protean depravity

  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...

Here we are again, standing at the end of the year, taking a last look back before moving on. Moving on has been the motto for the entire last year, honestly, as I feel like I was standing before a heap of shards and rubble from the year before and decided to completely concentrate on myself and, fitting the Chinese year of the snake, shed my skin, I let go - I removed many many things that are unnecessary and superfluous in my life, and focused on my healing and well-being, but also let older things back in that I feel are important to who I am and that I have been neglecting. So overall I feel good about myself and this past year. Of course, everything around the world is still going south and the rage that ensues from watching stupid politicians and death and destruction and fear makes it hard to find inner balance. I have no idea where the world is heading and I'm not very optimistic nor very enthusiastic to find out but there's nothing else to do but go with it. There'...

Cults! It seems like they 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 fear and the way it is reflected in recent horror movies.  A cult is a group of people who have an unusual, even abnormal or extreme, socially deviant religious or spiritual, in any case a numinous belief, combining a set of particular elements such as  devotion to a particular person or object,  rituals and practices, a secret or forbidden  knowledge that they either covertly use to gain advantages in life, or are chasing the opportunity to put into use to reach their goal. And as is well known, knowledge is ultimately power . In  Terror, Love and Brainwashing: Attachment in Cults and Totalitarian Systems,  Alexandra S...

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 ...

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. In order to do so I answer a series of questions that we use to sum up our reading year/half year over at the Shine and Shadow reading group on Goodreads. I feel like my reading considerably slowed down this year, and I indeed decided to read less fluff and more books that are of value to me. I still feel like chasing my own tail though, and I'm not achieving much of my reading goals. Let's break it down to how it went so far!

All the Protean Depravity columns have a deeply ritual (or shall I, less flatteringly, say repetitive?) character, and although I'd love to add more new, flashy, and exciting things to my blog, I also find comfort in little traditions. The wrapping up column, in which I look back at my reading challenges of the past, and most anticipated books in the upcoming year, is one of those comfort writes. The other main one being the best titles of the year, which is due next week, so hold on tight for that! But before, let's wrap up this year's reading. Among all the chaos and bad luck I had last year, there is one accomplishment that I'm proud of - I finished ALL my reading challenges I pledged to finish, and I'm a little proud of that. I have to add that I was very careful not to put too much on my plate and sometimes read as little as four or seven books per challenge, but that technique helped me finishing them, some of them even quite early in the year.

The last couple of months of the year are good times both for planning for the year ahead, as well as watching lots of movies which will be released around Christmas, the time of the year to spend money galore. So, I too have started looking into the next year's cinema and film programs and found quite a few great watches coming in December and early next year. I'm especially psyched to see recurring favorite names like Oz Perkins, Stephen King, but also two werewolf movies which both look good to me.

  We have reached the end of the golden horror years, let's drink to that with Willem and Robert, cheers! Here's my final selection of the best movies produced before the pandemic hit us like an octopus' tentacle in the face, don't forget to watch those you might have missed and re-watch those you enjoyed!

  Mid-year has come and gone and it is again time for looking back at this year's reading and draw a balance. There's a bitter-sweet feeling though, there haven't been too many good books that impressed me greatly, though I have to admit, because I have been struggling a little bit privately, I have read a lot of non-fiction and self-help books which don't really flow into this balance. And in the end, they didn't really help a great deal, so they were kind of wasted reading time. So, my friends, here's this year's mid-year freakout, in the hope that the really good stuff is yet to come!

  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!

Having recently written about what a great horror year 2015 was made me nostalgic for that time. Undeniably, there's already a wave of promising new horror pics on the way, and I am hoping for a revival of a good horror year in 2025, ten years after. Time will tell if it will really happen, but until then let's have a look at and discuss the movies released from 2015 to 2020; those five excellent horror years, until the pandemic replaced the screen horror with a real one. Here the first two years 2015 and 2016.

  The world keeps on turning and once again the nicer time of the year has arrived; the warm time. At least hopefully, because in this part of the world you never know - Remember last summer? And again, I have been merrily taking and taking review copies of books, and reached the point where they have accumulated to a degree that I'm about to lose track, but haven't quite yet. I am at a point where I need to straighten up the tbr pile - make a priority list so that no important book gets left out, but also make sure my personal goals, group reads, buddy reads and challenges are fulfilled too. It's not easy being a professional book worm, let me tell you.

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...

Only two weeks are left until the end of the year and it is already hard to escape all book websites and social media channels madly posting hundreds of anticipated-books lists for the upcoming year. Of course, I too have been peeking a little, although my experience has taught me that the best books in life come surprisingly and the most promising ones usually end up disappointing. I still get a special kind of childish joy from making lists of brand new books, so I made a little compilation here too.

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. ...

Realizing I didn't have a favorite book yet for the year 2023 until I recently read the new Bazterrica made me question the books I have been reading these past six months. None of them could hit me hard enough and that made me ponder why. I don't really have an answer for the why, maybe I was more focused when mostly at home during the pandemic, maybe the books really aren't that great, I don't know.

The Horror Aficionados summer challenge has begun in May this year, yay! So I went through my tbr-list and tried to make a smaller list of the books that are somewhat related to summer activities - only to sadly realize that the books I want to read are usually way too grim for the usually lighter summertime. I was still able to scrape together a few titles, mostly books about the sea, the seaside, swimming, but also one about open-air band tours, one theme park and one about camping. I usually try to not overdo it and pledge to read about five books, this year I'm shooting for more and hope it works. Here are my chosen summer challenge books:

I'm getting old... I'm getting old, I feel the unbearable pull to play community games and will follow that call by playing bingo galore. Book bingo, that is.

Despite the early snow, fog and bitter cold that already befell Berlin in November this year, winter is only just beginning, folks. So, I said to myself, it would be unfair to winter if I didn't make any "best winter horror books" list, since I already made a list of best summer reads some months ago.

Not only is the living easy during summertime, so is reading summer-themed horror books! While most people feel that Halloween is an especially good time for horror, I, not completely uncontroversially, argue that the summer is much more terrifying. The oppressive heat, the unknown waters, buzzing insects, nature and creatures coming to life all at once, crippling boredom... It can certainly be too much for some. Then there's my personal story - a couple of years back I had explained on the Otherlander's Blog how there is an intense connection between hot summer days and horror movies for me and maybe that clarifies this whole subject some more. We're not talking movies right now though, I will talk about summer-themed horror books. And luckily there are a lot of them.  Incidentally I'm joining a water-themed reading challenge for my Horror Aficionados group called "Summer Horror Reading Challenge", prompting me to look up aquatic horror books set in and arou...