Snow - Ronald Malfi

            Snow is the story of Ted and Kate’s struggle to survive against horrible spider monsters that get inside people.

           

            Erm, sorry. That’s Todd and Kate’s struggle to survive against horrible snow monsters that get inside people.

                                                                  

From the very beginning, I felt like I’d read this story before. I have, a few times now. For me, there was nothing particularly remarkable about Snow as a whole. It was a pretty standard group of survivors vs. monster apocalypse type story with a small town setting. The cop sacrificed himself, the kids got axed, and the pregnant lady was a psycho. Nothing new here.

They also killed off my favorite character, Shawna. Also nothing new here. I did find her refreshingly tough while she was alive. I really admired her will to survive, and felt a little betrayed when she was killed during a scene in her POV. For some reason I never expect a character to be killed in a scene when it is their POV, especially if they are the only character in that scene. Major expectation adjustment.

The only thing I found nonstandard about the book were the characteristics of the monster. Snow is, no surprise, largely about monsters that live in, or are part of the snow from a particularly large storm that covers the Midwestern United States. I’ve never seen a monster that takes the form of glittering, gravity defying snow in any sort of medium, other than a few select monsters in Dungeons and Dragons. When paired with the setting, which is a remote town in the center of a blizzard, the snow beast is well suited to its environment. In much the same way the alien from Alien uses its environment to its advantage, the snow beasts blend with their surroundings, amplifying the paranoia and fear that they could be anywhere and anytime.

As if incorporeal snow monsters with enormous hook arms that turn solid just long enough to hack and slash you and your shelter to smithereens wasn’t terrifying enough, the snow beasts are also capable of possessing their victims. Some of the human skin suites are used as disposable corporeal toys, and behave much like zombies. The interesting ones are the humans taken for more permanent residence. These retain some semblance of humanity, and are capable of blending in with the human population long enough to move about undetected (as seen in the epilogue), though they inevitably have a strange and alien demeanor that puts normal people on edge. This made me wonder how much, if any of the original personality remained in the possessed being. With Eddy Clement, I had the distinct impression there were still some remnants of his former self, but twisted and strange. This was the element of the story that held the most potential for me, and I was disappointed it wasn’t taken further.

An interesting thing also happens to children in this novel when they are possessed. They lose their faces. Something about the snow beasts doesn’t quite mix with prepubescent humans and the result is corrupted. The children appear to be outcasts from both the surviving humans, and the society of snow beasts. They take to roaming the woods in silent packs, and though disturbing, they never harm any of the human characters in the story, which was fascinating to me. I really want to know more about the feral, faceless children, their motives, and the state of their consciousness.

And lastly, there was totally a penis monster. And it was gross. I think there is something telling about ending the semester with a mention of a penis monster. Somehow, it says more than all my blogs ever could.

Relic - Douglas Preston, Lincoln Child

            Relic is the only book this semester that has made me squirm on the first page.

“Lighting a cigarette, he applied its tip to the forest of ticks on his shin and ankle.”

The forest of ticks. Have I mentioned how horrifying I find ticks? This has no particular relevance to the rest of the novel, but it still deserves a mention. I shuddered on the first page. Good on you Relic.

                      

As for the rest of the story, I found it to be more of a mystery than a horror. The pace was slow at points, and there were times it dragged for me, but the good moments of the novel made up for the low points. What Relic lacked most for me was the presence of strong characters. The only character I developed even a tiny attachment to was Smithback, and this was due to his obnoxious quirkiness, and possibly the moment of complete understanding I shared with him when he hit the buffet table and refused to be stopped even by absolute catastrophe.

What I enjoyed most about Relic was the setting, and the science. The giant labyrinth of the museum, stuffed with countless artifacts was at the same time lonely and compelling. I imagine if I was lost in the museum vaults, alone, afterhours I would be a bit apprehensive. Yet, at the same time, the beautiful realism and details that went into crafting the museum made me really want to go to one. And unlike the frozen Artic wastes, or vast spacecrafts, I can actually go to a museum. Relic actually inspired me to seek out first hand experiences with the diversity of other cultures and time periods. I am now planning a trip to the Smithsonian. Relic will doubtlessly be on my mind the whole time.

The other aspect of the book I enjoyed was the science. Natural science has always been an interest of mine, and I dabbled in a fair amount of biology during my undergraduate degree. Though the science in Relic took its creative liberties, it was clear to me it was based upon the author’s solid understanding of accurate science. One of my favorite puzzles in the novel was figuring out the machine’s predictions before the scientists could interoperate it for me.

Speaking of the machine’s prediction’s… what a fascinating beast! I found myself more intrigued by the museum beast than I was frightened, but this intrigue kept me turning pages. Though we never got to read in the POV of the beast, it still became a sympathetic monster to me. It was the last of its kind, living in a squalid and pitiful environment compared to the lush, green, expanse of its native home. It was drawn to the figurine of itself. It appreciated things of beauty. Then the beast was slowly hunted down, collecting bullets and injuries as the quiet lonely existence it had was disrupted, then destroyed by ignorant humans. I’d be pissed too. I’d probably go on a murderous rampage too. The beast, despite the opinions of several characters, wasn’t evil to me. The novel succeeded in turning the beast into a natural phenomenon, that like so many, is threatened and destroyed by the advancement of human society. It was a symbol of an old world, still wild, that was lost before it was fully understood, like the dozens of plant and animal species lost every day in the world’s rainforests.

