The Cabin at the End of the World (2018) by Paul Tremblay

The Cabin at the End of the World (2018) by Paul Tremblay: Winner of the Horror Writers' Association Bram Stoker Award for Best Novel of 2018, this novel takes place at a remote vacation cabin in Maine. Gay couple Andrew and Eric and their pre-teen daughter Wen are enjoying their rural vacation when the End of the World starts, maybe, with a mysterious quartet of strangers arriving to tell them that the three of them have a pivotal role to play in the survival or damnation of all mankind.

I was a little surprised to see that this novel won the Bram Stoker -- until I remembered that the Bram Stoker has been increasingly wonky over the years with its selections. The Cabin at the End of the World isn't a bad novel. But it's not up to the standard set by Tremblay's first two horror novels, A Head Full of Ghosts and Disappearance at Devil's Rock.

As the novel ponders the capricious nature of gods and the horrifying precedents of all those Biblical stories that require the literal sacrifice of offspring, the machinery of its plot and the nature of that quartet, what they represent, and how they represent it... the whole thing ends up feeling like an episode of Supernatural, but with less philosophical depth and a lot less hand-to-hand combat. 

When tragedy comes, it's moving, but perhaps not to the extent that a more conventional portrayal of supernatural forces might have allowed for. God's machinery and ideology are cheap and threadbare, but the novel itself almost becomes a representation of that concept rather than a critique of it, much less an in-depth examination. 

Of course, maybe God isn't involved at all, and maybe the End of the World is not the End of the World. The novel's ending seems less ambiguous than those of Tremblay's first two horror novels. But there's still some wiggle room left for the reader to wonder whether the supernatural was ever involved, or just some folie a sept. Lightly recommended.

Sleeping Beauties (2017) by Stephen King and Owen King

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.

The Pretence (2013) by Ramsey Campbell

The Pretence (2013) by Ramsey Campbell: According to a New Age cult dubbed 'The Finalists,' tonight is the last night of the world. But that won't stop Paul Slater from flying home from his ailing mother's rest home to see wife Melanie and children Amy and Tom. And the world isn't going to end just because a cult says it is. And Paul does make it home.

While the philosophical backbone of this novella is the nature of belief, it's the increasingly fragile and desperate hold Paul Slater has on his family life that supplies the emotional engine of the whole thing. There are explanations for what happens as the story proceeds, but none of them could be considered authoritative. 

The enigmatic nature of the narrative echoes some of Robert Aickman's more mysterious stories, though with some decidedly contemporary imagery. Cell phones and texting assume a great amount of importance as the novella proceeds; so too do Slater's musings on the nature of digital information as a reduction of the mediated universe to a fragile and infinitely malleable storm of bits. Love may keep a person grounded, but what happens when the idea of ground gives way? Recommended.

Hidden (2015)

Hidden (2015): written and directed by The Duffer Brothers; starring Alexander Skarsgard (Ray), Andrea Riseborough (Claire), and Emily Alyn Lind (Zoe): Parents Ray and Claire and tennish daughter Zoe hide in an old bomb shelter. They've been there for 300 days and counting. Creatures they've dubbed "Breathers" hunt for them on the surface. Underground, the food is running out.

It's a simple set-up for a fairly straightforward film. The performances by all three actors are solid and low-key, as is the direction. Flashbacks fill us in on what brought the family to the shelter. 

Running barely 80 minutes, Hidden is an adequate survival thriller which may or may not have a few twists along the way. Though the biggest enemies for much of the movie are a stubborn water pump and a rat that's gotten into the food supply. A talking doll carried around by Zoe plays the role of Chekov's Gun. Lightly recommended.

The Zombie Survival Guide (2003) by Max Brooks

The Zombie Survival Guide (2003) by Max Brooks: This oddity predated Brooks' World War Z by a full three years. It's basically a set-up for that novel, a guide to surviving the zombie apocalypse written before the zombie apocalypse described in World War Z actually occurs by someone who seems to exist in the same universe as that of World War Z.

The key thing in the volume is an explanation of the zombie virus (dubbed 'Solanum'). There have been zombie outbreaks throughout history, our nameless guide-writer tells us, all caused by that mysterious virus.

Brooks differentiates his zombies from most others with one of the effects of this virus: the living dead are rendered poisonous to virtually anything that might regard them as carrion, from almost all bacteria to bears. Zombies who truly are edible carrion would, as many zombie nitpickers have noted, be pretty much neutralized as a threat in a couple of weeks.

With Solanum comes a couple of other effects: zombies don't digest the people and animals they eat, and zombies can only be killed with a head-shot. The former has been implied from time to time in some zombie movies; the latter has been a staple of zombie movies since at least George Romero's Night of the Living Dead.

