Book Review: A Guide For Murdered Children

New year, new you, new thrillers! Coming up is A Guide For Murdered Children by Sarah Sparrow. Full disclosure, I got an advanced epub copy through Netgalley.

You are either going to love or hate this book.

The first half of the book is focused on setting up the premise; children who were murdered can possess the bodies of recently deceased adults, and exact vengeance on their murderer. They do this with the help of a Porter; a still living adult who can guide them through the process and provide moral support in a AA-type setting. Psychic alcoholic and disgraced cop Willow Millard Wylde (yes you read that right) digs up a cold case that he couldn’t forget, unbeknownst to him that the victims have returned to solve their own cases.

Some readers will be frustrated by the slow build. Sparrow takes her sweet gentle time getting to the point, and if you find her prose charming, in the first half at least it’s a fun, if macabre ride through Wylde’s scumbag past and that of the world of ghosts he refuses to want to understand. And if you don’t like it but hang on anyway, the premise is so original that half the tension comes from the fact that you haven’t read anything like this before, and you don’t know where it is going. I honestly really did enjoy the writing style in the first half, but Sparrow clearly struggles with resolution in the second half.

Unfortunately, while the premise is brilliant and new, many individual elements feel far more cliche. The villain has a unnecessarily long and utterly boring maniacal monologue, that, despite him crooning over a character I genuinely like who was at his mercy, I felt myself wishing he’d just shut up and murder the poor guy already. There are tired stereotypes about the mentally disabled that are as boring as they are offensive. The list of character names, like Willow Millard Wylde, Adelaide, Pace, etc sounds like a list of baby names compiled by a soon-to-be parent deadset on finding the most unique names possible and passed off to a panicking partner who helpfully suggests “Annie” and “Daniel” to balance things out. The way the women are written makes me somewhat suspicious that this is yet another case of a male author assuming a female name in the hopes of getting attention in the wake of Gone Girl. No one knows who Sarah Sparrow is yet, but I couldn’t help but wonder when Willow got a hot girlfriend decades younger named Dixie Rose.

A Guide For Murdered Children has a fantastic premise from an author who has real talent. The problem is Sparrow needs an editor who is willing to take a machete to whole sections of work and pluck the good parts out of the long, regurgitated mess that is the second half.

A Guide For Murdered Children will be published on March 20, 2018 and available wherever fine books are sold.

Megan “Spooky” Crittenden is a secluded writer who occasionally ventures from her home to give aid to traveling adventurers.

Women's Libation! Is A Tall Drink Of A Book

When I was in university, our women’s resource center would have a charity event every year called Women Who Rock. It was, essentially, a band show at a bar that featured female music groups of all sorts, and the bar also sold drinks with amazing names like Menstruation Sensation. When I finished reading Women’s Libation! Cocktails to Celebrate a Woman’s Right to Booze by Merrily Grashin, my immediate reaction was to mail a copy to each of my former volunteer mates. Finally, more inclusive drink names we could use!

Women’s Libation is in essence, a cocktail recipe book with illustrations and a page explaining the punny drink name. Feminists of yore are honored for their work, and moments in feminist history are marked. Nothing revolutionary, but it wasn’t meant to be. If you’ve never mixed drinks before, Grashin has you covered with a basic overview of the tools you need, methods to know and some common ingredients.

There are a few missteps here; not all the women in the book are exactly deserving of a cheers or a drink. Aung San Suu Kyi is honored with a twist on the Singapore sling, and Coco Chanel with the sangrita Mez Coco Chanel No 5.

Granted, that could just be poor timing as the book was likely completed months before Aung San Suu Kyi refused to speak out against the genocide in Myanmar. Still, this isn’t the first time she’s been quiet about violence against Muslims; the calls for the repeal of her Nobel Peace Prize are only the most recent and forceful criticisms against her. Coco Chanel I’m a bit more puzzled by. Now, there has yet to be any clear hard evidence that Chanel was an active Nazi agent, but there is some reason to believe that she was and at best being a Nazi wasn’t a deal breaker for her. I think if there’s any dispute about whether you are a Nazi, there’s only one drink for you.

Seriously, Chanel should have been bumped and Dorothy Parker honored with a Manhattan. That’s a huge missed opportunity!

Nevertheless, Women’s Libation! is a quirky recipe book sure to tickle your funny bone. While many of the blurbs may just be fact regurgitation, the drawings are adorable and the puns wonderfully groan worthy. As for the recipes themselves? They are twists on classics, nothing too crazy to make the drink unrecognizable and some like the Our Toddies, Ourselves are in my opinion an improvement on the standard. I didn’t get to test very many of them, but as a former bartender, so many of them looked good.  If nothing else, dear reader, I do believe this is an excellent resource for those bar fundraisers.  Why not replace all the cocktail names for the night?  I guarantee more money will be raised through drinks that way.

Cheers!

Women’s Libation! Cocktails to Celebrate a Woman’s Right to Booze By Merrily Grashin was published on November 7th, 2017, and is available wherever fine books are sold.

Megan “Spooky” Crittenden is a secluded writer who occasionally ventures from her home to give aid to traveling adventurers.

Artemis by Andy Weir Is A Bumpy Ride

Some authors become notorious for repeating themselves. When you read a Stephen King novel, chances are you’ll encounter things that you’ve seen in other Stephen King novels; black people with magical powers, an average looking middle aged schlubb with a smoking hot wife, a writer protagonist, etc. With Dan Brown, well, you’re going to get Dan Browned. There will be assassinations, conspiracies, and the most dubious presentation of fact that a simple google search will refute. Artemis is only Andy Weir’s second book, but after the success of The Martian he seems to be on track to repeat a formula that makes bank.

Jazz is a smuggler living in the moon city of Artemis. After failing to qualify as moon tour guide in an attempt to set up caches outside the multi-domed city, she is offered a very dubious job of committing corporate sabotage — cutting off the city’s supply of oxygen to allow a competing supplier to swoop in and save the day.

For the first half of the book Jazz is our tour guide and explains how a city on the moon could function. This is undoubtedly the strongest part of the book. It’s fun to think about, and fun to have it explained. Jazz in this part is witty, but unfortunately her humour turns juvenile and grating halfway through.

The social science of the book just doesn’t work very well. Nothing is technically illegal, Jazz says. No age of consent, just go too far and you’ll get beaten up for sleeping with a 14 year old or beating your wife. But said abused wife is presumably left with her abusive husband, who will certainly be more careful in making sure no one finds out rather than actually stopping. The pedophile is still free to do as he pleases. And yet the one cop in town is gunning to deport Jazz for smuggling in things like cigars, and she mentions being homeless is illegal. Is it intentional, then, that cigars and homelessness are more unforgivable on Artemis than domestic violence and sexual abuse? Probably not. Weir is here to tell you how a city on the moon could physically function. How it functions socially is far less thought out.

