protean depravity

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...

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.

Slowly but surely, the "Indian Lake Trilogy" is on its way to become author Stephen Graham Jones' magnum opus - that's the prime takeaway from the recent, massive and very much justified success surrounding its second installment Don't Fear the Reaper (only Reaper in text for purposes of brevity). It isn't unusual for a second book in a series to achieve more success than its predecessor, the first one having already separated the wheat from the chaff among readers and having established a backstory and setting for the protagonist. Solely people who accept and enjoy the terms set in the first book will stick around for more. The first book My Heart Is A Chainsaw ( Chainsaw ) of the Indian Lake series and its follower Reaper are no exceptions. When Chainsaw came out in the summer of 2021, it truly dropped like a bomb into horror circles. Even though there had been indigenous representation in the genre, (not the least thanks to Jones himself and his riveting...

So I have been feverishly reading aquatic horror themed books for my summer challenge and as a side-effect I am discovering hidden gems every now and then. Even though it isn't necessarily aquatic horror, one of these gems definitely is Zombie Sharks With Metal Teeth , a short story collection by Stephen Graham Jones from times back when the Lazy Fascist Press was still alive. I love short stories and I love SGJ books, so this has to be ideal for me, right? Right! As in all his writing, Jones really puts thought into every single one of his stories here too, no matter how short they are, which makes this seriously quality reading. I think I will keep on returning to these stories often.

High were the hopes for 2021 - after a disastrous pandemic year, tons of confusion, losses, sickness, bush fires, earthquakes and other catastrophes the world was going to enter a new, better era in 2021 with vaccination for all, freedom days everywhere, return to normality... It didn't turn out that way. Having reached the end of this year, having seen that the worst was yet to come, that those vaccines don't really work, 2021 actually feels like an extension of the most unpopular year 2020. The good things about the collective state that we are in can be counted on the fingers of one hand and one of them is certainly that there is much more time for reading compared to the old normal. So much did I read this year that it was seriously difficult to choose the winners for the Protean Depravity Best Books of 2021, but finally here they are!

I’d read Frankenstein in AP English, so I knew you don’t just walk away from your creations. Not without consequences. 2020 is the year of Stephen Graham Jones! With two seriously grand novellas and an impressive full-sized novel within only a couple of months, he is hard to keep up with right now and is finally achieving the breakthrough he deserves in and outside the horror zone. His latest release that completes the literary Tour de Jones'20 (apart, I think, from his annual contribution to Ellen Datlow's Best Horror of the Year ), Night of the Mannequins , is a small slasher story that holds in store quite a few surprises for the unsuspecting reader.