“Strangers on Paradise” (1986)

Noting that the more popular alternate title for this Damon Knight story is “Strangers in Paradise,” which ISFDB insists on. That’s fine but Knight himself preferred “on,” the way it shows up in the Masters of Darkness anthology edited by Dennis Etchison. In this anthology, Etchison gave writers free rein to pick one of their stories they felt never got the attention it deserved. As anthologies go, the results are perhaps predictably more on the dismal side, suggesting once again that writers may have little perspective on their own work. I mean, some of them are self-acknowledged trunk stories. Knight’s story is not bad as far as it goes, at least until the weak and cliched resolution. It’s the kind of story that doesn’t easily lend itself to a good resolution, but I think Knight could have done better. Another problem—though not as bad as I’ve seen it—is the attempt by the genre writer to do literary. The baggage around literary pretensions that can emerge is often terribly embarrassing. But that element is also at the heart of this story, making it difficult to write around. It’s about a literary scholar traveling to the planet Paradise to study the work of a poet who emigrated there. Quite an interesting place—there’s lots of SF stuff about the planet and space travel to get there that I enjoyed. And the mystery of the poet is also a very good element here. In the last 10 years of her life, we are told, she “went silent.” The story is an object lesson in the tragic foolishness of humans and their attempts, nearly as foolish, to learn lessons from experience. I mean, it’s all very easy and cynical, I know, but I’m feeling pretty glum myself about our prospects at the moment, so I shouldn’t fault Knight for taking the easy way out. What we’re talking about here is something along the lines of Charlton Heston pounding the sand at the end of Planet of the Apes, beholding the ruin of the Statue of Liberty. “Strangers on Paradise” is not quite as obvious—what could be?—but it’s pretty obvious. Still, it’s good enough that I’m thinking I’d like to read more of Knight down the road.

Masters of Darkness, ed. Dennis Etchison
Story not available online.

Split (2016)

Here’s the second installment of director and writer M. Night Shyamalan’s superhero trilogy, Unbreakable. The first had the same name, Unbreakable, and came out in 2000, starring Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson. The third was 2019’s Glass, with Willis and Jackson reprising their roles. Split is more of a supervillain movie. Superhero movies were not taken the way we understand them today until about 2008, with the release of The Dark Knight and Iron Man, but Unbreakable (the movie) has been discussed as an original forerunner, demonstrating the range possible with them. Fair enough. I saw Unbreakable when it was new, liked it, took the superhero element as a Shyamalan twist (set up by The Sixth Sense, I still look for brazen plot twists in all his pictures). Sixteen years is a long time to wait for a sequel and I must say I find all kinds of things about Split annoying. Start with the wanton use of the hoary old trope of multiple personality disorder, now called dissociative identity disorder (DID). It was made famous at least as long ago as 1960’s Psycho (Norman Bates, recall, suffered from it) and made even more famous by a 1976 TV movie starring Sally Field, Sybil. Note the Split tagline: “Kevin has 23 distinct personalities. The 24th is about to be unleashed.” It’s so old hat it doesn’t even look like a hat anymore. I feel like I also need to mention that a “split personality” was once the way schizophrenia was discussed, not DID. There are no surprises in this movie, at least if you’re as cynical as me. James McAvoy gets the plum role of every actor’s dreams and he’s pretty good at being Kevin (the outer shell others see), Barry, Dennis, Patricia, Hedwig, and maybe up to 20 others, including Mr. 24, known as “The Beast.” No, he’s not the X-Men character known as “Beast” (no “the”) but he does climb up and down walls like Spiderman. Seriously, McAvoy is good juggling all these roles, and notably with a good deal of skillful nuance when they speak to each other. Betty Buckley is also good as his misguided therapist inclined to minimize his extreme aggression. So is Anya Taylor-Joy as one of his victims trying to get away. There’s great suspense too: got to get the ammo, for example, got to load the gun. Hurry, he’s almost here. Run, run, run. Et cetera—oh, I should have mentioned, “et cetera” is a phrase favored by many of the two dozen, known collectively as “the Horde.” As usual with Shyamalan movies it’s pretty good as long as you don’t think very hard about it. But it’s so full of poppycock concept you almost have to think about it to try and make sense. But stop that. Stop thinking about it. I probably should have taken the time to look at Unbreakable again. Not sure I have the interest for Glass. Whose idea was a trilogy anyway?

“Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes” (1951)

This story by J.D. Salinger is skillfully done, a kind of tawdry sex farce that takes a hard turn toward pathos at the end. A gray-haired man is in his bedroom with a woman when the phone rings. He asks if she has any reason for him not to answer it. “God,” she says in perfect Salinger diction. “I don’t know. I mean what do you think?” He answers the call. All clues point to it being the husband of the woman. The gray-haired man is a colleague of the husband (they are lawyers). The husband is looking for his wife. She isn’t home yet. He’s distraught. The gray-haired man tries to soothe him, says she probably went off somewhere with mutual friends. All of them were at a party that night. It’s late now, the wee hours. The husband is also worried about a case he lost. The gray-haired man finally calms him—at one point the husband says he wants to come over for a drink—and gets him to go to bed and rest, assures him his wife will show up eventually, it’s just one of those nights. A few minutes later the phone rings again and it’s the husband, calling to say no worries, his wife just got home. It’s a searing, poignant moment. We know it’s a lie—she’s still there with the gray-haired man. But the husband obviously doesn’t want him to worry. Office politics is mixed up in this too. The husband is worried about his job and doesn’t want to alienate the gray-haired man. He may need allies. Yes, it’s another midcentury New Yorker story about white men philandering, but Salinger pulls it off well. As always he is a master of dialogue, with the italicized syllables and everything, and the story is mostly dialogue. It zeros in on the loser in this triangle, the hurt one, however incidental he may ultimately be to either or both the wife and the gray-haired man. The husband is generally annoying and whiny, but the story makes us feel for him. The setup may or may not have been original in 1951 but it’s not new now. We’ve seen countless scenes like it. But like Bob Newhart, Salinger makes the most of a one-sided phone conversation. It’s not presented to the reader that way, we get both sides, but we’re mindful the wife is getting the one-sided version, which adds another dimension. Solid story—more evidence Salinger was one of the best at the form.

J.D. Salinger, Nine Stories
Read story online.
Listen to story online.

The Space Merchants (1953)

This short novel by Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth arrives today with much apparent promise: accolades from Kingsley Amis, Anthony Boucher, Groff Conklin, and others, comparisons to Brave New World, and routinely on short lists of best science fiction ever, not to mention the first novel in the sizable Library of America American Science Fiction series of novels from the ‘50s and ‘60s. The Space Merchants is still talked about on booktube and Goodreads too—I saw it mentioned just the other day on a video, described as “Mad Men with spaceships.” If that sounds like something you might like, I can tell you I think that description is accurate, because it’s pretty much not what I like. It has some good ideas, notably Chicken Little, a food product, but the main problem is I don’t go to science fiction looking for lampoons of the advertising industry. The plot is frenetic and mostly pointless. The depictions of women are typically painful. It may be too much for me to expect a sense of wonder, but at least some more science fiction would be nice. I guess the visionary points are won by the dystopic setting—overpopulation, corporations literally holding political office, deep divides between rich and poor and little between, and marketing and advertising driving most thought. Fair enough. I think some people find The Space Merchants funny too. But little worked for me on this one. The video that mentioned it was focused on second-tier writers in the classic era, specifically Pohl rather than Kornbluth, along with James Blish, Doc Smith, and others (see “The Forgotten Sci-Fi Masters of the Golden Age”). One of the interesting points about Pohl—this is the first I’ve read him—is that he frequently collaborated with others, and not just Kornbluth. For that matter, Kornbluth was the name I was more interested in, though this is also the first I’ve read by him (and I might have him mixed up with one or two others). The whole Madison Avenue sizzle to this thing felt mostly dated to me now. The main character is a reasonable facsimile of Don Draper, who in turn is a reasonable facsimile of David Ogilvy. Their era was later, however, more the ‘60s, which leaves The Space Merchants with its best models MIA, and hence somewhat aimless and perhaps having an identity crisis. I wouldn’t call it visionary.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over. (Library of America)

