Add this book to the list of things I would’ve never picked up in a bajillion years if I hadn’t found it on CBR. Add this to one of my favorite books ever. I thought I hated graphic novels. I thought I hated horror. I thought I hated creepy gothic stuff. Apparently not. Who even am I? I don’t know. This book is just gorgeous. The illustrations are stunning and mysterious and creepy and terrifying. It’s like five little illustrated ghost stories. In “Our Neighbor’s […]
About that time I included the words “Sperm Gargling” in a review
Here’s a bit of a literary quandary for you: can a book still be good if it deliberately skirts controversy, or does the artificially generated controversy only distract from the other qualities a book may have? I’ve been asking myself this ever since I read Wetlands, and I still don’t know. Wetlands, the debut novel of Anglo-German TV personality Charlotte Roche, tells the story of eighteen year old school girl Helen Memel. Helen is obsessed with her bodily fluids; her own and others’. She likes […]
Well, the cover’s cool, but as they say…
Why do people like this book? Am I missing something? I get it. Bad writing and an improbable plot that could also operate as a pasta strainer have united like a defective pair of power twins before to create cult successes (I’m looking at you Sharknado). And really, there is a whole genre of bad horror films…but does it work with books, too? I’m not a horror book reader, so I’m sincerely asking. Why do people think this book is so scary? Creepy kids? Scary. […]
“…do something to a cadaver, it will do something back to you.”
I have yet to be disappointed by a recommendation from the NPR best books concierge, and Three Moments of an Explosion may be my favorite so far. A collection of sometimes sci-fi, sometimes fantasy, sometimes horror short stories, Three Moments starts with a base of a very realistic world, and adds in each of its stories an element of something beyond, something more magical or sinister. The stories in the collection typically start with or are based in a real object, or a regular person, that has become corrupted […]