Samantha Lienhard's Blog, page 182

The Thing: Paranoia Time

I'm not a big watcher of horror movies, so I'd never seen John Carpenter's The Thing before this semester. I was, however, familiar with the story, the major plot points, and the characters. Last October, Linkara began to review the comic book sequels to the movie. (He reviewed two more this October and has more planned for next year.) For those of you who don't know, Linkara is an Internet reviewer of bad comic books. He loves the movie, but yes, he thinks the comics suck. But we aren't here to talk about the comics (though I do recommend you check out the reviews). Let's discuss the movie.

Fair warning: there will be spoilers in this post.

First, I want to mention the music just briefly. Sometimes I feel like movies, television shows, video games, and so on have an advantage over books because they can use sound to help create a mood. I really liked the song that played during the opening and closing credits of The Thing. It did a perfect job of setting up a sinister, creepy atmosphere.

Next, I referenced the setting in a previous post. Antarctica is not as terrifying and isolated as space, but it's still pretty high on the list. But this movie uses that setting for a twofold purpose. It traps the research team, yes, but it also traps the Thing itself. It's both a means to heighten the fear (no way to escape) and provide a form of grim hope (the monster can't get to the rest of humanity). The Thing's resources are limited because it's in the middle of Antarctica. If it was in a more populated setting, it would become an Apocalypse scenario pretty quickly.
Even without the computer's amazing analysis to make things clear, you can imagine how bad it would be. The Thing wouldn't have to rely on a dozen men and a handful of dogs. With a huge variety of people and animals to infect, it would go from being the stalker/imitator of the movie to a plague--a thinking plague that actively tries to spread itself.

As monsters go, the Thing is pretty scary. Not only is it incredibly resilient and powerful, but its greatest strength is in its ability to imitate other organisms. It imitates them perfectly. This is no T-virus or Flood that mutates its host from the onset. This is a creature that assimilates its prey and becomes an exact duplicate. Until it's forced to show itself or tries to attack someone (at which point it displays some pretty grotesque body horror), there's nothing to set it apart from any of the others.

It could be me. It could be you. If imitation is its greatest strength, paranoia is its greatest weapon. You can't trust anyone, and no one can trust you. I like the paranoia aspect a lot. I think that's an excellent way to add tension and suspense to a plot. It's a step up from the "any one of us could be the killer" plot element. The cast--or at least Macready--does eventually come up with a way to discover whether or not someone is human by doing a blood test, but they still end up with a pretty grim ending--MacReady and Childs, the only survivors, await their deaths in the wreckage of the outpost, and neither knows for sure if the other is infected. (And this is part of the reason a direct sequel to the movie is problematic.) By the way, apparently the television version managed to make the ending even more hopeless by showing a Husky running from the burning camp.

In many ways, it shows the unstoppable force of some of the other monsters we've looked at, but it's also intelligent. It's not just killing people that get in its way. It's actively trying to get out of Antarctica. Apparently, there's some ambiguity about whether or not infected people know they're infected, but I like to think the Thing is in control of the infected, and that it's smart enough to imitate their behavior well enough for no one to notice anything strange. It adds a different layer of fear and paranoia if the Thing could be lurking dormant inside of you and you wouldn't know it until it made its move, but I still prefer the hidden malevolence of the Thing pretending to be a human.

All of these aspects come together to make it one of the scariest monsters we looked at. And as aliens go, it's one of the most alien. It made for a solid, tense, disturbing movie.

Also, that spider-head thing is going to haunt my nightmares.

The Wolfman: Maybe I Just Don't Get Werewolves

I don't want to give the wrong impression with this post title. I sort of liked Jonathan Maberry's The Wolfman. Depending on when you ask me, I might even tell you I liked it a lot. I certainly enjoyed the book for a while, but as it got closer to the end, its appeal diminished. I'll get to that in due time, so there will be spoilers in this post.

At least it really was Lon Chaney, Jr.First, though, I'd like to briefly talk about werewolves, wolfmen, whatever you want to call them. Of the classic monsters, I'm the least familiar with them. Off the top of my head, I went into this book most familiar with Angua von Uberwald, Remus Lupin, Chris Jennings, Quentin Collins, and Lawrence Talbot. But don't get your hopes up at that last one--I haven't seen the original The Wolf Man movie, either. Instead, I've seen Talbot in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. So if I say anything that suggests I'm missing the point, well, I don't have as much knowledge about this particular monster.

For example, is there a difference between a "wolfman" and a "werewolf"? Years ago, I thought there was, but more and more I think the two terms are used for the same thing--a man who transforms into a wolf (usually at the full moon). The Wolfman confused me even further about this near the end (spoilers!) when it arbitrarily assigns the name "The Wolfman" to one character and "The Werewolf" to another. I did appreciate that Maberry did something to keep track of who was who in that scene, but it also felt to me like there should be something significant about the names if they were to be assigned that way. It bugged me.

I have not seen the movie that this book was adapted to, so I cannot compare the two. I will say that I've read several novel adaptations of movies and games. Sometimes they work really well, and other times it's painfully obvious that they're adaptations. This fell somewhere in the middle for me.

