July 9, 2023

Time for another bit of accountability— today we’re apologizing to Michael Wehunt and Doug Murano, as Bad Hand Books sent me an e-copy of this and unfortunately the bizarre nature of my work schedule in the past few months also engulfed this. Doug, Michael, I’m sorry. I hope I do this justice

I’ve tried and failed to write this intro over and over again.

It’s not because it’s particularly difficult to describe The Inconsolables by Michael Wehunt, a collection of stories centered around grief, loss, and simply the spaces in ourselves where something is missing. No, the difficulty here is recommending a book, going “if you have ever had the unique experience of being in the same place these stories describe, this book will fuck you up. But you should definitely read it.”

You should definitely read it. Wehunt navigates the horrifying spaces of grief, loss, and depression in a disturbingly genuine way, pairing them with images out of nightmares that perfectly match the idea of something clawing its way into your empty spaces to live. Despite all this, a lot of the stories end up feeling hopeful, or at least end on a note of enough ambiguity that the anguish and dread don’t feel relentless. It’s a collection that perfectly manages the balance of dread, mild optimism, despair, and some truly disturbing, imaginative visions.

The Inconsolables is a book that demands you let it in.

More, as always, below

Keep reading

7:06pm | URL: https://tmblr.co/ZyQ6_xe6X2gQeu00

(Notes: 2)

July 6, 2023

The Marigold by Andrew F. Sullivan

Hello. Unfortunately, as the last few months have been a rather chaotic mix of radio silence, frantic holding patterns, a deluge of information, and me attempting to force myself to get off my ass, I fucked up. Way up. Then I forgot the login to my own website, which seems like a reasonable conclusion to this particular chain of events. Andrew, I apologize. Hopefully in some way I can make this up to you.

I’d like to begin with a little bit of bombast. It’s awards season, and being awards season we find ourselves once again preoccupied with the books we read that “deserve it” and the nature of popularity contests and overlooked nods. So let me get this right out front, because I need to have it said, I watched politely and silently as books I loved slipped silently beneath the waves while working for editorial media. I’ve borne witness to thousands of ignored revolutions and outright robberies in my capacity as a professional critic, so allow me a single provocative moment while I’m editing for myself here and am allowed to be somewhat more uncivil:

Sleep on The Marigold at your own fucking peril.

The book is a riot, a complex satire as pitch-black as the fungus Sullivan unleashes upon the city of Toronto, detailing in its own way (a way similar to the low-budget punk dystopian films of the ‘70s and '80s but with much more control and ability to execute its vision) the multi-headed hydra holding a city hostage, a sickening infection to which all are susceptible. It’s an all-encompassing view from multiple characters of how deep the roots of power can go, managing to be both a nasty guided tour of fungal dystopian hell and the most effective satire of toxic urban power dynamics I’ve read in quite a while.

More, as always, below.

Keep reading

9:53pm | URL: https://tmblr.co/ZyQ6_xe5bfDduu00

Filed under: horror all-time favorites urban fantasy dystopian horror the marigold andrew f sullivan books and reading fungal noir eat your fucking heart out jeff vandermeer maximum weird

February 4, 2023

Everything The Darkness Eats Is a Brilliant, Complex, and Dark New England Gothic

Everything the Darkness Eats, the new novel from Eric LaRocca, is a brilliant, complex snarl of a book. Taking elements of the New England gothic style of horror, LaRocca’s own talent for blending disturbing scenes with startling emotional and physical vulnerability, and a sense of constantly escalating impending doom, it draws the reader through a devastating exploration of grief and the awful lengths it can drive someone to. But while there’s plenty of disturbing moments and devastation to be found, LaRocca’s emphasis on complex characterization and his focus on the lives and intersecting fates of his cast, as well as a refusal to give them any easy answers or neatly tied-up endings to their various stories that turns the book from something familiar into something newer and far more devastating than the average gothic horror yarn.

In Henley’s Edge, Connecticut, people are disappearing. Led to their unusual fate by Heart Crowley, a man of eccentric manner and supernatural influence, they find themselves drawn to his large mansion and the terrifying power he keeps contained in his basement. But no one merely disappears, and Crowley’s abductions cause ripples through Henley’s Edge that affect everyone– Malik, a police officer tasked with investigating the disappearances even as he and his husband Brett deal with politely sinister homophobia from their neighbors and terrifying hate crimes; Ghost, a man with a parasitic sprite that feeds on his negative emotions; and Gemma, a young woman simply trying to go through life while providing for her blind daughter Piper. All will cross paths with each other, and all will be drawn towards Crowley and his mansion’s bizarre occupant. The question is what will be left of them afterward.

What LaRocca excels at in Everything the Darkness Eats is building a sense of impending doom. Heart Crowley’s pattern is established early, with the old man strolling into a church thrift store and walking out with his first victim, the narration entirely from her point of view as she feels more and more of her every thought being wiped away by whatever force Crowley commands. It’s a powerful scene, with Ms. Childers never realizing fully what’s happening before it’s too late and the reader helpless to watch her. Even though you spend maybe a chapter watching Ms. Childers get swallowed up, you still feel for her, something that only intensifies as Crowley targets characters who’ve been around longer in the narrative. The supernatural sense of doom is even paralleled with a more mundane sense as Malik and his husband deal with the series of mounting homophobic attacks, with neighbors and even the police chief pushing them to either stop being themselves in public or leave the town entirely, the escalation mirroring Crowley’s increasingly forceful use of his otherworldly powers. Even when the threat isn’t supernatural, there’s a sense of helplessness that’s utterly unnerving. It’s a perfect balance, allowing you to anticipate the horrors to come while still keeping the outcome uncertain enough that the reader hopes that maybe this time someone will actually win out.

