Nonfiction
Book Reviews: October 2021
This month, Terence Taylor reviews two new novellas: Zin E. Rocklyn’s Flowers for the Sea and Jason Marc Harris’s Master of Rods and Strings. Find out what he liked about these short reads!
This month, Terence Taylor reviews two new novellas: Zin E. Rocklyn’s Flowers for the Sea and Jason Marc Harris’s Master of Rods and Strings. Find out what he liked about these short reads!
I have a lot of experience, both professionally and personally, with disasters. I won’t insult the people who’ve also endured these life-changing events and their slow, painful aftermath by referring to the good that can come of them, but there’s no doubt that they result in profound destabilization of forms, physical and otherwise, both in a positive and negative sense. Significant hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires, flooding, ice storms, tsunamis, all that nature throws at us and the slew of human-created disasters as well, teach victims the hard way that their lives are fragile and temporally insignificant.
Picture a teenage film student in 1978 (me), who loves horror movies but has grown up wishing that occasionally, just every once in a while, the women would be the ones to defeat the evil and save the day. Alien’s Ripley and Dawn of the Dead’s Fran are still a year in the future; the big fright flicks of the previous ten years have featured women in the traditional roles of passive or victimized wives or mothers, while the men have served as the heroic exorcists, Antichrist investigators, shark hunters, and the ones who nailed the boards up over the windows.
This month, I have to confess to you all that I am a very poorly traveled person. I didn’t take my first flight until I was twenty-five, and since then I’ve only flown a few more times. Part of this is due to economy, and part of this is because for about a decade my husband refused to fly. When his brother got married in Michigan, he had to leave on a train four days before my daughter and I left to enjoy our flight. But I love flying! As the plane launches itself off the tarmac, I like to think about all the scientists and inventors whose work went into solving the mystery of flight.
Living through COVID-19 made it absolutely necessary for me to tell this story. We are all being impacted by the very best and worst of human behavior right now, and the consequences will be felt for decades. I would like to believe that humanity will ultimately choose unity in an apocalyptic situation, if only to increase our chances for survival, but human history contradicts this. Even now, people still refuse to take the necessary steps to ensure their safety and the safety of the broader community.
This month Adam-Troy Castro reads on the border between thriller and horror, giving us a recommendation for Hairpin Bridge, by Taylor Adams. He has some shout-outs for other great new books, too!
I think a lot about the power dynamics of the immortal/human relationships in monster-centric stories. These fictional relationships often have happy endings these days, but not always. A failed romance both guts and fascinates me. For the ice maiden, I wanted to write a figure who was a little too alien to be fully understood by a random human and naïve enough to assume that all humans are fools.
Death is a business. Some of the highest grossing podcasts are dedicated to covering true crime, and those podcasts are downloaded millions of times each month, and often rank in best of year lists. There are even true crime specific podcast categories that make it easy to select from which hosts, topic, and murder you would like to listen to during your morning’s commute, or as you prepare dinner for your children.
I spend a good chunk of time every day outside alone or with only my dog, and I like it a lot. When I’m in the garden or taking a run, I feel completely absorbed in the world, connected to the creatures I see and the plants I’m near. I never feel lonely when I’m out in nature. The same cannot be said for the time I spend with other people. There are times when a person can be surrounded by friends and still feel deeply, deeply lonely.
I think the idea of messing with the perception of time grew out of the realization of just how often gialli are reliant on memory; specifically, the protagonist struggling to remember some small detail they’ve seen that will somehow make the solution click into place. So, while they’re a detective story, the solution is often already there inside their head, they’re just trying to find a way to make it come into focus.