Then again, no one was beaten with it.Back to the story overall, I liked the first half of the book or so. It might have had a slow start, but I liked the mystery and the atmosphere. I also liked that a random Frenchman gave Lawrence a silver wolf's head cane, because I liked to pretend it was Barnabas's cane from Dark Shadows. (Since then, I've read that the cane was featured in the original Wolf Man movie. I still like to pretend it belonged to Barnabas.) It also was a sword, which made it even cooler. I'm glad it had a role in the plot at the end, because I was starting to wonder if they'd forgotten all about it. It confused me that Lawrence seemed to sense some malevolence from the wolf's head, but by the end I decided that maybe it was because of his suppressed memories of what he really saw the night his mother died (which would also explain his sense of the moon as "threatening" (Maberry 18). What it doesn't explain is why the Frenchman had "an enigmatic smile" (24) on his face when Lawrence reacted to the cane, but maybe he's just familiar with the legends about Blackmoor.

All right, enough about the cane. Let's talk about the Wolfman itself. It made a good monster--threatening, ruthless, and super-strong. The scene when it ravages the gypsy camp is notable not only because Lawrence is bitten in that scene, but also because it just demonstrates the monster as a majorly destructive force. The later scenes worked in that regard as well. So on that level, the Wolfman is a great monster.

However, I thought a key point of this sort of story was the werewolf character's guilt and sense of responsibility for the people he kills during the full moon. As a wolf, he is an unreasoning, amoral monster, while as a man, he suffers from the knowledge that he's dangerous. I expected a lot more of that in The Wolfman than we got. There were a couple of scenes where Lawrence brought it up, and of course we saw Sir John's method of containing himself in the past (though he's given that up by the time the story takes place and has become a pretty malevolent werewolf), but it didn't feel like a central theme. After Lawrence was bitten, more of the focus seemed to be on Sir John as the primary monster, with Dr. Hoenneger and his lackeys as secondary monsters (of the human variety).

My other problem with the second half of the book is that after Lawrence transforms, we aren't left with anyone to root for. We can root for the Wolfman when it goes after someone like Hoenneger, but not when it goes after innocent people, and it's hard to feel any connection with an assortment of random innocent people there to be killed by the monster. We can root for Gwen Conliffe, but she only gets a couple of point of view chapters near the end. Maybe we were supposed to root for Aberline, but if that's the case, it missed me entirely. I didn't like him.

My feelings on The Wolfman are mixed. I enjoyed many things in this book and found some parts to be handled quite well, especially at the start. But with the lack of emotional connections and the lack of focus on Lawrence's internal conflict, the last parts of the book felt hollow to me. It might be because it was an adaptation of a movie, but whatever the reason was, it didn't work for me. At least the wolf's head cane-sword made a reappearance.

That's about that, but one thing I want to say before I end this is that I was pleased that the townspeople and Lawrence himself readily accepted the existence of the Wolfman when they saw it. It was a refreshing change from stories where characters persistently deny the supernatural even in the face of evidence.

Works Cited Maberry, Jonathan. The Wolfman. New York: Tor, 2010. Print.

Celebrating All Things Spooky: Scratches

(You might be here looking for my post on Alien . The gamers among you might want to return for my thoughts on Scratches.)

I just finished Scratches: The Director's Cut , a point-and-click adventure game I've had my eye on for a while. I first discovered the game because of a Kickstarter I saw for a horror adventure game called Asylum . After I watched the videos and read about their ideas for the game, I was pretty interested. For one thing, the Kickstarter page described it as "a psychological horror adventure inspired by H. P. Lovecraft and set in a massive, decaying mental institute." There are a lot of things in that description that caught my attention. "Psychological horror," "mental institute"....okay, let's be honest here. My interest skyrockets when I see the name "H. P. Lovecraft" associated with something. But another notable thing about the way the game was described was that the page made a point that it was "from the designer of Scratches."


Scratches was the previous game designed by Agustín Cordes, so I checked it out and learned that it was another point-and-click horror adventure game inspired by Lovecraft. I marked it down as a game I wanted to try. I backed Asylum, one thing led to another, and I finally ended up with a copy of Scratches.

I started playing it on Sunday, October 13. That was nearly perfect timing--the story begins on Saturday, October 12. Better yet, the player character was a horror writer! I was tempted to try to play the game quickly enough that I would finish it on the same day the game ended, but as you can tell, I was busy with other things and couldn't do that.
I wish I had a creepy old mansion to write in.
Preferably one that isn't cursed, though.Anyway, in Scratches, you play as Michael Arthate, a horror writer who has moved to a Victorian mansion to relax and finish writing his next novel. However, instead of getting right to work on that novel, he does what anyone in his position would do--explore the mansion!

It turns out that the mansion holds many secrets. A murder... records of a strange, legendary tribe encountered in Africa... diary entries about boarding up a door to try to stop the whispers... all sorts of lovely things. So what do you do? You decide to solve the mystery, of course!

