208 Words About Parts 6, 11, and 12 of "Shadow Spinner" by Andrew Leon (Random Word Reviews)

Reading these books is like when you wake up in the middle of the night and thought you heard something, but it's all quiet.

And then something shrieks to high heaven and attacks you from behind.

That is the only way I can describe the actual physical feeling I get as I work through each installment of this serialized horror story.  Each section contains the requisite scares and horror imagery that Leon does masterfully: the man with no eyes, shadows with a rubbery physicality,  holes in reality appearing, corpses dragging themselves through broken windows.

But underlying all of that is this deeply unsettling feeling that there's something even MORE scary coming down the road, a sense that seems to come through by part 12 (which is as far as I've gotten so far) when a literal new world opens up, and the idea that all the creepy things that happened so far as merely precursors to even creepier things seems to be coming true.

The story works on two levels, as the best horror does: constant frights from the bevy of monsters and supernatural events, but setting up a fight over souls and worlds that raises the stakes even higher.  This book is shaping up to be a masterpiece.

CLICK HERE TO GO TO AUTHOR ANDREW LEON's PAGE AT AMAZON AND FIND LINKS TO ALL THE SHADOW SPINNER INSTALLMENTS.

Art by Rusty Webb,
at The Blutonian Death Egg

In Random Word Reviews, I get a pre-determined number of words, chosen randomly, between 1-750, to review something.  Read more of them here.

"Shadow Spinner" and "Andrew Leon" were also mentioned in all these other posts about serialized stories, his excellent Christmas/horror story (hard to pull off!) and his other great book, The House On The Corner, which he answered 10 1/2 questions about.

370 words about "Oculus," by author Michael Offutt.

In one word, I'd sum "Oculus," by Michael Offutt, as:

UNFAIR.

But I get 370 words. I'll use them all to explain.

I finished "Oculus" last night. The ending of the book being nothing so much as a headlong rush into a melee of darkness, I was getting more and more into it, feeling the excitement rise and then

BLAMMO,

the book ends, leaving you hanging until the third in the series, apparently being written right now, by which I mean it had better be being written right now, so stop reading this, Offutt. Get back to writing the third book.

"Oculus," continues the trilogy  begun in Slipstream, the plot of the series being "Boy discovers he has the ability to control the flow of time, and also he is the last heir of King Arthur, and there is more than one world, and demons are real, and also he is good at hockey."

(NAILED IT.  I should write book blurbs.)

That doesn't begin to describe how Oculus reads.  From the opening dreamlike gunfight the story unfolds deliberately, piece by intricately plotted piece, layering on myth, science and detail until the entire thing feels real, which is really saying something when one is talking about a book in which a giant stone mouth grinds up bodies to feed to a shadow devil that lives in a black hole.

The many characters have fully-fledged lives which make the people real, too -- and not always in a good way.  Even the main characters have flaws that balance their likeability, making them, too, real-er.  Those details come out in the backstory and mythology, too, legends and hard science mashed into each other: Oculus meshes fantasy elements with scifi so seamlessly it was like reading Foucault's Pendulum co-authored by Larry Niven. Those details, though, don't detract but rather feed the story, which is driven by  adrenaline-producing action setpieces ranging from hockey games to the incredible battle at the end.  Oculus is something you can keep going back to, re-reading and soaking up details, and that's good because until Offutt gets that third book out, I and his other readers are going to have to live with doing just that.

(Done, with four words left over!)

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In Random Word Reviews, I get a random number of words to review something.  Now aren't you glad you asked? Find more reviews like this here.

Read 10 1/2 questions With Michael Offutt, and my review of his first book, here.

CLICK HERE TO BUY OCULUS BECAUSE YOU LIKE GOOD BOOKS, DON'T YOU? OF COURSE YOU DO, AND THIS IS ONE OF THEM. SO GO BUY IT.

283 words about "The Possession"

Here is the one main thing that sticks in my mind about the movie "The Possession."

Email does not work that way.

That doesn't say much for a horror movie, that the most memorable and most stupid thing about the movie, and doesn't say much about the writers' ability to manipulate a plot.

In The Possession, Kyra Sedgwick complains to her ex, the dad of the possessed (?) girl, that she's "getting his email" and so he does something on the computer to delete something and says it's fixed, but later in the movie, Kyra hands him a printout and hollers at him because he's considering moving and says she's still getting his emails.

You know, because she's got his old computers.  And apparently email just keeps going to whatever computer you once had.  It's probably those tiny electronic mailmen, never getting the hint no matter how many tiny electronic "We've moved!" postcards you send out.



That was the dumbest part in a movie full of hundreds of dumb moments and one sort-of-creepy image. It was dumber than the dog door that exists for no reason and which apparently a box-captured ghost can get through unless it was really a raccoon. It was dumber than a guy thinking he could do an exorcism based on two hours of Google research, and it was even dumber than the fact that the mystical prayer which recaptures the monster is simply saying its name over and over.  BUT REALLY LOUDLY because that's how religion works.


All of that= not as dumb as the email thing.  Even now, four days later, I still want to shake someone by the shoulders and say "Email does not work that way." 

