protean depravity

In this column I will briefly introduce random four or five books I have recently read and I don't want to review extensively for one reason or another. In this first episode you can find some books I have read during lock-down. Enjoy!

Silvia Moreno-Garcia's latest novel Mexican Gothic is every bit Mexican and every bit Gothic as the title makes it sound! An old British family with a funky secret living in a very creepy mansion built in the middle of nowhere in Mexico... A rich and young Mexican girl, Noemí Taboada, sent there by her father to check on her cousin Catalina who married into this peculiar family and who, in a letter for help, indicates that someone might be poisoning her... During her stay in this gloomy place, the lighthearted and carefree Noemí experiences increasingly creepy, unsettling and outright invasive illusions/dreams which only solidify Catalina's suspicions. And oh, how right she is. The first half of Mexican Gothic heavily builds up tension that leads to a deeply disgusting turning point (slight spoiler - a scene reminiscent of another very uncomfortable scene from "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" 1974), from where on the story line quickly finds a direction, certainly di...

Reviewing The Roo by Alan Baxter Let's get this blog started with something rather playful, namely the wonderfully silly and gory creature feature The Roo by Australian author Alan Baxter. It doesn't take the math patrol to see that this one is no literary masterpiece that belongs on every school's reading list, neither is it intellectually exacting horror that will broaden your horizons... But who cares? The Roo is thoroughly silly, pure splatter fun with the brilliant premise of a kangaroo running riot in the Australian outback, murdering humans in inventive ways an actual kangaroo would never even be able to think of... mainly because they are herbivores and generally gentle creatures. And that's a good thing, because you'd never want to be slapped to death with the dismembered arms of your dead wife or be ripped in two halves by the claw of a hopping roo... Which by the way, in the foreword Baxter suggests you google before reading. I did and I can confirm th...

©aliyavuzata Hello, good day and welcome to my new blog! A few words about myself: İnci Asena German here, and if you found your way to this blog, we most probably met at the Otherland Bookshop, Berlin, where I worked as a bookseller before COVID. And if we haven't met there, it was probably in some book-related context. I was born and raised in İzmir, Turkey and did my high school senior year as an exchange student in the USA, in North Andover, Massachusetts. I then returned to Turkey and studied Translation and Interpretation for the French Language at the University Hacettepe in Ankara. Following my graduation, I moved to Wuppertal, Germany and started a Master’s program for English Literature, which I immensely enjoyed but never finished. Instead I tried and failed to build a life in Paris, France, rallied and demonstrated for a year in the streets, worked with refugees and ended up working in Düsseldorf in media monitoring with emphasis on the energy sector and environment, ...