That expert balance of the mundane and supernatural elements helps underscore the sinister air LaRocca imbues in Henley’s Edge. As Crowley goes about his dark mission to collect townspeople, Malik and Brett deal with the casual homophobia from their neighbors and even the chief of police, and a series of escalating attacks that end with a brutal hate crime and Brett in the hospital. Ghost spends his hospital visit arguing with the parasitic spirit curled around his neck, but the main focus of the scene is his interactions with Gemma and her daughter Piper, and the hopelessness they all feel at their respective circumstances. Things don’t just ramp up in one sense or the other, but mirror– Ghost even (unknowingly) passes by a kidnapped Malik while enacting a kidnapping of his own to try and save Crowley’s victims before the start of his ritual, for example, each protagonist growing more and more desperate in their attempts to escape the circumstances they find themselves in, the onrush of their impending fates only increasing the tension.

That sense of impending doom and the balance of mundane and supernatural horror wouldn’t be possible if it weren’t for the fact that LaRocca makes sure that you care about and feel for all of these characters. Horror cannot exist without some degree of empathy and sympathy– you have to care about the awful things happening to people for those awful things to have impact– and it’s especially important given the themes of Everything the Darkness Eats. There are no nameless victims or senseless sacrifices in Darkness. Most of these people have lives, homes, people who care about them. It makes the horror more intimate, more personal to see Brett and Malik’s life, to see them arguing over trying to make a home for themselves even as their lives get torn apart. To see Malik investigating the disappearances of Crowley’s victims and meeting their families, both tying him into the community and showing the absences left by the horrifying events in the plot. Even the monsters of the book are touched by past trauma, grief, and loss in their own way, those touches driving them to sickening and reprehensible actions. Grief and loss cause ripples, impact waves that spread out further than the people at their epicenter, and with his solid characterization, LaRocca makes sure every impact counts.

It’s important to note, though, that as guarded as Everything the Darkness Eats is, there’s at least some note of optimism in the work. Sure, the grief and trauma the characters experience lead them to do reckless and monstrous things, but there’s always that note of hope, that maybe the more sympathetic members of the cast will actually make it through their experiences– not intact, Darkness thankfully never feels like the kind of book where someone will escape unscathed– but in enough of one piece that with time and effort, they’ll eventually be able to move on from the horrible things they’ve witnessed. It would be easy for LaRocca to be cynical or pessimistic in a book like this, one that draws on both the very real horror of hatred and the more cosmic and gothic horror of the thing Heart Crowley keeps in his basement, but that note of hopefulness, the idea that things might get better, the idea that letting yourself feel and processing the complex emotions that come with awful life events is the right thing to do, feels more genuine overall than the darkness and pessimism would be here.

In the end, it’s how genuine all of it feels that makes Everything the Darkness Eats so effective. Eric LaRocca’s always been great at exploring the toxic and sometimes destructive ways we process complex emotions, and using that gift to explore grief and loss in the framework of a New England gothic (a subgenre that’s a fertile ground to explore those feelings) makes the book hit all that much harder. It’s a complex snarl of a work that manages both deeply disturbing horror and explosive catharsis, but avoids tying any of it up neatly or simply, allowing its damaged characters to exist without needing to be crushed or “saved.” Everything the Darkness Eats is a brilliantly sharp, nasty, and foreboding work of horror, one that understands the genre and emotions it builds on while pushing their boundaries to newer territory.

6:30pm | URL: https://tmblr.co/ZyQ6_xdKeVHGqu00

(Notes: 3)

Filed under: eric larocca horror booklr books and reading unburied reviews clash books stephen king needful things sad i didn't get this on the main site tbh

January 20, 2023

Garret Cook’s Art-School Gothic Charcoal Is in a Class All Its Own

Garrett Cook’s Charcoal is in a class of its own. While the story, with its tales of mad artists, haunted paintings, otherworldly patrons, and grand guignol kill scenes might proudly hearken back to more traditional gothic tales, Cook firmly roots this in a grittier, more unnerving present, bringing those traditional gothic ideas into modern focus: The poetic and the profane sit side-by-side in his prose, often in the same sentence, adding a certain grit to the lurid nastiness. The “mad artist's” mental illness and trauma is explored in depth, with an utterly wrenching degree of focus and empathy. The otherworldly retribution is set in a modern context of toxic power fantasies, allowing vindication, but also showing the consequences and mental toll of revenge. But perhaps its most crowning achievement is that rather than revel in its bleakness, it explores the toxicity of “tortured artist” tropes from every angle and shows that there’s more to art than pain, rage, and hunger. It’s a twisted exploration of the modern hurdles of an artist and someone forced into dealing daily with toxic people in a toxic environment, one that shows both highs and lows with rage and passion in equal amount. All of it, like the best art, both genius and depraved.

At an unnamed art school in New England, Shannon Hernandez finds herself overwhelmed. Jameson, her art professor, is a creep. Her classmates are the kind of jerks who take most of their personality from toxic subreddits, or simply unable to stand up to the professors’ bullying. And her own art lacks…something, according to friends and jerk classmates alike. During a classroom argument between Shannon and Professor Jameson, Shannon uses a set of charcoals supposedly made from the bones of Thomas Kemp, a horrifying deviant known as “The Libertine” and rumored to have kidnapped and tortured women in exchange for (dubious) artistic talent. In a mad frenzy, Shannon paints something new, something dangerous, something that will drag her down a disturbing path where hallucination and reality blurs, a path beset by a cabal of mutilated artist-monsters and their demonic patron, and a whirling crowd of crows who seem to act on her every move. It will bring her dark gifts, and terrible hunger. Revenge, and power beyond imagining. And all she has to do is create.

Charcoal’s depiction of obsession and mental illness is terrifying in its authenticity. Shannon’s descent into madness is agonizing to watch. Her world shrinks, to the point that outside of her apartment, the studio, and the twisted dreamscapes she visits nightly, there aren’t many places she goes. Outside of a few named characters, people seem to know Shannon more than she knows them, with her wondering when they met and why, since she doesn’t remember much about them, they seem to remember her. One particularly horrifying moment when Shannon is at her lowest describes the claustrophobia of her world shrinking to a single dot, a box within a box within a box in her apartment. It also ties into the more supernatural elements, as the more Shannon uses Kemp’s charcoal and the more freely she allows Kemp and her flood of black crows to operate, the more Kemp acts as a kind of intrusive voice challenging her every thought and action and the more the crows eat away at her memories, the way intrusive thoughts can frequently turn contradictory and accusatory, or the way various mental illnesses “eat” memories both harmful and happier in an attempt to warp one’s mental state. It’s a twisted but refreshingly honest look at disassociating, distancing oneself from harm, and the way trauma responses can ultimately cast toxic influence over every aspect of a person’s life.