Because I felt this way about the beast, I did not like the epilogue. I felt making the beast into Whittlesay and then having Kawikita attempt to harness the plant that caused the transformation, undid some of the work I appreciated most in the novel. I would have preferred if the beast were a natural born phenomenon, or simply one of the Korthoga, transformed by the virus. This adaptation seemed to destroy the ancient roots the beast represented to me. I prefer the conclusions Margo and Frock drew at the end of the novel.

Now, one last thing. While the science for the most part impressed me with its believability, this made the one flaw stand out in stark, annoying contrast to me. “All big game-lion, water buffalo, elephant- have eyes on the sides of their head”

No. Wrong. Lions, like all predatory mammals, have forward facing eyes. Predators have eyes in the front of their heads because it gives them the advanced depth perception they need to calculate distance to their prey. Herbivorous, prey animals have eyes on the sides of their heads to give them a wider field of vision to spot stalking predators. 

The Thing - John Carpenter

            I first saw The Thing years ago, and I must say my memories of the film do not do it justice. Or perhaps it just gets better with time. John Carpenter makes great John Carpenter films. There's no other category of comparison for them. The first scene involves the worst marksman ever, a helicopter that says “Caution rotating blades” with an arrow, and what is possibly the most glorious beard ever caught on film. Then every scene thereafter pretty much has equally great components along the same vein. 

            The Thing itself is our second alien of the semester, and like Rawhead Rex, is an ancient terror unleashed by foolish humans who won't stop digging. This beast, more than another I've encountered this semester, is terrifying because it is not understood. It is first seen on film as a dog with a strange habit of staring at things in a very poised and ominous way (the animal actor deserves an oscar). Even more than the gross out scenes where the Thing shape shifts, the first scenes where it is in the shape of a dog, but clearly not a dog are the most disturbing for me. It takes something familiar and makes it strange. 

            As the story progresses and it consumes other organisms and replicates itself, we receive very limited information about it. All we know is that it absorbs other organisms, mimics them perfectly, and reproduces in this fashion. Even though it seems to gain intelligence from the beings it consumes (which is perfectly terrifying in its own right), and developed the ability to speak, we never glean any of its motives beyond reproducing. As a matter of fact, every time we see the Thing, it is something else. In this way it is impossible to know the enemy, it is a truly faceless opponent, and that is the true horror of the Thing. 

            I love this movie. I love the monster. I even love the cheesy scenes and the amazing Yosemite Sam hat Kurt Russell insists on wearing with snow goggles and some kind of head wrap. However there is one problem I must point out for the sake of science and common sense. In the scene where Mac tests the blood of his companions with a hot wire and proves that each part of the Think is an independent organism, a lot of sentient blood escapes. The others were too busy burning the once human looking masses of Thing to apparently notice, but that blood would in theory be enough to continue the infection and menace. Also, the thing totally exploded all over everyone in the room and could have infected them that way. It seems odd that they had the foresight to suggest eating only canned food to avoid contamination, but weren’t concerned about being rained on by Thing-goo.

            To end this post I’d like to pose a question about something in the film. There are a lot of theories about the end of the film and whether or not Childs was a Thing. A lot of these theories have to do with the bottle of scotch they share at the end (in one of them it is suggested Mac replaced the scotch with kerosene, and because Childs was a Thing, he wouldn’t know what scotch or kerosene tasted like so that’s why he drank it and Mac had that weird crazy laugh). I paid close attention to the film this time around trying to see the significance of the scotch. Though I was unable to find any concrete evidence, the prevalence of alcohol in the film was very obvious. Liquor was centered in a ton of shots, especially Mac’s bottle of Jim Beam (I think that’s what it was) which was seen in his first appearance, and his last. To me, it seemed intentional, so I think there may be something I missed there. Did anyone see anything relating to the significance of the scotch or have any interesting theories?

The Wolfman - Jonathan Maberry

            I love werewolves. Of all the monsters and supernatural creatures that abound in fiction, werewolves are my favorite. I love all kinds of werewolves, evil werewolves, insane werewolves, monstrous werewolves, tragic werewolves, romantic werewolves; the whole spectrum. Of all the readings for this class, The Wolfman was the piece that had me the most excited.

            It was terribly underwhelming.

            It was just meh. Maybe it was because Maberry’s piece is a novelization of a film, but there was something off about the work as a whole. I never got into any of the characters (the omniscient narrator contributed to this), I never got a chill or a laugh, I never felt any tension. The whole time I read I was painfully aware of the fact I was reading. I will now point out a few of the factors that contributed to my disappointment.

