Things that brought me delight in August, 2023:
Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Silver Nitrate
I've enjoyed everything I've read from Silvia Moreno-Garcia, and Silver Nitrate continues that trend. Mexico, the early 90s: a horror movie-obsessed film editor and her childhood friend, a former soap opera star who is currently out of orbit, get mixed up in a nexus of cinema and the occult. This is not an action-packed novel, particularly in comparison to the previous The Daughter of Doctor Moreau, but rather a simmering mystery that reminded me a bit of The Club Dumas. Bonus points for the allusions to Hanns Heinz Ewers (by way of the fictional German occultist "Wilhelm Ewers") and to Carlos Enrique Taboada, a Mexican director whose work I've just begun to explore.
Home Sick Pilots has one of the more unusual premises I've encountered in a while: the comic is about some kids from the 90s punk scene who stumble into a supposedly killer haunted house--carnage occurs, and one of them realizes she has the ability to pilot the haunted house like a kaiju powered by the afterlife. And things get really kaiju-tastic when the house has to fight a machine of war that's fueled by all the misery of America's nuclear tests and, well, all the other bad shit America gets up to on the day-to-day. Somehow, Home Sick Pilots works.
Ghoultown is one of those bands that I absolutely loved, but for one reason or another they eventually fell off my radar. August was the month to check in on them. In the intervening years, they've released two albums: Ghost of the Southern Son and Curse of Eldorado. To my ears, they sound even heavier than before (especially on Ghost of the Southern Son), but they've lost none of their trademark macabre cowpunk vibe. The urge to run the most fucked up Deadlands game increases with every listen.
Twisted Metal is not a smart show, and sometimes it's not even a particular well-done show, but it is a surprisingly fun show. It's also an extremely PLANET MOTHERFUCKER show, so take that for what it's worth. Set in a slightly psychotronic and violent post-apocalypse, "milk men" (aka couriers) deliver goods between various walled-in enclaves, braving raiders, insane clowns, religious nuts, and cops. And, as it turns out, the cops are the fuckin' worst. Big surprise there. Anyway, I can probably sell you or unsell you on Twisted Metal in one line: a guy smashes a watermelon with his huge dong and then a fight breaks out on a stripper pole.
A slasher is about to embark on a bloody rampage throughout Indian Lake, and only a disaffected teenager girl with an overenthusiasm for horror can prep the final girl for her inevitable confrontation with the killer. Or maybe...? If the quality that makes for a good slasher movie is keeping the audience guessing as to the identity of the killer, then My Heart is a Chainsaw is at the top of the heap (of bodies). Stephen Graham Jones's love of the slasher genre really shines through, especially in the slasher-obsessed character Jade Daniels, who narrative voice felt instantly recognizable to me. Loved this one all the way through and couldn't put it down.
I'm immediately suspicious of any story that bills itself as a sequel to Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's classic Gothic vampire tale, especially after the ham-fisted Dracula tie-ins by Dacre Stoker. That said, Amy Chu and Soo Lee's Carmilla is both gorgeous and interesting on its own as a comic. When young women of a certain "type" start turning up dead in NYC, a dedicated social worker gets involved...and then gets in over her head. I'm a little unsure about the inclusion of a familial connection to vampire hunting--that felt like a late-game inclusion that took away a bit from the more grounded premise--but it's hard to argue with the nuances that Carmilla puts front and center.
Another band I caught up with in August is Witchery, who specialize in blackened thrash. Witchery are at their best when they let the thrash elements get nice and crunchy, but even when their sound is less precise they are a ferocious beast in action. In His Infernal Majesty's Service is probably my favorite of the lot; it has a ton of great, infectious riffs. Nightside is more dense; it's almost like being smashed in the head with a gravestone. I Am Legion feels like Witchery's take on a latter-day Slayer record, which may or may not be to everyone's taste, but I think it's great.
I worked my way through Tombs, a collection of Junji Ito's short horror comics, over a few days in August. What can you even say about Junji Ito's comic work? Ito remains unbeaten in the horror arena; the stories mine the grotesque, his black and white artwork always hits, and the "shock" pages work exceptionally well. My favorite stories in this collection are "Tombs," in which a hit-and-run accident has bizarre consequences; "Bronze Statue," a semi-comic Gothic shocker that has a twist ending right out of Tales From the Crypt; and "Washed Ashore," in which the corpse of a newly discovered sea creature hides a dark mystery.