OK Computer (1997)

I’m hardly out of step with majority views when I declare straight out that this is my favorite Radiohead album. But the nagging problems I have with this band and their product persist, even in the face of the deafening adulation out there. I see even my notes can contradict themselves. On one listen I praised “the spidery shivery mood of album opener ‘Airbag,’” going on to laud the next song too, “Paranoid Android”—“oh it can be beautiful.” But on another listen I note that “Paranoid Android,” the first of five singles from the album (though not one cracked the top 40), is “shivery beautiful. Where the album starts for me, if it’s going to start.” I’m telling on myself caught using the same words even, but note that now “Airbag” has somehow lost its luster (don’t worry, it had it again when I listened to the album yesterday). Really, the key term here is “if it’s going to start,” because the inconsistency of my response remains my main takeaway to this and all their albums. There’s an interesting sense of potent drama to their music and it can be thrilling, albeit on and off. Even at their best, it often seems to be only parts of songs that directly work. One obvious problem is that Thom Yorke’s vocals tend to put me off. As far as I can tell it’s his main contribution and in many ways I see he is the face of the band, hence a natural ambivalence on my part. But most of the songs on OK Computer have parts that I like and some that I like a lot. The one track here that I think is plainly a mistake is the shorty “Fitter Happier,” which is a computer voice running through suggestions for health and mental balance lifestyle choices in an implied Brave New World world. It speaks to a point of view shared by me and likely most of the Radiohead audience but it’s also suffocating heavy-handed irony and little more. It sits in the middle of the set, track 7 of 12. I briefly had a theory that the first half of the album, before “Fitter Happier,” was better but continuing listens only confused me further. “Climbing Up the Walls” has some glorious guitar chaos. “No Surprises” is excellent too, if it catches you in the right mood. But generally I think the best stuff is up-front (or maybe I get tired of listening to Radiohead after 25 or 30 minutes?). There’s a spooky good vibe on “Subterranean Homesick Alien” as well as the cheeky salute to Bob Dylan. “Karma Police” can be nagging and eerie. “Exit Music (For a Film)” is downright glum. It may be because it’s where I started with Radiohead, but I think OK Computer is the place to go for any Radiohead virgins who may be out there interested in venturing in.

#63 on the Pop Thruster Best 1,000 Albums Ever list

Synecdoche, New York (2008)

USA, 124 minutes

Director/writer: Charlie Kaufman

Photography: Frederick Elmes

Music: Jon Brion, Deanna Storey

Editor: Robert Frazen

Cast: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Samantha Morton, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Catherine Keener, Michelle Williams, Emily Watson, Dianne Wiest, Hope Davis, Tom Noonan, Sadie Goldstein, Robin Weigert

Movies are collaborative work practically by definition but those like me continually tempted to assign credit to a single person, or “auteur,” generally focus on directors. The director and writer of this picture, however—Charlie Kaufman—is something of an exception. Synecdoche, New York is only his first picture as a director, but he was already known for three screenplays: Being John Malkovich, Adaptation., and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. All won high praise and awards. Spike Jonze directed the first two, Michel Gondry the latter. They are weird and original with ingenious high concept, open neurosis, and inspired narrative surprises. And they are known basically as “Charlie Kaufman movies” in the same way that we hear about Alfred Hitchcock, Ernst Lubitsch, or David Lynch movies. Or that’s the career brand hoped for.

In 2008, appearing in a Charlie Kaufman movie had great attractions for ambitious actors. Think of Woody Allen, or Terence Malick with The Thin Red Line. The A-list players flocked to them, and Synecdoche looks much the same, with Philip Seymour Hoffman and no fewer than seven of the most in-demand women actors at the time. I only wonder how Cate Blanchett and Tilda Swinton missed out. Yet, unfortunately, it all adds up to less than even Adaptation., which, until this point, had been Kaufman’s weakest picture. I’m not even sure how to summarize this quivering mess except by analogy: it might be worth pairing with a more recent quivering mess, director and writer (“auteur”) Ari Aster’s Beau Is Afraid, for a long double feature journey into a night of head-spinning and bodies all over the street. Pie and coffee served with discussion until 4 a.m.

