TENEBRAE (1982) is a gory, dumb slasher film in which a serial killer begins hacking up hot women and taunting visiting American author Anthony Franciosa with the fact. This “spaghetti slasher” is interchangeable with countless other low-budget American hack-em-up films from the era; definitely not the right choice for introducing myself to Italian horror director Dario Argento. “It means the killer had an excellent classical education.”
HOUSE OF STAIRS by William Sleator is a creepy SF novel in which five teens find themselves trapped in a vast maze of stairways where the only way to feed themselves is to let a mysterious machine condition their behavior——but what, ultimately, does it want them to do? Effective (and very deft in subtly sketching in the world outside) though even the limited happy ending this gives two of the characters seems implausible.
HEXWOOD by Diana Wynne Jones has an ET conglomerate sending agents to shut down a reality-altering machine hidden in a British village; when one local girl follows them in, she finds a vast forest with dragons, wizards, androids and time constantly running out of joint. Rereading Jones in sequence, I realized the idea of Secret Overlord manipulating Earth is one she’s used before (Sudden Wild Magic and Homeward Bounders) and the time games, likewise, resemble Archer’s Goon and Fire and Hemlock. That aside, this is an excellent book (though it’s a lot easier to make sense of on second reading) and I’m impressed that even with a reality-altering supercomputer in the story, Jones doesn’t use it to cheat on the convoluted plot.
Bonus: Neil Gaiman and Emma Bull pay tribute to the late DWJ.
THE VICTORIAN UNDERWORLD by Donald Thomas looks at the Victorian world of crime, from the lower classes who stole out of need through suave schemers whose plotting financed their bourgeois respectability. The book moves through prostitution, theft, porn, con games (including many I recognized from reading the 1940s classic The Big Con) gambling and on the other side it covers court procedure, crimefighting and jail life (in the early years of the century it included prostitutes and gin shops for inmates). I have other books that disagree with some of Thomas’s analysis, but I found this a good book nonetheless.
THE ANNOTATED HUNTING OF THE SNARK: THE DEFINITIVE EDITION is Martin Gardner’s analysis of Lewis Carroll’s absurdist nonsense in which an ill-assorted squad of questers hunt the strange Snark with a blank map to guide them only to discover, when they finally confront the creature … The annotations are less interesting than Gardner’s Annotated Alice because he has less material to work with, but they’re still informative (though I’m surprised Gardner can’t resist reading meaning into the poem, which is something he staunchly rejects in his earlier work on Alice).
JOHN CARTER, WARLORD OF MARS was actually a Marvel series from the seventies that I recently finished rereading. Set during the 10 year period at the end of Princess of Mars (so technically Carter isn’t the planetary warlord yet) this squeezed out two main arcs before the licensor yanked the property; the first is a very good Burroughsian story, the second adequate (Chris Claremont takes a while to get up to speed) but unfortunately the two villains are very similar (both ready to destroy Mars in order to save it). Unfortunately the main arcs are accompanied by stories of supernatural menaces that simply don’t fit on Mars (they felt more like plots lifted from Marvel’s Conan the Barbarian).
Pingback: kate beckinsale