I have a strange relationship with the fantasy genre. From roughly age 10-13, my literary tastes tended toward books with barbarians on the cover. I’d always been a voracious reader, but something just clicked when I worked my way through the Prydain Chronicles by Lloyd Alexander and almost without meaning too, I found myself mired [...]
Reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan made me think more about food than I ever have before. For something so fundamental to human existence, it’s amazing how little thought I give to the stuff on the end of my fork (or spoon). I’m a large man and I can’t deny that my appetite is [...]
Star Trek was amazing. I can’t imagine a better relaunch for a tired franchise than what J.J. Abrams and company delivered. I was pretty much the target demo for the reboot, since I was not a big fan of any of the previous incarnations of the series aside from a brief fluttering of interest anytime [...]
Paul Malmont’s love for the pulps bleeds through in every word on the page of his debut novel, The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril. From the setting to the characters, from the plot to the overall structure it is clear the author set out to create a loving paean to the long dead genre. The novel [...]
House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski is a ghost story without ghosts. House of Leaves rolls its narrative out along two intersecting tracks and several levels of abstraction. You, the reader, hold the book in your hand and begin the tale told by Johnny Truant, an apprentice tattoo artist whose aimless carousing through the L.A. [...]
This past Saturday, I got a sneak preview showing of The Golden Compass. Based on the first book of Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, this film is a pretty clear attempt to launch a young adult fantasy franchise of Potter-ian proportions. Unlike the Potter films, which I kind of like without ever having read [...]