Things that brought me delight in July, 2023:
Apparently, The Drive In was a real bitch for Joe R. Lansdale to write, but his paean to b-movie shlock and the lost world of the drive-in theater is a joy to read. A buncha guys get trapped in a drive-in during the weekly horror movie event when a meteor passes by and causes all hell to break loose. Things get as wild and wooly as any low-budget gorefest pretty quick. Who will survive and what will be left of them? Besides the popcorn and blood, they're gonna be left with a whole bunch of trauma to work through. I enjoyed this so much that I used it as the basis for one of the PLANET MOTHERFUCKER games I ran in July.
Polite Society
It's not my usual sort of movie, but I gotta say that Polite Society was a boatload of fun. The movie is about two Pakistani girls living in England: the elder is an art-school drop out who is poised to be married to a guy who's too good to be true, and the younger is a martial arts-obsessed would-be stuntwoman who plans a heist to rescue her sister from the upcoming marriage. It's got lots of kung-fu fightin' and it's pretty funny. There's also a fairly Gothic twist to the would-be groom's family that I enjoyed. Lighter fare than usual for me, but this was a very good time so I'm glad I switched it up a bit.
Better known for her role in Igorrr, Ricinn is Laure Le Prunenec's solo, vocal-based project. Nereid is an interesting, experimental record. It's got elements of Gothic bombast, demonical outburst, and neoclassical elegance. You can even tell that this is an Igorrr-related album on the track "Sore." Ricinn feels like a hidden weapon; this project should definitely be more well-known among fans of Jarboe, Chelsea Wolfe, and Diamanda Galas.
I've been waiting for the Fantasy Companion for SWADE in hardcopy for a while now, but it's finally here! Savage Worlds' genre companions really hit the spot for me, as they're filled with stuff that's actually useful for a variety of SW games. For my purposes, there's a lot of material here that fits my Krevborna setting.(I've already gotten a lot of use out of the rules for necromancy and alchemy, as well as the wide variety of monsters on offer.) As a mix-and-match grab bag, the Fantasy Companion has ancestries, new edges and hindrances, more powers (and arcane archetypes, clerical domains, rules for familiars, etc.), a big bestiary section, mundane equipment and magical items, domain-level stuff, traps, and lots of worldbuilding ideas.
I finished up the last part of The Dark Road storyline. The "twist" is not much of a surprise: the traitorous vampires haven't been revived to kill D, they've been revived so that D can kill them. Here's a weird bit from this volume: one of the vampires is explicitly a pedophile. Make of that what you will. There's also a bit of unexplained weirdness where one character turns out to be something else entirely at the 11th hour without much context; it makes me wonder if something was lost in translation there.
Death Note is regarded as a classic manga, but to be honest I've been avoiding it because popular doesn't always equal good in the Japanese comics and anime arena. That said, I can report that Death Note is actually good! Really good, in facr. The story concerns a high school student who stumbles upon a magical notebook that causes anyone whose name is written into it to die. There are a lot of other rules attached to the notebook as well, making this something of a story of Faustian power. What surprised me most about Death Note is that it actually manages to pose some pretty interesting moral questions.
At its core, Female Prisoner #701: Scorpion is a Japanese women-in-prison exploitation movie, but it's elevated by depth of storytelling and some especially artistic visual flourishes. The sequence in which the main character recalls her betrayal by the man she loves and her failed attempt to kill him is particularly inventive. Of course, it doesn't skimp on the violence, torture, cruelty, and nudity that you'd expect from this kind of movie, but I do think it's got enough going on to really set itself apart from the pack. Some of the lighting reminded me of the better giallo set pieces. I hear that the sequel is even better, so I'm looking forward to that one now too.
Sarah Gailey, Just Like Home
Sarah Gailey's Just Like Home pulls one of my favorite Gothic novel routines: from the start of the book, it's clear that something horrible has happened in the family home, but exactly what that something entails is kept obscured for much of the early portion of the book. I love that stuff; keep me on pins and needles, wondering what the hell went so very wrong in the past!
Warning: spoilers below. Skip to another entry if you plan on reading Just Like Home.
Things get grotty in Just Like Home when the family's secret is revealed to be that the main character's father was a serial killer murdering men in the basement. As a child, the protagonist watched him kill through a peephole and tried to emulate what he was up to. The mom also knew about it, though it seems like she didn't participate. I wasn't sure if there would be a supernatural element at work in the novel, or if the protagonist was just traumatized from growing up with a serial killer dad, but there was--and it brings the book to a strange, off-kilter conclusion that emphasizes the lengths a person will go to finally find a place to belong.