            This was a novelization of a classic film, which has been done a few times. I kept that in mind. I made myself at all times aware of the fact the work was supposed to follow the film. But even with this in mind, the whole thing read like a giant cliché. It felt like one dramatic cliché after the other. Mysterious stranger, gothic manor, widowed beauty, gypsy wise woman, all of it. When I read the scene with the mysterious Frenchman with the silver wolf’s head sword-cane, I groaned inside aw, I wonder what he’s gonna do with that. I knew it was supposed to be this way, and in the end it didn’t matter a bit. It bothered me anyway.

            Then there was the language. The novel was set in 19^th century Europe. The writing tried to emulate the gothic novels of the time, but it came out all clunky and weird. An actual 19th century gothic novel is easier to read, Wuthering Heights was smooth and quickly immersed me in the language and style. Not so with The Wolfman.

            And then there was the Wolfman itself. This beast was the universal studios monster, and clung to the cannon. Great. I love werewolves, but… it did not lend itself to writing well. Where we could see the torment and rage in the expression of the Wolfman in his many appearances in visual media, on paper I was beaten over and over again with a hundred kinds of “rage” and then bloodlust this bloodlust that. And The Goddess of the Hunt, The Goddess of the Hunt, The Goddess of the Hunt, RAHHHH!!! I get it!

            All of the scenes in the Wolfman’s POV evoked images of Hollywood B-movie gore. Every time someone got decapitated by the Wolfman’s claws I shuddered inside. I'm sorry, I don’t care how strong the beast is, I just don’t see that happening unless his claws are ten inches long and sharp like a battle ready katana. And then there was the one severed head that tried to scream. Ugghhhh. I couldn’t take it seriously. It was like the novel was making a parody of Lawrence’s devastating struggle.

            The idea of the Wolfman style monster is potentially terrifying. The beast kills and eats, kills and eats, dozens, hundreds if it could catch them. It’s never full, it will kill, begin to feed, and then be distracted by the next fleeing morsel. The Wolfman is a nightmare of gluttony and excess in the most violent of ways. And it is virtually indestructible. The monster’s body eats lead bullets like they’re candy, and recovers from broken bones in seconds. The Wolfman also possesses just enough intelligence to make it more frightening than a beast, but not familiar like a man. Even more frightening is the potential for the Wolfman to be anyone. But for a few hours once a month, it could be your neighbor, your father, yourself. And on that one night each month whoever the Wolfman was doesn’t matter anymore. The transformation is irresistible, and total (barring a few seconds hesitation when faced with the power of love, awww). For me, the total loss of identity is the most frightening aspect of this monster. It kills a lot, so do other monsters, but the idea of being this monster is what is truly terrifying.

            But, alas, Maberry’s execution of this great idea didn’t do it for me.

            Yet, to end on a high note, there was one scene and one sentence that made me geek out in a good way. First is the scene. When the Wolfman enters the masquerade and is pacified by the blind soprano’s voice (yes, music lulls the beast is a trope, I know) I immediately recalled my beloved Grendel, torn apart by the Shaper’s poetry. It gets an A for making me recall Grendel.

            And now for the sentence. “Somehow his mass increased-perhaps drawing substance from Hell itself.”

            Thank you Jon. Thank you. Is that really so hard? Looking at you Pinborough.

Alien - Ridley Scott

This was my first experience with the Sci-Fi horror classic Alien. Yes, I am one of those people who saw Prometheus first, and yes, I enjoyed it. More importantly I also enjoyed Alien. Considering the film is from 1979, I was really impressed with the effects and filming techniques used to overcome the limited technology. I can count on one hand the number of scenes that looked disruptively hoaky, which is no small feat for a movie coming out of this time period. Many high budget modern horror flicks have failed to reach the level of tension I felt during key scenes in Alien.

            The first factor that contributed to the effectiveness of this film even decades later, is the cinematography. The film deliberately shied away from showing the alien in close up, well lit, and full detail. Instead the dark, claustrophobic, and inorganic aesthetic of the ship was reflected in the bits of the alien we were shown. As the film progressed, the setting and the monster seemed to blur until there was something hostile in every shot, even when the monster itself was nowhere to be scene. The feeling that the monster could be anywhere was more effective than actually having it pop up everywhere. In addition to the uncomfortable hostility of the setting, the parts of the monster that were shown with most detail were carefully selected to be the most dangerous and least human. The long glossy head, dripping double mouth, segmented tail, and perhaps the part I found most disturbing, the hands, which bore an unmistakable resemblance to human, but were corrupted, dark, wet, clawed things that moved with a disturbing fluidity in the scene at the end. In this way, the film drew attention away from the humanoid body of the monster (which was, in a few brief scenes, clearly a man in a suit) and kept the focus on the truly alien aspects of the beast.

            The second contributing factor to the success of this piece as a horror was the acting. I enjoyed the performance of every actor in the film. The screams were realistic; the growing terror in Lambert’s voice as she tells Dallas the alien is coming right at him was convincing. That scene was one of my favorites. There was something in the simplicity of the white blip on the radar marking the monster that served to heighten the terror, in the same way the static on your computer monitor makes you almost pee yourself when you play Slender. Weaver’s performance in particular struck me. Between her sweat drenched appearance, ragged breathing, and wide eyes, I felt anxiety with the character, who was also admirable and resilient to boot.

