April reads

 I'm late!  Which is hilarious, given how rarely I post on this little blog anymore.  But we were on vacation in the desert for ten days at the end of April/beginning of May and I read a bunch of books in between outdoors things and drinking (also sometimes outdoors), and then we came home and I got overwhelmed by laundry and real life and here we are, way late in sharing what I read in April.  Pluswhich, it's been so long I don't know how much I remember any of them.

• A Sorceress Comes to Call by T. Kingfisher.  I keep trying to read her older stuff but this is the newest one.  When your mom's an evil sorceress, it makes things difficult for everyone.  All the reviews say this is a "dark retelling of the Brothers Grimms' Goose Girl, but I don't really remember that one either.
• Horror Movie by Paul Tremblay.  Told by a somewhat unreliable narrator, this riff on a cursed movie tells the story of the making of an ultralow budget 1990s cult horror movie among a group of friends.  Unsettling for sure.
• Holly by Stephen King.  Holly Gibney returns to solve more murders in this mystery-horror mashup.  She's a great character and I like how King has kept her story going after her partner (and the main protagonist of the first few books in the series) has left the scene.  Good stuff.  Kind of icky.
• Sharp Ends by Joe Abercrombie.  This is a collection of short stories set in the First Law (etc.) universe, telling back stories and side stories that didn't quite have a place in those books.  Lots of fun (and rather a lot of knives).
• Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu.  An 1872 lesbianish vampire novella, this is a precursor to - and perhaps inspiration for - Bram Stoker's Dracula.  I loved it, although I thought the ending sort of fizzled out.  I was DELIGHTED to subsequently discover a 2015 Carmilla webseries on YouTube - recommend you read it first and then watch it.
• Home Before Morning - by Lynda Van Devanter.  This memoir, recalling the author's stint as an Army nurse in Vietnam, is basically a blueprint for the subsequent novel The Women that I read in March.  It leaves no question that war is hell, and so is the homecoming sometimes.
• All the Sinners Bleed by S.A. Crosby.  Changing gears, this one - which I quite liked - is about a black sheriff in a small southern town, fighting racism and the tattered remains of the Confederacy, while also trying to hunt down a serial killer.
• The Last House on Needless Street by Catriona Ward.  Stolen children, serial killers, recluses and charismatic cats are woven together in this one.  I was entralled all the way through and there are multiple twists as you go along.  So fun.
• What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher.  A retelling (huh, another one) of The Fall of the House of Usher, this time with more mushrooms.

Fourteenth Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series: #8 In the Tall Grass

 Another day, another crappy Stephen King adaptation.

I read the source story recently, a joint effort by Stephen King and son Joe Hill, found in a short story collection, Full Throttle, by Hill.  It was a solid story: unsettling, gross, easily imagined in one's mind's eye.  And that's the problem, I think, with so many SK adaptions.  He (and also JH) writes so vividly and so matter-of-factly that it is easy to picture what's going on, to "see" it clearly, even if it involves vampires or sewer clowns or giant rats or malevolent fields of grass.  Here, it just seems silly, like a lethal game of Marco Polo in a hayfield.

The story is this: pregnant Becky and her big brother Cal are heading across the country so Becky can give her baby up for adoption to a California couple.  Somewhere in the heartland (Kansas, I think), they stop so she can throw up (morning sickness).  They hear voices calling for help from inside a vast field of tall (like six-plus feet high) grass, a little boy and then, later, the boy's mom.  The siblings go into the field to try to help but it become clear very quickly that once in the tall grass, you will never get out.  They become separated and time and space become wonky, moving them around, keeping them apart, keeping them from getting back to the road.

In the story, they meet the kid, Tobin, and the kid's dad, Ross, who has become crazy because of [movie reasons].  The mom/wife is dead and Tobin and Ross are starving and dehydrated.  It doesn't really end well for anyone.  In the movie, a whole new character is added - Travis, the kid who knocked Becky up.  He has come to Kansas looking for the siblings because they've been gone for two months, having never reached California, but somehow, with the wonky time, gets to the field first and is the one who lures Tobin and his family in ... it's confusing.  I get that they needed to bulk up the story to get to movie length but, sigh.  It just didn't work for me.  Plus there are people with grass for heads and root people buried beneath the field.

If you read online articles, you can find the ending "explained" - feel free to do so.  The movie ending is certainly less bleak than the story.  I wasn't impressed, although Patrick Wilson (slumming here) does his best to chew the scenery as crazed father/grass-acolyte Ross.

Seriously though - where are all the good horror movies at?

