protean depravity

In her relentless account on the colonization of the American continent entitled La Férocité Blanche , the wonderful author and activist Rosa Amalia Plumelle-Uribe states something along the lines of "For the ones who know what it is, colonialism is not a word that needs to be explained. It consists of horrific and dreadful deeds" - in other words; horror is an inherent part of colonialism; horror is in colonialism . In the recently published The Only Good Indians the also wonderful Blackfeet author Stephen Graham Jones ingeniously reverses this statement by putting colonialism inside horror and brings horror back to where it has always belonged. During the whole time I was reading The Only Good Indians , not once did I guess where the plot would lead, nor did I foresee the emotional magnitude of that glorious conclusion. The story of Rick, Lewis, Gabe and Cassidy, four indigenous men who are being haunted by the elk they have hunted a decade ago, at first sounded like a...

Enjoy my new short reviews! 

Reviewing Stephen King's If It Bleeds In an interview on multiverses from 2015, Michael Moorcock states that authors who write a lot, gradually and unintentionally start writing about the same character. While Moorcock goes on to explain how that phenomenon affected his own work, especially in Eternal Champion , my mind drifts to another of my favorite authors, Stephen King, whose protagonists are usually a carbon copy of his younger self: white male author, married with children, lives in New England, preferably in Maine. In fact, King writes so much that he can afford to run four or five separate protagonists issuing from a certain range of archetypes. The same applies to his tropes and villains by the way. Since the preparatory work would take a lot of time (but would be totally worth it!) I will not present you a list of all tropes that King deals with and how he tends to cross two or more of those in his stories and novels - anyone who has read some King will know what I am ta...

Attention readers: The world of speculative fiction is under attack... the attack of author Stephen Graham Jones and he is way taller than 50 foot, he's gigantic! "The Attack of the 50 foot Indian" was a wonderful surprise in this horrible year 2020, since I was only expecting The Only Good Indians to be released by Jones. I haven't read the latter yet by the way, but only due to the sheer overwhelming mass of seriously good horror literature being published right now. BUT I very soon will catch up since the 50 Foot Indian has left me wanting to read more Jones and made me rearrange my TBR-pile. This little book follows the Hollywood tradition of very large people or things attacking the world, but is highlighted by Jones' very own, very necessary sociopolitical twist. An Indian giant is discovered sleeping between the Bering Sea and Siberia. They name him "Two Moon" because two moons have been sighted the night he was found; one yellow, one brown. As c...

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, ...