I generally avoid reboots and remakes like the plague, but I could watch Rachel Weisz wash dishes for an hour, so I thought I'd give this new Dead Ringers a try. And really, this is how it's done. Rachel Weisz does largely carry the show, playing both twins and managing to make each of them a distinct and complete character.
The Dead Ringers miniseries also deftly avoids one of the great pitfalls of this particular reboot genre: it has none of the self-satisfied sanctimoniousness that often accompanies a gender-swap. It allows the twins to be complex, twisted, and disturbingly flawed, instead of positing a righteous depiction as actual political progress. However, that is not to say that the series doesn't engage with the social fabric; it melds the focus on the twins' warped psychology with a solid understanding of the issues involved in birth and motherhood in ways that Cronenberg's original couldn't tackle.
I'm new to the Deathstars experience, but if Everything Destroys You is anything to go by I like their stomping Gothic-industrial metal sound. I saw someone describe their sound as a crosspollination between The 69 Eyes and Rammstein and honestly that's pretty apt, but they're also playing in the same ballpark as Gothminster and Crematory.
I backed the kickstarter for the Shiver: Gothic rpg so long ago that I kinda forgot about it until the physical rewards showed up this month. The package is honestly a little overwhelming; there is a lot of stuff here, as the main Gothic book is as thick as the corebook. I'll need more time to delve into this properly, and maybe I'll write a review here on the blog when I've gotten a grip on it, but so far I like that even though it's a class-based system there are ways to keep characters varied and interesting, the Mignola-inspired art is cool, and the Gothic fantasy supplements seem right up my alley. Things I'm less hot on: there doesn't seem to be any guidance as to what kind of gear characters start with and...ehh, bespoke dice with symbols on them.
All We Want is Everything is a book of short stories packed with sharp, incisive bursts of degradation. It's a parade of the infinite variety of fucked up specimens belonging to irredeemable human animal. Fans of Sullivan's novels, Waste and the more recent The Marigold, take note: this book contains stories that are functionally the "seeds" of those works. See how they grow, see what withers on the vine. Now that I've read All We Want is Everything, Waste, and The Marigold, I'm really looking forward to his collaboration with Nick Cutter, The Handyman Method. This guy always comes to the party with some fucked up shit to show us, and I'm loving it.
When I'm on vacation I like to pick up those little books about local folklore, hauntings, and weird shit that you always find in touristy gift shops. Since we went back to the North Shore of Massachusetts in July, I bought a couple more to add to the collection. It turns out I've been working through this series since the 80s. Now I know a whole lot more--and more than I probably need to--about New England's mad and mysterious men, to say nothing of its strange sea sagas.
My girlfriend had been wanting to watch John Carpenter's The Thing for a while now, so we finally got around to watching it. The Thing is absolutely a movie that will stand the test of time; this flick is pretty much unimpeachable. There's a real pleasure in getting to watch someone else experience a movie like this for the first time: my girlfriend's verdict is that The Thing had a good level of tension, and that it might be the grossest movie she's ever scene. And when you think about it, this really is an extremely wet looking film--in all the best ways. Practical effects win again!
I wonder how much trepidation there was over at Wyrd as they geared up to release the From Shadows supplement for their Through the Breach rpg. The book covers the Ten Thunders faction, who are essentially an Asian crime syndicate. By some metrics, that probably violates the modern rules of representation, but as I am neither qualified nor interested in commentary on that--my question is, "but is it any good?"
To be honest, there's probably more timeline, lore, and history than I prefer, but once it gives way we have a pretty interesting faction. One thing notable about the Ten Thunders is that it's kind of a pan-Asian faction: it's members are descended from Japanese, Chinese, and Vietnamese origins. (Though one wonders why Korea was left out here.) There's some neat new magic to play with here, and it gives a more satisfying implementation of Avatar-style elementalists than D&D was ever capable of. Also included is a special system of character creation specifically tailored for making characters connected to the Ten Thunders syndicate. Best of all? Sweet bestiary that includes my favorite--the penanggalan!
Gwendolyn Kiste, Reluctant Immortals
Truth be told, I picked up Reluctant Immortals solely on the strength of Gwendolyn Kiste's Rust Maidens. Reluctant Immortals is a very different kind of book when compared against that novel, but it's great fun all the way through. In lesser hands, this premise wouldn't work: Lucy Westenra and Bertha Mason are both immortals haunted by the men who have cursed them with unnaturally extended lives--Dracula and Edward Rochester, respectively. Both women have fled their pasts for California; when that past catches up with them, their forced to navigate the 60s Haight Ashbury scene. At one point some hippie chicks have gotten ahold of an urn containing Dracula's sentient ashes; said urn is quickly painted with psychedelic colors. If that's the sort of thing that sounds like a fun ride to you, definitely give Reluctant Immortals a try.
