Hollywood can’t get Frankenstein right. We all grew up thinking that the Frankenstein monster was this green, groaning thing was stupid and aimlessly looking for people to murder. The reason why Hollywood can’t get it right is because while people do die in the book, it’s not a traditional horror novel. Instead, it’s a quiet study of what makes us human and what happens when our basic needs aren’t met. It’s a gentle argument that we are shaped into the people we are rather than born […]
You’ll Never Be Able to Look Away Again
The Ballad of Black Tom is a retelling of Lovecraft’s short story, The Horror at Red Hook and like the best retellings it’s not necessary to have read original to appreciate it. Amusingly, though The Horror at Red Hook is one of Lovecraft’s stories that is divested from his Cthulhu mythos The Ballad of Black Tom works that story back into Cthulhu and used the Cthulhu mythos, with its racist beginnings, to explore racism in the US. It’s brilliant. Thomas Tester is a conman, a […]
Cannonballing with a book that was formative and remains shockingly relevant
It feels deeply appropriate to Cannonball with a book that I read for the first time four years ago, a book that set off my dissertation in motion and is now in process of becoming my (hopefully) next published article. Cheers! I first read this book in Spring of 2013 and was horrified/piqued by the content. I was so piqued that I wrote my first dissertation chapter on it. I’ve spent the last year and a half trying to get an article published, and the […]
Skip the book, watch season one, then skip the rest of True Blood
Like most of us, I think, I watched the show that grew out of these novels. And while I very much enjoyed the first season of True Blood, the bad acting (especially from Anna Paquin) and tiresome storyline of subsequent seasons eventually lost me. I honestly don’t even know if the show is still on, and can’t really be bothered to check. So why did I read the book upon which the show was based? To be honest…..I don’t really know the answer to that. […]