Fourteenth Annual FMS Scarilicious October Movie Series: #3 Nightmares & Dreamscapes

 Yes, it's another Stephen King adaptation, this time TNT's 2006 anthology "even" based on short stories from three different SK collections (not just Nightmares & Dreamscapes, to be clear).  As has been well-documented here, I love horror anthologies, despite how hit or miss they can be.  I also love SK short stories which are usually more hit than miss.  For made-for-tv / non-cable horror, N&D is okay, although I questioned some of the stories they chose to do.  I also suspect that I saw this on actual television when it came out in 2006 but that is neither here nor there.

• "Battleground" - Starring William Hurt and the helicopter pilot from The Road Warrior, whereby a hitman has to deal with the consequences of his job.  I love this short story - and it's a very short one so this episode seems a touch long - and they did a pretty good job with it.  There's no dialogue and the effects are darn good.  Best episdoe of the bunch.  The story itself is actually from the Nightshift collection and is more wierd than horror.
• "Crouch End" - I love this story too with its Lovecraftian tone, although much of what I love makes it difficult to adapt for television, especially with 2006 CGI: an American couple gets lost in an increasingly weird London neighborhood.  Starring Claire Forlani.
• "Umney's Last Case" - An homage to Dashiell Hammett et als., this is the story where private investigator Clyde Umney (William H. Macy) finds his life falling apart for a reason he could never have imagined.  Macy got excellent reviews for his dual role here.  Not horror though, by a long shot.
• "The End of the Whole Mess" - Ron Livingston and Henry Thomas play Howard and Bobby Fornoy respectively, two genius brouthers who destroy the world by trying to save it.  The short story is terrific but it really doesn't work well as a movie: the story is written as a diary entry by Howard, recapping what they did.  Depressing as hell too!
• "The Road Virus Heads North" - This one is from the Everything's Eventual collection.  It's a good story (horror writer meets haunted painting), with middling execution here.  Stephen King is just sooooo difficult to put on screen!  And they felt the need to verbally explain the symbolism rather than let the viewer figure it out.  Tom Berenger stars.  And the "New England" accents are predictably shitty.
• "The Fifth Quarter" - Jeremy Sisto is one of a group of ex-cons fighting over a treasure map.  I found this one boring, and might have dozed off a bit.  It's not much like the source story at all.
• "Autopsy Room Four" - Also from Everything's Eventual, this is another odd choice for adaption seeing how the whole story is told from the point of view of a man trapped in his body, unable to move or speak, such that everyone thinks he's dead.  It's played sort of as a comedy here and I really didn't like it.  Plus I'm not a Richard Thomas fan.
• "You Know They've Got a Hell of a Band" - This is one of my favorite SK short stories - I just like the idea with all the musicians who died too young.  Steven Weber and Kim Delaney star in this one.  I thought it was pretty good, although in the story, since you're reading, you believe the dead people are who they are (Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Elvis, etc.); here, since you've got actors made up to look like the dead musicians, there's a disconnect.  I also thought it was lacking the sense of dread from the story but still, one of the stronger episodes. 

Fourteenth Annual FMS Scarilicious October Movie Series: #2 Salem's Lot

 Before Netflix abandoned its DVD service, to which I have been a loyal subscriber for a long, long time, I managed to get a couple of older horror flicks, which are hard-to-impossible to find streaming, including this iconic television movie from 1979.  That vampire boy floating outside the second story window has traumatized all of Gen X - kids who shouldn't have been watching Salem's Lot when it was on.  The cast includes David Soul (from the OG Starsky & Hutch and miscast, if you ask me), Bonnie Bedelia and Fred Willard, plus a whole bunch of "who's that guy?!" actors.

If you aren't familiar with it, this 1979 t.v. movie is based on a 1975 Stephen King novel of the same name.  Go read the novel.  It's long but I'll wait.  It's terrific.  Writer Ben Mears returns to the Maine town he grew up in to write about an old mansion, the Marsden House.  But two newcomers, Mr. Straker and Mr. Barlow, purported antiques dealers, have bought the house.  Barlow is, of course, a vampire and Straker is his main minion.  Townspeople start getting killed for food or turned into baby vamps.  Ben amasses a small team to fight the vampires -  girlfriend Susan, an older high school teacher, a local doctor, a Catholic priest and a soon-to-be-orphaned teenaged boy, Mark.  It doesn't go well for the team and only Ben and Mark live to fight another day.

Look, I'll grant you that the vampire kid at the window holds up, and the Barlow monster design is fantastic (except why did they make him blue?), but otherwise this is a fairly underwhelming horror offering for the 70s, even keeping television standards under consideration.  It was directed by Tobe Hooper, for crying out loud!  Davis Soul is not as charming as Ben should be; Bonnie Bedelia plays Susan as a lot dumber than the book version; Barlow and Straker are very different from the book as well.  The "Maine" accents are predictably shitty.  The acting is pretty painful, to be honest, and the narrative seems disjointed and hard to follow.  Maybe if I didn't know the book so well I would have appreciated this more?

