Things that brought me delight in June, 2023:
Victoria Dalpe, Parasite Life
It's always a trepidatious moment when you're descending in a bucket down into the Young Adult mines, but I had read Victoria Dalpe's collection of horror short fiction last month so I had some confidence that this wouldn't be too twee. My instinct was correct: Dalpe goes pretty hard in Parasite Life. The novel is about a socially isolated teenager with a pretty bleak home life taking care of her invalid mother; she discovers something truly horrible about who she is deep down. If you're afraid of YA not providing the goods, rest assured that Parasite Life takes the reader and its subject matter seriously.
Bell Witch's Mirror Reaper was so critically well-received that it feels like there's a lot riding on Future's Shadow Part 1: The Clandestine Gate. The formula hasn't really changed between albums; Bell Witch still turns in epic-length slabs of contemplative, melancholy doom. And while this record might not reach the sublime heights of Mirror Reaper, I'd be hard pressed to name something recent that matches it, so this album certainly isn't a disappointment to me. It will be interesting to see where they got with a part 2.
It had been quite some time since I saw Phantom of the Paradise, Brian De Palma's insane take on both The Phantom of the Opera and Faust. And you know what? It more than holds up. De Palma is known for his cinematic oddity, but usually in the form of a louder, brasher Hitchcock-esque riff. Things are different here; his filmmaking was never so frantic as it is in Phantom of the Paradise, a movie about a would-be singer-songwriter who finds both his work and his muse appropriated by a sleazy, satanic record producer. Also, I'm a major Beef fan.
Things become unhinged when a Vietnamese-American girl visits her father in Da Lat to help with his attempt to turn a colonial-era home into an upscale hotel. Hanging over her head is a promised sum of money for college, but in her heart things are even more complicated as she struggles with her mixed identity, her unexpressed bisexuality, and a strained family history. While in the house, she experiences ghostly visitations, sleep paralysis, and dreams that are more than dreams. She is a Haunting excels at merging the mundane concerns of a teenager with the phantasmagoria of the otherworldly.
I've never been the biggest death metal guy, but there's something about Cattle Decapitation's modern sound that really does it for me. On Terrasite, the band hits just the right balance between melody and brutality. There's also one really amusing moment when the singer says "What a time to be alive!" in the death metal voice. I'm sure there's something "the earth is dying, mankind is the disease" sentiment flowing throughout the album; admittedly, it was the perfect thing to have on while driving under the hazy orange sky during the bout of wildfires in June.
Hell on the High Plains is the first in a new series of supplements for Deadlands that aim to cover all corners of the Weird West. This initial volume focuses on Kansas, Nebraska, the Dakotas, Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana. This seems like a particularly helpful book to me, as I know very little about any of those areas! Although none of the locations are treated with an avalanche of detail, the things that get picked out are of interest; they're the sort of thing that might inspire an adventure or two. Speaking of scenarios, this book includes a bunch of them. I also picked up the archetype cards that go along with this, so now I've got even more options for players to choose from. I love those things.
In Blonde Ana de Armis pilots a reimagined version of Marilyn Monroe from one Grand Guignol vignette to another. Not to be mistaken for any sort of accurate biopic, this Marilyn is a breathy vacancy, always on the verge of tears, a walking Electra complex. As a film, this is an exploitation film masquerading as arthouse fare.
I'm not entirely comfortable with rewriting the life of a real woman as the basis of a house of horrors, but I suspect the discomfort is the point. Blonde may just be poised for inclusion in my personal canon of Hollywood Gothic. Fans of Kenneth Anger's lurid Hollywood Babylon should line up for this one if they haven't already.
I've had a copy of this book for a very long time, but thankfully Tenebrous Kate picked it for our next episode of Bad Books for Bad People--giving me a nice excuse to finally get to it. And boy am I glad we did! I'll have a lot more to say about it on the podcast episode, but this is one messed up mix of detective fiction, Gothic grotesquery, anxiety over modernity, and unchecked libidinal excesses. Really sublime stuff. This particular edition is easy to find in America, and it's pretty cheap as well, so do yourself a favor and feel the grime with this one.
There was a time when I listened to a lot of "apocalyptic folk," but the repetitiveness of the music coming out of that scene eventually turned me off on it. Enter Hexvessel's Kindred, which gives me some of the same atmosphere and thematic content as apocalyptic folk, but with a much more diverse palette of sounds. I can't believe some reviewers criticized the runtime of Kindred--it takes time to conjure something of this magnitude!
Some people didn't grow up with Big Trouble in Little China on what felt like a permanent rerun loop on the USA Network, and it shows. Big Trouble in Little China is absolutely a classic, in my opinion, and it's certainly a canonical film in the PLANET MOTHERFUCKER universe. For such a gleefully dumb movie, it really does some interesting stuff. Its reinterpretations of Chinese kung-fu movie conventions is pretty solid, but the way it frequently enforces the idea that Jack Burton is a sidekick who thinks he's the main character isn't something I can remember ever seeing elsewhere.
Adam Mansbach's The Dead Run has it all: vicious drug cartels, ancient Aztec sorcerers, hellhole prisons, apocalyptic cults, armies of zombie virgins, gunfights with nationalist bikers, and more kidnappings than seems possible! The novel really hits the sweet spot between "crime fiction" and "horror fiction," with the added bonus of fantastic bad attitude humor. I enjoyed reading this one so much that I recommended it to Tenebrous Kate immediately--and then in talking about its psychotronic-on-the-page merits, we decided it might be a really good fit for the podcast. So, uh, stay tuned for further developments.
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Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!
