Book Review – Chasing America’s Monsters

Chasing American Monsters: Over 250 Creatures, Cryptids & Hairy Beasts by Jason Offutt
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Jason Offutt goes state by state, telling stories of four or five cryptids from each. As a result, things get a little repetitive. The local bigfoot. The local giant bird. The local lake monster. The local absurd chimera with an often-fake-and-thus-kinda-racist Indigenous name. Still, the author does his best to keep things interesting. The illustrations are fun, too.

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Book Review – Sex Lives of Superheroes

Sex Lives of Superheroes: Wolverine's Immortal Sperm, Superman's Porn Career, the Thing's Thing, and Other Super-Sexual Matters Explained by Diana McCallum
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Here’s everything you ever wanted to know about how superpowers could make sex better or – more frequently – much much worse. I was lured in by the author’s work on “Texts from Superheroes” and wasn’t disappointed to find the same kind of humor at play in this longer format. Added bonus: along the way we get entertaining lessons in biology, psychology and even physics. If there’s a sequel, I’ll definitely keep reading.

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Book Review – You Like It Darker

You Like It Darker by Stephen King
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Not a bad collection overall. I’m not a big fan of the “wrong man” story, and that’s a well King goes to more than once here. Also for those of us who yearned – eventually not in vain – for the author to get past his “protagonist hit with a van” phase, I don’t think there’s much hope of him breaking out of his “old white guy hero” era. Beyond that, this is King doing what he does, which as usual provided a pleasant start to the summer reading season.

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Review – The Painted

This movie has two things in common with an average episode of Rod Serling’s Night Gallery series: it’s a supernatural thriller that centers around paintings, and it packed enough plot for around 20 minutes. Sadly, it’s feature length. The digital liquid effects are fun when evil spirits emerge from or return to their canvases. Otherwise this is a mostly dreary ghost story with some awkward anti-porn subtext. Mildly amusing

Book Review – The World of Lore: Monstrous Creatures

The World of Lore: Monstrous Creatures by Aaron Mahnke
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I’m usually disappointed to find that a book by a podcaster has been written at a middle school reading level more appropriate for the non-print medium. But at this point in the semester that’s about where I’m at, so it actually worked okay for me under the circumstances. What I wish Aaron Mahnke hadn’t done was save the ghost stories for last. I’m not fond of the genre, at least not as non-fiction, and these also tended to be longer than the more fun stuff about cryptids and the like. Overall, however, this was a fun way to kick off the summer reading schedule.

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Review – Gladiator 2

What happened to Ridley Scott? He used to be really good at storytelling. But this grandiose flop is anything but. It’s fidgety, moving from one brief, unrelated scene to the next with the attention span of a pre-teen child living on a diet of Pop Tarts and Pepsi. Fans of actual Roman history will find this particularly hard to follow; the plot ostensibly includes historical figures and yet the movie intersects with reality only by coincidence. I was particularly taken with the part where Caracalla makes his pet monkey and the bad guy co-consuls. After the emperor and the villain are both slain (spoiler alert, to the extent that’s a spoiler), shouldn’t that make the monkey the next monarch? Actually, Gladiator 3: Monkey Emperor might well prove to be a better outing. See if desperate

Review – Mothman (2010)

Add the title cryptid to the list of things that are apparently oddly difficult to make into a non-terrible movie. This go-around gets off to the wrong start with a “Mothman Knows What You Did Last Summer” plot construction. And though I imagine the monster itself was the best a low-budget CGI team could produce in 2010, its crappiness still detracts from an already bad experience. See if desperate

Review – The Crucifixion

The story is pure tedium: journalist investigates the case of a possessed nun who died during an unconventional exorcism. Though the plot is paper thin, it holds together enough to tie some creepy sight gags together into a movie. Production values are also high enough to distance this from much of the rest of the sub-genre. Mildly amusing

Review – Demonic (2015)

Maybe 20 minutes’ worth of plot gets stretched to feature length by annoying cliches such as hopping unnecessarily (and sometimes confusingly) back and forth in the timeline. Detective and psychologist good-cop-bad-cop the sole survivor of a ghost hunting team that held a seance in a demonic murder house. Wow, that was barely a sentence. So not even 20 minutes. See if desperate

Book Review – What If?

What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions by Randall Munroe
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Physics is fun, at least when it’s applied to absurd-yet-intriguing scenarios that someone somewhere somehow thought up. This is Randall Munroe’s xkcd comics in book form, tackling questions such as “what would happen if the earth expanded at the rate of one centimeter per minute?” In the course of answering questions of arguably little practical value, the author delves into some intriguing, unfamiliar corners of natural science. And the sections tend to be brief, well illustrated and cleverly written, which makes this a perfect book for brief intervals.

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Book Review – Hauntings

Hauntings by Ellen Datlow
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I wanted to give this anthology a higher rating. Some of the stories included herein are really good, either excellent throughout or finishing strong after a slow start. Alas, the impressive stuff just has too much bad company, particularly tales that start off tedious and stay that way. I can tolerate a certain amount of obscurely poetic prose, and I can even cope with a measure of torture and death of pets and children as long as there’s some purpose to it. But when the underlying plot is odd or cliché rather than enlightening and engaging, the welcome gets worn out swiftly. I loved the cream but could barely stand the dregs. And though this isn’t a criticism of the book itself, I should note that the pagination was messed up on the Hoopla e-book edition. The errors made it hard to tell where one was at in the stories, which of course made the bad ones even harder to take.

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