Fourteenth Annual FMS Scarilicious October Movie Series: #1 Cell

 Welcome to the Fourteenth Annual FMS Scarilicious October Movie Series, wherein I attempt to justify this little blog's existence - once so full of television recaps and movie and book reviews.  It's still alive, or at least undead.  It seems apt, therefore, to do horror movies.

We kick things off with Cell, the Stephen King adaptation that reunites Room 1408 stars John Cusack and Samuel L. Jackson.  I've read the novel and while it certainly isn't SK's best, it's far better than this sad excuse for a movie.  The premise is SPOILER a signal goes out over the world's cellphones which turns people into "phone-crazies" a/k/a "phoners" - pretty much just psychic rage murder zombies who kill every other person they see.  A group of survivors, who survived because they don't have phones and escaped the signal, band together and make their way north out of Boston, looking for safety.  Along the way they meet up with other survivors and immolate some sleeper phoner groups, but the phoners, being psychically connected, exact retribution.

There are a lot of changes from the book, no doubt in large part due to budgetary constraints.  Instead of starting out in easily-recognizable/expensive downtown Boston, the movie opens in a generic airport terminal.  In the book, the hero Clay (Cusack in the movie), doesn't own a cellphone and lives in Maine, where his ex-wife and young son live; in the movie, Clay has a cellphone - which he tries to use - but the battery is dead and he has a Boston apartment.  Tom (SLJ), whom Clay meets out on the street in the book, is a T-driver in the movie and they make their escape via generic subway tunnels, not over the Tobin Bridge.  In the book, the heroes walk at night when the phoners are sleeping; in the movie, they walk during the day with no real trouble from the phoners.  Towards the end, once they get to Maine, they travel in a school bus in the book; in the movie, for some reason they are in an ice cream truck (which enraged me as it is much less defensible than a school bus).

Also: Stacey Keach is completely miscast as the headmaster of the boarding school they hole up in for a bit and the "Boston" accents are predictably shitty.  Verdict: Cell is a terrible movie and borderline incoherent.  John Cusack and Samuel L. Jackson are, if you will pardon the pun, totally phoning it in on this one.

Twelfth Annual Friend Mouse Speaks Scarelicious October Movie Series: #1 IT: Chapter Two

 Like a zombie clawing its way out of its grave, this seemingly abandoned blog has been resurrected, just in time for spooky season*.  These last eighteen months have been difficult (for every person on this planet) and although I've consumed a massive amount of media, I just haven't had the capacity to share it here.  I just couldn't do it.  What's more, I barely remember what I read/watched: a lot of urban fantasy, science fiction and swords-and-sandals fantasy books and a lot of streamed t.v. - but what was it?  The Good Place, Schitt's Creek, Trailer Park Boys, Teen Wolf, Reservation Dogs, The 100 (almost done), Lucifer, The Great British Baking Show, as much Drag Race as I could find, some The Witcher, a total rewatch (again) of Angel ... I wish I'd kept a list because everything else just went right out of my brain as soon as I finished it.

Mmmm.  Brains.  Let's watch some horror flicks - it is October, after all.

For this TWELFTH series, I started with IT: Chapter Two, finishing off what I started back in 2018 with Chapter One.  Maybe I'm feeling nostalgic, but this new remake just didn't measure up to the 1990 miniseries.  Sure, Chapter Two has a good cast (Jessica Chastain, James McAvoy, Bill Hader - who stole the show) but the younger actors were more fully realized iterations of the characters and the 1990 actors felt closer to the book too.  This adult Eddie was played way too belligerent for the book's character; the adult Ben just felt off, and was barely a person; the younger Bev was way more badass than Chastain's.  Bill Hader, though - wicked funny.

Other random thoughts (because everyone knows the story and has either read the book, seen the 1990 miniseries or watched this two-parter, so I'm not going to recap): Stuttering Bill has a very excellent vintage Schwinn bicycle that I loved, although I got mad at how he was throwing it around.  And SPOILER SPOILER they defeat Pennywise by calling it a bully to its face? WTF?  I get that biting down on the metaphysical tongue of a cosmic turtle was going to be tough to pull off - but CHASTISING the big bad to make it go away?  You have got to be kidding me.

Final verdict: IT: Chapter Two is not actually scary.  A solid meh, if ever there was one.

*  I hate that term.  Like, really a lot.

Where the hell have I been?

