June reads

 How am I doing, getting the prior month's reading list shared on a timely basis?  Well, I did manage to get June 2026's books up before the end of July.  So bonus points for me.

• The Autumn Springs Retirement Home Massacre by Philip Fracassi.  A slasher/thriller set in a retirement home, where some of the residents find themselves unconvinced of the naturalness of a spate of their friends' deaths.  Led by 70+ year old heroine Rose DuBois, they decide to investigate when the authorities don't seem to be getting anywhere.  Both humorous and mean-spirited, this was a decent read.
• Iron Flame by Rebecca Yarros.  Number two in the dragon fantasy series.  Still fun, still spicy.
• Vivatera by Candace J. Thomas.  When I have to fly, I usually pick up a couple of books at a thrift store so I can abandon them at the airport when I'm done.  I got this one.  It was awful.  Self-published, maybe, but also sort of seems like AI wrote it?  Terrible but I finished it just to spite myself.
• Inside of a Dog by Alexandra Horowitz.  Accessible science book about the cognitive processes of dogs, giving us some insight into how our best friends think, feel about and experience the world.  I am trying to give my own dog more space to sniff on our walks after it, and give him way more hugs and kisses (because I know that he likes it).
• The Correspondent by Virginia Evans.  An epistolary novel following the correspondence of Sybil Van Antwerp, retired lawyer, divorced mother of two adult children and prolific letter writer, even in the days of email.  There is small-scale drama - family dynamics, adult romantic relationships, the past coming back to haunt - and while it took a while to get into for me, I did enjoy it quite a lot by the end.
• The Wild Girls by Phoebe Morgan.  Four schoolgirl chums reunite at a luxury safari resort, ostensibly for one's birthday.  But they end up stranded, isolated and getting picked off one by one.  Intriguing concept, meh book.
• Red Queen by Victoria Aveyard.  Ooh! Young adult dystopian fantasy novel that I stumbled on completely by accident (see above re thrift store book)?  Yes please!  Red bloods are the regular people, serfs and servants, poor and beaten down.  Silver bloods are the rich, powerful, imbued with godlike powers.  So what happens when Mare Barrow, Red-blooded thief, is found to have powers like a Silver?  Add in a couple of handsome young princes, court intrigue and treachery and rebellion and you've got a party.  Lots of fun.  Looking forward to the next one.

May reads

 I read a bunch in May because Mr. Mouse and I had a week's vacation where we did stuff (hiking, trail running, road bike riding) in the mornings, then hunkered down to read through the early afternoons until it was time for beers.  Solid strategy.

• Audition for the Fox by Martin Cahill.  A debut fantasy novel with heavy folkloric overtones.  An acolyte, desperate to obtain the patronage of a god, gets sent back in time by the trickster Fox to try to save her own ancestors and, by doing so, save herself.
• I See You've Called in Dead by John Kenney.  Bud is an obituary writer and, one day, feeling sorry for himself, gets hammered and writes his own obituary.  But then he inadvertently submits it for publication.  The newspaper wants to fire him but the HR department has now classified him as dead, and you can't fire a dead person - until the glitch in the system is worked out.  Bud uses this time to figure out WTF he wants and he does this by going to the wakes and funerals of strangers.  I liked this one.
• Clown Town by Mick Herron.  The most recent installment in the Slough House / Slow Horses British spy series.  Decent, although it's been so long since I read the last one that I didn't really remember what was going on in the longer story arc.
• Mindhunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit by John Douglas and Mark Olshaker.  Mr. Mouse and I recently watched the Mindhunter series on Netflix and while we liked the first season, were less enamored of the second.  I was interested enough to pick up the (non-fiction) book the television series was based on.  As it turns out, I ended up liking the book better than the show.
• Hungerstone by Kat Dunn.  Ooh I liked this one!  It's a vampire novel, a feminist retelling of Carmilla (previously read here), which is itself the novel that inspired Dracula.  
• On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes by Alexandra Horowitz.  Wherein the author takes eleven walks, most in New York City, with eleven different experts, to see what she is missing with her inattention.  The experts include: her toddler, her dog, an artist, a geologist, a blind woman and a font designer.  I enjoyed some chapters more than others but mostly came away with wanting to read Horowitz's book, Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell and Know
• I, Medusa by Ayana Gray.  I liked this one too - another one in my unofficial series of modern retellings of Greek mythology.  This is a version of Medusa's origin story, and how a smart, young woman gets forced into being one of the most iconic monsters in mythology.
• The Maid by Nita Prose.  A murder mystery set in a hotel, with a slightly neuro-divergent chambermaid heroine.
• Death of the Author by Nnedi Okonafor.  A science fiction novel within a novel, with an irascible, Black handicapped protagonist, Zelu.  When she gets fired from her university job, in the wake of getting her novel rejected, she starts writing something completely different: a science fiction novel about robots in the aftermath of a global apocalypse that killed off all the humans. 
• Beasts of Carnaval by Rosalia Rodrigo.  A fantastical, fictionalized exploration of the effects of colonization on native peoples.  Sofia, a mestiza freedwoman, travels to Isla Bestia - where rich colonizers flock for the food, wine and various entertainments - in search of her twin brother, who disappeared there five years earlier.
• Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros.  Ooh.  Love this one.  Dragon fantasy that is kind of like Dragonriders of Pern crossed with Hunger Games but also pretty spicy.  Readers are apparently kind of pouty that the author hasn't finished #4 in the series yet.
• My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell.  This one is a re-read and, honestly, I have no idea how many times I've read it.  My copy was stolen from my fourth grade homeroom and completely fanned the flames of my youthful obsession with Greece.  Ostensibly written to be about naturalist Durrell's encounters with the fauna of Corfu when his family lived there from 1935-1939, it is as much about the crazy characters who are his family and friends as it is about critters.  I love this book.  One of my all-time favorites. 

