Every year around October I like to read horror books and you can see all my previous posts about that here and this is this year’s post.

This year I had a couple false starts with some really insipid contemporary horror novels, so I wasted time on those and didn’t finish them, and only ended up reading one prose horror novel—a novella, actually, Low Kill Shelter by Charity Porpentine Heartscape. I also read the graphic novel A Guest in the House by E.M. Carroll, and I watched a bunch of movies, and I went to some graveyards, so I’m just gonna throw all that into this post too. Enjoy! 🎃

What I’ve Been Reading

Low Kill Shelter by Charity Porpentine Heartscape – A virus has spread across the world which turns its victims rabid, and causes canine-like changes in their jaws. But it hasn’t spread so thoroughly that society has collapsed—in fact, the world is still running along as normal. You still have to work. And everyone has given up on discovering a cure, even the companies supposedly funded to do that. The officially sanctioned cure now is just to execute the infected person.

The novella follows a man who is keeping his infected friend chained up in a closet in his apartment, studying him and trying to find a cure on his own.

This is quintessential Porpentine—a dead-eyed vision of the world which brings the grotesque and the banal smashing together, transgressive in a way that doesn’t feel like just a stunt, transgression as a by-product of probing deep into pain, discomfort, and rabid desires. The book excels in attitude, style, and narrative voice, but the plotting felt a little stilted. At a certain point it just starts going from one archetypal monster movie scene to another, and loses the extreme tension, the claustrophobia, the push-and-pull dynamic of the beginning. Overall I enjoyed it, but it lost its edge about halfway through.

A Guest in the House by E.M. Carroll — A graphic novel about Abby, a young woman who has just married David, a widower. David doesn’t speak much about his former wife, and Abby doesn’t want to broach the subject with Crystal, her stepdaughter. But she can’t help but wonder, and start to probe more, especially when Crystal says that she’s been seeing her mother.

As with Carroll’s 2019 book When I Arrived at the Castle, there’s a really delicious interplay of terror and desire here. Abby is frightened by the ghost of David’s first wife, but also enamored with her, and jealous of her, wanting to be her, wanting to banish her, wanting to know why she died, but always wanting. The rivalry and attraction between this pair is a powerful core to the book, and each woman could be said to be the “guest in the house.” David’s first wife haunts the house as a ghost, but Abby is also an intruder upon this family, a person who has ended up here not out of a great love for David, but because the Wife is a shape that she can fit into, and after years of aimlessly drifting through life, that’s enough for her.

This is brought beautifully to life by Carroll’s art. Most of the book is black and white ink washes, which are really nicely rendered in their own right, but occasionally, during sequences of dreams or fantasies or intrusive thoughts, lurid blues and reds explode across the page. It’s a straightforward device, but Carroll uses it to maximum effect.

And that’s how it is with the every element of the book, it’s all so perfectly paced, so perfectly braided together. The way Abby’s narration flows into scenes, the way scenes flow into fantasy, the way small, unnerving details lead steadily to bigger, darker implications—it makes for a totally absorbing read. Effortless, but dense, substantial. There was one twist later in the book that stretched believability for me, but for the most part the story pays off as much as it promises.

I think this is really one of the best graphic novels I’ve read in a long time. A great read for Spooktober or any time of the year.

What I’ve Been Watching

Throughout all of 2024, for every movie I’ve watched I’ve written a little mini-review. No, I am not on Letterboxd—I just really enjoy bite-sized reviews like this when other people do them, so I wanted to do some of my own. I plan to post all of these reviews in a big compendium at the end of the year, but for now here’s a little preview, with reviews of all the horror (or horror-ish) movies I watched in October.

LONGLEGS. A serial killer who’s victims all kill themselves/each other. Actually it’s the devil.
A-grade execution of a D-grade story. The devil magic renders any twists arbitrary, makes the Nic Cage character not that scary because he can be as dangerous or as impotent as the plot needs him to be.
Great cinematography, long shots, slow-building tension. There’s probably a killer short film in here somewhere.
It’s fine.

