Darker Companions: Celebrating 50 Years of Ramsey Campbell (2017): edited by Scott David Aniolowski and Joseph S. Pulver, Sr. : Excellent tribute anthology paying homage to the lengthy career of horror master and noted Liverpudlian Ramsey Campbell. Stephen King compared the experience of reading Campbell to being on LSD way back in 1981's Danse Macabre. 40 years later, Campbell continues to write -- and he'd been published for 17 years before Danse Macabre.
The editors encouraged stories reflecting on Campbell's different periods, from his early Lovecraftian pastiches to later forays into X-rated horror, kitchen-sink dread, psychological horror, and many other modes.
A couple of humourous, meta-fictional stories break up the often grim proceedings, none grimmer than Cody Goodfellow's "This Last Night in Sodom." The title is a nod to Soft Cell, the only soft thing about the story. All of the stories are good-to-excellent. Steve Rasnic Tem offers the closest thing to a pitch-perfect exercise in emulating Campbell's mature style. Other stand-outs include stories by Thana Niveau, Adam Nevill, Lynda Rucker, and Michael Wehunt. Highly recommended.
Untouchable (2019): directed by Ursula Macfarlane: Harrowing, revelatory documentary on disgraced Hollywood powerhouse Harvey Weinstein's decades of predatory behaviour before revelations started to come out in articles in the New York Times and the New Yorker.
Weinstein's alleged behaviour included alleged rapes, sexual assaults, and various forms of 'retribution' aimed at any and all whom he viewed as having offended him or denied him in any way. Employees, victims, and journalists testify to Weinstein's malevolence and his power in the film industry and the larger culture.
Untouchable actually made me think of a book on the Manson murders I'm reading right now in which the author notes that the standard construction of the Manson murders as having marked the end of Hollywood's "innocence" is complete crap: Hollywood isn't, wasn't, and never was "innocent." The list of Weinstein's enablers is a Who's Who of Hollywood Elite. Hey, Roman Polanski just won a major award at Cannes! Maybe it's not Hollywood. Maybe it's just everything. Highly recommended.
Ghost Stories (2017): written and directed by Jeremy Dyson and Andy Nyman; starring Andy Nyman (Professor Goodman), Martin Freeman (Mike Priddle), Paul Whitehouse (Tony Matthews), Alex Lawther (Simon Rifkind), and Paul Warren (Woolly):
Adapted from a play by co-director Jeremy Dyson and starring co-director Andy Nyman as a psychic debunker, Ghost Stories creeps up on the viewer, building towards a harrowing final 20 minutes or so. The three ghost stories investigated by Nyman's rigid, unsympathetic Professor Goodman have changed their participants irrevocably, and not necessarily for the better. Goodman tries to remain unchanged as weirdness increases in his own life.
Some viewers (like me!) will be initially put off by the characterization of a psychic investigator as a bad guy, even as he exposes a fraud early in the movie in pretty much exactly the way that longtime debunker James Randi did. Stick with it, though. What seems like a general observation on the part of the movie may turn out to be something very much else.
I'd love to see how this play was originally staged. The movie has done such a terrific job of 'opening it up' that I'd be hard-pressed to cite any moments in which it seems like an adaptation of a stage play. Recommended.
Sleeping Beauties (2017) by Stephen King and Owen King: Not the worst novel Stephen King has either written or co-written (that would be The Tommyknockers). But it shares some commonalities with that terrible work.
One is that it's less a novel than a screed -- in the case of Sleeping Beauties, a screed against the patriarchy. There's nothing wrong with that, and the two Kings score a number of points against our male-dominated world. But screeds need to be relatively short. At nearly 700 pages, Sleeping Beauties is not short, and one wearies of the same points being hammered again and again and again, with little variation. We get it. Men are assholes.
The novel was so wearying that I put it down with 50 pages to go and didn't pick it up again (except to move it) for eight months. And that in the middle of an action-packed climax that seemed to be written with all four eyes of the writers squarely on a movie or television version. Explosions, gunfire, dogs and cats living together.
King has also never been good when he moves too far into pure fantasy rather than dark fantasy. The wheel of the plot turns on a magical woman named Eve who has magical powers and talks like a Buffy villain. She's not a villain. Or is she? In any case, she's tied to a worldwide phenomenon in which all women, regardless of age, go into a coma and sprout a cocoon as soon as they fall asleep. Attempts to get them out of their cocoons result in homicidal action by the otherwise still-comatose women/girls/babies.
