The Friday Article Roundup
Bone up on the week's best pop culture writing.
This week you will get the lowdown on:
Send good, bad and ugly articles throughout the next week to magpiesfar [at] gmail! Post articles from the past week in the comments for discussion, and have a Happy Friday!
For Reverse Shot’s annual survey of Halloween movies, Justin Stewart considers John Carpenter’s Christine:
Arnie’s about as terrifying as Bart Simpson, and his initial breaking bad is clearly a source of derisive amusement for Carpenter, though the amiable goofing sours when Christine starts terminating Arnie’s enemies one-by-one. This “malevolent force picking off the bullies” section, as well as the final shot zoom-in on the “corpse,” invite comparisons to De Palma’s much richer and more elegant earlier King adaptation Carrie, but Carpenter cannot be blamed for inheriting the weaker source material. Eventually, the teen body count brings a detective to Rockbridge, played by Harry Dean Stanton, whose real, effortless cool shames Arnie’s puerile peacocking.
At Harper’s, Nick Pinkerton reviews Abel Ferrara’s unsurprisingly take-no-prisoners autobiography:
Ferrara doesn’t draw an analogy between the film business and criminal endeavor per se; he instead provides ample evidence, gathered over the course of long life experience, that they are one and the same thing. His portraits of wiseguys and industry execs are almost interchangeable: Arthur Weisberg—a financier of The Driller Killer and, along with the Mob boss Michael “Mickey” Zaffarano, operator of the Pussycat Theater porn palace on Broadway near 49th Street—is introduced as “a legitimate Jewish gangster from Detroit whose rep was that he once strangled his partner in a car while arguing over a business deal”; Ferrara’s Mary (2005), we are informed, was financed with the help of a “band of Bolognese gangster investors, cash-rich from hand-making rip-off Pradas and Armanis.”
Miranda Reinert ponders the idea of being normal about popular music:
The calls to “Be Normal” can come from any number of these types of people about someone who falls into a different category. Many people who post fall into multiple categories. To “Be Normal” is to like music the same way I do, whatever that means to any given person. Not so enthusiastic so as to be cringe, but reject irony-poisoning. Don’t comment on the way anybody looks, but also maybe that’s part of it. Only show the right amount of interest in a musician’s personal life. Be cool, but not too obviously interested in being cool. It’s all so boring.
At his substack, Eric Harvey goes deep into the “peak indie” period of the aughts and early teens:
Indeed, one commonality shared by the heterogenous music filed under “indie rock” over the past few decades—from tabloid-taunting punks to cardigan-wearing indiepoppers and chin-stroking art-rockers—is that the music generates far more discourse than revenue. And the superstructure supporting the Such Great Heights era—from music blogs to YouTube, Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, and TikTok—is the most significant all-access discourse machine ever imagined. Digital platforms circulate trendy underground music while other, related platforms circulate discourse about that music, transcoding subcultural knowledge about bands, singles, albums, genres, trends, and controversies into the language of metadata and, for trendspotting fans, the practices of high-frequency trading. Such Great Heights, in other words, chronicles indie’s fast-fashion era, in which new trends were scooped up, replicated, sold cheaply (or freely downloaded), and often forgotten—with the unlucky forgotten bands accumulating in the landfill.
At Blackstarfest, Maya S. Cade writes about curating the Black Film Archive and the importance of distribution in ensuring films reach the audiences they’re intended for:
The economic challenges that have shifted many film distribution business models from large market share to simply getting by are all the more reason to find ways of collaboration, new pathways of connection, and transformation beyond the usual entry points of cinema. I am heartened by my colleagues who take a moment to protect the global majority cinema’s legacy by keeping their ear to the ground and their sights on something beyond profit. And to the moviegoers who know what’s at stake for Black film’s future and see it in the same realm of political participation, remember that you can vote with your dollars too.