I'd guess that this book would be pretty useful if one actually lived in Brooks' fictional universe. There's one glaring problem with Brooks' world both here and in World War Z: he drastically over-rates a silencer/suppressor's ability to muffle the noise of a handgun or rifle. 

This wouldn't be such a problem if the book didn't exhaustively detail all the 'noisy' things one shouldn't do (drive a car, yell, walk through tall grass) while nonetheless espousing the worth of silenced guns. Go look up silenced/suppressed decibel levels some time. They're definitely louder than walking through tall grass, cars (even cars without mufflers!) and pretty much everything else.

Brooks' unnamed writer also waxes eloquent about the efficacy of the Japanese samurai sword (or 'katana'). An entire Internet argument sprang up around this topic (and Michonne's use of the katana in The Walking Dead). The general consensus was that the katana is extremely difficult to wield and, wielded by a novice, has an alarming tendency to break. Oops.

There are long, tedious stretches throughout, the boredom and page-flipping arising from those sections which consist of check-lists for what one needs for certain zombie-apocalypse scenarios. Brooks really goes all-in on the idea that this guide is 'real.' And oh so boring in its details.

The most enjoyable parts consist of the entries on zombie attacks throughout history. Brooks apparently thought so too, as a subsequent book and graphic novel series described some of these millennia-spanning attacks in greater detail.  Brooks goes back to Ancient Egypt in terms of recorded encounters and even further back with cave paintings and other prehistoric artifacts suggesting that zombies have been around as long as Homo sapiens. The Zombie Survival Guide works best in concert with World War Z. Lightly recommended.

Handling the Undead (Hanteringen av odöda) (2005/ English translation 2009) by John Ajvide Lindqvist, translated by Ebba Segerberg

Handling the Undead (Hanteringen av odöda) (2005/ English translation 2009) by John Ajvide Lindqvist, translated by Ebba Segerberg: 

Handling the Undead is John Ajvide Lindqvist's second novel after the great, and marvelously adapted for Swedish film, Let the Right One In (2004). The first time around, Lindqvist looked at vampires with a fresh perspective. This time around it's zombies to not quite the same level of excellence as Let the Right One In. There's no shame in failing to match the earlier novel -- Let the Right One In is a truly great horror novel.

Handling the Undead presents zombies in a new light. All the recently dead in a specific part of Stockholm at a specific time one day come back to life. This is not a zombie apocalypse. There are perhaps 1500 of them, and they don't try to eat the living. They just try to get home if they can. Those that are buried have a hard time of this until the authorities figure out the parameters of the Resurrection and dig up those graves that should have the living dead in them.

The novel does concern itself with Why and How this event has happened. But it's more focused on three families handling their undead. 

Father David and son Magnus must deal with the return of the horribly disfigured Eva. She's David's wife and Magnus' mother, and she died in a car crash that occured almost simultaneously with the Resurrection. Of all the undead, Eva is the most intelligent and able to answer question, albeit vaguely.

Grandmother Elvy and granddaughter Flora have to deal with Elvy's undead husband who died a few days before the Resurrection after a decade of Alzheimer's. Oh, and Elvy and Flora are telepathic. And Elvy believes a mysterious spirit has told her that the Biblical Apocalypse is about to happen.

Reporter and grieving grandfather Mahler and his daughter Anna have to deal with the return of Anna's two-months-dead son Elias, who died soon after his sixth birthday from a fall from a window.

Meanwhile, lots of stuff happens in Sweden. Or at least Stockholm. The authorities round the dead up. Weird psychic phenomena start to happen. The undead that are extremely decayed cease to function. Is the Apocalypse at hand? And are these zombies ever going to eat someone?

Well, read it and see, I guess. Handling the Undead is a much shorter, less detailed, quieter novel than Let the Right One In. Too quiet, really, and the explanation for what has happened, when it comes, is just a little too goofy to be satisfying. 

As with the fantastic revelations at the end of Lindqvist's later Harbour, those in Handling the Undead don't so much satisfy as they undermine all the suspense and world-building that has come before. Despite all the uses of a very Stephen King-like "This isn't what was really there but only what the human mind can translate," the end sputters out in a most unsatisfying way. What has come before was pretty solid, but perhaps not enough to lift Handling the Undead above a Lightly Recommended.

Demons (2002) by John Shirley

Demons (2002) by John Shirley: Really a two-part novel with the halves composed about a decade apart. Demons starts as a splattery supernatural horror novel before metamorphosing into a reality-bending adventure about 100 pages in. One day in the near future, thousands of apparent demons of seven different varieties invade Earth and start killing, torturing, and acting like dicks on the Internet. And that's just the beginning.

