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You Like It Darker: Stories

In and around comics, as usual, I’ve been reading a short story collection, which is I suppose rather less usual. Honestly[1], it happens within a rounding error of once per published Stephen King short story collection. Which, in this case, was You Like It Darker.

The belle of the ball was the novella length story about the guy who dreamed of where a dead body was located, found it, and then (to his lasting regret) reported it. Several of the others washed right over me and have since receded, while there was only one miss, the one about the weird kid who has an unhealthy relationship with his dying grandfather.

Most of the rest[2] are King writing his way through aging and death. (Well, death via aging, I mean. Obviously he’s never had a problem writing about death. Really, now.) But where he used to write about young and then middle-aged protagonists, he is now clearly reaching a stage where his focus is a bit further down the road. Which is both meaningful to me, since I’m at an age where the people a generation above me are all long retired, and have started to die, but also distressing, since I’m not ready for a world without next year’s King novel.[3]

All the same, that year is coming.

[1] At least, counting after college
[2] Rattlesnakes, The Answer Man, Laurie, and to be fair Willie the Weirdo qualifies here as well. As do some of the ones that washed over me and already receded.
[3] This is not not a metaphor for the many other things that I’m not ready to happen. But it’s definitely not just a metaphor for that, either.

Kaijû sôshingeki

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Okay. Nine movies. I have watched nine movies, mostly to delve into the mystery behind how many Godszilla existed, to which the answer is, for now, still two. But at some point I also just wanted to finish. Skipping seven movies like I should have done is whatever. But skipping two movies after I’ve already seen five of them? (And before you ask: yes, it gnaws at me occasionally that I did not go back and watch the original Mothra movie and the original Rodan movie, before those characters were explicitly spun into the Godzillaverse. (Or were they there all along? I don’t know! Which is why it gnaws at me.))

But the point is, I’ve watched those nine movies, which means I’ve made it to Destroy All Monsters, which means I can go back to my horror movie podcast, finally! …yeah, this was a mistake, but nevertheless, here we are.

What has not existed in these movies so far is a timeline. Like, the early movies were obviously in the middle of the atomic age, set for when they came out. Some of the later movies involved deep space travel of the kind that we were not ready for in the mid ’60s, but which then again who knows, what with the advances that would have naturally sprung from having to fight giant monsters birthed or awakened in atomic fires. Irrespective of all that, I can say with certainty that this one is set in the distant future of the year 2000, where all giant monsters are safely collared and contained on Monster Island. There’s a moon base, and in all other apparent ways, we have reached utopia.

Until…

Oops, the monsters are wandering around destroying everything again, and also asteroid aliens want to take control of the world and run it themselves, and hmm could these facts be linked? Mostly, I’m just relieved that they got back to basics, if by basics you mean alien invasions and alien monsters vs earth monsters and a big showdown on Mt. Fuji. Which I very much do. This is I think a good place to drop out for now.

State of Delirium

Get it?

Anyway, I’ve been doing this for north of five years. Wow. And you may have noticed over the past week or so that it all went away. There was an unfortunate server incident and an even more unfortunate failure to retrieve data backups for six months. However, Google is sufficiently advanced as to be indistinguishable from magic, and with help from longtime contributor Jason Newquist and longtime reader Mike Kozlowski, and from the Google cache, I have retrieved all of the actual review files, the vast majority of the tags, and all but four of the comments. Everything should look just about the same as it did a week ago when this all happened. I, for one, am relieved. Also, the WordPress instance is now, as I understand it, mailing me weekly site backups to avoid this kind of tomfoolery down the line.

That’s it. Just wanted to catch y’all up, those as wondered at least. Thanks for reading.

Not a review of The Walking Dead: Miles Behind Us

One thing that I do before I review a sequel to, well, much of anything, is go back and read my review (or reviews) of the previous entries in that series. Having just done so prior to my review of the second Walking Dead graphic novel, I have come to the unprecedented realization that I need to read it again before I say anything substantive. Now admittedly I went to an awesome days-long party since finishing it wherein I drank like a… well, I drank a lot. But I’m pretty sure I remember what happened in the book. I just wasn’t reading it in the correct frame of mind, and I want to look at it through different eyes before I replay my thoughts.

Currently, they are: wholly entertaining, but nothing special. And that just doesn’t fit with my review of the first book. So now I’ll get a second opinion.

A brief update from the author

Shards of Delirium

Fragments of Delight