And Nate Chinen remembers the late Jack DeJohnette at NPR:
On [DeJohnette’s] first night in [New York City] as he recalled last year in an episode of The Late Set podcast, he headed to Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem and sat in with trumpeter Freddie Hubbard, who immediately counted off a supersonic tempo. (It was so fast, he said, that the bassist resorted to playing at half-speed.) He handled this trial by fire with no problem whatsoever. “Basically, to play that way, you have to be relaxed,” he explained. “You can’t have any tension whatsoever, so that you can focus on your ideas instead of how you’re dealing with it physically.”
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More articles by Dave Shutton
Double Features
Considering the comedy in The Phoenician Scheme and The Naked Gun.
The Friday Article Roundup
Going on the record with the best pop culture writing of the week.
The Friday Article Roundup
A cowardly and superstitious lot? No, the best pop culture writing of the week.
The Friday Article Roundup
No kings, of pop or otherwise, just the best pop culture writing of the week
The Friday Article Roundup
Out of the mists of history, the best pop culture writing of the week.
Department of
Conversation
What Did We Watch?
Tales From The Crypt: Demon Knight – Still a blast and Dickerson, unlike many cinematographers turned directors, deserved more of a career in the big chair. A murderers’ row of character actors (Pounder, Miller, Sadler, etc.), Billy Zane strutting his way through the villain role, and some great esoteric Christian mythology baked into the plot. This also makes me want to watch some Tales From The Crypt episodes where I can find them, I know some are on YouTube. Happy Halloween/Samhain!
Hell yeah Demon Knight! And if you want a great TFTC, see if you can find “People Who Live In Brass Hearses.”
Sounds like good last-of-Halloween programming.
The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (Director’s Cut) – Strip club owner Ben Gazzara owes gambling debts and is asked to kill the titular bookie. But this is really not about that, and more about Gazzara’s character. This is my first go at a Cassavetes film, and I can see both why he has his fans and why he’s not a mainstream success. The cinema verite approach to 70s LA is very effectively shot, both by day and by night, and this really captures the tawdriness of this corner of the world (and somehow manages to film strippers and not make them particularly sexy). And Gazzara is great in the lead. But the character study is never very engaging and after a while the tawdry gives way to the tacky and the trite. I get what Cassavetes wants to do, but it doesn’t come together for me.
Alfred Hitchcock Presents, “Shopping for Death” – Back in alignment with Lauren’s assessment of things.
Frasier, “And the Dish Ran Away with the Spoon,” part two – Mel’s demands on Niles include that he and Daphne not see each other in public till the divorce. A spat between Niles and Daphne and Frasier ensues, but before it’s all over, Frasier and Martin find a way for the lovebirds to have their first date, on the rooftop of the apartment building. A bit predictable in some ways, and season eight Frasier is far more likely to blow his top in the most pompous manner possible than season one Frasier (quite an accomplishment). But again, Niles and Daphne finally being together is utterly charming.
This feels like an influence on The Shield, or an ancestor, with the seedy daytime depiction of LA (and the killing, which is tense but also played as realistically as possible). Really liked it though the last act stretches a bit too long.
This is the only Cassavetes film I’ve seen and I felt similarly about it, an interesting experience but one that never fully hooked me in. I keep meaning to try another one or two but his films have a reputation (fairly or unfairly) for being largely made up of people yelling at each other and that is a corner of cinema I struggle with…
While The Killing of a Chinese Bookie initially looks like one of Cassavetes’s more conventional films (his version of a 70s gangster film), it turns out to be one of his more challenging ones, especially in trying to follow how the mob hit is arranged. There’s a lot going on around Cosmo, and yet he’s the black hole at the center of it all. And Cassavetes has little interest in providing any additional explanation for what Cosmo does or doesn’t do.
If you were to try another Cassavetes film, I might recommend Shadows (cinema verite approach to late-50s NYC) or Faces (similar approach to chronicling a 60s LA marriage in collapse).
For what it’s worth, I like Minnie and Moskowitz more, though I don’t care for the ending.