Since this is a point-and-click adventure, it is fairly slow-paced. You won't be racing around or fighting anything. Instead, you'll explore the house, gather items, and solve puzzles in your attempt to piece together the true story of what happened there. It can be frustrating at times. I needed to use a guide more often that I'd like to admit. Some of the puzzles are a bit obscure, and you may find yourself frustrated because you don't know what to do next, but even if you need to use a guide, it is worth it.

The atmosphere goes from pleasant to creepy rather fast, aided by the music and the setting. The story is disturbing. And, despite being a game where nothing can chase you, there were a few scary moments that got my heart pounding. It is horror, and Lovecraft's influence creeps through.

The Director's Cut also comes with a short episode set after the main game called The Last Visit. It's worth playing and has its share of creepy moments, although it also clears up a lot of the story ambiguity that Scratches will leave you with. Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing is up to you.

Best of all for those of you reading this now--yes, right now!--is that GreenManGaming currently has Scratches on sale for only $2.49, which is 75% off. That's a great price for this creepy little gem, so I hope some of you take advantage of the sale and try it out.

And if you hear scratches in the night... well... dare you go into the basement?

Celebrating All Things Spooky: Anna

(You might be here looking for my thoughts on Alien, but the gamers among you should return for my thoughts on Anna.)

2012 saw the release of a psychological horror game called Anna . Trailers displayed a creepy abandoned sawmill and threatened the player with the fact that Anna knows what you are afraid of and will adjust the game accordingly, a system somewhat reminiscent of that used in Silent Hill: Shattered Memories . However, when the game was released, it received dismal reviews.

At this point, it's hard not to draw a parallel with another 2012 horror game, Amy . They were both horror games with similar titles that received generally negative reviews--and both were eventually updated in response to players' complaints. But Anna went above and beyond fixing glitches and easing frustration, as Amy did. Instead of a patch, a massive update was released for free to everyone who already owned the game, and that was Anna: Extended Edition. This new version increased the game's length, added a sanity system, updated puzzles to make them more intuitive and logical, provided a journal and other details to make the story more coherent, and expanded the game to include 8 possible endings. The resulting game received much better reviews.

I did not play the original game, as the Extended Edition was already out by the time I played it. Therefore, all of my comments apply to the Extended Edition.

The atmosphere is nice and creepy as you explore the abandoned sawmill and try to figure out why you were drawn there and what your connection to Anna is. The only thing that detracts from it is the music--while there are a few great pieces (with ominous chanting!), the main theme is a calm, soothing melody that really clashes with the horror. The story has been criticized for being vague, but I feel that it provides enough details to give you an idea of the truth, while still maintaining a supernatural air of mystery.

And there is some creepy stuff going on in that story.
There are even some nice little shout-outs, like an achievement called "Anna fhtagn."

The gameplay is standard survival horror fare: you try to piece together the mystery while at the same time, you collect objects and solve puzzles in order to explore more of the sawmill. Since the area is under the influence of the supernatural, these are often more unusual than just finding keys or moving obstacles. Nevertheless, it's the classic survival horror gameplay I want to see more of, so I loved it.

One additional gameplay element is the "intuition" system. When certain events happen or when you examine specific objects/areas, the protagonist gains a new insight into the truth. The resulting "intuitions" are listed on the inventory screen and can be combined with items or one another to create further intuitions. Finding all of the intuitions is required for the best ending.

There is one thing that really frustrated me about the game: I kept missing items. I like games that make items stand out, whether the item shines, the protagonist looks towards it, whatever. This game did not do that. If you find yourself stuck, your best bet is to very carefully comb over every inch of the sawmill, because it's most likely that you missed something--be it an item or a book that will give you the clue you need to solve a puzzle.

NOPE!Now, with 8 possible endings, one would expect that Anna: Extended Edition has an abundance of replay value. This is not exactly the case. Several of the endings can be achieved in a single playthrough, as long as you save before making the choice in question. That's not necessarily a bad thing. This handles a certain video game predicament in an interesting way (mild spoilers to follow): while many video games leave some gamers with questions like, "Why can't James just leave the way he came?" and "Why is that dog outside enough to prevent Jill from leaving the mansion filled with zombies, Hunters, and worse horrors?" Anna will give you an epilogue and consider it an ending if at any point you throw your hands up and say, "Nope! I'm getting out of here!" and bolt through the nearest door to the outside. Even a "game over" gets such treatment.

Ah, the words have been said. "Game over"? Is there, then, combat? The answer is no. You don't have a standard health bar. You get a game over if your sanity meter is entirely depleted. And this is where we reach one of the most interesting mechanics Anna employed. (The following section is in spoiler tags, because for the purest experience in Anna, you don't want to know this. Understanding the system significantly reduces its impact.)
» Click to show Spoiler - click again to hide... « Throughout the game, random supernatural events occur around the sawmill. Knowing that they were linked to the sanity system, I initially made the mistake of assuming that this worked the same as the system in Amnesia. That is, I believed witnessing supernatural events would deplete my sanity, and I made haste to get away from them. However, that does not seem to be the case. The sanity mechanic goes back to the trailer's claim that the game would play on your fears. As long as I calmly went about my business, I was usually fine. If I spun around and zipped across the room, my sanity decreased.
Unfortunately, while I love this idea in concept, it eventually became more of an annoyance. If a health system was used in conjunction with the sanity system, it might have had great potential and set up a horrific fight-or-flight choice, but as it is, it seems too easy to overcome once you understand it.