“The Great God Pan” (1988)

M. John Harrison is an out-there horror writer worth reading but this story is unfortunately way too coy about any relationship it has to Arthur Machen’s original of the same title. The connection appears to be more metaphorical, but in both stories we find people are fooling around with forces of nature they don’t understand (and/or underestimate) and they get hurt. How exactly they are hurt, at least in this story, is less clear. I had my problems with the Machen the first time I read it, which of course has a reputation as one of the greatest horror stories ever written. That is less the case for Harrison and this story, though Harrison has an exemplary reputation of his own to sustain. Too much is hinted at here for my taste and not enough explained (I know I also complain about too much explanation in other stories). The primary special effect—a vision in the passageway near a kitchen—is not bad but it’s not enough. I’m filing this under the “restrained horror” label but that might not be the right term. Reading between the lines, extraordinary things are happening here. I just wish more of it was in the lines. What we know: it’s present-day (late ‘80s) and a group of four are still feeling the effects of an experiment they conducted 20 years earlier, in the late ‘60s. They’re all basically PTSD one way or another. Harrison quite likely might have talked about it more if PTSD had been more current then, or maybe it was and he was being subtle. My problem with this story is that it’s too subtle—all background setting, no foreground action. In horror, nibbling at the edges is often considered a way of implying enormity and vast unknowns. Machen’s original is where I coined the term “furniture-moving” for stories that position large and simple plot points consecutively. See also H.P. Lovecraft. Another feature of horror is that people often “go mad” from the things they’ve seen and experienced. Harrison is doing these things and trying to be artful about it. Instead it comes out too often as vague. Though Harrison has denied it as such, his story is critically dependent on familiarity with the Machen story and exists as a kind of homage. Take away that title—Pan is silent and invisible in this story, not even his name appearing—and work with what we have here and we’d have to call it something like “These Things That Happen” (from Harrison’s collection titled Things That Never Happen) or maybe “Ann’s Story,” after the character who loses her mind. I’m not trying very hard here, but the point is that the Machen story illuminates this one, which in turn, to be fair, illuminates the Machen, albeit feebly. E.F. Benson, M.R. James, and Saki have better Pan stories, something of a fad among horror publishers at the turn of the 20th century. They are vividly immediate, which may be the quality most lacking here. It gets to some nice details and images and suggestions of ideas, but it probably needed to work a little more closely with the furniture-moving model. I mean, I just wish Harrison had given us more information.

The Year's Best Horror Stories XVII, ed. Karl Edward Wagner (out of print)
Story not available online.

Old (2021)

In this movie by director and cowriter M. Night Shyamalan, based on a French graphic novel by Pierre Oscar Levy and Frederik Peeters, tourists visiting a resort spa are invited to a unique and special hidden beach. Once there, things begin to happen in strange ways. Time passes more quickly. The three children in the group are suddenly growing into adolescence and then full adulthood. They find they can’t leave the beach the way they came. Every attempt results in a blackout. The beach is otherwise blocked by steep cliffs and ocean on all sides. Eventually they gather around and do some math for our edification. It seems that one hour on the beach is aging them two years. A 24-hour stay, if they can’t get away, will age them to the ends of their lives. It all seems a little silly but that also seems to be part of the intent of the picture, making it into a kind of easygoing lighthearted horror movie with subtle comfort points—a near-total case of cognitive dissonance. A famous rapper (played by Aaron Pierre) is with them, for example. The kids want to approach him but are cautioned that famous people like privacy. His stage name is Mid-Sized Sedan, which I could not take any other way than as a joke, and a pretty good one. Lots of familiar faces dot this ensemble: Thomasin McKenzie (Last Night in Soho, Leave No Trace) is one of the kids aged to 16, Gael Garcia Bernal (Amores Perros, Y tu mama tambien) plays well against type as a fuddy-duddy actuary and muddled dad, Ken Leung (Lost, The Squid and the Whale) is a nurse with more common sense than most of the folks on the beach. As usual, Shyamalan twists the narrative near the end with surprises in the form of the explanation. It would be a spoiler for me to discuss so I will leave it to you to discover for yourself. I find myself moving off thinking of Shyamalan as mostly gimmicky. He’s that, for sure, but he’s also just good at making movies that pull you in and keep you committed, with a fair amount of style and wit. The fact that they are arguably silly—and Old certainly is that—only underlines how good they are, how infectiously fun or insidiously suspenseful. I’ve been dubious of Shyamalan for a long time now, but must admit it’s been fun going through his stuff. Cautiously recommended for the feel-good qualities and the jokes. Don’t expect too much.