The plot depends on all the characters being super geniuses. Jazz can learn in an afternoon what most people dedicate years of academic study to learn. Artemis’s one and only cop Rudy puts Poirot, Sherlock, and Columbo collectively to shame, solving crimes instantaneously and without effort. Side characters have graphic calculators for brains and whip up solutions within seconds of thinking. This wasn’t terribly irritating in the first half of the book, but in the second half it becomes more and more unrealistic, and then conveniently when the plot needs to thicken they overlook obvious things.

Jazz is also a bit of a emotionally stunted psychopath, almost utterly incapable of empathy. Other character’s motivations are an utter mystery to her unless it’s spelled out for her. Other character’s feelings simply aren’t acknowledged or quickly dismissed. She does not stop to question as to whether the insanely dangerous sabotages she commits might be perilous to the city (spoiler: they are). Mostly, she just snarks at the reader about how attractive she is, how the domes of the city like boobs, and how the reader can stop pretending to know what a niqab is, you ignorant uncultured swine. The whole narration is a conversation between Jazz and the reader, and while at first I was rapt with attention, by the end of her story I was tired and knew she was full of shit. Andy Weir thanks a slew of women for helping him write a female narrator, but I’m not sure why when he just slapped the personality of a male teenager on Jazz and called it good.

Artemis is an entertaining read that suffers from poor characterization and overindulgent exposition. It has an excellent start but in the end when the fate of the city is at stake, I couldn’t help but wish that the entire book was about the first caper. When you know by the third caper that anything that can go wrong will go wrong, it gets a little difficult sitting through meticulous details of welding and the 100th slut shaming joke to get there. 

Megan “Spooky” Crittenden is a secluded writer who occasionally ventures from her home to give aid to traveling adventurers.

Blockbusters: Thor Ragnarok vs. Justice League

Superhero movies are big business these days and during the times when a genre is big business, everyone wants to be releasing as many of them as possible. That this eventually leads to a bubble is an article for another time. No, the point this time is that eventually there starts being some overlap between some releases, and since there were two major Superhero releases and I'm desperately trying to release some content, I thought I'd compare and contrast them, in a series of categories I'm more or less making up as I go.




Expectations:

Thor Ragnarok

As I've said on multiple occasions, I've got a little tired of the MCU lately, which gave Thor a pretty major uphill climb to start with, especially when you consider that the previous Thor movies are probably the weakest ones in the entire MCU, with the possible exception of Iron Man 2 (and that Hulk movie Marvel hopes we've all forgotten) and Thor: The Dark World is probably the worst of the MCU movies.

That said, there were reasons to expect some good things out of this. The director of this outing is Taika Waititi, who previously directed What We Do In The Shadows and Hunt For The Wilderpeople, both of which are excellent films that deserved to be watched. So perhaps, I thought to myself, this movie could be okay, could even be pretty good.

Justice League

If there was a bar that could be lower for a movie than the one for Justice League I don't know what it could be. To start, while Wonder Woman was a genuinely excellent movie, the other movies in the franchise range from Pretty Bad (Man of Steel) to Oh My God Make It Stop (Batman v. Superman). Add in the horrifying event Snyder's family endured during production, the switch between directors and the massive rounds of reshoots and recuts supposedly happening behind the scenes, and it seems like we're lucky the movie even came out at all.

The Casts:



Thor Ragnarok

Both of these movies are ensemble focused, and Thor has an incredibly impressive one. From our long standing series greats like Chris Hemsworth, Tom Hiddleston and Idris Elba, to our newcomers like Jeff Goldblum, Tessa Thompson and Cate Blanchett, the cast of this movie is a laundry list of great actors. All of them very attractive.

And they all turn in great work. Yeah we knew that Cate Blanchett would be giving us a great performance (and let me be clear, she's basically perfect) and Chris Hemsworth is a perfect Thor, but Jeff Goldblum's comic timing is still completely on point and it's shocking what a massive standout Tessa Thompson is, dominating the entire screen from the first scene she's in. I really hope we get to see more of her in later Marvel films, she's fantastic.



Justice League

Obviously the major standout from Justice League is was and always will be Gal Gadot. She's the central element of easily the best film in the DCEU. She's incredibly adept at selling her character and she totally dominates every scene she's in. The rest of the holdover cast is pretty good; Affleck still looks a little disinterested in this role, but he's getting better, Jeremy Irons is still great and hey, Cavill gets to act like a human being.

The new cast is a mixed bag. Erza Miller is genuinely entertaining as The Flash and while the movie doesn't give him a whole lot to do outside of punching things, I actually really liked Ray Fisher as Cyborg. The big letdown is, surprisingly, Jason Momoa. He's certainly a big guy and kind of cool outside the movie, but something about him is just not clicking with his performance. He has shockingly little screen presence in movie and between this and his performance in Conan, I'm starting to worry his good performance as Khal Drogo was a fluke (Note: I haven't seen Stargate Atlantis).

Story and Script:

Thor Ragnarok

Our story this time around starts out as yet another Thor story: Thor is flung out of Asgard, Asgard is in peril in his absence, he must find his way back, he's got Loki (who remains a treacherous little s**t) and some other secondary characters at his back. You get the basic idea, we've seen it twice before.

But then something odd happens around the midpoint. Once the film finally gets its plot squared away, it becomes a well written character focused piece with metaphors about owning your history and making up for your family's mistakes. There's a lot of good character work and fantastic dialogue in the latter half, that really kept me involved in the final battle, something that a lot of MCU movies have had trouble doing.



Justice League

It's the plot of The Avengers. I don't want to trash it, it's a good solid foundation for a plot, but well, there's a magical square shaped macguffin that a guy from outer space is looking for so he can open a portal to a place where his army is waiting, requiring a group of heroes to team up to bring him down, even though they don't initially get along. It's just the plot of The Avengers with the names replaced a couple extra beats.

It's in those extra beats that we see the scars of the film's long and troubled production, with several moments are so tonally out of step with not only the rest of the film but the rest of the DCEU that it might as well be playing in a different theater. The film is clearly pretending that huge chunks of Batman v. Superman either didn't happen or happened completely differently than it did, and while everyone has seen the fun scene where Batman and Flash are talking about getting into a fight, that scene is in the middle of a sequence where Steppenwolf is torturing and murdering civilians. The film is clearly the result of a troubled production and occasionally seems to have been edited with a machete.

Action:



Thor Ragnarok

For a superhero film, Thor is surprisingly light on the action, preferring to spend most of its 2nd act in character work, with only the fight between Thor and the Hulk (plus occasional jumps back to Asgard) really doing most of the action. It heats up in the third act and the final action beat is incredibly engaging, but up until that point, it's pretty dialogue focused. That's not a complaint, I like that about it.

Justice League

This is one of those places where Justice League is an unambiguous success. From Gal Gadot's incredible physical presence to the way they actually manage to include Cyborg and Batman in the action scenes to even the way they manage to make Flash work. Yes, I'm still waiting for a better film visualization of super speed than the one in Days of Future Past, but this one is still pretty good... even if the lightning surrounding the Flash never stops looking silly.