All this worldwide turmoil focuses on the small Appalachian town in which the novel is mostly set, where the fate of the world will be decided by what the women of that town decide, and what the increasingly desperate men do.
I think maybe this would have been a dandy, angry yawp of a novel at about 300 pages. But the characters are all so flawed and so often unsympathetic -- men and women -- that things get pretty dire, pretty fast, and then go on forever.
Sleeping Beauties has its moments. But I can't shake the feeling that the genesis of the novel came when King and son Owen were discussing Y: The Last Man, the comic-book series in which all men on Earth die in the first issue, all men but one. King called this entertaining, poppy series, written by TV guy Brian K. Vaughan, the greatest graphic novel in history. That comment tells you a lot about King's tastes, or at least that maybe he needs to read more graphic novels.
But Vaughan's anti-patriarchal comic was nuanced and subtle compared to Sleeping Beauties. Indeed, the scariest thing about Sleeping Beauties is a reference in the acknowledgements to a much longer first draft of the novel. Please, God, let that not be released! Not recommended.
It Comes At Night (2017): written and directed by Trey Edward Shults; starring Joel Edgerton (Paul), Christopher Abbott (Will), Carmen Ejogo (Sarah), Riley Keough (Kim), Kelvin Harrison Jr. (Travis), and Griffin Robert Faulkner (Andrew):
Tense, claustrophobic thriller is set during some sort of zombie-plague apocalypse but uses that apocalypse to explore the horrors of human beings under pressure. Father, mother, and teen-aged son hide in a house in the woods. A stranger arrives. Charity fights with fear.
Anyone expecting pitched battles with the walking dead will be disappointed in It Comes At Night. But if you're in the mood for a downbeat tale of character and failure, the movie is a solid effort. It's a use of the zombie to comment on human frailties that the Grandfather of Zombie Movies, George 'Night of the Living Dead' Romero, would have thoroughly enjoyed and endorsed. Recommended.
Veronica (2017): written by Fernando Navarro and Paco Plaza; directed by Paco Plaza; starring Sandra Escacena (Veronica), Bruna Gonzalez (Lucia), Claudia Placer (Irene), Ivan Chavero (Antonito), Ana Torrent (Ana), and Consuelo Trujillo (Hermana Muerte):
Set in 1991, Veronica is vaguely inspired by a 'true story.' It's about as truthful as The Exorcist -- the events of the film are entirely the invention of the Spanish director/co-writer best known for the found-footage horror film REC.
The real events involved the death of a young woman. So even with the names changed and the events leading up to that death entirely invented, there's more than a whiff of exploitation to the film. That's too bad. It's a solid supernatural thriller with a sympathetic teen-aged protagonist (Veronica, that is). Traumatized by the recent death of her father and overwhelmed by doing the majority of the care-giving for her three younger siblings, she's gradually going adrift.
And then she and two friends decide to consult a Ouija board.
During a solar eclipse.
Oops.
And there's also a somewhat sinister, elderly, blind nun at Veronica's school who warns her of tampering with the supernatural. Too late!
The result is a movie that conveys creeping, escalating dread quite nicely. Though it's no wonder there's a blind nun at the school -- the protocols the school follows for watching that eclipse would result in a whole lot of visually impaired school children. It's a pretty distracting sequence, really, because it's born of inadequate research and not intentional horror.
Boy, do those nuns not understand how the sun during an eclipse works! Maybe they should have consulted a Ouija board! Recommended.
Trench 11 (2017): written by Matt Booi and Leo Scherman; directed by Leo Scherman; starring Rossif Sutherland (Canadian Lieutenant Berton), Robert Stadlober (Reiner), Charlie Carrick (Doctor), Shaun Benson (German Kapitan Muller), Ted Atherton (British Major Jennings), and Luke Humphrey (U.S. Captain Cooper):
Enjoyable low-budget Canadian horror movie filmed in Manitoba and Ontario. Rossif Sutherland is an appealing Everyman as a Canadian 'tunneler' in WWI. He's supposed to be on leave as the war enters its last days. But British Military Intelligence needs him to help a small group investigate a mysterious underground German complex in the Ardennes.
Well, and we all know how respectful British intelligence officers are of human life, allied or otherwise. Because the Ardennes are under American control, the squad consists of four American infantry, two British officers, and our Canadian tunneler.
