protean depravity

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!

Hey! It's time for new short reviews again and the closer we come to the end of the year, the crazier and the better the books get, let me tell you. Look out for the Best Of 2021 next week as there will be some tough choices to make.

Photo by Pylz Works on Unsplash With yet another possible lockdown ahead of us, the time has come again for another round of horror film festival at home. A short wrap-up if you don't know what I mean: about this time last year I decided to start my own film festival at home due to the lack of cinemas and cinematic activities in general under hard lockdown in Berlin. So I basically make a selection of horror movies and watch these at home after which I select a winner for that season. The winning movie gets a way too long and exhaustive review, and my gushes (the winners of last year were Relic and Sator ). Although we finally witnessed the opening of the film industry and all the movies that had been put on hold during lockdown times have at last been released, with COVID spiking again in Berlin, my heart breaks but I'm kind of reluctant to go to cinemas. So, after having done some research for upcoming movies that sound exciting to me, I have come up with the following l...

Editor Ellen Datlow's new collection of short stories inspired by the infamous Shirley Jackson is simply SUBLIME. Believe me, I'm saying this as someone who isn't even an overly great fan of Jackson: each story in this book is magic! In her introduction, Datlow explains the essence of a Shirley Jackson story as "filled with hauntings, dysfunctional families, and domestic pain; simmering rage, loneliness, suspicion of outsiders; sibling rivalry and women trapped psychologically and/or by the supernatural", adding that Jackson embodies the "dark undercurrent of suburban life". And indeed, in each and every one of the 18 stories in this collection there is a piece of good old Shirley - haunted houses bring about madness, poisoning women in abundance, evil mothers, collective guilt, small-town horror... As I already mentioned above, I am not the biggest Jackson-fan but it was a great pleasure to recognize traces of say, "The Lottery" or Haunting o...

The weekend before last was a horror fan's "that time of the year" again and I hope you had the opportunity to read lots of spooky ghost stories, watch tons of gory films, decorate your house in various shades of orange and eat lots of candy on Halloween. But autumn in Berlin is all the more special because each year the lovely team of Final Girls Berlin does a Halloween special to fuel up your horror tanks before the dark season really starts and it ends in a crazy masquerade where you can go wild, dress up in mad costumes and/or just be and enjoy yourself. If you have good dress-up and make-up skills, you might even win one of the super original prizes FGB has in store for you. As for me, I don't need a prize as long as I can watch the short films. As is the case each year, there were some absolute gems in the selection this time too and here are my favorites amongst this year's Halloween shorts:

October is gone and so is the intense race to read as many horrific stories as possible until the scariest night of the year... Here I am emptying my bag of horror goodies I collected during this dark time of the year, and hope you enjoy!

I have never been the one to wish to be able to fly in the skies, but Nupur Chowdhury’s A Flight of Broken Wings sure made me think about how cool it would be to have a pair of huge, beautiful wings with which I can float around and which look like those on the awesome cover, my god, look at the beauty of that!

Enjoy the new shorties!

It is always a very strange and a very specific pleasure to read Brian Evenson's short stories - a very own blend of latent dread, existential fears, perturbed presentation of everyday life and a good portion of chuckle humor is sure to grab and not let go until you have finished reading the last page. So, I’m more than happy to have had that pleasure again when this summer his new short story collection The Glassy Burning Floor of Hell was published. Apart from the exceptional high quality of each story, the sequencing also plays an important part in making it easy to step into the dreadful world of Glassy, which starts with a striking piece of writing that instantaneously enthralls: “Leg”. This admittedly short but remarkably absurd and intriguing piece about a sentient shapeshifter leg turning into a serial killer on a spaceship, is only the gateway to a universe of uncanny encounters, environmental urgency, body horror, folk horror but also noticeably often dystopic and eve...