Conclusion:

I could not have gone into these two movie with lower expectations than these two, so I will say that both managed to surprise me. I expected to hate Justice League and honestly, I can honestly say that I didn't even dislike it. Heck, I may have even kind of liked it. I might see it again when it hits DVD.

But in every comparison episode, there must always be a winner, and this time around, the clear winner is Thor Ragnarok, shooting up the roster of Best MCU Movie to land near the top and giving me hope for the megafranchise yet. So if you've somehow gotten to December without seeing both of these, give them both a shot.

But go see Thor first.

Elessar is a 27 year old Alaskan-born, Connecticut-based, cinephile with an obsession with The Room and a god complex. 

Ghost in the Shell Film Analysis Part III: Setting

We really need to talk about future Japan, because it’s fascinating. The film has several things present from the manga and the anime films, as it is to be expected, but the filmmakers infused the setting with its own originality.

That right there is a cool video showing what I’m talking about. It compares some filming locations in Hong Kong with the film. The work they did is astonishing.

While some people might be annoyed by the fact that no characters other than some Japanese background extras and Chief Aramaki seem to speak actual Japanese on-screen, I’m actually not all that bothered by it. The film establishes a possible reason for this at the outset. When the Hanka Robotics rep that gets brain-hacked and the President of the African Federation are having a business meeting, the Hanka rep plays a recording of a child singing in French. It’s his daughter, and he tells the President of the African Federation that in the time that it took his daughter learn Au claire de la lune (a French folk song), she learned the entirety of the French language. Done.

Clearly the daughter has the latest language implant tech, unlike our adult characters who each speak in their respective languages — nonetheless they can still understand each other. Yes, I know; this is a lazy way of not including too many foreign languages in order to, in a business exec’s mind, not to alienate the US audience and so on, but at least it’s supported by the setting itself. And it’s not an something paraded in front of us, either.

Major Mira Killian has fake memories in her brain, implanted by Dr. Ouelet as ‘motivation’ to fight terrorists with Section 9. You see, the story goes that she came into Japan in a refugee boat that was blown up by a terrorist attack. The damage was so bad that she lost almost all of her body. Leaving aside the fact that this revelation that comes near the climax, while a surprise, it’s already substantiated by the poor garbage truck driver that had fake memories hacked into him by Kuze. It should tell us something about the setting that the Major finds it plausible that she came in a refugee boat.

The Japan in the film is more ethnically diverse than today’s Japan; many ethnicities can be seen in the background. There’s a particular shot that shows this best; what better way to convey the changing face of the film’s Japan than by doing a close up of a Black Buddhist? It plays with the stereotype, even though, in the real world there are Buddhists who are black, it’s not what is usually pictured when we hear the word ‘Buddhism’.

I like the symmetry in the shot, too.

Today’s Japan is a nation that’s estimated to be 98,5% ethnically Japanese; it’s a fairly homogeneous country. Clearly, as the film’s cyberpunk world emerged, in typical cyberpunk fashion, other nations buckled under the power of megacorps and destabilized, causing an influx of refugees.

A lot of cyberpunk works would be set inside of one of this megacorp-run nations, or in another sort of dystopia. Something that has always made the Ghost in the Shell franchise unique is that, in contrast to other works, in future Japan the rule of law still pervades hard, as pointed out in the first confrontation between Cutter and Chief Aramaki — Aramaki immediately dismisses the notion that the Prime Minister would take Cutter’s word over his own. Which makes it extra brilliant, in a way, that the live-action adaptation updates future Japan to be more ethnically diverse, because of course refugees would strive to go to the most stable nation possible in times of strife. It’s kind of a subtle nod to the situation we are living in right now in the world.

That’s not to say there aren’t any shady buisness deals or anything. Major Mira Killian and Batou at some point shoot up some sort of yakuza underground club, not to mention the whole of the unethical experiments tied to Project 2571, the one that resulted in the creation of the Major. There’s also a scene where some shady trafficker, when Batou and the Major are on the way to the marketplace, attempts to sell the Major some black-market body parts or something.

In general the street scenes are amazing.
Look at the background details.

I don’t know where to put this, but the film thinks itself very clever when it turns out that, before the Major, there has been other 98 people that have been experimented on to become full-body cyborgs and weapons useful to the Major. So this makes Major Mira Killian the 99th test subject, a human-machine dream combination, working at Section 9.

I told you future Japan was fascinating.


Rosario is an early-twenties, outspoken woman, who likes to burrow between piles of books, and store miscellaneous trivia in her head.

Remaketober 2017 Week 3: The Last House on the Left

Wes Craven was such a towering figure in the horror genre, it's hard to remember that his ratio of good movies to not good movies was...tenuous at best. Oh he's definitely got some classics in there and a few just straight up good movies, he's also got a lot of stuff I don't think is very good (I hate the Scream franchise. There, I said it, I can't unsay it). But that makes the stuff that is worth defending very, very much worth defending.

1972:


Going to bat for The Last House on the Left is one of those things that makes me feel uncomfortable, because it's a very rough movie to actually watch. I end up defending it in the same spirit as I often end up defending Irreversible or Dogtooth, or maybe some of Cronenberg's more extreme work. It's definitely not for everyone and should come with a laundry list of warnings and caveats, but damned if it doesn't totally grab my attention the entire time I'm watching it.

Of course while Dogtooth or Videodrome are buoyed past their difficult to stomach content by some incredible filmmaking and solid themes, The Last House on the Left is much rawer, the filmmaking much less solid, but in a way that almost works in its favor. Its a punk rock approach to filmmaking, in the vein of Clerks or maybe Evil Dead, with enthusiasm and raw talent making up for a lack of polish.

Speaking of, one of the other things that gives the film a big boost is how relevant it feels to the moment it came out. I'm sure other critics have noticed the similarities in how the film is shot to footage coming out of Vietnam during during the same time, which gives the film a sense of reality that makes the horrifying goings on even more horrifying, especially given the similarities Krug and his gang have to the then-current Manson family.

None of this is to say the film is flawless, its still got some issues (mostly due to an on set learning curve that trips up...well basically everyone but the Coen Brothers). First movies are always a little rawer and shakily put together, but a good director can still take that and make a great movie. The Last House on the Left is a very hard to watch film, but its definitely one with an impact and and style that would be hard to replicate.

2009:


Which is why I suppose the remake didn't even bother to try. There were lots of directions the remake could have gone, from updating the imagery and themes to be more in line with the Iraq war footage of the time to putting it more in line with the then popular (albeit on its last legs) torture porn subgenre, and I half expected the latter going in. But I didn't expect the movie to just sort of...sit there.

To be clear, when remaking a movie whose primary selling points were its shocking content and how incredibly raw and of-the-moment the filmmaking was, you need to add a new selling point. The slick, high cost production value automatically discards the intensity and sense of reality given by the original's style and obviously the content can't be as shocking given that its just a recreation of the existing content (and, if we're being honest, far less extreme than other contemporary horror films like Saw, although given how much I hate Saw and its contemporaries, that's not a complaint).

