Things that brought me delight in April, 2024:
Becky Cloonan and Tula Lotay, Somna #3
The third book of Becky Cloonan and Tula Lotay's Somna brings the comic to a fiery conclusion. Literally. The murderer reveals themselves, though that isn't the crux of the climax; rather, the book ends with a consideration of faith, doubt, guilt, oppression, and the possibility of redemption. The set pattern of how art is used in the comic--with Cloonan handling the "real world" elements and Lotay covering the "dreamlike" sections--is disrupted here to fantastic effect as the boundary between dream and reality gets muddled and ruptured. The end may well be too ambiguous for some, but I'll be thinking on it for a while.
The first half of What Happened at Hawthorne House is about orphans who invent a strange game of social hierarchy, each a "princess" vying to be the "queen." The orphan girls construct a crown for the reigning queen out of barbed wire and make a scepter by studding a wooden mallet with nails. Within paragraphs of these items being introduced there is bloodshed. Within a chapter further, there is a disastrous cataclysm. And that's only the first half of the book. This is a compelling novella if, like me, you have an interesting in the morbid games of childhood. I do think that the ending fizzles out a bit and lacks bite, but as a quick, creepy read What Happened at Hawthorne House has merit.
Wet Moon is definitely not my usual kind of comic. It's more a soap opera about gothy queer college girls, than my more traditional Gothic nonsense. One thing I really like about it is that it refuses to paint the characters as anything less than messy, as most people are at that stage in their lives. Their relationships are pretty toxic, and they're still figuring out how to be people. It's also a pretty funny snapshot of a particular era: the characters are huge fans of the band Bella Morte, who used to be one of the bigger names in the goth scene--but I wonder how well that name resonates with anyone in 2024. Probably doesn't, I bet. The Southern Gothic qualities emerge over the series' volumes, and what a series it is. Wet Moon really does feel like Sophie Campbell's opus.
"Dared to spend the night in a haunted house" is one of my favorite premises, and Danza Macabra uses it to good effect. I had seen Danza Macabra in its English-language cut under the title Castle of Blood before, but this was my first time with the European cut. Although it's a bit hilarious how slow the dare-accepting protagonist is in catching onto the fact that he is being visited by the murderous ghosts haunting the castle--as well as the fact that he's gone to bed with a dead woman--but overall this is a fun Euro Gothic that is well worth your time if you're a fan of the genre.
Between Immaculate and The First Omen, we're currently in a renaissance moment for nun fanciers. Though I'd say that Immaculate is easily the better movie, I was shocked at how good The First Omen is. Usually a prequel to a long-standing horror franchise is doomed to mediocrity, but The First Omen has some great tense moments and dares to go pretty hard on its gross fx. The story might not hold up under too much scrutiny, but it's easy enough to turn off the skeptical part of your mind and just have some fun with the Evil Catholicism on display here.
I kept up with the latest issues of Vampiress Carmilla and Shudder in April, as well as continuing to make progress through the back issues! Man, check out the cover of Vampiress Carmilla #20: if you don't have a deep desire to have a framed print of that art on your walls, I don't understand how you're choosing to live your life at all.
There are a number of gothic metal bands whose work I never got the chance to delve into when it was fresh; The Sins of Thy Beloved falls into that category, so I decided that April was the time to investigate their back catalog. Overall, it feels like the bastard child of Theatre of Tragedy and My Dying Bride due to the combination of "beauty and the beast" style vocals and morbid violin. Lake of Sorrow is exactly the kind of gloomy Gothic doom I love. Even the slightly shoddy production makes me feel a bit nostalgic. Perpetual Desolation is the band's second and final album, and although Perpetual Desolation got poor reviews upon its release, I think the occasional experimental flourish keeps the album interesting and perhaps even more noteworthy than its more staid contemporaries.
The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, Season One (Parts One and Two)
I watched the first part of the first season of The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina when it first "aired," but I abandoned it because it didn't live up to the comics--which rule, by the way. I've gone back to the beginning and...it still doesn't live up to the comics. It's a strange mix of decent ideas paired with some of the worst plotting, to a maddening degree. That said, the episode with the tarot readings really worked because it felt like a throwback to the anthology horror films of yesteryear, but that episode also illustrates how the show generally struggles to earn its per-episode runtime and how the show is stronger when it doesn't focus on Sabrina. Miranda Otto and Michelle Gomez make the whole thing occasionally worthwhile.