Anna: Extended Edition left me with mixed feelings. On one hand, I loved some of the things it did, but on the other hand, there were unnecessary frustrations that dampened my enthusiasm. Overall, I highly recommend it.

And if you're reading this right now--yes, right now!--you're in luck! GreenManGaming has Anna: Extended Edition on sale for $2.49 for today and tomorrow only! It also qualifies for the voucher for an additional 20% off, found in their blog. And with Halloween on its way, there couldn't be a better time to check out this entertaining horror title.

Alien: Space is Terrifying

Ridley Scott's Alien, today's topic.Isolation is terrifying. When the protagonists of a horror story are trapped and isolation, it's almost guaranteed to increase the tension. A lot of different settings can accomplish this. A little house out in the rural countryside is isolated. A base in the middle of Antarctica is isolated (we'll get back to this in a couple of weeks, don't worry). A ship in the open ocean is isolated. But is anything more isolated than a ship out in deep space?

Space is terrifying. I love learning new things about space. I can watch documentaries about NASA and the space program for hours. And when I think about the astronauts of the Apollo missions going out there and landing on the moon--or orbiting the moon alone, which is what the third astronaut did while the other two went down to the moon, you know--I have to think that they were some of the bravest people in the world. It's not just all of the unknowns and all of the things that could go wrong that get to me, but just the sheer fact that they were all the way out there, so far away from everyone back here.

Aliens are also terrifying, as well as being something else I can watch documentaries about for hours. And when I consider different types of monsters... Let me put it this way. I'm 99.9% positive I will never, ever encounter a legitimate vampire. Or a werewolf. Or any of a number of classic monsters. Zombies are unlikely, though I won't completely discount the possibility. And you might know that despite my fascination with hauntings and willingness to listen to evidence and anecdotes, I don't really believe in ghosts.

But aliens?

I'm not saying I believe in aliens. I don't, really. Probably. I just think there's a much better chance of aliens existing than any of those other creatures I listed. If I turned on the news and saw that we'd made contact with extraterrestrial life, I'd be shocked, but not completely. So I may not believe in aliens, but I believe there's a chance that aliens exist.

Demons are another story entirely, but we aren't talking about them today. We're talking about aliens, or more specifically, Alien, the 1979 film.

Space is not as terrifying for her.Sometime in June, when I saw I'd be watching this movie for class, I went to one of the forums I frequent and told them that after the coming semester, I'd finally understand all those Alien references they make. Their response was...enthusiastic. It consisted of things like, "Wait, you've never seen Alien before?!" and "That is one of the few perfect movies in the world." So of course I'm going to link them to this post. (Yes guys, I'm talking about you. :)) That gave me high hopes for the film. It also had a good cast, or at least, I like Sigourney Weaver. I also wondered about the actress who played Lambert, because her name sounded familiar. It turned out Veronica Cartwright is the sister of Angela Cartwright, who I've seen on Lost in Space.

Space and aliens are both terrifying, which puts this movie off to a good start in the realm of horror just from its premise. The ship itself, the Nostromo, reminded me of an article I'd recently read about a game called Routine, which wants its futuristic setting to look like the future was imagined in the 80s, rather than current high-tech visions. More importantly, however, the ship created an environment that was both claustrophobic and vast. If something stalks you in the setting like that, you're trapped and constrained, while at the same time your enemy has many possible hiding places.

This is the point where anyone who hasn't seen Alien and doesn't want spoilers should stop reading.

You know what my favorite thing about the movie was? (Okay, to anyone who guessed "the cat," you might be right, but I'm being more general here.) The way the alien, once it was full-grown, could blend in with the ship's environment. It looked enough like regular stuff on the ship that it had even more hiding places than one would expect for a huge alien. I want to watch the movie again if only to try to spot it in the background in certain scenes. I love stuff like that--background events that have more meaning when you see them the second time, or things you don't even notice the first time you see them, but were there all along. (Kind of like this awareness test, except scarier.)

So, how does the alien of Alien (a Xenomorph? Is that right, or am I mixing up franchises?) do as a monster? Fantastic! It's got the nigh-unstoppable power and lack of morality we saw from Rawhead, and even though it faded into the background--sometimes literally--for large portions of the movie, it remained a constant threat looming over the crew. It also looked scary, especially when you only got little glimpses of it. Oh, and then there's all the sexual symbolism. I'm pretty sure that's been discussed to death already (considering I knew about it before I even saw the movie), so I'll skip over it in favor of a brief discussion of the other "monster" in the film.