Cook also tears the ideas of “sacrifice for art” and “salvation from pain” to shreds. While the Cenobite-esque trio of monstrous artists that follow Shannon around as her power grows are in some way pained, that doesn’t excuse the horrifying deeds and literal human sacrifice they engaged in when they put their depraved gifts to use. Art doesn’t save Shannon, either, as much as it leads her spiraling away from salvation, with Shannon putting her toxic feelings on the canvas, but creating more and more toxic emotions and situations to feed into art until the point that she starts committing murder to feed the hunger inside her, literally sacrificing other people and even her own memories to her artwork. There are even parallels between her own crimes and the power dynamics in her life, as she brutally sodomizes her victims and then feeds their remains to her charcoal crows and ghostly companion to make new portraits. Similarly, Shannon spends an early part of the book obsessing over her dorm-mate Rem, even striking up a relationship with them, but eventually ghosts Rem and instead pursues the far more toxic and networking-driven art world because Rem feels too good (and Shannon believes she doesn’t deserve something like that), and because she needs to make sacrifices and make more deals with the literal and figurative devils in her life for the good of her artwork. She even turns the moments where she felt powerful with Rem into moments of violence she visits upon the “deserving,” trying to recapture that feeling of power without understanding it. It’s not until she finds power in herself, the self existing in her more beautiful memories and healthier emotions that her art starts to get better.

And that power, that interplay, that emphasis on the negative side of trauma and oppression and power dynamics, is what drives Charcoal. A lot of Shannon’s internal monologue is focused on what’s missing, what she needs to take from others, what others take from her, and what she needs to “get back” or “take back” in the process. And indeed, a lot has been taken from her. She’s a Black queer latine who lost her father at a horrifyingly early age and who is viewed by the men around her as simply someone they can push the right conversational buttons with or exert the right amount of power with to use her for sex, or to piggyback on her talent, or any number of other things. Even the inciting incident that puts her in contact with the charcoals is a classroom showdown over the idea of “separating art from artist,” forcing her into becoming a spectacle just for speaking up, pushing her into a choice between public humiliation and a loss of autonomy. But there’s no catharsis in the vengeance she wreaks, nor a sense of justice. Shannon even wonders herself at a certain point if her victims– monsters though they are– deserve her acts of violent sodomy, getting torn apart by crow spirits, and then turned into artwork at her hands.

But it isn’t all about darkness and toxicity. There are moments where the idea of holding on to beauty and joy even when all around is dark shine through. It’s even the thing that finally does give Shannon the fulfillment she desires– not in “taking back,” not in revenge or death by crows or her final gory tableau– but in the beauty she tries to capture in simple forms, the things she makes for herself, and the art that is ultimately all hers, not the charcoal’s, not the crows’, not Kemp’s, but in the power of creation used to make something that affirms her life and reflects what she wants to build. It’s in that moment that the demons finally release their hold, that Shannon finally finds the catharsis she’s looking for through her art. Which, when depicted in Cook’s gorgeous, poetic, and somewhat overwhelming voice, makes it all the more beautiful.

It’s what makes Cook’s Charcoal the most refreshing variation of the “mad artist” story to date. Its authentic depiction of mental illness, discusses the effects of trauma and oppressive power dynamics on mental health, and brutally shreds the idea of a “revenge” narrative by showing the dire and upsetting effects of wielding power for toxic ends. But while it’s an easy task to knock something down, it’s in those moments of beauty and fulfillment and the idea that there’s a road away from the all-consuming swirling nihilism of the dark that Charcoal finds its heart. It’s a brilliant enough story without that– one part Hellraiser, one part American Psycho, and one part Koja’s Skin– but as we all know, the best art has emotion, ideas, and focus behind it. And Charcoal can and should easily count itself among that exclusive class.

3:30pm | URL: https://tmblr.co/ZyQ6_xdFmx91Ou00

Filed under: unburied reviews don't call it a comeback charcoal garrett cook horror fiction horror art school book review

January 13, 2023

Boris Says The Words by Kyle Winkler Is About Finding Hope and Freedom in the Dark

The world of Boris Says the Words, the new novel by Kyle Winkler, is breaking down. But this is by no means a sad occasion. While it’s true that the book depicts a dystopia at times gloomy, banal, and grotesque in its own way, Winkler manages to hit a perfect note of existential despair and at the same time, introduce an unambiguous sense of hope and humanity to the work. As Winkler traces the lives of a group of desperate and ailing people who all have interactions with a strange healing language and its shadowy folk-healer practitioner, it becomes a work about people searching for a way out of the toxic situations they’ve found themselves in, a journey to grow beyond their awful circumstances and finally set themselves free in whatever ways they can. It requires its bleakness and melancholia to make it that much clearer that it’s bright and uplifting. It’s weird, wonderful, dark, hopeful, and deeply empathetic all at once, and absolutely demands your attention.

Pavel works in a call center for victims of a nuclear plant disaster until a gigantic bird of prey drops a rabbit through the roof of a nearby house. Polina and her cursed, radiation-sick son Garry live a quiet existence running a psychic scam until the day a rabbit corpse crashes through their roof and brings Pavel into their lives. Han and Katya live a quiet life in the American Midwest until the day Han is diagnosed with a degenerative illness and finds out about Katya’s former life in Russia and her connection to a strange gelatinous hallucinogen called zuby boga. All of them have a connection to Boris, a hulking and secretive healer who can teach people special words that can cure any ailment, but at the cost of sending the harm into someone or something else. As all these people are slowly, inevitably drawn to each other on a journey through the decaying Russian countryside, they will encounter cults, vast electronic graveyards, and a number of unusual events, all influenced by the looming figure of Boris and his mysterious words. As characters are drawn together on a fateful train ride, the question remains if they will survive, and what, if anything, will be left.

