Elizabeth Reuter's Blog

I'm so proud!

My goodreads e-mail just got its very first spam message! :DDD

My latest book review, of The Red Girl by Luke Walker, is up on the Hellnotes website here:

Red Girl review

In the last couple of days, I've found sudden inspiration for some nasty horror stories from two places I never expected.

1) The video game Clive Barker's Jericho. I don't even play video games. They're awesome, I'm just not into them. But watching youtube clips of "witches with guns" shooting their way through things like undead children's crusaders who strangle victims with their dangling entrails is more entertaining than a lot of movies I've seen lately. The sets are beautiful, detailed visions of desert bunkers and stone labrynths, and as is usual for Barker, the monsters are creative and amazing.

2) The MSNBC documentary series Lockup. An integral part of horror or action stories is writing people under pressure. Prison counts, I think. >< The obligatory grain of salt must be taken, since you've got a team of editors working to turn real life into dramatic TV, but still.

I watched the original Hellboy movie again this weekend. I think I’ve seen it half a dozen times. It’s one of my favorites.

If you liked it, you already know why it’s awesome in general. But for me, Hellboy’s love interest Liz Sherman—played by Selma Blair, who I saw for the first time and have been a fan of since—added an extra reason to enjoy. Superhero love interests are, nine times out of ten, so dull, so colorless, so without character (I’m looking at you, Gwen Stacey) that I spend every moment she’s on screen wishing the hero could not care about getting the girl just this once. In the best case scenario she’s not wallpaper, but neither is she essential to the story; she’s around to make us like the hero more (producers say Pepper Potts is this sort of plot device) and easy to dump when she adds no more to him (Roxanne from Ghost Rider).

Not Liz. She’s introduced to us through Hellboy’s eyes, as a love interest usually is, but she’s not cute or sweet or sexy right off in the usual cheap bid to make the audience see why he wants her. Instead she’s in the middle of an attack of major psychological issues. While this made some viewers dislike her, always a risk when you give any character actual character, it made her interesting in her own right as someone with problems, acting as a person with problems acts. Liz isn’t graceful about her pain, but sulks and can be mean (telling Hellboy to go away, dating another guy right under his nose). It’s not that she wants to hurt him, but that she’s absorbed in her own issues. It’s Hellboy who must pay attention to her and figure out how to help her. And while he’s instrumental in her recovery—it is his movie—she has her own journey getting there.

Hellboy is the only superhero movie where the love interest wound up my favorite character (and that’s saying something, since all the characters were so awesome). It looks like they're getting to Hellboy III, and I look forward to seeing where she goes as much as I look forward to seeing more of Hellboy himself.

-Elizabeth Reuter
Author, The Demon of Renaissance Drive

I’m trying to decide if Shame, a movie about sexual addiction, counts as a horror movie.

Basically it’s the story of two siblings, Brandon (Michael Fassbender) and Sissy (Carey Mulligan) who are successful, glamorous, and have a lot of problems. Brandon is a sex addict, sleeping with anyone and everyone--unless he actually likes them, at which point he can’t maintain an erection even with drugs. Sissy is desperate for affection, and keeps throwing herself at men who hurt and eventually abandon her.

Neither has any idea how to help themselves or each other, and so we the audience watch them spiral into a black hole. It’s a numbing, depressing, horrifying experience.

It’s also titillating, and there’s no way that wasn’t deliberate. Michael Fassbender is so hot he’ll melt your TV screen, and the size of his penis is still causing a stir two years later (links: TMZ and George Clooney making fun, Charlize Theron soliciting). Director Steve McQueen also said the actresses had to meet “certain physical requirements” if the Wikipedia page is correct, and since they’re all babes, it seems they met all the physical requirements that exist.

A lot of horror deals with sex in this way. Clive Barker has written of demons “as likely to fuck you as kill you”; Nina’s awakening sexuality in Black Swan both frees and destroys her; Dren in Splice sleeps with its father, then later rapes its mother; in Stephen King’s novel Desperation, trucker Steve and his hitchiker Cynthia find an evil object that influences people to act in destructive ways. Their first act is to fuck, violently.

Such sex is rarely shown in a completely negative way, designed purely to disgust. The idea is rather to arouse and disgust at the same time. The best horror, by its nature, makes you want to look away, and yet hooks you so you can’t. Repulsive, arousing sex scenes are one part of that.

I don’t know if McQueen meant to shoot Shame in that tradition. But he did so, and the result was a narrative a lot of horror fans can recognize.

-Elizabeth Reuter
Author, The Demon of Renaissance Drive

When I went back home to New Mexico for Christmas, I went to my local (Albuquerque) public library to ask about donaing my book. They told me they'd be happy to look at it, but could not guarantee a place in the catalogue--they'd have to see if they could use it.

Well, it looks like they could! The Demon of Renaissance Drive is now available for checkout in Albuquerque, New Mexico!

If you're in the area, check it out. And thanks to Albuquerque's wonderful librarians for their decision!

Hi guys. My latest review on the Hellnotes website: Jin Village by Vincent Stoia, an adventure with a lot of cool Chinese folklore.

Check it out!

I have a review of Steven Pajak's new zombie novel Mad Swine up at the website of horror magazine Hellnotes.

Mad Swine Review here.

If you like it, I'll have a couple more published in the next month or so.

Elizabeth Reuter
Author, The Demon of Renaissance Drive

Just discovered Clive Barker.

In Japanese.

Aww yeah.

I have just finished the first season of Glee, and have to admit to shedding a tear. Cheesy and predictable as the story was, the way it was carried out worked. I loved the characters, the numbers, and wanted to see what happened. And am looking forward to season two.

A few months ago, I visited a special needs school here in Okinawa. Upon finding I was from America, a group of kids bustled up to me and announced, “We are the (school name) Glee Club!”

I, who had not yet seen the show, found it adoable, the way they rhapsodized over the characters (one boy had a huge crush on Quinn) and tried to imitate the musical numbers. I understand now what that show can mean to someone who lives their life outside the norm; Glee is based on the idea that outsiders are cool, something every outsider wants to believe. Believing it can give a suffering person an extra reason to get up in the morning, to attack a world that can seem, and be, cruel.

However cliché a story is, whatever weaknesses it has, I can’t think of anything more important than that. Or any greater triumph for an artist, to know they inspire people all over the world.

Elizabeth Reuter
Author, The Demon of Renaissance Drive