It's no surprise to discover that the Germans were developing a new weapon before something happened and they sealed the complex, badly. Once the squad enters the complex, things rapidly go sideways.
Trench 11 becomes something of a surprise at this point, focusing on humanity's capacity for monstrosity rather than on some pitched battle against super-zombies. The film-makers do a nice job of conveying the claustrophobia and confusion going on far below the surface of the Earth. It's a terse and effective film. Recommended.
Happy Death Day (2017): written by Scott Lobdell; directed by Christopher Landon; starring Jessica Rothe (Theresa 'Tree' Gelbman), Israel Broussard (Carter Davis), Ruby Modine (Lori), Charles Aitken (Gregory Butler), and Rachel Matthews (Danielle):
Satiric slasher riff on Groundhog Day gradually loses steam towards the end of its eternally returning day of doom for a grumpy sorority girl.
Still, it's a fairly engaging piece of entertainment for most of its length. Part of the reason it bogs down is that it also wants to be a heart-warming tale of someone who learns better, riffing as much on A Christmas Carol as Groundhog Day in this regard. The funniest scene comes as the sorority girl and her new boyfriend discuss Groundhog Day and the films of Bill Murray.
Jessica Rothe does a decent job of making our time-shifted protagonist growingly sympathetic as she tries and fails again and again to avoid her fate. The identity of the killer seems sort of obvious to me, but your results may vary. There's a red herring that feels like it needed another two or three minutes of exposition, or some personal connection to the protagonist that never materializes. It's another Blumhouse horror movie. Are they trying to match the annual horror output of Hammer or AIP back in the 1950's and 1960's? Lightly recommended.
Seven in Heaven (2018): written and directed by Chris Eigeman; starring Travis Tope (Jude), Gary Cole (The Guidance Counselor), Haley Ramm (June), and Clark Backo (Nell): Filmed in Brampton, Ontario! Very slight Blumhouse Joint is less horror movie and more Mirror Universe episode by way of Narnia's magic closet and some risible playing cards. The cast is at least pleasant. Gary Cole wanders through as a Guidance Counselor with mysterious powers. An adequate time-waster for Netflix, but certainly avoidable if you've got something else to watch or do. Very lightly recommended.
Cargo (2017): written by Yolanda Ramke; directed by Yolanda Ramke and Ben Howling; starring Martin Freeman (Andy), Anthony Hayes (Vic), and Simone Landers (Thoomi): One of those Netflix movies whose lack of a theatrical appearance baffles the viewer. It's a zombie-plague movie set in Australia with fine performances from Martin Freeman and Simone Landers. Landers is especially good as Thoomi, the 11-year-old aboriginal girl whom Freeman meets in the countryside at a dire moment.
The plague has been around long enough that "countdown watches" are available to those recently bitten, giving a 48-hour count to the point at which a person will zombify. Freeman has been bitten as the movie begins. But in the depopulated countryside of Australia, he needs to find someone to take charge of his young daughter Rosie, the cutest 1-year-old girl ever to appear in a zombie movie.
Thoomi has her own trauma to deal with. The film-makers handle the growing friendship between the two delicately. It helps that Freeman's default acting mode is a sort of baffled, affable humanity. Thoomi is understandably cautious around him, but Rosie The World's Cutest Baby eventually wins her over.
There isn't a ton of violence in Cargo, though there is some zombie-fighting action (and human vs. human action, these catastrophic zombie events never bringing out the best in humanity). Cargo does hold out hope, though, in the manner of some of George Romero's genre-defining zombie classics. I shed a manly tear or two at the end. Recommended.
Alien: Covenant (2017): based on characters and situations created by Dan O'Bannon and Ronald Shushett with an out-of-court settlement granted to A. E. Van Vogt for similarities to his stories "Discord in Scarlet" and "Black Destroyer"; written by Jack Paglen, Michael Green, John Logan, and Dante Harper; directed by Ridley Scott; starring Michael Fassbender as the only character who matters:
Oh, what a dreadful movie.
Alien: Covenant gibbers and oozes with nihilistic stupidity on almost every conceivable level except for the occasional burst of creativity in the production design department. If you enjoyed Alien and Aliens, avoid this movie.
