I really like this story, but I suspect I would have liked it more if I were British.
It's a really, really funny story, but it's the weird kind of comedy of manners stories that works best from Great Britain. In my gentleman's travels across the globe, I've had the opportunity to watch a lot of television. One of the more common themes that I saw on zany British television is the very polite catastrophe: a series of increasingly vile humiliations happens to a person who strives to remain dignified and unaffected by the chaos surrounding them. Subtextually, it's pretty clear that this is an effort by the British to make fun of the stiff upper lip that won them an empire, but it usually winds up looking like an uptight dude surrounded by naked butts and covered in mud.
Barker's story fits well into that genre of comedy but it has a very sharp twist; if poor Jack acknowledges the humiliation that the demon is subjecting him to, his soul will be lost to Hell. I have always liked the way Barker does Hell. It reminds me of a Bosch painting, all inhuman shapes and bitterness and longing for Heaven. It's also a very hidebound place, full of the kind of fussy little rules that fit in well with a Catholic worldview. It's a great battleground between the will of one man and the malevolence of one increasingly desperate demon.
Also, one of the greatest punchlines of any story I've ever read.
Speaking from a writing perspective, the big lesson I'm taking from this is the benefits of shifting POVs within a scene.
Most of the complaints I read in other people's reviews of Rawhead Rex were due to Barker's tendency to switch perspectives mid-scene. The effect doesn't really bother me. I like jumping heads to get different perspectives on a scene without sacrificing immediacy. It's a trick I use to a much more amateurish degree in my own work.
Here, jumping heads quickly enhances the effect in the story. The tale opens from the Yattering's perspective, and chronicles his growing frustration at Jack's complete obliviousness. We assume, like the Yattering, that Jack is completely clueless until a single paragraph, told from Jack's perspective, shows the reader that Jack is not just aware of the Yattering's presence but is playing a very dangerous game with it. From there, the facade of a comedy of good manners conceals a deadly game of wills between the forces of demonic chaos and the forces of English politeness for the soul of an "innocent" man.
It's a great comedy and one of the most intense battle of wills I've ever read.
BONUS LEVEL!
Apparently they did the entire story as an episode of Tales from the Darkside. Enjoy!
It was the one movie that I really should have made the effort to see. All the ads made this film look like the second coming of Leatherface. Remember these ads?
Yeah.
Anyway, the people who know me in real life were dying to find out my opinion on it. Unfortunately I missed it in theaters. Partially it was because I was a little intimidated by its supposed intensity, but mostly it was because I could never get the money and the time together. I'm sad I missed it in the theater because I would love to have seen it done properly. As it stands, I watched a DVD of it while on three different types of medication for an epic ear infection, which made the whole thing extra-surreal.
It's also making writing this review a challenge.
Anyway.
Is Paranormal Activity good? Depends on the audience. Kids who expect horror to be nothing but gore and jump-spike scares are gonna feel let down by this one. I liked it. It reminded me of how little you actually need to tell a scary story. The movie works just on sound and suggestion, on strong performances and a slow escalation of terror. Much like The Blair Witch Project, it's a movie that keeps a claustrophobic focus on the leads. In both movies, as shit begins to unravel, I really came to dread nightfall and the terrible escalation of the demon's assault. If that's your cuppa tea, go check it out. Final Girl's reviews are here and here, with a less-gushing one by Flick Filosopher.
The other thing I took away from the movie is the characterization of Micah and Katie, the doomed couple who find their suburban San Diego home under siege. Micah is one of those take-charge alpha male idiots who sees the supernatural siege as something he treat like a home-improvement project. He constantly shines on and ignores poor haunted Katie and refuses to accept help or treat the threat with any degree of caution or respect. He's basically the pushy jerk in every slasher film that dies the most horribly, only fleshed out and broadened into a real character. Our sympathy really lies with poor Katie, torn between a jerky boyfriend and a menacing spirit. Perhaps she courts her doom by not being assertive enough, but they're both people I can believe in. That's the kind of stuff I like: characters that exist as something other than knife-bait.
Go check it out, as it's probably one of the most important American horror films of the last few years. While you're at it, wish me a speedy recovery from this miserable ear infection. Also, for the record, I liked the theatrical ending more than the alternate DVD ending.
Is it reasonable to enjoy a story you emphatically don't believe in?
I like possession films, cliched as they often are, but I don't agree with the themes presented in them. Two of the most famous ones, The Last Exorcism and The Exorcist, tell the story of modern day conflicted priests confronting old-timey evil in a way they're unprepared for. Only by returning to the superstitious roots of their faiths are they able to overcome the forces of hell, usually at the cost of their own lives.