Instead the movie just recreates the basic outline of the original film with only a vain attempt at a happy ending inserted to make you feel like there's a difference, which is missing the point a fair bit. Maybe if the film had ended Texas Chainsaw style, with the sense that even though some of the victims survived, they're permanently scarred by the experience, but the film can't even manage that much.

I've reviewed a lot of bad remakes for Remaketober, but aside from maybe the shot-for-shot remake of Psycho, this is probably the most pointless remake I've ever covered. Questions of whether it's good or bad don't even enter into it, it just has no reason to exist. If the original film is equivalent to Clerks then the remake is equivalent to Mallrats; the same basic bones of the story but somehow infinitely more soulless and empty inside.


Elessar is a 27 year old Alaskan-born, Connecticut-based, cinephile with an obsession with The Room and a god complex. 

Ghost in the Shell Film Review

Yes, yes. This should have come out a long time ago. Now, let’s get on with it!

The Ghost in the Shell live-action film has had some… troubles, to say the least. Box office troubles, to be specific, since 41 million dollars of revenue as of this writing is a flop. The white-washing  didn’t help, as well as the sad, sad, fact that Paramount doesn’t seem to get why this is important, which can be frustrating for advocates and activists. From the outset, I’m not going to delve into any white-washing issues in any depth since a great deal of commentary has been made elsewhere, far more eloquently and by people more knowledgeable of the topic than I can ever hope to be. In fact, I linked you to very good resources about some of the discourse surrounding white-washing at the beginning of my write-up about the Ghost in the Shell live-action film preview.

But there is still plenty to say about it. This will be your only warning, there will be spoilers. You all have been forewarned; let us summarize the plot:

The Major (Scarlett Johansson) is a full-body cyborg, a human brain in a synthetic shell, made in a project headed by Dr. Ouelet (Juliette Binoche) and Hanka Robotics CEO Cutter (Peter Ferdinando). Her amazing mechanical body confers her all sorts of abilities, such as enhanced strength, than come in handy in the film’s numerous fight scenes. Then, a Hanka Robotics representative  gets brain-hacked and killed. So our protagonist, who happens to be part of a government counter-terrorism division called Section 9, starts investigating the crime with her trusted companion, Batou (Pilou Asbæk). Eventually they find out, after another murder, that the question they should be looking to answer is ‘who is targeting high-level employees of the Hanka Robotics megacorp?’

Not ominous at all.

When that becomes apparent, Dr. Ouelet becomes a target, so she has to be rescued by her cyborg-baby, The Major. After this, she figures out a way to contact the killer, who calls himself ‘Kuze’. It turns out Kuze is the cyborg prototype that came before her in the project that made her, and that Hanka has taken their memories. Kuze’s motivations is to gain back what he has lost, his memories. This causes a rift between the Major and Dr. Ouelet, and Cutter orders Dr. Ouelet to kill the Major. Rather than killing off the Major or wipe out her current set of memories, Dr. Ouelet chooses to give the Major back the memories from her previous life and to save her life, which makes Cutter kill Dr. Ouelet. The Major becomes a fugitive; she faces off with a giant robot controlled by Cutter, and wins epically. Then she finds her biological mum and newfound satisfaction in her job. The end.

Huh, will you look at that? I managed to avoid spoiling the film too much.

The film, quite subtly for your standard sci-fi Hollywood fare, deals with themes of personhood, consent and transhumanism. Unlike most cyberpunk films, it avoids pontificating that cybernetics will eat your soul; transhumanist body modification is just something people do. I have no idea if the creators intended this as an explicitly feminist theme, but the theme of consent is very thematically important. One character, Dr. Ouelet, committed such a grievous violation by tampering with the minds and bodies of societal rejects, that she had to die to redeem herself. Even if the film is a bit in-your-face about it, it can be fairly satisfying; it’s not just mindless entertainment.

The action is pretty cool, too.

Okay, I totally lied. You also need to know the twist: Section 9’s Major Mira Killian is in reality the brain-in-a-jar version of runaway Motoko Kusanagi, who had her memories wiped out in a shady experiment to turn her into a weapon. Her biological mum is Japanese. Holy white-whashing.

Score

 I award this film 7/10.

The Ghost in the Shell live-action film has lots going for it. It’s a solid action piece that makes the fullest of the tech inherent to the setting, most action scenes are well-edited, creative and entertaining. The world is very well-developed and I, personally, find it believable on several levels. However, it has one Big Issue: Racism. It’s embedded in the world-building in a very icky way. A review is too short a format for me to expand on that, but watch out for my Ghost in the Shell analysis pieces!

In absence of the racism, I would have awarded this film a 8/10 score, due to some editing and pacing issues, musical score, etc. And, even in the presence of racism, I cannot award it a 5/10, because this is not a mediocre film, and I cannot say it’s 6/10 because, clearly in themes and other aspects, a lot of thought went into making this film. But racism is such a big disqualifier, that I have to reflect in my score somehow and this is why the Ghost in the Shell film gets 7/10.

That said, can I, in good conscience, recommend any readers to watch this film? No, I cannot. If you care about diversity, about being respectful, about being mindful of the impact our actions and choices have on people, then I think you shouldn’t spend the green in your pocket on this film in any way or form, even merchandise. I cannot stop you if you want to see this film anyway, and it’s not a bad experience; but I’d really rather you didn’t.

Rosario is an early-twenties, outspoken woman, who likes to burrow between piles of books, and store miscellaneous trivia in her head.

Remaketober 2017 Week 2: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre

In the last 2 years we have lost so many iconic and influential people from every aspect of entertainment, from film, to music to literature, that some of them began to run together a tiny bit. I don't think that's totally fair to some of the people who passed on who may have helped inspire hundreds of people, to say nothing of some who helped kickstart entire subgenres. So while I wanted to address It for my first week of Remaketober (partially to spare me having to write it its own review) for the rest of the month, I'm going to be addressing movies by some dearly departed horror icons.


1974:

When I say the title of this movie, I feel like it's a title people who don't know movies don't take super seriously, and I understand that. The title is a silly one, evoking the schlocky movies titles of its era that were so ubiquitous that they were eventually spoofed in a movie written by Rita Mae Brown. So when I say that this movie is one worth taking seriously, I occasionally get odd looks.

Still, when you actually sit down to watch this movie, its always surprising how restrained it is. Not that the content isn't grim and horrifying, but its not the blood splattered gore fest that the title evokes in your mind. The amount of blood is bordering on nonexistent, kept mostly in cutaways and off screen, but it gets its point across nonetheless.

Honestly, while the title grabs your attention, the thing that sticks with you about this movie is the pervading sense of dread and horror that saturates every frame. Even before the actual violence begins,  it manages to give you the sense that something isn't right. Once the violence actually does begin, it's so intense that by the time the film rolls into its legendary finale, the horrifying ending is almost a relief. Sure, that final image will haunt your nightmares, but at least you survived the movie.

It's not a perfect film, occasionally reflecting its low budget and on-set learning curve, but the energy and intensity are enough to overcome how cheap it was and its occasional weak pacing. It's a real low budget success story, a shining example to anyone who ever wanted to become a filmmaker but doesn't have the money to pull a Tommy Wiseau. And it's definitely a timeless sort of movie that in no way needed a remake.