            The alien itself is an apex predator. It has multiple life stages, similar to many species of wasp. And like these wasps, each of the aliens life stages are terrifying, from the mouth-raping face-hugger, to the toothy little chest popper, to the fully formed adult (how did it get so big so fast anyway? What did it eat?).  Its blood is super corrosive, it’s incredibly adaptive, and it can probably eat four adult humans in less than twelve hours. On top of all that, it is also perfectly camouflaged with your claustrophobic spaceship.

            Oh, and there’s an evil android who’s most sinister quality is the level of ambiguity he operates in. for me, my inability to pin down how alike, or how unlike Ash was to humans made him particularly monstrous. He starts off seeming like he acted out of regard for Kane’s wellbeing (aw, how human), then we learn he only wants to preserve the alien and the humans are expendable (woah, how synthetic), and then right at the end he has that really uncomfortable scene where he tries to essentially orally rape Ripley to death with a rolled up nudie mag (WTF? What is up with this robot? Uncanny valley… *rocks*).

            In hindsight after conducting a little research, I’ve come to realize just about the entire Alien franchise is built upon the fear and horror of rape, but when first viewing the film, other than the obvious scene with the android, I was totally oblivious. I'm going to go ahead and keep the impression I had about the story of a tough girl, a scary monster, and a cat.

World War Z - Max Brooks

Officially my favorite piece so far, World War Z hit a level of depth and character the previous stories fell short of. I had my reservations coming into the piece, not being a fan of war stories, or stories with too many POVs, but by the end I was blown away by the novel. The strong voices really distinguish this piece from all of the others. Each interview reveals a POV ripe with culture, philosophy, and diversity in every way imaginable. This gives readers the chance to view the apocalypse from angles all over the globe and human spectrum, from suburban mom, to international space station astronaut.

For my favorite part.                      

I was majorly impressed by Brooks’ ability to create well developed characters in a handful of pages. So many of the characters came alive from the get go, but for me, the truly incredible feat revolves around my favorite character. General Raj Singh was a larger than life hero, and this fantastic image of him was built without ever giving him his own POV. The square he had is men form to fight off a zombie swarm became world famous, and was mentioned by many POV characters. The moment one of his men had to knock him unconscious to get him to evacuate the lost battle was viewed from space via satellite. His final moments were brought to us through a third party POV character who witnessed him run off to detonate the charges that would avoid a nuclear strike when the remote failed. Through the thoughts, eyes and ears of other characters, whether right in front of the General’s face, or literally a world away, Raj Singh was brought to life in a way that will stick with me even after many of the POV characters fade. This was one of my favorite parts of the novel, and really shows the power of characterization.

Now, about the zombies. The monsters in World War Z were an unstoppable plague that tore apart the planet. Science and technology were dreadfully underprepared for a disaster of this magnitude, and so were the social structures of every country. The book said it best, but to summarize, what made Zack so effective for me was that the monster’s destructive powers weren’t an inherent thing the creature possessed, but rather the exact way they combined with the faults of humanity. Another race, a better race, one more sophisticated, ethical, and united would never have succumbed to Zack the way humans did. The zombie is humanity turned against itself, both in the literal sense (zombies were people) and in the metaphorical sense (much of the devastation in World War Z came from people not getting along and doing things like launching nukes at each other.) I appreciate this poetic symmetry.

Another thing that really hit the spot with this work, was that it did the exact opposite of what many previous works earned my nerd rage for. World War Z acknowledged the scientific faults in it, and it made it more believable. Characters bring up both the fact that Zach somehow doesn’t rot in sea water, and the miraculous survival of the zombie’s brain tissue even after being frozen and thawed.  This made my nerd heart feel so warm. Thank you. Thank you for acknowledging the fact that science exists and should work, but doesn’t and no one knows why. That’s all I ever wanted.

The only thing I really found at fault with this piece is the lack of clarity in naming the different POV characters. The interviews are titled by location, and in many cases, the narrator’s opening narration leaves out the name of who he is interviewing. Though the voices were so strong I could usually tell when a repeat POV came up, it would have been nice to have the names readily available at the beginning of the POVs. Especially when you have to write a blog post. I don’t know the name of the Air force woman with the imaginary sky watcher “Mets” off the top of my head. And there are wonderful characters I can only refer to as Astronaut Man, Dog Man, and Resorted to Cannibalism Girl without pouring through the pages. They sound like bad superheroes.

But overall, World War Z has become a personal favorite. 

The Yattering and Jack - Clive Barker

So, I'm going to go ahead and out myself as a crazy cat lady because I'm going to talk about the cats in The Yattering and Jack a lot, but first…

This was a funny story. Out of all the nooks and corners of horror I’ve visited this semester, this was the first piece I can honestly say gave me chuckles. The Yattering was quite a character, a low level demon sent to torment Jack until breaking him and claiming his soul for hell. The only problem is Jack is all but impervious to every diabolical demon trick the Yattering can think of, and the poor fiend slowly starts to lose his mind when confronted with endless days of ineffective drudgery. I sympathized with the Yattering, far more so than Jack, because the Yattering’s story pretty much reflected my inner feelings about my time in the retail hell of Wal-Mart. Over worked, under paid and underappreciated hourly workers everywhere will be able to share in the demon’s suffering as he struggles to complete a near impossible task for a purpose his superiors won’t even share with him.

