Nonfiction
Book Reviews: March 2019
This month reviewer Terence Taylor looks at two dark novels about children: Shelley Jackson’s Riddance and Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys.
This month reviewer Terence Taylor looks at two dark novels about children: Shelley Jackson’s Riddance and Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys.
I am well familiar with the phenomenon of death penalty proponents who hate it when a convict is proven innocent because they see the penalty itself as an absolute good that needs to be nurtured, like a beloved pet, regardless of the facts of any individual case. The way the system works now, even when somebody is freed because of exonerating evidence, the state still has every incentive to deny the facts and call the conviction justified, regardless.
In 1726, an English woman named Mary Toft became the center of a rather peculiar medical controversy. The pregnant Mary was working in a field with other women when they disturbed a rabbit. It fled from them, and they pursued, but failed to catch it. The incident left such an impression upon Mary that it consumed her thoughts, eventually leading her to miscarry . . . but what emerged from her womb was not a human fetus, but a misshapen rabbit.
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I grew up where the temperature hardly ever dropped below seventy degrees Fahrenheit. My first experience of real cold was extremely unpleasant. Nikki, the protagonist of the story, comes from the same background, and I imagined this setting as especially horrifying within her context. Nikki has never been so far north and she doesn’t have the luxury of indoor heating (as I did, when I needed to flee from the cold). For her, this environment is stark beyond imagining, yet she endures through this hardship.
To celebrate Women in Horror Month 2019, I asked four excellent female writers and horror experts to join me for a roundtable discussion. Given how the genre seems to be expanding rapidly to include more women at all levels of experience and publishing, I tried to gather a group of women with a range of talents and experience: Linda Addison, Joanna Parypinski, Becky Spratford, and Kaaron Warren.
Shortly before I started writing this story, there was a viral message being forwarded via WhatsApp. I believe the message originated here in Nigeria, but I’ve heard that it has made rounds in other countries, too. It was a set of rules advising women on how to be good and “godly” wives. This list was really long, and several points in it were backed by Bible verses. These rules perfectly highlighted some of the pressure women face in Nigeria, so I decided to borrow some of them to tell this story. That said, the number in the title is arbitrary.
If you haven’t seen The Witch (2015) and Get Out (2017), you must have been living under a rock. The former was a breakout title for A24 Films, becoming the fifth highest grossing movie they’ve put out to date (with over $25 million dollars in earnings). And the latter was nominated for several Golden Globe and Academy Awards, winning the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. Two very different films, they both took chances at the box office—with their stories, images, themes, settings, and overall experiences.
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I’m from rural Arkansas, and small, dying towns are a feature of the landscape. I think I’ve been troubled by places like Swine Hill ever since I was a kid. In some towns, there’s a palpable mood that things are bad and getting worse all the time. Obviously that’s not true across the state, and some places are doing fine. But many communities are in deep decline. The past feels heavy there. It’s hard not to see my home state as a little haunted.