Let's keep some to study!
What could possibly go wrong?1I didn't trust Ash, but I assumed he was just an evil science guy, the sort of scientist who puts research and knowledge above the lives of other people. He'd rather study the alien than destroy it, even if that could lead to the deaths of everyone on the ship. Those kinds of scientists show up often enough in science fiction, after all. Instead, he's actually a robot, programmed to follow the orders of people like that. (His superiors would have been in for a nasty shock if he made it home with the alien.) Ash the Android took me completely by surprise and nearly distracted me for the rest of the movie. I wasn't expecting a robot at all. Once I took a few moments to think about it, however, it didn't bother me as much. I was willing to accept a horrific alien thing onboard a ship transporting ore through space, but a robot was too weird for me? I'm fine with it now, and even read some interesting theories about his actions throughout the movie. But as a monster, the alien definitely has him beat.

In short, I enjoyed Alien and I might consider the alien itself to be the best monster we've looked at so far this semester.


1: Halo. I know the Forerunners might have had legitimate reasons. But still, when you have to wipe out nearly the whole galaxy to stop an alien race, keeping a bunch to study is a terrible idea.

Celebrating All Things Spooky: Writing

(If you're here looking for my response to World War Z, you can follow the link or just go to the previous post. If you've already read that, feel free to shake your head over how I talk in one post about how I'm not a huge zombie fan, and then I talk about my zombie stories in the next.)

I like October, largely because the weather gets cooler and it's not absurd to hope for snow, but also because the month ends with Halloween, and that's great news for horror fans! It's the perfect time to celebrate all things spooky, so why not enjoy October with some fitting blog posts?

With the appearance of "The Shape in the Sky" at The Word Wood, today is a great time to kick off this celebration with a special post to highlight my horror stories. "The Shape in the Sky" is the shortest of these stories, as it is flash fiction--under 500 words. I wrote it for The Word Wood, based on their monthly prompt, which was to write a flash horror story that incorporates the noun "spots" and the verb "dream." It was fun to write, and it features UFOs and insanity.

Slightly longer is "White Lady." If you want to read a short story inspired by a true ghost story, take a look. It's not a horror story, though. Sarah is a benevolent ghost. Not everything rumored to lurk in the library is, though...maybe I'll write about them someday.

 There is no cover, but I made this.There will always be a special place in my heart for Sacreya's Legacy , which I consider to be my first true published story. When I got that acceptance email, I thought for sure I'd somehow misunderstood. But no, it was real! I was on top of the world. Sacreya's Legacy stars a zombie detective whose new case takes him into the heart of a zombie outbreak.  But don't be fooled by the premise. This isn't really a mystery. Every now and then I sit down and say, "I'm going to write a mystery!" Once I get into it, I remember I don't like writing mysteries. In this case, it became zombie horror with very light mystery elements. Also, note the title. It is not named after Ben, the main character, but his creator, Dr. Sacreya. Yes, there is a touch of mad science in this story.

And speaking of mad science, if you want a more lighthearted dose of zombie fiction, you can always try The Accidental Zombie , the story of two definitely-not-mad scientists who, well, accidentally create a zombie. It's meant to be a comedy, so the sense of impending doom caused by the rampaging zombie is mitigated by the layers of absurdity. It was a lot of fun to write.

There should be another horror story on this list. There really should. However, due to unforeseen troubles, The Book at Dernier is still on the "upcoming" list. So you'll have to wait a little longer before learning the dark secrets of Dernier... but don't worry. It will come.

Stay tuned as we continue to celebrate October, Halloween, and all things spooky!

World War Z

I just finished reading World War Z by Max Brooks for the second time. I had mixed feelings when I sat down with my copy of the book. My unsigned copy of the book. You see, I first read it about a year ago, for my undergraduate monster class. That November, Max Brooks came to our college to give a talk...and I stayed home. I was fine with that until the next class, when everyone was talking about how great it was, and realized how much I regretted not going.

I'll never get to see that talk, but at least my college uploaded videos of their hour-long interview with Max Brooks. There's a lot of great stuff in that interview--he discusses his interest in zombies, his inspirations for the novel, his feelings about the movie, the Walking Dead, and more. Since I know you're going to go watch the interview after you read this, I won't rehash all of that. I won't keep ranting about how I should have gone to his talk, either.

Instead, let me start with a brief word about zombies in general.

I don't like zombies nearly as much as people think I do. I have friends who are all, "Hey, Sam, check this out! I bet you'll love it!" and I go see whatever it is and say, "Okay, so there are zombies. I need to see more than that to be interested." When I became a Resident Evil fan, it let me to many other enjoyable zombie stories, and I wrote my own zombie fiction. And from then on, people had the idea that I'm a huge zombie fan, which isn't quite true. Survival horror gameplay and mad scientist stories are more likely to draw me in, and those often come with zombies. I don't dislike zombies, either. They can be fine monsters. I just wanted to make it clear from the start that I wasn't automatically drooling over this book because it involved zombies.