Northanger Abbey (1803)

Although this novel by Jane Austen was published in 1817 as her fifth—indeed, published posthumously—it is actually her first completed novel as of 1803, when she was in her late 20s. She just couldn’t get a publisher for it during her lifetime. Honestly, it’s not hard to see why, even given that things change over two centuries. It doesn’t have the light touch she maintains in the best of her stuff. It’s more like apprentice work, the novelist working out how to do it. There are some fun details here, such as Austen’s fascination, via the main character, Catherine Morland, with gothic literature and the “seven horrid novels,” such as Castle of Wolfenbach by Eliza Parsons, The Necromancer by Lawrence Flammenberg, etc. We end up at the abbey of the title, now the home of the Tilney family, with some timid gothic flourishes there. It does take us half the book to get there. It’s a short novel but the scenes at Bath that occupy the first half are an arguably overlong prelude. This is what I mean by somewhat awkward apprentice work. The situation is complex, with youths and their siblings sorting themselves into friends and prospective partners. You know the drill: single men in want of wives and the women who want them. Friendships and love relations blossom or go sour. Austen’s characters here seemed more stock to me, but the situations can be ingenious in terms of moving players around the board. To a certain degree I wish she had leaned harder into the gothic stuff, but the better choice is probably what she came up with. Again, if the prelude felt too leisurely, the finish is certainly too rushed, polished off lickety-split in two or three chapters. All’s well that ends well, I guess? I have to admit this one makes me much less interested in pursuing the stories or fragments that came before it, though Love and Friendship still bears some interest because of the movie by director Whit Stillman. That just leaves me with Persuasion for now, taken as her sixth novel, also published posthumously but the last she wrote before her death (at age 41) in 1817. I have some high hopes for that, but we’ll see.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

I’m late to the utilitarian aspect of this novel by Arthur C. Clarke, a companion piece to director and cowriter Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation. Actually, “adaptation” is the wrong word. The project was a years-long collaboration between British countrymen Clarke and Kubrick. The joke is that the screenplay was written by Kubrick with Clarke, and the novel was written by Clarke with Kubrick. They were released the same year. I think I like Clarke—he is more or less the ”sense of wonder” writer in the classic SF with Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein. He’s well-suited to this particular novelization. It’s arguably little more than that, but it does include lots of useful clarifications for a movie that is often intentionally mystifying. The ending is still cosmically ineffable, but a few things about it are nailed down, which is better than nothing. My favorite new detail is the explanation for why the HAL-9000 computer goes crazy. It makes me think about literature versus cinema and all the bromides about showing, not telling. Sometimes cinema is not delivering all the necessary information needed. Sometimes, perhaps, you need to tell as well as show. Kubrick could have included the HAL explanation in the movie, but it would have required exposition. Kubrick could be mulish on how to make a movie, famously often stranding viewers in not just his 2001 movie. Those who find the movie boring perhaps may not need to apply here. I’ve heard it both ways on this novel, but I think it’s a must if you like the movie or Clarke or both. In many ways it is a fix-up novel, tying together previously published short stories, but it’s better by far as a whole than some of the fix-ups I know, including Clifford Simak’s City and Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles. Turning disparate stories into a novel is harder than you might think. I’m not sure whether I like this more as companion to the movie or as a Clarke novel. It is good either way, a heady froth of human evolution, first contact, and rogue robot. The many small differences between novel and movie are also interesting to ponder. Somebody cue Thus Spake Zarathustra.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