It had probably been literal decades since I saw Russ Meyer's Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! but you know what? Much like Big Trouble in Little China, it still holds up. Three car-lovin' go-go dancers get mixed up with a kidnapped girlie, a murder scene, and a stash of money hidden on a pervert's desolate ranch--and it's all downhill from there. This one's got sweet cars, karate chops, bosoms out to here, fried chicken--basically, a perfect movie. And man, Tura Satana really is somethin' else.
Continuing my own personal Bummer Summer, I picked up a copy of Jim Thompson's After Dark, My Sweet. Things start horribly in this novel and only get worse as the pages fly by. After Dark, My Sweet is a tale told by a former boxer who has recently escaped from a mental institution. He falls in with a boozed-out widow and a scheming con man who wants everyone to call him "Uncle." Yeah, no way that's going to work out well for anyone involved, right? Well, things take a turn for the worse when our trio of wash-outs kidnap the child of a wealthy family for ransom, only to discover that the kid has diabetes and they have little idea how to actually keep him alive until they can get their loot.
I keep seeing reviews that say that Siernia's 1977 has a big 80s synthpop vibe, but to be honest I don't really hear that as a throughline on the album! Sure, "Twist in My Sobriety" brings those elements to the fore, but generally I think 1977 features a pretty standard array of Gothic symphonic metal. Don't get me wrong, I think it's a solid slice of that sound, I just don't think they've really changed up the formula substantially with this one! What are people hearing here that I'm not?
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Controversial when it came out, Rob Zombie's Halloween remains divisive to this day. I'm still on the fence about what the extended backstory adds, aside from allowing the opportunity for Zombie to put his wife on a stripper stage, but damn the final few scenes where Michael is pursuing Laurie Strode do have a good bit of ratcheted-up tension to them.
Halloween II is where things get weird. It feels like a sequel that Rob Zombie was strong-armed into making, given the retcons and re-castings needed to make it possible. The "hallucinations" (which include their mom, a young Michael, and a white horse) that Michael and Laurie share are intriguing, and since Michael resembles Rob Zombie himself in this one, it makes you wonder how much of this "family reunion" theming is autobiographical. Personally, I now wish Zombie had been able to bring the energy of this sequel to his original remake--just to see what would happen if he were allowed to go off the reservation earlier.
If you don't know it by reputation, Starving Zoe is the book that got C. Derick Miller fired from his job when someone with a grudge used it as evidence of his degeneracy. Which is fuckin' rich because Starving Zoe isn't even close to the most graphic or disturbing book I've read in the Splatter Western line. This one actually struck me as a bit more of a "horror comedy" than most of the others I've read; don't get me wrong, it's still intentionally "gross," but it's so over the top and the protagonist is such a cartoonish buffoon that I am having trouble imagining anyone really having their world rocked by it.
The plot's fairly simple: a murderous scumbag returns from the Civil War to find that his wife assumed he had died and shacked up with another man--and left her with a baby. When the protagonist takes unjust revenge on the woman and her child, her mother in law brings her back as a skinwalker intent on making his life a living hell.
What is it about symphonic metal that makes bands want to go to space with it? (Or, perhaps more accurately give this record's cover, the dystopian cyberpunk future.) Anyway, I'm not complaining. Hybrid Ego System is one of those albums were I'm so thankful that the band didn't push all the good songs to the front and then pad out the back end. There's some big high points on the second half that definitely shouldn't be missed.
This is the "Kickstarter Edition" even though I didn't back the Kickstarter. When the Moon Hangs Low is definitely "Bloodborne with the serial numbers filled off," but I do appreciate that the game includes a wider variety of soul- and body-warping curses that might afflict the hunters. In When the Moon Hangs Low, those who stare into the abyss and doomed to have the abyss stare back into them, which strikes me as nicely thematic. I'm not entirely convinced on all the mechanics of the game (armor doesn't seem to work right imo), but I could definitely see running this as part of my Halloween offerings on my Discord this year.
I polished off a second book from the Splatter Western series in June: Regina Garza Mitchell's Shadow of the Vulture. This one is quite short, but it manages to pack a lot of interesting characters into its slim page count. A young woman on the path of the bruja intersects with a woman who fought for her country (and whose best friend tags along as a maimed specter) so that they can take on the gringos trying to steal their homes out from under them. I do think Shadow of the Vulture could have benefitted from a little expansion in places, but this is a quick, fun read overall, so I can't really fault it.
Poison for the Fairies is not really a horror movie in the strictest sense, but it does have elements of folk horror and Gothic thriller. If you've ever had a childhood experience with a kid who is either a fabulist or experimenting with that particularly childlike form of "folk magic," the child characters in this movie will be immediately recognizable to you.
One interesting choice in the cinematography: the faces of the adult characters are mostly not seen at all. Their heads are just out of frame or we see them on screen with their backs to us. They become anonymous figures of authority for the viewer as much as they are for the children in the film. Poison for the Fairies feels like a movie you show to kids because it doesn't have explicit gore to it, but it traumatizes them even more despite that.
The first third of Dark Road is a pretty odd Vampire Hunter D novel in that nothing really happens in it. I suppose it introduces some characters, such as the "victim" Rosaria and the powerful vampire General Gaskell, but there aren't much in the way of stake setting here.
Do things pick up steam in the second part? Eh, this is another volume where a group of powerful baddies decided to conveniently attack D one-by-one so he can pick them off with relative ease.
But are there some weird bits to this one? But of course:
- After one battle, a trucker offers D a back rub
- A vampire who has the body of a ten year old falls madly in love with D; it's noted that her chest is more developed than a child's, which feels fairly sleazy
- We also learn that the girls father probably sexually assaulted her because she looks like her mother; again, these books have some really greasy moments in them
- We learn about a new vampire invention: a vacuum cleaner you can use after a big bloody battle that sucks up all the corpses and warps them into deep space