Ridley Scott seems to be determined with this and Prometheus to trash the Alien franchise beyond all right reason. I suppose part of the problem is that Alien was never really a franchise: it was a great first movie, an extremely good second movie, a stylish but empty third movie, an awful fourth movie, two serviceable Predator crossovers, and Scott's extremely revisionist Prometheus. Let it go, 20th Century Fox. Let it go. Not recommended.
Annabelle: Creation (2017): written by Gary Dauberman; directed by David F. Sandberg; starring Anthony LaPaglia (Samuel Mullins), Miranda Otto (Esther Mullins), Stephanie Sigman (Sister Charlotte), Lulu Wilson (Linda), Samara Lee (Bee), and Talitha Bateman (Janice):
Annabelle: Creation (2017) is the best horror movie in The Conjuring franchise, in part because director David Sandberg has shown some talent for scares here and in Light's Out (2016). Many of its flaws come from the efforts of the producers to hammer the movie into the pre-existing Annabelle timeline created by the first Conjuring movie and the first Annabelle movie. This leads to an open ending and a coda that's ridiculous if one has seen Annabelle and confusing if one hasn't. Oh, well.
Anthony LaPaglia and Miranda Otto look very... glum as two of the three major adult characters. Stephanie Sigman is a lot more energized as a loveable nun. The child and teen actors are all fairly solid as Catholic orphans who get to live in a country house some time in the 1950's, a house that has the demonic doll Annabelle hanging out in a locked room.
That room will not stay locked, folks! Even though it's wall-papered in pages from The Bible!
Not that it really matters if the door stays locked. Annabelle has some pretty terrific teleportational powers to go along with her atypical (for a doll) mobility. That she was supposed to be a children's doll innocent of all evil when created has always struck me as hilarious: she's clearly meant to scare any child with the misfortune to receive her. Anthony LaPaglia is cast here as her doll-making creator, so it's his fault. His... and THE DEVIL's !!! I think. On the bright side, tragedy stops LaPaglia from making more than one Annabelle: she was originally supposed to be one of a hundred.
There are some decent scares, a lot of improbable character moments, and a genuine feeling of tragedy attached to one of the children, polio-stricken Janice. There's a genuinely eerie-looking scarecrow. There are a lot of jump scares. Really, Annabelle can only teleport if her unexpected new location creates a jump scare.
The makers of the film indulge way too much in one of my new Horror Don'ts: Don't give your ghostly or demonic presence X-Man-level telekinetic abilities. If you do decide to go down this route, use those powers sparingly. Perhaps only once in your movie. And even then, maybe off-screen. A demon who rampages around like the Hulk isn't scary after about ten seconds. It's goddam stupid. If you want to make a superhero movie, have your telekinetic wundergeist get into a Jedi battle with the bulldozing snooze that was the rebooted Blair Witch and the escalating Sith-like forces of evil in every Paranormal Activity movie after the first one.
Oh, well. Boy, Anthony LaPaglia looks pissed off at being in this movie, though. Lightly recommended.
It (1990): adapted from the 1986 Stephen King novel by Tommy Lee Wallace and Lawrence D. Cohen; directed by Tommy Lee Wallace; starring Harry Anderson/ Seth Green (Richie Tozier), Dennis Christopher/ Adam Faraizi (Eddie Kaspbrak), Richard Masur/ Ben Heller (Stanley Uris), Annette O'Toole/ Emily Perkins (Bev Marsh), Tim Reid/ Marlon Taylor (Mike Hanlon), John Ritter/ Brandon Crane (Ben Hanscom), Richard Thomas/ Jonathan Brandis (Bill Denbrough), and Tim Curry (Pennywise):
It (2017): adapted by Chase Palmer, Cary Fukunaga, and Gary Dauberman from the novel by Stephen King; directed by Andy Muschietti; starring Bill Skarsgard (Pennywise), Jaeden Lieberher (Bill), Jeremy Ray Taylor (Ben), Sophia Lillis (Bev), Finn Wolfhard (Richie), Chosen Jacobs (Mike), Jack Dylan Grazer (Eddie), and Wyatt Oleff (Stanley):
The 1990 miniseries adaptation of Stephen King's It is more faithful to the book in many ways, even allowing for the fact that the miniseries tells the whole story while the 2017 movie deals only with the childhood sections of the novel. In the miniseries, British Columbia plays Derry, Maine while the real-world locations for the movie are mostly located in Ontario, Canada. Hmm.