The novel shifts into Philip K. Dick territory, and then shifts further into the sort of metaphysical science fantasy that Colin Wilson hit people on the head with back in the 1970's in bait-and-switch novels like The Space Vampires and The Mind Parasites. The philosophies espoused here are much more palatable than those in Wilson's novels. Moreover, Shirley keeps his characters fallible and the ground-level stakes in view. The scenes of horror towards the end of the novel are more Zombie Apocalypse than Demonic Invasion, but they're repeatedly framed in terms of human loss and sorrow.

I liked Demons a lot. Your response may vary depending on how much mystical lunacy you're willing to withstand. Recommended.

(Wo[e])Man vs. Supernature: The Road to Victory

End of Days (1999): written by Andrew W. Marlowe; directed by Peter Hyams; starring Arnold Schwarzenegger (Jericho), Gabriel Byrne (Lucifer), Robin Tunney (Bride of Satan), Kevin Pollak (Comic-relief Sidekick), CCH Pounder (Bad Detective), and Rod Steiger (Father Rod Steiger): 

Dumb, often inept apocalyptic action movie that basically recasts the plot of The Terminator in Judeo-Christian terms (well, that plot borrowed from the Annunciation, so sauce for the goose...) and makes the Terminator the hero. Well, Arnold Schwarzenegger isn't a robot. He's woefully miscast as a burned-out, alcoholic ex-cop-turned-security-grunt  mourning the murder of his wife and daughter at the hands of a criminal syndicate he testified against.

I mean, woefully miscast. Arnold may look like a lot of things, but despairing dissipation is not in his acting toolbox. This movie might have been marginally better with someone like Mickey Rourke in Arnold's role. However, I'm not asking for a remake.

The action sequences range from inept to competent. Kevin Pollak, as Arnold's comic-relief sidekick, has nothing to do and possesses absolutely no charisma or comic talent anyway. So we'll recast him with... oh, who cares?

The mystical Christian stuff gets dumber the more it's explained. You know you're in good hands when you note that they've got a Hebrew document upside-down in the opening credits. The screenwriter (who would go on to create the TV show Castle, so good for him) also invents an order of Catholic Monks (the Gregorians, a mistake caused by all those monks selling albums of Gregorian Chants, I'd wager). And a complete inversion of the meaning of End of the World in the Book of Revelation. And a priest named Thomas Aquinas, a name no one comments on. And so on, and so forth. Tuco's Dad (or was he Tuco's grandfather?) in Breaking Bad plays the Pope. Yay!

Arnold Schwarzenegger really works hard here, but he was getting old and the character was way, way out of his range. Rod Steiger shows up in his last studio film to chew the scenery and keep people interested for as long as he's on-screen. Arnold survives a crucifixion, harking back to Conan the Barbarian. Satan just wants to get a girl pregnant between 11 p.m. and midnight, New York Time, on December 31, 1999. Yes, it's very similar to Vigo the Carpathian's plan in Ghostbusters 2, where he has to possess Sigourney Weaver's baby by midnight on New Year's Eve. Ho hum.

The Satan Creature does look pretty good, so kudos to the Stan Winston Creature Shop. Too bad we only see it clearly for about 10 seconds. Gabriel Byrne does what he can with Satan the Man, but the script is terrible and Gabriel Byrne is not a threatening presence. Oh, well. Not recommended. 

Ghostbusters (2016): adapted by Katie Dippold and Paul Feig from the 1984 film written by Harold Ramis and Dan Aykroyd; directed by Paul Feig; starring Kristen Wiig (Erin), Melissa McCarthy (Abby), Kate McKinnon (Holtzmann), and Leslie Jones (Patty): Part valiant try, part corporate disaster. Paul Feig really wouldn't have been any of my choices to co-write or direct a Ghostbusters reboot. Edgar Wright would have been perfect, given his comfort level with visual effects and the effective integration of those effects into a comedy. 

Feig and co-screenwriter Katie Dippold don't have a clue when it comes to the fantastic elements of Ghostbusters. One of the charms of the original movie was that Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis wrote a screenplay that could have been played completely straight as a supernatural action movie pitting the forces of science against Lovecraftian horrors. In its comedic way, Ghostbusters (1984) is the greatest Humanity vs. The Supernatural movie ever made: it certainly presents a more believable battle with higher stakes than any Exorcist or Omen movie, and all without the creaky apparatus of Judeo-Christian apocalypticism. 

And that movie knew how to deploy its visual effects in service to its story and its comedy. This Ghostbusters just keeps throwing an escalating series of expensive visual effects at the screen in what looks by the end of the film like total panic by Feig and the studio. 