CARNIVAL OF SOULS (1962). Woman survives a car crash, takes a job in a new town as a church organist. On the way there she sees an old abandoned fair pavilion by the lake shore. Also sees a ghostly man in the middle of the road.
The man reappears a few times, and the pavilion haunts her. A movie heavy with dread, paranoia, and the uncanny.
Score gets kind of grating at times, but visuals and the slow-building terror make it.
Also all you dorks who lose it over “liminal spaces”,  this one’s for you.
It’s cool.

RIVER’S EDGE. Teen murderer shows his friends the dead body of their friend, who he murdered. No one cares.
A strange and pretty unpleasant movie, composed of a lot of very specific and unexpected choices which give it a bizarre sense of reality. The antithesis of the John Hughes teen movie.
Crispin Glover delivers an extremely affected and punchable performance, which is either terrific or the worst shit ever. Solid performances from everyone else.
It’s cool. It’s great?

AMERICAN PSYCHO. Investment banker murders lots of blonde women, and one fellow investment banker.
Funny movie! But a little aimless, no strong sense of increasing tension or stakes or psychosis. The movie hits a plateau after he kills his rival.
Tour de force from Bale.
It’s cool.

THE STRANGERS. A young couple at a vacation house in the woods are tormented by three people.
A series of contrivances keep the couple from escaping, keep the tormenters from catching them. Despite the stilted plotwork, the movie is very well-executed. Goes for long, dread-inducing shots over quick jump-scares. The couple are real people, who feel like they’ve been living a real life, having a real relationship, before the film starts rolling. Lots of small, very believable moments sprinkled throughout.
It’s cool.

VIDEODROME. The head of a small paid-subscription TV station known for broadcasting softcore porn and violent movies is looking for something edgier. He manages to tune into another channel broadcasting 24/7 footage of torture and murder—Videodrome.
The snuff film stuff is fairly tame and always kept at such a remove that it’s never really disturbing or compelling—but that’s just the entree to the real horror of hallucinations, breathing TVs, throbbing cassettes, quintessential Cronenberg, as the protagonist becomes more and more obsessed.
Sharp script, solid performances, thought-provoking theming, repulsive effects.
It’s great.

THEY LIVE. Look to your left. Now look to your right. One of those people is an alien freak working towards the total subjugation and exploitation of the Earth.
Hot guy vagabond joins a homeless encampment which also hosts the nascent resistance to the alien overlords. The resistance makes the proverbial glasses which let you see who’s an alien, and read plainly the subliminal messages in ads, TV, books, etc.
This is such a fun bit of spectacle (ha), and used to great effect. Glasses off: Dollar bill. Glasses on: THIS IS YOUR GOD. Classic.
Schlocky meathead agitprop action flick. 
It’s great.

THE GATE. A hellhole begins to open at the base of a kid’s treehouse, and the kid and his friend inadvertently complete the 2-factor blood ritual authentication to fully open it.
Movie has a doltish pacing which lurches predictably between We did it, gate’s closed! and Psych, it’s still open!, but the core characters have a believable charm, and the special effects are a fun mixture of stop motion, costumes, and composites.
Really, you gotta watch this for the little demon guys. The little demon guys are great. They ook and eek and run around and steal every scene they’re in.
It’s cool.

Where I’ve Been Walking

After living here five years, I’ve finally started exploring some of Philadelphia’s historic graveyards. My favorite so far is Mt. Moriah, the largest cemetery in the state. It straddles the county line, one half in Delco, one half in Philly. Both sides are open Saturday and Sunday, with the Philadelphia half open Friday and Monday as well (more info here). For many years it was abandoned, with no legal owner, and used as an illegal dumping site. Even before that, large areas had become completely overgrown. Thanks to the efforts of local community orgs, the cemetery is in better shape now—I didn’t see any trash when I visited, though many areas are still overgrown. Below are some pictures from my visit to the Delco half.

That’s all for this year’s Spooktober post. Next regular post will probably be for Public Domain Day 2024. Also, if you’re reading this via email, you may not know that I’ve been posting some pages from my comic Lonely Friends on the blog. I didn’t want to spam the email subscribers with a bunch of little posts, but you can go ahead and read them from the beginning here if you want.