2003:

I f**king HATE this movie. I hate every worthless second of it. Everything that was good about the original, every interesting idea it had in its head, every unique stylistic choice, everything that made the original movie noteworthy and worthwhile is stripped down to an utterly generic slasher flick. The only notable things about it are how sadistic it is and by extension that it was one of the films that helped kickstart the torture porn wave that enveloped and devoured the horror genre for over half a decade.

It's actually kind of ironic: With its dark visuals and gleeful embrace of gore and torture porn, this film has a lot more in common with the silly movies which it title resembles than the original. It has a couple of reasonably effective sequences, but honestly, there's very little that's worth discussing about this film.

The script is weak and lifeless, with one dimensional characters and all the subtly and interest from the original drained in favor of turning Leatherface into a Jason knockoff. Most of its direction is similarly awful; director Marcus Nispel being a reasonably successful music video director before this movie (and it shows, since the movie is moving way too fast and scaring you way too little) but would go on after this film to direct some of the worst movies of the 2000s such as 2007's Pathfinder, 2011's Conan and 2009's Friday the 13th...stay tuned.

There's more I could probably summon to say about this awful awful movie, from its terrible acting to its somehow even worse prequel but honestly, I've been done with spending time and energy on it. And to be even more honest, given that they're making another goddamn Saw movie, I'm worried that giving this movie too much attention will cause the torture porn wave to come back. So I'm just going to quietly end this review and move on.

Elessar is a 27 year old Alaskan-born, Connecticut-based, cinephile with an obsession with The Room and a god complex. 

Praise Amaat, Ann Leckie's New Book Is Out

2015 was an innocent time, if you can remember that far back. That was what, eighty years ago? Yet I remember it like it was yesterday; the world seemed sane, and Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radch trilogy concluded with Ancillary Mercy. It was a bittersweet read, as I just wasn’t ready to say goodbye to Breq and friends. Leckie said she was likely to return to the universe, and lo, she has delivered. Provenance is a new stand alone novel in the same setting, where the conclusion of The Imperial Radch has set the wheels of change throughout the whole galaxy.

Ingray has a hard time impressing her adoptive mother. In Hwae society, the head of the household passes their name onto a selected heir, and Ingray’s brother is shaping up to be first choice. Ingray concocts a scheme that will see her broke, but will not fail to get attention: bust the disgraced Pahlad out of a prison that no one has ever escaped from and find out where e hid the priceless artifacts e had stolen. But that was the easy part; the hard part is a murder conspiracy that gets in the way!

After the events of Ancillary Mercy, at first this book seems like a step backward. The Hwae are far from the Radch, and the civil war there is only a matter of gossip and speculation. The situation that Ingray has found herself in, however, becomes increasingly large-scale as the story progresses. What might have been an inter-family struggle slowly boils up to a simmering threat of war.

And it is a slow boil. Much of the book is discussion between characters about what other characters might possibly be thinking or doing, but it’s okay because Provenance is primarily a mystery wrapped up in science fiction. Ingray is no Poirot, but through conversation she works her way through what the hell is going on and how to move from one crazy plan to another, not unlike how Agatha Christie’s detectives arrived at the truth. Unlike many cozy mysteries, Leckie avoids sticking to any type of formula. The plot seems to be going one way before a amphibious alien piloting a mech drops in on the scene to complicate things even further for poor Ingray, and that’s just one example of the kinds of roadblocks that pop up unexpectedly.

I’ll admit, I really miss Breq and the Radchaai, and practically cheered when a Radchaai side character showed up (then I turned on the kettle because I always think, “You know what would be rad? Chai.”). That said, I’m glad we got to have a look outside the empire, and I’m very glad that Leckie is still playing with gender. The Hwae have three gender classifications, which the Radch evidently still have trouble with. Once a person comes of age, they can announce their preferred gender pronouns. Like in the Imperial Radch trilogy, the primary focus is not on gender at all, but it does play it’s part in the general themes of identity and belonging. Like Breq, Ingray and Pahlad (or is it Garal?) do not know exactly where they belong. While it is acceptable on Hwae to declare gender identity and have it respected, changing names, changing allegiances, and challenging tradition while still honoring the past are central themes of this book. Why, yes, there’s alien politics and mysteries to solve, but as in Imperial Radch, there is more to the story than just fun sci-fi adventures.

The only criticism I have for the book is that Ingray’s motivation for her original harebrained scheme does not align with the unsure, meek girl we spend most of our time with. The synopsis in the book cover describes her as “ambitious”, but for the most part she is coasting on what is expected of her rather than acting out of a desire to win a title. I understand that her mother expects her to take risks, but she puts herself in a huge amount of debt and risks her very position in the family in the first few pages. Ingray is much smarter and collected than she gives herself credit for, but her reasoning for busting Pahlad/Garal out of Compassionate Removal just never seemed in character, especially reflecting back after the ending.

I didn’t love Provenance as much as I did Ancillary Justice, but I loved Ancillary Justice enough to stay up until four am reading. Provenance didn’t keep me up late at night, but I still happily zipped through it in just three days and it is a worthy addition to the universe Leckie has created.

Provenance was published by Orbit and released on September 26, 2017, and is available wherever fine books are sold.  

Megan “Spooky” Crittenden is a secluded writer who occasionally ventures from her home to give aid to traveling adventurers.

Remaketober 2017 Week 1: IT

Hello ladies, gentlemen and anyone who subscribes to something else, and welcome to the greatest time the year: Remaketober! What is Remaketober, I hear you ask? Well each week of October, I will watch a horror movie and its remake(s). It's been an October tradition for me for years and I look forward to it all year. And this year I thought I would kick things off with the movie of the hour, Stephen King's It.

1990: 


So, here then is my dirty little secret as a horror fan: I'm not really into Stephen King's books. Oh, he's a good writer and he's made some great stories, I've just never been able to get into his writing style. Something about it just keeps me at arm's length and I never get totally into it. So when I say It, a decades spanning, thousand plus pages, multi-part epic is one of the few King books I've actually read, it means something.

This 1990 miniseries is a particular, odd kind of bad movie. It has one central element that works so well that it outshines the rest of the movie in your memory, until, years later, all you can remember is that one element. Its only when you return to visit it again that you realize how much the rest of the movie doesn't work and is in conflict with the one element that kicks ass. And then the clown shows up again and I collapse into a sobbing wreck.

Yes, it seems odd to say about the movie that I still reference as the source of clowns being my major phobia, but overall, this miniseries just does not work. It, rather unwisely, attempts to jam together the entirety of the book, which was already overly long and wonkily paced, which just leads to an adaptation that's punishingly long at over 3 hours and never seems to build up much steam.

The big issue is trying to shove both the kids story and the adults story into the same movie and using a back and forth flashback style narrative, which just undercuts the tension and stretches everything out. We know none of the kids in the 1950s story are going to die because we see them as adults, so the tension just gets sucked out of the room.. Combined with the start-stop pacing of the story and the occasionally sucky special effects, and it's hard to take the majority of the film seriously.

