protean depravity

I have been meaning to write this post for quite some time now and have been postponing, then came the FFF White Nights, and then Berlinale, and also lots of work, and yada yada yada, and it's kind of late, but finally here I am scribbling something, because I don't want to keep putting off reviewing this movie to the point that it's too old to be relevant, and the second part of the 28 series, The Bone Temple, deserves it. It is such, such a good film all around. Let's analyze it then! (OBVIOUSLY SPOILERED REVIEW)

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.

Hello back with the first short reviews in the new year 2026, a year who saw a turbulent start already, but will hopefully be better for us all (later 😭). Enjoy!

It is not very often that an epigraph reflects the overall atmosphere and mood of a particular book ideally, but Samanta Schweblin's latest short story collection Good and Evil and Other Stories opening with Silvina Ocampo's words "strange is always truer" is a great example. It is an atmospheric, quite unique, strange work about seemingly everyday situations and people that are just a little bit eerie, but never openly horrifying, yet always slightly terrifying.

Probably everyone has some kind of story revolving around the first author they enjoyed reading, and for many people in my broader generation that author is Stephen King, since fear as he writes it moves children and younger people on a deeper level. I first read The Stand  in middle school and back then it was already all the hype to read Stephen King, it was even more impressive to read this particular book because it was so thick and the cover was so crazy. Still, then and now, it has never been my favorite King book. The reasons for that are many, but mainly because I see it more like a dark Fantasy book and it has many religious implications I personally don't very much enjoy. I can still acknowledge the importance of a book without necessarily loving it, though, and that's what I'll do in this case. So, ever since I heard about The End of the World As We Know It , this mammoth project of 35 short stories set in the The Stand universe by 35 contemporary horror authors ...

For the first chapter of the second book in the series A Short Story Lover's Guide to Stephen King , I thought I'd do something quirky and combine it with my dormant column Based on Books since Skeleton Crew  opens with The Mist , a short story (or rather novella) as masterly written  by Stephen King  as legendarily adapted to film by director/writer/producer Frank Darabont. Straight up from the start, some useful multimedia links; a good audiobook narration , a ZBS radio drama , and  some fun fan art . There is a TV series somewhere too, but I'm personally not crazy about series/serializations, so you need to find where to stream it yourself. I WILL SPOIL EVERYTHING SO READ THE BOOK, WATCH THE MOVIE BEFORE READING AND DON'T BLAME ME! 

As with each of my film reviews, I will talk spoilers for sure, so go and watch the movie first, then come back and let's discuss this film!   So we're in the middle of the Fantasy Filmfest fever with lots of great sounding movies coming our way, but there have been lots of good horror movies showing in regular movies too, and it's time I address them in a series of posts here.  Weapons is the first movie I want to discuss because I was smitten with it, although I would not give it the 100% it allegedly got on Rotten Tomatoes.   We start off with a mystery; at 2.17 am on a given night, all children from one single class at Maybrook Elementary School disappear, except for one little boy, Alex. They just wake up in the middle of the night, open the door and make that Naruto run for an unknown place. (I have to say at this point that I don't get this running gesture, the Naruto run, and it's one of my critique points that it looks just a little bit ridiculous, but ulti...

All around the world tens of thousands of fan girls dressed in pink pony shirts or black Victorian attires sipping their mini appletinis and Lady Grey teas are hit with the news... They push aside their bitch curtains, put away the Derrida they've been engrossed in, and start jumping for joy because THE BUNNIES ARE BACK! If you too missed the Smut Salon, the restaurant "Mini", the fiction girls and poetry boys, then it's time to rejoice, as the most infamous clique of literary absurdness doesn't fail to deliver for a second time.

Guys... I don't really know where to start discussing this movie... In its opening week it came second only after "How To Train Your Dragon" and debuted many millions of dollars (well deserved); the internet is teeming with heated discussions (especially about the end), and I feel like I didn't even know I've been waiting for this... On the day it was released in Germany I left work early so I could literally run to the theater and watch the first English showing. I've seen it twice more since then, and I'm still thinking about this movie and about going to see it one more time. Why? Because it's a movie where there's so so much going on, and despite their imperfections, or maybe because of them, I love movies likes that. DON'T FORGET THAT I ALWAYS HAVE TO SPOIL EVERY MOVIE AND EVERY BOOK, SO PLEASE GO AND SEE THE MOVIE BEFORE READING THIS!!! 

There's a reason that out of body experiences such as body swaps or astral projections are a staple of speculative fiction – the possibility of experiencing life in a different body, literally walking in the shoes of someone else, is EXCITING, it is the antidote of looking at the same old boring face in the mirror every single morning. But it is only when the experience is not a swap anymore, and becomes one sided, say like a possession or a haunting, then we're entering horror, uncanny territory. And if the bodies merged belong to people of backgrounds antithetical in nature, let's say the richest and most powerful white man of the world, the president of the USA, and an orphaned boy in Nigeria, you have pure social comedy, and that's what Nigerian-British author Nuzo Onoh explores in her latest book The Fake Ghost .

