A Personal Education

So, it’s official: I’m going to the University of Kansas for a PhD in Creative Writing and Literature, starting this fall! I broke the news previously on Facebook when I was originally notified of acceptance by the program, but I officially notified the university of my decision to enroll at KU a few days ago.

Here’s how it happened. On Valentine’s Day, while I was eating breakfast, I got an email notification on my Google Nexus, which I use for reading the news in the morning. I opened it and it said, in so many words, that the university had reached a decision on my application for admission. They didn’t say what the decision was in the email, just that I needed to log into the university’s online application portal to see their letter of decision. It was a bit nerve-wracking, wondering what it meant. I actually thought at first I’d been rejected, since I hadn’t gotten a phone call or any other form of communication yet. But then, I thought, maybe I got selected for the program after all and this is just standard operating procedure. Ultimately, I forced myself to finish my breakfast and a cup of coffee, trying not to let my imagination run wild (I distracted myself by watching Downton Abbey), before I ran upstairs to check my application.

Thankfully, the first few words of the letter said, “We are pleased to inform you…” And just like that, my worry turned to joy.

Giselle Anatol, the Director of Graduate Studies in English at KU, called me later in the day for a chat to let me know person-to-person that I was admitted to the program and they hoped I would choose to accept their decision. They’ve offered me a GTA position, complete with tuition waiver and yearly stipend, among other things. And, as I mentioned at the top, I officially accepted their invitation to join. So, after living in Mizzou country for the past twenty-eight years of my life, I’m going to be a Jayhawk.

All told, it’s what I wanted from the start, not just the GTA position with funding, but the acceptance to KU. It’s a striking reversal of what happened when I initially applied to MFA programs back in 2008. Six different schools, all of them turning me down, with my two personal favorite picks turning me down before anyone else. Totally demoralizing. This time, it’s the exact opposite. And, as an extra special twist of fate, one of those two schools that originally turned me down for MFA applications was KU! It’s a really sweet indicator of how things can change within five years, and how far I’ve come in that time.

Overall, I’m ecstatic. One of my favorite writers, Kij Johnson, teaches there, and they have the Center for the Study of Science Fiction, established by James Gunn and currently directed by Chris McKitterick; I hope to hang out there whenever I can. I can’t wait to meet Giselle Anatol, especially after our very pleasant conversation on the phone. I’m also looking forward to meeting the rest of the faculty at KU. One of the best lessons I learned in my time at Stonecoast is that you can learn a lot from a wide variety of teachers, especially the ones you don’t initially intend to study with, and I fully expect that to apply to KU as well. Plus, Lawrence is supposed to be a great college town, and I’ll be fairly close to some friends in the Kansas City Metro area.

I have high hopes that it will be a good, much-needed change of scenery for me. The plan for now is to move to Lawrence sometime this summer, hopefully mid-to-late July so I can take some time to acclimate to the area and prep for the school semester in relative comfort. Before that, I want to drive up to Lawrence to meet everybody in the English department and scout for apartments, or see if there’s anybody in the department looking for a roommate.

Getting picked up for enrollment at KU has made me very reflective lately, in a good way. It’s a nice change of pace from the brooding introspection of the previous year, spurred by all the obstacles and difficulties I encountered. This time, I’ve been looking back fondly on good times with my family, since I’m going to be leaving them to go out of state for school for five years, and beyond that hopefully somewhere else for a tenure-track teaching position. My parents have been very supportive and loving the past four years, letting me live with them while I completed my MFA program and tried (and failed) to find full-time teaching work. I’ll be glad to strike out on my own, but I’m still incredibly grateful for the time I’ve been here with them.

My acceptance at KU has also prompted me to realize that even after graduating with my MFA, I’ve continued carrying out my own personal, customized education. What did I do after getting my diploma? I agreed to manage Weirdfictionreview.com for the VanderMeers, and even before then I was reading materials for them and offering advising opinions and copyedits. I’ve been doing a lot of reading since January 2012, as part of that work and also on my own prerogative. Why have I been doing this? Deep down, I realized that I wasn’t the kind of expert I wanted to be, not yet anyway. I also felt like it was time to take another leap in my writing, to change my methodology, and I wasn’t sure of how to do that. So, it was time to sit and simply absorb things, and become more widely read and knowledgeable.

What the PhD means is that my personal education will become “official” once again, because I’m pursuing a degree. That said, I wouldn’t have been able to join KU without engaging in the education I laid out for myself the past year. I would have still wanted to be there, but I wouldn’t have nearly as good an idea of what I wanted to do. My studies of the past year have enabled me to know what I want to do once I get to Lawrence. So, after what I feared was the futile sturm und drang of 2012, all of that time wasn’t for naught after all.

Movie Roundup: Klowns, Ghosts and Other Monsters

This will likely be the last movie roundup I do for a while, mainly because I’ve got a lot of writing and reading I want to get done in the next few weeks. I also want to post something to this blog that isn’t just a list of stuff I’ve read or watched for once, since I’m getting back into the habit of updating this thing regularly. There’s a few topics and questions I’ve been thinking about the past couple days, and hopefully I’ll steal away some time to write about them soon. That said, I’ve watched some notable movies recently, and as they say, sharing is caring, and I do care, so here we go.

Pontypool: I watched this Valentine’s Day, which was appropriate – not because it’s a sweet date movie, but because it’s set on Valentine’s Day in a town in Canada. Basically, the denizens of the town of Pontypool find themselves afflicted with a bizarre infection that turns them into crazed, hiveminded monsters. They’re like zombies in almost every way except for the brain-eating, although they engage in cannibalism at some points. The movie revolves around a radio jockey and his production staff, who have to at first figure out what’s going on and then try to warn people how to stop the infection later. It’s a clever movie with some great acting. The nature of the infection is very distinctive and unique for this kind of movie. The action of the movie is what I would call “stage-bound,” though it doesn’t happen on a stage, because it’s contained to the setting of a radio station studio. In that sense, it felt like I was watching or listening to modern variation on the classic War of the Worlds broadcast from the early 20^th century. If you can overlook the lack of “action” for a strong story, it’s worth watching.

The Stone Tape: Rather neat movie overall. This one is really hard to find, since it was broadcast on BBC back in the 70s and it’s never received an official DVD release (it is available for download and rental on Amazon Instant Video, though). The premise: a tech development team moves their operations into an old manor home with a secretly haunted history; when they discover the presence of a ghost, they try to discover the source of the haunting, thinking they’ve discovered a new form of data storage. It’s a very scientific take on the concept of a haunting – in fact, from what I understand, this movie popularized the notion of “residual haunting,” the incident of a ghost or ghostly phenomena repeatedly occurring in a set sequence of actions in a location like a tape loop. This has since become the “Stone Tape Theory.” Nicely done, Nigel Kneale! Anyway, it makes a better science fiction movie than a horror movie – using science and computers to find an alternate explanation for the occurrence of ghosts and supernatural phenomena. Yes, the characters are prone to spells of back-and-forth exposition about this, but it all sounds so cool and brain-bending when you listen to it, so it ended up appealing to me. The ideas are better than the story, but that doesn’t mean the story is bad, just that the ideas are massive. My other major misgiving about this movie involves the female protagonist, the programmer who first discovers the presence of the ghost. Half of the time, she’s this strongly capable scientist who makes major breakthroughs in how to communicate with and then “record” the ghost; the other half of the time, she’s your typical hysterical, helpless female protagonist from any other somewhat sexist ghost story. It’s fairly annoying.

The Chaser: Another Korean action-thriller, on the heels of The Man From Nowhere. This is a good movie, but not as good as Nowhere. A former-cop-turned-pimp finds out that his prostitutes are being abducted and murdered by a serial killer living in his city, so he uses the skills cultivated from his former trade to track him down. It’s a fairly exciting movie, but it suffers from being a little overlong and dragging too much in the middle when the police bring the killer in to their custody and wind up running around in circles trying to find evidence of his crimes. There’s a sense of something intangible missing from this movie that’s present in similar movies, like the aforementioned Nowhere and others like, say, Oldboy, that I can’t fully explain except to say that it’s a matter of personal resonance with the characters or their emotional contexts. It just feels a little more ordinary in comparison to other movies I’ve seen recently. Doesn’t mean it isn’t worth watching, though.

Donnie Darko: I’d already heard all about this movie, owing to the fact that it’s a cult classic. When I went to college, every other student’s favorite movies were this and Boondock Saints. I had already heard every possible opinion about this movie – good, bad, indifferent – so when I finally watched it, I was in this bizarre situation where despite all I’d heard, I came to it with no expectations. Turns out I like the movie quite a bit (the original theatrical cut, not the director’s cut; I know there’s a world of difference between the two). It is a very weird movie, and the SF-nal/Horror-ish elements work well without a lot of explanation, simply because of what they lead the characters to do to themselves and others. What I noticed about the movie more than anything else? It’s a surprisingly funny movie, dependent on the irony of its frequently self-absorbed characters saying and doing stupid things. It’s also one of the few movies I’ve seen, aside from American Psycho, to honestly portray just how weird and alien the 80s really were. And yes, it has a pretty awesome soundtrack.