The Boogeyman – I sat down and demanded that free streaming throw a horror film at me, and this recent Stephen King adaptation with a good cast immediately stood out. It’s based on an early short story that I can’t remember reading (which doesn’t mean that I haven’t!) but unlike a lot of King adaptations it doesn’t really have his folksy Maine vibe – I don’t think I’d have picked up that it was based on his work if I hadn’t already known. Sadly the director (Rob Savage, whose short films I have enjoyed) doesn’t fill that space with much of a voice of his own, although I found this solidly creepy and enjoyable even if it falls squarely into “solid but unmemorable” territory. Sophie Thatcher is good in the lead and there were some unexpected soundtrack picks but yeah, just solidly decent rather than anything I’d return to.
The short story is a very nasty piece of work, it is blunt and straightforward and in retrospect a really disturbing work from a drunk guy with three kids, much like The Shining it is not hard to see real fears coming out on the page (and it is not particularly Maine-y, it all takes place in one room). But it is also squarely in the Short mode of short stories, the kind of thing King could churn out by ripping off Twilight Zones and Outer Limits in style if not actual plot (although this here is original), and making it into a feature-length movie as it stands would not work. So I’m sure they fuck it up in a boring way.
They fuck it up in a slick and competent way, I guess. The FX / creature stuff is solidly unsettling and it gets off to a good start but deploying David Dastmalchian in full-on creepy mode. But yeah it’s largely indistinguishable from a lot of modern horror in the end and could just use a little more personality.
Ughhhhhhhhh, Dastmalchian is such good casting for the main character in the short story, but I just looked up the movie and it takes the short story — the guy going to the shrink — as a jumping off point, and it makes Dastmalchian the shrink instead of the guy. Bah!
Babylon 5, Season Three, Episode Eleven, “Ceremonies of Light and Dark”
This is another episode about symbolic/performative action; Delenn forces the rebel leaders through a process of confession and sacrifice. This is more thoughtful than the show has been about this subject before – I was skeptical at first, but it was genuinely moving. It’s summed up by the new uniforms, which are meaningless to the status quo but feel very cool. This ties heavily into its liberal-not-leftist politics; leftists often get frustrated with performative liberal behaviour. I’m particularly thinking of American leftists and Democrats, though I also remember the Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd creating Sorry Day as a form of apology to indigenous Australians and thinking “But you’re not gonna do anything or give them land back, right?”.
On the other hand, a certain level of symbolic behaviour is necessary to make life worth living. It fascinates me that there are things that objectively make life better but improve the subjective experience of it, and vice versa; giving homeless people homes and social workers for free vastly improves not only their lives but the system around them, but some people just have a visceral negative reaction to that because it feels like an undignified commentary on them. Government (and I suppose leadership in general) is about finding a way to balancing this thirst for symbolism with practicality.
This ties into B5 specifically in the way it alternates between pragmatic blue-collar work with mysticism. This works in particular because it’s about the characters finding Recognition and admitting things about themselves. As always, Lennier owns the hardest; he admits to being in love with Delenn and choosing to carry that burden. There’s an angle at looking at this in which he’s a put-upon Nice Guy, but he’s fully aware his feelings are not Delenn’s responsibility, or anyone’s but his own, and he sublimates that for his duty. Meanwhile, Sheridan is reduced to hysterical violence because he’s simply frustrated that fascism has managed to get such a strong foothold in his universe.
Londo is in an unrelated situation; he’s now to the point of criticising someone for doing exactly, precisely what he did. To an extent, this is a necessary part of growth and change, though I imagine that would mean little to his Narn victims.
“Opinion doesn’t enter into it. What is, is.” Lennier owns.
“I’ve already been born once, and quite sufficiently, I think.”
We roast Marcus a lot but I like his reaction to Delenn telling him he feels guilty for being alive.
Lennier rules and this is a very interesting revelation about how composed he is — if the Hulk is always angry, Lennier is always horny and tamping it down (and it implies his owning of dudes when necessary as some of this energy getting released). I think it is setting him up for his own explosion down the line, though.