April reads

Late to post and not that many books read in April.  It happens.

• The Comfort of Ghosts by Jacqueline Winspear.  Finally finished the Maisie Dobbs series and I must say that, for me, it went out on sour note - I thought the final book in the series was the weakest by far.  I haven't enjoyed the sections of the most recent volumes that have Maisie focused more on her family (I don't care a fig about her daughter Anna).  Family took up a big chunk of this last book, plus an inordinate amount of time was spent with the characters reminiscing about events of the prior seventeen books.  I already read them - I don't need you to rehash them.  I guess it was time for the series to end.  I did, however, love many of the previous installments and do recommend the series.
• Blood of the Old Kings by Sung-Il Kim.  Wherein three strangers unite to save their home.  Epic fantasy with journeys, dragons, the corpses of dead sorcerors and two of the three protagonists are women.
• Atlas of Unknowable Things by McCormick Templeman.  My notes say that I really liked this one but, honestly, I can't remember it at all.  Set in a gothic college campus high in the Rocky Mountains, a historian arrives to study its manuscripts whilst secretly searching for an artifact.
• Nowhere Burning by Catriona Ward - I liked this one too, and funnily enough, it is also set high in the Rocky Mountains.  This time, abused siblings Riley and Oliver run away from home, searching for Nowhere, a hidden sanctuary for children like them, built on the ruins of a former movie star's ranch.  Or is it a cult?  Or worse?  This one is pretty dark and pretty good.
• Rosemary & Rue by Seanan McGuire.  I was looking for a different Seanan McGuire book and picked this one up instead, the first of the October Daye urban fantasy series.  October "Toby" Daye is half human, half faerie, and all caught up in the fae world, despite her best efforts.  A knight for Faerie, she's a bit of a P.I. and has to solve the murder of a fae countess before a curse ends her own life.  Didn't love it but enjoyed it enough to see what the next book has to offer.

March reads

I ended up going back to my folks' house for a few days mid-March for some family time.  Because it was mid-March in Maine, the weather was such (snowing, raining, cold and gloomy) that we spent a lot of time indoors, watching the college basketbasket tournament and reading.  

• The Consequences of Fear by Jacqueline Winspear.  #16 in the Maisie Dobbs series - which, if I'm honest, diminishes in quality as the series goes on, as though the author is maybe just a little tired of the whole thing - finds our intrepid sleuth in September 1941.  Europe is reeling under Nazi occupation and Maisie finds herself investigating a murder that has implications for Britain's war effort.
• Magic for Liars by Sarah Gailey.  When a faculty member dies under suspicious circumstances at an elite magical boarding school, non-magical Ivy Gamble, private investigator, is hired to figure out what happened.  Things are complicated by the fact that Ivy's magical and estranged sister is an educator at the school.
• A Sunlit Weapon by Jacqueline Winspear.  Maisie Dobbs #17 (which I liked better than 16) is in October 1942, following women pilots and American servicemen and a possible threat to Eleanor Roosevelt, who is visiting England. 
• Women of the Post by Joshunda Sanders.  Based on true events, this is the story of the all-Black battalion of American women soldiers, sent to England to sort out the millions of pieces of mail languishing in warehouses and get them to the servicemen who badly need the morale boost.  I had no idea about this piece of WWII history - there's a movie? - so I enjoyed learning about it.  I didn't think this book was terribly well written, however.
• Listen to Me by Tess Gerritsen.  A murder mystery from the Rizzoli and Isles series (#13, but I don't think it's crucial to read them in order - these are popcorn books), wherein Jane Rizzoli (detective) and Maura Isles (medical examiner) investigate the murder of a well-liked nurse, all while Jane's nosy mom Angela starts getting suspicious of new neighbors down the street.
• Code Name Helene by Ariel Lawhon.  I LOVED this one.  Another WWII novel (there's been a lot lately, I know), this is a historical novel based on the TRUE story of Nancy Wake, an Australian socialite who became a spy and a French resistance leader against Nazi Germany.  She began as a journalist, segued to helping Allied servicemen escape from occupied France over the mountains to Spain.  Then, after the Nazis learned about her, she escaped to England herself - but then went back to France to help arm and organize the Maquis rebels as they fought against their German occupiers.  Amazing woman.
• The Black Ascot by Charles Todd.  This is the 21st murder mystery in the Ian Rutledge series by mother-son duo/pseudonym Charles Todd.  Rutledge is battling his own shell shock from WWI while trying to solve a decade-old murder.
• Class Clown: The Memoirs of a Profession Wiseass by Dave Barry.  This is a memoir, not a straight humor book or funny novel like so many of Barry's books.  As such, there are some poignant moments, especially when dealing with his parents.  But it's still pretty friggin' funny!
• A Cruel Deception by Charles Todd.  This one is from their Bess Crawford series (#11), with heroine/nurse Bess Crawford assigned by a superior to find wayward soldier who has abandoned his duties and salving his mental WWI war wounds with opiates.  I liked this one okay but Bess Crawford is no Maisie Dobbs.
• Chosen Ones by Veronica Roth.  Ooh I liked this one too!  This is an adult fantasy novel by Divergent author Roth, following a group of late 20/early 30-somethings who are plagued by serious PTSD following their defeat of a world-destroying dark entity.  Trouble is, it doesn't look like he has stayed defeated.
• Clytemnestra by Constanza Casati.  As previously noted, there seems to be a trend recently with authors novelizing Greek mythology.  There are mixed results but I quite liked Clytemnestra, bringing to the forefront Helen of Troy's sister/wife of Agamemnon/queen of Mycenae who ruled in her husband's absence and paid him back for the murder/sacrifice of their daughter.