Killer Klowns From Outer Space: Yeesh, this movie is lame, but I suppose that’s kind of the point. It actually terrified me when I was a kid; I never finished the movie. It’s exactly what it sounds like: killer aliens that look like clowns and use alien-circus-grade technology kill and abduct people in this little college town while a few people try to stop them and escape their clutches. Turns out it’s on Netflix, and I am now somewhat less scared of clowns than I used to be, so I decided, what the hell, I’ll give it another shot. Still couldn’t finish it, but for different reasons. It’s a B-movie, basically, and it never tries to rise above that or take itself more seriously. I watched the first fifty minutes or so because the filmmakers actually do come up with some unique ways of having the klowns terrorize people – in my favorite scene, a klown makes shadow puppets on a building wall at a bus stop before eating a group of bystanders with a shadowy t-rex. Once the novelty of watching the klowns wreak havoc wears off, though, there’s no real reason to finish the movie, other than simply wanting to finish the movie.

Trollhunter: This is right alongside Lake Mungo as my favorite found footage film ever. I’m very critical of the found footage style/genre/whatever in most instances where it pops up, for reasons I may have to get into with a future blog post. Trollhunter does not suffer for being a found footage movie, though, and in fact makes a good case for when it’s done well. Basically, an amateur film crew tracks down this reclusive hunter and finds out he’s been tasked with controlling the troll population of Norway, and so they begin documenting his adventures, which quickly become their adventures. There’s quality acting, for what the movie requires, and the story is inventive and clever and above all good. The faux-real style of the movie makes the appearance of the trolls all the more incredible when they appear, especially when the Moby Dick of trolls shows up at the end.

Dark Portals – The Chronicles of Vidocq: I liked this one in theory, but not in execution. It’s a detective story set in 19^th century France, with all of its social upheaval and what-not. The main character, Vidocq, is basically the French version of Sherlock Holmes. The primary calling card for this movie is the stunning visuals and bizarre scenes and villain, a black-cloaked “alchemist” who can seemingly shapeshift and blend into the shadows/wall/floor anywhere, invulnerable to attack. Imagine my disappointment, then, to find that it’s mostly a by-the-numbers murder mystery with supernatural elements added in and too many plot points dependent on coincidence alone. The big twist with the revelation of the villain’s identity is fairly underwhelming too. There’s really no reason to care about the movie unless you happen to care for these kinds of stories. It is well shot, but I’ve seen better. Overall, it left me with a feeling of “meh.”

The Skin I Live In: One of the strangest movies I’ve watched recently, and it also happens to be the first Pedro Almodóvar film I’ve ever watched. I’m, um, not sure how typical this movie is of his other movies, but I do know that I liked this one enough that I would readily watch anything else he does. It features maybe my favorite Antonio Banderas performance ever, as a mysterious, creepy doctor who keeps a woman locked up under odd circumstances in his home, watched over only by him and his maid, the only two people who seem to know that the woman is a prisoner there in the first place. The first thirty minutes are somewhat rough going, but the movie picks up big time as it rolls out the tragic backstory for the doctor and the causes of the woman’s imprisonment in the house. It also contains some industrial-grade twists, which impressed me with how unexpected they were. It all builds up to a surprisingly affecting ending. Definitely one of those movies that grew on me as I watched it.

Movie Roundup: The Good, the Bad, and the Strange

Thanks to Netflix and the extra free time resultant from graduating grad school, I watch a lot more movies and TV than I used to. I didn’t watch a whole lot while I was in grad school because I had to really concentrate on getting my school work done in tandem with my full-time job and part-time teaching work. It’s nice to watch this stuff now because it gives me ideas of things I want to explore in my writing and provides an opportunity to study how storytelling works in other mediums.

So, on a regular basis, I’ll probably start posting lists like these, of movies I’ve watched recently and my take on them, in case anyone is looking for suggestions of their own or just want to start up a conversation. I’m always looking for further recommendations myself.

***

The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover: A gangster/wannabe gourmand’s wife carries on an affair with a book depository clerk in the restaurant that they all frequent, with the head chef’s blessing. Things go very badly from there. Some very frank sex scenes and violence, though it works well within the overall aesthetic of the movie, which is very theatrical and even painterly at times. The cinematography and set design are lovely, and the soundtrack is great (Michael Nyman FTW; love his work). Some quality performances too. What held me back from really liking the movie was the chilly tone and presentation (which feels Kubrickian at points, to give you an impression of it) and the overlong running time; the movie drags on in places. Good choice if you’re in the mood for tragic love triangles, beautiful arthouse directing, and inventive revenge.

Mother: Another revenge movie, of sorts, and this one is a doozy. A teenage girl in a rundown South Korean town is murdered; a mentally handicapped young man is fingered for the crime, and his loving (and zealously protective) mother seeks to prove his innocence. The actual story itself isn’t nearly that simple, and the supposed innocence of any and all involved gets substantially called into question by the end. I’ll say this right now: Mother is not a feel-good movie. It’s a tragic family/small town drama more than anything. Bizarrely, it reminded me of Winter’s Bone at times, because the poverty of the town is such an influencing factor for many of the characters (although it isn’t openly acknowledged to nearly the extent in Winter’s Bone). You wind up feeling horrible for just about everyone in the movie. That said, it’s masterfully written and directed (courtesy of Bong Joon-ho, whose movie The Host is high on my watchlist, and his writing partner Park Eun-kyo). Kim Hye-ja gives a stunning performance as the mother, one of the best I’ve seen in recent memory.

Requiem from the Darkness: I used to watch anime all the time in high school, but fell out of it in college. At the time, I simply couldn’t afford to buy much anime, being a broke college student, and I didn’t want to illegally download it. It slipped my mind until recently, when I found a treasure trove of anime series on Netflix. I decided to dip my toes back in the water with this series. It’s a macabre horror series about a writer exploring Bakumatsu-era feudal Japan, collecting ghost stories for an anthology, when he encounters three spirits who roam the land, setting traps for people who have committed atrocities and allowed their guilt to fester within them. Each episode is a self-contained story until the very end, where they wrap everything up. It’s actually a pretty good series. It’ll definitely work your horror jones, especially in the court of body horror, demonic/supernatural forces, and revenge stories (again!). The character design is, um, interesting. The show was pretty low budget, it looks like, but the animators ultimately turn it into a strength. Don’t watch it expecting a masterpiece and you’ll do just fine.

The Man From Nowhere: I kinda went on a streak of watching Korean films, starting with The Man From Nowhere and continuing with a few of the movies on this list. This one’s an action-thriller about a widower with an ex-Black Ops experience who hunts out a criminal gang (would there be any other kind) after they kidnap a little girl who befriends him. Way, way better than similar films, like Taken. The pathos that runs through the movie and the protagonist, Tae-Sik, makes you care a lot more about him and the little girl while he rushes to save her, as opposed to just witnessing mindlessly entertaining action. That said, the action is pretty killer, especially the climactic fight near the end of the movie where he confronts the remnants of the gang in a last bid to save the girl.

Santa Sangre: I’m not a Jodorowsky rookie; I’ve watched El Topo and The Holy Mountain, and I actually enjoyed both of them for what they were. I loved the surrealistic, philosophical imagination of the prior two movies and how fast and loose they played. Santa Sangre is a much tighter, more cohesive affair, though it still possesses that Jodorowsky touch. I’ve heard it described as Psycho adapted by Luis Buñuel, which is actually very accurate. Fenix, a former circus performer who underwent horrible family-based trauma as a child, grows up to aid his armless mother in committing murders. I’m in agreement with Roger Ebert, who essentially called this a psychic trauma horror story – a psychodrama, in more concise terms. It’s a surprisingly affecting movie, all told, though it also features plenty of WTF-worthy scenes and moments, most notably (for me, anyway) a funeral for an elephant and the worst tattoo session ever.

The Last Circus: I wanted this one to be good, I really did. The trailer is so utterly crazy, I couldn’t help but watch this movie. Another one set in a circus, in fact. Sad Clown Javier, a wimpy sad sack of a man with a tragic history, meets Happy Clown Sergio, an abusive psychopath, and Segio’s trapeze artist girlfriend, Natalia (their relationship is seriously twisted – and unfortunate, given the real world issues of abusive relationships). Guess what? There’s a love triangle, and it leads to tragedy for all of them in the end. The path to that tragedy is the bulk of the movie, of course, and for the most part the movie is entertaining. It’s pretty insane overall, so you can’t ever take everything in it completely seriously, but it’s entertaining, and there’s an eye for historical context that provides an added reading for the events of the movie (it takes place during the Spanish Civil War). It’s a shame the final fifteen minutes of the movie utterly ruin its momentum by finally tipping over from absurd to overblown.