There's nothing wrong with the casting of the distaff new Ghostbusters. I particularly liked Leslie Jones as a subway guard with an encyclopedic knowledge of New York's history. But McCarthy, Wiig, McKinnon, and Jones would have benefited from better writing and a plot that actually builds: the movie goes from set-up to climax without any of the original film's middle complement of successful Ghostbuster operations. 

Chris Hemsworth's idiot receptionist is a clunky puzzle -- he may work as a very broad parody of genre portrayals of women, but he certainly doesn't work as a gender-flipped equivalent to Annie Potts' brassy receptionist from the original.

Beyond that, the villain is terribly uncompelling -- and the movie spends a lot of time trying to flesh out his character. The original wasn't saddled with this problem: Zuul was an approaching force, and William Atherton handled the role of secondary bureaucratic villain without any worries about his backstory. 

If there's any emblem of this movie's misguided nature, it's this: ghosts et al. now throw slime everywhere pretty much all the time, but especially when passing through solid objects. Some slime good, more slime am better, say Hollywood! And let's give Slimer a girlfriend and a car! Yeah. That's super. Not recommended.

Enclosed Spaces

Wind Chill (2007), JeruZalem (2015) and Quarantine (2008)

Terminator: Genisys (2015)

Terminator: Genisys: written by Laeta Kalogridis and Patrick Lussier, based on characters and situations created by James Cameron and Gale Ann Hurd, some of which were inspired by Outer Limits episodes written by Harlan Ellison; directed by Alan Taylor; starring Arnold Schwarzenegger (Guardian), Jason Clarke (John Connor), Emilia Clarke (Sarah Connor), Jai Courtney (Kyle Reese) and J.K. Simmons (O'Brien) (2015): Oh, what a terrible movie. About all one can charitably say about Terminator: Genisys is that it's competently directed and that Arnold Schwarzenegger has a few good moments as the old good-guy Terminator.

Otherwise, the movie makes a terrible hash out of the first two movies with a time-travel plot designed to negate all the significant events of the previous Terminator films and replace them with new, shoddier versions. It also gives us a strange, far-flung future of, um, 2017 in which everyone from the U.S. military to adolescent boys are ga-ga about a Cloud-based app that, umm, integrates all your computer-based systems. This is Genisys. Hoo ha.

There are mental workarounds to make the plot work, though they involve positing things the film doesn't seem to have thought of yet. And it's not an enjoyable enough film to give the benefit of fannish thought to. It's also perhaps the worst-cast big-budget movie I've seen in, perhaps, ever. Jason Clarke is vaguely serviceable as John Connor, who's now been played by almost as many different people on screen as Sherlock Holmes, but there's nothing in him to suggest the charismatic leader of the human resistance to Skynet and its machine army. Emilia Clarke (no relation, so far as I know), Daenerys in Game of Thrones, seems to have invested so much effort into creating an American accent that she can't reliably furnish adequate line readings.  And Jai Courtney is utterly without charisma or interest as Kyle Reese. 

The script compounds the problem by giving them almost nothing to work with. The movie spits out the famous lines from earlier Terminator movies in different forms and coming from different characters. This is what passes for wit. 

What also passes for wit is that Arnold's old Terminator (the 'Guardian' of the credits) now repeatedly plays Mr. Spock to Courtney's Dr. McCoy. Well, Star Trek and The Terminator ARE both Paramount properties. The action sequences are competent except in situations that give us cartoon physics. Oh, cartoon physics. How many human characters would die in action movies without you?

This being what looks to be a failed attempt to generate more Terminator movies, I feel obligated to warn you that the ending is conditional. Well, if you watch until about halfway through the credits, anyway. It's just one more bad taste in a movie full of them. The film-makers even seem to crib an explanation of how time works from a Star Trek episode penned by Harlan Ellison, who once got an out-of-court settlement based on the original film's similarities to two Outer Limits episodes he penned in the 1960's. Is another Terminator lawsuit in the works? Not recommended.

Extinction is Extinction

The Genocides by Thomas M. Disch (1965): It's 1980. Earth has been under siege for nearly eight years by giant, fast-growing plants. The cities have fallen. The environment is collapsing as the plants destroy all other plant species and the animals that rely upon them as a result. Basically, humanity has become a rat hiding in fields of 600-foot-tall corn. And now whoever or whatever sent the plants has sent out the exterminators.

To say that Thomas Disch's first novel is an astonishingly bleak end-of-the-world novel is an understatement. We begin in terrible shape. Things don't get better. The plot focuses on a small Minnesota farming community on the shores of Lake Superior. Well, not so much shores. The plants have been relentlessly draining the Great Lakes for years.