And the Minbari in general love ceremony and symbol, I am pretty fucking sick of their bullshit so I generally write it off as woo woo nonsense. The uniforms are cool though! But cooler is Londo, I think the Centauri have their own symbolic issues and they are definitely tied to a Make Centauri Great Again blood and soil ethos, but they are also just scheming realpolitikers and that is more interesting to me. Londo owns here, and part of that is because he knows his mistake and can recognize that furthering it is not just “wrong” but a bad idea, and he’ll do what he has to to undercut it.
Practical Magic — these women would’ve done a much better job disposing of a corpse if they’d had a man telling them what to do. Obviously not my cup of tea but beyond that a very weird movie, it’s apparently adapted from a novel and I think the generational stuff/town dynamic/sister dynamic would all play out better on that scale, and in a more “adult” register. This is in that 90s PG-13 tone that will film a party in a way that is clearly implying drug use but not show any drugs — you can put a cocaine on the screen, Griffin Dunne! And Aidan Quinn’s performance suggests a sensitive 90s Johnny Cash, what a loathsome concept. But there are worse things to watch and plenty of opportunities for low-key goofery here.
One Cut Of The Dead — If Mrs. Miller makes me watch Practical Magic I will make her watch this! Which I had seen before and while it can’t live up to that first viewing and realizing what’s going on, it’s still a lot of fun to rewatch and see how things are fitting together from the start. I forgot this is adapted from a play, and it has a very interesting tone that definitely feels theater-energetic but reworked beautifully for cinema and its perspective(s).
I read Practical Magic and found it very mid, but I should probably revisit it at some point, because the main thing I remember was my impression that every character wound up with a separate PTSD trigger, to the point where it felt like accessorizing through trauma.
One Cut of the Dead is such a banger. I didn’t know anything about it going into it and almost switched it off during the initial setup, and I’m so glad I didn’t (and glad I didn’t know what was coming). Zombie live TV Noises Off is a thing the world absolutely needed.
The local rep theater was hosting a screening of Practical Magic last night and I thought hey, maybe we can go, but it turned out to be an event that included the novel’s author for a Q&A (not great but oh well) and the ticket purchase price included an autographed copy of her book, so it was $60. Nope! Nice scheme she has going though. The movie definitely doesn’t have a lot of “trauma” in the way I think of it now, sometimes this is dopey because it will bring up bad feelings only to discard them but it also doesn’t wallow, which is points in its favor.
It is hilarious to watch One Cut Of The Dead knowing the slow bits early on (and there is a funny acknowledgment of them later on in the movie) — I have a high enough tolerance for that anyway but I was also there to goose Mrs. Miller through it.
The X-Files, “Talitha Cumi”
Progress through this season was slow because of various real-life obstacles and scheduling difficulties, but we finally hit the finale last night. I feel checked-out of the mytharc at this point, and this was especially disappointing in that regard because the initial setup–a mysterious healing, a disappearance–was intriguing enough that I hated to see it subside into something tangled, frustrating, unresolvable. I don’t care about the Alien Bounty Hunter.
But–as is still the case with these kinds of episodes–there are occasional well-crafted scenes and good characterization beats, and here we have a doozy in the form of Jeremiah taking on Deep Throat’s appearance to turn the tables on the Cigarette-Smoking Man. It’s fantastic to see Hardin and Davis opposite each other, especially with Hardin’s warm, sad confidence opposite Davis’s barely covered fear; I love how this scene emphasizes a fundamental loneliness to the Cigarette-Smoking Man, even when it’s a loneliness he’s created and reinforced, and sometimes murderously so. Sometimes when you kill your old friends, you become not the victor but someone whose old friends are all dead. There’s a shakiness to being the last one standing, and Davis captures that very well. He’s also great in his “remember how we used to fuck?” scene with Mulder’s mom and in his scene with Mulder; incredible Cigarette-Smoking Man episode overall. And I’m always going to be happy to see Deep Throat. I still miss him, and I’m clearly not the only one.
Mulder fights a lot of people in this episode.