Reservoir Dogs: Hopefully all of you know what Reservoir Dogs is by now, so I won’t say much about it. All I will say is that this was my first time watching the movie (I’ve only ever watched Pulp Fiction and the Kill Bill movies from Tarantino’s filmography). I enjoyed it! Great acting, sharp writing, inventive structure. It’s pretty hyped up as a cult classic, but it didn’t let me down.

V/H/S: I’m very fond of anthology films, especially anthology horror films. I see them as the filmic equivalent of short story collections. V/H/S is getting a lot of love from people for being the latest, greatest horror anthology. There are some people on IMDB that absolutely rave about this movie. Honestly, I thought it was one of the most obnoxious, useless viewing experiences I’ve had in a while. There were a few inspired ideas and moments, but by and large the movie demonstrates a ton of things I absolutely hate about some contemporary horror movies and the found footage format. The opening story, with three “bros” going out on the town to seduce drunk women and then film sex with them, was so repugnant I almost turned the movie off right then and there.

Three… Extremes: Now this is how you do a horror anthology! Three great directors – Fruit Chan, Park Chan-wook, and Takashi Miike – each contribute a forty-minute film (Dumplings, Cut, and Box, respectively), every one imaginative and grotesque in its own way. Dumplings gets a lot of love for being so blatantly horrifying (it’s about a supposed cure for aging, made from the worst ingredient you could possibly imagine). I’m a bigger fan of Cut, because I’m a big Park Chan-wook fanboy, and especially Box, which is a surreal, sad mini-masterpiece. Three…Extremes is worth watching for Box alone.

The Good, the Bad, the Weird: This movie was a blast. It’s a Korean western loosely inspired by The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Instead of the American west, it’s set in 1930s Machuria, then under Japanese rule/oppression. The main characters – the titular Good, Bad, and Weird (a bounty hunter, hitman, and thief, respectively) – all chase one another to gain possession of a treasure map, while larger forces, namely the Japanese Imperial Army and Manchurian freedom fighters, chase them. I loved the spectacle of this movie and the glorious, seemingly endless action scenes and chases. There’s a prolonged chase scene toward the end, that takes place in the Manchurian desert, which I consider one of the best of its kind that I’ve ever watched.

The Secret of Kells: Lovely animated film loosely based on the famed Book of Kells. I got sucked in on the basis of the animation alone, which is so crisp and distinctive, but the story itself is strong as well. Highly, highly recommended.

“Street of Crocodiles”: They have a pretty good collection of short films from the Brothers Quay on Netflix, including this absolute gem of a short film. The animation, puppetry, and set design are stunning. It’s actually a very haunting little film, despite the lack of an obvious, explicit story per se. I took note after note of running motifs and images throughout the film simply because I felt compelled to, because they somehow create this emotional algebra (putting it perhaps too succinctly) that I want to absorb for myself and my writing. Highly recommended.

Brick: I enjoyed Looper, so I decided to go back and watch Brick, a murder mystery set I a high school in Califorina. At first, it’s really weird listening to these high schoolers spout off Chandleresque dialogue like its second nature to them, but by the end of it I was sucked in. Joseph Gordon-Levitt totally kills his role as the wounded, loner anti-hero who has to make sense of the sordid plot.

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai: Under most circumstances, I would consider Santa Sangre the weirdest film I watched in this batch of movies, but just before that I watched Buckaroo Banzai. Quite the madcap movie; I honestly feel like I need to watch it again, just because the movie throws so much at you and expects you to pick it up and keep running along. Trans-dimensional travel, aliens in human disguise, rock and roll superstar scientists, doppelgangers, government conspiracies, schizophrenic John Lithgows, the works. It is the kind of movie that might prompt someone to label it as “weird for the sake of weird.” That said, it is a fun movie, especially once you throw up your hands, say “screw it,” and just go along without trying to figure everything out.

Mary and Max: A heartbreaker of a movie with some of the best stop-motion animation I’ve ever seen. It’s a simple enough story, with a sad, lonely little girl becoming penpals with a man afflicted with Asperger’s Syndrome and the development and challenge of their friendship over the years. The emotional content of the movie is in fact very complicated and even tragic at points, or threatens to become tragic. Ultimately, though, the movie winds up being life-affirming, and it earns that nature without schmaltz or dubious sentimentality.

Trailer Park Boys: God, this show is hilarious. I absolutely love it… well, Seasons 1 through 5, anyway. Season 6 isn’t nearly as funny, and I watched eight minutes of Season 7 before deciding the show was no longer all that entertaining.  Still, I got a big kick out of the show while I could. For those unfamiliar with the show, it’s about the residents of a trailer park in Nova Scotia, initially centered around the misadventures of two drug dealers, shot in a mockumentary style that works pretty well. The show lives or dies on the strength of its characters, but they’re more than up to the task, especially the boozy trailer park supervisor Mr. Lahey. Totally worth it if you’re up for a laugh.

Lo: Check this Netflix description of the movie: “Lovelorn Justin sees his life change for the better when quirky April lands in the middle of it. When she’s abruptly kidnapped by a band of demons, Justin sets out to rescue her, with the help of the hellion Lo, who has an agenda of his own. Hell, musical demons and oversized rats complicate the path to love in writer-director Travis Betz’s horror-comedy hybrid.” This should’ve been right up my alley, yes? Problem is, it’s actually terrible. The “comedy” part of the horror-comedy hybrid is painfully unfunny to the point of being obnoxious, and the acting is annoyingly hammy and distracting. It’s like everyone involved with the movie tried too hard to make it quirky and theatrical. The whole thing feels utterly forced and lame. I turned it off halfway through; I couldn’t finish it. Very rarely do I not finish a movie, even if I don’t think it’s good.

Die Monster Die!: Rather lame monster movie from the 60s loosely based on Lovecraft’s short story “The Colour Out of Space.” An American scientist who more closely resembles a flat-topped classic gumshoe travels overseas to visit his sweetie at her home estate, which happens to be the creepy old place up on the hill with a tortured family history involved strange meteorites and deformed relatives. Yeah, it’s got Boris Karloff in it, and there’s a certain retro movie monster charm at times, but the script is pretty bad and laughable, especially towards the end. Might be worth watching in a Mystery Science Theater 3000 sense, though.

I Spit On Your Grave: I know that this is a cult classic of the slasher movie genre, but I found it almost completely unwatchable. I get that the movie is basically an indictment of men who commit atrocious acts against women. The whole point of the movie is a woman getting revenge against a pack of rapists by mutilating and killing them in horrible ways. That said, I found the actual rape scene extremely horrid and hard to watch. I couldn’t watch the whole thing because it hurt to watch it, so I fast-forwarded to the end of it. I get the argument that claims events like this should be depicted as realistically as possible so people can see just how damning these acts are, and in spirit I admire it…except that it’s still very traumatic to watch. I already know that violence against women is something I would never, ever condone or participate in. So, in my perspective as a viewer, it becomes less of a valuable moral lesson and more of an excruciating endurance test, and the rape scene in I Spit On Your Grave really does feel almost completely like an endurance test, which in turn makes me question the morality of the filmmakers. Anyway, I feel like that’s opening up a whole other venue of argument that I would actually like to engage in down the road, so I’ll cut this off for now by stating the other rather damning part of the movie, one that doesn’t really intersect with the moral dimensions of it: it’s truly, utterly boring and even amateurish at points.

Shrooms: I didn’t really care for this movie. It’s about a bunch of American students traveling to Ireland to go explore the woods and trip out on mushrooms – seriously, that’s the main reason they travel over there. Of course, they’re by-and-large unlikeable boors who you won’t mind seeing perish over the course of the movie, minus the Final Girl and her Irish would-be boyfriend. Of course, their Irish friend tells them there are dire consequences if they eat the wrong mushroom, which happens to look very much like the right mushroom they’re looking for. Of course, once he mentions that, one of the Americans ingests the wrong mushroom and gets totally messed up throughout the movie, notwithstanding the serial killer that suddenly starts stalking them. The movie seems to exist solely for the central conceit of the tripped-out victims seeing weird stuff and being killed in grotesque ways, because otherwise the story is pretty predictable and boring. The ending is even worse because they try to pull a total 180 on the perception of one of the characters, which, as opposed to saving the boring movie that led up to it, actually makes it even worse.

A Tale of Two Sisters: Let’s end with what I would consider a truly great horror movie.  I feel like I’m coming to the party a little late on this one, since it’s been out for a while and it’s a bit of a modern classic of horror movies and Korean cinema. That said, it’s a great movie. It’s genuinely creepy and unsettling, and the movie sustains and builds true tension throughout. It also executes not one, not two, but three game-changing twists, two of which actually surprised me. The really great thing about the movie is that as much as it executes some expected and unexpected horror movie beats, the story is tethered to strong, complex characters with unique psychologies and affecting conflicts. At the core, this is just as much a Shakespearean family tragedy as it is a horror movie, which is exactly the way I like it.