Erin A. Craig's House of Salt and Sorrows is a secondary-world Gothic fantasy that veers into a fairytale murder mystery. A family of accursed sisters seem to be dying one-by-one due to mysterious circumstances; they discover a door that lets them travel to the masquerade balls of their dreams--or nightmares because all is not what it seems. The worldbuilding has some exquisite touches; the dark "nautical Gothic" setting is particularly up my alley and the way it's detailed is not heavy handed or overly lore-laden. I will admit that I was a little disappointed that the novel pulled its big tragic punch in its final pages, but I guess not everyone is as much of a fan of suffering as I am. I'll definitely be reading the sequel.
I have a fairly rocky history with A24 horror movies, but I was genuinely surprised by how much I liked Talk To Me. When some Australian teens get ahold of a strange "embalmed" hand that lets them contact (and be possessed by) the dead, things go very wrong when two of them bring something back from the experience. Of course, it doesn't help that the main character is already traumatized by the death of her mother and entranced by the possibility of using the hand to communicate with her. There's some real brutality to this one and it's not really reliant on jump scares--win/win in my book.
I'm generally not a live album guy, but I'll make an exception for Rob Zombie. I also pulled these out to prime myself because we're going to see the Rob Zombie experience in September. There's something missing without the stage show, but these three records are a good way to get excited for the main event, in my opinion.
I still find it hard to believe that I enjoy this comic. Blood Stain is essentially an extended "meet cute," albeit inflected with a loving send up of Gothic fiction. Elliot Torres seems like a Gothic heroine: she's invited to work in an isolated lab overseen by a boss who may just be a murderous mad scientist. Or the two of them might just be two barely functional nerds incapable of viewing their situation in real terms. (Though, admittedly, the protagonist's lens is justly distorted by the fact that her boss is named Vlad Stein.) Like a latter-day Northanger Abbey, Linda Sejic's Blood Stain playfully uses the Gothic's sense of excess to explore other, more mundane, sources of anxiety in the modern world.
Elizabeth Massie's Sineater is one of those novels that was much talked about when I was getting very into horror fiction in the early 90s, but unfortunately it was also one of those novels that was impossible to find locally. But now, thanks to the fortitude of imprints dedicated to bringing classics back into print, I got my hands on it. (Though, I do have to note that this edition really did deserve another editorial pass. There are enough typos in the text that I'd characterize it as "slightly distracting.")
Sineater sits on the border of Southern Gothic and horror. A rural Virginia community practices a form of Christianity that features some non-standard beliefs, such as the necessity of having a sineater who consumes food left on the bodies of the recently diseased so as to cleanse them of sin. But as death and violence rears its head in the small community, who is to blame? Has the sineater become the devil incarnate due to an excess of sin? Has the sect's leader become unhinged and taken the punishment of sin into her own hands? It lands on the sineater's young son, a boy ostracized by the community and troubled by his backwards family, to unravel the mystery.
You Won't Be Alone
You Won't Be Alone is billed as a horror movie, but I don't think that's quite accurate. Despite being about witches, it felt more like a film that takes fairytales and folklore seriously. You Won't Be Alone is about a witchling girl who can assume the flesh of those she kills; by swapping bodies and identities, she gets to participate in a full range of human experience--fuller than any of us get in a lifetime, really. All the while, she's watched by the jealous witch who "created" her. The witch is always ready to interfere and dash her attempts at finding happiness. Again, I'd say this is less a horror movie and more a beautifully-shot meditation on the unfairness of life and learning to find joy in what little a life really is.
Light of the Morning Star was one of Tenebrous Kate's picks on one of the Best Of episodes of Bad Books for Bad People. I really dug the album she was talking about, and now I've finally made some time to go back and explore their back catalog. Light of the Morning Star make Gothic metal that bears a more obvious goth rock influence than many of their peers; you can definitely hear elements of darkwave and deathrock playing off the heavier elements of their sound on Nocta and Cemetery Glow. I absolutely love this stuff; it's exactly what I wanted to hear this month.