The faithfulness of the miniseries does lead to a certain breathlessness at points, as the filmmakers cram an astonishing amount of the novel into about three hours. Why didn't ABC make It a six- or eight-hour miniseries? No idea. Without commercials, the miniseries clocks in at about 187 minutes, less than an hour longer than the 2017 movie while tackling the entire novel. That's some impressive condensation!
The performances by both the children and the adults the children grow into are good, for the most part, with Brandon Crane as a young Ben Hanscom especially seeming truer to Ben's physical appearance in the book than Jeremy Ray Taylor in the 2017 movie. We will not go on at length about the ponytail sported by Richard Thomas as the adult Bill Denbrough except to say that it is immensely distracting. Tim Reid is especially impressive as the adult Mike Hanlon. Yes, Venus Flytrap from WKRP. John Ritter is also pitch-perfect as the adult Ben Hanscom.
One of the oddities of the miniseries is that Harry Anderson as the adult Richie Tozier towers over the other characters (Anderson is 6'4" while Ritter was 5'11" and Thomas is a shade below 5'9"), which seems weird if one has read the novel. Ah, Hollywood.
Movie It's Jeremy Ray Taylor's Ben Hanscom seems about six inches too short for his character, and lacks the character-defining sweatshirts of his novel and miniseries counterparts, though only the novel explains the significance of a 'fat' kid wearing sweatshirts even in the hottest weather. Both miniseries and movie could use more character-building like this, as just the sweatshirt stuff in the novel makes Ben more poignant while also showing the young Richie Tozier's combination of insight and crude bonhomie.
The miniseries also hews closer to the age of the children in the novel while the movie up-aged them by a couple of years. Tim Curry's Pennywise is a brasher, less physically startling Pennywise than Bill Skarsgard's, though neither actor really captures the novel's idea that Pennywise should be appealing at first meeting. Their Pennywises are just creepy and scary all the time, a decision made by the directors, I'd assume. An ingratiating John Candy would have probably made the best Pennywise.
The miniseries leaves the truly cosmic origins of It (the creature) mostly untouched. Supposedly, the next movie will actually delve into this. I'll be interested to see how that goes. Both the movie and the miniseries do admirable jobs of adapting King's work. I'd guess that most people who saw the miniseries last when it aired probably remember it as beginning, as with the movie, with Georgie's fateful encounter with Pennywise in the storm drain.
Not so! And it's not a puzzling choice, as the miniseries has to set up the dual timelines of its plot immediately. But it did seem a little Mandela Effect for a moment as I rewatched the miniseries for the first time in 28 years. Live and learn. Both miniseries and movie: recommended.
The Mummy (2017): written by Everybody; directed by Action Robot Director 3000; starring Tom Cruise (Lieutenant Jerkstore), Russell Crowe (Actually Acting), Annabelle Wallis (Too Young Love Interest/ Archaeologist), Sofia Boutella (The Enchantress from Suicide Squad), and Jake Johnson (Cheaplaffs Johnson): Such a colossal turd of a movie that it makes the unfortunate The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor shine in one's memory like Lawrence of Arabia.
Solid screenwriters including Christopher McQuarrie (The Usual Suspects!), David Koepp (Jurassic Park!), and Jenny Lumet (Rachel Getting Married! Wait, what?) are buried alive by this misguided attempt to turn Universal's monster movies into a Marvel-like shared cinematic universe. That would be Dark Universe, the absurd shared cinematic universe that died about a month after The Mummy died in North American theatres, thus sparing us superhero movies featuring the Invisible Man, the Hunchback of Notre Dame, and Abbott and Costello.
Did you know that Dracula Untold was the previous attempt to create a shared-universe Universal monster-hero franchise? And before that Hugh Jackman's Van Helsing: will Universal ever learn?
About the only good thing in the movie is Russell Crowe, approaching plumminess as monster-fighter Henry Jekyll (yes, that Jekyll, updated to the modern day). Crowe would really have killed it in those old Hammer Horror movies with Christopher Lee and/or Peter Cushing. I'm not kidding. He manages humour and a slight bit of gravitas despite being knee-capped by this ridiculous script, poor acting, and a frenetically desperate Tom Cruise as a bewilderingly unlikable lead character. Not recommended.