Reading Roundup: The Bookening

Since the beginning of the new year, I’ve been reading like a fiend. It’s been a rather productive start, actually, churning through more books and stories in the month of January than I can recall in recent memory. Much of this is due to my work at Weird Fiction Review, where I’ve been reading through a lot of material and figuring out a tentative schedule for the first half of the year. A lot of what I’ve been reading isn’t quite available to the public yet, or more accurately I don’t know if rights and permissions allow me to discuss it. This includes some absolutely splendid work from French writers like Bernard Quiriny and Jehanne Jean-Charles, translated by Edward Gauvin, one of our regular columnists at WFR.

A lot of what I’ve read has already been featured on the site, like Yoko Ogawa’s collection Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales, which I enjoyed immensely. My review for WFR sums up my feelings on Ogawa’s book pretty nicely. And then just last week, we posted some features on Helen Marshall and her collection of short stories, Hair Side, Flesh Side, including an interview and her story “The Mouth, Open,” which knocked me back when I originally read it. I seriously hope many readers have the same reaction.

Here’s a brief, non-complete roundup of the rest of my reading for January, then. Some of this will be featured on WFR in the coming months, hopefully. Otherwise, all of these books and stories make for quality reading.

The Divinity Student by Michael Cisco: I’m quickly realizing that Cisco’s novels, indeed his writing in general, are required reading for fans and scholars of weird fiction. This is the first novel of Cisco’s that I read, but it won’t be the last (I’ve already acquired copies of The Traitor and his latest novel, Celebrant). The central premise is striking enough: a guy who is struck by lightning and brought back to life as a paper-stuffed golem, then sent into this crumbling city to try and reconstruct a forbidden divine language by reliving the memories of dead people. The language itself is stunning and vivid, rendering what are some pretty bizarre and consciousness-expanding/challenging moments in readable prose. Even when you don’t quite understand what is going on, you’ll at least perceive what’s happening. This is a novel of a phantasmagorical, broken, maddening world with characters and a pervasive overall psyche to match. Simply amazing.

Anonym by Eric Basso: I’ve previously written about my experiences reading Basso’s work and how notable it is, and Anonym is a similarly notable and distinct experience. It’s a large, sprawling work, which surprised me because up to that point my experience of Basso had come from reading his novella “The Beak Doctor” and other short stories and poems of his. It also shows off his considerable range as a writer, seemingly moving from genre to genre within the same chapter: surrealistic stream-of-consciousness, stranded astronaut sci-fi, decadent historical drama, unsettling gothic horror, etc. Like much of Basso’s other work, sadly, it’s also hard to find: it exists in the form of eight chapbooks, each distributed in a limited edition of sixty copies. Fortunately, there are plans for serializing Anonym on WFR later this year, which will hopefully lead to greater interest.

Teatro Grottesco by Thomas Ligotti: Before I read this book, my only experience with Ligotti and his writing was in reading “The Town Manager” in The Weird and “Notes on the Writing of Horror: A Story” from Poe’s Children, edited by Peter Straub (a collection I enjoy by and large). The influence of people like Lovecraft and other luminaries of pessimistic, cosmic horror and philosophy is evident, but Ligotti is a far better writer than Lovecraft ever was. His scares are more genuine and personal, and he has something that Lovecraft lacked horribly: a sense of humor, however sardonic, which actually helps to enhance the horror and keep it from going stale. My personal favorite stories from this collection include “Gas Station Carnivals” and “The Bungalow House.”

Move Under Ground by Nick Mamatas: Now this is my idea of good Lovecraftian fiction. This novel is set in a version of the 60s where Cthulhu and the sunken city of R’lyeh have risen from the Pacific Ocean, sending America and its citizens mutating and spiraling out of control into hideous forms, threatening to drop the world into a horrible nightmare existence. Our surprising heroes? Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassidy, and William Burroughs. The novel itself is written from the perspective of Kerouac, who makes for a surprisingly effective and appropriate protagonist and narrator for Lovecraftian horror. The really cool part about this novel is how Mamatas uses the setting of the 60s, the threat of Cthulhu and his bros, and the perspective of Kerouac to let loose on American culture of the mid-20^th century and beyond. As it turns out from reading the novel, America was far better primed to received Lovecraftian horrors than we may realize.

“The Descent of Man” by T.C. Boyle and “Buddha Nostril Bird” by John Kessel: I’m lumping these together because I read them in the same anthology, The Secret History of Science Fiction, edited by my old Stonecoast mentor James Patrick Kelly and his frequent partner-in-crime, John Kessel. These two stories couldn’t be more different in content and style, but I loved them all the same. “The Descent of Man” is a bananas story of a man whose wife has been steadily losing her culture – and her heart – to the genius-intellect monkey she works alongside at a primate center, in a world where intelligent monkeys and humans coexist as a given. Besides being lovably bonkers, the story is alternately funny and heartbreaking. Meanwhile, “Buddha Nostril Bird” is what I would term philosophical science fiction, with sequencing of detail and event that feels partly surreal and partly Zen koan. The story kicks off with the protagonist escaping from a prison that specializes in ontological torture and quickly becomes a trial of enlightenment as he attempts to reclaim his old life and loves.

“The Black Pool” by Frederick Stuart Greene: This story is one nasty piece of work. It’s about twin brothers with distinctive, and opposite, personalities who begin to experience turbulence with one another after they fall for the same woman. One of them wins her hand, the other one does not. In different hands, this would be the work of sheer melodrama, but in Greene’s hands it becomes the catalyst for a twisted, dark story of sibling rivalry with deadly consequences, and not always in the way you might expect.

“Special” by Kit Reed: Another nasty piece of work from a writer I really need to explore further (luckily, I have a copy of Weird Women, Wired Women I’ll read soon). This story, which comes from her collection What Wolves Know, overlays small town middle class culture with celebrity worship in a simultaneous, razor sharp takedown of both. There is a genuine sense of undefinable menace that creeps into the story and builds, until you reach a final paragraph that hits you like a cinderblock to the back of the head.

“Prolegomenon to the Adventures of Childe Phoenix” by Marly Youmans:  Lightspeed Magazine recently reprinted this story, which I enjoyed immensely. It’s a coming of age story, more or less, that uses its fabulism and imagery as an extension of the protagonist’s emotional state. His father is an alchemist, his mother is a ghost, his sister lies in a glass coffin in suspended animation, and the house is falling apart around them. The sheer strangeness and poignancy of it is what keeps you reading. In a way, it reminded me of the intense emotional fantasy of some of Bruno Schulz’s stories.

“The Dog Said Bow-Wow” by Michael Swanwick: I actually read a four story suite of Swanwick’s Darger and Surplus stories, including “Smoke and Mirrors,” “The Little Cat Laughed to See Such Sport,” and “Girls and Boys, come Out to Play” – but my favorite of the bunch is “The Dog Said Bow-Wow.” There’s a fun sense of adventure and playfulness in these stories. The backdrop for the stories is essentially science fiction, but the actual surface detail of the stories is at times surreal and fabulist.

“The Fall River Axe Murders” by Angela Carter: Oh, how I love Carter and her writing. I encountered this story in an anthology called Extreme Fiction, which I heavily recommend. It collects a variety of stories that challenge reality either through the use of fabulist or formalist narrative methodologies. “Axe Murders” falls in under fabulism between Flann O’Brien and Octavia Butler, presumably because the story engages in alternative mythmaking for the story of Lizzie Borden and the (supposed) murder of her family. Carter’s goal for this story seems to be nothing less than rewriting the sequence of events leading up to the murders to show various forces applying pressure to Borden – her family, her personal life, her hometown – that made her act inevitable. The story never depicts the titular act, but quite frankly it doesn’t need to because we already know it’s going to happen. It’s great, deft writing really, challenging readers’ expectations while still being aware of them.

“The Repairer of Reputations” by Robert Chambers: I would love to put together some kind of feature week for Chambers on WFR in the future. I only recently encountered him and his fiction, namely his collection The King in Yellow, published back in 1895. His stories revolve around a play that induces madness in all readers, concerning the titular king who rules the alternate dimension of Carcosa. Those who have read the play are then susceptible to the influence of the Yellow Sign, a glyph that communicates the King in Yellow’s power. “The Repairer of Reputations” is the lead-off story for The King in Yellow. It’s quite well-written, in fact easily readable. It’s also surprisingly sci-fi for a story that proved influential in supernatural and weird fiction. Alternate history of New York? Suicide booths? Curious. Those of you who are readers of H.P. Lovecraft should check out Chambers and his stories because Lovecraft himself borrowed concepts from Chambers! (It should be noted that Chambers himself was influence by several of Ambrose Bierce’s stories, especially “An Inhabitant of Carcosa.”) The whole notion of Carcosa and the King in Yellow was massively influential on the Cthulhu Mythos, and Lovecraft (and especially his followers) lifted entire names and places from Chambers’ fiction for use in the Mythos down the line. So, without Chambers, there would be no Cthulhu Mythos, and likely no Lovecraftian fiction. How’s that for an alternate history?