It's always a bit of a surprise when a tie-in comic is actually pretty good, but the Bloodborne comics buck that trend. The first four series are surprisingly experimental and philosophical. Rather than focus on the action-forward monster hunting of the game, they tend more toward contemplation and grief. The extended wordless segment in A Song of Crows is particularly exquisite. The Lady of the Lanterns, which is by a different creative team, changes things up and gives a decent story about a group of misfit hunters coming together to rid a town of an alien menace.
The further I get from teaching, the less I want to ever do that again; and then along comes a book like Nick Cutter and Andrew F. Sullivan’s The Handyman Method that has so much to say that I wish I could build a whole course around it. A veritable canon has been written about Gothic feminism, and rightly so, but this book opens the door to the dank basement of Gothic masculinity, forcing us to examine the dark shape of manhood in the current moment. I've got a lot more to say about The Handyman Method, but you can read my full review of it over on the Bad Books for Bad People blog, if you've a mind to.
My girlfriend took me to a Ghost concert in Syracuse, and it was a truly great show! I was only familiar with the opening act, Amon Amartha, by name, but they were great--if not exactly my thing. Their brand of viking metal was fun, and hey where other bands bring back-up dancers, they bring a couple of guys to swing swords and axes around.
Ghost was great, of course. What a show. It's funny that Tobias Forge sings songs about Satan, but in his stage banter he's all "Gosh darn!" Great setlist, super tight musicianship, just excellent all around.
The Last Voyage of the Demeter is Dracula On a Boat, that's really all you need to know about it. Loosely an expansion of the "Captain's Log" section of Bram Stoker's Dracula, the movie is about what happens when Dracula makes his journey from Romania to England aboard a Russian ship. (Though, in practice, the ship in the movie does not feel very Russian.) The Last Voyage of the Demeter doesn't offer much in the way of surprises, but it's a solid movie that does what it says on the tin. The funniest thing is that the final reel seems to set things up for a sequel, but I'd be astounded if this one got the box office needed to make that happen.
Igorrr, Hallelujah and Spirituality and Distortion
I'm back on the Igorrr train. If you haven't heard them, well, Igorrr is extremely hard to describe. I've heard them called a "more metal Mr. Bungle," but my take is that they're more like if Cirque do Soleil's music was done by extremely weird metalheads. Both Hallelujah and Spirituality and Distortion are incredibly varied; even if this isn't your bag, you're bound to find something interesting on these records.
I made more progress in my quest to work through the ever-expanding Splatter Western line. Cruel Angels Past Sundown begins with a late-night visitation at an isolated ranch: a pregnant, naked woman with a saber and the hellfire and brimstone preacher who is hot on her heels. Things do get a bit convoluted and the end plays out on a much larger theological scale than is usual for these books. Spoilers follow! The main character ends up with the Mark of Cain and then she fights, and apparently kills?, the archangel Gabriel in Heaven's potting shed. This is a decent entry in the Splatter Western series, though I'm not convinced that all the elements in the novel work together well.
As Lux Interior once said, "I don't know about art, but I know what I like/I'll be a-surfin' in your blood on a Saturday night." And that, my friends, is the experience of leafing through any of Dan Brereton's art books. If you like pretty ladies, Halloween, and monsters, you owe it to yourself to check these out. There's plenty of art of his Nocturnals characters, but for my money I looooove the way he draws the Bride of Frankenstein.
There's a Metalocalypse movie coming out (and it might even be out as you're reading this), so I decided to re-watch Metalocalypse in preparation for it. I'm pretty sure I didn't watch all of it when it originally aired on tv, but I was surprised by how much I remembered from the first season. If you haven't seen the show, here's the gist: the extreme metal band Dethklok is the most popular in the world; they're an economy unto themselves that is larger than many nations. The members of Dethklok get into all sorts of brutal shenanigans, all the while they are observed by a shadowy cabal of powerful men who are interesting in thwarting the band...maybe. This is the kind of lowbrow humor that makes me laugh out loud.
