protean depravity

With a discussion that stretched over two days, we had a rather unusual Otherland book club session last weekend on a rather unusual book - Stonefish by Scott R. Jones. And I'm using unusual in the best sense of the word! A Lovecraftian skeleton and existential body in gnostic clothes, as described by its author, this great debut centers on Den Secord, a journalist who is set on the mission of finding the eccentric tech guru Gregor Makarios. And that mission is a truly, distressingly, depressingly mind-bending experience which will turn all reality toroidal and poloidal . Stonefish is a very thought-provoking and profoundly interesting work which will grab, occupy and frighten your mind while playing with and yes, even reinventing traditional tropes and notions. It is a blast to discover new good books, new authors and when those authors turn out to be great people who are genuinely interested in their readers, the whole experience turns into double the fun. This is what happen...

It's Ugress time again! Don't forget to tune in on Thursday, November 12, at 8 pm; the warmup starts at around 7:30 pm. http://www.ugress.com/live/ or participate live with comments on Youtube , Facebook  or Twitch . I'm really excited about this upcoming show because listeners can determine the locations this time! How, you say? Just take a picture of your living room and send it to ugress@ugress.com , and let the show in your living room begin!

For my beautiful home city; geçmiş olsun İzmir'im! Thanks to several members of my family who worked in various theaters around the world scooping the contingencies of free tickets for family and friends, I have been lucky enough to have free access to watch as many theater plays as I want, whenever I happened to live or stay in the same city with them. As it is with everything that you do often from an early age on, watching lots of stage plays has left its mark on me - not only am I hopelessly enchanted by the performative side - stage, backstage, costumes, props, atmosphere -, I am also completely fascinated, on a pure textual, dramaturgical level, by the immediacy, as Oscar Wilde put it, this art form conveys. A text that needs to transmit whole universes in an hour or two, a text relying on the spoken word and gestural implications, without narration, needs to compulsorily rely on a stripped, archetypal presentation and a very precise, concentrated sense of aim. There is somet...

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.

With his heartwarming and funny Death and Life of Schneider Wrack, Nate Crowley brought us the aquatic Zombie-Klassenkampf here to Berlin. Then, with the first post-truth book in history, he took us back to the good old days when we never had outrageous fun playing the 100 Best Video Games (That Never Existed) … And now he is taking us on a 100% corona-free voyage around science fictional and fantastic worlds in his latest book, a delightful travel guide - Notes from Small Planets ! Meet Floyd Watt: disgraced diplomat, journalist, television personality, a self-important, arrogant assh*le, who, in Crowley’s own words “thinks he’s an enlightened, progressive fellow who enriches the places he visits by his very presence”. He’s also the author of the extraordinary travel guide Notes from Small Planets . Extraordinary, because these destinations and hundreds of other planets have been accessible to us Earthlings only temporarily and this book is the sole witness of those glorious times....

Did you, as a child, enjoy the later episodes of the children series Hallo Spencer and grew up to be a geeky adult who listens electronica, reads speculative fiction and has an affection for house plants? If that's a pretty accurate description of you, I'm pretty sure you shouldn't miss the live streams of Ugress -  a music/storytelling project from Norway with the ruthless charm of Spencer (though, with only one character and songs instead of sketches), awesome music, self written stories and fun, interactive games, starring my dear friend and fellow book clubber, the unbearably congenial Gisle Martens Meyer.

illustrated by Gustavo Barroni   Original Fiction by Lindsay Taylor The publisher had dutifully tried to hype the whole affair, but there’s only so much that could be done under the circumstances.

Recently I tried to focus on finishing books I had started reading at some point in the past and didn't finish for one reason or another and it's looking good so far; here are some results of project DNF, as well as newer reads that I had been anticipating. Two of the books I am discussing here are slashers and the other three can definitely pass as (dark) fantasy but also as contemporary literature depending on where your focus is. Enjoy!

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