Boris Says the Words is a book about disintegration and decay. It begins in the aftermath of a nuclear plant meltdown, an event whose effects are felt almost constantly throughout the book as the radiation moves further into the countryside. Even beyond that, Han has a nasty and aggressive form of Multiple Sclerosis that courses through his body, causing him more pain and loss of function as the book continues. His relationship with Katya breaks down as he learns more about her and the healing words, with the two of them growing more and more distant as they become unable to live with each other’s choices. Pavel constantly monitors everything with a handheld dosimeter, worried about exactly how much lethal radiation is swirling around him. Even Boris is affected to some degree, with his body breaking down further and his belief in his own power causing him derangement as the book goes on, at one point referring to Rasputin as “a backwater pimp.” Winkler writes toxicity and the disintegration of both relationships and their surrounding landscape with a naturalistic feel. These things are part of the everyday world of the characters, whether it’s the background radiation or simply the toxic relationships they find themselves in. Even the worse things they find themselves doing, like Han and Polina’s addiction to zuby boga, a drug that allows them to essentially astral-project into objects and other people, seem simply like a natural choice of the world they find themselves in. They self-medicate to escape the crushing sense of entropy around them, around their relationships, even around the grotesque circumstances in which they find themselves.

It suffuses the book with an air of melancholy, but specifically not despair. Instead, there’s a sense of fatalism present throughout. Misfortune, decay, and death are presented as something gentle, casual, and inevitable; Less the onrush of trauma and more the slow inevitable slide into the dark. There’s no saving the world. It’s too large, too broken. Even those who can speak the words tend to view that more as a hasty stopgap maneuver than something that could reverse the disintegration around them. After all, things have to end sooner or later. The major conflict in Boris Says the Words isn’t so much between good and evil, or decay and renewal, but with choosing whether or not to live and more importantly how to live in a world that’s more or less breaking down. In Winkler’s version of Russia, the horror seems as natural as anything else. Even the few scenes of violence are met with shock, then a slowly-fading sense of danger and fear as the characters adapt to the new situation. They’re conditioned through repeated exposure to accept the horror, to try and keep themselves despite the awful things going on around them. To free themselves from that looming, melancholic specter, and the shadowy, malignant presence of Boris, as sure as the radiation or external forces at work on the cast.

All of this sounds depressing, but Winkler deftly avoids the obvious route of making Boris Says the Words pessimistic. At every turn, at every moment in the plot, the characters might not be trying to change the world or rail against the dystopia where they live, but they are choosing to live. They elevate themselves by choosing to survive, by hanging on to every choice, every personal moment, every scrap of themselves. The book’s central theme is healing from trauma, being able to free yourself from the awful circumstances around you and around your life, and finding ways to live. It would be wrong to say that anyone in Boris Says the Words has their circumstances greatly improved by the end– the world is still broken and in many ways so are the people in it– but most importantly, despite that sadness, the book ends on a note of hope. It would be wrong to say anyone is healed or saved in Boris. Healing is a work in progress (even with the false quick fix the words represent), and salvation is a fairy tale that even a miracle worker like Boris would fail to provide. But those that reach the final chapter of the book are changed for the better, and they are free. Free to make what choices they can. Free from their magical thinking and self-medication. Free in some cases from being a cosmic plaything and being battered around by forces that might or might not exist. It’s not easy, and in some cases the cost is much higher than anyone would want, but that freedom, that continued existence despite the horrors of the world, is worth it.

Which is what, above all else, makes the book worth it. Existential and cosmic horror are evergreen topics in weird fiction, but rarely do we have books that thread the needle so adeptly. Winkler’s astonishing mix of new wave-style science fiction, domestic tragedy, Soviet magical-realist horror show, and definitive note of hope are, while drawing on the past and things the reader might have seen before, something new to consider. At the very least, if you’re looking for something with the right amount of existential despair that doesn’t make you feel completely gutted, you owe it to yourself to take a visit to the village of Bulm. Winkler’s cockeyed vision of rural Russia and the shadowy madman at the center of it all are well worth the trip, if not multiple trips.

3:00pm | URL: https://tmblr.co/ZyQ6_xdDWJ8keu00

(Notes: 2)

February 11, 2020

The Hellraiser Story

Obviously, this post will contain spoilers for Hellraiser.

This is the story of how a pissing match in a dorm lounge started a tradition I’ve kept in place for over a decade.

Every Valentine’s day since 2009, I’ve gotten drunk and watched Hellraiser. It’s usually a solitary exercise, I haven’t had any want or desire for partnership since July of 2010*, but if anyone wished to join me, they would of course be welcome. It’s been an annual tradition, usually involving the imbibing of several Dark and Stormys, a drink I became quite fond of at college, and since college is the whole reason I do this thing in the first place, it’s a little bit of nostalgia and a small taste of a time I once called home. The rum may be better quality (ever since Captain Morgan changed the recipe on Private Stock it just hasn’t been the same) and the ginger ale might be lower quality (It’s difficult to get sugarcane colas at a goddamn Shop-Rite, okay?), but it’s a connection to something important. And it’s a way of striking back at people who tried to force their interpretation of love on to others, a way of showing that there are multiple forms of romance, and that even the darkest movies can be about painfully human subjects.

Even if I was, as this story kind of illustrates, a prick.

On the top floor of La Salle Hall at the College of Santa Fe was the LaSalle Lounge. It wasn’t much overall, just a wall-mounted TV, a couple of huge heavy-ass comfy chairs and a couch made of scratchy fabric and gigantic wood blocks, a dining-room table, and a microwave. But the TV came with an A/V input, and a bunch of us had game systems and DVD players and the like, so it became kind of a prime hangout spot for the residents and their friends. It was also safe enough and familiar enough that if you put your game system or something in the lounge, there was a high chance you didn’t also have to build a metal cage around it to protect it**. There are a lot of good memories I have of that time, some of my favorite memories of watching movies are tied deeply to sitting in huge scratchy dorm-lounge chairs. It wasn’t perfect, but it was nice.