If there's one thing worth keeping in the film, it's Tim Curry's performance as Pennywise, but he actually pinpoints one of the problems. Curry is not what we'd call a restrained performer but he works best when the entire movie goes along with him. The majority of the movie isn't over the top enough to contain Tim Curry and doesn't have the budget or skill to realize some of its better ideas. So while Curry is really excellent, and incredibly memorable, the rest of the movie just can't keep up.

2017:

The first and smartest decision this movie is to cut out the second half of the story and save it for a hypothetical sequel (although given that this movie has blown past 500 million and counting gross on a 35 million budget, that sequel is probably not hypothetical anymore). The kids story has always been the more compelling aspect of the story, since the adults story tends to get more mired in the cliches of Stephen King and just dragged down into stuff I don't care about.

This movie takes the bare bones of the kids storyline from the book, shifts it up to the 1980s (so that the adult story can take place in the modern day) and gives it a makeover.  It removes the monster-mashup style of Pennywise's attacks and creating original monsters to haunt the children, leaving a good portion of the movie pants-sh***ingly scary.

The movie still has flaws, mostly losing steam gradually in the second half and an ending that is a pretty obvious sequel hook, but it manages to improve in all the ways it counts. Even Bill Skarsgard manages to find a unique take on the character of Pennywise, and manages to be a compelling screen presence. The plot structure and acting are also big steps up from the 1990 original.

Of course, it is a little unfair to compare the movies, since the 2017 film is only telling half the story, and the more compelling half at that. The second half, with the adults and the weird underdeveloped cosmic horror stuff is a bit of a slog to get through and is much harder to realize on film. It's entirely possible that, when the sequel hits in a few years, it'll fail to stick the landing and retroactively make this version worse. But for now, this version is superior to the original and, since I still haven't given it a proper review and likely won't, high in the running for the best horror film of 2017 (although Get Out is ahead of it).

Next week, we pay homage to a recently departed director...something we'll be doing a lot this Remaketober...with a look at his greatest film and the stuff that came after it.

Elessar is a 27 year old Alaskan-born, Connecticut-based, cinephile with an obsession with The Room and a god complex. 
 

The Beautiful Ones: Book Review

Nina Beaulieu is in beautiful Loisail for her first Grand Season, where she’ll try to snag a husband with the help of her cousin, Valérie. She rebuffs most of her suitors, but when she meets telekinetic Hector Auvray, he becomes her favoured suitor. But Hector and Valérie were once engaged, and he has returned to exact some kind of retribution for her faithlessness.

Now, The Beautiful Ones by Silvia Moreno-Garcia is promoted as a fantasy and a romance, but leans far far far toward romance. In this alternate history, some people are born with psychic abilities; two of our heroes have the power to move objects with their mind. Nina lacks control; it is frowned upon for women to display these powers, and she is labeled a witch. Disappointingly, that is as far as it goes. The focus is on the romance; while Hector helps teach Nina to control herself, and it serves her well in the end, it ultimately is window dressing for a romance novel.

That isn't to disparage the book for being a romance. I’m not a huge fan of the genre because it is often formulaic and I feel like if I read one, I’ve read all of them. The set up for The Beautiful Ones is very interesting, and I was hoping it would break the formula. The first half felt like it would, but in the end I was a bit disappointed. I was hoping that after finding out about Hector and Valérie, Nina would strike out on her own as a telekinetic performer and break barriers down for psychic women. Maybe she’d reconnect with Hector later, maybe Valérie would leave her husband for Hector and renounce the strict expectations that forced her into marriage. When another suitor for Nina shows up, I was hoping he was actually conspiring to fix everything up for poor Nina and then bow out.

Alas, it was not to be. The second half becomes your bog standard romance. Valérie is cold but not completely unsympathetic in the first half, but in the second half she becomes a psychotic villain. Nina is a pure virgin, whereas Valérie is not afraid to use her sexuality to get what she wants. Hector stops being any sort of agent of his own; whatever happens, is because Valérie drives the plot with her mad schemes and Nina decides either not to put up with it, or acts rashly for maximum melodramatics.

In Moreno-Garcia’s favour, Nina is very much like a Jane Austen heroine. She doesn’t sit idly by, and once she knows what she wants she goes for it. I just wish Valérie was more than just your standard romance novel harpy villain, and that the story moved in a more subversive way. At first I found myself comparing it to Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier; both Hector and Maxim de Winter are haunted by their past and unable to let go, and Nina and Mrs. de Winter are standing the shadow of more beautiful, more refined women who are no longer in their love interest’s lives. But wherea Rebecca took an unexpected turn, The Beautiful Ones went down Romance Tropes Lane and took no more turns after that. Nina might have been fairly progressive for a heroine if this was published a hundred years ago, but for the most part in the end, gender norms and conventions were slightly bent but never broken, and justice is meted out in nothing but predictable ways.

I will also say Moreno-Garcia’s prose is wonderful as always. Often with books set over a hundred years ago, there is a temptation for the writer to try to mimic the prose of Austen or other classical writers, and it usually always comes up short. Moreno-Garcia’s narration and dialogue avoid this entirely, and stands on its own. There are no cheap imitations here, at least.

If you are a fan of romance, you might like it better than I did. While I couldn’t put it down, ultimately it ran too long for me and I was disappointed in the end. I’m very picky with romance, however, and you can do much worse in the genre. If you’re just looking for a romance that doesn’t challenge, The Beautiful Ones may be for you.

The Beautiful Ones by Silvia Moreno-Garcia will be published on October 24, 2017 by St Martin's Press and can be preordered wherever fine books are sold.

Megan “Spooky” Crittenden is a secluded writer who occasionally ventures from her home to give aid to traveling adventurers.

Hellboy: An Assortment Of Horrors

Hellboy has been in the news quite a bit lately, from the roller coaster that was Ed Skrien’s casting as Ben Daimio to David Harbour’s beefcake reveal. Aside from movie news, there has been pieces on how he is a timely hero in an age where Nazis are a thing again, as well as enjoying a slew of new releases this year. The most recent is a short story anthology, Hellboy: An Assortment of Horrors.

If you’re only familiar with Hellboy’s origin story or the Del Toro films, this is an easy book to get into. The stories are stand-alone features and do not draw much on the big events that have unfolded in Mike Mignola’s comics over the years; there are few references to the Nazis, and I don’t recall any mention of the Plague of Frogs, Rasputin or Baba Yaga. There are some quick references, but nothing that will make you feel lost. Even if you’ve only seen the 2004 movie, just keep in mind that in the comics, Liz and Hellboy never date and you’re good to go.

Short story anthologies from various writers are sometimes hard to review, but the quality here is mostly consistent. I only disliked one or two stories, and even then I just found myself speeding through them rather than actively hating what I was reading. It wasn’t so much that I thought they were terrible, just less enjoyable than the others.

