Garrett Zecker's Blog

Dave Barry’s ‘Class Clown’: A Journey Through His Hilarious New Memoir

I have been a fan of Dave Barry’s since middle school. I own just about all of his books, many of them signed and personally inscribed, and have been lucky to have met him several times and had some correspondence with him over the years since. When he hand-wrote me a letter when I was a sophomore in high school and asked him about his career, he solidified my choice to dedicate my life to the written word and helping others to be lifelong readers and writers. This stranger that eventually recog...

#807 Spoorloos (The Vanishing) (1988)

Spoorloos or The Vanishing is an incredible 1988 Dutch film from George Sluizer that presents the inner self analysis of a sociopath and psychopath thrillingly portrayed by Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu. 

The film tells the story on several planes and timeframes that align with the different portions of the Tour de France happening as the story is told. The main timeline is the relationship of Rex and Saskia, a couple that seems quick to fight but also quick to make up. They are a Dutch couple on ...

“The Antediluvians” Short Story Recognized

Zecker’s Short Fantasy Story “The Antediluvians” was recognized and awarded this week by the Leominster Public Library. The full text of the story is free to read below.

The story is based on events that unfolded due to catastrophic floods ravaging the Central Massachusetts city a little over a year ago on September 11, 2023. Retaining walls failed, shores bulged at the influx of floodwaters, cars floated away, and entire foundations crumbled as rushing water pushed and pulled dirt and stone ...

Richard Littler’s Scarfolk Books

Richard Littler is a graphic designer and writer who has put together a cool art project that plays with the ideas of design and nostalgia, government, conspiracy, and paranoia and brings them into an imaginary town in England entirely stuck in the early 1970s: Scarfolk. Similar to the execution and storylines we see in Welcome to Night Vale, the books of Mark Z Danielewski, Look Around You, They Might Be Giants and other such cultural phenomena, we are treated to an upside-down version of Lake ...

Sure, I’ll Join Your Cult by Maria Bamford

Maria Bamford’s “Sure, I’ll Join Your Cult” is an incredible, deeply personal memoir that gives her audience a glimpse into a lifelong struggle with Mental Health. Of course, the indomitable Hollywood types that make it have an impeccable habit of making their personal lives hermetically sealed from that moment on, but in this memoir Bamford hits it all: her childhood and parents, her difficult decade-long rise to fame, her marriage and other relationships, her attendance at no less than ten dif...

To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

A beautiful, broadly modernist tale that explores the long-term relationships within families, the differences and drives of men and women, and the way art (and education) can influence a lifetime of work and what we ultimately place value on. I found myself attaching to the mother most of the story. Still, there is no doubt that the core family dynamics that permeate the central narrative are at the core of every family in some way or another – and in modern times, with modern incomes and expec...

Coldiron’s Junk Film

Katharine Coldiron’s JUNK FILM is a book that was recommended to me for my voracious taste in tacky, unreliable, exploitative, and crap cinema. A collection of essays that cover perennial favorites such as Plan 9, Showgirls, Switchblade Sisters, and The Room, Coldiron also explores some lesser-known (to me) classics that I immediately went out and bought remastered physical media copies of films/shows like Cop Rock and Death Bed. Each of these essays are introspective love letters to the craft, ...

Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury

I have read a lot of Ray Bradbury but had never picked up this gorgeous reflection on growing up in America in the early 20th Century that ended up on my desk one spring day in 2023. This is a book that seems to do what Bradbury does best, but perhaps not in the way that one might consider it to be based on the rest of his work. This is truly magical realism, where Bradbury uncovers and simmers the magic of the perfect summer in the ‘good old days’ of his childhood. Frankly, the anecdotes, the f...

#763 The Color Purple (1985) and The Color Purple by Alice Walker (1982)

Somehow it took me three English degrees, writing and teaching for over twenty years, and a hazy summer in 2023 to finally pick up Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. Sometimes with modern classics such as these, it is easy to put too much weight and expectations on the many opinions, interpretations, and adaptations that have come about over the years. Thankfully, it is one of those books that deserves all of the praise and attention it has ever received. It is truly a masterpiece. 

The Color P...

Hawksmoor by Peter Ackroyd

I picked up Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor as an entry on David Bowie’s essential top 100 books – and I am so glad I did. I have heard nothing about this author, and what a treat it was to read this obsessive mystery novel about poverty, history, murder, architecture, and how coded occultism and superstition, as well as the echoing curse of death, can inject itself so deeply and linger for centuries in the history of a city. 

Ackroyd seems like one of those authors with a local flavour – particula...