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320 Words About "Phineas & Ferb" (Random Word Reviews)

In Random Word Reviews, I have random.org pick a number between 1-1000 and write a review using exactly that many words.  Here are other things I have said a random number of words about.


Four years ago we took a vacation to Orlando, and one of the things you should know about me is that I have a passion for discount t-shirts.

That doesn’t seem to tie in to Phineas & Ferb, and, true, the two halves of that sentence don’t seem to relate to each other, but bear with me.

On that trip, we happened across a sale rack of t-shirts at a store and I was glancing through them to find a shirt for Mr F or Mr Bunches, and I happened across one that had this guy:

 on it. I didn’t know who this guy:

Was.

The shirt also said “Agent P.” I didn’t know what that meant, either. But the shirt was two bucks, so I bought it and for a while, Mr Bunches was “Agent P” even though I had no idea what that might mean; I’d put the shirt on him and then call him “Agent P” and not think anything of it.

I remember how I happened across Agent P but not how I first found out that Agent P is “Perry the Platypus,” the pet/secret agent of two little boys, Phineas & Ferb, who spend every day of their summer vacation creating wild inventions and getting into weird mischief.

The show in a nutshell: Two kids spend each summer day revamping kids’ rides to make them more exciting, or finding a lake monster, or building an actual pioneer town, or something, while their pet platypus sneaks off to his second job as a secret agent fighting the Evil Doctor Doofenshmirtz, who runs Doofenshmirtz Evil, Incorporated, the only evil organization I can think of that has a jingle.

The show has puns, great songs, catch phrases, and a secret agent who is also a platypus. This is one of my top ten favorite shows of all time. It’s totally wasted on the kids. Adults will love it.

72 Words About "Plants Vs. Zombies." (Random Number Of Words Review)

Perhaps I'll be of use to society in a post-apocalyptic world after all.

It may not seem obvious to look at me, but hurling watermelons at a giant zombie robot who is standing on my rooftop dropping Zamboni-driving, pole-vaulting zombies into my flower pots in retrospect is obviously something I was meant to do with my life.

That's a hidden skill I discovered playing "Plants vs. Zombies," a game I heartily recommend.

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In Random Number Of Words Reviews, I use Random.org to decide in advance how many words (between 1-750) I get to use to review something.  Read more of them here.

58 Words about "The Dark Knight Rises." (Random Number Reviews)

In Random Number Of Words, I let Random.org tell me how many words, between 1-750, I can use to review something.  Click here for more reviews like this.

It was the most comic-book-ish movie of the trilogy, but Batman's gadgets, especially the annoying "Bat" he flew, made him more an "Army of One" than The Batman.

Also: summer's two big superhero movies ended with heroes flying into the distance to blow up, then improbably survive. That odd, specific heroism says something about us as a culture.

57 Words About The Burger King Bacon Sundae (The Best Of Food)

In Random Number Of Words, I pick a random number between 1 and 750, and then write a review in that many words.  Click here for more.

Food is now entertainment as well as sustenance. Premade food is cheap and plentiful enough that cooking is a hobby; you should no more cook your own meal than you should write your own novel.

That is partly why I am into “event food,” like the Bacon Sundae.  It did not disappoint, either in spectacle or taste.

222 Words About "The Avengers." The Best Movie EVER?

This is a Random Number Of Words review.  For more information about this, and a list of other such reviews, click here.

At one point during the movie The Avengers, I spontaneously began to laugh, not because there was anything particularly funny going on in the movie, but because I was so happy to be watching this movie. 

I can't remember feeling like that about any other movie I’ve seen in recent memory, feeling happy to be alive and watching this movie.

I’ve seen some good movies in my life, but none of them have measured up to my elation at how good “Avengers” was. There is literally nothing wrong with the movie. The fight scenes feature every possible combination of awesomeness one can imagine. The slower, plot-development scenes are like that lap when you’re jogging where you pace yourself before another sprint. Even the parts that should not work, like Hawkeye and Black Widow fighting an alien invasion with a bow and arrow and judo, somehow work.

Before I saw The Avengers, which I watched Friday, a coworker said “It’s a little long.” I beg to differ: it’s a little short.

I didn’t want it to end.

I wish I was still watching it, right now.

 I thought maybe I was just excited by the movie and I would come back down, but I saw it Friday and I’m still not over the rush. I might skip work and go see it today.

71 Words About "The Many Lives Of Yelena Moulin": The Best Short Story That Makes Me Wish I Had Written It.

The Many Lives of Yelena Moulin is one of the best stories I’ve read in years. Set in the future, it focuses on the title character, who stars in a sex show, is killed by a rival, and revived years later as a computer-stored set of memories people call ‘ghosts’, Yelena is the captive of a misogynist rich man with whom she makes a bargain: help him, get freedom. Read it.

Read The Many Lives Of Yelena Moulin on Martian Lit.

Why don't I say more? This is a Random Number Of Words review; read more about those here.

A Random Number Of Words About "Fright Night" (Movies)(Random Number Of Words)

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720 Words About “Fright Night.”