I’ve got more reading yet to go, as always. Currently working my way through K.J. Bishop’s collection of short fiction, That Book Your Mad Ancestor Wrote, and I plan to follow that up with Christopher Barzak’s new collection, Before and Afterlives. After that?  Not sure. Of course, I’ll have reading for WFR to take care of. New and new-to-me releases I’ve got my eye on are Tamas Dobozy’s Siege 13, George Saunders’s Tenth of December, Ian Sales’s Adrift on the Sea of Rains, Stefan Kiesbye’s Your House Is On Fire, Your Children All Gone, and Matt Bell’s Cataclysm Baby. I’ve also never read Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, a situation I must resolve soon, and at some point I have to finish reading Cloud Atlas (I’m halfway through; I keep having to stop and tackle other things). So, yes, one book at a time.

Looking Forward

I’ve worked for the better part of the month to try and come up with a personal recap of 2012. It’s been a gnarled mess so far. There’s so much from last year that I never got the chance to cover on this blog, and I feel obligated to try and cover all of it, which makes the whole thing tediously long. Also, much of what happened to me this past year was, to understate things, difficult, and writing about freshly lived difficult experiences is, well, difficult. Plus, the idea of a recap of 2012 is just so comically late by this point; it’s almost February now.

So, I’ve decided it makes more sense for me to lay out my personal and professional ambitions for this year, as a means of letting people know what I want to work on, but also as a means of holding myself to my goals. There’s still some recapping, but it’s (hopefully) more focused.

I will continue to develop and challenge myself as an editor.

I feel pretty confident in my chances of pulling this off, to say the least. It’s been a very busy, rewarding year on the editorial front. I’ve spent a little under a year as the official managing editor at WFR ever since taking over for Angela Slatter, and I’ve also been helping the VanderMeers with other editorial tasks since earlier than that. It was all a bit overwhelming at first, sure, but by December I’d gotten the hang of it quite nicely. I like editorial work; I enjoy helping writers with their work and making sure it exists in its best possible form, and it’s rewarding to play a role in helping undiscovered or overlooked writers gain a larger audience. I’ve written editorials, reviews, interviews and the like, and I’ve discovered that, much to the surprise of my usually introverted nature, I’ve gotten better at talking to people and discovering connections with them and what they do. Barring any sudden developments, I’ll be at WFR for a while, and I’ve got a few (for now) secret projects in the pipeline too.

I will continue to travel to new places.

In April, I flew to North Carolina to have a mini-retreat with some friends from Stonecoast – Julie Day, Lindsey Bogason, Taylor Prestion, Mariel Morales, Amy Tibbets, Keith R. Potempa, and Derek Hoffman – with all of us shacking up in a beach house at Wrightsville Beach near Wilmington, on the Outer Banks. I got buried in the sand, among other things.

In May, I took a surprise trip to Maryland for a job interview at a community college in Germantown, then drove over to Frederick for a night to visit my friend Devin Gaither, who was participating in a reading for her theater troupe.  In July and November, I flew to ReaderCon in Burlington, MA and the World Fantasy Convention in freaking Canada (Toronto, specifically). I say “freaking” Canada not because it sucked – far from it! – but because that was my first trip out of the country, ever. Both times, I traveled in support of my duties at WFR and Cheeky Frawg.

Four times, I flew solo to different places, for business and pleasure alike, and every time I flew out, I came back home with vital insights and peace of mind, and the joy and relief of meeting up with friends in person again, as opposed to just staying in touch electronically. That’s a combination of wonderful things I can’t get any other way than just packing up and going somewhere else for a while.

I will continue to attend conventions this year.

ReaderCon and WFC were absolute blasts and really helped me to find my place within the speculative fiction community at large and find new friends and colleagues. I visited ReaderCon with Jeff VanderMeer back in July, shortly after he came to Stonecoast as a visiting lecturer (I was visiting soon-to-be-graduates, and the timing worked out perfectly). So, I got to be his sort-of-sidekick for the trip, which was fantastic. We took a scenic drive through Maine before ending up in Massachusetts for ReaderCon. The drive that day was great, and so was the company. Jeff and I talked about a lot of stuff and got to know each other, and he was thoroughly traumatized by eating a whole lobster for the first time. I have evidence.

Fun fact: husked-out lobsters make for decent makeshift finger puppets.

My experience at ReaderCon turned me into a bit of a social butterfly about halfway through my time at the convention, and as a result I met a lot of fantastic new people and was in my element in general, more than I expected. I took that new attitude with me to WFC, and so I really had fun and knew how to interact with others from the very beginning. My partners-in-crime this round were Malissa Kent (who has an awesome story in Steampunk Revolution that everyone should read: “The Heart is the Matter”) and Genevieve Williams (who is just awesome, period, and has a story in the new anthology Future Games). There were many adventures had at WFC, between helping Karin Tidbeck with her autograph session, setting up the Cheeky Frawg launch party with Nicole Koehler-Stace, Dominick Parisien, and Genevieve Valentine, and meeting many more new, cool people, along with some return faces from ReaderCon. As a whole, WFC felt like this great big epic party from start to finish, a truly transformative experience.

I also got myself a cool new sidekick out of the trip: a surly white rabbit named Krowley. He’s Canadian-American, since I share custody of him with Amal El-Mohtar, per our agreement at WFC.

My owl mug is closely watching Krowley, lest he do something shifty.

I don’t know how many conventions I’ll attend this year. I’d love to go to ICFA and WorldCon, since I’ve never been to either, but I’ll have to see regarding money and timing. At the very least, I will be attending ReaderCon again. Bet on it.

I will exercise regularly.

My physical health slid a bit this year, most notably later on in the year when my workload began to press down on me. I’ve gained a little weight back, and I’m not happy about it. So, I’ve resolved to exercise regularly, as a means of rectifying this and also as a way to deal with stress in a more beneficial manner. Thus far, I’ve created a regimen I feel good about: squats, push-ups, sit-ups, and regular use of elliptical machines and treadmills to sweat my weight out. I’ve even discovered that I have an easier time using the treadmill when I’m reading; I get so absorbed in it, I don’t even notice the soreness of my body.

I will write and sell at least six stories.

I made my first actual sale earlier this year: “The Artist in the Tower,” which appeared in the December issue of Ideomancer. I’m incredibly proud of this story. I also don’t want it to be my only sale as a writer. That said, I didn’t actually complete a new work of fiction this year; all I have is a few fragments and aborted drafts of stories lurking in my hard drives and handwritten notes.

So, I’ve set the goal of selling six more stories to various publications this year, which I know means writing more than six, way more (which is the main reason why I set this goal). I’m comfortable with that. I need to set expectations for myself and retool my creative process so that I don’t just go queasy at the first signs of trouble in my drafts. I need to learn how to juggle multiple projects and work through rough spells, like actual professional writers do (or should do), and I need to learn how to write something when I don’t have a definite plan for it beforehand. Most importantly, I need to learn how to write and be productive regardless of how easy or difficult the rest of my life is at that moment. It’s a matter of discipline, I think, just sitting down and doing it, no matter what, and making it a habit.

I will start working on a novel at some point.

Or a screenplay. Or a play or two. Definitely a few essays and professional reviews or columns, if I get into a groove. Maybe even a graphic novel, comic book, webcomic, etc. The point is, I need to continue to stretch myself as a writer. Working in the same medium and mode constantly can get to feeling stale at times, which stagnates the imagination. Such is the case with me, I suspect, since I more or less work exclusively with short fiction. Even now, I’m thinking of how I tried writing a comic book script when I was in my first semester at Stonecoast, thinking I needed to transition to writing comics. Immediately after that, my interest in my own writing was rejuvenated, and I experienced a burst of creativity and sheer writing that resulted, within months, in five different stories I consider among my best.

I will make new progress toward my ideal academic career.

Which would be as a full-time, tenure-track professor of English at a university or liberal arts college somewhere, preferably teaching a mixture of courses: composition, literature, and, of course, creative writing. I enjoy teaching, but right now I do it on a part-time basis at a local junior college in addition to full-time work elsewhere, and I only ever get to teach basic composition and freshman composition courses. I don’t want to be doing this adjunct dance forever; the thought of doing this for even five or six more years while I try to go full-time somewhere makes me go a bit crazy.

So, of course I’ll keep applying for teaching jobs – most of which are in other states, because there isn’t squat for academic openings in Missouri – but I’ve also applied for Ph.D. programs in creative writing at four different universities. That would give me at least five more years to develop my portfolio as a writer and teacher and make me a more attractive candidate for a position somewhere (provided universities don’t plummet into financial oblivion in the meantime; great, now I’m bummed again).

I will move away to somewhere new by the end of the year.

