IT'S THE FINAL COUNTDOWN (course catalog final review)

My final ratings for the assigned content from 'Reading in Genres: Monsters'



Do Watch:

***** Alien (1979)
****  The Thing (1982)
***    The Blob (1988)
***    Night of the Living Dead (1968)

Do Read:

***** The Call of Cthulhu (H.P. Lovecraft)
**** Snow (Ronald Malfi)
***  The Funeral (Richard Matheson)
*** Breeding Ground (Sarah Pinborough)
*** The Outsider (H.P. Lovecraft) 
*** Relic (Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child)
**   Pickman's Model (H.P. Lovecraft)
**   World War Z (Max Brooks)
**  The Yattering and Jack (Clive Barker)

Don't Watch:

**      Godzilla (2014)
**     An American Werewolf in London (1981)

Don't Read:

**    Rawhead Rex (Clive Barker)
**    30 Days of Night (Steve Niles)
**    Cycle of the Werewolf (Stephen King)
*      I Am Legend (Richard Matheson)

And DO READ the craft book Writers Workshop of Horror (Michal Knost) whether you write horror or not!

How Many Days of Night Were There? (30 Days of Night graphic novel review)

I had a very hard time figuring out what the monsters were in 30 Days of Night by Steve Niles. I assumed they something like the hybrid zombie vampires in I Am Legend, especially because the zombies in I Am Legend couldn’t withstand being out in sunlight. But everyone else who has read this seems to definitively define them as vampires. I realize that is what they are now after Googling the book, but I was very confused. Instead of a set of fangs, they has circular jagged teeth like a leach, and they clearly call them undead. Yes, vampire are also a kind of undead, but in general that specific term is used to define zombies. It was unclear to me, but since they drink blood, I suppose vampire was the right answer. The art style didn’t make my confusion any better.

I like visual novels. I read Webtoons and online comics all the time. I’ve liked the visual novels we’ve read in this class so far. Until now. The art style in this novel was so messy and blurry. Maybe the story would have been better in the text form versus the comic, or maybe the movie makes it better, but I found myself unsure what some of the panels were depicting. While this helped create a very distinct aesthetic and showed off the mood of the comic through the frazzled style, I really hated it. It was distracting and made the story much harder to digest than it needed to be. I don’t want to have to question whether a scene is blood or not because of how sketchy the image alongside the text is.

I will say that the plot pacing of the comic was good though. It all flowed nicely together, and was very quick in the parts that weren’t slowed down by the artwork. Though I knew from the setup that the novel was 30 days of night with no sunlight, I also would have believed you if you told me the novel was only one long evening. I think that is both a pro and a con to this story. It means the flow was very smooth, but it also kind of made it difficult for me to rate the stakes of the story. They kept talking about the hidden humans being hungry, but I didn’t see that in the pacing. I wish the time had been more exaggerated in the comic. I didn’t feel the suspense build.

As for the actual vampires themselves, I loved that we assumed the original guy killing everyone was the big bad, then Vicente arrives and they assume he’ll be pleased, only for him to wreck shop with distaste. I love the idea of creatures exploiting their being myths and fairy tales. I thought that part of the story was the most clever. However, I didn’t really understand the guy coming in with the helicopter. I’m sure it was more vital in text or movie form, but it felt out of place in the graphic novel version and unnecessary. I also thought the ending was a cop out. The sheriff turns and is somehow able to control himself when the other infected guy wasn’t able to, and then after he wins the fight he just drifts off into dust and doesn’t bite his wife. Anticlimactic to say the least.

Not the worst story we’ve read in this class, but definitely the worst graphic novel assigned.

Is Relic a Relic of the Past? (Relic book review)

 

Relic by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child was a good book. Not a great book, not a bad book, a good book, but I will say that it was one of the easiest books this term to sit down and binge read. It definitely read like an old school horror movie. It felt like going to the cinema to watch some black and white monster movie.

The novel is written very well, flowing together very nicely. The chapters read quickly, and it’s also easy to read because of how much it feels like a classic murder mystery, like Agatha Christy but supernatural. It reminded me of the YA fiction I consumed feverishly as a teen, where I could sit down and binge the book in a few hours. And that’s exactly what I did with this book. That being said, the story did drag on a little for me though.

The book didn’t really get going for me until around Chapter 40, when the museum party started. But to be fair, most of the students so far that have posted reviews of the book have said that the plot got good after hitting the halfway point, and that’s for a reason. The second half makes it worth a read. Not only that, but the ending to the book was a wonderful twist. I knew it would be a monster because of our reading course being on monsters, but I wouldn’t have guess that the monster was Whittlesey. And I love that I didn’t guess that. Most murder mysteries are easy to guess the ending of, and this one made sure to throw enough twists and turns to keep you guessing until the very end. And then even after the ‘end’, when Kawakita turns out to be sketchy.

However, on a less positive note, I’m going to say it: there are too many characters in this book. I don’t mind having so many specifically main characters, because it is easy to follow them all considering that they are all classical stereotypes, but the main characters plus side characters being referenced by name frequently was a little too much for me to coherently remember.

Also, as everyone seemed to point out, Margo drove me insane with her constant mentioning of her dissertation. I feel like that happened with a lot of the characters, the authors adding a ton of detail to define and introduce them. Then, once introduced, those characters referenced the same things over and over, like Smithback and his book. Once you hit hallway and the plot got going though, those characters became interesting again. For some reason, the many characters bothered me, but the many theories about what was going on didn’t. Nicely done on the murder theories Preston and Child.

After I finished this book, I ended up Googling the monster to see if what I imagined was what the movie depicted for the creature (I also didn’t even know there was a movie until I read someone else’s post). The movie monster was not what I had thought. However, I think I almost like it better than what I had imagined.

Overall: Worth a skim, then an actual read at Chapter 40.