So the town of Tassel, much of its original location overrun, has moved to the newly draining bottom of Lake Superior. There, Anderson, the Christian fundamentalist patriarch of the town, attempts to push back the plants and feed his town by growing corn. Just keeping the corn going requires a maximum effort by the village. Anderson believes they are being tested by God. But if they are, then God has gone silent. Or his answer is simply 'No.'

Disch invests this short, terse novel with effectively chosen moments of Biblical imagery and language and the occasional quote. But The Genocides is about the failure of all of humanity's institutions in the face of a sublime and indifferent menace, not a world in which a Christian God actually exists. Or any other gods. 

The occasional scene of terror gives way to scenes of fumbling, racing panic. Our protagonists can only flee or die. Or flee and die. It's a rich, full life. Their numbers dwindle. Winter comes. Internal tensions begin to destroy Tassel almost as effectively as the invasion. Will whatever is behind all this ever show its face? Good question. 

Even at this young age, Disch was a skilled stylist and an occasionally sardonic chronicler of human frailties. Some of Anderson's choices as a leader are understandable yet almost unspeakably grotesque, none moreso than a sort of Uber-Calvinist imitation of communion. We may become invested in whether or not some of the other characters survive, but it's an investment kept at a remove: it's doom alone that ultimately counts.

Disch was never known as a technically inclined science fiction writer, but the science of The Genocides still seems ruthlessly pragmatic and sound. The plants, devoid of personality and agency, nonetheless become an extraordinarily effective foil for humanity's own inhumanity, and for humanity's world-reshaping mistakes. The Earth is at the mercy of the ultimate invasive species. The crops must grow. The weeds and the vermin must go. Highly recommended.

Eyes of God

The Reaping: written by Brian Russo, Carey Hayes, and Chad Hayes; directed by Stephen Hopkins; starring Hilary Swank (Katherine), David Morrissey (Doug) and Idris Elba (Ben) (2007): Dumb but good-looking horror film in that venerable sub-genre of the Christian apocalypse. Plagues start descending on a small, isolated Louisiana town. Plagues like the ten plagues of Egypt! Well, not quite, but the movie says they are.

So a female priest who's lost her faith after the death of her daughter and husband in the Sudan turns that loss of faith into the world's only university job as a debunker of miracles. That's Hilary Swank. And I'm not kidding.

She's even got Idris Elba as her scientist sidekick. And apparently they travel the world disproving miracles. And then she lectures about it at her Louisiana university. Does she have tenure? What department is she in? Did they pay a two-time Best Actress Oscar winner a lot for appearing in this movie? I hope so. They stick her in a peculiarly unfetching tank top for much of the film. Aren't there a lot of bugs in the bayou? Surely sleeves would be a good idea.

As this is a Hollywood production, debunking miracles proves to be an entirely bad thing, even though Hilary Swank saves a group of Chileans from an on-going toxic waste problem at the beginning of the film. But screw that, right?

Various shenanigans cause a bunch of residents of the Louisiana bayou town of Haven to call for Swank's help in solving the mystery of what appears to be a possessed girl and a mysterious murder. Pretty soon, dogs and cats are living together and there's mass hysteria. Also boils, blood for water, a rain of frogs, lice...

Stephen Rea periodically appears as a mostly useless Roman Catholic priest who knew Swank's character in Africa. He delivers some exposition that, as is de rigeur in dumb Christian horror movies, refers to absolutely nothing in terms of actual Christian mythology, and does so with great portentousness and absolutely no sense. Truly, he is Father Basil Exposition. Truly, God works in completely confusing ways so that the movie can go on for 100 minutes.

Stephen Hopkins directs in his usual competent way. There are a couple of nice moments involving locusts. Oh, and some fireballs. Lots of fireballs. Out of nowhere also comes the theft of a scene from the first Terminator movie. Don't worry. You'll know it when you see it. Not recommended.

Cube: written by Andre Bijelic, Vincenzo Natali, and Graeme Manson; directed by Vincenzo Natali; starring Maurice Dean Wint (Quentin), David Hewlett (Worth), Nicole de Boer (Leaven), Nicky Guadagni (Holloway), Andrew Miller (Kazan), Julian Richings (Alderson) and Wayne Robson (Rennes) (1997): Fun, occasionally thought-provoking bit of horror in which several people wake up in a trap-filled building that consists of cubes they need to move through to find a (hypothetical) exit. It's certainly better than most subsequent horror efforts in this bizarre sub-genre, riffing on "The Lady or the Tiger?" in a technological world. The writers and director have real talent.

