The Ballad of Black Tom is a retelling of Lovecraft’s short story, The Horror at Red Hook and like the best retellings it’s not necessary to have read original to appreciate it. Amusingly, though The Horror at Red Hook is one of Lovecraft’s stories that is divested from his Cthulhu mythos The Ballad of Black Tom works that story back into Cthulhu and used the Cthulhu mythos, with its racist beginnings, to explore racism in the US. It’s brilliant. Thomas Tester is a conman, a […]
Cannonballing with a book that was formative and remains shockingly relevant
It feels deeply appropriate to Cannonball with a book that I read for the first time four years ago, a book that set off my dissertation in motion and is now in process of becoming my (hopefully) next published article. Cheers! I first read this book in Spring of 2013 and was horrified/piqued by the content. I was so piqued that I wrote my first dissertation chapter on it. I’ve spent the last year and a half trying to get an article published, and the […]
Skip the book, watch season one, then skip the rest of True Blood
Like most of us, I think, I watched the show that grew out of these novels. And while I very much enjoyed the first season of True Blood, the bad acting (especially from Anna Paquin) and tiresome storyline of subsequent seasons eventually lost me. I honestly don’t even know if the show is still on, and can’t really be bothered to check. So why did I read the book upon which the show was based? To be honest…..I don’t really know the answer to that. […]
The original vampire-ess
Bram Stoker may have been the first to perfect the literary vampire, but he was certainly not the first to creep people out with a good monster. Carmilla was here first (by over 20 years), and she is perfectly frightening herself. After a carriage crashes near their remote forest estate, our narrator Laura and her father agree to take in a young woman as their guest while her mother travels on and promises to return for her. Not too surprisingly, young girls in the nearby village […]
Stupid is as Stupid Does
Katie: Before we get started with today’s installment, I’d like to introduce you to Candace. We were friends in middle school, we lost touch after I moved away, et voila! Behold! The miracle of Facebook restored our friendship after 20 years. She’s wicked smaht, and has advanced degrees that involved her teaching a class on Buffy at Stanford. You know, our kind of people. She’s going to be joining us for our Bible related installments. Candace: *smile, waves* FYI, I’ll be reading along in The […]
Back to ZOMBIES! Yay!!
I loved this book. I really did. I just spent the last two and a half hours finishing it, because I couldn’t stop. I loved the characters. I loved the point of view. I loved the idea of the virus and where it came from. Ok, enough praise. If you’ve ever read Mira Grant and liked her, I suspect this book is for you. I started out last year with her Parasitology trilogy. I liked them a lot, and I kept hearing about the Newsflesh […]
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