The Shape of Water (2017): written by Guillermo del Toro and Vanessa Taylor; directed by Guillermo del Toro; starring Sally Hawkins (Elisa), Michael Shannon (Strickland), Richard Jenkins (Giles), Octavia Spencer (Zelda), Michael Stuhlbarg (Hoffstetler), David Hewlett (Fleming), Nigel Bennett (Russkie), and Doug Jones (Creature from the Black Lagoon):
Guillermo del Toro is in a groove here he hasn't been in since Pan's Labyrinth, combining genres and stirring up emotional attachment in service to a gloriously melodramatic story handled with delicacy and sold through terrific performances by the entire cast.
It probably helps to have seen The Creature From the Black Lagoon and Revenge of the Creature. But it's not necessary. The film hits some surprising notes as it plays with a comment made in del Toro's last movie that was metafictionally about that movie -- in Crimson Peak, we're told that this is not a ghost story but rather a story with a ghost in it. Similarly, The Shape of Water is not a monster movie but rather a movie with a monster in it. Who the monster really is... well, that's part of the story too.
Sally Hawkins is wonderful as the protagonist, mute because of an old throat injury, feeling excluded by the world of Baltimore 1962 except for her best friends Richard Jenkins and Octavia Spencer. Hawkins' Elisa is a night-shift cleaning woman at a US military experimental facility, as is Spencer's character. Jenkins is Elisa's room-mate and confidante, a gay man trapped in a very ungay world and a painter whose career has stalled out due to alcoholism and changing tastes.
Then along comes Jones, Doug Jones, the go-to actor for soulful monsters and super freaks, this time out playing an amphibious biped captured in the Amazon and much, much more than he appears to be. Jones is terrific, too. Michael Stuhlbarg is also excellent as a scientist with his own secret agenda. Michael Shannon is scary and warped as the sadistic neat freak charged by the military with learning the Creature's secrets.
It all runs beautifully and, unusually for del Toro, without any stretches in which one longs for an editor to curb del Toro's tendency to extending a movie 10-15 minutes beyond its optimum length. You've seen elements of this story in everything from Beauty and the Beast to del Toro's Hellboy movies. It's the style and the little bits and the performances that make this one special in and of itself. Highly recommended.
Phoenix Forgotten (2017): written by Justin Barber and T.S. Nowlin; directed by Justin Barber; starring Luke Spencer Roberts (Josh), Chelsea Lopez (Ashley), and Justin Matthews (Mark):
Here in the real world, the Phoenix Lights that form the backbone of Phoenix Forgotten were a real thing.
In the movie, a young girl's teen-aged brother disappears along with two friends several days after the Phoenix Lights. Now at the age of 26, 20 years later, the sister and her camera-carrying dogsbody go In Search Of... Lost Brother.
Yes, Phoenix Forgotten is low-budget, found-footage horror. It's an enjoyable, low-key entry in this genre. And it involves UFO's instead of the supernatural, thus making it somewhat unique. The actors for both the 2017 and 1997 narratives are all quite charming.
The panicked flight of the missing teenagers across the rapidly darkening desert, recorded for posterity in its near-entirety because no one ever stops filming in these movies, has some fresh moments of terror. The actors sell panic at things unseen or barely glimpsed.
The makers don't stick the climax, though the coda is unique among these things as filming continues in what's really quite an unusual and, by the end, hilarious situation insofar as, Jesus Christ, that goddam camera can't be destroyed, it can only run out of battery power. Recommended.
Providence (2015-2017): written by Alan Moore; illustrated by Jacen Burrows:
Alan Moore called Providence a version of his own Watchmen for the cosmic horror of H.P. Lovecraft. I think he's wrong. It's much more like his terrific Jack the Ripper saga From Hell, illustrated by Eddie Campbell. There's a wealth of factual material especially as related to HPL's own life here, along with an almost encyclopedic tour through all of Lovecraft's fiction. The deadly Boston molasses flood shows up in one issue. That was a real thing !!! The ghouls who got sugar-coated corpses because of it, maybe not so real. I hope.
Technically, Providence is simply named for HPL's beloved home town in Rhode Island. The title accretes other meanings as the story proceeds.
For the first ten issues, we follow the adventures of Robert Black during the year 1920. He's a closeted gay man who has left his New York reporting job after the death of his lover to research various elements of New England legends and folklore.
Black's name riffs on Lovecraft pen-pal Robert Bloch, who would create Psycho, among other things. Like Bloch, Black originally hails from Wisconsin. Black's homosexuality plays on that of several other Lovecraft 'disciples,' some of whom (all of whom?) appear at least briefly in Providence.