Performances are the key, and Nicole de Boer (Star Trek: DS9) and David Hewlett (Stargate: Atlantis) do much of the heavy lifting, along with Maurice Dean Wint as a cop with anger-control issues. The sets (or should I say set, as only one cube-room was built to stand in for all of them) are clever, as are elements of the script. Mathematics is important, kids! And be nice to autistic people -- you'll never know when you might need one's help.

That the whole movie functions as an occasionally heavy-handed metaphor for life itself pretty much goes without saying. While there are a few gory moments, the whole thing is much more in the vein of classic Twilight Zone than it is the torture-porn horror movies that would follow it into the 'escape from horror prison' sub-genre. Recommended.

Armagideon Time for Mack the Knife

Excalibur, Orlando, Anti-Christ, and Mina Harker (l-r)

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century (1910, 1969, 2009): written by Alan Moore; illustrated by Kevin O'Neill (2009-2012): In the otherworld of Moore and O'Neill's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (LOEG) series, our fiction plays out as that world's fact. Focused on the myths and stories of Great Britain, LOEG may or may not be Moore's last comic-book series. This volume is now done, but an earlier story mashing up Captain Nemo's daughter, the crew of the Nautilus, and H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness awaits.

Literary mash-ups aren't new, and LOEG has been compared to many of its forebears (Silverlock, the Harold Shea series by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt, and the Wold Newton universe of Philip Jose Farmer are three prominent ancestors) and contemporaries (Kurt Busiek and Brent Anderson's Astro City, Warren Ellis and John Cassaday's Planetary).

No one in my experience, however, has gone more metafictionally mashy to such bizarre and telling effect. This can be frustrating at times (who the hell are some of these characters?), but overall the effect has been thrilling -- indeed, more and more thrilling, at least in a intellectual sense, as the series has continued to become less interested in the bones of conventional superhero narrative and more interested in the nature of story itself, its care and feeding, its rises and falls.

At first, Century seems straightforward: the League of 1910 (now comprising Mina Harker, Virginia Woolf's Orlando, Allan Quatermain, William Hope Hodgson's occult detective Carnacki the Ghost-finder, and British super-thief Raffles) seeks to stop sinister mystic Oliver Haddo from creating both a Moonchild and the Anti-Christ itself.

Subsequently, things go galloping off madly in all directions, including the direction of Bertholt Brecht's Threepenny Opera. There's a lot of singing in the three chapters. That Brecht's play was a major reference point for Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen probably shouldn't go uncommented. Andy Capp walks through several panels. Fictional characters crowd the background and foreground, most of them staring at the reader.

And there's 1969, and then there's 2009. Some of the major plot points are so weird and ultimately rewarding that there's no point in me spoiling them. The identity of the Anti-Christ manages to be hilarious, horrifying, and perfectly apt within this world of Great Britain's fictions, the narrative dream-time of an Empire's rise and fall. Meanwhile, in the United States, the Bartlet administration of The West Wing gives way to the Palmer administration of 24. Lost's Driveshaft releases a new album. The armies of different fictional Moon-dwellers clash on the Moon, observed by characters from The Wire and Homicide: Life on the Street. Whew.

Back in 1969, a rejuvenated Allan Quatermain suddenly looks a whole lot like Moore's John Constantine. Back in 1910, revelations about the Jack the Ripper killings fly by, almost unnoticed. From Hell? So it goes. Boy, does Moore ever seem to hate James Bond. Highly recommended, though on-line annotation sites are also highly recommended.

End of Dazed and Confused

Promethea Book 5, written by Alan Moore, illustrated by J.H. Williams III, Mick Gray and Jose Villarrubia (2003-2005; collected 2006): Promethea, the 1600-year-old demi-goddess whose current host/personality is young college student Sophie Bangs, will end the world if Bangs allows her to manifest again. So Bangs hides from the government and from herself in New York under an assumed name.

But the paranoid, increasingly militaristic U.S. government has recruited science-hero Tom Strong to track Promethea down because Strong knew one of Promethea's previous avatars back in the 1950's. Strong reluctantly agrees, but he doesn't believe that Promethea really means to end the world.

But she does. She has to. That's her job.

And so the end comes to the Earth of Moore's America's Best Comics imprint, ushered in by the unstoppable Promethea despite the best efforts of Tom Strong and the rest of that world's heroes. From the realms of fiction and poetry and magic and gods descends judgment on everything. But what does the end of the world actually look like?

Well, it doesn't look like the end of the world in Moore's Watchmen. Promethea is a much different bringer of catastrophe than Ozymandias. And violence is not a solution or a means to a solution.