In comparison to the Yattering’s plentiful emotional outbursts, Jack left me cold. As the human victim of a demonic haunting, one would think Jack is the obvious protagonist. However Jack’s POV comes into the story very late, after I’ve already begun to sympathize with the demon, and Jack’s POV reveals that he is in fact playing the demon on purpose, and willfully risking the lives of his family and….

CATS.

The cat murdering is the only thing the Yattering did that felt truly villainous to me, though I will admit, the first murder was kind of funny. The Yattering just sort of scooped up the cat and threw it into the fireplace. And the way it is written makes it seem like the cat just sort of instantly turned to ash. Poof. Cats are very flammable.

Bad Yattering!

But then the real evil shows itself. Jack brings home another cat. A cat the Yattering drowns. Then Jack brings home yet ANOTHER cat. The Yattering blows this one up. Jack brought home two additional cats knowing the Yattering was going to murder them. Jack is a monster. I don’t really care that he brought his daughters home for the holidays and exposed them to the demon. They’re big girls, they can take care of themselves, they have thumbs, they can leave the house. But three defenseless cats, which in addition to murdering the Yattering tormented for quite some time… that is a level of coldness that chills me to the bone.

By the end of the story when Jack cements his clever victory over the demon, my final sentiment was “yeah, that’s right Jack. You don’t get to go to heaven you cat murderer.”

Also I think Yattering would make a good name for a cat. An evil cat that destroys your kitchen when you're not home, like the one I have. Then when you hear something break from the other room you can yell “knock it off Yattering!”

Plans. Big plans. 

30 Days of Night – Steve Niles, Ben Templesmith

           30 Days of Night introduces a vampire tale in a graphic medium. The plot is simple. The small Alaskan town of Barrow experiences a polar winter every year lasting thirty days, and a vampire baddy named Marlow decides to cash in on the opportunity and orchestrates a month long feeding frenzy for twenty of his kind. A few individuals survive the initial frenzy and hide, but soon their food stores run low and it is apparent they won’t survive to see the sun at the rate things are going. The town sheriff, Eben sacrifices himself, and injects blood from an infected citizen to turn himself into a vampire and uses his new strength to destroy the vampires. And then he decides to watch the sunrise with his wife and end his existence before he entirely loses his humanity.

            The graphic novel is under a hundred pages long. Even with an incredibly simple plot, I think the story suffers for its brevity. The title of the work is 30 Days of Night. Thirty days of the vampire apocalypse in total darkness, cut off from the outside world, starving and freezing, might as well be an eternity. The narrative doesn’t do justice to the situation. The entire month is glossed through with a vampire killing montage. The entire day to day struggle of the survivors is lost, with all of their fear, despair, and grief. The novel spends more time on the set up than it does on the event, and even the resolution. I felt an emotional disconnect from the story and characters. The only panel that got to me was the last one, when Eben and his wife watch their last sunrise.

            That said, the vampires in 30 Days of Night have a unique feel to them, partially contributed through their characteristics, and partially due to the art style. These vampires are intelligent, but have clearly lost their humanity. They lack the seductive grace and refinement of the modern vampire and instead exhibit bestial savagery, and overwhelming hunger. The muted colors and sketchy style of the art, though confusing at times, gives a gritty, hardboiled feel to the beasts. They are primitive, not in intelligence, they clearly have higher reasoning powers, but in their mentality. Most of the vampires are completely driven by their most base desire to feed above all else. The artistic focus on teeth and wide, gaping mouths drives the endless hunger of the monsters home, and their glossy black eyes robs them of humanity. These vampires are not tormented by their fallen state, or haunted by memories of the past. They are clearly new beings, completely disjoined with whoever they were in life.

            In some ways, the 30 Days of Night vampires reminded me more of the Wendigo from Algonquian myth; a terrible spirit of hunger and cannibalism, that feeds and feeds but is never satiated. I enjoyed these vampires because the theme of insatiable hunger is one I enjoy in horror. It drives the monsters with limitless motivation, robs the prey of any hope of respite, and dehumanizes the survivors at the same time, degenerating them into so much meat, blood and bone. That level of dehumanization is frightening in many ways, because it forces people to look at the reality of their mortality. We are meat. All of the intelligence, emotion, dreams, and soul of our existence is no assurance that we will ever be more than meat when we die.

            Ironic that the immortal vampires of 30 Days of Night can embody the fear of ultimate human mortality. 

Rawhead Rex- Clive Barker

           I loved Rawhead as a monster. He was a real monster in its purest form, as Rawhead at his core, is a force of nature. He was the physical embodiment of the most monstrous things, rage, hunger, destruction, and unlike many other monsters (which are monstrous in a very different way) Rawhead is completely devoid of humanizing characteristics. Rawhead is not a monster that can be reasoned with, and he is not a monster that can be changed. He is as he always was. He is exactly as he was created.