Next month: I finally finish the Maisie Dobbs series!

February reads

Only six books in February.  This is because (I think) we had guests over the Presidents' Day holiday weekend and whereas normally I would have hunkered down and plowed through a bunch of books, I had to be sociable instead.

• The Incandescent by Emily Tesh.  A grown-up, queer-friendly magic school ("dark academia") novel wherein the heroine, Dr. Walden, must protect the 600 school kids from demonic incursions.  Great world-building, interesting characters.
• The American Agent by Jacqueline Winspear.  #15 in the Maisie Dobbs series.  Maisie is back on the case when an American correspondent is found murdered in her London flat.  As these later books go on, I find myself less engaged when we have to explore Maisie's home life with newly-adopted daughter.  This installment was (thankfully) not so heavy on the child bit.
• Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir.  Another science-adventure-in-space from the author of The Martian.  I didn't like this one quite so well, which is weird for someone who DOES like science fiction and fantasy and aliens and all that.  Movie coming out soon starring Ryan Gosling, apparently.
• Dark Sisters by Kristi DeMeester.  Wow - I don't remember this one at all.  Hold on ... [looks it up] oh yeah.  Three centuries of witches and persecution and a curse.  Didn't love it - seemed scattered.
• The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah.  I've read Kristin Hannah books before about women in war - this one is about two French sisters in WWII, one actively in the Resistance against the occupying Nazis, one resisting the best she can.  
• Hemlock and Silver by T Kingfisher.  This one I liked: Anja - a plus-sized, competent spinster (35 years old lol) - wants nothing more than to putter around her laboratory, manufacturing antidotes to common poisons.  She reluctantly gets drawn into royal intrigue when the king hires her to find out what's wrong with his ailing daughter.  Again, good world-building, interesting characters, humor but also tension and violence.  I am a T Kingfisher fan.

January reads

 Ooo I'm on top of it this month!

• The End of the World as We Know It (anthology).  This is a collection of short stories by horror writers, all based in the universe of Stephen King's The Stand.  The Stand is one of my favorite SK novels and it was interesting to see other fans' takes on it.
• Journey to Munich by Jacqueline Winspear.  In this Maisie Dobbs mystery, set in 1938, Maisie is enlisted by the British Secret Service to infiltrate Nazi Germany to affect a Dachau prisoner's release.  The man is a British engineer, very valuable in the war effort.  Maisie poses as his daughter and, while she waits for the Germans follow through on their promise to release him, tracks down a missing woman from her past and also finds herself again in the wake of her husband's death.
• In This Grave Hour by Jacqueline Winspear.  Finally returning to England in 1939, as Britain enters WWII, Maisie Dobbs throws herself back into work, investigating the murders of Belgian refugees from the Great War.  
• To Die But Once by Jacqueline Winspear.  This is book #14 in the series - which ends at eighteen and then what will I do? - and Maisie and her team are back at it, investigating the murder of a young apprentice who was involved with a wartime government contract.  Organized crime looms large but Maisie is more than up for it.
• Bittershore by V.V. James.  Ah ... apparently this is a sequel to Sanctuary, which I haven't read.  Didn't really matter, in this fantasy/thriller focused on mother and daughter witches, Sarah and Harper Fenn, regrouping after being run out of town after a literal witch hunt.  Meh.  I guess there's an AMC show based on these books?
• The Island of Last Things by Emma Sloley.  Set on (in?) Alcatraz in the middle of a planet-altering apocalypse, this novel follows two zookeepers in the last zoo on Earth.  Dark but surprisingly hopeful.
• In Cold Blood by Truman Capote.  One of my BFFs from college said that he did a book report in ninth grade on this one, but this is the first time I've read it.  Being true crime (indeed, basically inventing the genre), it's not my usual read but boy, was it fascinating.  Meticulously researched via indefatigable interviews, this book switches POVs between the decent, hardworking Clutter family and the two men who brutally murdered them.

And so now I'm going to have to try another classic true crime: I've got Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil on my list now.

December reads

I must have been busy doing holiday stuff in December because I only read three books.  That's the fewest in a month all year; the next fewest was five in September.