At first, claiming the lounge was a first-come first-served affair, but due to several incidents involving people who weren’t residents occupying the space with their friends, and due to an incident where an unnamed party decided to announce about a week or two in advance that they were showing Peter Jackson’s classic family drama Dead-Alive and posted handwritten signage to that effect, one forward-thinking resident put up a signup sheet for the lounge and TV. It gave a sense of schedule and people got advance warning if, say, several people from the lower floor were going to show an awful romance film called Angst*** that they picked up from the local Hastings for twenty bucks. By and large, most people played by the loose social contract the signup sheet presented– there were always a few changes and cancellations and “hey, we need the room” sort of things, but the boundaries were respected, and those transgressors (who, I admit, I numbered among briefly) were rare. It also gave a good view of what was going on, so if you knew someone was watching, say, The Land Before Time synced up with In Rainbows by Radiohead as an ironic goof that still sorta vaguely worked, you could either show up, or avoid the upstairs like the plague.

So, scene all set? Good, then let’s begin.

My friend Geoff was kind of a complicated figure. He was wildly philosophical, but also tended to do the thing where he tried to apply the specific strains of thought he learned to absolutely everything, to the point that he’d get in arguments all the time about whatever he’d read or learned at that particular moment. He was a person I’d had no less than three arguments about Lost Highway with, but he was also one of the few people I knew on campus who would watch trashy movies with me and try to appreciate them without irony (the best way to watch Urotsukidoji is in the middle of the afternoon on your roommate’s mini-tv while complaining about the censor blur). He overintellectualized things, sometimes a lot, but at his heart, he was a good guy. Because of our shared taste in trashy and weird movies (it’s through him that I finally saw Caligula and found it was everything I wanted and some sex scenes I didn’t) and the residency status I had and he didn’t, he would often get me to claim the lounge for whatever weird thing he wanted to watch. I didn’t mind, because usually he could draw a better crowd and his choices were a little more acceptable than mine. (Never spring Aeon Flux on people who don’t already want to watch Aeon Flux. That’s your lesson for today.) He also had an unmatched passion for everything, when he hooked into something, he really hooked into it, deciphering it and deep-diving into it like it was a sacred text, trying to take it apart and figure out why he liked it so much.

He also had his troubles with women.

Between 2007 and 2008, Geoff bounced between bad breakups and some interesting coping mechanisms to try and gain some semblance of catharsis, vanishing down rabbit hole after rabbit hole of weird film theory, music theory, and experimentation. Not all of it was particularly well received, and a few things he proposed were wildly off-base and caused at least one shouting match in a Del Taco, but I felt for the guy, because he was really trying to get a grip. He needed people and a way to cope, and his normal approach was failing. For him, his solace was in figuring out how things worked, applying his own philosophical bent or ideas about the world to the things around him and trying to work his way through, the same way some people do with martial arts, or religion, or whatever you have. You find the thoughts and concepts to get you through the day, to help the world make sense to you. His might have taken him to some dark places and included drinking tons of vodka, but, again, he was a good friend. He was hurting in a bad way, and he needed help working through it.

In hindsight, a lot of my behavior during that period was most likely enabling, but I meant well and I was trying to help someone out of a dark place.

After a rather nasty social entanglement imploded on Geoff early in 2008 when he decided to get involved with exactly the wrong person, he was again in a dark place. Even I was starting to get a little weary of it as it had become self-destructive to the point of dragging me into the singularity, and of continually having to defend Geoff’s choices, which he foisted on our mutual friends without much care to what he was saying. In those days, while many of us would be loath to admit it, we were all so sure and certain of our choices and resolute in our refusal to back down from them. It was just that Geoff took it way too far. And in this dark place, Geoff had an idea that would become the basis for a decades-old tradition.

One day, about a week or so before Valentine’s Day, Geoff came to me and told me, “Know what? Fuck it. We’re gonna watch Hellraiser this Valentine’s.” For once, I was immediately on board. I’ve always been a huge proponent of non-trad genre distinctions, from calling Dune an epic fantasy novel, to my early-adopter status on the “Die Hard is a Christmas movie and so is The Long Kiss Goodnight” argument (I know it probably had its supporters pre-2003, but I argued for it hard and it still seemed novel back then), to even this blog’s long-ass article on Fight Club. So Hellraiser as Valentine’s Day watching? Sure it was a little bit of a dark choice, and sure it was a gruesome movie to watch on a holiday that’s normally a celebration of love, but there’s some insight there, and I was always down for a reason to watch Clive Barker. I’d gone off of Stephen King for a while after The Stand and loved the “melancholic lyricism but also everyone bangs” vibe Barker laid down in most of his work.

So naturally, I said yes. Why wouldn’t I? I put my name, time, and title of the movie down on the signup sheet in the lounge, and figured that would be the end of it. I’d hang with my friend, we could shit-talk love because we were both on the wrong end of things, and watch a movie that’s romantic for all the weirdest reasons.

Then midway through the week, things changed. By that time, Geoff wasn’t well-received, and my film picks were seen as an extension of his ideas and choices, which did not jibe well, especially since I wasn’t all that popular myself with contingents of the dorm for a variety of reasons****.

When I mentioned I had plans, then one of my friends suddenly went, “Oh…yeah, we didn’t want Geoff pushing his ‘screw love it’s all horrible’ thing, so we crossed that out and we’re gonna watch a bunch of romantic comedies instead."

”…but I wanted to watch Hellraiser. And it’s a romantic movie.“ I responded. "It’s not about how love is evil.”
“Yeah, but…it doesn’t fit with the holiday and Geoff was just trolling, so this is better."

I protested that it wasn’t Geoff who made the decision but me, tried to explain my reasons, and even offered to change the movie as long as I could keep the spot, but there really wasn’t anything that could be done. Complete shutout because "it would be better.” It seemed like both me and my friend wanted to end the awkward conversation, so I had to drop the issue. When the day finally came around and I was there, someone even stood there and announced how much time everyone had left in the lounge almost every five minutes for a solid hour before they took over, and kicked everyone out so that somehow we wouldn’t ruin their viewing of 13 Going On 30^.