            Some of the specific details that made this beast so effective.

            Rawhead was created out of centuries of mythology and folklore. Rawhead, and the other names he was known by, comes to us out of generations of European oral tradition. The monster is ancient (both in the story) and in human history. Because of this, even in this new rendition of the creature, Rawhead had a definite authenticity about him. Rawhead is not a monster that will be scaring us for an hour as we read through Barker’s short story, but rather, Rawhead is a monster that has been scaring us since early history. Our ancestors cowered in their huts and villages, listening to the wolves and wind in the dark, surrounded on all sides by enormous stretches of untamed wilderness, and they believed this beast was out there. There is something deeply disturbing about a monster that was truly believed to exist. If only in the minds of our ancestors and frightened sixteenth century children, Rawhead was real.

            We were privileged to Rawhead’s POV. This is an element that I always love in stories, whether the monster is a sympathetic evil or not. Rawhead is not. When we get into Rawhead’s, erm, raw head, we see beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the inside matches the outside. Rawhead is the violence and destruction he brings. He has no deeper motive for it, and where in some cases this makes for a poorly drawn character, in this case it solidifies the monster. As a pagan god, and possibly the product of pure belief, Rawhead is the physical manifestation of destruction. The monster never ponders on why he does what he does, he is what he does. This served to heighten the sense of unstoppable power Rawhead possesses as a force of nature.

            Now that I’ve gone on about why Rawhead is a good monster, I’ll mention the reasons I also found him to be a likeable monster.

            I liked Rawhead. Really, I did. I actually liked Rawhead more than any of the other characters in the story. Now, there is a distinction between like, in the Rawhead sense, and like in a protagonist or antihero sense. Rawhead is the villain, and will always be the villain. He is horrible, and does horrible things, but Rawhead also has these tiny details that make me enjoy him while I'm waiting for someone to kill the bastard.

            Rawhead is out of his time. He’s been imprisoned beneath the earth for ages, and in that time the world he knew has passed. He emerges to find his vast wilderness kingdom gone and replaced with paved streets and metal boxes that make terrible noises and stink. There is a sense of loss there, not for Rawhead, but for the time that birthed him. The world was once a truly wild place, where the forces of nature held sway, and humans where the pathetic worm-like creatures without big teeth or claws, that had to huddle by the fire to survive. The world held places of deep shadow and darkness. The world held true terror, the unknown. Rawhead is the monstrous child of a world that died long ago, under the plow, concrete, and written word. I feel something for that. When in his head and seeing this world, new to him, I always feel a sab of loss with the terror. That gave just enough variability to what I felt for the monster, to heighten the dread of his main attributes, and make me like him.

            Ok, and maybe he reminded me of Grendel. An R-rated, soulless, distilled evil, version of Grendel. 

Breeding Ground - Sarah Pinborough

            Firstly, I want to thank Pinborough for the image of the partially eaten aborted three month fetus on the kitchen tile, I will never be able to scrub it from my brain. I'm not afraid of spiders, but I am afraid of parasites, and just the thought of pregnancy makes me nauseous (both the normal and evil spider-baby varieties) so Breeding Ground definitely had me squirming at parts. In the category of queasy images, Breeding Ground takes the gold.

            Breeding Ground, unlike I Am Legend, also had the characters going for it. They weren’t particularly deep, but they weren’t alarmingly terrible. They were comfortable, like most archetypes, and they moved the story forward. Katie was annoying, but she was also like twenty one, so I tolerated her existence. Unlike with Robert Neville, I was comfortable with Matt as a POV character and main protagonist, I'm not going to espouse love for him, but he got the job done, and I hurt for the guy in most of the right places.  

            However, there is a rant coming.

            What the hell is up with the hack scientists?! The one thing that will get me every time in anything with a science fiction element, is science that does not hold water. I get that it is science fiction, but if you are going to spit in the face of every natural law we know, your characters at least need to have a “holy crap, this is physically impossible!” moment, or else I think the characters, or worse, the writer is just stupid. Chloe doesn’t eat for a week and continues to gain an incredible amount of weight. You can’t make matter from nothing folks! Someone, anyone, in the novel, please be as alarmed as I am at this violation of the law of conservation of mass! When she stops eating, she becomes a closed system. Nothing is being added. That can’t come out of nowhere. And if it does, because fiction is awesome like that, someone please recognize this law and freak out a little!

            Then as the apocalypse grows in the vast majority of women all over the world, I am asked to believe that all of the doctors, scientists, and even the Joe’s in the world simply throw up their hands at this phenomenon and decide to wait and see. Everyone in the world, unanimously, decides to wait and see. WHAT? Someone put that chick in an MRI! Does her weird budding powers cause the electronics to malfunction? Exploratory surgery baby! We find out from Chris’s autopsy of Katie that the fatty lumps are different parts of the spiders developing around the body, which will contract and assemble in the womb shortly before birth. How hard could it be for a doctor to slice open one of those lumps, pull out a partially developed arachnid limb, and conclude Houston, we have a problem.