The graphic novel rewards multiple readings and punishes the short attention span. Like Watchmen, Providence increases the density of its narrative by including lengthy prose pieces at the back of the comic book. This is Moore's densest comic-book work since From Hell with its 100+pages of appendices.
All one really needs to know is, um, all of H.P. Lovecraft. Well, no. Indeed, it would be interesting to tackle HPL's work AFTER reading Providence. Be sure to tell me how that goes if you try it!
The world of Providence isn't meant to be ours. One of the fascinating metafictional herein is Moore's use of the work of Robert W. Chambers, one of the acknowledged precursors to HPL in American horror. In the world of Providence there is no Chambers because elements of Chambers' stories exist in the real world -- most notably, state-sanctioned suicide booths.
But Lovecraft himself exists, and is a writer. And he's about to start writing that crazy Cthulhu Mythos stuff after apprenticing with Poe-influenced horror and works inspired by the wide-ranging whimsies of Lord Dunsany (who also appears as a character).
William S. Burroughs also briefly appears. The anecdote connecting Burroughs and one of HPL's disciples? That's totally true!
Moore's approach to the story privileges psychological and bodily horrors over those of the cosmic. This is a very cloachal approach to HPL's Cthulhu Mythos. The starkest moments of horror, three of them spaced throughout the book, deal with rape as the defining sin of cosmic horror. Providence is not for the squeamish. But the rape scenes are justified, and there's nothing risible about them. They're deeply horrifying.
One of the key structural elements of Providence is the format (and the idea) of the Commonplace Book. Robert Black keeps one on his journeys, containing both things he finds along the way (including a hilarious church newsletter) and his own musings. H.P. Lovecraft kept one. And Providence combines fact, fiction, comics, written sections, and an overwhelming array of different covers to give the work some flavour of the Commonplace. Make of all of this what you will. Providence rewards patient study.
To tell much more would be to give something away. Technically, Providence is both prequel and sequel to Moore and Burrows' The Courtyard and Neonomicon. Search them out!
As to Burrows' art -- it's perfectly suited to Moore's cold, clinical eye in Providence. It's a horror equivalent of Dave Gibbons' straightforward, subtle art on Moore and Gibbons' Watchmen. Burrows can draw horrible imaginings with great skill, but he's at his best throughout Providence giving the reader the creeps by being matter-of-fact and (seemingly) representational.
Oh, and the ghouls. Moore and Burrows' ghouls are unlike their forebears in HPL's own work. They're a terrific, funny, strangely lovable creation. Not that you would ever, ever want to meet them, in a subway station or a graveyard or in your own living room. In all, Providence is horrifying, sad, funny, satirical, scathing work from one of comic-book-writing's Grandmasters. Highest recommendation.
Get Out (2017): written and directed by Jordan Peele; starring Daniel Kaluuya (Chris Washington), Alison Williams (Rose Armitage), Catherine Keener (Dr. Armitage), Bradley Whitford (Dr. Armitage), Caleb Landry Jones (Dean Armitage), Marcus Henderson ('Walter'), Betty Gabriel ('Georgina'), LilRey Howery (Rod Williams of the TSA), and Stephen Root (Jim Hudson):
A zippy, suspenseful horror movie about racial relations. Rod Serling, who did so many allegorical stories on The Twilight Zone, would be proud of Jordan Peele's creepy, satirical story about an extraordinarily bad visit to the country by art photographer Chris (a great Daniel Kaluuya) to meet the parents (creepy Bradley Whitford and Catherine Keener) of his girlfriend of four months (Alison Williams, perfectly cast).
Peele builds the suspense gradually over the first half, lightening some scenes with comic-relief TSA agent/Chris's best pal Rod on the phone (one of the jokes is that Rod's paranoid fantasies about what rich white people want with black people is neither paranoid nor fantasy). The ending descends into cathartic violence that seems to comment on both current events and the tragic ending of George Romero's seminal Night of the Living Dead, with its heroic African-American protagonist.
Peele has a nice director's eye, giving us colour-saturated scenes of privileged gentility and night-time scenes of startling horror. The movie also nods to The Wicker Man (the original), Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery," and Star Trek episode "Spock's Brain" in interesting ways. I think Peele's just-announced Twilight Zone reboot should be a blast. Highly recommended.