The fact is, where I live right now isn’t a good place for my future. That’s part of why I like to travel: I’m kinda scoping out places I could come to call home. With luck, I will be moving somewhere else by the end of the year, either because of a new teaching job or a Ph.D. program. If neither of those things happen, then I would seriously consider moving just to move, and then finding new work once I settle somewhere. I’ve lived in the same place for too long, with too much a lack of opportunities for myself and my life, and it’s driving me nuts. It’s long past time to relocate.

I will be more active in fighting back against any dark moods that rise up on me.

I’m going to be walking a very fine line here between being perfectly honest and (hopefully not) disclosing too much personal information, so bear with me: oftentimes, I have trouble dealing with depression or general blue moods that seize me. It tends to happen when negative things occur and I allow my feelings to well up on me and metastasize, as opposed to dealing with them in a positive manner. Doesn’t make them suck any less, but still. And this year, it became a huge problem, bigger than it had in recent memory.

Contributing factors this year: a failed job search that lasted months and ended in another year of adjunct limbo; living in a community that has a middling-to-hostile relationship with higher education and a distinct lack of local friends and activity partners with shared interests to my own; an especially rough Fall semester of teaching (which was the biggest contributor to stress later in the year) where I constantly felt I was failing to reach my students and make them care about academics; the cumulative strain of failing to get any worthwhile writing done; and the ever-constant fear that I was trapped in a life situation that would never change. By October, it had become this giant twine-ball of anxiety and depression pressing at the back of my head, making me simultaneously sad, angry, tired, withdrawn, and fragmented. I was genuinely afraid that I would suffer a nervous breakdown before the end of the year.

As bad as it got, it could have been much, much worse. My work at WFR helped me a lot, because it gave me a strong sense of purpose, as well as something to focus on other than my own feelings and fears. My trips to ReaderCon and WFC saved me at vital moments this year from just wallowing in muck, and I came back home energized. My travels gave me a chance to find out how I fit in different environments, with pleasantly surprising results. As much as I maintained a policy of radio silence this year – that’s what I do when I get depressed, I just go silent – those moments where I stayed in touch with friends helped make things that much more bearable. My story sale to Ideomancer and its publication later in the year made me want to dig up all of my old drafts from the year and see if they were as bad as I thought they were; turns out they’re not (a danger of working on writing while you have a bad sense of self).

So, these are all the kinds of things I need to do and remember whenever it starts getting a little too dark for me. I just need to remember walking on the beaches of North Carolina, or navigating the busy streets of Frederick, or tasting my first Guinness at ReaderCon, or racing Dominick up the stairs while getting ice at WFC in a spontaneous burst of childlike energy. Just now, I smiled again, even if it was a little one, to myself.

I think the following picture best represents the kind of mental state I want and need to cultivate, even in the face of the unknown and the uncontrollable. My friend Lindsey Bogason took it when we arrived at Wrightsville Beach at the start of our retreat in April (she also took the previous picture of me buried in the sand). It was the first time I’d seen the ocean since I was in high school, when my family vacationed on the beach in Florida. I took my shoes off and walked toward the water, wanting to feel it on my bare feet once more. The closer I got to the water, the louder the sound of the ocean became. It filled my ears and became a second pulse, pushing my anxieties right out of my head to make room. I stood there for a minute, just listening to the ocean and nothing else, the sound of the tourists on all other sides of me drowned out. I could have stood there forever and done anything else I wanted, as long as I had that sound and the cold shock of salty water on my toes. Unfortunately, I live in Missouri, good ol’ landlocked, boring, pollen-infested Missouri.

Fortunately, I have a strong imagination.

Favorites from 2012: Music

I originally wrote this list up as part of my recap of favorites from 2012 a few days ago, but I decided to split it off into its own post before I got into a personal recap for the year. I’m a huge hound for music; I tend to get into this stuff pretty heavily. My iTunes library is full of custom playlists I make for different projects I’m working on, just to get me into an ideal mood and rhythm, and I love sharing music recommendations with friends.

As I wrote this, it basically ballooned into this joyous sharing of music I loved, so the following is a big custom playlist, essentially (apologies if loading is a bit slow; there’s lots of YouTube videos). I’d love to hear what people think about these albums and songs, and if anyone’s got any suggestions of their own from the year, I’m all ears!

Lots of great tunes this year overall. There’s some albums I still want to listen to all the way through, like Django Django’s debut, Scott Walker’s Bish Bosch, and The Chromatics’ Kill For Love. For the most part, though, I came out of this year with a lot of albums in heavy rotation.

BEST ALBUMS

In Our Heads by Hot Chip: If I ever threw a big party, I’d want these guys to deejay. Great album packed with quality jams from beginning to end. Catchy as hell. Also, they have the best, loopiest music videos.

Lonerism by Tame Impala: Psychedelic rock with a lonely pop heart. My favorite song is actually “Elephant,” which has a great blues rock stomp to it, but this is more indicative of the overall feel of the album.

Shrines by Purity Ring: This album grew on me throughout the year. It has a really strong electronic element to the production, to the point that it reminds me of a contemporary variation of trip hop. The lyrics are occasionally grotesque and surreal, with a heavy fantasy element (although it’s likely just heavily metaphorical).

The Haunted Man by Bat For Lashes: My personal pick for best album of the year. Great alternative pop in the tradition of Kate Bush, albeit filtered through Natasha Khan’s individual aesthetic and experiences. Lots of great individual songs, but when taken from start to finish, it’s a work of catharsis, sometimes stark, often melancholy, but always beautiful.

Bloom by Beach House: Ethereal dream pop that transports me to another place every time I listen to it. The opening three-song salvo of “Myth,” “Wild,” and “Lazuli” is great.

Nocturne by Wild Nothing: More dream pop. I feel like there’s a lot of really good bands coming about recently that are informed by the dream pop/shoegaze aesthetics developed in the 80s. Which is great for me, because that’s one of my favorite musical periods ever.

The Seer by Swans: Grim, stark, dynamic, epic, exhausting. A big album that whispers and thunders in equal measure. It’s one of those albums you have to devote your total attention to when you listen to it, simply because it demands it.

Rispah by The Invisible: “Protection” is a strong contender for my favorite song from 2012. It feels like something alive. It shifts, twists, and mutates over the course of its full seven-minute length, never wearing out its welcome. That goes for the rest of the album it comes from, Rispah. It’s a slow burn, but once it catches fire it doesn’t go out.

The Something Rain by Tindersticks: “Show Me Everything” is another top contender for my favorite song of the year. Its deliberate pace and somber, assured tone remind me of a storyteller who is well familiar with the tale he’s telling, milking it for maximum dramatic potential whenever necessary. I’d actually never heard of Tindersticks until this song and the album it comes from. Because of both, I’m steadily becoming a fan.

Trilogy by The Weeknd: I’ve followed The Weeknd ever since the release of his first mixtape in 2011, House of Balloons. He released two other mixtapes, Thursday and Echoes of Silence, before the end of that year, and all three of those were collected in Trilogy this year. The lyrics wear a little thin at moments, as they can be a bit one-note about the debauchery and Machiavellian attitude of the singer’s persona, but the actual vocals and production are stunning.

Ghostory by School of Seven Bells: I haven’t seen this album mentioned that much on year’s end music lists, which saddens me because it’s easily one of my favorite albums of the year (might just be because of my dream pop/shoegaze sweet spot). The album as a whole has this haunted, ethereal feel to it.

Neck of the Woods by Silversun Pickups: If I was writing a horror story, I’d listen to this album on repeat. The lyrics circle around private, personal horrors that come back and bite people, oftentimes when they return to their source. The synth hook of the opening song, “Skin Graph,” is basically a scare chord. My favorite moment of the album, though, is the opening minute of “Bloody Mary (Nerve Endings).” Just let the sound and texture wash over you.

Gossamer by Passion Pit: This album is a deceptively poppy affair, full of boppy, catchy synth hooks and singalong choruses. Once you take the time to parse the lyrics for some of those choruses, though, you realize they’re not so happy-go-lucky. The album as a whole is the story of a nervous breakdown; the lyrics reveal that story and the music tries to cover it up. The most bleakly honest song of the album, “Constant Conversations,” happens to be my favorite.

Instinct by Niki and the Dove: Simply stated, this is pop music for people who read fairy tales. Try listening to “The Fox” and not thinking of those woodblock engravings from certain Grimm Brothers compendiums. They’re not afraid to get a little sci-fi either, as shown by the video for “Tomorrow.”

Drive Soundtrack by Cliff Martinez et al.: I didn’t like Drive when I first saw it. The pacing threw me quite a bit. What made me return to the movie was the performances of the principal actors and the realization that everyone involved in the movie was attempting something different from the typical noir setup. The first thing that drew me back, though, was the soundtrack. Apparently, 80s synth-pop also resides very snugly in my musical sweet-spot. Either way, I sometimes listen to the soundtrack when I’m driving and pretend I’m Ryan Gosling.