The Bends (1995)

I don’t listen to Radiohead much but lately I’ve been trying again. I keep hoping it will finally click for me with this exceedingly important rock band to Gen X, compared generationally to David Bowie, Pink Floyd, and Talking Heads. See also the lengthy artist bio by Stephen Thomas Erlewine at Amazon Music. I’m skipping their first album, Pablo Honey, which I didn’t even try for years. My secret superpower happens to be an ability to avoid “Creep,” on which I recall a lot of moaning and groaning about overplay. I never heard it properly until 1997. I’m fond of the Prince cover, I will say (and I thought the way it was used in the 2024 movie Heretic was quite interesting). In the late ‘90s a Gen X friend pulled me aside to clue me to The Bends being the better album over OK Computer. Wow, OK. It motivated me to listen more and, for a time, I thought I could almost hear it. But this is my pattern with Radiohead. The appeal is elusive, out of the corner of my eye if I can see it at all. On recent visits to their albums it has been about the same. My notes on The Bends mention two songs: “High and Dry,” which has an epic guitar solo and a chorus I whistle with. If I’m understanding my streaming service app interface correctly, it might be the most popular song on the album. The other song that caught me was “(Nice Dream),” a nice song but who parenthesizes whole titles? Well, Radiohead, that’s who—brash iconoclasts, experimentalists par excellence, enigmatic rock stars, etc., etc. Their sloppy mode often reminds me of Pavement, who also have never done much for me. At one point I even pondered the emo question because that’s what Radiohead often sounds like to me. I found on the internet that there is a long-running and intense debate about that point. The consensus is they’re not emo. I’m leaving it alone. Like my Gen X friend in 1999 was implying, maybe the greatness of Radiohead needs no explanation, it’s so obvious. Just, perhaps, some gentle re-ranking about which are the better albums. I might try my hand at that too.

#359 on the Pop Thruster Best 1,000 Albums Ever list

Days of Heaven (1978)

USA, 94 minutes

Director/writer: Terence Malick

Photography: Nestor Almendros, Haskell Wexler

Music: Ennio Morricone, Leo Kottke

Editor: Billy Weber
Cast: Richard Gere, Brooke Adams, Sam Shepard, Linda Manz, Robert J. Wilke, Jackie Shultis, Stuart Margolin

A number of big impressive names are associated with director and writer Terence Malick’s second feature—the last before his hiatus from filmmaking for nearly 20 years—starting with Malick himself, the mysterious master filmmaker who went away (and then came back). Cinematographer Nester Almendros (My Night at Maud’s, Sophie’s Choice) shot the picture, backstopped by Haskell Wexler (Medium Cool, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?). Ennio Morricone (A Fistful of Dollars, Taxi Driver) provided the soundtrack, supported by Leo Kottke (acoustic guitarist extraordinaire). And there’s a big fancy-pants and utterly gorgeous sepia titles sequence to start it off.

That leaves the pretty faces to Richard Gere, Brooke Adams, and Sam Shepard, who are players with varying degrees of ability. Days of Heaven is no actor’s showcase, though everyone here at least is competent enough and following direction. More the point, as with much of Malick’s work, is the stunning beauty—of nature, mostly, but note that he and Almendros worked carefully to emulate masterpieces of Dutch landscape painters such as Peter Bruegel (the Elder) or Jan van Goyen and others such as Edward Hopper, Johannes Vermeer, and Andrew Wyeth. But not even these museum inspection tours, in this case, are the main point. I think it’s fair to say the strongest and most interesting feature of Days of Heaven is the simmering sordid story, which ultimately feels biblical in its scope. Well done!

