Search Results for: best of the year so far

Never been just all over Bukowski’s stuff — no real excuse, aside from lack of taste, I suppose — but this is about as good a poem-reading as I’ve heard/seen.

Too, like everybody’s been saying, yep, 3.75 million for a vampire trilogy. Or, like everybody’s been bemoaning? That too. Hopefully not because of ‘vampires,’ though, or ‘literary.’ I mean, this is the dream, right? So maybe the moaning is because of …

Man, except for re-hitting ReAnimator the other day — and maybe even including it — Behind the Mask: the Rise of Leslie Vernon is far and away the best horror I’ve seen all year. Best I’ve seen since Feast, really.^* And Feast is that holy kind of good for me. The only time I plan on being this horror-movie happy anytime soon is come fall, when we get the sure-to-be-beautiful All the Boys Love Mandy Lane. Cannot wait for that one.^** Though I do suspect IR…

or, more particularly, from DEAD SILENCE: going to the Guignol ‘doll’ Theater on Lost Lake in a town called Raven’s Fain when there’s a killer on the loose who eats living tongues is pretty much just asking for trouble. This isn’t to say DEAD SILENCE isn’t pretty surprisingly good either, though. I’m not really one for doll-movies — they all kind of smack of Chucky, and I was tired of him instantly (though, just because I&#…

[ the title and the whole piece here may not make much sense–it may not anyway–without cueing into TheValve.org, which, it looks like, may have the original Marcus article in PDF ]

Just what is experimental fiction, then?

The easiest definition for experimental or innovative or non-conventional fiction is fiction that, both at armslength and upon closer inspection, doesn’t look or read at all like standard, mainstream, commercial fiction. A more …

The best place to hide from an axe-weilding maniac is with your back pressed up against a wooden door you’re pretty sure is both solid and impenetrable. This is because that maniac who’s after you, his first strike with the axe will nearly always be from two to six inches from the left side of your face, thus allowing you both to know exactly where she or he is, and thus escape into the next room, and getting the maniac’s axe caught in the door long enough for you to make that esca…

Been trying to figure out what scenes/images from horror movies have become so indelibly imprinted on pop-culture that even people who don’t watch horror kind of have to know them, or at least of them. Which is to say I can’t just pick the coolest or best horror clips–the ones that imprinted me once upon a time. I mean, that’d be Freddy’s long arms from A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET, kid-Jason at the end of FRIDAY THE 13th, Gage cutting grandpa’…

First, as this is just all about the end of THE DESCENT, then, yep, it’s just chock full of spoilers. So stop here if:

• you’ve not seen it
• you’re going to see it
• and you don’t like to know how a thing’s going to end

Not meaning to say THE DESCENT has a gimmick-ending or anything — we don’t change perspective and slowly become aware that these are just action figures in a toy bin. But the two endings it does have, in being at odds with each oth…

I first read Pynchon when I was twenty-two, I think, between a B.A. and an M.A. The only reason I read him, too, was because I’d hit up a professor I trusted for a list of books I’d need to have read if I didn’t want to get laughed out of grad school. She of course gave me an excellent list — Nabokov, Heller, etc — but, when guiding me through the highs and the lows of all these titles, that professor stopped at Gravity’s Rainbow, said I wanted to st…

I don’t have nearly enough time to devote to this now — I’m in the early stages of a study that hopes to finally conclude whether the Bulletboy’s old “Smooth Up In Ya'” song¹ (1989) really had hidden sexual overtones or not (next up: Warrant’s “Cherry Pie”) — but I feel I’ve got to say something anyway. And, I’d meant to frame this in some “Open Letter to Hollywood” or something, alon…

For a long time now I’ve gone to bed early

For a long time now I’ve been writing “title shot” in the back of every book I read, along with a/the page number. Most, anyway. All it means is that this (page) is the first time the title of the book appears in the book itself. Just something I’ve been tracking for years and years, with the idea of going back someday, synthesing all the ratios (“if a title’s to appear in a book, it’s usual…