Okay, I've rambled enough. Back to the topic at hand, World War Z. I liked this book, I really did. It just felt a little too long. I'm not entirely secure saying that, because most of my favorite stories are in the second half. (And that's really how this book feels to me--not a novel so much as a book of many interconnected short stories, with each interview being an individual story.) The beginning of the book is cool. I love that creepy set-up, with the mounting realization among people that things are really bad. But then there are a lot of interviews that mainly serve to set up the political situation, emphasize how dangerous the zombies are, and demonstrate how a zombie apocalypse would bring out the worst in a lot of people. That's a common theme in zombie fiction. Your fellow survivors are often scarier than the monsters. A little bit of that stuff is fantastic. Too much, and I feel like I'm being beaten over the head with cynicism. That's one of the main reasons I stopped reading Karen Traviss's Wess'Har series. Whenever I get partway through that section of World War Z, I think that I dislike it and that it's too long...but then I eventually get past that.

What are my favorite parts of World War Z? It might raise some eyebrows since I just complained about the cynicism (but remember, I also said a little bit is fantastic), but I love the Paul Redeker story. From the cold-hearted line "The first casualty of the conflict must be our own sentimentality" (Brooks 107), to the twist at the end, I really love that section. On the other end of the spectrum, I really enjoy the parts about movies giving people hope. Then, about halfway through the book, I have a string of favorites--the pilot saved by Mets, who may or may not exist. The castle defense. Kondo Tatsumi and Tomonago Ijiro. Captain Chen's submarine. The International Space Station--I love learning things about outer space, and it would never have occurred to me to think about people on the space station during a zombie apocalypse. That might be my favorite interview overall. On the other hand, I can't forget to mention the interview with Father Sergei Ryzhkov, the chaplain who decides it's his duty to kill the infected, that priests "were the only ones who should bear the cross of releasing trapped souls from infected bodies" (297). That section fascinates me.

I think the greatest strength of World War Z is that it makes you ask yourself, "How would people really react to a zombie apocalypse?" and "What would I do in that situation? Which of these people would I be like?"

I should talk about the zombies themselves, but I'm not sure what to say. They're zombies. If they bite you, you're infected and you'll become a zombie too. The only way to kill them is to blow their brains out. And even though you can trick them into running off rooftops or running into your lines of fire, you can't fool them into thinking you're a zombie. Actually, since you know due to the format that all of the interviewees survive the zombie war, that takes away a lot of the tension the undead normally cause. It's the other humans, and their solutions, that are the scariest part of this book, from the Redeker Plan to the quislings.

I may not have been very interested in the zombies, but I found the quislings very creepy. Quislings are more or less people who would have defected to the invading army, except you can't defect or surrender to zombies, so "they started moving like zombies, sounding like them, even attacking and trying to eat other people" (156). But it doesn't work. It just made things worse for everyone else, and the zombies would attack the quislings anyway. In other words, to end on a lighter note, do NOT try this against Brooks's zombies:



Works Cited Brooks, Max. World War Z. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2006. Print.

The Yattering and Jack: A New Favorite

There are a few key things that can instantly capture my attention in a story. When I read the first line of Clive Barker's "The Yattering and Jack" and realized the Yattering was a demon sent out of Hell to torment someone, nothing short of an explosion1 could have torn me away from the page.

The first half of the story made it an instant favorite, possibly my favorite thing I've read so far for this course. The Yattering's fury at Jack Polo for being such an oblivious, unimaginative person made me laugh out loud. It was a perfect setup for a (rather dark) comedy--a demon is sent to drive a man insane, but in the face of every situation, that man shrugs it off with his fatalistic worldview. The Yattering tries everything it can think of, but Jack does nothing more than mutter, "Che sera, sera,"2 a phrase he uses "with monotonous regularity" (Barker 44). The first half of the story goes through an account of how things normally go between the Yattering and Jack. The Yattering tries everything. It stops his key from opening the door to his house. It whispers obscene things to him in the shower. It explodes his cats. And through it all, Jack says, "Che sera, sera," and continues on with his mundane life.

My excitement diminished as soon as the story went to Jack's point of view. It occurs in the middle of a scene, and we are told that "Jack thought of the game he was playing, and quietly calculated the odds against him" (Barker 50). From there on, it was more of a human vs. the demon plot, and while that was still interesting, I liked the beginning better. I would have enjoyed the story more if we didn't know for sure until the end that Jack was aware of the Yattering and deliberately fighting it. Not only would that have been a fun twist, but the humor was strongest when it seemed like Jack just didn't get it. However, for what they were, Jack's struggles to pretend he didn't know the Yattering existed, while it did terrible things to him and his daughters, were quite well-written. I enjoyed that part of the story as well. And while I found the ending a little anticlimactic, it was clever and came full circle in an entertaining way.