This is not so much a cliffhanger as people driving very slowly towards a cliff edge, to the point where they have time to check their watches as they’re screaming, “Nooo!” The Alien Bounty Hunter’s incredibly slow, deliberate advance, with Mulder, Scully, and Smith just standing there, is some real unintentional comedy.
Paranormal Activity 3
I wrote this up for Lovefest on The Dissolve, lo these many years ago. I still like it and mostly stand by that essay, but why did I keep referring to the fan the camera is mounted on as a ceiling fan when it’s clearly nothing of the sort? It’s a regular oscillating fan! Some very well-constructed scares here (that sheet ghost!), nice Poltergeist-adjacent vibes, and better story construction than you might think on first viewing. Rewards rewatching.
Dennis >>>>> Micah.
The Strange Vice Of Mrs. Wardh – Mrs. Wardh (beautiful giallo queen Edwige Fenech) is a recovering perv. Her sexual predilection involved some slapping and getting cut with and rolling in broken glass. She was in a sadomasochistic relationship that became abusive, as it would without a safe word. Now she’s a respectable diplomat’s spouse being followed by her ex. Meanwhile, a “sex maniac” is on the loose killing all the beautiful women in the film. Is the killer Mrs. Wardh’s ex, or is he the Red Herring? There are so many fish in this giallo they could be spun off into their own movies. Namely, the title of the film. It doesn’t really play directly into the plot. It should have been called, The Really Big Insurance Policy of Mrs. Wardh. It’s full of Hitchcock homages: two faked deaths, a shower kill and “criss-cross” murders. Interesting note, the ‘h’ was added to the end of her name after a real Mrs. Ward complained that the film would sully her good name. Nora Orlandi’s soundtrack stands on its own as not incidental or having an overused motif. QT used it in Kill Bill.
Someone Is Watching Me! – Pre-Halloween Carpenter. Its theme is voyeurism, an idea Carpenter continued to explore in Halloween, and knives feature heavily; so, along with its tracking shots and fluid camera moves, it clearly prefigures Halloween. It also has a strong, almost proto-feminist heroine, who is bit of a kook who talks to herself too much, but very much her own person. It’s just not Halloween.
The Wolf Of Snow Hollow – A small skiing town is in meltdown with brutal murders attributed to a werewolf. A bleak, dark comedy. This isn’t the werewolf movie you wanted, probably, but the theme of the monster inside each of us is a good way to exploit the myth for extra meaning. Never mind, that’s been done.
I recently mainlined the Swan Boy webcomic (hey, something else I’ve been reading!), an excellent decision, and there is a hilariously weird extended story about a character’s father’s secret career making giallos, it is an excuse for Branson Reese to run wild with the funniest titles he can come up and it’s great. My favorite here is RING RING … AND THEN IT IS THE KILLER! https://swanboy.com/comic/doncarlo-incognito-8/
Haha, “The Insanity Of Lady Warden”. Oh, this is perfect. Thank you!
What Did We Read?
I tried to read the Always Sunny history read on audio by Brian Unger AKA the lawyer, but goddamn if the writer doesn’t try to fill up the text with recaps of the plot when the people reading this are going to be Sunny obsessives like me. You fool, did you think you were speaking to children, nay, donkey-brained ones? She also bafflingly skips over the Rob McElhenny/Olsen romance on set (even though this seems like interesting territory, given that they knew falling in love with costars is a bad idea) though she at least gets a new interview with Jordan Reid AKA the original Sweet Dee in the pilot. Ended up skipping out 45 percent into the book.
Meanwhile I’m reading Rubicon by Tom Holland, which is pretty good, and Tell My Horse by Zora Neale Hurston. I also started Elizabeth Hands’ Curious Toys which apparently features a version of Harry Darger(!)
Completed Silver and Lead (the current October Daye book). I really like this series, but this one ends a bit suddenly and opens the door to the return of three more antagonists. There are now, by my count, five characters who have it in for Toby and who various characters have promised to kill. Is Seanan planning to have the five team up? I don’t see that, but otherwise this already-long running series will need to just keep expanding. (This is book nineteen, and there are at least three more scheduled.)
