Underground in Berlin is an unusual memoir of a Jewish woman in WWII Germany. Marie Jalowicz Simon avoided the concentration camps by going into hiding in Berlin. With the help of both Jews and Germans, Communists and even Nazis she managed to find shelter and meager food from 1941, when she became “illegal”, until the end of the war. Given that many memoirs by Jews from this period deal with the Resistance and/or survival of the camps, Jalowicz Simon’s memoir is quite remarkable — a […]
Silly Merricat.
Shirley Jackson’s last full length novel is a startling and unsettling peek behind the curtains of the house at the end of the street that is always dark. The one the neighbor children taunt each other to approach after sunset. It begins with the following: “My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all, I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers […]
“I don’t want more sense!” I said loudly, beating against the silence of the room. “Not if sense means I’ll stop loving anyone. What is there besides people that’s worth holding on to?”
I really loved this book. It’s got magic and scary trees and romance and friendship and mad cow disease, pretty much all the things. It’s really very, very good. You can read my full review here.
Oh crap! Live ones!!
Ah, Mike Mignola, how I love that dude’s work. It goes back a zillion and a half years to when a friend of mine, who is a cracking good comic book artist himself, introduced me to Hellboy. The art was a revelation and the characters and stories were so wonderfully weird and full of humor that I was instantly hooked. When Guillermo del Toro came out with the first Hellboy movie and Ron Perlman so embodied Big Red, we were over the moon because it […]