Let's discuss demons, starting with the Yattering. It is a fairly traditional demon in that it comes from Hell. It's bound by specific rules--it cannot harm or touch Jack, and it isn't allowed to leave the confines of the house. That's the game Jack is playing with it--if he can drive it crazy enough, it will forget itself and break the rules. The Yattering shows poltergeist-like behavior in its attempts to get Jack's attention, which even comes up at one point in the story. Of course, because of the rules that bind it, that makes a lot of sense. It can't touch him, so it touches everything else in the house. At one point, the Yattering decides to beg its superiors to remove it from the situation, and calls upon Beelzebub. Beelzebub is a much higher-ranking demon, and is rather arrogant. He refuses to let the Yattering go, because Jack's soul is to be theirs. One distinction between the two demons in that scene stood out to me:

The word that followed was anathema. The Lord of the Flies could barely bring himself to pronounce it.
"--Heaven," said Beelzebub, with infinite loss in his voice.
"Heaven," said the Yattering, not knowing quite what was meant by the word. (Barker 47)

 I found that very interesting. Beelzebub's sense of "infinite loss" solidifies him as the fallen angel one would expect him to be. The Yattering, however, does not know what Heaven is. It isn't a fallen angel, it was never in Heaven, and it later uses the word just based on the meaning he gathered from Beelzebub's use of it. The Yattering is a demon, but of a lesser and different sort. I would have liked to learn more about that.

All right, so remember when I said I found the story less interesting when we got Jack's point of view? There are two reasons for that. The first is what I said--I thought he was funnier when we didn't know the truth about him. The second reasons is just that I find demons fascinating, so I was much more interested in the Yattering than I was in Jack.

But, as the title would suggest, this story was about both the Yattering and Jack, and it was a great little piece of demon fiction. And if it wasn't quite as fantastic as the first half led me to believe it would be, well... che sera, sera.

Works Cited Barker, Clive. "The Yattering and Jack." 1984. Books of Blood: Vols 1-3. New York: Berkley, 1998. 43-64. Print.

1: Or food. Yes, I admit it. I tore myself away from the story for a snack.
2: "Whatever will be, will be." I had trouble finding where this phrase actually comes from. One of the earliest, or at least most famous, uses seems to be in Doctor Faustus, which makes it even funnier in the context of this story. After all, Jack Polo "wasn't a Faust: a pact-maker, a soul-seller" (Barker 43).

30 Days of Night

Let's take a look at the graphic novel 30 Days of Night, written by Steve Niles and illustrated by Ben Templesmith. By now you've probably come to expect my insanity, so I'll get it out of the way early. Instead of attempting a Moarte imitation and filling this review with maniacal laughter, I'll just tell you that I first heard of 30 Days of Night last October, when it appeared on Longbox of the Damned. It's been almost a year since then, so all I remembered was the general premise of vampires attacking an Alaskan town during polar night and that an important vampire guy showed up to tell the others what idiots they were. I'm glad I didn't remember more, because I re-watched the review just a moment ago, and it covers the entire plot. But I knew Moarte/Linkara/Lewis Lovhaug liked the comic, so I had high hopes. And anyone who knows how much time I've spent trying to figure out how sun-fearing vampires would fare in space shouldn't be surprised to learn that the story's premise grabbed my attention right away. Vampires and polar night? All right!

Once again, there will be spoilers in this post.

I'm not a big reader of graphic novels. 30 Days of Night is only the fourth graphic novel to find a place on my bookshelf. Therefore, my inexperience could be to blame here, but the art style made it kind of hard for me to follow this one. There were entire panels that forced me to use context clues from the dialogue and surrounding panels to figure out just what had happened. (For example, the ending. I read it four or five times before I realized that there was a scene break between the pages. Until then, it seemed to me like the sun rose two minutes after they said it would rise in a couple of days.)

 Animorphs was my childhoodI will praise the art for the teeth. It did a good job with teeth. They did a better job of communicating the danger of the vampires for me than the stylized sprays of blood did. But still, there were several times when the vampires' teeth and crazy tongues (what was up with that?) reminded me of Taxxons instead of vampires. That was pretty weird, but all right. I'm not overly picky about vampires. This graphic novel's super-strong, nearly-indestructible, deadly, evil variant was fine, although they left me with some confusion. They were a step up from the zombie-like vampires of I Am Legend, with individual personalities and the ability to plan and reason. Marlow's plan is well thought out, even if he didn't consider the long-term consequences. Vicente, who is aware of the consequences, comes up with a new plan to fix things. So they're pretty smart and could possibly pass as humans, although I assume their unique font means their voices are strange. But for all that, they seem pretty one-dimensional. They're vampires, humans are food, done. We don't get much insight into them beyond that. I was fine with that, especially when one of the survivors turns into a vampire from a scratch (these vampires need to take care to make sure they don't turn their victims, because this sort of vampirism spreads very easily) and immediately goes into attack mode. As soon as he becomes a vampire, he's an enemy. That explained a lot to me--even if the vampires could think and had personalities, the people they once were ceased to exist the moment they turned. Then Eben launched his final plan to stop the vampires, and my theory died.

Eben uses vampire blood to infect himself, in the hopes that it will make him strong enough to drive the vampires away. He gets the crazy vampire font for his dialogue and becomes hungry for blood, but he runs from his wife so he won't hurt her and goes to fight Vicente. He's a vampire, but he's still Eben. So what was with the other guy's instantaneous switch to evil? Does Eben just have awesome willpower? Was it the way he was infected? Did a panel explain it and I missed it? I thought when he and Vicente were arguing about whether being a vampire is great or horrible, they were going to clear this up for me, but they didn't.

