changes you – a city, a neighborhood, a hotel. A story. You arrived to each with your own fear, your own hunger, and you found yourself taking on the cast and the appetite of where you were. You couldn’t help it. About one third into Extended Stay I was confused and not sure what Martinez was trying to do here. The half-hypnotic, half-psychedelic narration. The dream-like atmosphere. Confusion. A main character as detached from his reality as he was from his readers. Helpless, directionless, sometimes mean, sometimes aggressive, sometimes opportunistic, sometimes indifferent. An environment teeming with, literally leaking hostility. It really felt like reading a dream, or rather a nightmare-diary. And I didn't like how it affected me, it didn't feel like a kind of fiction I enjoy reading.

First off - I am profusely sorry if I have motivated anyone to go to open air cinemas in Berlin in my last text on films, in which I claim it an exhilarating pastime and the way the summer goes this year, let's face it, it's just not great at all, it is awful... I apologize. This summer sucks, to be brutally honest. During every single movie I went to see open air it rained in various degrees, from mild pattering to Earth-has-decided-to-end-by-flood level and I am now tired sitting on cold benches with chattering teeth and wet feet, and before developing severe frostbite in August I decided I will finish my film plan either at home with my hot water bottle or in indoors cinemas. Still, it wasn't all for nothing, because I saw a lot of good films and documentaries so far. The day before yesterday, for instance, I finally got the chance to see a movie I was really craving for and it was amazing for me. I am, clearly, talking about Mad Heidi.