I don't believe in gods or devils and I think such ideas are detrimental to society at large and, more than any other aspect of the genre, I think that the demonic possession subgenre is the most conservative and regressive thematically (Constantine being a notable exception.) The Rite looks incredible and dramatic and beautifully themed, but it's the same sort of Old Testament sturm und drang you see in this genre.
It didn't fascinate me due to it's quality. It can be politely described as formulaic but fun, something to pass the idle hours on the commuter train. There are about five or six horror writers I regularly come back to when I want something lurid and sensationalistic and fun. They wear their genre bonafides on their sleeve and their stories are almost interchangeable: corruption and anarchy hits a maddeningly suburban town, the protagonist is always some Sunset Strip hair metal type, the violence splashes gleefully across the page, and the woman are always cartoonishly sexually aggressive. The tea sipping elitist in me is mortified that I enjoy this stuff, but my inner five year old devours it.
Soultaker plays pretty close to form. A female sexual demon known as a Lamia comes to a shitty little suburb and begins corrupting the populace by taking the form of a surly goth teenager and fucking the local hot shot jock. The jock's alcoholic writer brother comes to town to help him out and is unwittingly forced to fight against evil and blah blah blah. It's not particularly inventive or challenging but it's competently put together and I enjoyed my time reading it. The reason it stuck with me after I put it down because the more I think about it, the more I feel it's a story about male fear of female sexuality.
I've gone on rants before about how I believe horror is often a satire of our fears. Some of them are cultural fears, some of them are fears specific to an era in our history, and some are universal. It's no secret that human cultures have spent generations trying to control what a woman does with her body and Soultaker feels like a sort of extreme satire about what could happen if women had complete control of her own sexuality.
Lamia is an unequivocably female threat. While her goal is to perform some sort of mass sacrifice for another hundred years of life, she achieves it by seducing and destroying anyone who gets in her way. Her acolytes are all women and they use an almost comically exaggerated sexuality to get what they want. They're not bashful or subdued; they want to fuck and come and push bondaries all the way through to graphic murder. The men who they take over become simpering submissive slaves bent to their evil will. The heroes eventually become drawn into an Invasion of the Body Snatchers-style web where they can no longer trust that their friends or families aren't acolytes or slaves of Lamia. All the heroes are male with the one exception of a lesbian who happens to be Lamia's daughter and uses the same sexuality in an attempt to destroy her mother.
I absolutely don't want to suggest that I think Bryan Smith is a misogynist. While the subjects he's tackling can be incredibly challenging, I don't really sense any particular malice from his work. To be honest, I'm probably overinterpreting the intent behind his book. For all I know he just wanted a little raunchy sex, a little gruesome violence, and a bunch of fun scares. Besides, I'm currently reading the collected horror stories of Robert E. Howard and his virulent racism makes Smith seems like the copywriter for the ACLU.
I don't know if I would actually recommend this book to people. It's crudely written and the subject matter might turn off people with sensitive constitutions or people whose socially conscious dial is set too high. I don't know how much of the stuff I'm drawing from the story is from my notorious penchant for over-interpretation and how much of it was deliberately laid down by Smith, but the gender politics of the book kept me fascinated.
Also, it was a good way to kill five or six hours on my commute.
I'm really struggling to come up with something clever to say on this one.
First, I loved it. I've been reading a lot lately, given that I no longer have access to video games or a TV, and most of the stuff coming across my desk have been slogs to get through. I breezed through Horns and I didn't want it to end.
Second, the themes of the book hit me at the right time. I broke up with my girlfriend of seven years within the past year and I'm currently at the "oh my god, why did I let her go" phase. This story is essentially The Crow, in that supernatural agency allows a wronged man to seek revenge, but unlike The Crow's ethereally perfect love, Ig's romance with poor doomed Merrin is much more fraught with doubt and discomfort and pain. She's murdered the night she dumps Ig in a bar and the conversation she has with him rings cruelly authentic. There's a bit where she accuses him of putting her on a pedestal and loving the image he's made of her rather than who she is as a person.
That stuff resonated with me because, unlike a lot of love stories in genre work, it resonated with authenticity. Hill has a real gift with chronicling realistically damaged relationships. I remember a line from Heart Shaped Box where Judas Coyne talked about staying up late at night so his girlfriend would be too tired to want sex. I've been to that level of dysfunction and I haven't seen it detailed with the same heartbreaking accuracy that Joe Hill brings. I dunno where he's been in his life, but you can't make that shit up.
I actually had some trouble with the twist, which essentially invalidated Merrin's previous behavior. I liked the difficulty and ambivalence of Ig's memories of Merrin and when it turned out that every decision she made was made out of love for Ig suddenly stripped the story of the emotional murkiness that I found so charming. Then again, I'm not exactly reading the story without baggage.