But they were wrong.

Hellraiser is a romantic film, and one exclusively about love. Let me explain.

Hellraiser is the story of Julia, a woman who moves into the old house of her former lover Frank with her husband and stepdaughter. Frank mysteriously disappeared after an encounter with an ancient puzzle box called the Lemarchand Configuration, and now he’s gone and presumed dead, his house an unsettling wreck of narrow interiors and dark rooms. Julia’s husband Larry, Frank’s brother, is a doofy good-natured and oblivious sort who wanted to move his wife back to her home country and hopes to strengthen their relationship. With them is Larry’s daughter Kirsty, who moved so she could be closer to her parents and possibly learn to get along with her stepmother. While they’re moving into Frank’s house, Larry cuts himself in an accident and drips blood on the stairs, something that stirs the previously trapped spirit of Frank and allows him to contact Julia and beg her to spill more blood in the house so he can live again. Meanwhile, Kirsty is disturbed by both the house and her stepmother’s odd behavior in hiding Frank, and begins to have encounters with a homeless vagrant who looks like the lawyer-friendly version of Alan Moore, and a mysterious puzzle box.

Right away, that’s the structure of a gothic romance. You have infidelity, an old dark house, a ghostly or demonic lover, weird artifacts, and a subtle hint of classism. Julia’s a villain, but she’s only a villain because of her obsessive love and a desire to right the wrongs of her now almost-dead lover. It’s Larry’s obliviousness that continues to isolate him from his wife’s repeated awful misdeeds with Frank, believing that she’s faithful and they’re still in love even when it’s obvious to the audience that she views him as an empty suit. And Kirsty, the one mostly “pure” person in the whole movie and definitely the one innocent, slowly grows in importance to the plot as she tries to piece everything together. It’s Victoriana updated for the modern era, pitting the young woman against a house full of ghosts and wicked stepmothers, but somehow in a much more humanizing light. Julia’s trapped by everyone, by Frank’s obsessive need for resurrection, by her lack of maternal status in Kirsty’s eyes, by Larry taking her for granted.

It’s also telling that it’s the unhealthy relationships that cause all the deaths in this movie. It’s established practically from the outset that Julia and Larry don’t have the best relationship, and she was much happier with Frank, to the point of moving back into his house with him. It’s that obsession and love that drives their toxic relationship, as Frank seems to see her as nothing more than a useful necessity, someone he needs to bring him blood and skin so he can finally escape the prison he was trapped in by the box. Meanwhile she believes what they had was truly love. Frank and Kirsty even have a shadowy but heavily implied past that doesn’t exactly cast Frank in the best light and only further shows exactly how monstrous and uncaring towards everyone else he truly is. Julia and Larry fail to work on their marriage even a little, which drives Julia further into Frank’s arms and away from her husband, who appears to not even care if she’s in the room at times. All these toxic relationships even come crashing down in the finale when Kirsty, the one person who displays empathy towards others, manages to set up a desperate gambit with the box, finally bringing everything to its explosive and inevitable conclusion where all the toxicity finally burns itself out.

Hellraiser is about love because it’s Kirsty’s love for her father that keeps driving her to investigate her stepmother, because it’s Julia’s lack of love and intimacy that drives her to literally murder people, because it was Larry’s love and desire to support his wife and his failing marriage that put them in Frank’s old dark mansion to begin with. It’s a cautionary tale, a morality play about unhealthy relationships and chasing sensation over actual feeling and empathy. It’s about pain, infatuation, obsession, and loss. It might go about it in a gory, effects-heavy, and surprisingly fish hook-happy way, but it’s a tragic romance sure and certain as any other tragic romance out there, even if it’s nontraditional. A human story is a human story, even if it involves a switchblade-wielding zombie and a man with his lips and eyes cut out, after all.

So for those reasons, and because it’s an amazing movie and the one correctly rated entry in Clive Barker’s filmmaking career, every February 14th, while the rest of the world settles in with classic love stories and whoever makes them happiest, I pour myself a glass of rum and ginger ale. I pour myself a glass for Geoff and all those like Geoff, caught in a vortex of bad relationships and not-great thought patterns, and desperate to get out^^. I pour myself a glass for myself, never exactly sure where I stand romantically but terrified I’ll end up in that same vortex before I’m able to escape, and knowing I’m too old to keep trying. I pour myself a glass against the people who stopped me, as petty as that is, because I know in my heart and in my head and in my God. Damn. Soul. that they were wrong about love and wrong about Hellraiser. In my pettier moments, I hope they still are.

And this has happened every year since 2010, and I hope it still will. I hope it continues long past everyone who stood against that first viewing. I hope other people pick up on the trend and it outlasts and outlives us all. And I hope people realize that romance and romantic films aren’t necessarily what everyone thinks they are. To paraphrase a former friend of mine, genre’s fake anyway.

So that’s the story. It’s overlong, it’s not exactly charitable, but it’s a tradition. In honor of all those things, I’ll proudly raise a glass this Valentine’s day and every day after. Hope you enjoyed this, and hope you do it, too.

Goodnight.

*My second-ever relationship ended in a rather depressing dissolution that was as much my fault as the other party’s, and showed me that I was too emotionally immature to handle intimacy and the work that goes into romance. I promised my then-partner I would be alone from that point on, and in spite of several incidents I don’t wish to discuss, I have tried to keep to that as best as I possibly can. While I do get lonely and I do have needs, I also don’t want anyone to have to experience me.
**The other dorms taught me the important lesson that maybe this wasn’t the case everywhere on campus, and much thanks to my friend CMC for both fixing that and the chair I ended up stripping the screws on somehow
***Two and a half stars from the now-defunct Absolute Horror, and a premise that’s shitloads ahead of its execution
****Being cringey, obnoxious, and generally making wildly explicit comments (while not about anyone in particular, still) will do that to you. By that point I’d had an identity of my own for maybe five years, tops, and the idea I could be confident and in control of my own identity and go to bed whenever I wanted all kinda went to my head, as well as finally living unrepressed for about two years. All of this informs my behavior. It doesn’t excuse or absolve it. I’d get into it more, but why add fuel to the dumpster fire?
^Ironically, a movie I have a small amount of fondness for ever since I watched it with my sister back when we were teenagers
^^I know I’ve been using the past tense here about Geoff. I’d like to report that he’s still alive and completely well as far as I can tell. We drifted apart years ago over a rather significant and irreconcilable difference of opinion. Writing this, I actually kind of miss him, the obstinate dingus.