• The Poppy War by RF Kuang.  The first in a trilogy of "grimdark" military fantasy, this novel follows Rin, a gifted orphan who enters an elite military academy.  She discovers that she has supernatural powers and this catapults her into the war that grips her country.  Didn't love it.
• A Dangerous Place by Jacqueline Winspear.  Another Maisie Dobbs, this one jumps forwards a few years to find a struggling Maisie trying to lose herself, first in India and then, on her way home to England, in Gibraltar.  Thinking to just solve the murder of a local photographer, she finds herself drawn back towards the machinations of the British secret service as WWII looms ever nearer.
• How to Seal Your Own Fate by Kristin Perrin.  The second novel in the Castle Knoll murder mystery series, Annie spends the inheritance she received in the first book by investigating a pair of murders.  These are enjoyable but lightweight mysteries, not quite to the level of Maisie Dobbs or Inspector Gamache.

So I ended up reading 106 books this past year.  I didn't have a goal, just wanted to track how many books I would read in 2025.  I have a goal for 2026 though: more.

November reads

Ten read in November (thank you, long weekends).  The first one barely counts as I read the bulk of it in October, but I didn't finish it until November.

• I'll Be Gone in the Dark by Michelle McNamara.  I'm not really a true crime girlie, but after the author's untimely death, I'd read enough about the book to be interested.  And I knew nothing about the Golden State Killer at all.
• The Devils by Joe Abercrombie.  I adore Abercrombie's First Law trilogy and successive in-universe book.  His voice is very clear in The Devils but it's a different world with its own wonderful, scary, heart-breaking and very, very, very flawed characters.  Loved it.
• How to Solve Your Own Murder by Kristen Perrin.  As a girl, Frances learns via a palm-reading session that she will be murdered.  She spends her whole life preparing and attempting to prevent such a thing.  After her demise, her great-niece Annie must solve her aunt's murder in order to inherit her estate.  Fun, low stakes.
• The Care and Management of Lies by Jacqueline Winspear.  NOT a Maisie Dobbs novel (we'll get back to those shortly) but set in England during WWI as a young farmer's wife must keep things running on the home front when her husband and her best friend enlist.  I liked it quite a lot.
• Elegy for Eddie by Jacqueline Winspear.  Yes, the next Maisie Dobbs novel as our intrepid psychologist and sleuth investigates the murder of horse-whisperer Eddie.  WWII is drawing ever nearer and Maisie is uneasy about her fella's involvement with Winston Churchill and his ilk.  Really good installment.
• Leaving Everything Most Loved by Jacqueline Winspear.  In this one, Maisie investigates the murders of two young Indian women, working in London as household help.  She also starts listening to her heart.
• Shift by Ethan Kross.  Non-fiction, about trying to get a grip on, and adjustment to, one's emotions.  Interesting but didn't offer as many actionable tips/tricks as I had hoped.
• Never Leave the Dogs Behind by Brianna Madia.  This is Madia's second memoir, covering her struggles in Moab, post-divorce.  She's a bad ass, no doubt, but reading this was especially poignant given that one of her beloved dogs, Dagwood, just died last week.
• What Stalks the Deep by T. Kingfisher.  I guess this is the third installment in the Sworn Soldier series: I've read the first, What Moves the Dead, but not the second.  I do like these books, set in olden times, with some alt-reality and dead things that flail around in the dark.
• Chasing the Boogeyman by Richard Chizmar.  This one is written like a true crime book, with the author as the main character, but it is, in fact, a novel.  I liked this a lot, liked the hybrid feel of it.  

That was a good bunch - I rather liked most of them.  What have you all been reading?

October reads

 Lots more books read in October, due to a week of vacation in a place with no TV or internet, and actually getting them posted timely here, due to getting my shit together somewhat.

