protean depravity

Women find their power where they can, and remember it in twisted threads. Misheard whispers. Embroidered and disguised. This was a pretty wild read, people, and I don’t know how to begin reviewing... I guess it's best to start with the author and her previous work.

Yay, The Final Girls Berlin Film Festival is due in two weeks and their program looks AMAZING! The festival takes place in City Kino Wedding but the very cautious of you or those who can't come can watch the shorts online! Here's their message:

I finally made the time and gathered the concentration to write this post about my last few reads in 2021 and my more recent reads. Hope you enjoy the first shorties of this year!

The Best Horror of the Year Volume Thirteen was to be my final book of 2021, the perfect closure of my reading year… Or so I thought. What actually happened is that it didn’t even make it to the first book of 2022 because it starts so damn slow! My initial impression of the first few stories is such a poor one that I seriously wondered if this really can be the best horror of any year at all! I was wrong, though, a slow start does not necessarily mean a bad anthology. And as we all know anthologies usually are a mixed bag – it’s next to impossible to find consistently awesome ones and even if they were filled with only good stories we’d start petty bickering and comparing them to each other. Even though I was a little disappointed of the weak start (and honestly thought it would all go downhill from there because anthologies usually start really strong to get you hooked), I was very pleasantly surprised by the middle streak of genuinely scary and/or original stories which basically ...

Happy new year, I wish everyone a safe and terrific 2022! I'm starting the new year with big reading plans, joining various reading groups, book clubs and challenges that I'm all excited about, so let's take a look at them.

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...