Apparently I needed to take a l o n g break after October!  I haven't been paying much attention to what I've been consuming, mostly needing to turn my brain off and just veg in front of a screen of late.  I've watched a bunch of stuff, including:

• Batwoman which I rather like, just like I like the other Arrowverse shows (Legends of Tomorrow is my favorite, I think).  Like the others, Batwoman will have some growing pains but even the first season is improving as it goes.
• Crisis on Infinite Earths - since I was doing Batwoman, I figured I'd watch the Crisis episodes too, even though I haven't kept up with any of those shows besides Legends.  I'm a little in the dark as to Arrow - adult daughter from the future? - but I think I've figured everything else out.
• At the repeated urging of a high school friend, I've started Lucifer.  My friend says it has supplanted Buffy as his favorite show (!!!) so I'm giving it a go.  Tom Ellis is certainly charming, and I think it's getting better as it goes along, but I'm not 100% sold yet.
• I'm catching up on Legion episodes on Hulu too.  I never half know what's going on at any given time but it sure is pretty to look at.
• With this Hulu subscription, I've watched the first two Castle Rock seasons.  These are mixed, with some parts being very strong and others just ... meh.  I think S2 was better than S1, in large part because Lizzy Caplan (as Annie Wilkes pre-Misery) is SO AWESOME.  I also appreciate the fact that no one really tries to do a Maine accent (Tim Robbins skirts along the edge but never commits, thankfully) because I just don't think anyone who isn't a Mainer can do it.
• I've just started The Witcher, knowing nothing about the books or the games going in.  Reviews say that this show definitely gets better as it goes along, which is good because E1 was borderline incomprehensible.  I'm not sure I'm ever going to accept that godawful wig Henry Cavill wears, though.
• Finally, I watched The Shape of Water.  I'm a huge Guillermo del Toro fan but ... this movie won an Oscar for Best Picture?  Really?  Where was the plot (aside from being Beauty and the Beast)?  Pan's Labyrinth is a way, way, way better movie on all fronts.

Vacation reading

Mr. Mouse, the new dog - a/k/a Boy Genius, for his propensity for accidentally locking himself in rooms - and I were recently down in the southern Utah desert for a week's vacation.  We did active stuff in the mornings (mountain biking and hiking) but hunkered down through the middle of the day, in the A/C and out of the sun, napping and reading.

I read all of the above books.  Well, technically I'm not quite done with Swan Song yet, and I didn't read Witches Abroad because I picked it up out of order.  But I did read the rest of them, plus the last two books of Stephen King's Dark Tower series, so that's a decent number of pages read.

Joe Hill's Stranger Weather is not his strongest outing; his other short stories are much better.  Similarly, his father's Elevation is a slight thing, a novella very much of its time.  I appreciate King's politics but this little book was a wee dite preachy.  The Girl With All the Gifts seems to be the novelization of the movie that stemmed from a short story.  I really liked the movie and am inclined to re-watch it, now that I've read the book.

Next up: back to the library to keep working my way through Discworld.

New goal

Not only have I utterly failed in my easily-attainable goal to watch one movie a month (just one!) to post here, I completely neglected to post ANYTHING for the month of May.  Not cool, man.  My excuse is that I've just been so caught up in watching television series.  I got through the Scooby Doo episode of Supernatural, I've started the guilty pleasure that is Pretty Little Liars, I've been getting caught up on the most recent Netflix-able season of Legends of Tomorrow, I'm two episodes deep into S5 of Black Mirror.  It doesn't end there either:  the final season of Jessica Jones starts in just a couple days,  S4 of Veronica Mars is just around the corner and I haven't even gotten to start in on Good Omens yet, much to my chagrin.  Golden age of television indeed (give or take Supernatural and PLL).

So I am therefore resetting my goal to this: I want to read all of Terry Pratchett's Discworld series by the end of the summer.  I've ready several of those books already, randomly, but this time I'm going chronologically.  I've finished the first four - The Color of Magic, The Light Fantastic, Equal Rites and Mort.  I think I can attain this goal.  These are quick books for me to read - I just need to keep going to the library.

Other books I've read:  Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado, a wonderful collection of short stories that cannot be kept to one genre, instead incorporating horror, comedy, feminism and fantasy; and The Troop by Nick Cutter, a body horror/zombie-ish/Lord of the Flies mash-up that's good enough to have a Stephen King blurb on the front cover.

Ninth Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series: #2 IT: Chapter One

I am a huge Stephen King fan.  I cannot tell you how many times I've read the massive tome that is IT.  And I've seen the 1990 miniseries several times: I'm very fond of Tim Curry's Pennywise, Seth Green as Richie Tozier and most of the adult casting (Harry Anderson/Richie, John Ritter/Ben, Annette O'Toole/Bev, Tim Reid/Mike - I just didn't much care for Richard Thomas as grown Bill).  I know the story fairly well and thus was well-prepared to watch the new (2017) IT: Chapter One.