• Night Shift by Stephen King.  A re-read of his first collection of short stories because I didn't want to start in on my horde of library books until vacation started.  You know how I feet about his short stories.  You should probably read them, this one or Skeleton Crew to start.
• Nestlings by Nat Cassidy.  Reviews seem to think it's akin to a lovechild between Rosemary's Baby and Salem's Lot, which I guess I can see.  I found it weird and not entirely cohesive, plus I didn't like either of the main characters.
• Fever House by Keith Russon.  A couple of enforcers sent around to collect for their boss end up with a severed hand that incites madness, bloodthirsty killing and uncontrollable rage.  The hand makes its way across the city, wreaking havoc.  This is supposed to be a sprawling horror/crime novel and sprawling is right - the interconnections didn't really interconnect for me and the ending is a clear set up for the sequel.  Didn't care for this one all that much.
• Motherthing by Ainslie Hogarth.  At this point, I'm on a roll with books I don't love.  When Abby's mother-in-law dies, she goes all in to save her husband, fight the mother-in-law's ghost and create the perfect family for herself.  The gross parts are fun and it's definitely got some funny parts - but again, I just didn't like the protagonist.
• Piranesi by Susanna Clarke.  In which we switch gears from horror to fantasy.  Piranesi lives in a labyrinth world, ruled by tides and populated only by him, birds, statues and dead bodies.  This is a weird one, with ruminations on knowledge and belief, but I did like it.
• You're Not Supposed to Die Tonight by Kalynn Bayron (which sounds like a pseudonym to me, which is fine).  A young adult slasher in book form: a bunch of kids who work at a live action haunted house, set up like a summer camp in a slasher film, actually find themselves face to face with a masked killer on the last night of the concession.  It was cute, I guess, and pretty murdery.  But also pretty light-weight.
• The Mapping of Love and Death by Jacqueline Winspear.  Another Maisie Dobbs novel!  Maisie is hired by American parents to track down the English nurse their son fell in love with during WWI, before he was killed.  But it looks like he was killed by his own men ... Good one.
• Hawk Mountain by Connor Habib.  Todd, single father and English teacher, gets gaslit by a former high school bully, Jack, after a chance (?) meeting at the beach.  Jack insinuates himself into Todd's life and things escalate A LOT from there.  This is like two totally different books and ends up going completely off the rails.  I sort of liked it until I definitely didn't.
• A Lesson in Secrets by Jacqueline Winspear.  Back to Maisie Dobbs, who does an undercover job  for the British Secret Service as a professor in Cambridge, as Europe rolls inexorably towards WWII.  I am so glad I found out about this series - I do love British murder mysteries.
• A History of Fear by Luke Dumas.  University of Edinburgh graduate student Grayson Hale achieves notoriety when he murders a fellow student and then claims the Devil made him do it.  The novel is from the POV of Daniela, a reporter, as she goes through the evidence after Hale is found dead in his cell, reading Hale's memoir and adding her own comments and portions of third party interviews.  Twisty, slow burn, unreliable narrators.  Pretty good.
• The Songs of Trees by Davie George Haskell.  What ho - non-fiction!  Haskell visits a number of trees around the world over a period of years, commenting on their connections to the life around them: fungi, bacterial colonies, other plants, communities of animals, indigenous people, the owners of the corner bodegas.  Everything is connected, in this increasingly fragmented world.

September reads

So overdue!  We were on vacation for the first week of October, when I normally would have posted my September reads, and then when we got back, I had to dive right into the Sixteenth Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series.  Who has time to read books?  I only got to a few in September, actually:

• An Incomplete Revenge by Jacqueline Winspear.  Another Maisie Dobbs mystery wherein the intrepid sleuth investigates goings-on in rural England during the hop-picking season.  I learned quite a lot about hops, but this wasn't one of my favorites.
• Among the Mad by Jacqueline Winspear.  Book #6 in the Maisie Dobbs series.  I did like this one, a lot, as Maisie and Scotland Yard try to catch a madman blowing people up across London as 1931 comes to a close.
• Skeleton Crew by Stephen King.  It has been a while but I reread this short story collection in anticipation of the movie version of The Monkey coming out.  He's so good at short stories and this collection has quite a few good ones.
• Mrs. March by Virginia Feito.  The titular Mrs. March, an Upper East Side housewife, starts to become a bit unraveled when it appears that an unlikeable character in her author husband's new novel is based on her.  I didn't love it but I appreciated the end - didn't see it coming.
• The Empire of Gold by S.A. Chakraborty.  The final volume in the Daevabad trilogy.  Djinn and ifrits and demigods all along the Nile.

Stay tuned soon for my October reads!

Sixteenth Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series: #13 Cheerleader Camp

 And here we are, lucky thirteen (I sort of fizzled out at the end, sorry about that), rounding out yet another year (sixteen! wow!) of watching lots of scary movies in October.  To close out the month, we end with the wonder that is 1988's Cheerleader Camp.  Found, in its entirety, on YouTube.  Is it good?  Oh, hell no.  But is it glorious? A resounding YES.

Alison seems to have it all: head cheerleader, pretty, popular, with a studly boyfriend.  But at Camp Hurrah - the titular cheerleading camp, with teams from all over (all over where?  are they college teams? it's vague at best, like much of this movie) - Brent the boyfriend (played by former teen heartthrob Leif Garrett, already way past his prime in 1988) is cheating with other girls, and many of the girls - including some on her own squad - are out to defeat her for title of Queen of the Cheerleaders.  Or whatever.  Only Alison's squad's mascot, Cory, is friendly and supportive, even as Alison is wracked by anxiety, paranoia and scary nightmares.

Then the killings start.  First a non-teammate rival is found on her bed, wrists slashed. Everyone thinks she did it herself until the other bodies start piling up, including teammate Pam, the camp director, the weird handyman, etc. etc.  I would like to state for the record that after the first body is found, my notes read: I think Alison is killing her competition in a fugue state ... or maybe Single White Female Cory is killing them for her.

I can see where they tried for a plot with this flick but it really didn't quite get there.  The paperthin characterizations and really, really bad acting doesn't help.  But there's classic tempera paint blood, a few nekkid boobies and big 80s hair, so what's not to like?

Sixteenth Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series: #12 Christmas Bloody Christmans

 This movie (streaming on Netflix) is not what I thought it was.  I thought it was the David Harbour Christmas horror movie, which is actually Violent Night.  This one is The Terminator as played by a Santa robot.