Head Shrinkin' Fun is a record I've been looking for since the late 90s. NOW IT IS MINE! The Bomboras do fuzzy garage rock and surf instruments. There are a few tracks with vocals, but I have to admit that those aren't my favorites. Still, this record is great fun--as good as I always imagined it would be in the intervening years. The only danger is that this is the kind of music that makes me drive fast. Gotta keep an eye on the speedometer.
I read Stephen Graham Jones's Night of the Mannequins in one day, unwilling to put it down for very long to attend to other things. I don't want to say too much about the plot because you really should experience it for yourself. I can say that it was not what I was expecting, but I loved the way it swerved in a direction I didn't see coming. Night of the Mannequins is a quick little read; you should definitely pick it up if you're looking for a sharp little burst of horror. One of these days we really gotta cover one of Stephen Graham Jones's novels on Bad Books for Bad People.
Why did no one tell me that Ash vs. Evil Dead was so fuckin' fun? Certainly more fun than Evil Dead Rise, which tried it's hardest and just couldn't get there for me. Is Bruce Campbell the missing ingredient? He's certainly in fine form here, but the supporting cast ain't no slouches either. Great mix of comedy and I love that every episode features at least one impressively gory set-piece death scene. I'm definitely going to keep watching the other seasons of Ash vs. Evil Dead, even though I know it doesn't really have a "proper" conclusion. I can live with that because this is one of the few shows I've seen in the last few years that makes me laugh out loud.
Thoughts and Prayers is a fun little game zine with material for MORK BORG, CY_BORG, and Death in Space, as well as more general stuff like musings about rpgs and record reviews. Even though I'm unlikely to use all the material in this zine, or even play some of the games that the material is aimed at, this is a fun grab bag of stuff. It's practically guaranteed that something between the covers will spark your imagination or amuse you. Plus, the proceeds from this thing go to a good cause.
Chad Lutzke's How the Skin Sheds is another book I've devoured in the Splatter Western line. In this one, a cattle rancher is driven to pursue a grotesque serial killer after the murderer kills his sister and violates his niece. Impressively gut churning at points, How the Skin Sheds is another example from this line of a short novel that gets a lot done in a small bundle of pages. It's a simple tale of revenge, all things told, but I especially liked the emphasis on how vengeance is always a path that changes, if not corrupts, those who pursue it. You'd know what I'd love? A sequel novel featuring the adventures of the life-hardened niece in the vile West.
Confession: I've actually had Tribulation's Hamartia ep for a while now, but I lost track of it in the shuffle and only got around to listening to it in late July. The ep features four songs, each of which showcase Tribulation's unmistakable blend of goth rock, blackened metal, and 70s hard rock influences. I've heard some metal hipsters posit that Tribulation is the "good" version of Ghost, and interestingly Tribulation has never sounded more Ghost-like than in the Blue Oyster Cult cover on Hamartia. Why quibble? Would love to see them tour together for the ultimate experience.
Now that I've seen it, I'm of the opinion that the trailer for Renfield didn't do a good job of selling the movie. I was expecting something far goofier--along the lines of an extended SNL skit--and even the promise of Nicholas Hoult wasn't even for me to stomach such a thing. But Renfield is actually a pretty high-octane romp with a surprising amount of Mortal Kombat-esque violence too it. Nicholas Hoult is great, Awkwafina (man I hate typing that name) is great as the comedic springboard, and Nicolas Cage gets to chew the scenery with aplomb as Dracula. Watching this so close to reading Reluctant Immortals, a book also showcasing Dracula's "toxic masculinity," might be a bit much, but I had a great time watching this. So much so that I kinda regret not seeing it in the theater!
Vampire: The Masquerade Player's Guide
Speaking of vampires, I got my hands on the long-awaited Player's Guide for the newest edition of Vampire: The Masquerade. The content in this book reminds me of what we expect from rpg zines: it's a real grab bag of stuff that you can plug-and-play into your game as wanted or needed. The book collects the clans published in other disparate books, offers advice on how to run chronicles in different formats, gives alternate clan banes, details rules for playing as various kinds of "cast offs," adds new sorceries, disciplines, merits, and flaws, and has tons of doodads pertaining to coteries. My favorite bit: the quick and easy rules for "instantly" generating a character; I'd love to use them with a group that wasn't immersed in Vampire lore to get things running quickly.