7:22pm | URL: https://tmblr.co/ZyQ6_x2nhOVJK

Filed under: hellraiser clive barker body horror extreme body modification personal essay memoir probably whitewashed someone while writing this hope i didn't though college of santa fe i regret this more all the time

October 8, 2019

Trolls by Stefan Spjut

When I was younger, I used to have a saying: “It’s in the past, it can’t hurt you any more.” The thing is, no matter how much you move on, the past will always be there behind you. It’s not a static thing, but a living thing as much as the present, reaching out to touch all your present and future decisions. You can process something, but it’ll always linger there, ready to resurface when you least want it to or least expect it. It’s what happens when that trigger pops, when that thing comes back to bite you, when the memories finally unlock in the dead of night, that shows you whether you’ve recovered enough. Whether you’ve processed enough. Whether or not you’re actually on the mend. Trolls by Stefan Spjut and translated by Agnes Broomé is a book about processing the trauma of the past, of how to deal with the horrible things you’ve seen and done, or had done to you. It might have shape-changing forest monsters and a bleak suspense-thriller plot, it might be one of the darkest and most downbeat horror novels I’ve ever read, coming forward at a slow and menacing pace as it delves into the depths of its characters’ attempts to make sense of the things they’ve seen and done. It might not be the lurid, gothic horror I’m normally used to, but its psychological slow-burn, some absolutely horrifying scenes (usually involving Stava), some very off-kilter humor, and the way the themes of processing trauma mess me the hell up make it well worth the time to read it and enjoy.

More, as always, below.

“They hide inside animals…And you can’t be involved with them without being affected by it. You say you don’t want to talk about it, and that’s exactly it. If they get too close, they burn you up. Mentally. There’s no way of telling how that ends.”

- Susso Myren

A pair of researchers find and tranquilize a monstrous wolf, only for the creature to then shift into something else and go off on its own, leaving one of the men dead and the other with a severe mental illness. At the same time, Lennart, a former cult leader who might possibly be over a century old gnaws his own hand off to escape a psychiatric facility and reunites with an odd group of his former followers for some unusual purpose. A strange woman with the power of verbal suggestion finds her way into the researcher’s broken home. And Susso Myrén, a former cryptozoology enthusiast living in self-imposed exile after a brush with Lennart’s cult left her traumatized and disillusioned, is forced to confront further horrors as Lennart’s followers close in just as her childhood friend Diana comes looking for her.

And then things get weird.

Spread throughout these various groups are a variety of odd, shapeshifting forestdwellers with unclear motives: A squirrel who seems highly protective of Susso, mice who incite people to violence, a homicidal wolf-creature who wears the faces of others like masks. All of them are drawn towards the small village of Runarjavi for some unknown purpose, leaving a swath of broken minds and bodies in their wake. But while they and the cult might be an immediate threat, the further psychic toll on their victims might be the thing that truly destroys them all.

I don’t get to use the word “Lynchian” often enough to describe things. It’s kind of an overused term in the criticism world, usually reserved for when someone puts a dwarf in a dream sequence or tries inexpertly to blend pastoral suburbia with dark surrealism. But that’s not the essence of the thing. Stefan Spjut, by dint of keeping his supernatural elements shadowy, his focus on the wrenching human drama and suspense elements at the fore, and by working in elements of dark, off-kilter humor throughout, has actually created something Lynchian. Trolls feels eerie, even when there’s nothing supernatural going on. There’s enough wrong, enough menace lurking just at the edges of the book’s events, that even the lighter and quieter scenes feel like there’s something definitely wrong going on. The shapeshifters themselves feel weirdly alien, too. Few of them speak, their motives are unclear other than messing with humans, and even when the squirrel is protecting Susso, he doesn’t feel particularly benevolent. It’s a shock when there actually is an unambiguously benevolent creature, though the scene is still unnerving enough to sit weird. That alienness, that idea that the supernatural elements harm simply by being, is almost as horrifying as anything else the book can possibly serve up. It’s terrifying to imagine that something’s presence, even if you can’t see it, will still affect you in massive ways. That these alien forces are constantly at work on your life. It’d almost be a cosmic horror premise, except it feels wrong to affix the cosmic or existential label to something so old and supernatural. It isn’t the universe, it’s that these things have existed and operated for longer than humans have, and have their own ways and methods.

But while all of that is in play and comes through in the book, the actual supernatural and violent events are used sparingly, gruesome sequences revealing themselves with dawning horror as the plot moves ever forward, as slow and methodical as a slasher movie villain pursuing their victims. Trolls is a subdued book if anything, its more violent sections sudden and jarring shifts against the usually foreboding and downbeat nature. It plays well enough for the themes, though. This isn’t a book about nasty people doing horrible things, it’s about dealing with the aftermath of horrible things happening. Diana’s left a wreck after Susso’s captors torture her, but she tries her best to keep it together and seek closure for what happened. Her husband, meanwhile, completely falls apart and is prone to emotional outbursts after he encounters one of the mice, unable to deal with the guilt of what he’d done. The horror of the book comes mainly from these reactions and the further psychological manipulations of the trolls, the idea that one day something will come along and completely wipe out any sense of normal you have, that the world will keep going, but you’ll be warped in some way and unable to adequately explain why. It’s one of the very few really affecting and realistic portrayals of trauma in fiction, one that doesn’t descend into histrionics, and I wish more people would portray this approach rather than the more heightened examples found elsewhere.