The plot is straightforward.  The military, having successfully built combat robots to fight overseas wars, has sold their robotics technology to various corporations.  One such company has made the "RoboSanta+" for toy stores and malls, doing away with the need for Santas-for-hire.  In some small town, one of those RoboSantas (played by an unrecognizable Abraham Benrubi (from ER!)) wakes up in its Main Street toy store and starts a very violent, very bloody rampage.  And it is a foul-mouthed, hard-drinking indie record store owner who is left to fight him.

CBC is a low budget flick, looking like it was shot on location in town and in various homes.  The number of f-bombs dropped far surpasses Deadwood's own impressive total and I wonder how much dialogue was ad-libbed.  This movie looks like it was a lot of fun to shoot.  It is brutally violent, with a penchant for splitting rubber heads down the middle with a big axe; the practical effects are old school and pretty gnarly.  It was original and quite a change from a lot of the cookie-cutter horror films out there now.  That said, when I paused the movie to see how much time was left, I was surprised that only an hour had gone by (it's around 90 minutes total) - it seemed to take forever.  I liked it okay but don't know that I can really recommend it to anyone.

Funnily enough, for a movie about a murderous rampaging Santa robot, for me the most unbelievable part of the whole thing was that a town that size was able to support an indie record store.

Sixteenth Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series: #11 The Dead Don't Die

 I knew nothing about The Dead Don't Die going into it.  Well, I mean, zombies, but other than that.  And then, as the titular theme song (good song) rolled over the opening credits, my jaw dropped at the cast. Huge cast, so many names!  And then the director: Jim Jarmusch.  And then I understood the huge cast.  I've never actually seen a Jim Jarmusch movie (until now) and so I don't know if TDDD is exemplary of his style.  But I'm guessing it is, with the deadpan absurdity, the repetition, the fourth wall breaks.  Afterwards, I think that I had read something online about Jarmusch doing a zombie movie but I certainly hadn't made the connection.

Here's the cast:  Bill Murray (small town chief of police), Adam Driver (cop), Chloe Sevigny (cop), Tilda Swinton (Scottish undertaker/ninja/SPOILER); Steve Buscemi (racist farmer); Danny Glover (hardware store owner); Tom Waits (hobo/narrator); Selena Gomez (Cleveland* hipster); Austin Butler (Cleveland hipster*); Iggy Pop (zombie); Carol Kane (zombie); Rosie Perez (news anchor); RZA (delivery driver).

Here's the plot: due to fracking at both poles (the U.S. Dept. of Energy says it's TOTALLY FINE), the earth has shifted off its axis, fucking everything up and causing zombies to rise up and wreck havor.  On the plus side, they're the slow-moving types, easy to kill but overwhelming in numbers.  On the negative side, ZOMBIES.

Is it a good zombie movie**?  It's okay, a little slow but with decent zombie makeup, nice humor sprinkled with legitimate gore.   Is is a good Jim Jarmusch movie?  You tell me.

* No disrespect intended, as I was born in Cleveland but left shortly thereafter and never went back, but does Cleveland even have hipsters?

** Apparently a LOT of zombie movie fans hated this movie, but I do think JJ was attempting some sort of satire, which, as the OG George Romero would tell you, is always a good thing for zombie movies.

Sixteenth Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series: #10 The Lost Boys

 Here I was, thinking that this was going to be a throwaway post.  I re-watched The Lost Boys (in my head, it's just Lost Boys) last night because a coworker and I were talking about appropriate horror movies for his fourteen year old daughter.  He's been slowly introducing her to things like Poltergeist and Alien and she is NOT impressed when he squirms and jumps at these iconic movies - that TERRIFIED ALL OF US back in the day.  I suggested The Lost Boys and he was like, ooh good one, and I wondered if she'd balk at the 80s of it all, and he said that she loves Stranger Things, and I said well, I have it on DVD if you have something still to play DVDs on, and he's like, OF COURSE I DO.  But then that night, at home, I thought I should rewatch it to see if it really is appropriate for a fourteen year old because it's rated R and what the hell do I know about what a fourteen year old should watch.

And here's why I thought it would be a throwaway post because I LOVE The Lost Boys and I rewatch it a lot and I was sure that I had done a post here about it within the last couple of years.  But I can't find a post.  And I think maybe I've never included it in a Scarelicious post?

ANYWAY The Lost Boys is AWESOME and you should watch it, or watch it again.  It came out in 1987 and it is soooooooooo 80s - but like real 80s.  It was largely filmed in Santa Cruz (California), on its boardwalk, and you can tell - especially in the opening bits - that these are real folks, not actors: punks, New Wavers, dudes in Speedos, street kids.  The soundtrack is amazing and I'm pretty sure I bought it on cassette when the movie came out.

It's a vampire flick - nearly a horror-comedy with some serious 80s music video style (Joel Schumacher was the director, if that tells you anything).  And it has some surprisingly brutal violence in one or two scenes, something that I always forget in the face of all that hair and shoulder pads and Kiefer Sutherland's bleached-blond snarling and the beauty that is that era's Jason Patric.  The cast is amazing: Kiefer and Jason, plus the Coreys (Haim and Feldman), and Jamie Gertz, and Dianne Weist, and Alex Winter (of Bill and Ted fame), and Edward Herrmann (of Gilmore Girls fame).  Basically, a divorced mom and her two boys move in with her father, in a seaside town that is overrun with vampires.  That's all you need to know about the plot.  Seriously, I adore this movie.

