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December 6 - December 19, 2024
Readers were particularly fascinated by the priestly vow of celibacy. Surely, they reasoned, a total denial of sex must mask total sexual perversion.
Yes, having sex will cause your baby to die, especially if that sex involved female orgasm (Crib, 1982). Yes, having a baby will cause a woman’s breasts to look “as though a vandal had defaced a great work of art” (also Crib). Yes, you will be confined to a locked mental ward after giving birth (too many books to list).
The message seemed to be that women should have babies by finding them in a cabbage patch or receiving them from a stork, the way nature intended, rather than using their dangerous, weird-looking wombs.
The terrifying truth about childbirth is that carrying the fetus to term is merely the first step on the long road to having your house to yourself again.
The most important thing to remember is that it is not your fault. Many children are born evil and must be taught to be good. As the famous French writer Alain Robbe-Grillet said, “What do little girls dream about? Knives and blood.”
“Maybe God is not civilized.”
Automatonophobia is the name smug people who’ve never been chased by witch marionettes give to the irrational fear of inanimate objects that resemble human beings: puppets, robots, mannequins, dolls.
Since time immemorial, humankind’s greatest natural predator has been the clown.
But there’s one problem: “Her clown hated her mother.”
Hating clowns is a waste of time because you’ll never loathe a clown as much as he loathes himself.
Magicians think they’re wise and witty, full of patter and panache, walking around like they don’t deserve to be shot in the back of the head and dumped in a lake. For all the grandeur of its self-regard, magic consists of nothing more than making a total stranger feel stupid. Worse, the magician usually dresses like a jackass.
But cats have an inherent nobility that dogs and rats lack, which is probably why humans feel better when we bring them down to our buffoonish level by dressing them in reindeer antlers for holiday cards.
There is no moral. God is dead and life is a bleak, dark tunnel lined with hungry insects.
This is one issue on which carnivores and vegetarians must stand united: we must eat nature, or nature will eat us.
Marasco was a high school English teacher, so his illusions about human nature had long ago been stomped to death.
Crass, commercial minded, grandiose, ridiculous, this carnival barker’s idea of a haunted house is a shame-train of stupid.
Only gentrification can keep the forces of darkness at bay.
What danger signs should patients watch for when selecting a skeleton doctor? Well, if the doctor refers to patients as “poor unlucky bastards,” be careful.
America is number one! Let’s kill a commie for mommy and head for the mall!
Turns out that Jeb’s ex-wife is a witch, and no matter how open-minded you are, you should never marry a witch.
From their earliest appearances in literature, vampires have been jerks. Dracula was rude and smelly Eurotrash. Sheridan LeFanu’s Carmilla was a terrible houseguest. And the less said about Varney the Vampire, the better.
Alienated, lonely, brooding, gothic, glam, good dancers—Rice’s vampires were everything we wanted to be.
It’s the night before Christmas and all through the town, someone is chopping up pregnant coeds, stabbing babysitters in the brain, and decapitating divorced ladies.