Started City Boy by Herman Wouk. This is the novel he wrote before The Caine Mutiny, and it’s about a tween in the Bronx after the Great War. It’s not bad, but it’s hardly much more than Wouk’s memories attached to a kid protagonist.
And started Victory ’45: The End of the War in Eight Surrenders by Al Murray and James Holland, who are apparently a comedian and a podcaster. But this was well reviewed, and so far it’s interesting if not hugely surprising. The biggest thing I have learned is that once Italy went from ally to subject, the Nazis started looted Italian art. Very on brand, but somehow I did not know this.
Monty: The Making of a General 1887-1942, Nigel Hamilton
Another one of those books I’ve been reading for over a year. This is a biography of General Bernard Montgomery, who led British forces to success over the Nazis (this particular volume covers up until his success at El Alamein). The introduction lays out how Hamilton personally knew Monty and considered him a mentor, which made me concerned that this would be a hagiography; such concerns were laid to rest almost immediately, when Hamilton not only openly characterised him as often emotionally unstable and crude, but the child of a distant father and abusive mother (her story is interesting just in itself, being a young woman with a much older husband who was thrust into motherhood long before being ready and reacted badly).
Hamilton makes the convincing argument that Monty’s genius was both professionalising the British military – creating not only a clear chain of command with a clear set of instructions passed down, but also a culture of education and training, with those rising the ranks expected to pass down their knowledge frequently and soldiers to practice everything every day. When you know a battle is coming, you train for what you need for it right up to the day itself.
He also makes the convincing argument that Monty was great at building relationships; he specifically phrases it as ‘spotting talent’, but this also involves weeding out the weaker commanders and replacing them with his own respected men, and he memorises the names of every man in every company he serves in, no matter how high he goes, and goes out of his way to learn as much about them as possible so he can groom them for success.
On top of this is a weird detachment to the work itself, which makes sense; he loves soldierin’, and he’s not attached to any one way of doing it. This contrasts heavily with his emotional instability, especially early in his life; Hamilton notes how his relationships are driven by a need to get out from under an overbearing mother. After his marriage and the death of the love of his life, this matures into making him a relatable figure with a crude way of writing and joking that, nevertheless, is charismatic to his men (there’s a speech late in the book which I’m sure came off much better in person).
8-Bit Theater, 0210-0240, Brian Clevinger
It continues to amaze me how effectively this builds on its own principles. It almost has tiers of running gags; the base gags for each character, then the base gags for the world, then specific gags for specific situations, and finally the absurdist runners. It’s an absolutely fascinating series of interactions, and now it’s far enough in that these are shaken up by setting-specific gags. For example, the majority of these strips take place on a boat as the characters travel to Elfland; it also catches them on their first entrance into it, which gives us our first real characterised walk-on characters. They’re not very complex, but they do take themselves and their situation seriously in a way the protagonists do not, though they are also self-serving and frequently horny.
(This is also where we learn Thief is elven, which will be more important next week)
The Bikke plot is resolved with the characters setting out with a great plan, only to immediately find the pirates are all near-dead from scurvy anyway, which of course is another classic anticlimax; this is followed up by the hysterical moment where RM manages to get Bikke to confess to stealing Matoya’s crystal by responding to his denial with “No… or yes?” sufficiently confusing him. The great thing about 8-Bit’s humour is that it’s actually quite fast, finding the quickest way to get the plot moving even when it requires bending language.
“Our flesh? But that’s where I keep my delicious nutrients!” This is a great line. Fighter can be relied upon to articulate absolutely any thought that’s accurate and implies he’s hearing things without actually listening. It’s followed up quickly with “No unless! Undo unless! This is a universe sans unless!”, which I have frequently quoted.
Really great moment where BM tries explaining how they’re safe, only to slowly realise what’s happening to them. It’s great because it’s effectively slow and subtle.
The characters go in disguise as women. If it works, it’s because the characters are sprites, requiring specific modification of those images, and also because as a character points out, their lie is ridiculously implausible.