The new IT movies break the story in two:  the first one covers the kids' story, now set in 1988; the second one, not out yet, will wrap things up with the adult versions of the Losers Club.  For much of the first movie, things stay fairly faithful to the source material.  We start with a bang with Bill and Georgie:  Bill making his little brother a paper boat; Georgie chasing the boat in the rain; Georgie getting his right arm chomped off by Pennywise the Clown and then dragged down into the sewers, never to be found again.  Bill and his friends, Eddie, Richie and Stan, are soon joined by tomboy Bev, new kid Ben and home-schooled Mike as they investigate the town's history and the many, many missing kids.  Each of them sees Pennywise, who manifests as each's particular fear, and then when Bev is taken by Pennywise, the rest of the Losers head into the sewers to rescue her.  All the while fending off some hard-core bullying from Henry Bowers and his thugs.

Obviously, with a source book that massive, things needed to be edited down.  Some bits were very faithful:  Eddie's leper, the blood erupting out of Bev's sink, the rock fight.  Some things were changed: Richie being afraid of clowns instead of the Wolfman; Stan's being haunted by a painting instead of drowned children; Mike's parents dying in a fire (and a name-check of the Black Spot massacre); having the entrance to the sewers be an old well-house instead of the "morlock holes;"  using a bolt gun instead of a slingshot and silver shot against Pennywise.  Perhaps the most egregious change - aside from Mike's character being a total non-entity - was turning Beverly into a damsel in distress, needing to be rescued by her friends.  In the book, young Bev is the toughest of them all - brave enough to go into the sewers and the best shot with the slingshot of all of them.  I hated that change.

Bill Skargard as Pennywise was pretty good - nothing goofy about him but being able to turn on a dime from clown-charming to sinister.  Despite his best efforts, however, this chapter of IT isn't terribly scary, despite its rating.  We'll see if they ratchet things up for Chapter Two.

Mini book review: The Outsider by Stephen King

When well-liked youth coach Terry Maitland is arrested for a sadistic and gruesome murder, his community is shaken to its foundation.  When Maitland's family and friends prove that he was literally in two places at the exact time of the murder, lead Detective Ralph Anderson doesn't know what to think.  And when things get weirder - like supernaturally so - Anderson has to put his faith in evidence and police procedure aside and put his faith in things he cannot see. 


The Outsider by Stephen King is a middling King novel, not his best but not his worst.  The crimes committed are terrible but the villain himself is not super-scary.  It has the return of Holly Gibney, a main character from the Bill Hodges trilogy of Mr. Mercedes / Finders Keepers / End of Watch, who uses her expertise in the world of the weird to help Ralph Anderson, while Anderson helps her re-engage with the world after Bill Hodges's death. The Outsider doesn't have the depth of characterization of those Bill Hodges books, though - for the first part of the book, I assumed Terry Maitland was going to be main character, not Detective Anderson, and I was a little surprise when the focus switched.  This novel does have some nice call-backs to the Hodges books, however, and it was nice to see Holly again.  Maybe I should re-read that trilogy.

Mini book review: Sleeping Beauties by Stephen King and Owen King

Sleeping Beauties is a 2017 collaboration between horror master Stephen King and his son.  No, not Joe Hill, pretty famous in his own right, but Owen King, who still relies on the family name.  This ponderous book follows what happens in small town Appalachia - standing in for the world - when a pandemic brings down all the women.  When a female human falls asleep, she does not wake up and becomes wrapped in a cocoon.  When the men try to take the cocoons off, the sleepers attack, violently and mindlessly - so it's better to leave them wrapped up.  A very few women stave off sleep - the insomniacs, or those with access to amphetamines or cocaine - but for the most part, the men of the world are adrift.  And that does not go well.  Oh!  And there's a supernatural woman - goddess or witch, perhaps - who has ushered in this state of things.  Some of the men want to protect her.  Some of the men don't.

I'm sounding pretty flip here but I did like Sleeping Beauties reasonably well.  It reads largely like a Stephen King book (so I wonder how much collaboration the co-authors did), with its detailed, intricate world-building and knowledge of small town life.  It's also a fairly political novel: King is liberal and it is clearly pro-feminist, as well numerous digs at the current administration.  Lots of the characters (and there are LOTS of characters) are pretty thinly sketched, including Evie, the goddess/witch, and one would think that she would be more developed, being so intrinsic to the story and all.  I wouldn't put it up with King's best works by a long shot but would put it lower-middle of the pack.