And speaking of Chris. Ah Chris. I am not a geneticist, nor am I a doctor, but I am confident anyone infected with a horrifying spider baby would fare better in my care, than in the care of Chris, the brilliant geneticist. When John discovers he has developed the telltale lumps of a widow infection, brilliant Dr. Chris fist suggests that they might just go away. Right. Because we have every reason to believe now, of all times that massive sporadically appearing lumps are more likely to go away than turn into a horrible spider baby. When John refuses to accept the all to prevalent “wait and see” policy of the many hack scientists who caused the apocalypse, Chris’s only other suggestion is to drink a pint of the deaf girl’s blood.

By the way, deaf people’s blood kills the spider things.

Moving on. Drink the deaf girl’s blood. Why would a geneticist suggest he drink the miracle blood? Does he not know what human stomach acid does to DNA and proteins? Inject that stuff! How about right into the lumps! If they’re not the same blood type, don’t inject enough to kill him! But no. Drink the blood and then we’re done. Shockingly, this does not work and an evil black boy spider bursts out of John’s head and kills him. And I liked John too.

Perhaps more motivation was needed to spark the creativity of this doctor. Nearly every other man in the group develops the lumps shortly after. Though I am assured Chris is doing everything he can to save himself and his comrades, I'm fairly certain he just decides to roll over and die, because I can come up with a bucket of things to try that do hold some logic. More logic than drinking the deaf girl’s blood.

And here are the reasons why I am a better post spider apocalypse doctor than Dr. Chris, with logic to boot.

              1.      When John killed his mother by bludgeoning her to death, just a few hours or maybe even moments before the completed gestation of her monster spider baby, it also killed the spider baby in question. Ergo, we could try to stop the heart, and then resuscitate the host to see if it would be enough to kill the developing spider baby.

              2.      The environment is becoming increasingly tropical. It is even postulated that the widows are somehow controlling the weather. Ergo, the widows need a higher temperature to survive. Most organisms in fact, need a stable environment to incubate their young. Ergo, we could try to lower the core temperature of the host in an ice bath, to make the body unfavorable for incubating the young, and kill the developing spider baby.

               3.      Electricity does kill the suckers. Yes, the high voltage fence packs a lot more punch than what a human body can survive, but when the alternative is dying horribly as a spider baby erupts from your body, why not hit the host with a defibrillator a few times? Who knows, usually embryonic life forms are significantly more fragile than adults. Maybe it will kill the developing spider baby.

               4.      Hit that sucker with some Chemo. Chris even suggested the spiders were made from all of the genetically modified food messing with peoples’ bodies, causing them to grow these monsters. That sounds a lot like cancer. Wriggling, sentient, spider-cancer. If you kill enough cells from anything, it will die. Here’s hoping we nuke the developing spider parts before the host.

a.       Oh, don’t have any Chemo or enough medical equipment on site? Well the spiders don’t attack people who are carrying future spiders. You all have a shield of invulnerability. Go out, get the stuff, come back, and fix yourself people. Go now. Chop chop.

                5.      And last, but not least, good old fashioned surgery. Especially in the male hosts, the lumps of developing spider baby are centralized under the skin in their chest. Just under the skin. So close you can see it moving in fact. Get a scalpel and have at it! Even if you miss parts, if you pull enough limbs and organs out of anything, especially prenatal things, they will probably die. After all, the last amateur surgery, the amputation of an entire arm from the shoulder in a vet clinic, actually worked! Add a doctor and supplies, and I like those odds!

Yes, all of these measures are incredibly risky, but look at the alternative. Two characters even waste themselves. If you're going to waste yourself, waste yourself for science. Let us electrocute you a little first or chill you in an ice bath. Who knows, you could save lives.

One more thing and I’ll stop. What is up with that genius freakin dog? The dog waits in front of the gate for hours like it knows it’s going to be let in, makes best friends with the deaf girl like it knows they’re both deaf, and then in the end exercises an incredibly advanced form of morality when it decides that Nigel isn’t good enough for a bullet after what he’s done, and stops the others from shooting him so he can die slowly from a widow bite. The dog voted for vengeful punishment. Was the dog some new evolution in the canine species? Brought on by the same phenomenon that caused the widows? Were the widows somehow controlling it to use as an undercover agent? No, it’s just a deaf dog. What the hell!? You can’t have a genius dog, then not explain it! You can’t! It even decides to go with George to find his grandson in the end, because the genius dog knows he won’t make it on his own. What?! Why is no one alarmed by this?!

Some great images, some great moments, but a very sloppy apocalypse.

The Funeral - Richard Matheson

            Having just read I Am Legend, I could scarcely believe The Funeral was by the same author. I’m glad my first experience with Matheson was I Am Legend, because had it been The Funeral, I don’t think I would’ve known what to think. I saw almost every writing ‘rule’ that has been tormenting me since the beginning of my graduate study in writing, beaten, broken, gutted, stuffed and put on display. The writing was ludicrous, and yet still somehow effective. Perhaps it is because I went into the story knowing Matheson as an accomplished writer who could actually write, or perhaps it was effective because it was a comedy, and nod toward the nostalgic Universal Studios Monsters, I will never know. It was the literary version of the gloriously campy episodes of The X-Files and Supernatural.

