Garrett Zecker's Blog

Reading Homer in 2025: When men were men and gods were gods

“Come, men of Troy and Trojan women; look upon Hektor if ever before you were joyful when you saw him come back living from battle; for he was a joy to his city and all his people.” 

It has been a long time since I read The Iliad. I think my last time was during my senior year of high school, and perhaps even when I was working on my undergraduate literature degree. I also don’t remember which translation I read all those years ago, but in a box of banged-up books from an estate clearance, I ...

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...

The Graphic World of Junji Ito

Over the past year, I have read most of the available Junji Ito in translation, and boy, is it a blast. Ito is the master of visual manga horror, and his methods of storytelling are uncanny, waking nightmares that push characters to a terrifying, existential moment of clarity… and this even bleeds through to his autobiographical, shorter piece, simply about owning cats.  

I plan on absolutely continuing to read Ito, but there are plenty of commonalities with the books that I read – No Longer ...

Tears from Waltham to Boston: Zalkind’s The Waltham Murders

Zalkind’s The Waltham Murders is a wildly engaging true crime book about the improbable murders the author is directly connected to growing up in Waltham, Massachusetts… But also, as the story blooms, a surprising connection to a major terrorist event and a statewide manhunt that resulted in one of the perpetrators dead and the other on federal death row, just a few miles from the murders (and from where I am currently writing this).

This was a Kindle First Reads selection I got for free, whi...

In Cold Blood, Capote’s Invention of A Genre

This is one of those classics that I never read but had to pick up and learn quickly because it became a required text for a Crime unit in a course I was teaching. Man, did this piece blow me away. Truman Capote’s writing? Terrifying, honest, and completely brutal. This piece is one of the first examples of the true crime genre ever, and Capote delivers a harrowing, horrifying story of the murder of a family and the manhunt and investigation that led to the execution of two of America’s most rem...

Seeing the Impossible through The Eyes of Dave Eggers’ Johannes

This was easily my favorite book of my 2024 year of reading, and coming from one of my favorite writers (and friends – his words, not mine), it is no surprise. It is very much unlike the rest of his writing, aside from the recent dips into children’s literature – but he is very much a writer for all ages, and I would say the same thing about this book, despite it being categorized as middle-grade fiction. It is very reminiscent of a short piece I spent some time with in the past, George Saunders...