Seventh Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series #11: Carrie (1976)

Ah, a classic: Brian De Palma's 1976 retelling of Stephen King's Carrie!  This movie really needs no introduction or discussion but because I've suffered through so many dogs this October, I wanted to revisit it just briefly.  Because this one is a really good one.

First of all, Carrie is chock-full of now-recognizable names who were just fresh faced babies in 1976:  Sissy Spacek (Carrie White), Amy Irving (good girl Sue), William Katt (popular boy Tommy, and later The Greatest American Hero), John Travolta (bad boy Billy), PJ Soles (mean girl/tomboy Norma), Betty Buckley (Miss Collins, later the mom on Eight is Enough) and Piper Laurie (Carrie's mom, Margaret White).

Second, I'm not going to recap the story because we all know the story (and if you don't, you should fix that right away).  But here are my notes from watching it:

• Piper Laurie as Carrie's mom is TERRIFYING
• RAGING SEVENTIES FASHION!!!!!
• Was that English teacher in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest?  [he was]
• William Katt has AMAZING hair
• Everyone is soooo skinny
• Travolta's accent is so bad
• srsly William Katt's hair
• When Tommy is nice to Carrie at the prom, it's really quite lovely
• The prom starts out so pretty and sweet that when the HELL finally breaks loose, it's all the more shocking

Looking back on this iconic movie now, I find it hard to watch it with a critical eye because I love it so much.  All of it.  The seventies of it, Sissy Spacek really selling how terrorized she was by her mother, the tiny moments of people being nice to Carrie, the brutal bullying by the mean girls.  I do imagine, however, that back in 1976 it was fairly shocking - especially to those moviegoers who weren't familiar with the book - the horrible dousing with the bucket of blood and Carrie's subsequent transformation into a vengeance demon.  Up until that point, Carrie is really the victim and even afterwards, after everyone dies a bloody and/or flaming death, it's still hard to blame her.

Catching up a bit

I finally made it back to the library after some months away and stocked up on some books, trying to catch up on my Neil Gaiman/Stephen King backlog.

Finders Keepers by Stephen King.  Sort of a sequel to Mr. Mercedes since it includes some of the same characters, Finders Keepers is equal parts literary musings and thriller, with nary a whiff of the supernatural.  A superfan murders a reclusive author, getting away with not only cash but scores of notebooks in the author's own handwriting.  He hides the cash and the notebooks, only to get put away for a totally different crime.  The stash goes unfound for almost forty years until a young boy finds it, uses the cash to help his failing family and covets the notebooks for his own.  But when the superfan is finally released from prison, he wants back what he thinks is his.  I give Finders Keepers a solid meh.  I think I liked Mr. Mercedes better; FK seems to go along at a leisurely pace for most of the novel and then hurryupfinishitallatonceinarush.

Trigger Warning by Neil Gaiman.  A short story collection but not, I think, Gaiman's strongest.  I liked some of the stories - "Black Dog," "The Sleeper and the Spindle," the creepy "Feminine Endings," "Orange" - but I think my favorite bit was the introduction, when Gaiman gave some context/framework as to how each story came about.  I love these little practical insights into writers' brains.  Stephen King does this too with his short story collections.

The Bazaar of Bad Dreams by Stephen King.  A short story collection, made up of stories that have either been published in other places or never been published.  With some of these tales, you can understand why they've been languishing in a drawer for decades.  Others succeed better and I think the quality of the stories improve the deeper into the book you go.  I particularly liked "Blockade Billy," "Obits" and "Under the Weather."

Edited to add:

The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman.  This one I enjoyed quite a lot, a short fantasy novel with new kinds of creatures and very old magic.  Things start to get very scary for a young boy when a man steals his family's car and commits suicide in it, at the bottom of the hill near their house.  Cracks in the very fabric of reality start to open up, issuing in terrifying things.  But young Lettie Hempstock, who lives with her mother and grandmother at the farm at the end of the lane, finds the little boy and promises to take care of him, through whatever may come.  Both sweet and scary, The Ocean at the End of the Lane is a lovely treat for fantasy and faerie tale lovers.

Sixth Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series #2: Tales from the Darkside

At some point in this "scarelicious" movie series I should probably watch a scary movie, right?  Tales from the Darkside: the Movie (1990) would not so much be classified as scary.  (Also, I realized twenty minutes into it that I'd seen it before, which also lessens the scare factor.)  Set up as an anthology, TftDtM has three story chapters, surrounded by an overarching framework story in which a little newspaper boy keeps telling stories to the witch 1,001 Nights/Scheherazade-style who has captured him to keep her from stuffing him in the oven, Hansel and Gretel-style.  (The witch appears to live in Brookline, Massachusetts, as you do.)  Timmy the paperboy is played by Matthew Lawrence (Blossom's Joey Lawrence's little brother - ah, the 1990s!) and the witch is played by Debbie Harry, who is not much of an actress.