Sixteenth Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series: #9 I Know What You Did Last Summer (2025)

 I have seen the OG, 1997 I Know What You Did Last Summer, starring Jennifer Love Hewitt (Julie James), Freddie Prinze Jr. (Ray), Sarah Michelle Gellar (Helen Shivers) and Ryan Phillippe (Whatsisname).  It came out a year after Scream, intent on capitalizing on that stunner's success; IKWYDLS was a decent slasher but not nearly as good as Scream.  And so when I learned that they'd done a new installment in the series (the 1997 one, 1998's I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, 2006's I'll Always Know What You Did Last Summer (which I definitely did not see)), I was like, oh, is that still a thing?  And yet, as far as decent series with diminishing returns goes, this most recent I Know holds up okay.

In 2024, Ava returns to her hometown of Southport, South Carolina, for her BFF Danica's engagement party.  Also there are members of her high school clique: Danica's fiance Teddy and Ava's ex Milo, plus Stevie, a townie who never got to leave Southport to go to college.  It's July 4th and the five decide to drive up to "Reaper's Corner," a cliffside road above the South Carolina coast (with those rocky cliffs, that's definitely not SC's coast).  Goofing around, a little high on booze and weed, they cause a truck to go over the side of the cliff.  Teddy convinces everyone not to tell what happened and they all go about their separate ways with varying degrees of guilt.

One year later, Ava is back in town for Danica's bridal shower: different fiance, as Teddy got really weird after the accident.  Then Danica gets an anonymous note - I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER - and the bodies start stacking up like cordwood.  In over her head, Ava learns that back in 1997, there was another serial killer killing people in Southport: she does some digging and tracks down SPOILER Julie James (JLH, reprising her role from the first two movies).  Also still in town is Ray (FPJr.) and SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER the vampire slayer herself, SMG, reprises her role of long-deceased Croaker Queen Helen Shivers.

The body count is decent (I counted seven); the Final Girl(s) acquit themselves well.  And the ending SPOILER SPOILER sets up yet another movie with Julie James at the center.  Good for you, JLH!  I Know What You Did Last Summer is a perfectly adequate slasher that I found entertaining, with a splash of late 90s nostalgia thrown in for good measure.  I didn't find it scary - I don't seem to be finding many of these movies scary these days, which either says something about the movies I'm selecting or my current unease with the state of the workd - but I certainly didn't regret watching it.

Why does everyone have their

butts to the camera here?

Sixteenth Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series: #8 28 Years Later

 The third in the 28 installment ... having loved 28 Days Later and liked 28 Weeks Later quite well, to say that I was looking forward to Danny Boyle's 28 Years Later was an understatement.  Now, having watched it, was it worth the wait?  I think so, but I also can understand the ire I've seen from viewers who were expecting more of the same from the "rage zombie" situation.

Synopsis: Twenty-eight years after Londoners unwittingly unleashed the rage virus on an unsuspecting Great Britain, the world has managed to contain the virus to the British Isles.  Great Britain is under quarantine, its surrounding waters surrounded by other country's navies.  No one is allowed off the British Isles and the denizens have been left to fend for themselves.  The residents of Holy Island are doing better than most: connected to the mainland by a causeway that is only accessible at low tide, with deadly rip currents otherwise, the folk there are doing okay, in a just-above-medieval lifestyle sort of way.  (They are a little weird religously but understandable.)  They do have a tradition of sending youth to the mainland when they are 14-15, to learn to kill the infected.  

Young Spike, age 12, is old for his age in many ways (dealing with a sick mum); his dad Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson, unrecognizable) takes him over for his field trip.  Spike successfully kills a couple of slow ones (fat, sluglike, crawling on their bellies) but gets overwhelmed by the fast ones (the regular rage zombies) and both he and his dad are chased back to their island by an "alpha" - bigger, stronger and slightly smarter than the other infected.  Back home, however, his mum (Jodie Comer) is worse and Spike devises a plan to sneak back to the mainland with her to confer with a nearby crazy doctor (Ralph Fiennes).

Are there gross and scary rage zombies?  Yes.  Does the alpha like to pull the heads off of people and animals?  Yes.  Was I at ever time scared of the infected or worried that our heroes might not make it?  No, not at all.  27YL is not actually scary.  It's more like an Alice in Wonderland/Wizard of Oz journey for Spike and his mum, wandering through beautiful landscapes and meeting really weird and/or dangerous people.  I loved it, although it isn't the zombie movie that most people were expecting.  And the very ending fell a little flat, as it is clearly setting things up for the next film.  But this was not what I thought I was going to be seeing and I appreciated it all the more for that.

Sixteenth Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series: #7 Fear Street: Prom Queen

 Oops!  Missed a couple of days - was trying for the every other day posting thing - sorry.  And, unfortunately, this one won't have been worth waiting for.  I REALLY need to get myself a Shudder subscription because the mainstream horror streamers have been uninspiring, to say the least.  I was poking around on Netflix (having recently given up our Hulu/Disney/HBO scrip and being unwilling to sign my "smart tv" onto my Amzn account for the Prime offerings): I'm fixing to dive into the new 28 Years this weekend but needed a midweek watch.  And I landed on Fear Street: Prom Queen.  

