protean depravity

Attila Veres is a filmmaker and an author from Hungary who got introduced to international horror readers as recent as last fall through the Valancourt publication The Black Maybe , an outstanding collection of ten of his short stories which has since been nominated for the esteemed Bram Stoker Awards.

  Ugress is back! And not only do they have a new livestream scheduled on youtube for June 23rd, they will also be performing tomorrow, Wednesday May 24th at 12:30 CEST for the Festspillene i Bergen, “ What is the City but the People? ” at the royal opening ceremony, Festplassen, city centre. If you happen to be in Norway, admission is free, go pay a visit. If not, it will be livestreamed by the festival at fib.no !

My favorite final girls in Berlin* are back with another Brain Binge weekend on the 3rd and 4th of June. The discussions this year are pretty awesome ranging from women's contribution to horror sfx makeup, to the lesbian vampire following the model of Countess Elizabeth Báthory, to motherhood and the reluctant mother as monster in horror cinema and so much more.

The Horror Aficionados summer challenge has begun in May this year, yay! So I went through my tbr-list and tried to make a smaller list of the books that are somewhat related to summer activities - only to sadly realize that the books I want to read are usually way too grim for the usually lighter summertime. I was still able to scrape together a few titles, mostly books about the sea, the seaside, swimming, but also one about open-air band tours, one theme park and one about camping. I usually try to not overdo it and pledge to read about five books, this year I'm shooting for more and hope it works. Here are my chosen summer challenge books:

Kris at Otherland Horror and crime author Kristopher Triana was in Germany last week to join the big horror weekend of publisher Festa in their offices in Leipzig and extended his stay to visit Berlin. The writer of award-winning novels like Full Brutal, The Night Stockers , or the wildly popular Gone to See The River Man was kind enough to accept a little interview with Protean Depravity. Enjoy!

Enjoy the new short reviews!

Wolf gave me an ancient butcher knife to pose with my books, 😆! It was too rusty to cut, though, no worries. Let's face it; my to-be-read list is hopeless, as everybody's is probably too. It is off the charts and yet I find myself over and over again joyfully discovering new titles which all sound better than the other and I want to read all of them. But for the majority of the time I struggle to keep up with my own reading plan. I am my worst nemesis.

 The shorties are here, enjoy!

A couple of years ago my way to work passed through the so-called "Pissallee" behind the Berlin train station Zoologischer Garten - a terrible, derogatory name for a street in Charlottenburg inhabited by homeless people, the walkway usually packed with tents, makeshift beds, blankets, shopping carts and bags full of stuff to live on scattered all around, so much so that sometimes you didn't really have space to walk. One evening on my way to the train station I saw from the corner of my eye a sleeping bag - nothing unusual in this street - which looked empty to me the way it was thinly spread across the floor. Just as I was passing, it started moving and wriggling around like an earth worm, giving me for a split second the impression the empty sleeping bag is doing this eerie squirmy dance. In that split second I felt such a dread in me, felt my stomach drop and my spine chill with such a force that it threw me off for a moment and I felt the need to first collect mysel...