Moore's 32-issue exegesis on magic and the nature of reality comes to a stunning end here, beautifully imagined by both Moore and his artistic collaborators J.H. Williams III, Mick Gray and Jose Villarrubia. This may be one of the most visually beautiful comic books ever created, and one of the most visually complex. It's not for everybody -- this is a didactic essay about Moore's actual beliefs ever since he decided to become a practicing magician (!) in the 1990's.

Images and iterations of the Kabbalah, the Tarot Deck, various occultists and pretty much every religion under the sun get combined and recombined within Moore's apocalyptic vision -- with the caveat that 'apocalypse' derives from the Greek word for "revelation" or "lifting of the veil."

Never has Aleister Crowley made so many appearances in a comic-book series not named Aleister Crowley. Hurry down doomsday! Highly recommended.

Too Many Vampires

The Passage by Justin Cronin (2010): The Passage caused a bidding war among publishers that topped out at $3.75 million for the publishing rights and an unknown (and probably greater) amount for Ridley Scott's purchase of the film rights. Pretty good for a third novel from a writer whose first two novels were acclaimed and awarded for their literary merit but, insofar as I know, lacked vampire apocalypses.

There are a lot of good things in The Passage, especially in the first 500 pages or so (it checks in at about 760 pages in trade paperback, with two more volumes of the trilogy on the way). Cronin has a flair for description and characterization that elevates this above the run-of-the-mill thriller, with passages of occasional lyric beauty and some keenly drawn sympathetic characters. The plot is suspenseful, the apocalypse nicely imagined. He's not so good at imagining the inside of unsympathetic characters, but that seems to be part of the ethos of the novel -- there's really only one truly despicable person in The Passage, and he isn't a vampire. Everyone else has his or her reasons.

We begin in 2016. A U.S. military-funded expedition to South America yields what appears to be the source of all vampire legends: a bat-carried virus that turns people into, well, vampires. They're super-strong, nearly invulnerable, extremely photo-sensitive, tear people to pieces and eat them an awful lot, and can transmit their affliction to others. They also lose all body hair and run around naked -- essentially, they're a cross between the vampire in F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu and Will Ferrell's character in Old School.

The military sees this a golden opportunity to "weaponize the human body", and begins experimenting with the virus in a secret Colorado laboratory. Things go well. And then they don't. They really, really don't. Boy, do they not go well at all.

We leave the major characters of the 2016-2018 portion of the novel behind at about the 250-page mark with the complete collapse of civilization well underway. A couple of vignettes take us through the next 93 years until we arrive at a small California mountain-top settlement that's survived the ongoing apocalypse, and we are introduced to our next cast of characters. Here, the novel shifts into a post-apocalyptic mode that recalls novels like A Canticle for Leibowitz, only with vampires and a lot of late teen-aged angst. Lots of stuff happens. And 500 pages later, we end on a cliffhanger.

There's a major logical flaw very early in the novel that may derail some of your appreciation for the work if you figure it out. I'm not telling you. Like Ontario, it's yours to discover. The first 500 pages really do zip by, with solid world- and character-building yoked to a rollercoaster of a plot. And what a rollercoaster!

No, seriously, what a rollercoaster! After 500 pages of reversals, apparent deaths, shocking developments, shocking returns from the dead, more shocking deaths, and a casino that explodes because of a 93-year-long build-up of sewer gases, I started to feel less like I was on a rollercoaster and more like I was being punched in the head repeatedly.

Cronin never runs out of ideas (though they're often other people's ideas synthesized into new combinations), but after awhile you may wish he would. Or save some for the sequel. As The Passage has often been compared to the first volume in The Lord of the Rings trilogy, I'll illustrate the problem with the climax using The Fellowship of the Ring: imagine if Gandalf and company fought a Balrog, then fought two Balrogs, then fought an army of Balrogs, and then found out that there were 500 more Balrogs between them and Mordor. Somewhere in the middle of all that, both Boromir and Gandalf die and then come back to life, only to die again. Or maybe not. Now imagine that scenario on speed. That's what the novel accelerates into, out of the blue and into the black.

By the end, there's too much of everything. So too much of everything. Two loveable animals killed for no discernible plot reason except to jerk some tears; two 'good' characters with what amount to superpowers; two Magical Negros (seriously -- it's as if Stephen King decided to have both Mother Abigail and John Coffey dispensing magical blackness in The Stand); two action set-pieces involving a train pursued by a horde of vampires; 12 vampire lords (actually, 13. Or maybe 14. Maybe it's an homage to the replicant-number problem in the original version of Blade Runner); so many teary farewells and subsequent teary hellos that I lost track; bioluminiscent vampires (which are I assume a satiric commentary on the sparkly vampires of Twilight); multiple nicknames for vampires, none of them being the obvious 'vampire' or 'vamps' (instead we get 'smokes' or 'jumps' or 'flyers'); one super-magical little girl; two dead characters who return from the dead and really, really shouldn't have; one fairly major character we know is doomed because he alone never gets an internal monologue; a seemingly haunted house; and repeated references to an academic conference more than a millennium after the outbreak of the vampire plague that recall Margaret Atwood's frame narrative for A Handmaid's Tale but which don't help at all with generating suspense.