When I put Stephen King's Joyland on the short-list for books under consideration for Bad Books for Bad People episodes, I was expecting the thrill of seeing how "the horror author" would handle a pure-strain hardboiled crime novel on the Hardcase imprint. I'll certainly be talking more about this one on the podcast, but what I got from the book was so very different from what I was expecting and also so much more. My recommendation: get a copy of Joyland now so you're all caught up by the time our episode on it drops!
I picked up Witch Doctor on a whim and it turned out to be a pretty fun comic. The main character feels like he lives at the overlap point between Herbert West and Carnacki the Ghost-Finder. The comic is a monster-hunting book at heart, but the premise--that monsters as the parasites Cthulhoids brought with them from another dimension--is a pretty cool idea. The second volume takes things in more of a long-form direction, and it makes the transition from "monster of the week" to extended narrative very well. I wish we had a third volume; the characters definitely have more juice left in them.
I've been looking forward to The Angel of Indian Lake for quite some time off the strength of the previous My Heart is a Chainsaw and Don't Fear the Reaper. As a conclusion to the Indian Lake trilogy, The Angel of Indian Lake is overall good-to-great, though I do think the middle nearly goes off the rails in a somewhat muddled lake of plot contrivances and a tide of dimly remembered characters who have been accumulating over the course of the series. I also think a tighter hand at the editing wheel could have cleared up some of the repetitions--there's so much "calving," so many chins that are constantly "pruning"! But the final reel really lands, even if Stephen Graham Jones passed on the opportunity to go really dark with it. I will say, though, I was terrified for Jade Daniels all the way through; god damn, he made me care about that character so much.
There's nothing in Abigail that you won't be expecting if you have seen the trailer, but it was undeniably a fun movie. Horror doesn't always have to be deadly serious, obscure, or elevated; if you don't have love in your heart for a popcorn horror flick about a vampire ballerina running roughshod on a team of criminals, I don't want to know you. It's got some cool gross moments, some genuinely funny bits, and a cast who seems to be having a blast with the material. All that a Danzig song in the mix? Yeah, I can get down with that.
Do you like melancholy? Crushing guitars? Somber violin? If you said yes to the above, you're in luck because My Dying Bride has a new album just for you. At this point in their career, the question for any new My Dying Bride album isn't "is it good?" it's "how good is it?" Aside from one misstep in their long and storied catalog, every My Dying Bride album ranges from "pretty good" to "classic of the genre." On A Mortal Binding, the band is sounded energized and vital; it may not equal the highest points in their discography, but from any other band it would count as an unqualified success.
High on Fire, Cometh the Storm
It will be a sad day when High on Fire's new album isn't a roaring slab of bad attitude doing wheelies on a road ragin' motorcycle, but with Cometh the Storm today is not that day. Lots of churning grind, pounding drums, and throat-shedding war cries here. And it never really lets up; no quarter is granted on Cometh the Storm, so lay down your white flag--surrender is not allowed with music this gnarly.
I'm not sure what kind of horror movie I had assumed that Messiah of Evil was, but as it unfolded I realized it falls squarely into the "all vibes no plot" style of horror flick, so I had to adjust my expectations while watching. Messiah of Evil feels a bit like Carnival of Souls' seedier 70s cousin. The movie concerns a woman looking for her artist father, who went missing in a strange seaside California town. She encounters a dandy and his two swingin' lovers, and the mystery only deepens from there. There's a great sequence inside a grocery store, which I had somehow seen before--maybe in a documentary on horror movies?
Unicorn Meat is an adventure supplement intended for use with OSR-style rules. The tone of Unicorn Meat is unique; eschewing the tired standard dungeon format, it centers instead on the last unicorn farm and the horrors that have unfolded there. Overall, there's a Southern Gothic feel to the book that charms me. There's quite a bit of content packed into Unicorn Meat, but I find myself a little bewildered by the order that information is delivered; for example, we get advice on how to alter the adventure to meet our players' various sensitivities before we actually get a glimpse of what the adventure is actually about. A roadmap at the very beginning of the book, detailing the shape of the adventure and the basic gist of what you might use it for, would go a long way toward making Unicorn Meat easier to parse.
Reviewers tend to say that the Vision Bleak specialize in Gothic metal in the style of Type O Negative, but I don't really hear the sonic resemblance. The guitars are more traditionally heavy, there are way more aesthetic flourishes, and the vocals just aren't the same. The Vision Bleak are very much their own animal, and now they're back with a concept album based on the legendary magazine of horror, sci-fi, and fantasy. A concept album is already a dicey proposition, but The Vision Bleak tempts fate further by making Weird Tales a single, forty-plus minute track. And...it works. Somehow they pulled it off. Uncanny. Then I went back and listened to The Unknown, another rock-solid album in their discography.