Paperbacks from Hell: The Twisted History of 70's and 80's Horror Fiction (2017) by Grady Hendrix: A delightful book about the boom in horror paperbacks that lasted from roughly 1968 to 1993. What a time it was to be alive! I know! I was there!
Copiously illustrated. Maybe obscenely illustrated! Horror writer Grady Hendrix keeps things zipping along, aided by all the crazy covers from those paperbacks (and discussions of some of the more famous cover artists of the period). A chronological discussion of the era shares space with thematic discussions (Insects! Incest!) and pieces on notable writers of the boom.
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| Nazi leprechauns! |
The covers, though. Really, even if this were just a picture book, it would be worth the money, even for a casual horror reader. I'm not casual, so I really loved it.
Hendrix begins the story of his own infatuation with horror paperbacks by discussing his discovery of John Christopher's batshit-crazy novel The Little People, thanks to its batshit-crazy cover art.
Holy moley! I have to buy and read this book!
I noticed a few factual errors (most puzzlingly, the misidentification of the writer of Watership Down). But overall, Grady has an interestingly idiosyncratic take on the Golden Age of Paperback Horror, along with the reasons for its rise and fall. Will Errickson supplies an essay at the back of the book, along with a lot of help Hendrix gleaned from Too Much Horror Fiction. Highly recommended.
Gwendy's Button Box (2017) by Stephen King and Richard Chizmar: In 1974, twelve-year-old Castle Rock native Gwendy Peterson meets a man in black sitting on a park bench. He's peculiarly convincing but no pervert. No, he wants her to take on stewardship of a peculiar small wooden box covered with buttons. She's the best person for the job. And as compensation, the box dispenses rare silver dollars on occasion and one exquisite chocolate once a day.
So begins this peculiar, affecting coming-of-age novella/short novel (it's really an abbreviated kunstlerroman). King handed it in unfinished form to writer-editor-publisher Richard Chizmar, who came up with ways to finish the narrative. The two work seamlessly together. The prose is a bit leaner, perhaps, than the King norm, but I'd be hard-pressed to figure out who wrote what.
The gem here is the character of Gwendy, who is perfectly believeable in the midst of increasing weirdness centered on that box and those buttons. As to who the Man in Black is -- well, I'll leave that to you. He sure does like the word 'palaver.'
The horror in Gwendy's Button Box is mostly quiet and psychological, though King and Chizmar do throw in one gross-out scene, a brief one. In all, a rewarding, short read. Recommended.
Born To the Dark (Book Two of The Three Births of Daoloth) (2017) by Ramsey Campbell: In The Searching Dead (2016), narrator Dominick Sheldrake told of his early teen-aged years in 1952 Liverpool. Along with friends Roberta (Bobby) and Jim, Dominick encountered increasingly weird occult occurrences, though by the end of the book he alone faced the final horrors.
Now it's 1985 and Dominick is all grown up, teaching film studies at a Liverpool college, married, with a five-year-old son. But the son has a curious sleep disorder. A nurse recommends a new clinic specializing in successful treatment of this disorder. And Dominick finds himself plunged into new iterations of the horrors of the past.
Ramsey Campbell is at the height of his multitudinous powers in this, the middle novel of The Three Births of Daoloth. Narrated again at some time after the events of the novel by Dominick, Born To the Dark is cosmic horror amplified by Sheldrake's fears for his son, his friends, and his sanity. We view much of the cosmic terror through Sheldrake's son's descriptions of his dreams and the strange things and events lurking there. Somehow, this makes it worse.
Like many protagonists of horror novels, Dominick struggles to find someone -- anyone -- who will believe his story. And he also struggles with the consequences of telling his wife and others about the cosmic threat that seemingly only he sees: paranoia, abandonment, the threat of divorce, the threat of police action, public humiliation...
But this isn't simply psychological horror about an unjustifiably paranoid narrator. Something is coming, something worse than whatever it is that's already there. The novel climaxes with a lengthy journey into a place being undermined by an invading reality. And with a third book to go, there are (as Manly Wade Wellman once observed) Worse Things Waiting.
The characterization of Dom and the other characters is sharp, the mood and description unnerving throughout. As in many of H.P. Lovecraft's seminal tales of cosmic horror, Born To the Dark gives us a protagonist who continues to attempt to stop a rising tide of horror that is almost certainly beyond his powers to stop. Yet he persists. Highly recommended.