Also, am I crazy, or did most of the vampires look like what would happen if Nosferatu was about mobsters?
+           = On second thought, maybe I am crazy. Despite my confusion, I did think the vampires were good monsters. They were dangerous, they spent most of the book killing people, and like I said, I liked the teeth. And even if they were a bit one-dimensional, there were enough differences between them to make them actual characters. When Vicente arrives, and the other vampires are clapping while he's wondering how they could all be such idiots, I laughed. They were interesting. I just would have liked to know more about them. And that isn't confined to just the vampires. I didn't feel like I knew any of the human characters, either. I rooted for them because they were the humans, but that's it. Most of the survivors just seemed like they were there to be victims, and even the main characters, Eben and Stella, weren't much to me beyond named good guys with a chance at success. I'd chalk it up to my unfamiliarity with graphic novels, but other graphic novel characters have come to life as characters for me. I liked 30 Days of Night. It's earned its spot in my tiny graphic novel collection. I just didn't like it as much as I wanted to.

Rawhead Rex and several strange connections

This week we'll take a look at "Rawhead Rex," a short story by Clive Barker. I'd never read anything by him before, despite a friend telling me I should. I filed the recommendation away and more or less forgot about it. The closest I got was when I watched the first few videos of a Let's Play of Clive Barker's Undying . So I didn't really know what to expect from this story, but as long as the monster didn't have eight legs, I wasn't too worried.

I should mention that I'm not a big fan of visceral horror, and "Rawhead Rex" was filled with blood, people being eaten, and similar gory moments. But I'm not going to complain about that. It worked for the story and made Rawhead a gruesome, serious threat. If Rawhead comes after you, it's probably over. What can you do against a force like that? (My suggestion: count to zero, then scream and run away.)

Once again, to give fair warning to anyone who reads this before reading the story, there will be spoilers in this post.

When characters in fiction come across a door that's been welded shut, a box that won't open, an insanely strong prison, or in this case, a boulder that doesn't want to budge, you can usually count on two things. First, they'll find a way to force their way in. Second, bad things will result. As soon as Thomas Garrow came across a massive boulder in a field his family never used, and decided to get rid of it no matter how ridiculously hard it was to remove, his fate was sealed.

This story worked for me, especially since it had several of the elements that make demons my favorite monsters. If Rawhead wasn't exactly a demon, he was still a demon-like monster, sealed away years ago and accidentally released by humanity, and ultimately defeated by a force of good. He even shows signs of being able to possess people, or at least exert considerable influence over them. I'll resist the urge to veer off-topic and babble like a lunatic about Ray Bradbury, but I consider Rawhead to be demon-like in the same way that Mr. Dark and Mr. Cooger from Something Wicked This Ways Comes are demon-like--forces of evil with undeniable similarities to traditional devil portrayals, but who don't necessarily fit the role in a Christian sense [Mr. Dark mocks the idea that the Bible could harm him, and Rawhead is delighted to realize that "the true power, the only power that could defeat him, was apparently gone: lost beyond recall, its place usurped by a virgin shepherd" (Barker 390).]You could say "Rawhead Rex" subverts religious ideas because of that, but Rawhead was terrified of and repelled by a statue of (arguably) a goddess, which had been hidden in the church.
When I first read it, I thought Rawhead was an invention of Barker's, but apparently he's a variation on a mythological bogeyman-like figure that eats children who misbehave. (I looked it up because  Rawhead reminded me of a bloodier, more violent version of the troll in Ernest Scared Stupid . The troll was sealed away years previously, goes on a rampage when it's released, and targets children. The similarities end there.)

While Rawhead's actions--murdering people, eating children, etc.--and appearance make him a brute force sort of monster, he gets point of view sections. His thoughts mainly revolve around eating people and claiming his position as King (hence the "Rex" in the title), but there was something disturbingly childlike about his confusion over technology such as cars. Rather than make his less monstrous, his fears made him even creepier. He knows what can harm him and what can't. He is capable of learning, as seen when the crashed car teaches him "a new and lethal lesson" (383) and he later uses petrol as a weapon.


Rawhead's downfallRawhead's downfall is female fertility, or the creation of life, which is an unusual weakness...but we're dealing with a demon here, so it works. I liked the way Barker handled it. It didn't come out of nowhere, but was foreshadowed quite early on, when Rawhead was afraid to touch a woman having her period. In the end, one of the characters finds a Venus statue hidden in the church, and the sight of it paralyzes Rawhead with fear. From the description, the statue is not the Roman goddess Venus, but a prehistoric figurine similar to Venus of Willendorf (pictured).

All in all, I enjoyed "Rawhead Rex" (and look at all the things it gave me excuses to reference). With so many characters, many of whom die partway through the story, it's hard to pull out one as the protagonist. I like to think it's Reverend Coot. Sure, Ron got the statue and delivered the killing blow to Rawhead, but he only found it because Coot clung onto life long enough to tell him the altar was the key. But of course I'd choose a good-hearted Reverend as the protagonist in a demon story. Don't tell me you didn't see that one coming.

Works Cited Barker, Clive. "Rawhead Rex." 1984. Books of Blood: Vols 1-3. New York: Berkley, 1998. 362-407. Print.