I've watched a couple other of these R.L. Stine Fear Streets.  I know they're for the tweens.  I've never read any of the books and I don't know if it's important to have seen all of the Fear Street movies - I suspect not, but I also think there were some callbacks/references that I missed.  Regardless, I have been in the mood for some 80s horror and this was ... sort of that.

Set in 1988, at the Shadyside High School prom, we've got a slasher flick whose masked killer is working his/her way through the prom queen candidates, and their dates, and a whole bunch of adjacent fodder.  The plot is pretty simple: a mean girl, her coterie and an outsider are all in the running for Prom Queen.  The outsider has family baggage and a weird BFF, but used to be friends with - and now has a crush on - the mean girl's boyfriend.  A whole bunch of people get hacked to pieces - mad props to the guillotine paper cutter! - and SPOILER the outsider girl does actually get to be Prom Queen.

Look, at the risk of aging myself, I literally was the class of 1988.  And my high school/prom looked nothing like this.  Budget is probably an issue but at best, the costuming was a combination 80s/90s.  The music was okay but the hair was way off.  Kudos to nabbing Lili Taylor, Chris Klein and Katherine Waterston to play the adults.

In a nutshell, not a complete waste of time: meh acting, decent body count/gore, not scary.

Sixteenth Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series: #6 The Blackening

 Actually, I tried to watch I Saw the TV Glow first.  I failed.  It was stylish and vibey and a little creepy.  But it was also SO SLOW that I got tired of falling asleep in the middle of it and gave up.

So, The Blackening instead, which is not at all slow but a very clever, very funny horror comedy.  You know the horror trope where the black character gets killed first in the slasher movie?  Well, the black main characters know it too:  "We can't all die first."

The plot is that a group of college friends reunite ten years after graduation, going to a cabin (pretty fancy cabin) in the woods for card and board games, drinking, party drugs and catching up.  Once they get there, however, they are targeted by a racistly-masked, crossbow-carrying bad guy who starts picking them off.  What happens next is a rapid fire, hilarious and also true-feeling demonstration of black culture and black horror film culture.  The cast knows the assignment and has tremendous chemistry; the pacing is brisk.  The Blackening isn't at all scary but it is massively entertaining.

Sixteenth Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series: #5 The Monkey

 As noted here before, Stephen King adaptations are hit or miss, despite how good his books are.  His short story collection, Skeleton Crew, out in a fortieth (!) anniversary edition, contains three stories that have been made into movies: The Mist, done by Frank Darabont, a strong showing with an even more brutal ending than the story; and The Raft, the best and grossest part of Creepshow 2.  And now comes the third, The Monkey, by Oz Perkins, in an absolute departure from that director's usual oeuvre.  

Here's what the movie has in common with the short story: brothers Hal and Bill; and a toy monkey that is a harbinger/brings about death, including orphaning the brothers.  What's different? Pretty much everything else, from the monkey having a drum (instead of cymbals), to Bill being a huge asshole and Hal hating him, to Hal's son Petey being a complete dickhead, to the sheer number of deaths, to how they end up getting rid of the monkey.

This is not the worst SK adaptation but it doesn't rank up there with the better ones.  Perkins has made a gleefully mean-spirited little flick, clearly relishing the opportunity to not be as moody as his prior movies.  There is a nice callback via naming the brothers' babysitter Annie Wilkes.  Some of the kills are clever and funny (lawnmower, tea kettle, snake, vape, wasps and an excellent schoolbus situation).  The Monkey isn't scary and while there are funny bits, it isn't a horror-comedy - the tone just seems a little uneven.  Nice mix of actors: Theo James, Adam Scott, Tatiana Maslany, Elijah Wood and Oz Perkins himself as "Uncle Chip."

Sixteenth Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series: #4 Final Destination: Bloodlines

 You know, I don't know if I've actually ever watched any of the Final Destination movies.  Maybe the first one, ages and ages ago.  And I've certainly seen that iconic log truck disaster scene from #2.  But from what I've read, as the series went on, it largely devolved into one splashy/grisly Rube Goldberg sequence after another.  I'd had some recommendations for the latest installment, FD:B, and thought I'd give it a go.

PLOT SPOILERS AHEAD.  The opener has young Iris and her fella, Paul, enjoying opening night at the new Skyview Tower (think Seattle Spaceneedle).  It doesn't go all that well, although better than it could have due to Iris's premonition that enables her to save folks.  But anyone who has seen a FD movie knows that you can't cheat Death.  Iris manages to survive for decades, hidden and paranoid, but then Death comes for her, picking off not only her but - because Iris was pregnant at the time of the Skyview incident - also all her descendants because they aren't supposed to exist.  Carnage ensues.  

The cold open disaster is pretty operatic, with both CGI and practicall effects.  The subsequent kills are very bloody and creative, some squirm-laugh-inducing and sometimes just squirm-inducing.  While it certainly sticks to the formula that made the series famous, FD:B is fun, splashily gory, funny and shows sparks of heart, including a poignant send-off to Tony Todd in his last on-screen role.  Dunno if I'll seek out the rest of them, but this most recent one is worth the time.