Fans of comics know that when new writers take over a character, it’s common to see their personality totally change to fit the new writer’s view. This isn’t the case here. What is particularly lovable about Hellboy is that even when he’s snarky, he’s ultimately a sweetheart. The stories range over the decades and different periods of his life, but each writer nails what makes Hellboy, Hellboy. The Other Side Of Summer by Chris Roberson, for example, takes place in 1950 when Hellboy is five and decides to investigate a haunting with a girl he just met. Most other stories cover cases he takes on as an adult BPRD agent, but it’s really great to see his brief childhood years covered as well.

There is a story or two that seemed to have been written to showcase an original character the writer thinks is cool rather than concentrate on established ones; The Duelist by Jonathan Maberry features a hot young woman named Lilah who is mildly psychic after a few years of dropping acid and we’re supposed to care. The story works just fine without her. It’s not the only story to have an original character, of course, it just feels like a waste of space to read how pale Lilah’s breasts are, and how she folds her arms under her breasts, when we could be focusing on the ghost haunting her town.

There are some great original characters here, mostly by having Hellboy observed from their point of view. Fire Is The Devil’s Only Friend by Michael Rowe does this extremely well, and I think is my favorite story out of the collection. It focuses mostly on a little girl named Hazel, her mother and the mother’s scheming boyfriend. When Hazel is targeted by a child sacrificing cult, she sends out a psychic cry for help that Hellboy picks up on. Hazel and her family aren’t perfect, and she isn’t exactly a cool new character to show off; mostly, she’s a scared and troublesome young girl that Hellboy has to race to save, and it’s genuinely suspenseful and touching.

Other BPRD characters do get some focus. We are treated to two stories all about Liz Sherman, and one focusing on Kate Corrigan, BPRD’s folklorist. Chelsea Cain’s One More Radical Stone Fox follows a teenage Liz Sherman as she runs away from BPRD Headquarters, and it’s one story I wish I could see in comic format. In fact, I’d follow a whole series by Chelsea Cain about teenage Liz Sherman; Mike Mignola writes women well, but Cain absolutely nails a relatable Liz that explores her past and her powers without delving into self pity or unbearable teen angst.

Really, all this anthology was missing was Abe Sapien.

Hellboy: An Assortment of Horrors was published on August 29th by Dark Horse Books and is available wherever fine books are sold.

Megan “Spooky” Crittenden is a secluded writer who occasionally ventures from her home to give aid to traveling adventurers.

Wonder Woman/Conan #1 Review - A Crow Without Mercy

The Concept:

Wonder Woman/Conan is a book made for a fan like me. My two favorite characters in comics might very well be Diana of Themyscira and Conan of Cimmeria, but for much different reasons. While Wonder Woman appeals to the idealism of my heart, Conan's brutal adventures get my heart pumping.

Diana and Conan are not quite two sides of the same coin, but perhaps inversions of each other. Both are the greatest warriors of their world, but where Diana is a wise and loving crusader of justice, Conan is a reckless, rolling stone of a mercenary. Both are passionate, but Diana's love and need for justice extends outward to the world and people around her, while Conan tends to turn his love and sense of justice inward, looking out primarily for his own happiness and well-being.

My first question about this pairing was who of them would be taken out of their element? Conan is not new to feats of heroism, nor is he without compassion. Diana, however, while consistently challenged by the trials of gods and villains alike, has never been in Conan's sandals: Diana has not lived a life of desperation, fighting for little more than her own day-to-day survival.

It makes sense then for this book to take Diana to the brutal, low-fantasy world of the Hyborian Age, and we've been blessed to have Gail Simone be the one to take her there. Not only does Gail love and understand Diana, but she also understands the innate pulp appeal of the sexy, but inescapably dark, sword and sorcery world of Conan. Gail is able to remain authentic and give both themes their just due.

The Story:

We begin with a slice of Conan's childhood, some of which was fleshed out from the notes of Robert E. Howard in Busiek's Conan: Born on the Battlefield, but now with a new element: a long-lost love, Yanna. Decades later as an adult, Conan thinks he sees Yanna again, this time not in in his homeland of Cimmeria, but in a gladiator's arena.

Conan is mistaken: it is not Yanna, but our favorite Amazonian princess. An amnesiac dressed in rags and strategically-splattered with mud, Diana been de-powered, enslaved, thrown to the fighting pits, and branded as the "Warrior Witch." Slavery is abundant in Hyboria, and Conan himself has been enslaved as gladiator in the arena; naturally, Conan detests slavery. I partly would expect then, that this alone could be reason for Conan to get involved, but instead, this case of mistaken identity seems to be his motivating factor in sneaking in to Diana's cell.

Diana does not immediately discount Conan's insistence that she is Yanna, but she does immediately feel a connection to Conan, perhaps even chemistry. Before they can escape, Diana's slaver Dellos captures Conan, and believing the two to be long lost lovers, declares they will fight each other to the death in the arena.

The Book:

The book is well-crafted. Lopresti's pencils deliver the sinewy physicality we expect to see in a Conan book, and inks by Matt Ryan enhance this wonderfully. Wendy Broome's colors expertly handle light and shadow, delivering the appropriate shifts to mood for scenes and characters. Saida Temofonte's lettering is innovative and effectively stylistic; all together, the book's team meshes perfectly.

Gail leaves us with a lot of questions but a few hints to what lies ahead. Diana dreams of Themyscira, feeling something about her true identity, even remembering that she is known as 'Wonder Woman.' We also get a look at two sisters of the Corvidae, raven-sorceresses (who remind me of Medusa's sisters, Euryale and Stheno, from Rucka's Wonder Woman: Eyes of the Gorgon). The sisters, who have been following Conan's exploits, stop to entertain themselves with Diana's arena spectacle, and I have to wonder if they're involved or even responsible for Diana's strange and unfortunate circumstances.

I also find Diana's de-powering and enslavement to be safe in Simone's hands; any other writer might give me pause, but Gail knows all too well about the fridging and exploitation of our heroines; it's not going to happen on her watch.

Also, Issue #3's cover teases a tryst between Diana and Conan, which I have mixed feelings about.

It's no surprise Conan would be interested in Diana; Conan is an absolute hound. Frankly, Diana is everyone's type, and I have a hard time pinning down what Diana's type is (maybe she doesn't have one), but Conan doesn't seem to be it. He's too sweaty. Still, it's not my business who Diana wants to roll around with, and if there's anyone who could make this pairing work, even if only for one wild night, it's Gail Simone.

In a comics world of world-shattering events and superhero reinventions, it's refreshing to indulge in a fun story that seems to be heading toward character exploration, rather than deconstruction. We have an attractive book and an intriguing start to this series and I'd encourage Wonder Woman and Conan fans alike to add this one to your pull list!

Adrian Martinez is a graphic designer, comic book letterer, hobbyist writer, and all-around geek living in New York City.