            The Funeral goes a long way to showing how forgiving readers will be about the things they are fond of, and how fondness and nostalgia itself can be so transformative. Monsters like Dracula and the Wolfman began their lives as something genuinely terrifying. New things are always scary, because they are unknown, and it is human nature to fear what we don’t understand. But through constant exposure and adaptation the frightening becomes the fascinating, and fascination becomes familiarity, and familiarity becomes fondness. Now we can pull a chair up to the service of our beloved monsters of yesterday and have a good laugh and a good time with them, because we know them like family.

            Unfortunately for Morton Silkline, his universe is not so familiar with our beloved monsters, and his verbose terror and dread make for some intensely funny irony. In fact, Silkline himself fails to recognize that he is a character trope; the greedy funerary service provider, profiting from loss. Though there is nothing actually funny about the grossly profitable business of death and mourning, we can laugh at this funeral, because no one is actually dead or mourning, the miser is the fool, and money is a nonissue for the client.

            It’s not all fun and games though; I found an actually thoughtful moment with Asper’s musing over his lack of a proper send off. People have a pervasive belief that their funeral service is somehow reflective of how they were regarded in life, Asper does. This is the belief that makes the business of grief so profitable, yet when the actual service begins and rapidly goes to hell in a hand basket, it is because none of the guests particularly cared about the service. Actual funerals, are for the living, not the dead. Funerals are for the people in attendance, not the body in the casket. If the body were the only one who cared, well, there would be one less global industry.

            It makes you think of the exact way we are conditioned to think of death and dying, and of the constructs in place to help us mourn. The dead don’t care. Fancy caskets, lovely flowers, and stirring speeches are things the living do to feel like they can do something about the death of their loved one. That tiny illusion of power works wonders for the grieving process. It matters less that our loved one is completely beyond our reach if we feel like we can do that one last thing right by them, out of love. When we lay the body in the ground we tell our loved ones they are at rest, but rest is what we seek in that action. People need their illusions, funerals supply them, it’s very human, something Matheson’s monsters are not. 

I Am Legend - Richard Matheson

            

            My honest opinion was asked for, and it shall be given. I Am Legend was lukewarm for me. I didn’t find it particularly scary, or cerebral. It was an easy read, and not like pulling teeth, but it still left something to be desired. After some long contemplation, I’ve finally figured out why I Am Legend didn’t do it for me.

            

            It lacked character interaction.

          

            Going into this book, I knew the vast majority was going to be about a solitary character, pitted against forces beyond his control, and struggling for survival. This actually excited me, because some of my favorite childhood novels included Island of the Blue Dolphins, Julie of the Wolves, and just about everything Gary Paulsen touched. Solitary survival stories were my jam for a long time. So why was I Am Legend different? Why did the lack of other characters leave me so cold?

           

            Robert Neville.

          

            I will be the first one to jump on a survival story with a solitary protagonist, providing I like that protagonist, or at least find him compelling. I did not like Robert Neville, nor did I find him compelling. For me, Robert was scene after scene of excessive drinking and foolish mistakes. I like my characters flawed, I do, but I also like them inventive, and resourceful, especially in a solitary survival situation. In Island of the Blue Dolphins Karana made a fence out of whale ribs and a lamp out of tiny fish. I was totally underwhelmed by Robert Neville’s ability to plaster paper mosaics on the wall, and then get drunk and destroy them.

The one thing Robert did that did impress me, was teach himself relatively complex skills from reference books. It was so impressive, that when we got to the part where he was using the microscope to identify the bacteria that created vampires, I called bull. Bull. Every surface of the world is covered in so many different microorganisms, their numbers are uncountable. So when Robert Neville found the ONE bacteria responsible for the vampire outbreak, I couldn’t believe it. It disillusioned the fantasy. Why would he be so sure it was that ONE bacteria instead of the hundreds of others he must have found crawling around on the slide or sample? Are vampires entirely sterile microcosms? With their faulty lymph system and poor waste processing abilities, I don’t think so.

Moving on. There was another problem I had with Robert. I found him to be… incredibly Rape-y. There is no better word to describe this. He was Rape-y, and the explanation I was given for these very uncomfortable mental tangents, was basically, everyone was dead so he wasn’t getting any nookie. I'm not a guy, so maybe I'm wrong, but I find it a little hard to believe that when somewhat normal men go on a dry spell, they become internally rape-y. This started off uncomfortable and remained uncomfortable. There were several instances throughout the book, where I looked away, said, “Oh my God, please don’t go there,” and then returned to reading. It made me question Robert’s character, and it made me feel like I was trapped alone in a dark room with a psycho. In horror, you’d think this would be a good thing, but for me it wasn’t. He was not one of those compelling psychos you love to hate. He was creepy, and sad.

However, so not to leave the impression that the book was a total bust, the scene with the dog punched like a twelve gauge, right in the chest. I was very impressed. It is rare that the best scene in the film adaptation of a novel is the best scene in the novel too. And they were so different, but both were outstanding.