I hope we all know this story by now, seeing as this was made into the Academy Award winning film of the same name, the film that some Academy voters never even bothered to watch. I took great issue with that revelation at the time, and it still rankles. Not because of the perverted sanctity of the Academy Award, but because the logic behind not watching the movie in the first place (the subject matter is too difficult to watch) is made worse by the […]
I shouldn’t know more than our culture’s leading experts…
While reading this, I found myself questioning beliefs I have held for many years. Not because this book presents novel ideas or is deeply informative about a subject I mistakenly thought I was familiar with (though it did represent what are to me novel ideas, and I am not overly familiar with this subject), but because its author’s views occupy the same space as mine, and he has fallen not only into controversy, but disfavor. Which, of course, makes me question how I see the […]
Titles, shmitels. He’s rich.
Stephen King is the undisputed master of horror. He’s written about everything from rabid dogs to aliens, to plagues that wipe out most of humanity; he’s covered ghosts, vampires, serial killers, and the visceral terror of evil manifested as a clown. Hell, he’s even covered machines coming to life with murderous intent. He’s done it all. But it took until 2006 for him to cover zombies? Weird. Especially considering that the real villain here doesn’t seem to be the zombified denizens of New England, but […]
Iyamisu. That’s all you need to know.
According to Wikipedia, one critic called this novel the “Gone Girl of Japan”, which is interesting because it was originally punished in 2008, four years before Gillian Flynn’ s most popular novel. At any rate, they both fall into the iyamisu category of fiction, which is Japanese for “eww mystery”, and is reserved for the deliberately shocking form of storytelling familiar to anyone who has read Gone Girl (which is most of us). If you take nothing else from this review – please incorporate that […]