13 Days of Halloween:

“Okay. Well, I’m just gonna say that your popular media inspired me to a new level of decadence. I mean, I’m like a Darkseid MMA version of the WWE. You know the word ‘turpitude?’”

Jaded characters, fraying traditions, nail-biting b-ball, and a creature determined to hold it all to account. Grimace through the horror tropes and you’ve got a great novel.

The trilogy’s close is contrived and predictable, but nonetheless accomplishes what fans usually want: tight style, fun asides, and plenty of tension!

I like my new dentist, truly. Yes. She’s just great . . .

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A Winter Solstice tale by an old Irish storyteller, maybe even believable . . .

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A Winter Solstice tale of a peculiar kind of terror, this story was recently discovered (2011) among a collection of du Maurier’s works completed around the age of 21. This story has mature themes.

And he could not, then, blame himself too much at redressing some of that grievance now. A little balance in the world, please.

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A reading of “Clarimonde,” an appropriately creepy story befitting the tradition of Winter Solstice ghost stories. This story in French is titled “La Morte Amoureuse.”

“I think it’s still under there, Fred.”
“Okay, then, you look under your end of the car and I’ll look under my end of the car, and we should see it if it’s still there, okay?”

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WayPoint: A reading of Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market.” wondering how her work might respond to Chopin, how she anticipates the role of author and reader.

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Le buste / Survit à la cité.

We can read this deliberate ambiguity in a number of ways: the particular puzzled psychoses of repressed females, for instance, or the dysfunctional power relationships within families; the self-struggling identities of adolescent development or even the unreasonable demands of an outside world to extract simple clarity from complex humanity.

Like the characters themselves, viewers are left with a futility that either their hours were wasted or they must see the film as a “sunk cost” and thereby invest still more time in prequels and spin-offs.

While it’s true that Snyder has been granted a larger, freer role in producing Army of the Dead than he has been allowed in previous films, we can’t forget that this very freedom is being marketed to us; Snyder is still caught up in this $90 million budget.

I despair (only a bit) that, as much as I enjoy a good zombie film, Zack Snyder’s heist-zombie film with a big budget will eat itself as well.

What has yet to be developed is a zombie-specific set of criteria which determine the quality of a literary event, a tragic absence in our culture, which this manual seeks to rectify.

I hate zombies (and consequently love the films) because I dread becoming one, living, dead, or undead. Is there a worse fate than the loss of mind? Zombies speak directly to that too-real possibility.