The first story-within-the-story is "Lot 249," in which dweeby college student Edward orders a mummy (from a catalog?) to get revenge on the popular students who are tormenting him.  Dweeby Edward is Steve Buscemi; two of his tormenters, preppy Andy and Andy's sister Susan, are played by Christian Slater and Julianne Moore respectively.  This vignette is more funny than scary although there are some gooey moments when the mummy recreates his own mummification process on his victims.

The second story-within-the-story is "Cat from Hell," a pedigreed tale with the story by Stephen King and the screenplay by George Romero.  In this one, rich old man Drogan has hired a hitman to take out the titular cat who he believes is killing off his family.  The hitman thinks this is a ridiculous thing to do (although for $100,000 he's game) but things do not go well for him - or the old man, for that matter.  Again, not so scary but the hitman's demise by cat is great fun.

The third story, "Lover's Vow," is not really scary at all.  A broke and despairing artist comes across a real life gargoyle one night.  The gargoyle kills his friend (swipes his head right off his shoulders) but promises to spare the artist's life if he vows to never, ever tell anybody about their encounter.  On his way home, the shaken artist meets up with a pretty girl (Rae Dawn Chong, wearing a trenchcoat - ah, the 1990s!).  They hit it off and the artist's life immediately gets better.  His work starts selling, they get married and have kids.  But at night he keeps drawing and sculpting gargoyles, haunted by his encounter.  Finally, after ten years of success and bliss, he tells his wife about the gargoyle.  TWENTY-FIVE YEAR OLD MOVIE SPOILER-ISH:  He shouldn't have done that and it ruins everything.  Not at all scary, scarcely gory and hilarious practical gargoyle effects.

This movie is extremely dated looking - hair- and clothes-wise.  It barely registers as horror but is worthwhile as a collector's piece, I guess, especially if you are fond of anthology series.  I am, because I like horror short stories.  But in essence this is a pretty silly collection.

Stephen King obviously doesn't need my help

The great and mighty Stephen King obviously doesn't need any of my help selling any books - his author book-jacket blurb flatly states "the author of more than fifty books, all of them worldwide bestsellers" but I recently got the opportunity to knock two more of my all-time-King list: Revival (published in November 2014) and Mr. Mercedes (published in June 2014).  (How does he do that?  Publish two complete novels in the same year?)  I'm not going to count either of these as my favorites but I almost always enjoy a new King read.

Revival follows the life of Jamie Morton, and his connection with the at first charismatic, and later sinister, Reverent Charles Jacobs.  Reverend Jacobs is at first an electricity hobbyist but after a horrific family tragedy, becomes more and more obsessed with the power coursing through the earth and its sky.  Jamie's path keeps crossing with Jacobs; they are inexplicably intertwined, right up to the sharp swerve into The Dark Tower/Lovecraftian ending of the book.

Mr. Mercedes has no supernatural elements and is a straight-up cop thriller.  In an unnamed Midwestern city, a terrible mass murder case has gone unsolved after a masked man driving a tank of a Mercedes plows into a crowd of applicants at a jobs fair.  Retired detective Bill Hodges can't let the case go and, when he receives a letter purporting to be from the driver of that Mercedes, Bill is compelled to solve the case.  Told from twin points of view - Bill's and the killer's - the point of this novel is not to figure out whodunnit (you know who by page 42), but to see whether the good guys will be able to catch the very clever but all too human bad guy.

I liked Mr. Mercedes well enough (certainly moreso than Revival) and was interested to learn that King's latest, Finders Keepers, is a related book, revisiting with some of the characters but following a different plot line entirely.  I prefer my Stephen King on the spooky side but I'm always up to see what he's got for us next.

When in doubt, post a list

It's all the houseguests' fault: we had houseguests, and we had to do things with houseguests, and all that being social and a good host really cut into the scary viewing.  This is what's upcoming: the recap for the season premiere of The Walking Dead (oh dear god I can't believe it's back on already and I have to recap it again and can we please focus on Darryl and Michonne and Carol and ignore Rick?) and also the latest scary movie, The Ring.  But not yet.

Since I don't have much for you in the meantime, and since I've been re-reading Stephen King's Dreamcatcher just for the hell of it, and since it's a scary time of year and since Mr. King is the undisputed high emperor of scary written things, here's a list of all his novels with the ones I haven't read in red.  I'm a big Stephen King fan.  There will not be much red.