C'est le moment où un homme sain d'esprit qui cause avec un fou ne s'est pas encore aperçu que c'est un fou. The above quote by Marcel Proust from À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs , the second installment of his In Search of Lost Time series, describes a moment you haven't yet realized that the person you are chatting with is, in fact, insane. It is this quote, oddly enough, that has always sprang to my mind, the feeling that surfaces from within me, when I listen to the American folk rock band Neutral Milk Hotel. It is the core of what this music's surface of pleasantness and harmony, conveyed by melodious, honeyed, smooth tunes, hiding outbursts of intense emotion and distorted, disrupted by glimpses of insanity, by cacophony, awakens in me. And it intrigues me, it haunts me, I can listen to them and be inspired to a different feeling every single time, but that basis of oddity, of weirdness remains.

It would be good  to read along the stories I'm discussing in this column, because I'll spoil everything! Americans are obsessed with many things: college sports, high school life, peanut butter, haunted houses, ice in their drinks, UFO's... Out of their many strange obsessions, though, the strangest of them all surely must be the love for their lawns. I can't claim to understand how and why the small piece of green grass around their houses became some sort of status symbol, but I can accept it, as it seems relatively harmless compared to other stuff.

In almost every horror anthology there's one recurring name that piques my attention because the stories under that name almost always land among my highlights: Joe R. Lansdale. I also keep on hearing how great he is, even more so since I started working at a crime and mystery bookshop, because Lansdale shines both in horror and crime fiction. So, you know how you have an endless back list of authors' names you want to read some day? Well, Lansdale was one of those names perpetually in the back of my head. I even have his The Best of Joe R. Lansdale sitting on my shelf, because you know me, I'll buy it and let it sit there for years before finally reading a book and then get frustrated because I had this gem in my home all these years.

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 ...

Ladies! Do you feel tired of the neglect, emotional damage, selfishness, infidelity, trust and intimacy issues in your marriage? Then worry no more. Meet Wolf:

There’s much to appreciate about an author who can, in a short story collection, juggle with a limited and recurring set of ideas without coming off as monotonous and repetitive. Collections are considered accomplished to the degree that they are varied and reflect a mixed assortment of literary devices; differing points of view, thematic and stylistic variation, anything to keep tedium away. It takes a master hand like Evenson to go against that convention and to write a collection of stories thematically focused and subtly interconnected, extremely well curated and arranged, unparalleled in minimalistic writing and laconic dialogues, examining themes like environmental collapse, paranoia, AI, or cruel family ties through heady, composed, original horror.

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.

Dark, darker, American Narcissus … Chandler Morrison surprises with an unusually grim novel about the vapid, vile, self-serving, chain smoking rich people of Los Angeles. Against the backdrop of the wildfires that consume the city, we follow four people who are both part of this empty, shallow, cruel social system but also struggle to fit in: Arden Coover, rich junkie and proud owner of a useless philosophy degree from Berkeley; his sister Tess who tries to figure out if her affair with a narcissistic writer (“the” Writer , mind you) is worth it; Ryland Richter, an insurance executive, addicted to coke, to work and the new employee in his company who turns out to be unhinged and dangerous. And finally sweet Baxter Kent, surfer boy addicted to porn and afraid of real women, who meets an unlikely person to soothe his loneliness.

There's no shame in wondering about the background of people who do terrible things, and the extensive coverage of the lives of shooters, monsters or serial killers in the news, in literature, and especially in cinema is proof of that. Schroeder certainly isn't the first book to explore the mind of a killer, and yet I feel unusually torn thinking about this tormented character and the one fateful day in his life, his very last day after the last straw broke the camel's back.

Ah, the woman’s search for eternal beauty… The trope as old as time has always been a grab bag for storytellers, but in the last couple of years it has been seeing a true revival explosion, especially in horror. The wish to hold on to the one source of power granted to her in a world in which she is sexualized and measured by her youthfulness, fertility and sex-appeal is naturally a huge source of anxiety. Efforts to stop her body from aging and decaying, to appear desirable and pretty, not to lose “it” and not to succumb to cruel reality, and all this eventually leading to her self-destruction, are all themes organic to horror. Add to it a little snip snip here, a nip tuck there, a little blood, a couple of needles into the flesh, some body modification and you have yourself the perfect template for a class A body horror story that reminds us that ultimately we are nothing but meat. Books like Natural Beauty (Ling Ling Huang), #thighgap (Chandler Morrison) or Rouge (Mona Awad) disc...