Vamps is a pretty fun comic that doesn't try to pretend that it's about anything other than skanky vampire biker chicks--which is fine because that premise rules. This collection brings together three different series: the first centers on one of the Vamps' quest to find the child taken away from her by the courts before she became undead; the second lands them in Hollywood to make a movie, with predictably funny and gruesome results; and the third details what happens when one of the girls gets marked for death by the vampire council. Trashy, but it's a nice ride. I liked the addition of Elaine Lee's afterword where she talks about how people couldn't decide if she was trying to make a feminist point or if she was just really horny when making Vamps. Insert "why not both?" gif here.
Jennifer Reeder's Perpetrator is a pretty weird movie: it feels like it takes place in one of those slightly off mirrors of our own world, something like Twin Peaks. The movie's protagonist is a young girl who is not quite human, but her nature--and, by extension, that of her weird family--is never fully explained. But whatever she is puts her in the perfect position to discover why other young women in her town keep going missing under mysterious circumstances. This is a movie that attempts a lot--maybe too much--as it works in themes of the way women are encouraged to remain young and plaint, the sexualization of youth, warped family dynamics, etc., but I did ultimately enjoy the uniqueness of tone in Perpetrator.
Monica Ojeda's Nefando is an abject book, and it is frequently disturbing both in what it describes and the implications of its content. It's well executed, if occasionally a little lit-wanky for me, but I'd have trouble recommending it widely because of the content. The story, such that it is, is told through a collection of interviews with its polyvocal cast of characters, excerpts from their creative work, drawings, and challenging perspective pieces. The six central characters were all roommates, sharing a space while three of their number--siblings who were sexually abused by their father and forced to participate in child pornography--directed the design of a video game called Nefando. I appreciated the way the presence of the titular video game--an indie project that appeared on the internet, messed with people's heads, and then disappeared--lurked in the background like a digital specter, made all the more effective because there is another website, barely discussed, that also seemed be an object of unquiet fixation that was hiding behind the game itself. It's an odd novel, and if I were trying to sell it to you (I am not), I would say it is like Story of the Eye meets the urban legend about Polybius.
I picked up Creepy Cryptids on a whim, but I'm glad I did as this is a neat little product. What you get is a pack of cards. The front of each card has a nifty illustration of a different cryptid drawn from real-world myths and legends. The back of each card features stats in OSE format--that's B/X D&D to the real ones out there. Although I haven't really run B/X D&D in years at this point, I could see doing a one-shot or short campaign that focused just on cryptids rather than the usual vanilla fantasy orcs, goblins, and trolls.
I had a quiet morning to myself in late April, so I brewed a cup of tea and read Jeremy C. Shipp's The Atrocities cover by cover while I waited to see if the weather would turn. The Atrocities has a pretty interesting premise: a woman arrives at the isolated house where she is to be employed as a private tutor, only to find out that her sole student...is a ghost. Or perhaps the mother of the house has simply gone mad with grief over the death of her daughter, and she is simply being employed to go along with the charade that the child persists beyond the veil.
Agathodaimon, Blacken the Angel, Chapter III, Higher Art of Rebellion, Phoenix, The Seven
As with The Sins of Thy Beloved, I did a deep dive on Agathodaimon's discography in April. The band's transition between symphonic black metal and extreme Gothic metal has been a fruitful exercise: there's something on every album of theirs that I listened to that had something thrilling or surprising. Observed over the course of several albums, the band's evolution feels entirely natural. Can't wait to go back and fill in the few gaps I didn't get to this month.
Dhampire: Stillborn is another of the Vertigo titles that got a lot of ad space in the goth mags of the mid 90s, yet somehow I never picked up a copy until recently. Dhampire has definitely got that tragic Gen X thing going on; the main character is a messed up would be suicide coming from a bad background, though truth be told he doesn't initially understand how bad his background truly is. Hint: he's the son of a woman who had vampire blood running through her body when he was born. His search for identity take some dark paths, and ultimately he chooses the darkest road for himself. Not exactly heart-warming, but a fun comic with that 90s flavor I crave.
Speaking of that 90s flavor, we polished off the second season of Yellowjackets and now must wait patiently for the third season to arrive. I continue to be Team Misty in the second season of Yellowjackets, but I have to admit that Elijah Wood's character has rapidly grown in my estimation. Overall, the mix of crime elements in the present and folk horror-themed survival horror in the flashback segments continues to really work for me. So many astounding performances from both the adult veterans and "the kids." Yellowjackets might just be the best thing on "tv" at the moment.
