Fantasy

This week I started reading Coraline. This is my first time reading Neil Gaiman's work and I really liked the mood of the book. However, what I like most about Coraline is the visual style of the movie so there kind of feels like something is missing. I still have not finished the story yet.

Besides Coraline I also read Tarantula by Bob Dylan. It is not a fantasy book but I definitely enjoyed this book more than the other. I enjoyed the unstructured way that the book ran on and on. It felt like I was just reading excerpts from Bob Dylan's raw, unedited mind. The book combines poetry, lyrics, and spoken work but in some ways it feels like a storybook. Recurring themes seem to creep up and paint a better picture of what Bob is actually referring to.

VHS

This week I watched V/H/S, a collection of short horror films. For the most part, most of the stories felt like re-tellings of the same old kinds of stories. Cute girl at bar ends up being a man eater or creepy guy in the woods hunting teen campers. The vintage tape recorder look has become pretty popular in recent years so it felt like some of the films were just riding the bandwagon. None of the stories really needed to be told from the first-person, "this actually happened" perspective. This kind of felt like some of the lowest common denominator horror I have watched in awhile.

Interview with a Vampire

This week I read interview with a vampire. I did not particularly enjoy it, but I did think that it was an interesting take on the vampire genre as a whole. This book seems to humanize them in a very eerie way. Something that stood out to me through the whole book was the prominent sexual tones of the story. I feel like I cannot watch or read a vampire story these days without some kind of underlying sexual tension. I am not a prude but sometimes I just want some horror with no strings attached. As a child I used to love vampires. Well, they actually scared the hell out of me but I thought they were cool. Dark, blood-thirsty creatures driven to murder by their ungodly nature. Now, not so much. In recent years I feel that vampires have become more of sex symbols than supernatural creatures. I blame Twilight. This movie series took everything cool about vampires and filtered it through a 15 year old's wet dream. Vampires are the new unicorns.

The Hobbit

This week I read The Hobbit, written by J. R. R. Tolkien. I found the plot and characters very compelling, and this is probably the best book I have read so far for this class. Although it does reflect most of the elements of the classic hero's journey, it feels very fresh, fantastic and fun. The novel begins like many other heroic stories. We find our hero in relative comfort, unaware that a strange journey is about to come knocking on  his door. Of course our hero does not answer the call of adventure initially, but after a little push from our magical helper, Gandalf, Bilbo accepts the call of the Dwarves and enters the threshold into the outside world of the unknown. The story then goes on to address other elements of heroism. Although The Hobbit pretty much follows the exact structure of any other great adventure story, I think what makes this story different is the characters. From Bilbo to Gandalf, Thorin and company, trolls, elves, and goblins, there are so many interesting creatures and personality types. There is always someone to laugh at, someone to hate or blame, and someone who knows the next step in the journey.

Black Maria

I am still reading Black Maria but so far I have enjoyed it. I think that it could be a little faster paced, but once I got to the part when Mig finds her story hidden in Aunt Maria's shed I really got into it. I see this going in a pretty predictable way but hopefully something unexpected happens. For some reason I can visualize this story in my mind more vividly than the other stories. It has a very eerie mood and I can really picture all those wrinkly old ladies.