We watched the remake of Fright Night on Christmas Eve, as is our habit: every year since the first year we did this, we have watched a horror movie of sorts on Christmas Eve as our family movie, with the sole exception being 2010, when we watched The Other Guys, which was not in any sense a horror movie unless you count the fact that it begins with two men jumping to their death horribly, which is kind of funny to think about in the sense that it’s not funny at all that two men jumped to their death in a comedy and we called that a comedy while in Fright Night, which is a horror movie, we don’t actually see anyone die except [SPOILER ALERT!] McLovin’, who is turned into a vampire early on and who I’m pretty sure dies of being decapitated later on even though he didn’t have to because the end result of the movie is that everyone is cured of being a vampire.

Here’s your very-spoilery plot of the movie: A single mom is raising a kid who has inexplicably become popular and gotten a superhot girlfriend:

over the summer, and like everyone who suddenly becomes popular, the newly-popular kid has problems that geeks like me can barely understand, in that he doesn’t want to have sex with his superhot (and, they kind of hint, slutty) girlfriend




and also the guy who just moved in next door is not just Colin Farrell, whose name, it turns out, isn’t even kind of spelled like ferret, although it seems it should be, but also a vampire.



What really jumped out about this movie to both Sweetie and I, as we watched it on Christmas Eve (remember?) while the Babies! Slept in their room: Man, Colin Ferrell doesn’t even try to hide that he’s a vampire, does he? The movie jumps right in with a bunch of vampire-y stuff and about halfway through it Colin The Vampire is not just slinking around trying to be creepy, he’s ripping up gas lines in the backyard to blow up the house (because he can’t come in as he hasn’t been invited, see, so if he blows up the house, then he can just eat them all, a plan Edward Cullen would have never moped his way into thinking up.)

I do not remember the original Fright Night very well, although I’m sure I saw it. Why I’m so sure I saw it, I don’t know, as I haven’t seen practically any of the iconic 80s movies that everyone my age talks about loving. I spent the 80s reading sci-fi books and comics and being unpopular, and not the kind of unpopular that leads one to get a superhot and kind of slutty girlfriend. The kind of unpopular that leads one to, 25 years later, watch Fright Night and think, of the scant few high-school scenes, “High school was not like that” but secretly worry that, yes, it was, for everyone else.

Beyond Colin Ferrell imprisoning strippers (the movie’s set near Vegas, which kind of confirms what I secretly think about people who live around Vegas) and trying to molest teen boys, Fright Night doesn’t offer much: There’s a half-hearted attempt to throw some mythology into it (Vampires are dirt-dwellers, or something dumb) and the de rigeur self-referential thing horror movies have to do because Scream existed once (a vampire killer stages a Vegas show about killing vampires but he doesn’t really, unless he does really, kill vampires.) There is a car chase, a cameo appearance by Vampire From 80s Fright Night, a not-so-great fight in the Hall of the Vegas Vampire Killer, but the end result is entertaining enough to pass.

And, in the end, the teenage boy has his slutty girlfriend turned into a vampire and has an excuse to actually not sleep with her:


but he comes up with a plan to save everyone by lighting himself on fire and hugging Colin The Vampire to death, which really happens in the movie and which causes all the people Colin made vampires to become not vampires anymore, and so everyone is as happy as can be expected.

Except for McLovin’, who they decapitated and who is still dead at the end of the movie.

A Random Number Of Words About... the Introduction And List Of All Reviews!

370 words about "Oculus," by Michael Offutt

283 words about "The Possession"

71 words about "The Many Lives Of Yelena Moulin"

720 Words About "Fright Night."

222 Words About "The Avengers"

57 Words About The Bacon Sundae From Burger King

58 Words About "The Dark Knight Rises."

72 Words about "Plants vs. Zombies." 

320 Words about "Phineas & Ferb"

Those of you who follow my 38,000,000,000 ...howmanyzeroesinazillion...000 blogs know that I used to do something I called the "Rum Punch Review," which were extended book reviews that explored not just the books but anything that came to mind while reading or writing about them.

Then I got bored with that.

And then I tried to write a 500-word short story that ballooned into 58 pages and while that story is probably the greatest story ever written and will make you laugh and make you cry and make you do long division in your head which will make you doubt your answer, it's also not really a short story.

And I've tried from time to time to write other reviews -- like Indie Book Reviews and Random Blog Reviews -- but I've never really gotten into the "movie" or "book" or "thing" reviewing world as a regular thing.

Until now: I've read so much phenomenal stuff lately, and seen so many movies that deserved comments, and found so many podcast... and ... you get the picture... that I'm going to start reviewing them, and the twist, to make it interesting, is that each of my reviews will be a random number between 1 and 1,000 -- I'll go to Random.org, get a random number assigned, and write exactly that many words about the subject.

For no particular reason. Just to see if I can do it. (In case you didn't know, this is my new experiment this year: hitting an exact target of words. Like Ezra Pound, who [possibly mythically] wrote a sonnet a year before he decided to write free verse, I am going to do this as an exercise to keep writing fun and interesting for me.]

This'll be fun. Until I get bored.