Surprisingly, this is something I listened to because my girlfriend recommended it to me. (She's not generally a heavy music person.) But Faetooth make solid, sludgy doom metal in somewhat in the vein of Windhand or King Woman. Remnants of the Vessel gets surprisingly gnarly in places, but the lead-off track (aside from the intro) is quite catchy, melding doom with a bit of grunge and a smidge of goth gloom. Definitely a band to watch; hopefully they get to refine and expand on this sound.
Brian Evenson's The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell was a bit of a surprise, as its quite different from the previous short story collections I've read from him. It's not uncommon to see people in my extended social circles complaining about the dearth of well-written, dark science fiction, but what this really means is that we've all been sleeping on The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell. Evenson's sci fi in this collection deals largely with ecological collapse; though there are menacing aliens, or at least non-humans, in these stories, it's hard to escape the feeling that the real monster is human negligence. There's an elegiac quality to these stories that really hits hard.
That said, not everything in the collection is science fiction. There's fair more in-line with what I've read from Evenson previously, and even a tale or two that feels like a homage to late Victorian or Edwardian horror in the vein of Blackwood or Nesbit.
Black Butler continues to detail the backstory of each of the Phantomhive household staff as part of the larger narrative. This time, we get the tragic past of Baldroy, the "invincible" American soldier. His story is pretty interesting and surprisingly layered: it involves his family being massacred by Native Americans, but it gives the attack more context than just "they're violent bad guys." I honestly wasn't expecting the manga to be as thoughtful about the idea it was working with as it was, but that's definitely a pleasant surprise. All the backstories have been fun, but I'm looking forward to getting back to the blood-theft plotline.
The Pope's Exorcist is categorically not a good movie, but there's something charming about the way its well aware that it's not very good. The characters comment directly on the movie's plot holes; I'm surprised they didn't look directly into the camera and break the fourth wall like Catholic Kool Aid Men.
Aside from all that stuff, this is standard demonic possession fare: a kid does something sexually inappropriate, a head is turned in an unnatural way, and a girl spider climbs up the wall. Also, it turns out that the only reason that the Catholic Church supported the Inquisition was because of demonic intervention. Hilarious premise.
I've loved John Kenn Mortensen's art since I first saw his doodles of monsters on Post-It notes. The premise of Night Terror is that it's a collection of art that captures the artist's fever dreams and nightmares. In practical terms, that means there's a lot of art here of children with monsters. What I really like about Mortensen's art is that it's not only visually stunning, it's also highly ambiguous. You get the sense that these meetings between children and monsters could go either way. And hey, in the back there's more monsters on Post-It notes!
The Devil's Bag Man is the sequel to Adam Mansbach's The Dead Run, which we did an episode of Bad Books for Bad People on. The Devil's Bag Man picks up exactly where the previous book left off: Jess Galvan is struggling to contain the Aztec sorcerer who now lives in his head and attempts to adapt to life with superpowers. Meanwhile, his daughter is trying to adjust to life with salt-of-the-earth cop Nichols and cult deprogrammer Ruth. Of course, all hell breaks loose--literally. This one has the same tone as The Dead Run, but I did find the writing in The Devil's Bag Man to have a bit less swagger and I thought the ending felt abrupt...almost like there's room for a third book in the series, which I'd welcome.
I grew up in a fairly permissive household, but there were two things that my mother didn't want in the house: Fangoria magazine and Garbage Pail Kids cards. This book collects every card from the earliest series of the cards. This is truly a time capsule that captures an era the likes of which will never be seen again. It's pretty easy to see why the juvenile grotesquery of these cards captured the prurient interests of kids and freaked out parents--they're all Id, lashing out in every direction.
For most of The Least of My Scars, I was thinking that this was going to be my least favorite book by Stephen Graham Jones. Generally speaking, fiction about serial killers often lose me by making the murderer's thought process "weird" in a way that ultimately reads as the dark side of quirky, when in reality a lot of murderers actually seem like mundanely monstrous fuck ups. The Least of My Scars has something of that nature going on with its protagonist, a killer who has been sequestered in an isolated apartment by a crime boss; when the boss needs someone disposed of permanently, he sends them to the murderer's address. All of that becomes complicated by the intervention of a woman who wants revenge for her husband's murder. I wasn't entirely sold on the book until the final chapter, where everything kicks into high gear and never looks back.