AWESOME SONGS

“Hit the Ground (Superman)” by The Big Pink: I was a fan of the Big Pink’s previous album, A Brief History of Love, which I would consider flawed by nonetheless inspired and catchy as hell. Their latest album, Future This? Not so good. I wound up liking this song quite a bit, however.

“Five Seconds” by Twin Shadow: So, apparently in addition to writing albums, the man behind Twin Shadow, George Lewis Jr., writes novels about motorcycle gangs in the future (not bad, George!). Hence, the video for this song. It is pretty cool, so I’m not complaining.

“Shoreless Kid” by Young Galaxy: Great song, and it’s responsible for a passage of lyrics that called to mind whenever things got rough for me this year: “Nothing’s as simple/as knowing you’re safe/in your home/at the end of the night”

“Undertow” by Warpaint: Another one of those bands that lands pretty squarely in my dream pop/shoegaze sweet spot, although in this case it’s a notably darker, gloomier corner. I’ve heard more of their songs since this one, but it’s still my favorite.

“How Deep Is Your Love?” by The Rapture: One of the most euphoric songs I’ve heard. I’m not normally a fan of The Rapture, but this song is outstanding.

“The Stable Song” by Gregory Alan Isakov: I’ve never heard anything else from Isakov, but I heard this song when it was referred to me by one of my new friends from this year, Sarah Fletcher. Makes my heart tighten up a little every time I listen to it.

“Inhaler” by Foals: This one came out in December and quickly became a sort of personal anthem for me. May very well be my favorite song of the year, in a year full of fantastic songs. It was the first song I pulled up to listen to in 2013, in fact.

Favorites From 2012: Books, TV, Movies

So, I’ve had difficulties keeping up on my blogging this year. I haven’t posted a thing since August, when I gave my take on the situation regarding Weird Tales and their current editor and publisher (if you haven’t read that yet, please do; it’s my favorite blog post from this year, for many reasons). That’s not for a lack of material, but (not so) simply personal matters. I’ve also had my fair share of great reading, listening, and viewing this year, all of which I meant to dissect at some point earlier this year before I fell into radio silence.

I’m still working on a big ol’ end-of-year personal recap for 2012, which might be a while in coming along. So, I’ve decided to share the books, TV, music, and movies that left a strong impression on me this year in the meantime. Keep in mind that this isn’t necessarily the best of 2012 per se, but the best of what I encountered this year. I’m still more behind on my To-Read/To-Watch lists than I would prefer to be.

BEST BOOKS

A short list of some of my favorite books from this year can be found up at Weirdfictionreview.com in their recent End of Year Booklist (which you should read anyway, just because our contributors have fantastic taste). So, I’m high on books like Karin Tidbeck’s Jagannath and comics like Prophet and Tale of Sand. Here are some other books I really enjoyed this year, some weird-centric and some not.

Prater Violet by Christopher Isherwood: Recommended to me by Sarah Fletcher at WFC in Toronto during the Cheeky Frawg/VanderMeer launch party. Great short novel about a writer who is drafted into service for a brilliant, eccentric director who is trying to corral a difficult film project while his family is effectively trapped in Austria during the 30s while Hitler’s forces march through Europe. Partly a blithely comic take on the creative/moviemaking process, partly a chronicle of a difficult time in history.

Silently and Very Fast by Catherynne M. Valente: Before this year more or less railroaded me, I was planning a novelette/novella in part dealing with consciousness and AI, and so I took the opportunity to read this novella. I think very highly of it, in part for how Valente pulls off the emotional and personal development of an AI as a character and narrator. There’s also a strong emphasis on tying science fictional concepts to myth and fantasy, but that’s no surprise, considering the writer.

Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day by Ben Loory: Potent, imaginative collection of stories from Loory, who I met at ReaderCon this year thanks to my friend and WFR colleague Nancy Hightower. The language is stripped down and simple, exposing the characters and scenes in such a way that, however fantastical they become (and they do get quite out there), I was always there with the stories, never doubting what I read. It’s an interesting approach, mostly because a lot of writers think suspension of disbelief is best accomplished with a bounty of detail, when in fact an anonymical approach can be quite effective sometimes.

Redemption in Indigo by Karen Lord: Wonderful novel about a woman who flees her gluttonous husband and is bestowed with godlike power over the forces of chaos and chance – which attracts the attention of the god who lost those powers in the first place. A treat for the imagination, with its humor, mythic resonance, and sweet emotional core. I found myself wanting to believe in the story, however bizarre or fantastical it became. Required reading for anyone who enjoys fantasy.

The Palm-Wine Drinkard by Amos Tutuola: Another bit of required reading for anyone who enjoys fantasy. In fact, make it a doubleheader with Indigo. Very surreal imagination, clearly influenced by African myth and folklore while doing its own very distinctive thing. I saw it in part as an African odyssey story, about a man who follows his palm wine tapster into the land of the dead to try and bring him back to the land of the living. It’s much, much weirder than that though.

One Soul by Ray Fawkes: This graphic novel absolutely broke my heart, and I loved it. It tells the story of eighteen different people throughout the history of humanity, from birth to death. These stories are told – and meant to be read – concurrently. In fact, the pages of the comic are arranged in such a way that there are eighteen panels across a two-page spread, with each panel being dedicated to each character. Some characters have more tragic lives than the others. Some die much earlier than the others. All of them face the hard, unending questions of life and death, which made me consider those same questions on my own and place my own life along theirs. A deeply felt, moving experience that I would force all of my friends to read, should the chance arise.

Windeye by Brian Evenson: Collection of short stories from one of the freakiest, most unnerving imaginations I’ve ever encountered. When I read through the collection earlier this year to select a story for Weirdfictionreview.com, I ultimately decided on “Legion,” a story about robots (?) that steal body parts from dead people and attach them to their bodies. That meant overlooking other, equally weird and unsettling stories. Personal favorites include the title story, “Grottor,” “The Sladen Suit,” and “Angel of Death.”

“The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary” by Ken Liu: Another absolute heartbreaker of a story. Written in the form of a documentary (duh), it’s about husband-and-wife scientists who pioneer a form of time travel – more accurately, time observance – and then use it to try and help victims of a massive historical atrocity – Unit 731 in World War II – gain true acknowledgment of their suffering. The form of the story matches the content brilliantly. More than that, though, it affected me on a cellular emotional level, which is a rare occurrence. I hope history eventually identifies this story as a classic.

The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer: This is such a given, considering where I work and who I work for. That said, this is an amazing collection of short stories and novellas. What I really enjoy are the stories I haven’t previously encountered , like Eric Basso’s “The Beak Doctor” and “The Other Side of the Mountain” by Michel Bernanos.

Illyria by Elizabeth Hand: The best YA novel I’ve read recently, and one of the best novels. Lots of complex family history propels this novel, rooted in a firm awareness of familial past and the destinies we may or may not buy into for ourselves, but the heart of the novel is the thorny, tender relationship between two cousins who find themselves involved in both the theater and each other. This is one of those novels where the fantastical element is subtle, yet utterly necessary. You’ll think you have it pegged midway through the novel, but by the end you’ll be proven wrong, and you’ll love it.

The Honey Month by Amal El-Mohtar: Lush, sensual language and a free-flowing imagination make this collection of poems and stories well worth your time. Amazing to think the prompting for this whole book was El-Mohtar receiving and tasting 28 days’ worth of honey. Now, not only do I want to get back into poetry, but I also want to taste honey. Lots and lots of honey.

Shriek: An Afterword and Finch by Jeff VanderMeer: Back in May of 2007, I read City of Saints and Madmen, which introduced me to both the city of Ambergris and Jeff’s writing. This year, I closed the circuit by reading Shriek and Finch. Both novels are resonant, imaginative, immaculately written affairs, which is even more notable when one considers how different the two novels are from one another (one is a fictional memoir of a sister of a discredited historian who knows far too much about Ambergris, the other is a detective story of a city at war). Reading these novels really reminded me of how much I still want to push myself with my own writing.

Troll: A Love Story by Johanna Sinisalo: I had such a wonderful time reading this novel for WFR.com earlier this year. This novel is about a photographer who finds a lost troll cub by his apartment block one day and decides to adopt it. Housetraining, sex, and ultimately violence and abduction ensue. This book is begging for a movie adaptation, I tell you. (Maybe the Trollhunter fellows could get on it.)

The Moment of Change edited by Rose Lemberg: I reviewed this anthology for WFR.com earlier this year when we ran poems from Sofia Rhei and Lisa Bradley. My feelings about this collection are still very much the same: it’s the best poetry anthology I’ve read in some time.

BEST TV

Adventure Time: I finally got into this show a month ago or so, and in that time it’s become my favorite show currently on television. It’s one of those shows you can come into at any and enjoy, more or less, but the ongoing story of Finn and Jake and the people of Ooo is surprisingly baroque and compelling, with a robust backstory. I want to write novels like this.