Barely anything! My reading has been butts, I haven’t even gotten any Aickman in for spooky season! I did read another Crissa Stone novel from Wallace Stroby, Shoot The Woman First, and it was quite good, building to an extremely rad moment of ownage. But it is interesting in how much Stone is trying to avoid conflict and how susceptible she is to owing people that she feels a responsibility to — this is not a criticism, it’s a smart way to differentiate from her big influence. Once again, the villain is an ugly piece of work who is also clever and active, this threatens the balance of the book a bit but makes for real stakes.
Tristan’s Lost book
Discord benefits in action! This is extremely interesting, even for someone like me, who hasn’t seen the show since it first aired: the episode write-ups capture the appeal of the storytelling (and hit on a lot of good points about storytelling in general, unsurprisingly) without rehashing all the details, so it’s not a recap book but rather a kind of study of how (and to some extent why, but I’d say mostly how, which is the more intriguing question if you’re a narrative process geek like me) Lost worked and still works. Great stuff.
The October Country, by Ray Bradbury
This may be a reread? I recall checking it out of the library in high school and reading at least certain stories from it–“Skeleton,” “The Small Assassin,” and “The Jar” are ones that I still vividly remember from that encounter–but I’m not sure if I read the whole book back then. I have a list of all my pleasure reading since senior year of high school, but this would’ve been before that. Anyway, this is a strong collection and a good seasonal read. I think the funnier, more whimsical stories are usually weaker than the horror–although “The Wonderful Death of Dudley Stone” works pretty well–but then, given the time of year, the horror is what I was here for. Some creative moves here–the very weird vivisection in “The Man Upstairs,” the magnified postpartum horror of “The Small Assassin,” the biological fixation of “Skeleton”–and some killer endings–“The Next in Line” and “The Jar” were my probably my favorites on that front. “The Lake” is also a beautiful, sad, perfectly formed little ghost story, and the introduction clarifies that it was how Bradbury found his way into his own voice, which makes sense.
I wonder if “Homecoming” helped inspire Encanto.
I was hoping to finish Fritz Leiber’s Our Lady of Darkness before this post, but alas, while I still plan on finishing it on Halloween, I’ll have to report back next week.
Fuck yeah Ray Bradbury! And The October Country in particular rules, I love how creepy “The Man Upstairs” is and how the resolution is a delightful spin on the classic ruthless Bradbury child. And speaking of which “The Small Assassin” is so good — the boundary between horror metaphor and horror actuality is entirely collapsed and this makes them both so much stronger (the absurdity of “killer baby” becomes the inability to express the danger of “killer baby” and the increasing terror of no one listening/understanding and hey, there’s your metaphor again). I think the best one here might be “The Emissary,” a classic structure (it feels like a Saki story) given incredible juice by Bradbury’s autumnal language, the stuff he can overdo but is just right here, and it carries you heedless into that cold snap of an ending.
Our Lady of Darkness has been on my list for some time, excited to hear what you think.
<3
The Merry Wives of Windsor, by William Shakespeare
Finished it. It’s a lighter and considerably more straightforward work than the bard usually produces, even among his comedies. The comic moments are standard, and, curiously, its main plot is less interesting than a love triangle, which is resolved almost by accident and in the background of the action. It was my pick this year’s for my annual first-time Shakespeare play. Already taking suggestions for next year.
Started Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose.
Some bonus articles for my fellow comedy fans:
With Jim Downey’s return to the spotlight (One Battle After Another, Downey Wrote That, New York financiers and relationships with), there’s a New York Times profile on him and an interview with him in Variety:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/17/arts/television/jim-downey-saturday-night-live-writer-actor.html
https://variety.com/2025/tv/news/jim-downey-snl-trump-jeffrey-epstein-obaa-1236561159/
And Stavros Halkias is having his mainstream breakthrough with his role in Bugonia. NYT profile and Vulture interview:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/23/magazine/stavros-halkias.html
https://www.vulture.com/article/stavros-halkias-bugonia-cum-town-joe-rogan-interview.html