protean depravity

Well... There goes that hint of hope everything is going to be alright again. Berlin was doing so well after the initial COVID19 shutdown in the spring. We even tentatively started sticking our heads out of

When Marlon James jokingly termed the first book of his "Dark Star Trilogy", Black Leopard, Red Wolf , the "African Game of Thrones", little did he know that he could seriously share that title with C.T. Rwizi and his wonderful epic fantasy Scarlet Odyssey . Although no, stop! Let's not start the review of this brilliant debut with a comparison and create false hopes or expectations - there are no graphic scenes of sex and violence and not every man dies here; but there are plenty of intrigues, misfits on a mission and powerful magic games. Scarlet Odyssey is first and foremost an epic fantasy which borrows its cultural, folkloric and mythological elements from Africa. It is furthermore in both the description of administrative intrigues of a society and more importantly in the magic system that it demonstrates and excels in complexity, the latter probably being the most remarkable factor in this fascinating work.

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Treacherous mother, Hereditary (2018) Say farewell to Jack Torrance, it is now mothers who attack, betray, damage, make suffer and hurt with their absence in horror movies. I have watched three horror movies last weekend, “Becky”, “The Lodge” and “Come to Daddy” and ALL of them are marked by the absence of the mother – either because of a sad death, a tragic suicide or the physical absence on a father-son vacation. And that absence has devastating consequences. Is that a coincidence? For anyone who watched horror movies in the 80s and 90s the lack of parental authority is something not only familiar, but almost a prerequisite, but what about only the mother disappearing? Is that a thing in horror movies right now? A little research into the topicalization of mothers in horror shows that mothers are actually depicted so frequently in horror movies that it is safe to say they rule over the genre. Mothers have ALWAYS lived in the castle and their absence has frequently been the stuff of n...

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...

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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!