It’s not all dark, though. Well, at least, it’s not all dark and dramatic. There are some flashes of black humor that run through the work, whether it’s the way the trolls around Lennart tend to…fail at being human (one decides to act more human by ripping off the face of an associate and wearing it like a mask. For the rest of the book, they just call him “Erasmus,” the name of the man whose face he stole), the absurd juxtaposition of Hakan’s violent search for a mouse, which makes sense in context but looks completely insane out of context, or the entire body-disposal scene, which turns into an argument about potatoes and finally involves two “helpers” Susso’s mother’s partner Roland employs for a variety of jobs (in fact, any time Roland and his easygoing weirdness is on the page, it’s kind of a lighter time). It helps keep the tone from being completely grim, which is good, because processing that much trauma and horror over the course of four hundred pages would be brutal otherwise, and the humor never gets to the point of whiplash, adding a sardonic edge without overwhelming the darker nature of the book.

There are some things to keep in mind about Trolls, however. It does deal with some very dark subjects, including abuse, torture, toxic relationships, and some truly unsettling sequences involving murder, kidnapping, and other horrifying incidents. It doesn’t pull its punches, and the internal monologues of the (willing or otherwise) participants only add to the feeling of dread. Its ruthlessness is only matched by its slow-burn pacing. It is not a book that rushes to get anywhere, but one that trudges relentlessly forward. If you’re not prepared for a heavy slow-burn of a book, this is going to be a problem, and if you’re expecting the usual kind of supernatural horror instead of horrifying supernatural folk-horror weirdness and Lynchian psychological suspense, then this might not be the book for you.

This is, of course, all academic. The book is very much what it is, and it’s uncompromising in that. It’s a deep, slow-burning, heavily psychological and surreal horror novel that’ll hit you as hard and as deep as any extreme/hardcore horror volume without any of the gallons of bodily fluids that all those novels seem to want to sling around. Trolls is excellent, a very Scandinavian, very horrifying Scandinavian horror novel, dark and forbidding as the forests in which it’s set. Stefan Spjut is incredible at building some absolutely wrenching psychological stakes, and when the cathartic moments finally come, they’re every bit as hard-hitting as the buildup. While it’s not for everyone, Trolls is at least worth checking out to see if it’s for you.

Geek Rage/Strange Library was sent a copy of this book in exchange for a review. Thanks to the good folks at Faber and Faber for allowing me the chance to get back in the saddle and write this, hopefully it’s as fun to read as it was to write.

5:56am | URL: https://tmblr.co/ZyQ6_x2lIEUKo

Filed under: trolls stefan spjut extreme horror hardcore horror psychological thriller suspense Supernatural Horror terrifying dark comedy scandinavian horror commissioned reviews thanks faber and faber why a squirrel tho brutal choose not to put warnings up but seriously this is triggering hey i'm back how ya like me now

November 13, 2017

thaebae:

curvycorinneranga:
spitefulreality:
hermes-whore:
maryburgers:
maryburgers:
riskpig:
luthienebonyx:
telanu:
britney2007spears:
hoodoo-hoodlum:
I’m so mad because this worked
help me roger
Reblogging myself because
Originally posted by gifs-for-the-masses
Reblogging myself because… what was that? Five minutes?
O_O
………my friend has made me curious
help me roger
Update: after I reblogged this someone messaged me offering me tickets to the sold out Hausu screening with a Q&A and autograph session with the director
let’s do it, roger
Roger helppppp
I need you Roger!
ROGER PLEASE

Help me, roger

(via redridingflannel)

1:38am | URL: https://tmblr.co/ZyQ6_x2RyHjbc

(Notes: 3,163,859)

November 11, 2017

seymonecristina:

jacobmick:
haiku-robot:
someoneintheshadow446:
mrsolodolo24:
drayaintshit:
galvan-in-portland:
luckytaters:
skuubasally:
tumblgang:
codyslipring:
spn-fandom-breathing-heavily:
westbor0baptistchurch:
“But if you forget to reblog Madame Zeroni, you and your family will be cursed for always and eternity.”
not even risking that shit
scrolled past this, re-evaluated my life, then SCROOOLLLED back up and hit the damn reblog button.
She ain’t no games in real life so I take her serious all the time
Anyone with a name that starts with a “Z”, ends with an “i”, and isn’t some kind of Italian pasta, IS SERIOUS
I’m not climbing no mountain with a pig on my back, 🙅🏽🙅🏾🙅🏿 Negative.
Nope. I know better, have your reblog Madame Zeroni.
who the fuck is Madame Zeroni
Look at these stupid children who don’t know who Madame Zeroni is
☝🏾😂
Man lissen if you don’t know you better ask somebody AFTER you hit the reblog button
Idk who she is but I have an exam today so I’ll reblog her
idk who she is but
i have an exam today
so i’ll reblog her

^Haiku^bot^0.4. Sometimes I do stupid things (but I have improved with syllables!). Beep-boop!
Because wise, I am.
Oh fucks no she’s back lmao must reblog. I’m sorry guys

(via neonsaline)

2:07pm | URL: https://tmblr.co/ZyQ6_x2RunDfF

(Notes: 3,641,649)

September 18, 2017

thesaltbride:

Hi, I’m Scout. I’m a Black NB who relocated across the country to get out of a lowkey emotionally abusive situation and have been languishing in unemployment ever since.

I do art, draw, write and act and I would really like to be an actor.

Everything, however, is deeply cost prohibitive and I spend most of my days in a depressive fugue because I owe so many people so much art and yet the march of time persists so I still need to keep my phone on for job interviews despite the only people fucking calling me being bill collectors.

I’m about $80 short on my phone bill, which is due in four days. As tired as I am of doing this, I need to keep my phone on and car legal to have any chance of employment before the end of the year.
If you can spare anything, I’m putting it towards towards my cell phone, food and car insurance - in roughly about that order because I’ve been so freaked about about not having a job that it drowns my appetite in anxiety. The fact that I have a restricted diet doesn’t help things.
Square Cash - $wingedbeastie
Paypal.me/wingedbeastie
Thank you for your time.

5:53pm | URL: https://tmblr.co/ZyQ6_x2Q7rpPc

(Notes: 152)

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