Final Girls - Book Review

Quincy Carpenter does not think of herself as a Final Girl, a name the press has given to her and two other girls who became the sole survivors of horror movie-esque massacres. After that terrible night at Pine Cottage, her memory is repressed and that is just fine with her. She’s got a successful baking blog, a loving boyfriend, and an endless Xanax prescription. But when Lisa, the first of the Final Girls, is found dead, Quincy’s world is turned upside down. The third Final Girl Samantha Boyd shows up on her door step, and soon Quincy finds herself forced to remember what happened that awful night.

Final Girls by Riley Sager is a tribute to slasher films. There is no relation to the film The Final Girls, in case you were wondering. If you’re not familiar with the genre, usually the only survivor at the end of the film is a girl, often a virgin or someone who lost her virginity shortly before the end of the movie. There’s a lot to be said about the Freudian implications of the trope, but Final Girls doesn’t really address it. Instead, the focus is largely on the mystery of what happened at Pine Cottage, and Quincy’s difficulty in acknowledging the past.

I hope you like baking, because there’s a lot of it in the book. In fact, the first half of the book is very slow. Like the slasher films this book takes it’s cues from, the protagonists are largely bland and unlikable and you wait anxiously for someone to finally be killed. Quincy is particularly bad about connecting the dots, and moping in purple prose internal monologues.  Her fiance Jeff exists solely to remind her that she’s supposed to be normal now and never deal with her trauma. Sam is the only one who is interesting, but you can tell she’s bad news because she dresses in punk fashion. I know my thrillers well enough to know that punk and goth is usually code for a weirdo or a villain, and other outdated stereotypes.

I felt also there was a fundamental issue with the idea of the media labeling the three girls as Final Girls. The world Quincy lives in must be a kinder one than we live in, because massacres are depressingly common in the US. Quincy says she cannot relate to survivors of sexual assault and other crimes, but there’s no mention of her reaching out to survivors of school shootings or misogynistic rampages. Either they don’t exist in the world, it was just not thought about. In this world, however, victims are usually forgotten or largely ignored and do not become celebrities. Many of us can list off many serial killers and mass murderers, and obsess about what drove them to murder, but rarely can we name a single victim. We deify murderers, not the people and certainly not the women that survive them.

The book picks up towards the end and to its credit, after a point I couldn’t put it down. There are twists and turns and red herrings, a few I called and a few that surprised. The way the pieces fit together with so many coincidences feels unsatisfactory, but there’s enough foreshadowing to prevent it from feeling completely cheap; it’s just too neatly tied together. Speaking of foreshadowing: flashbacks in a novel, even one that wants to be a slasher film, should be illegal. I know, author! I was there, I read it! I don’t need to read it twice!

It would be remiss not to bring up the fact that Riley Sager is the pen name of a man. “Riley Sager” seems to have been chosen, according to The Guardian at least, as a marketing ploy to be the next in the line of Gone Is The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo On The Train With All The Gifts. If so, it does suck that marketing sees successful female authors in the thriller category and decided to stage this as the next one. It’s especially shameful since it is utterly unnecessary; The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo started this “Girl” thriller title trend, and it was written by a man and enjoyed success because of it. There was simply no need! I actually enjoyed Final Girls better than I did The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. Which isn’t saying much, but it’s something.

While Sager is not bad at writing women, finding out that he’s a man makes some things make more sense, like the amount of baking without any talk of cleaning the huge mess baking makes, or the awkward sex talk between two female characters. There’s no Cool Girl speech here, and that’s fundamentally what marketing this book under Riley Sager misses; Flynn is partly popular because she has the perspective of a woman. It isn’t to say that men can’t write women well, or shouldn’t try. But you can’t slap an unisex name on something and hope it’ll sell out of feminist demand for female authors.

That said, if you’re a fan of slasher films, and can put up with a slow start, it won’t be a bad Halloween read. If you were looking for a sort of analysis of the final girl trope, and what it means, you are actually better off renting Behind The Mask: The Rise Of Leslie Vernon.

Final Girls by Riley Sager was published on July 5, 2017 by Dutton and is available wherever fine books are sold.

Megan “Spooky” Crittenden is a secluded writer who occasionally ventures from her home to give aid to traveling adventurers.

The Ancient Magus's Bride Is Just Wonderful

On July 26th Crunchyroll showed off the first three episode of The Ancient Magus’ Bride in theaters across the country, as an installment of it’s Anime Movie Nights. The show has yet to air in Japan or in North America, so it was a rare peak at an anime months before it is due to actually come out.

The Ancient Magus’ Bride follows Chise, a young girl who has lived a life of misfortune and out of desperation, sold herself into slavery. She is auctioned off to a bone faced mage named Elias Ainsworth, who aims to train her as his apprentice and one day marry her. He brings her from Japan to his English countryside residence, which she quickly begins to think of as home.

Now, yes. Elias is in fact a bone faced mage and that seems to be his genuine appearance, having to use magic to appear human at all (a face that Chise complains, looks fake). And yes, Elias makes for an extremely weird romantic interest for Chise. His bone face never changes expression, except for during humorous moments where his face becomes simplistic and he smiles or sweats. Despite his frightening appearance, I was surprised by how quickly I was endeared to it. He can look menacing, or genuinely pleasant, just by his words or the context of the scene. It’s no surprise that Chise quickly becomes loyal to him.

I haven’t seen the prequel or read the manga yet, so I went into this with only the trailer for the series. The show, from what we can tell from the first three episodes, avoids massive exposition dumps and instead prefers to world build slowly, when it makes sense for Chise to ask questions or be given information. It might be more useful for Chise to be sat down and taught everything all at once, but for the sake of narrative we should be glad that Elias and friends prefer to show rather than tell, and only tell when they must.

Chise’s history itself isn’t explained up front; how she came to sell herself into slavery is dripped out in the first three episodes, and I am sure we still don’t have the full story. It does not shy away from the fact that her reasons are depressing and she’s been left severely damaged by whatever has happened. I’m glad the reasons are saved; enough is shown already that we can believe that she felt like it was her best option, but we can watch her heal as we learn more about why she was so desperate in the first place. I realize this may all be explained in the prequel miniseries, but I never felt confused about what had happened. The sadness of the first three episodes are juxtaposed directly with scenes of acceptance, happiness and peace, which works very well. It is emotionally engaging without becoming overwhelming.

The show is heavy on whimsy; fairies come to chit chat, a letter Elias writes becomes a bird and flies away to deliver itself, cute spirits appear out of nowhere to cuddle—all the while harpsichord tingles to emphasize how magical it all is. Luckily, it avoids being too cheesy. The only times I felt like it was edging towards too much was one scene where Chise is babysitting infant dragons. It felt like it went on a bit too long, but again the juxtaposition came; after they fall asleep she has a conversation with their uncle about death. It’s all a bit too heavy to be appropriate for small children, but I can’t help but suspect this will be a good show to introduce to the tweens and teens in your life; cute and bubbly at times, but one that doesn’t sweep away how unfair life can be.

The Ancient Magus’s Bride will being to air on October 7th, 2017 on Crunchyroll. Two of the three prequel episodes are already there, and the third one will be added on September 7, 2017.

Megan “Spooky” Crittenden is a secluded writer who occasionally ventures from her home to give aid to traveling adventurers.