“The Inhuman Condition” (1985)

Most Clive Barker stories are a little too long, and this is no exception, but most Clive Barker stories also have ingenious premises and details, and this is no exception on that score either. It starts with a Clockwork Orange style beatdown by a gang of youths of a homeless old man they find urinating beside a tunnel. They’re doing it for the kicks. He has nothing of value but they make him empty his pockets anyway. The least malicious of the four youths, Karney—he usually gets the lookout duties on their escapades—finds a knotted length of rope among the debris. It turns out Karney is fascinated by knots the way others are by great historical enigmas or knitting. He keeps the rope with him and starts to worry one of the three knots obsessively. When he’s not doing that he’s thinking about doing that, and looking forward to getting back to it. I know this kind of obsessive fascination and am vulnerable to states like it over things like anagrams, the impossible (for me) Rubik’s Cube, some video games, and formerly jigsaw puzzles before I started living with cats. I’ve had some interest in knots too for that matter, but they frustrate me too quickly. Maybe these obsessions are common, or maybe not, but I’m not sure I’ve ever encountered them laid out so lucidly before. Of course it turns out the guy they were beating up (named Pope) is some kind of wizard or something, who has trapped monsters inside the knots. I know, hard to believe. They’re good monsters too. Barker has a knack for them. You wouldn’t think there could be so many. They are certainly original. Fresh? I’m not as sure about that, because as impressive as Barker’s visions are they too often seem to devolve into chase scenes and explanations. Too much service is paid to a narrative arc and setups for monsters on the loose in bad need of corralling. But I love things like focusing so intensely on a fascination with knots and a knotted length of rope. Barker may not be writing great or even good short stories, but he is writing great original horror all the same. It’s not hard to see how people like Stephen King got excited and started talking about Barker being the future of horror.

Clive Barker, Books of Blood, Vols. 1-6 (Vol. 4 kindle)
Story not available online.

Knock at the Cabin (2023)

I know, as a general rule, that novels tend to be better than the movies based on them. Paul Tremblay has a good reputation as a horror novelist and this movie is based on his Cabin at the End of the World, which I haven’t read. But I thought the premise was notably weak here. A gay couple, Eric (Jonathan Groff) and Andrew (Ben Aldridge), is vacationing at a remote cabin with their adopted Chinese daughter Wen (Kristen Cui). It’s a little confusing—the place is full of books and furniture and a fully equipped kitchen. I thought they might be living there but that didn’t make much sense either. Anyway, they are approached by four mysterious strangers who bang on the door of the cabin, force entry, and explain the family must make a sacrifice and kill a member of their family—their choice. The home invaders carry very terrible-looking weapons. The leader is a soft-spoken man named Leonard, who says he’s a second-grade teacher in Iowa. He’s played by Dave Bautista of Guardians of the Galaxy with infinite calm and patience and his menacing size. If the victims don’t commit this sacrifice, he explains, the world will end in various ways with a biblical tinge—flood, plague, etc. There is only limited time. If the terrorized family refuses to cooperate, one of the home invaders will be killed by the others in gruesome fashion, one at a time, the family forced to witness. No, it doesn’t make much sense and the strangers, not surprisingly, are not persuasive, even when they turn on the TV to news reports of various disasters. Some of these are great—a tidal wave coming ashore at Cannon Beach in Oregon, planes failing in flight and falling out of the sky. Those falling planes correspond to a recurring nightmare I used to have, so they worked very well on me. But more often I was frustrated with the proceedings here, which of course is not atypical for a movie by director and cowriter M. Night Shyamalan. The invaders can’t convince the family to commit the sacrifice because their arguments are so weak. They are based on visions they’ve had, which means it’s reasonable to think they are more likely mentally ill than that they have personal knowledge of God’s retribution, or whatever this is. Still, Knock at the Cabin got me in its grip and didn’t let go. Not making sense only made it more terrifying. Among other things by now we’re trained to try to out-think Shyamalan on the plot twists. It’s distracting, but I think he might be making that work for him now. Knock at the Cabin is perhaps less a horror picture than an unnerving suspense thriller, but any time you’ve got a home invasion you’re in the vicinity of horror. While none of it particularly adds up, I admit I spent most of my time watching from the edge of my seat.