One of the things that I really liked about the story was the way it was told from multiple angles. It's essentially a very small story between a couple of characters, but nature of Ig's powers allow the readers to see the crime from several points of view. At no point does the book feel padded, mostly due to the strength of the characterization. Hill has a great command of his character's point of view. Ig's lovestruck, self-loathing perspective on events is a million miles away from Lee Tourneau's selfish, sociopathic take on his crimes, and both are equally entertaining to follow.
Finally, both of Hill's novels feature female characters who start out in the background but eventually come into their own. In Horns, it was the sad, damaged Glenna. I really liked her arc in the story. We know that she doesn't like herself much, that she's curvy but sees herself as fat and grotesque, and that she possesses a wounded beauty. She's one of the invisible people of the story and my heart went out to her.
Maybe it's my love of superhero stories, but I really dug Ig's transformation into a pitchfork-wielding, red skinned devil. It's a compelling image for a character and it has the same nifty internal logic of a good comic book story.
I even dug his powers, which compel people to confess their darkest secrets to him. I was originally a little iffy on this aspect of the story because I was worried it would turn into yet another variation of the same old "people are shits deep down" that I've gotten bored with before, but the characters in Ig's world are all interconnected, and you see the effect of one person's secret spill over into another. Their deepest, most unspoken thoughts are especially vicious given that almost every character in the book believe Ig murdered Merrin, which deepens our sympathy for him as we see how much of an outcast he's become. The scene with the waitress who originally reported Ig to the police is especially amusing because we find out just how messed up he is. I could have easily read an entire novel where Ig goes around getting confessions from people. Reading the story in my wretched, misbegotten state, I couldn't help but wish I could use this power on my ex and figure out exactly what she felt about me, but I doubt I would have liked the answers.
Ig's powers grow to a point where he can start tempting people to act on their secret desires. He almost seems like he's going to walk the path of damnation, especially given the shocking and slightly out-of-character scene where he nearly kills his grandmother after she confesses her hatred of him. Instead, this devil turns out to possess some decency, and spends the rest of the story walking a brutal road to redemption, one that involves him using Morse code, finding a tree house, getting set on fire, wearing a blue skirt, and discovering an aversion to the crucifixes of dead ex-girlfriends. As the story went along, I discovered that I really didn't care how he got all these cool powers, but the explanation cooked up at the end is both lyrical and strangely satisfying.
I can't recommend this book highly enough. I liked it more than Heart Shaped Box and I foresee a future where Joe Hill is a big cheese in genre fiction. You can read a really good interview with him here, along with a pretty good review of it from the AV Club.
This was one of those books that came along at the right time in my life. The themes of lost love and alienation really resonated with me. I sometimes wish I could find the Tree House of the Mind, with it's strange votive candles and cheerful proprietor. There's a lot of trees in this city. Maybe it will appear for me when it's needed.
I really, really liked Juno, quirky hipster dialogue and all. I liked Juno and her little coterie and underneath the razzle-dazzle verbal sparring Diablo Cody created characters I actually cared about, with an ear toward teenager's real insecurities. After years of non-characters in teenage horror movies I was looking forward to an Oscar winning genre fan's take on the genre.
Plus, y'know, Megan Fox. Man, I'm only human.
The movie is...meh, okay. There's a lot to like about it, there's nothing really wrong with it, but there's just something missing. It feels like it straddles some gray area between black comedy, teenage drama, and Evil Dead-style gorefest. I'm a big fan of crossing genres and ideas, but this one felt like it was missing it's center.
Also, Megan Fox is pretty unlikeable. Granted she's the bad guy, but she's supposed to be seductive and enticing and possessed of a beauty that intimidates, like your very presence taints the ground she walks on and the air she breathes. From the beginning of movie all the way to the end, Jennifer is an unlikeable pile of shit. It's hard not to see her through the prism of her public persona, but she's not particularly seductive. She comes off as unpleasantly cocky and entitled. The movie would be a lot better if her character was more balanced.
Diablo Cody haters will have plenty to hate. Her quirky dialogue, charming-ish in Juno is a bit over-the-top and unrestrained, particularly in the beginning. There's a lot of god-awful, unnatural quips and turns of phrases that no actor can deliver well.
The best stuff in the movie takes place in the club scene early in the film, where the stereotypical big-city hipster band. The notion of a band so desperate for success they'd turn to the black arts is kinda hilarious. I liked them in all their petty villainies.
The movie, like Juno, centers around a quirky outsider and her sweet shy boyfriend. I liked Needy, the girl living in Jennifer's shadow, and her goofy-charming drummer boyfriend. They're sweet and confused and I bought into 'em completely. I wanted to transport these characters into something more cliched and have them bring a bit more life to it.
Okay, that's all I got. Oh, and the movie has the best kissing scene I've ever seen. Go check it out.
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