This last one is quite interesting, as it's similar to what Max Brooks did in World War Z -- that is, contain the apocalypse within a shell narrative demonstrating that the end of the world did not, in fact, entirely arrive. It defangs the menace of the apocalypse (and the vampires), and I can't say as I think it's a good idea. Essentially, it puts a guardrail up for the weak of heart. Someone will survive! But one of the points of an apocalyptic narrative in the contemporary world is that someone may NOT survive, and you're supposed to read to the end to find out.

The dual trains-outracing-vampires sequences illustrate one of the problems with Narrative Overkill. The first sequence is startling, in part because the character describing the events can't actually see what's happening -- she can hear what's happening, she can respond to the reactions of the people around her who actually know what's happening, and she can describe what she learned later about what she was hearing. It's quite unnerving and evocative, and leaves a lot to the imagination, which is where a lot of great horror ultimately resides.

The second train sequence plays like a storyboard for a Mummy movie, with rivers of fast-moving vampires pursuing a train in what really reads like a description of a CGI scene from a big-budget film. It isn't evocative at all, or particularly scary, and the conclusion of this sequence also operates as a 'Get Out of Jail Free' card that immediately solves what might have actually been something of a messy plot problem. It's dull, it's manipulative, and it's completely inorganic. Remember when Spielberg couldn't restrain himself and had to give us a second 'bike flying through the air' sequence in E.T., only with more kids and far less impact? That's Cronin's problem here. He's too schematic in his attempts to top himself.

Overall, though, I enjoyed The Passage more than I was annoyed by it. The first 500 pages really are solid and sometimes spectacular; the last 260 pages are increasingly wearying and manipulative. I will be interested to read the middle book of the trilogy. Right now, Cronin could go either way as a thriller writer, and I'm interested to see which way that will be. Recommended.

Dead boys, Demons, Darkness

Comics:

The Sandman Presents The Dead Boy Detectives by Ed Brubaker, Bryan Talbot and Steve Leialoha: A slight delight almost entirely populated by characters created by Neil Gaiman during his Sandman days (hence 'The Sandman Presents'), including the two boarding-school ghost-friends from A Season of Mists and immortal Morpheus-pal Hob Gadling. The boys, who elected not to go with Death back in A Season of Mists, have been goofing off around London ever since, and have now opened a detective agency with its office in a treehouse in the yard of a haunted house. Street kids are disappearing and the turning up dead and extremely desiccated. So the dead boys take the case -- luckily, while most adults can't see them, kids and teenagers can. Various hijinks ensue. Recommended.


Books:

Darkness Demands by Simon Clark (2001): There's a sub-genre of horror in which a town is imperilled repeatedly by a horror which returns cyclically. In Stephen King's It, the creature has been terrorizing the town of Derry, Maine every 28 years or so since before there was even a town there; in Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes, Cooger and Dark's Pandemonium Shadow Show travelling carnival returns to the twons on its schedule at about the same frequency. In Darkness Demands, something that 'lives' beneath the massive English cemetery known locally as the Necropolis returns every 70 years or so to request things from randomly selected townspeople. The requests are minor -- bars of chocolate and pints of porter are to be left in the cemetery prior to a certain date. Failure to do so results in extremely bad luck for the person who refuses to do so, and for the entire town if enough people refuse to honour the request. What's doing it and why? Well, you'll have to read the novel. This is a very tightly plotted, suspenseful novel with a climax you may not see coming. Recommended.


A Lower Deep by Tom Piccirilli (2004): The narrator (referred to only as The Necromancer or The Master Summoner) and his demonic familiar Self find themselves pulled back into the machinations of the Necromancer's old coven leader, whose previous major feat of magic destroyed his previous coven with the exception of the narrator and a couple of others. Piccirilli draws on Christian, gnostic and kabbalist sources to portray the magic used by his characters, with a bit of Marvel's Dr. Strange thrown in for good measure (spells crackle and arc before being released). What seems like a pissing match between two former friends turns out to be something much larger, as a version of the Christian apocalypse begins to seem pretty much certain. Piccirilli plays fair with the implications of an apocalypse right out of the Book of Revelation -- would it be such a bad thing if one was on the side of the saved? -- while sketching in enough of the rules of magic so that the novel remains 'fair', even in its surprising final pages. Recommended.