Where Southern Hospitality Meets Mind Shredding Insanity
Zombies! Fantasy princesses! Royal ass-kicking! I was super psyched to read this one. It’s not often that a book has an intersection of so many good genres – in this case, horror, fantasy, and YA. Is YA a genre? I’m gonna go with yes. So let’s dig in.
Continue reading Maidens of Zombie Kingdom Book One Review
1/6/2021 is a date that no American will ever forget. Not even during the Civil War – not since the War of 1812 – did any foe or force manage to penetrate the capital of the United States. Where Robert E. Lee, Adolf Hitler, and Nikita Khrushchev failed, Donald J. Trump succeeded. Like many, I watched events in Washington D.C. unfold that day live on my screen. First there were the machinations of democracy, boring but not as boring as they should have been. Without much in the way of warning, a recess was declared and then NPR’s feed of the proceedings was immediately cut off. I switched to a live news feed and watched as a mob of howling cultists and Confederate-flag-waving white supremacists stormed my country’s seat of government. They met little in the way of resistance. “The capital has fallen!” was how this was ecstatically reported by Harrison H. Smith, fill-in anchor at the loathsome Alex Jones’ InfioWars. While Smith’s enthusiastic exclamation would prove to be a premature ejaculation, for that brief moment he was correct.
Continue reading The Horror of the Howling Mob
This is numero tres in the Mega Shark franchise and by far, the worst one yet. How can a movie about a 200 foot Megalodon and a giant robot shark-shaped death machine be boring? Well, this movie cracked that fucking code.
Continue reading Mega Shark vs Mecha Shark: A Huge Pain in the A.I.
This morning my wife tried snuggling me, she asked if I was mad, I said, no, but that I was thinking about eating Pokemon. Her response? “That tracks.” But it doesn’t. Not really, Pokemon is a strange fantastic world filled with bright colors fueled by friendship, but if you peel back even the first layer of the game’s setting things begin to unravel in the worst way. Pokemon is a survival horror game as grisly and dark as they come. Let me explain.
Continue reading The Existential Horror of Pokemon
Cruel Summer by Wesley Southard was a fun read. I have a soft spot for water-based horror since I’m personally terrified of the ocean, and this had all the watery creepy-crawlies you could shake a stick at, from enraged manatees to swordfish impaling people on boats to eels in bathtubs. Cruel Summer starts off right away with a character you love to hate in the form of Hoyt, the abusive boyfriend of Melissa, and the abusive potential step-father of her son, Patrick.
I was rooting for something terrible to happen to this man from the first page. I was not disappointed.
I have never been married and have no children. For my demographic (38, if you’re wondering), this puts me in the minority, although more Americans than ever before have made the same choice, and our ranks continue to grow. Having no kids definitely shapes one’s view of their behavior, making one an outsider to a lot of the dynamics of boundary-testing and youthful misadventure. I’m old enough that much of my experience from my youth doesn’t apply to the dynamics of today. While my family were extremely early adopters of the internet, social media didn’t exist when I was a teenager and connection speeds were still so slow that the internet was a clumsy, geeky thing for the most part. Cell phones were a new technology, clunky and owned by relatively few people. Some things, however, have not changed and may never change: for example, teenagers will always need a place to party.
Continue reading ‘Ma’ (2019): Desperate Youth, Bloodthirsty Babes*
Oh. My. God. You already spent all that time carefully crafting your words into the perfect masterpiece. You spent hours hunched over a desk, or a coffee table, or some surface pouring out the darkness and pain inside yourself in order to grace the publishers and editors of the world with your intense and insanely skilled wordsmithery. Why should you, after doing so much, have to kowtow to some stuck up publisher’s meager whimpering for how to submit your work that will make you both rich? Fuck em’ instead send them this list, to explain why their guidelines are stupid and you are amazing!
Continue reading Why Submission Guidelines Are Bullshit
I sat down to write a best of 2020 list. I did. I was going to talk about the best horror books of 2020, I was going to go on and on about how much I read. But I got into it, and I realized, that most of the books I read, I read to provide blurbs, or I read submissions. Or I read to prepare for an interview. Long story short, I read a lot fewer of 2020’s books than I intended to. I was also going to write a Women of Horror list, and I will do that, there are so many incredible authors that I want to highlight, but as it’s currently the last day of 2020 I wanted to do a best-of list today.
Continue reading Top Ten Unexpectedly Spooky Games of 2020
YUP! We’re starting with the spoilers, and you know what that means… FUCK. THIS. MOVIE…
Continue reading Reed Alexander’s Horror Review of ‘Splice’ (2009)