Regular Show: The main characters are twenty-something slackers, a blue jay and a raccoon, who work at a city park with a yeti, a humanoid lollipop, a fat green man, a ghost with a hand  protruding from its head, and an anger management-challenged gumball machine man. The show gets weirder and funnier from there. Basically, it’s an excuse for the writers to come up with seemingly ordinary setups for episodes and then carry them to the most absurd, surreal extent possible. I love it.

Archer: The ongoing chronicles of the most inept spy agency in the world. Another one of those shows I just discovered earlier this year, thanks to Netflix. The voice acting is damn near perfect, and the chemistry between the characters rivals what you would find on most well-done live action shows (it’s very reminiscent of Arrested Development at times).

The IT Crowd: Just a great sitcom, basically. Two IT geeks and the hapless new employee asked to chair department because she lied on her resume about being good at computers. Shenanigans ensue. The show has a surprisingly bizarre imagination at its heart, which is probably why I enjoy it so much. That, and it’s legitimately funny.

Blackadder Goes Forth: From what I understand, this is the best of the Blackadder series. I’ve only ever watched this series of the show, but I can say that it’s really funny, the best I’ve ever seen Rowan Atkinson in anything. It somehow manages to make World War I funny, even while it actually goes to serious places as the series goes on. It’s like the writers ultimately acknowledged you can joke about war as much as you want, but in the end it’s still war.

Twin Peaks: Again, Netflix. I’m not going to recap this show because it’s a classic. Still, it was about damn time I watched this show. Unsurprisingly, I loved it. I could take or leave some of the more soap opera-ish small town interactions (although some of them were amusing diversions from the main action). That said, I ate up the main storylines and the knotty, mythical backstory like a greedy little child. The season finale is as insane and glorious as advertised. I still say the best part of the show is David Lynch as hearing impaired Agent Gordon Cole, however.

Game of Thrones: I actually watched both seasons of GoT this year, thanks to a timely free preview of HBO. I enjoyed it enough that I picked up paperback editions of the fantasy saga that inspired it. The Battler of Blackwater Bay at the end of Season Two was pretty fantastic. That boat blew up real purty…

The Twilight Zone: I rediscovered this show thanks to Netflix, watching fifty-odd episodes in an attempt to reappraise old favorites and find new ones. This show is still excellent. Some of the episodes have not dated well, but many of them have held up well with the passage of time. Episodes that especially impressed me were “Walking Distance,” “Perchance to Dream,” “The Four of Us Are Dying,” “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” “A World of Difference,” “A Stop at Willoughby,” “The Howling Man,” “The Eye of the Beholder,” “Deaths-Head Revisited,” “Five Characters in Search of an Exit,” “Little Girl Lost,” “Number 12 Looks Just Like You,” and “The Masks.” I’m still not done watching TTZ either; don’t be surprised if I return to this show later for blog posts.

The Prisoner: Another classic show that I finally got to watch this year, and I loved it. One of the better mindscrews I’ve watched, all told, and the libertarian philosophy underlying much of the show didn’t rub me the wrong way, probably because of how it was handled within the context of the story. Very inventive and twisty in the right ways, for the most part. And that finale was even more demented than the finale for Twin Peaks.

BEST MOVIES

The Raid: Redemption: I have a weakness for really well-done, balls-to-the-wall action movies, and this one is the best I’ve seen all year. The fight scenes are outstanding set pieces, some of the best I’ve ever seen. As an added bonus, the story itself is pretty decent. But, yeah, the action.

Hardware: This one’s on Netflix. It was made back in 1990 on a fairly small budget by Australian director Richard Stanley. Premise: in Mega City One (yes, the same Mega City One from the Judge Dredd comics!), this found-art sculptor accidentally comes upon a piece of sentient ex-military grade technology and has to fight it off when it reactivates and causes holy hell in her apartment building. What impressed me about the movie was how cohesive it felt as a story. It’s got lots of weird flourishes in it, especially towards the end when the machine reaches peak power, and the overall set design and style of the movie helps maximize its potential.

The Dust Devil: Another movie from Richard Stanley, his follow-up to Hardware in fact. This one’s about a mystical serial killer stalking Namibia and taking victims for an unexplained ritual. A white woman fleeing her husband gets caught up with the killer – who also happens to be white – while a black police officer tails the titular dust devil (he’s a kind of demon; that’s not a spoiler, by the way). Really imaginative, certainly weird, with a unique aesthetic all its own. There’s also a really strong cultural subtext to the movie, with its attention to racial tension in Namibia and indigenous folklore/beliefs. Highly recommended. Do be warned, though, that apparently there are multiple cuts of this movie available. The version on Netflix, which I watched, is 89 minutes. I enjoyed it quite a bit, but the Director’s Cut is much longer and available somewhere, somehow.

Timecrimes: One of my favorite SF films of the year. Spanish-language movie about a man who, through a series of accidents, is caught in a time travel loop while trying to evade a sinister killer. That’s all I’m going to say about it because anything else would be a spoiler. I will say I thought it was really tightly written and appropriately mindscrewy.

Little Shop of Horrors: Yeah, I’m pretty sure most everyone is familiar with this one by now. My first time seeing it, though, and I loved it. I was humming the songs for days afterward.

Cropsey: Really interesting documentary about a series of murders on Staten Island and how they played into the creation of the myth of this boogeyman-like killer, which in turn affected how future crimes in the area and the area itself were perceived. Definitely one of those movies where the central mystery only spirals out more and more as its investigated. It also partly involves a strong, shocking examination of mental health care back in the 70s and how that may have played a role in things.

Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles: Great documentary about the Toynbee Tiles, which have been appearing in cities across America for a few decades now, and the documentarians’ efforts to figure out who has been making them and why. Really, Resurrect Dead and Cropsey make for a great double-feature for what I would call “weird reality.” The narratives laid out in these films match step-for-step some of the best stories I’ve seen and read in mysteries or weird fiction, except they come from what we would consider real life.

I Saw the Devil: Powerful, disturbing revenge story, Korean language. It reminded me of Oldboy, only more violent. The villain is thoroughly depraved and unapologetic, and he does horrible things to women. I would understand if this movie set off triggers for people. I ultimately viewed it as a sad, unsettling story of utter evil and how someone could himself or herself devolve into evil while trying to gain retribution.

Lake Mungo: Really creepy mockumentary filmed a few years ago, but I discovered it this year through the recommendations of friends. One of the better ghost stories I’ve seen in recent memory. Way better than Paranormal Activity or The Blair Witch Project. The movie bends and folds back on itself all throughout, constantly making you stop and re-evaluate what you think might be going on. It’s maybe 85 minutes, but it makes every minute count.

Network: Probably falls under “You mean you hadn’t watched this yet?” It’s a classic for a reason. Stunningly written and acted, watching it now feels downright prophetic in its searing look at broadcast television and corporate culture and economy (it was filmed in 1976, I think).

Tucker and Dale vs. Evil: Maybe the best horror spoof I’ve seen. Very fun and clever. Basically takes the stereotypical rednecks you find in most slasher movies, the ones who are usually the bad guys, and turns them into sympathetic protagonists who flounder and flop into situations that make them look like your average slasher killer.

Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale: I used to tell people Die Hard was my favorite Christmas movie. Rare Exports has likely replaced it in my esteem. It’s basically a piss-take on Gremlins-style horror-comedy movies, only the monster in this movie is Santa Claus (well, Krampus anyway, the real Santa). Fairly demented and lots of fun.

Catfish: Really unsettling documentary about a guy who finds himself in an Internet relationship with a woman, then tracks her down in real life and discovers that she’s not who she claims to be. This movie actually frightened me more than most of the horror movies I saw this year. Part of that comes from realizing just how easily someone could be screwing with you online. The other part comes from pretty much everything in the movie after the documentarians discover the woman’s fraud. The extent to which she falsifies her life and the degree to which her online life diverges from her real one is staggering. There’s actually some controversy about this movie in regards to whether much of it was staged or not. I think it’s a valid discussion, but that doesn’t stop the movie from freaking me the hell out.

Session 9: Another quality horror movie. Basically, these guys have to gut this abandoned mental asylum and refit it for business-industrial use, and of course it’s creepy as hell, and things go to pot from there for all involved. Another one of those movies I would love to go into more detail on except for risk of spoilers. I will say it’s one of those movies where you have to be observant from the very beginning to pick up on key clues. Also, the supernatural element is very subtle, and also very ambiguous, to the point that you could argue whether it’s there or not. I would argue that it’s there.

The Masque of the Red Death: I went through a phase this year of watching all of the Vincent Price/Roger Corman adaptations of Poe I could get my hands on. They varied in quality, by and large, but I thought Masque was rather excellent. Somewhat straightforward adaptation of the original story, with lots of intriguing psychedelic touches. The set design and style for the movie is the most notable element of it, and there’s a scene at the end that reminds me really strongly of Neil Gaiman’s conception of the Endless in The Sandman.