11/22/63
'Salem's Lot
Bag of Bones
Black House
Carrie
Cell
Christine
The Colorado Kid
Cujo
Cycle of the Werewolf
The Dark Half
The Dark Tower: Song of Susannah
The Dark Tower
The Dark Tower: The Drawing of the Three
The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger
The Dark Tower: The Waste Lands
The Dark Tower: The Wind Through the Keyhole
The Dark Tower: Wizard and Glass
The Dark Tower: Wolves of the Calla
The Dead Zone
Desperation
Doctor Sleep
Dolores Claiborne
Dreamcatcher
Duma Key
The Eyes of the Dragon
Firestarter
From A Buick 8
Gerald's Game
The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon
The Green Mile: The Complete Serial Novel
Insomnia
IT
Joyland  
Lisey's Story
Misery
Mr. Mercedes
Needful Things
Pet Sematary
The Plant: Zenith Rising
Revival
Rose Madder
The Shining
The Stand: The Complete & Uncut Edition
The Talisman
The Tommyknockers
Under the Dome

Then there's also his short story collections, which I think I like even better than his novels: Different Seasons; Everything's Eventual; Four Past Midnight; Full Dark, No Stars; Hearts in Atlantis; Just After Sunset; Night Shift; Nightmares & Dreamscapes; Skeleton Crew; and Stephen King Goes to the Movies.

Wow.  I sure do love me some Stephen King.  (Except Full Dark, No Stars.  Didn't like that one quite so much.)

Desert Island Lists: Books edition

While I struggle to get my ass in gear with the rest of the True Blood recaps, let me pose this question to you:  What five books do you want with you when you're stranded on a desert island?  Series are acceptable with qualifications - finished ones like Harry Potter or unfinished like A Song of Ice and Fire (with the caveat that you get the next volumes as they come out) are fine but the complete works of Agatha Christie, for example, are not.  I'll start.

• American Gods by Neil Gaiman
• My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell
• Watership Down by Richard Adams
• The First Law Trilogy by Joe Abercrombie
• The Dark Tower series by Stephen King

Now you, in the comments.  And put your thinking caps on because there are movies and television series to do in upcoming posts.  (Television is HARD!)

Mini book review: Doctor Sleep by Stephen King

Ooh, I said to myself, Doctor Sleep - a new Stephen King book!  A sequel to The Shining, where we finally get to see what happened to little traumatized Danny Torrance after his alcoholic dad went crazy, tried to kill him and his mom and ended up perishing in the furnace-explosion blaze that razed the Overlook Hotel!  [Oops.  SPOILER, but hell, The Shining was written in 1977 and if you haven't read it by now, it's your own fault.]  I said, to myself, I can't wait to see what happens and be terrified all over again!

Here's what happens:  Dan Torrance grows up and wrestles with his own alcoholic demons.  He uses his shining to ease hospice patients until one day he meets Abra, a little girl whose own shining far surpasses Dan's.  Abra is in trouble because the True Knot, a group of supernatural beings who travel the country in fleets of massive RVs, wants to suck the shining right out of her, just like they've been doing to other special (and thus now missing) kids throughout the centuries.

Here's how much I was terrified: Not at all.  For all that this is a pretty big book (the "large print edition" I ended up with from the library had 778 pages!), the treatment of the characters is pretty lightweight.  King usually excels in getting you to connect with his characters but this time, he just doesn't get into their heads; for example, he spends a huge number of pages talking about how a new member gets inducted into the True Knot ... and then scarcely mentions her again for the rest of the book.  The True Knot themselves are not that scary - from the first moment you meet them, they are clearly a group in decline - and their leader, Rose the Hat, is a missed opportunity for a charismatic villain.

I absolutely love Stephen King books as a whole but this new Doctor Sleep doesn't come close to reaching the levels of such classics like 'Salem's Lot, IT, The Stand, Carrie or The Shining.

In the dead zone

I'm traversing a bit of a pop culture desert right now, burning through S2 of Fringe, which is picking up steam and getting better and better - I'm glad I went back to it after giving up partway through broadcast S1, and re-reading Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time books because I own volumes 1-12 and need to refresh before finishing the series.  (Actually, I'm mostly re-reading those books because my library is undergoing some major renovations and it's a huge pain in the ass to get books out of there right now.  Pluswhich the one I really want to read - Joe Hill's NOS4A2 - has a huge waitlist.)

I'm reluctantly keeping up with Under the Dome, which I'm less and less enamoured of as it goes; I know Stephen King is being all supportive of it but the show is SO different from the book (it would have to be since the book is one of King's more violent tomes) and so much less interesting and well done.  I really don't think they should have renewed it: you can't keep those people under that dome indefinitely.  Finally, I am eagerly awaiting the return of Breaking Bad and the start of Broadchurch, and have also become sucked in, for the first time, to So You Think You Can Dance.  A girl's gotta have at least one guilty pleasure, right?