Movies and Books

LIANNA (1983)is a frustrated faculty wife who gets a new lease on life when she starts an affair with a female professor only to have her marriage and her new relationship both fall apart. As with Return of the Secaucus Seven, John Sayles approach (this was his sophomore directing turn, though he had several screenwriting gigs between them) is low-key and naturalistic. It doesn’t work quite as well here, but it’s still well executed—close to how the story would play out if the lover had been a man, but not too close (if that makes sense). Sayles casts himself as a lecherous film teacher. “You’re not gay, you’re hysterical.”
THE MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE (1971) is an AIP film starring Jason Robards as the had of a Grand Guignol theater troupe rehearsing an adaptation of the Poe story, and haunted by Herbert Lom as a scarfaced Phantom of the Opera figure fixated on Robards’ wife. An entertaining job. “There was no murder—he already had a death certificate.”
UNKNOWN (2011) has biochemist Liam Neeson attending a Berlin conference with wife January Jones only to wake up from a car crash with his identity erased and Jones insisting that Aidan Quinn is her real husband. This got largely unenthusiastic reviews, but while it starts slow, I quite liked the overall result. Diane Krieger plays a helpful Bosnian immigrant and Frank Langella colleague of Neeson’s. I’d suggest Trading Places as a double-bill for another story about a man mysteriously replaced in his own life. “You had time after I called—why didn’t you run?”

ALABASTER by Caitlin Kiernan is a collection of Southern Gothic shorts about Dancy Flambeau, the albino SAPS hunting protagonist of her novel Threshold (which I haven’t read) here criss-crossing Southern Georgia battling various horrors crawling out of swamps and pine forests, or holed up in trailers or an isolated gas station. Well written and extremely effective.
THE YARD by Alex Grecian is a Victorian-set police procedural in which Scotland Yard’s Murder Squad tries to hunt down a mad killer whacking their own while also coping with gun-toting hookers and the death of a chimney sweep. Nothing really wrong with it, just by-the-numbers and lacking in spark.
FIVE STORIES FOR THE DARK MONTHS by my friend Kate Traylor is a collection of self-published short stories available on Smashwords. The best story is “The Boon” (a Gothic version of Thumbelina), followed by the secondary-world fantasy “Warmth in Winter” (familiar elements nicely nixed); the only one that really didn’t work for me was “Sans Merci” (well written but too predictable). For the record, while I’d be unlikely to write a negative review of a friend’s book, I wouldn’t write a positive one I didn’t believe in (I’d just not mention it).
MONSTER EARTH is the anthology that includes my Peace With Honor story. The others include the first recorded appearance of the monsters during Japan’s invasion of Manchuria, a version of Pearl Harbor where a Japanese kraken battles an ancient Hawaiian spirit and a fifties-set one where the giant sasquatch-like Johnson runs wild in Los Angeles (probably my favorite besides mine). One where my judgment is obviously biased, but I really do think it’s good (whether the Kindle version or print)
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